Dominance (32 page)

Lydia looked down at the carpet. Alex saw it in her eyes: she was afraid of her own son. “Charlie, we'll be in the kitchen,” she said weakly. Then, to Alex: “Come on.” Alex glanced at Charlie, who had turned away now. She knew that she would have to get alone with him, find out what he knew. The impossibility of the task made her shudder, and she turned and followed Lydia into the kitchen.

Alex sat at the table. Lydia moved around the kitchen, began slamming cabinets, muttering something to herself. Alex stared at the walls. It was 1960s Americana, unchanged probably since before Charles Rutherford's death. Above the sink was a frame, and inside the frame was a needlepoint square:
CHARLIE'S AND MOMMA'S KITCHEN
.

Alex looked at the woman. She thought of Charlie in the next room.
Now or never.
“Where's your bathroom, Mrs. Rutherford?” she asked.

Lydia pointed and Alex slipped out. Charlie was still sitting in his chair and watching his cartoons. She moved toward him slowly, as if approaching a wild animal, braced herself, and said, “Your dad—I bet you really miss him.”
How idiotic, Alex!
But it didn't matter: the man didn't turn, didn't move.

Alex shook her head and continued down the hall. It would have to be done sometime; she would just have to find the right words. Approach
him somehow. Get him to tell her more about his father. It was the only way.
The mysteries are one and the same.

In the hallway she took in her surroundings. There were family photos on the wall, some of them of Charles Sr. Here was the man and a much younger Lydia, and in her arms was the baby. They were smiling, but Alex couldn't help but read something in their gaze. Something of the future pain. She went on.

Into the bathroom, where she stared at herself in a streaked mirror.
What are you doing, Alex? Why did you come back here?
She splashed water on her face and then closed her eyes. She saw Aldiss sitting in that cell, head in his hands, his books arranged before him. His new information there on the cold stone floor as he waited for her to return and—

She opened the door and left the bathroom. She took one step and paused; something had caught her eye.

A room. It was there on her right. A cluttered room, boxes and detritus slung everywhere. Down the hall she heard Charlie's cartoon soundtrack blipping, and behind that was the teapot beginning to churn. Alex turned to look at the room again, wondering,
Could I?

She stepped inside and closed the door behind her.

The room smelled like must. Motes spooled down from buckled shelves, and Alex pulled the cord on a bare ceiling bulb and looked at the junk. The boxes were old and feathered, a skin of dust lying atop them. Some of them were unlabeled, but others were marked
Charles
. She removed the lid on one of these boxes and looked inside.

Books. Bound manuscripts, photocopied and laid perfectly inside the box.

But there was something about these books. Hands shaking, she removed one of them and flipped through it. As she did, the knowledge dawned on her. The slow, horrible knowledge that she was looking at what Shawna Wheatley and Abigail Murray had found before they died. The last piece of the puzzle, the final clue in Aldiss's literary mystery.

The books were encyclopedias.

Alex ran toward the dark campus. There was someone a good distance in front of her—a man. She called, “Keller!” but he did not stop. She moved on into the night.

Then she saw where he was going, and it made her blood go cold.

He was heading toward Culver Hall.

Alex thought,
This is where it ends, this is where it ends, this is where
—her pulse roaring and the wind striking her face full on. She had no choice but to follow the man.

At the front door now, where he had entered. She stopped herself, thinking of Black. But there was no time to call for help from the detective. If Keller was in this building with Aldiss, then she was the only person who could stop what was going to happen.

She pulled the door open and stepped inside Culver.

The first thing she noticed was the light.

It was a bleeding light, a slow strain of whiteness on the walls. Otherwise the classroom building was pitch-dark. Alex climbed the three steps in the vestibule and then turned the corner into a long corridor. When she did she saw a man. He was crouching just in front of her inside that pool of security light.
Aldiss,
she thought. But no. It wasn't the professor.

It was Matthew Owen.

“He's hurt,” Owen said. “Get someone.”

