“Yes?”
“There’s a railroad track in the right-hand corner,” the student went on.
“And?”
“And so that could support a staged crime. Her father could have taken her out to Stribbling Road-”
“Are people still on that?” Dennis sighed.
“-and slipped her away on the train.”
“This isn’t nineteen twenty-five, Ms. Davies. People still hop boxcars where you’re from?”
When the girl fell silent, Mary began to speak. But before she could say anything Dennis said, “I want to go back to the ‘Place’ clue.”
“Go on,” Williams led him.
“Pig and Polly had a thing,” Dennis said.
“It’s interesting, isn’t it?” mused the professor. “Here’s a guy about fifteen years older than Polly. He clearly-clearly-isn’t in her class. She’s beautiful, he’s…not.” A few people laughed. Williams rolled his chair around here and there but kept his feet kicked up. “She’s got a family, whereas Pig grew up on the streets. He’s a tough guy. But she sees something in him. What is it?”
“He takes care of her,” a girl said from the back row. “He’s like a father to her.”
“A father,” Williams said. “Go on.”
“She was drawn to him because she had a rocky relationship with her own dad?”
“The same dad who was waiting up for her the last night she was seen?” he asked. “Try again.”
“He protects her.” Dennis had picked up the loose thread. “Mike hits her, abuses her, is generally nasty to her. And Pig is there to nurse her back to health. He tends to her wounds, her broken heart.”
“Sugar daddy,” said Brian. He had his head down and was looking at Williams from the side of his gaze.
“So they were fucking,” Williams said. The word jarred the class. Some students giggled nervously. Williams apparently didn’t register this strangeness, the ripple it created when a professor used language that was so un-professor-like. “They had an affair. How does this change things?”
The girl from the back again: “Pig fell in love with her.”
“And?”
“And he threatened to kill Mike if he touched her again. They were seen arguing by the pool.”
“Maybe Polly was obedient to Pig,” Williams said.
“How do you mean?” asked Dennis.
“I mean maybe he held some authority over her. Maybe he was demonstrating his authority in everything he did. How he dressed, how he spoke to her. Perhaps he made her afraid to defy him.”
“Maybe,” Mary said, “he planted the seeds of the abuse in her head.”
“That’s really interesting, Ms. Butler. And that’s pure Milgram.”
“Who?” someone asked.
“Stanley Milgram. You haven’t seen the statue outside the Orman Library? A dedication to Milgram. He came here in the seventies as a visitor of Dean Orman. He lectured right in this room in February of nineteen seventy-six. Do you just walk past that statue without noticing the inscription? Why must students have such tunnel vision?”
“We have a library?” said a boy in the back. The class laughed, but Williams only grinned and shook his head.
“Milgram conducted behavior experiments at Yale in the sixties,” Williams continued. “He found that people are willing to go along with anything if an authority figure tells them to do it. Perhaps Pig was Polly’s authority figure.”
“I don’t believe that,” said Dennis.
“Let’s test it then,” Williams said. “What if you were told you were going to fail this class if you didn’t, say, stand on your head in the corner. Would you do it?”
“No,” Dennis said. Mary saw him blanch-she knew he was lying.
“Okay,” the professor continued. “What if someone of tremendous authority at this institution, say Dean Orman, came into this room right now and told you that you would be expelled if you didn’t reach across and pull Ms. Butler’s hair. Would you do that?”
“Well, it’s not
my
head,” Dennis said.
“Exactly!” Williams laughed. “Milgram proved that we will go to great lengths to hurt people if we are told to do it by someone of influence. After all, they know best, right? Dean Orman knows best. He is an authority figure, is he not? He is learned, and his education makes him a figure of control.”
“The Nazis,” Brian said.
“Yes,” Williams said. “Milgram was showing that even notions of right and wrong are meaningless when stacked against authority. We are more obedient to another’s authority than we are to our own instincts.”
Williams stopped speaking. He composed himself, drew in a breath, and went on. “So here we have,” the professor said, “two people who have threatened Mike with his life. Polly’s father and now this guy, Pig. Mike, it seems, is not the most well-liked individual on the planet. Which proves?”
