Dominance (14 page)

The others hugged their widowed friend, and Sally stood among them, quivering as if she might slip off the edge of the world. She finally composed herself and walked out, nodding coldly as she went by Alex.

The rest spoke more freely when the specter of the woman was gone; their stories got rowdy in the makeshift wake. Alex tried to parse the conversations, find a piece of information that might help her with her task. But there was nothing here. It was implausible to her that one of these people would betray Michael, let alone murder him. They appeared to her as they had at Daniel's funeral: made awkward by grief,
trying their best to fill up the silences that would lead them to imagine the body, the library, the blanket of books.
They're just old friends, Alex. Aldiss has led you off, he's conned you. When you go back tonight you must—

Behind her there came the chirp of a cell phone. Sally, pulling on her heels by the door, flipped the phone open. “Hello?” she said. Then she listened, and Alex watched the woman out of the corner of her eye. “I can't talk right now,” she whispered. “It isn't a good time.” She slapped closed the phone and went out into the evening.

*   *   *

Alex excused herself and walked slowly upstairs to her own room.

The talk of Aldiss before had stirred her. She knew the professor was innocent of the Dumant murders. After all, it was her investigation that had proven beyond any doubt that Aldiss could not have committed those crimes.

But what if there had been a mistake? What if Aldiss had been manipulating the night class, and now he was manipulating the murder of Michael Tanner?

No. Aldiss was innocent this time as well. He was innocent and someone in this house held the answers that would lead her to Michael's killer.

Alex moved down the dark corridor. The house was quiet up here on the second floor, just the slight trill of the others' talk reaching her. She walked deeper into the house, her hand on the wall leading her into the dark. One step at a time, the planks announcing her every step.
Is it up here?
she thought.
Did he hide it in these—

Her cell vibrated.

“Hello?”

“Dr. Shipley, this is Detective Black.”

A heat rose to her face.
They've found something.

“Can you meet me on the east campus in twenty minutes?” Black asked.

“Of course. What's this about?”

“Nothing much,” he said. “I just want to show you something that I think you'll find interesting.”

“I'll see you soon.” She ended the call.

Alex continued down the hallway. She was thinking,
Answers.
There were many reasons to return to Jasper, after all, reasons that were at least a little selfish. With her heart thumping and her blood roaring, she stepped into a room off the main corridor.

It was another book-filled room, shelves sagging under the weight of volumes that had not been touched in years. This room, like so many others in the mansion, had almost been overtaken by tomes. But Alex could see a pattern: instead of letting them run wild, Fisk had attempted to order them into schools or eras. In this he was nothing like Aldiss.

She stepped over the threshold and turned on the room's only lamp, approaching the shelves with reverence. She traced a hand over the spines, making sure to look closely between the books to see if a manuscript might be hidden there.

She began with William Wordsworth and the Romantics, Whitman and the American poets, Hazlitt and the critics, then on to the modernists. This shelf was more bare but still diverse: Eliot, Oppen, Pound. Alex traced her fingers across the books, allowing her senses to lead her, the others' laughter echoing up from below.

Where are you? Are you real?

Alex continued through the stacks. There was nothing here. Nothing at all. She had looked throughout the second floor, checked every room, and still she wasn't even close. The manuscript was a farce, another promise by the scholars that turned out to be—

She stopped. She was still in the modernists, looking at the studies on Fallows. There was Benjamin Locke's famous text on
The Coil
, and of course Stanley Fisk's own treatise on Fallows the feminist. And there were two Aldisses side by side, the volumes he had written in prison on Fallows. She stared at the shelves, at the way the books had been arranged. The order she had noticed before—it was disturbed here. The book called
Ghost
had been eased out over the lip of the shelf, its wrinkled dust flap clinging staunchly onto one loose tendril of spiderweb.

She reached out and gingerly slid the book off the shelf, and as she did she heard a click. A small, rasping bite just beneath the text. She
looked closely at the empty space on the shelf. An opening had been created behind Aldiss's
Ghost
, a carved notch in the wall roughly the shape of a mailbox. Curved inside the space was a manuscript.

