Dominance (18 page)

Not such a soccer mom after all,
Alex thought. Quietly, she stepped back into the kitchen. Then she walked out into the great room, into the flushing heat of the fire, and ran right into Frank Marsden. He was drunk but solid, and she was nearly knocked to the floor.

“Alexandra,” he slurred. The fire's reflection burned in his eyes.

“Hello, Frank.”

The man smiled and said, “Lock your door.”

“Excuse me?”

“That's what they're saying on campus.” Frank got close to her, the liquor on his breath strong and thick. Some mad vision of revenge burned in his eyes. “Lock your doors tonight. Whoever did this to Michael—the guy's still out there.”

*   *   *

“Is that you, Alex?”

She was upstairs now, her heart pounding from what she had seen in the kitchen. At the sound of the voice Alex stopped midway down the corridor and looked into the dean's study. The room was mostly dark, lamplight streaming weakly across the old man's form. He sat in his wheelchair, the limp wig hanging askew on his head, his lipstick smeared and his breathing thick and wet. She waited for him to go on.

“Your eulogy tomorrow,” he said. “Do you have something planned?”

She didn't, but she was going to try to get her thoughts down in her room before sleep. That was how she always wrote her lectures: exhaustion
coming on, the conscious mind being peeled back and laid bare, inhibitions stripped away.

“I'll be ready,” she said.

“Good. Sally is broken, I think. There are police watching her every move. It's a horrible thing. She will need some relief, some proper remembrance of him.”

“Of course.”

The dean shifted, pulled back out of the light. “And how was Richard tonight?”

“He didn't do this, Dean Fisk.”

“He told you that.”

“I know him. I know he's not capable.”
Do you have a weapon? I can get that for you.

“We change,” the man said, and then he coughed harshly into his fist. When the spell was over he repeated, “We change. My falling-out with Richard was the genesis of it. When you finished the night class and he was released from prison, I began to see the man's capabilities. I started to see him for who he really is.”

“He isn't like this,” she said. “This is . . . evil.”

“An overused word. I believe it is much more simple than that.”

“Simple?”

“I believe Michael had found something. Discovered something. And his killer was forced to silence him. It is pure Shakespeare, to snuff the truth with the greatest silence. ‘Truth is truth, to the end of reckoning'—the reckoning has come to Jasper, Alex. Michael had fallen upon the wrong secrets.”

“Secrets about Fallows?” she asked.

“More than likely, yes.”

“I know he'd been playing the Procedure again. With Christian.”

“Yes,” Fisk said, his blind eyes moving more quickly now. “As I said to you earlier, Matthew tells me that he sees them playing it on his walks across the east quad. The students. Rudimentary versions, mostly on weekends. Nothing complex enough for Michael to be interested in. But it is here on this campus. It has spread.”

She wondered about the significance of what the dean had just said. “What does it mean?”

“It means that Richard is perhaps more connected to this college than he is letting on. And that makes him a suspect.”

Fisk slumped back in his wheelchair. His face was ashen and doughy, the bald scalp pink and irritated. Alex bid the dean good night and left the room. She no longer felt exhausted, even though it was getting late. Instead, her senses were sharp and her mind was calm, precise. She walked purposefully down the hallway and entered the library she'd been in hours earlier.

Once again she felt her way across the shelves in the weak light, searching for the modernists. Easily she retraced her steps to find Aldiss's
Ghost
, the marker she had given herself to find the secret space. She pulled it off the shelf and—

The manuscript was gone.

She reached into the space and groped madly in the darkness, splayed her fingers across the dusty shelves. She ran her hands over the spines, pulling out book after book, her heart hammering and sticky sweat pooling beneath her arms.
No,
she thought.
Please, no.

Anger. It all came out in that instant, the bitter, gnawing frustration. Michael's murder and the task Aldiss had given her and all the rest of it.

Keller,
she thought.
Goddamn him.