“Polly is lovable,” said Mary.
“Polly is indeed lovable. She is the heroine of this story, after all, and she is counting on you to find her. Some of you have developed an obsession for her already.” Mary looked away from him quickly. He wondered what Troy had told him. “Some of you are thinking about this crime when you should be studying for other classes. I know how it is. This is Polly. What you’re feeling is the intuition to
save,
to deeply care. This is something that, as a species, we are the only ones capable of feeling. Oh, a mother chimpanzee will save her baby, but only if the baby is in immediate danger. Right now, the danger is abstract. You don’t know what it is. In fact, the danger is conceptual: I have created it. I have told you that Polly is going to be murdered, and you believe me-in a purely metaphorical sense, of course. And so you have followed me into this narrative until you care, some of you deeply, about what happens to Polly.”
Then: “I don’t care.” It was Brian.
“Oh yes, Mr. House? And why not?”
“Because everybody’s going to figure it out anyway. Somebody will get the answer and call someone on the telephone and then we’ll all have it.”
“But what if nobody figures it out?” Williams asked, and the class went silent.
“Why did you send me a photograph of my friend?” Mary said, cutting the silence sharply. She left out the part about the phone call from the campus police; she wasn’t sure what that was about just yet. She didn’t tell him that she and Summer had figured it out. The couch was in the basement of the Sigma Nu house.
“It seems, class,” the professor said, smiling and swiveling his chair back behind the table again, “that Ms. Butler believes that this class is for her. That she’s the only student here. I got your note, by the way.”
He said it loudly, aiming it right at the class. The message: Mary Butler is trying to get a leg up on you. She’s trying to
sabotage you.
What had she done that was so wrong? She had simply asked him a question about Summer McCoy. Wouldn’t everyone in the class, if they knew Summer like she did, feel that Williams had designed the e-mail specifically for them?
“The picture was just a picture, Mary,” Dennis said. “It was just a photograph of a party. I think I know some people in that shot.”
“When I send these clues,” Williams said, “I am not singling anyone out. We are all receiving the same information.”
“But that was my…” She couldn’t go on. She suddenly felt awful, as if she’d been tricked not just by Williams but by everyone else in Logic and Reasoning 204 as well.
“It’s not just about you,” Dennis said to no one in particular.
“But he was with her,” Mary said quietly. “Mike was with Summer on that couch…”
Oh God, oh God, oh God. What have I done? Why did I let it get this far?
She felt herself getting up, walking toward the door. It was not fast; it was more of a methodical walk, determined, head down. Before she was at the door, Professor Williams rolled his chair in front of it. It was the closest she’d been to him. She looked at his scarred face, at his eyes, which were deep and whimsical, and in that constant state of enchanted amusement. She smelled him: cigarette smoke. “Stay,” he whispered. There was something stern in his tone, something rough. He was blocking the door fully, with his whole body. “Please…let me go,” Mary whispered through clenched teeth. She reached out and touched him. She did not mean to push him, she simply wanted to make him realize her discomfort, to let him know that she needed to get outside into the fresh air. But he was so strong that she could not move him. “Stay,” he said again, stricter. And though Mary did not want to, she returned to her seat. She felt all the eyes in the class on her, all the mouths ready to erupt with laughter at her expense.
“Those pictures,” said Williams, “of course, were meant as artifice. Just to give you a sense of reality. Image makes us understand in a way that narrative cannot. That was the car of a student who is in the PhD program here at Winchester. It’s parked beside Highway 72. I wanted it to appear as real as possible. A road you knew, a place you’d seen.” He smiled broadly at Mary, trying to win her back, trying to change the tone of his lecture. “The other photo was in the Sig house on a Friday night. Just a former student of mine sitting on a couch. The girl-your friend, Ms. Butler-just happened to be there at the time. Coincidence, nothing more.
“But I do want to apologize to Ms. Butler. I didn’t know that the photograph contained someone familiar to her. If I had known that, I would have never sent it.” He rolled back to the side, so that he could look at the class as a whole again. Seminary East’s light was on his legs and creeping up. “Now that that’s out of the way,” he continued, “an announcement: there will be a guest speaker on Wednesday.”
