Obedience (20 page)

“We have to find her,” she told Dennis now, referring for the first time not to Polly but to Deanna Ward.

That night, he met Elizabeth at the Cossack, a little bar on the border of DeLane and Cale. She was already drunk. He slid across from her and she looked at him, her glare unfocused, sloppy. “What’s wrong with you?” he asked. They had been talking again in the library, and while Dennis had to admit it wasn’t like before, there was still a certain charge to it. She was at least acknowledging him again, looking at him and considering his thoughts.

“Nothing,” she slurred. “This-this damned dissertation.” The word was dirty on her tongue, a swear.

“So, I’m going to be busy these next few days,” he told her.

She only nodded heavily.

“I’m going with some friends of mine on a trip,” he said.

Again, that slow nod. She knew all of this, of course, but he was making sure. Making sure she knew so that she would remember when he returned, so that maybe-maybe that old energy would return. Who knew: maybe that would be his reward. In just a week, he had gone from angry at her-the kind of anger that is unhealthy, vile-to something else. Something like desperation. Yes, he admitted it: he was
desperate
for Elizabeth now that she had turned him away. Dennis stayed awake at night thinking of ways to bring her back.

They were silent for a moment. And then she said, “I got a tattoo.” When Dennis didn’t say anything, she continued, “Want to see?”

He stared at her as she tore back a square of gauze and showed him the back of her hand. “Isn’t it cool? You ever seen anything like that?”

“No,” he lied. “No I haven’t.”

In the blood-dotted ink he saw an S and a P, entangled.

They had planned the Cale trip for Saturday, but it turned out that Dennis had a mandatory charity event with the Taus, so they postponed it until early the next week. Brian and Mary spent the weekend sitting in her room at Brown, anxiously waiting on a call from Dennis. They played Uno, their hands moistening the deck until it was so slick that it could not be shuffled. They watched reruns of
Seinfeld
and
Friends
and Mary’s entire DVD collection: Persuasion, Elizabeth, Mel Gibson’s
Hamlet.
They listened to Mary’s CDs, falling asleep here and there to the Weepies and Cat Power and the Arcade Fire. They spoke to each other in short, clipped phrases about anything not related to Deanna Ward.

On Sunday afternoon, Mary checked her mail at the campus post office and found a crude package in the box. It was a mangled manila envelope that had been taped and lined with a series of months-old Attn’s on the outside. Her name was the last in the line: M. Butler.

Mary waited until she returned to Brown Hall to open it. Inside, she found a VHS tape. Someone had written on the white strip in the middle of the tape,
This might help.

She pulled out her old VCR from under the bed and plugged it in. She and Brian sat in front of the television and waited for an image to appear. The film was grainy. Lines ran through the wavering picture, making it difficult to see what was happening.

But Mary had seen this film once before. It had been freshman year, in Dr. Wade’s Psychology 101: The Milgram Experiments.

The experimenter was asking the subject a question. This man, Mary knew, was being paid by Milgram to scream when the participant pushed the buttons on the “shock generator.” When the subject answered a question incorrectly, the participant said, “You will now get a shock of one hundred and five volts,” and he pushed a button on the machine. The subject in the next room cried out in mock pain. The participant said, “Just how far can you go on this thing?”

The scientist, who was also one of Milgram’s actors, said, “As far as is necessary.”

The participant said, “What do you mean ‘as far as is necessary’?”

“To complete the test,” the scientist said.

The participant continued. The next time the subject answered incorrectly, the participant pushed a button and said, “One hundred and fifty volts.”

Again, the subject cried out. “Get me out of here!” the man shouted. “I told you I have heart problems. My heart’s starting to bother me now.”

“It is essential that you continue,” the scientist told the participant.

The screen went black. But there was still audio coming from the television, a scratching sound that resembled someone rubbing fabric over a microphone.

A man’s voice said, “I don’t-”

“Bring it here,” another man said sharply. “Bring it the hell over here.”

“Can’t,” the first man said.

“Listen, she’s got-”

“Deanna. Call her Deanna.”

“Whatever. Listen. She’s not doing good. It’s her breathing. It’s her color.”

“Like chalk.”

“What?”

“Like sidewalk chalk. That’s what she looks like. I used to play with it at my grandma’s house. We’d draw hopscotch on the sidewalks, and-”

“Listen to me. Would you shut up and listen to me? We need to do something. We need to-”

“Turn it off,” Mary whispered, and when Brian didn’t hear her she began to shout, “Turn it off! Turn it off! Please turn it off!”

Later, they sat in her room and ate lukewarm soup. They hadn’t spoken about the tape or the weird audio at the end. “Did you recognize the voices?” Mary asked.

“No. They sounded like they were…inside something. An airport hangar. Or a-”

“Cave,” she said. “It sounded like a cave. The echo.”

“Yeah,” he said, turning his soupspoon over and letting the broth drip into the bowl.

“So how old was the audio on that tape?” asked Mary.

“It sounded old,” Brian said. “Years. It was…scratchy.”

“But what if it wasn’t? What if she’s still there in that place? What if whoever sent the tape was trying to tell us something, trying to lead us to her? She’s sick, Brian. You heard it. She’s not…not breathing right. Should we take it to the police?”