She spun on her heel and left the room. It was pitch-black in the hallway now, and for a moment she couldn't find her way. Her thoughts were still swimming, the fact of the manuscript being stolen blurring her vision and making her stumble into the tattered wall. So much darkness here.

A sound. A footstep behind her.

Alex turned and put her palms to the wall, bracing herself in fear.

“Hello?” she said into the shadows. “Keller, is that you?”

She listened, her pulse pounding in her jaw. Nothing.

She began to walk again but stopped. Something moved, the form of someone darting across the room at the end of the hall.

“Who is it?” she called. “I can't see anything. I can't—”

Again there was stillness.
Damn it, Alex, you're creeping yourself out.

She backed again into the darkness, palm over palm against the curling wallpaper, until she found her room. Then she went inside and shut the door. Locked it.

For a moment she stood there, breathing, with her back to the door. Cursing herself for being here, for putting herself into this situation.

Then she went to the bed, opened an end-table drawer, and found a pen inside. There was her copy of Christian Kane's
Barker at Play,
and she put the paperback on her knees and began to write in the margins of a page what she had learned so far.

Melissa Lee. Distance from campus: lives in downstate Vermont. Motive: unclear. Still using sex as she did as a student—for power, leverage?

Frank Marsden. Distance from campus: resides mostly in California. Motive: possible dislike/jealousy of Michael Tanner, just as in night class.

Sally Tanner. Distance from campus: lives here. Motive: possibly found something of interest on her husband, something incriminating (re: Fallows?).

Lewis Prine (hasn't arrived yet; remember to call again before sleep). Distance from campus: lives and works in upstate Vermont. Motive: connection with last existing Fallows manuscript. May be right about its existence and it being hidden in the Fisk mansion.

Christian Kane. Distance from campus: close. Motive: became involved with Michael Tanner while in the Procedure. Included a crime scene in one of his novels that matches the Dumant/Tanner scene. Seems overly willing to absolve himself from the situation.

Jacob Keller. Distance from campus: close. Motive:

She sat back and looked at what she had written. She wondered again if Aldiss was right about one of her old friends. Wondered if Keller could somehow be involved. Inexplicable, but still . . .

She went back to her notes:

Jacob Keller. Distance from campus: close. Motive: stole Fallows manuscript.

She put the pen down and looked at the six names. As she studied them a vision appeared: the crime scene photos she had seen earlier that morning. Michael's body, broken and destroyed, the—What had Keller said? The
brutality
of it. The awfulness of it. And someone here, one of the people she had once trusted and studied with in the night class, might be to blame.

Almost at once exhaustion fell over her. She felt herself falling, tumbling softly down—

Another sound from the hallway. Alex sat up in bed, her senses alive now. Readied.

She stared at the door. Heard it again: a scuffling noise, the sound of someone walking. Approaching.

“Who—” Alex began, but she was cut off by a knock.

She went to it and pulled it open a crack. “Yes?”

“Hey, it's me.” Keller.

“Tired,” she said.

“Yeah. Of course.” Disappointment in his voice. “Something came for you.”

“What?”

“Here.” He handed her something through the crack. It was an envelope, thick and chunky, nothing on the outside but
ALEXANDRA SHIPLEY
in a jagged, slashing hand. “There was a knock on the front door. We thought it was another reporter, so we didn't answer. When Christian went out to smoke, he found this on the porch.”

“Thanks, Keller.”

“No problem.”

The man hesitated there at the door. She thought about letting him in, and then she remembered Peter, her boyfriend back in Cambridge. She remembered the missing manuscript.

“Good night,” she said, and closed the door.

Alex took the envelope to her bed and opened it in the pale lamplight. Tipped its contents onto the bed: a book. It was a Fallows, a first
edition of
The Golden Silence.
She turned it around, saw the photograph of Charles Rutherford on the back.

What is this?

She opened the book and saw what was inside.

The pages had been cut out. The text had been carved into a precise shape, and an object had been placed inside the space that was left. It was a perfect fit, the gun falling out slowly into her hand when she turned the book upside down.

