Dominance (28 page)

“
The Golden Silence
is about many things,” Keller explained to her. “We never got to it in the night class, but I did.”

“You what?”

“I cheated, Alex. I read on.”

“Show-off.” Alex nudged him with an elbow. “What's it about?”

“Well, it's a story about Iowa, for one.
The Coil
was a New York novel, but this book is about here. Where we're sitting now.”

“Page's Diner?” asked Alex playfully.

Keller made a face. “You can tell Fallows loved his home. Even if Rutherford is not Fallows, I still think we're dealing with an Iowan.”

“Go on.”

“
The Golden Silence
is a story about a man in prison.”

Alex broke away from the text and craned her neck to look at Keller. “A what?”

“Yeah, I know. Right up Aldiss's alley. But this guy escapes.” He paused, looking down at the book as if its very existence troubled him. “He's in there because of something. Something happened a long time ago. A crime. But it's never explained what this crime is. It's something awful. A murder, maybe—I don't know. Fallows is intentionally trying to throw the reader off. This thing is like
Finnegans Wake
on steroids.”

“And the main character is put in prison,” Alex said, guiding him back.

“Yes. But, like I said, he escapes. He pretends to be someone else and then—this is strange, Alex. Really damn strange. People start believing him.”

“What do you mean?”

“He tells them he's another man. He starts using this alias. First on his cellmate, and then on the guards. And slowly . . . well, it's like he hypnotizes them. They just start believing that he's a different man. Surrealism, of course—but Fallows was after something else with this.
The Golden Silence
has all these trapdoors, these broken passageways. In a lot of ways the book is this house of mirrors. But it's also poetic and, in its own way, sad.”

“What happens to him when he gets out?”

“Not much,” Keller said. “He lives the rest of his life. He writes and reads poetry. That part is nonessential. What is essential, and what made me think about the book tonight when we were at that house on Olive Street, is this.”

And then he moved his arm and showed her the page he had marked. Alex saw his notations at the edges of the text. But she could make sense of none of it—at least not yet.

“What is it?”

“It's the connection,” said Keller, as if it were all right there, on that ink-heavy page under his heavy right arm. “In this scene he's talking to someone in the prison. Telling them this false story about his identity, this lie about who he is. A throwaway conversation, you think. But . . .”

“What is it, Keller?” Alex urged.

“See for yourself.”

He turned the book around, and Alex scooted out of the booth so that she could get right above the page. She began to read the lines Keller had highlighted.

The prisoner looked into the shadows. The guard stood outside his cell, looking in at him. The guard's eyes glowed. Everything was dark. These, the prisoner thought, these feral beasts who kept him here. He couldn't wait to spring himself, to free himself from this . . .

“Where did you grow up, prisoner?” the guard asked.

“Iowa,” he said. “In its very heart.”

“And your youth?”

“Troubled.”

The guard nodded. He had expected this, was used to being
around torn and broken men. Somewhere deep in the prison a man screamed.

“And your first crime?” the guard said, tapping a finger on the cold steel bar. “Your baptism?”

“Theft,” the prisoner said slowly. “I stole books.”

The guard smiled, teeth parting slightly. He was interested now. This man, this prisoner—he wasn't like the rest.

“And what did you say your name was?” the guard asked.

The prisoner looked at him. Gauged him. Readied himself for the lie, the tale. As always, his heart grew and the golden silence descended. He was ready. “My name,” he said, “is Morrow. Dr. Isaac Morrow.”

She read the section twice, then sat back, slumped down beside Keller in the booth, and turned it over in her mind.
What's happening?
she thought.
What's he doing to us?

“I don't understand it, Keller.”

“Lydia Rutherford,” he said. “She used that name tonight. Dr. Morrow. She said it plain as day, Alex. We both heard it.”

Alex stared forward. The diner had fallen away. “Why would she do that?”

“I have no idea. My only thought is Lydia Rutherford is in on it somehow. She's trying to tell us something without telling us.”

The last stragglers were leaving the restaurant, looking at the two college kids as if they were beings from another planet. Alex felt unmoored, rattled loose—again she wanted to move closer to Keller. Take comfort in his warmth, his strength. She moved her arm so that it touched his.

“The timing,” she said finally.

Keller looked up. “What about it?”

She reached across and took his pencil, made a notation on a napkin. “Fallows wrote
The Golden Silence
in what year?”

Keller turned hurriedly to the front of the book, found the copyright date. “Seventy-five,” he said. She scribbled the year.

“Charlie Rutherford Jr. would have to be how old?”

“Wait, I remember. Lydia said he was nine in '74, when his father died.”

“That means he was born in the midsixties. And she told us Dr. Morrow cured him
after
her husband died. If Charles Rutherford is Fallows, how could he have known about Morrow?”

Keller said nothing. He kept his eyes down, staring at the napkin Alex had just written on as if it might tell him a secret. Reveal something. Then he sat up, his eyes opening wide. He closed the book with a heavy
thump.

“Maybe it doesn't have anything to do with any of that.”

Alex blinked. “What are you talking about?”

“Maybe,” Keller said, “Lydia Rutherford is Paul Fallows.”

Where are you, Aldiss?

It was just after eight o'clock now. Alex looked out the window of her room, down at the twinkling Jasper campus. Everything was still, still and silent. Black's men would be waiting and Aldiss—would he come back here? Would he return to the campus to finish off the class? They were all here, after all, all in one place and so easy to find.

Once again she reached beneath her mattress and felt for the false Fallows book. She removed the book and opened it, saw the gun gleaming inside. Had Aldiss given her a way to save herself from him? Did he want Alex to end his life? She thought about Iowa again, about the awful person she'd met there, the true Dumant killer.