Heart fluttering now, Alex put her fingers on the paper and pulled.

“Alex?” Startled, she spun around. “What are you doing up here?”

Keller stood in the doorway. He was leaning against the threshold, a beer in his hand. A flash, then, to when they were students. Her knees would have weakened under different circumstances.

“I—I'm not doing anything. Just looking at Fisk's collection.”

He stepped into the room. Said, “So. Lucy Wiggins, huh?”

Alex turned her back to the shelf, hoping beyond hope that Keller hadn't seen the secret space. “I know. Isn't it wild?”

“Different than I thought she would be.” He sipped his beer. “I saw her on
CSI: Miami
a few months ago. Googled her. Married with children, sitcom star in the nineties, rehab a few times. The usual. I wonder if she knows Frank's married.”

“How could she not?” Alex rolled her eyes. Then, “They look happy.”

“So they do.”

He came deeper into the room, swept past the pale lamplight. “You're going back to see Aldiss tonight, aren't you?” he asked.

“After I meet with the detective, yes.”

“What do you hope he'll say? That he knows who killed Michael? That he has all the answers? How could he, Alex?”

“Aldiss is smarter than us all.”

“Of course he is. He's also more dangerous.”

She looked away. “I have to go back.”

Keller waited.

“I have to go back because if he had anything to do with this, then everything we did in Iowa doesn't matter. Don't you see that, Keller? Don't you understand?”

She watched him breathe. The alcohol was burning in his cheeks a little, and he took another drink. He said, “Melissa says Daniel didn't kill himself.”

Something dropped inside her. “What do you mean?”

“While you were meeting with the detective she knocked on my door. We talked. She says she spoke to Daniel sometimes. Says she went
with her family once to Manhattan and he came to meet her. She spent the day with him, meeting all his cop friends.”

“And?”

“And he was fine, Alex. Happy. Not a man who was apt to blow his brains out in the front seat of his squad car.”

Alex thought. The temperature in the room seemed to have dropped, the cool night pressing in. There was the feeling again of running wildly along, of being pulled in every direction at once. She steadied herself on the bookshelf. “What does it mean, Keller?”

He shrugged. “Daniel had a stressful job. A detective? With the NYPD? Maybe the atrocities he saw became too much to handle . . .” He trailed off, couldn't find the words. “Or maybe Melissa is right and all this—Daniel and Michael and all the rest of it—has something to do with Aldiss.”

A flash of anger behind her eyes. “Impossible.”

“Listen, Alex,” Keller said, taking a step toward her. “Listen to me. You have to be careful out there. You have to watch him, pay attention to him. Close attention. If he is lying as everyone in this house except you believes, if he has anything remotely to do with Michael's and Daniel's deaths, then this is a pattern. And you could be putting yourself right inside that pattern.” He stopped speaking. He was looking at her as intently as he ever had, but she couldn't hold his gaze. She looked away, back to the secret space, which gaped open not six inches from Keller's hand. “You could be next.”

Detective Bradley Black was waiting for her when she crossed over Harper's Knoll. He was reading a paperback novel—she knew instinctively, by the way the pages bent, by the aged-brown tinge of the book, that it was Fallows's
The Coil
—and he folded the book into his pocket when he saw her.

“I wanted you to see,” the detective said, falling into stride beside her. “Wanted you to get at least one look at it without that asshole Rice around.”

She stared at him. “You mean Michael's library.”

He nodded. His boots echoed sharply over the quads as they walked.

“I appreciate it, Detective. I really do. But I don't need your charity.”

“Yes, you do. You think you're a hero around this place, and in some ways you are. I expect them to rename the library in your honor when Fisk kicks the bucket, slap a bronze statue right out there on the great lawn. But there are a lot of people here who think you saved the ass of a man who wasn't innocent.”

“And what makes you think I care what people think?” she bristled.

“You've got a tattoo on your shoulder.”

“So what?”