“There’s no”-he picked up the package the tape had come in and studied it-“return address here. I don’t know what they would do with it. What does it say, anyway? It’s meaningless.”

Mary said nothing, only stared blankly out the window and down to the quad.

“He was testing evil,” Brian finally said.

Mary didn’t say anything. Her soup steamed in her face; she closed her eyes and felt its warmth on her lids.

“Milgram,” he went on. “Williams didn’t mention that part in class.”

“I know,” she said.

“The participant would go as far as the scientist would tell him to go. He was afraid of the scientist. He was…”

“Obedient,” Mary whispered.

“Yeah, obedient. Most of them went so far that the screams stopped in the other room. Milgram’s subject was playing dead. And still the participant would go on.”

Mary was looking off, through the open window and down to the quad. She shook her head. It was all elusive, so abstract but entirely cruel. She didn’t know what it meant, yet she had a notion about what it
could mean.

“Did Williams send it?” he asked.

“I don’t think so,” she told Brian. “I think somebody’s trying to warn us about him.”

“Orman,” Brian said. “Orman studied with Milgram at Yale. Maybe he’s trying to tell us something about Williams.”

“But what about Deanna?” Mary asked.

Yes, what about Deanna? It was the only part of this she could verify; she had the documentation to prove it. What was unclear was how Williams’s story, and how Williams himself, connected with Deanna Ward. Until Mary could somehow find the answer to that question, all else-Williams’s puzzles, Brian’s story about Elizabeth Orman, and now this mysterious tape-would be inconsequential.

They left on Tuesday afternoon, one day before the deadline Williams had given them. They drove to Cale, unsure of where they would go once they got there. Mary had the idea that they would find Bethany Cavendish again, but it was decided among them that Cavendish was possibly a part of Williams’s game, since she had put Brian on the trail of the book that was not a book. Dennis thought they should drive out to Bell City to ask around about the girl who had been returned to Wendy Ward, the girl who had been mistaken for Deanna.

But that was for later, they decided. They had to ask a few questions in Cale first, because Cale was where it had all begun. Mary suggested that they go to the house on During Street, where the elderly couple lived (if Cavendish could be trusted with even this information), and the boys agreed that it was probably the best place to start.

They drove Dennis Flaherty’s Lexus, and Mary felt a kind of nostalgia the whole way there. She had spent time in this car. There: she had reached across and taken Dennis’s hand one night on the way back from a play in Indianapolis. And there: he had kissed her, pulling her across the seat toward him. They were confusing memories, and she had to look out the window, at the blurring scenery, to get it out of her mind.

They got lost on the back roads of Cale. Brian had the map spread across his lap in the backseat, and he and Dennis had a spat when it was determined that they’d missed their turn and gone five miles out of their way. Dennis, sighing in an exaggerated manner, turned the Lexus around in a gravel turnabout and made his way back into town.

Finally, they found During Street, its sign bent and nearly shrouded by a weeping willow that was growing beside the road. If there is such a place as the “backwoods,” they were there. During Street was a tree-shrouded lane, and from the road you could see the blue expanse of the Thatch River. The vegetation was thick-river foliage, dark leaves and dark soil, kudzu falling in torrents all around. A few cabins, probably only used in the summer, were falling into disrepair here and there.

Brian claimed that he would know the couple’s house by the field that Bethany Cavendish had described to him. And there it was, just ahead on the right, a simple Cape Cod with an American flag flying out front.

“Polly’s house,” Mary said, referring to the transparency they had seen in Williams’s class the first week.

An old man answered the door. Dennis, because he looked the part of a salesman, was appointed their speaker. “We were wondering,” Dennis said through the mesh of the screen door, “if you wouldn’t mind talking to us for a few minutes about the girl who used to live here.” Although Brian would not have used such honesty, Dennis’s tactic seemed to work. The old man opened the door for them and let them inside.

“We find some of her stuff sometimes,” an old woman explained once they were sitting at the kitchen table. Her name was Edna Collins. She fixed them instant coffee and they sat around the table, drinking and listening. The couple, just as Bethany Cavendish had said, was happy to see them.
Lonely,
Mary thought. They’re just aching for company.

“People come by here all the time,” the old man said. “Tourists. Taking pictures. This is a famous site, isn’t it, Edna? We’re local celebrities.” He laughed-a hearty, deep laugh that was larger than his small frame.

“Just the other day I found a doll out in the field. I told Norman, ‘I bet you it come from that girl.’ We find little things like that all the time out in that field-trinkets, toys, all sorts of objects. Possessions she may have had. All down the hillside, down to the river, we find stuff. Why, I bet you could go out there right now and find enough to fill a house.”

“They hide out there sometimes,” the old man put in. “Kids. We’ll see them out there in the field with their flashlights. God knows what they’re doing. Once they were having some kind of ceremony, some evil thing.
Wicca,
I reckon they call it. I went out there with my gun and told them to stop. We don’t mind pictures being taken of the house. We knew what we were getting into when we moved in. But I have to draw the line when you’re bringing Satan onto my property.”