Alex looked down. Owen's hand was on Keller's back. Keller lay on the floor, motionless. Injured. There was nothing in Alex's mind but confusion. Why was the nurse here in this building? What the hell was going on?

“Matthew,” she managed to say, her tongue thick and clumsy. She looked at him, tried to place him here. “What are you doing?”

“I saw Aldiss running away from the house,” he said breathlessly. “I followed the professor in here and found Keller like this.”

“Where is he, Matthew?” she asked. “Where's Aldiss?”

“I don't know. I lost him in the hallway, but he's still here. In the building.”

She took a step toward Owen and looked down. There was a gash on Keller's head, and the nurse was applying pressure to the wound. She saw how he looked at Keller, how concerned he seemed about the other man.
It's time to stop,
she told herself.
This is not the night class. This isn't part of Aldiss's game. He's trying to help.

Seeing her relax, Owen nodded. “Aldiss hurt your friend. I need help. Can you help me, Alex?”

Slowly, carefully, she knelt beside Keller. She listened to the shallow keen of his breath, running her fingers through his hair as Owen inspected the wound. The hall was quiet.

“We're in danger here,” Alex said. “The professor—he'll come back for us. For me.”

“I don't think that's going to happen,” Owen said without looking up. There was something distant about his voice. Something almost detached.

“What are you talking about? He's here, Matthew, in this building. You said so yourself. He's going to come back and—”

“Shhh,” he said, pressing harder, dark blood trickling out around his fingers.

Alex stood up. “Well, I'm going. I'm the only one who can convince him to turn himself in. Stay with Keller until I get back, okay?”

She began to move into the darkness. She knew her way through this corridor, even though there was little light. She'd walked here in her dreams many times.

She moved down the hallway, keeping close to the wall. Emergency lighting bled onto the floor, and she followed the grid with her hands on the cold stone. Counting steps, her heart roaring in her ears, she felt the terror replaced by a hopeless inevitably. Three steps, four. Before she could take another something stopped her. A slight hush from behind, a flit of shadowy movement. She stopped, listening.
Go back. Go outside and get Black right now. This isn't your job, Alex.
But it was. It had been hers since the beginning, since she'd found the book and its hidden message. Now she had to finish it.

Another step, and again something made her hesitate. Footsteps? She turned around and—

—everything exploded into whiteness. She stumbled back against
the stone wall, an arm blocking her vision. A powerful flashlight had been aimed directly into her eyes. She saw a man's legs approaching, his dark shoes softly vibrating the tile beneath her. The upper half of him was invisible, sheared away by the manic light. Owen? Aldiss? She had no way of knowing. The world had simply winked out. “What are you doing?” Alex shouted, her voice a panicked and warbling screech.

No response. The man drew closer.

Her vision swam, tiny pinwheels spinning behind her lids. She blinked madly, her eyes watering, and felt the man there, in her space. Felt his heat. Smelled him. She still could see nothing but his dark slacks. There was something familiar about the way he stood, about the cant of his posture. But before she could figure out what it was the light pressed forward, blotting everything out again.

“Who are you?” she said.

No sound. He kept the light high. There was a kind of controlled violence in it; that light could have been a knife. An axe.

“Professor, is that you? It's over, Professor. They know all about you, about what you've—”

Closer now. The light was almost pressed against her face. The bulb touched her cheek, stinging her skin. She slapped him away but he restrained her, pushed her back into the wall. And it was then, as he moved his hand toward hers, that the light shifted. Was knocked upward the slightest degree. And beneath it, in her blurred vision, she saw the man's face.

“Matthew.”

“I only want to talk to you,” the nurse said. “Just stay there.”

Things were moving in her mind. Conclusions, connections. “Aldiss . . .” she managed.

The light remained. The figure behind it, silhouetted by the beam, stiffened. “I already told you, Alex,” he said. “The professor is somewhere in this building. He's hiding from us.” There was a mechanical quality to his voice now.