Unless that too was a lie.

Unless all they had found there had been put in place by Aldiss.

Jesus, Alex, get ahold of yourself. That's impossible.

She returned to the window, wondered how long until something happened—

There was a knock, and she turned around quickly.

“Who is it?”

“It's me,” said a familiar voice. “May I come in?”

“Please do, Dean Fisk.”

The door opened and the dean was there. He waved Matthew Owen away, and the nurse—his eyes fearful and quick—disappeared down the hall.

Fisk pushed his chair into the room and Alex sat at the foot of the bed, looking at the frail old man. A spike of regret for what had happened tore through her.

“I'm so sorry, Dean Fisk. I thought Professor Aldiss was—”

“Shhh,” the man said. “Now is not the time or the place for apologies.”

She nodded.

“I came up here to speak to you in confidence.”

She looked at him. “Please, go on.”

The dean began, and then stopped himself. This hesitancy was so unusual for Fisk that Alex was taken aback. She waited for the man to continue.

“It seems,” he said, “that I have not been completely honest with you, Alex.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that I have lied,” the dean said. He stared blankly at her, his eyes wet and pleading. “What happened to you in Iowa—I feel partly responsible for that. I lied to you on your visits during the night class and I live with those lies every day of my life.”

Alex awoke to find that someone else was in the hotel room with them. It was a man. He leaned back in the shadows, his face distorted by darkness, watching her. She didn't like his gaze. Not at all. It was as if he was
learning
her, studying her and teasing out her secrets. She sat up in bed, feeling Keller's body beside her, and stared deeper into the room. The darkness tingled like static. And sitting there in the room's lone chair, his face bathed in the swath of light that fell through the parted curtain, was Richard Aldiss.

Alex tried to scream. Tried to stand up, to do
something
—but her body was frozen. Her mind locked. She reached for Keller, thinking,
Please, please wake up.

Then Aldiss wavered, just a slight flicker like the interference in a television image, and stood up. He took a step toward her, his boots (they were so dirty, she saw, and thought,
He's escaped
) sighing on the carpet. A second step, and then—

“Alex. Alex, I'm here.”

She opened her eyes. Found that she was clutching Keller, sweat pasting down her hair and the sheet balled in her fists. She sat up, wiping sleep from her eyes. The bedside clock read 3:12 a.m. It was Saturday.

Keller sat up in bed and put his arms around her. She slumped against him.

“Nightmare,” she said. “About him.”

Smoothing her hair with his massive hand, the boy said, “We should go back. We'll just go back to Jasper and forget this. All of this—this class, Aldiss, Fallows. It isn't worth it.”

“No.” Her voice was a slight whisper. “Not now.”

Keller began to speak, to protest, but then he fell silent. She curled into his chest.

“We've found something huge,” she said. “We're too close. With Charlie and Dr. Morrow in
The Golden Silence
 . . . we can't stop now. The night class is almost over. We almost have Fallows.”

He leaned his head back and closed his eyes. A car whispered past out on the Iowa highway, a grid of light sweeping over the wall.

“Tomorrow,” he said. “Where do we start?”

She wiggled closer to him. To be here, alone with him . . . under different circumstances it would have been pure pleasure. But now, given the task they had in front of them—Alex was unsure if this was something true or if it was just a product of the night class. If she and Keller had been brought together not by destiny but by the whims of Aldiss himself. Maybe their pairing, like everything else, was another twist in his plan.

“He was famous,” Alex said at last.

Keller sat up. She could feel his gaze on her. “Slow down for us simpletons, Alex. I'm not following you.”

“Paul Fallows. He would have to be the most famous thing to ever come out of little old Hamlet.” She stared at him, at his dark shape. “In every small town in America, the locals keep up with their prodigal sons.”

“So, what,” Keller said, “we take a trip to the Hamlet Historical Society?”

“Not at all.” She leaned up and kissed him, the sting of the Aldiss dream finally dissolving behind her eyes. “We tap into the town gossip mill.”

*   *   *

The next day, just after the noon whistle pealed in the distance and a cold, muted sun finally broke through the clouds, they returned to downtown Hamlet and found a bar called Easy Living. A skin of blue smoke clung to the ceiling. Billiard balls cracked behind them, and now
and then laughter echoed out. Keller, clearly out of place here, held everyone's gaze in the room. He took up two stools and drank a Tab with his arms draped across the bar.

“Where's home?” someone asked.

Alex turned. The bartender was a skinny man with yellowed teeth and a rumpled, splotchy apron. She was used to lonely bars; she did her best studying at Rebecca's. “Jasper College,” she said. “Vermont.”

“A long way from home, honey.”

“It's a sordid tale.”

“I've got time.” The man smiled crookedly. There was a pack of cigarettes and a lighter on the bar, a community gift, and she reached over and took one. A sometimes thing, a thing she did when she was nervous or studying for an exam or thinking about grad school. She lit a cigarette and held it like she knew what she was doing.
Go for it.

“We're looking for someone,” she said.

“Oh yeah?” The bartender leaned closer and put his elbows on the bar. “And who would that be?”

“Paul Fallows.”

Something changed in the man's eyes. “The writer.”

“That's right. Know him?”

“Honey, there isn't anybody who
knows
him. That guy is a figment of somebody's weird imagination. A ghost.”

Alex exhaled toward the ceiling. “Surely you must know somebody who can tell us something. We've come a long way and would hate to leave this beautiful town empty-handed.”

The man eyed her. Was he suspicious? Did he see what she was doing? “What is this?” he asked cautiously. “A school project or something?”

“You could call it that.”

He hesitated, then said, “I guess I can tell you one thing.”

Alex wiggled forward on the stool, her heart kicking into gear. “What's that?”