“There are two kinds of women,” he said, a smile touching his lips
for the first time. She wanted to like him. “Those who have tattoos and those who don't. Those who do know they are the center of attention. They know people are staring at them, trying to read them. To puzzle them out. What does it say?”

She felt the six-year-old tattoo burn her shoulder blade now, remembered the drunken night she'd gotten it in Cambridge. It was a string of bluing words written in the most ornate fashion the pierced and goateed artist could pull off: “
Un buon libro non ha fine.
”

“I have no idea what that means, Professor.”

“A good book has no ending.”

They walked toward the fringe of campus. Black kept his eyes down at the concrete. She had the feeling that he wanted to say something but couldn't quite find the words.

“If this crime is just like the other two,” he finally said as they passed in front of Bacon Hall, where Michael Tanner would have taught his undergrads, “the killer will not be satisfied with one. There were two murders at Dumant, two victims.”

“I know that, Detective.” Then she gentled her voice. “I remember.”

Black stopped. Something caught his gaze, a blackbird tearing away from a beech on the quad. He tracked the animal's movement until it was a crumb in the sky, and then he said, “We studied you. Back in police school. The others—they laughed it off. An English major solving a murder? Some joke. But I was always fascinated by what you were able to do.”

She looked more closely, studied his face. “Is this an invitation, Detective?”

Black started on ahead of her. He had a way of not looking at you as he spoke, of connecting even as he remained elusive. She reminded herself to be careful around him. “Dean Rice says you're unpredictable,” he said. “That you have no regard for the rules. That some of the things you did during the night class could have gotten the Jasper brass in trouble. That you could have gotten you and that boyfriend of yours killed.”

This stung her, but she said nothing.

“But if you want to know what
I
think, I think this investigation could use a little unpredictability. You could be our go-between with Aldiss, you could do what you did back in '94.”

She reached into her pocket for the nicotine gum, slid a piece between her fingers, as if it might take effect through touch alone. “Tell me one thing, Detective.”

“Anything.”

“Why are you harassing Sally Tanner?”

The man tumbled away again, followed the air with his eyes. “In a murder, the spouse is always the first—”

“Don't give me that bullshit,” Alex said. “This isn't some lovers' spat. This crime was calculated, scripted. Whoever did this is trying to create some twisted work of art. That's not how Sally was—is.” Alex bolstered herself. “Please. She's suffered enough.”

The man's mouth went tight. “She was sleeping around on Michael,” he said. “Driving downstate, maybe seeing another professor. Or perhaps even a student.”

“Are you sure?”

He nodded. “She was gone every weekend to Dumant University.”

Alex remembered what Christian had said earlier.
The Procedure,
she thought.
Sally was playing it too.

The detective measured her. Finally he said, pointing off toward a grid of police tape in the distance, “Let's move on. It's getting late.”

*   *   *

Michael and Sally Tanner's house was a modified Cape Cod on Front Street. A dog barked shrilly in the neighborhood and a Jasper Police cruiser sat in the drive, its flashers languidly throwing blue light over the house.

Two cops sat on the hood of the car, sharing a bent cigarette. They eyed Alex as she approached.

“Davidson,” Black said. “Warren. Meet Dr. Alex Shipley.”

“Pleasure,” the shorter man said.

The other man's eyes held low.

“Go on,” Alex said. “Say it. No need to save it for later.”

The cop's jaw tensed. Beside her Black coughed into his fist. Then he tugged on her coat and they went for the front door.

“Are you ready?” Black said at the front door.

She looked at him and nodded. “As I'll ever be.”

They went in.

A lamp stood on the floor, shadeless, its bare bulb painting the walls white. The dust had been disturbed, and Alex covered her mouth with the collar of her trench. As Black had told her that morning, the house was not as clean as the apartments at Dumant: there was a gash on one wall, dark and ugly. An investigator had circled it with chalk. In one corner a chair had been toppled. In the kitchen the tablecloth had been pulled to the floor and dishes were scattered, some of them broken into a thousand glittering pieces.
You fought him, didn't you, Michael? You fought that bastard and you nearly won.