Could Owen be the one?
Alex thought.
But how could that be? Aldiss said to look for someone who was part of the night class.
And yet here she was, trapped in the hallway, the wild light still flooding her vision.
As she backed away from him Alex thought of what she knew about Owen, of all the things she'd seen from him the last two days.

He was a nurse who'd left his old job after a falling-out of some kind. Now he stayed with Dean Fisk, lived in the mansion, learning its secrets.

She remembered the card Aldiss had given her:
The Procedure has begun. Everything they say, everything you hear could be part of the game. Trust no one.

Another memory: Dean Fisk in his study saying,
But Matthew tells me that he sees them playing it on his walks across the east campus . . .

“Alex,” Owen said now. “Keller needs help. He's bleeding badly. Aldiss hurt him.”

A thought. A seed of something. A reason. Everything became clear in that one second; everything was revealed in that fraction of no-time: the reason Owen was here. The reason he'd come to Jasper College to care for Dean Fisk.

She looked at the man. Then she said, her eyes steady and her voice level, “Why are you doing this to us, Matthew?”

Owen's hand wobbled slightly; the light danced. Silence.

“You said you were brought here by the college, but that isn't true, is it? This is a job you coveted for a long time. You've been waiting for this moment.”

“I don't know what you're talking about, Alex,” Owen said, “but you really need to—”

“You killed them,” she went on. “You killed Michael Tanner, and then you put Melissa Lee in the lake to frame Aldiss. It was you all along.”

Owen took another step, the light shifting erratically. Alex listened for movement outside Culver Hall. Nothing now but the howl of the wind. She shut her eyes again.

“It's not what you think,” he said. “Just listen to me now. Listen, Alex—”

A memory descended, fitfully: Iowa. That morning in Iowa inside the Rutherford house. She realized for the first time how much she wanted to be done with it now, to be free of the night class and Paul Fallows and all the rest of it. To finally have it behind her.

“You killed them,” she said again.

“No, you killed them, Alex.”

Alex froze. “What are you talking about?”

“When you went to Iowa you set in motion all that would happen,” Owen said. “You ruined the game for everyone else.” He made that face again: that sour, childlike face that said to her,
This is happening whether you like it or not.
“Now I am going to win it once and for all.”

He grabbed her. Grabbed her by the hair and pulled her out of the screaming light. And it was then that Alex saw the nurse's face up close; she saw what was strange and familiar about him. That thing she could not place before. It was the eye, Owen's one blue eye visible while the other remained hidden in shadow. Below the eye was the patchy down of his beard, pale skin reddening in the cold beneath it. She remembered Aldiss during one of his seizures, the camera jostling just enough to reveal a face behind him. Yes—she had seen Owen before.

It ends,
she thought as the light fluttered and began to seep away.
It ends like this. Like this. Like this.

Aldiss had been right all along. The killer was part of the night class.

Matthew Owen had been one of Richard Aldiss's prison guards.

Alex looked around the small room. The air was thick, musty, dust hanging everywhere. It had begun to choke her, and she used the crook of her arm to cover her mouth. She stepped back into a corner, reached for one of the books, and—

The whole box slid forward, then toppled to the ground. She froze, waiting for someone to come. The hall remained empty. Quietly, her mouth bone-dry and her heart pounding, she knelt down and picked up another book. When she saw what was there she breathed in sharply, the shock of it hitting her like a blow to the chest.

Names.

The encyclopedias contained names, each entry the name of another girl. And they were all girls, Madeleine and Mary and Marybeth and Marissa. Last names too, and . . .

Yes. Addresses.

These were real. As real as she was.

Alex leaned down and flipped through one of the books. Its binding was crude, red string looped through holes, but it was there. Physical. She could pick it up and flip through it in the semidarkness. And this she did, the dust clogging her airways and making her gasp silently, but she kept on turning, flipping through the pages and taking in the
names of these girls. There were hundreds here, perhaps thousands, each of them arranged by the name of the town. When she was at the end she flipped back to the title page and saw what the book was called. And this, too, struck a kind of wild fear in her. A blind terror at seeing, at knowing what these books were. What they contained.