She had her weapon.

When Alex arrived at the Fisk Library that Wednesday evening to finish her Fallows reading, she opened
The Coil
and found a note inside. It had been written on a small strip of paper, no larger than a sliver of glass. It read,
Find out about the Procedure.

Her backpack—had she left it somewhere on campus? Mentally she retraced her steps that day: lunch at the Commons, 1:00 p.m. with Dr. Mew (Japanese Literature After the Bomb), afternoon study session in Lewis Prine's dorm room, back to her dorm to retrieve the Fallows. Someone had gotten to her book.

She looked around, paranoia tickling the back of her neck. There was a group of students leaning over a physics text two tables over. A lone reader in a lighted cubicle on the other side of the library. A few others drifting lazily through the stacks. Other than that the library was empty, quiet. She fingered the note.

Find out about the Procedure.

Alex had heard the term somewhere. Had Aldiss said it in one of his lectures? Had she read it somewhere? Again she scanned the library. A boy lifted his gaze to look at her. He was a floppy-haired sophomore, a Kappa Tau she'd danced with at a party—she glanced away. There was the loose feeling of something coming unraveled, a thread tipping from
a spool. The Procedure—had she seen it in a book? She stopped, her hands absently crinkling the note into brutal origami, her breath coming fast.
A book,
she thought.
That's it.

She was up and moving, her backpack slung over her shoulder. Outside, into the biting cold, and over the lawn toward Philbrick. The day was ending, the trees shot through with bloodred sunlight. The old Alex would have stopped and observed this, maybe appreciated it. The silent quads, the way the snow diamond-sparkled on the ground. But this was the new Alex, the girl who'd been changed by the night class. By Aldiss. She pumped her legs harder, walking fast, wind striking her cheeks like a thousand needles. She entered the dorm, breathing in the blast of warmth, and took the elevator up to her room.

The book was exactly where she had hidden it.

Mind Puzzles
by Richard Aldiss. For a moment she stood in the empty room, thinking about how her life had changed because of this. One little volume, a collection of pages held together by cheap glue. A flimsy thing—and yet so powerful. So profound.

As she had done that night in the library two weeks ago, Alex searched the index. It was easy to find: there were over ten references. PROCEDURE, THE. She scanned the subentries and picked one: RULES, VARIATIONS OF. Her hands trembling, she turned to the page.

It was a game. That much was clear right away. Alex ran her eyes over the text, making sure her back was to the door in case her roommate returned. But this game—it was unusual. It was only played by what Aldiss called “the enlightened,” those Fallows scholars adept enough with the texts to keep up. And there was something else; something about the tone Aldiss used to discuss the Procedure. A certain demure quality she had never seen in his other work. About this the professor had cared deeply. He wanted the reader to understand that this game, these pages, were important.

One section particularly struck her.

A game, yes, but the Procedure is not some innocent children's pastime. Half memory contest, half puzzle, the objective is this: to reenact scenes from Paul Fallows's novels as perfectly as one can. There
are levels of complexity—from the true Masters to neophytes who are simply looking for a new experience on campus—but the form and function of the Procedure is always the same. It is a method of deconstruction, a method of understanding the texts in a completely new way outside of a dusty lecture hall. Of tunneling inside the pages themselves.

There was a photograph accompanying the section of text. It showed a group of students on a campus, their '80s fashion clearly evident, talking to one another. There was something about their faces, about their stance and their manner of dress, that struck Alex right away.
They're acting,
she thought.
It's like they're in a production. A play of some sort.

She continued reading. She read about the variations of the game, how it had been invented (at Yale, perhaps by Benjamin Locke—though this was disputed), its rules and objectives. “Some believe you cannot understand Fallows,” Aldiss wrote, “unless you learn how to play the Procedure. That you cannot truly know the two existing novels unless you become enlightened in the game. And if one does not know the novels, if one does not fully understand them, then how is one to even begin his search for Paul Fallows?”