It wasn’t until later, when she was back in her dorm room trying to read the middle section of City of Glass, that the thought came to her: But what is real and what isn’t? Was Polly’s father’s tattoo real? Williams had referenced it in class, so it must be part of the game. Why were some details meaningful and others mere coincidence? This was what Williams was doing to them. He was intentionally mixing them up, leading them far away from the true source of the crime, decoying them into believing certain things were in play and others were not.
The mystery, then, would have to be figured out by a system of elimination. She must discard all that was false and focus only on the substance of Williams’s game. This would not be easy, as it all began and ended with Williams. She had to figure him out, to decipher his tendencies. She had to pay more attention.
13
The next time, to get away from the old man, they went to the Kingsley Hotel in downtown DeLane. Elizabeth had called ahead to reserve the room, told the girl at the desk that people were arriving in town to visit with Dean Orman. They know what you mean when you say “people,” she told Dennis. Dignitaries, professors, alumni. It was easy to conceal things in this town, she said: all you had to do was mention people, and things were veritably done for you.
The room was impressive. Art nouveau, wrought-iron chandelier bending the light into every corner, Victorian upholstery in the sitting area, and, unfathomably, a flat-screen LCD television mounted on the wall. An impressive Monet replica across from it, hanging over the headboard. It was the nicest hotel Dennis had ever stayed in, and unfortunately the room was his for just three hours. He had a study group back at the Tau house at 8:30 p.m.
Elizabeth was systematic, almost professional, with him. She turned around, still on top of him, and they watched themselves through the cheval mirror that stood at the foot of the bed. Their lovemaking was becoming more polished, less of a rush, and for the first time Dennis felt his mind wander as she rode him. For some reason he thought of Polly, the fake girl that would be murdered if he didn’t find her. What would it have been like to be with her? She was wild. She had piercings, Dennis remembered, all over her body. Or maybe she would have been submissive, weak. Vulnerable.
Thinking of Polly, Dennis came in a spasm.
“It wasn’t the same,” Elizabeth said later. They were lying on the bed, spooning each other, the ceiling fan softly looping above them.
“No,” Dennis admitted. Again, that brutal honesty.
“Maybe it’s over.”
“Probably.”
They lay there in silence, the cool air prickling their skin. Dennis thought of the British boy, the one who’d cried in the living room while Dean Orman watched secretly from upstairs. In some ways, he was glad that it had come to this. Ever since his conversation with the dean he had been thinking less of Elizabeth and more about Polly-and, strangely, he didn’t mind.
“My mother did this,” Elizabeth said.
“This?”
“This thing. What we’re doing here. This sneaking around. Deception. Always hiding out, calling on the phone from somewhere and saying she would be late. My father knew about it. This was the sixties, you see. Free love. I once caught them having one of those parties. I was maybe seven years old. I walked downstairs and everyone was naked, all the women with their flabby breasts. Incense in the air. ‘Go back upstairs, Lizzie,’ my mother said. And I did, just as I was told.”
“You’re lucky,” Dennis joked. “The wildest thing I ever saw was my dad scribbling equations on the windows. He said that he liked to see them from both sides. Mother disagreed.”
“You don’t understand,” Elizabeth said. “It got completely out of control for my mother. She couldn’t contain it. She fell in love with an artist, a guy who did lithographing in San Francisco. Finally, she moved out there with him. A few years later, when I was in college, she came back. Broke. Dirty and damaged. She was a completely different person. And still married to Daddy. He took her back, of course. There really wasn’t any question. He still loved her, fiercely. He took her back even though my brothers and I warned him not to.”
Elizabeth was turned away from him now, speaking into the pillow. Dennis felt her speech wasn’t for him. These were things, he knew, that she could never say to Dean Orman. He would look down on her for it, think she was low class, weak and disposable. So, Dennis realized: the same act-the covering of the ring, the omission of her name-had been played with Orman in Morocco. He thought of the dean and Elizabeth in the desert, the sandy wind sweeping across their tent, and all those half-truths being told.