Obedience (26 page)

They walked in a straight line, trying to keep their eye on the door of the garage Dennis had spotted, and when they got there Brian tugged on the lever.

Nothing. The garage was locked.

Mary leaned on the garage door, her back against it. She felt so tired, so zapped, that she could have lain down on the gravel and gone to sleep for a hundred years. There was so much weight on her, so much awful tension.

Brian was walking down the bank of garages, which contained about a hundred in all, pulling on every lever. “Brian,” Mary whispered. But he was intent. She could hear him grunting with every failed pull from where she stood, the sound of it guttural, animalistic.

Dennis was crouching beside her, tossing gravel. The sun was high and hot now, blistering down on them. She could still taste the metallic residue of the gravel dust on her tongue.

“It has to be here, doesn’t it?” Dennis asked her.

“Why else would he show us those photographs? Why else-”

“I found it!” Brian shouted from the other side of the wall.

They ran around the first bank of garages and found him in the middle of the other bank, the ones Williams had left in the background in his photograph.
To confuse us,
Mary thought.
To keep the puzzle going on just a little longer.
He was standing in front of the garage, which was still closed. “I think this is what we’re looking for,” Brian said matter-of-factly.

They all stepped back and looked at the garage door. Mary’s breath caught in her throat, and she nearly choked again on the dust. The door had two giant red letters spray painted on the front:

Dennis opened the door.

Sitting inside the garage, at a small table, was Leonard Williams.

He was sitting in a rolling chair that could have been the one from Seminary East. His hands were tied behind him. There was a typewriter on the table with a sheet of paper rolled onto the platen. “Professor Williams?” Mary asked. The man’s head was hung, and there was a dirty gag stuffed in his mouth. He didn’t look up at his students, but it was clear he was alive: he blinked away the sunlight when it fell through the open door on him.

There was nothing in Mary’s mind but raw, coursing fear. Brian had her hand now and he was pulling her inside.

They entered the garage. Williams was still looking at the floor. His eyes, however, were open and aware. Someone had assaulted him. He had a shiny knot under his right eye. He looked, Mary thought, more ashamed than anything.

They approached Williams, but he did not acknowledge their presence. His eyes remained down, at the concrete floor. “The typewriter,” Dennis whispered. They made their way around the table and looked at the sheet of paper. When she saw what was written there, Mary’s knees buckled and Brian had to hold her upright. “I want to go home,” she said, although she didn’t even realize she was speaking aloud. It was just a string of words, a sort of notation, an expression of her fear. It was an involuntary reaction-nothing so much as her mouth sending out a distress signal for the mind that was locked up now, frozen with a kind of obliterating dread.

For the, read the page. Over and over again, filling up the white sheet entirely until there was no white space.

For the for the for the for the for the

8 hours left

They untied Williams and got him to the car. He was mumbling, despondent. He had been beaten badly. His eye was swollen almost shut, and a couple of teeth were bloody and loose. Mary used her cell phone to dial 911, but they were so far removed from civilization that the call wouldn’t connect.

As they were driving back toward campus, Williams began to speak. His words were like a bomb in the nervous silence of the car.

“I set it all up,” he said weakly. His head was still down, his eyes trained on the floor. Mary thought he looked like a child who had been caught stealing candy from a store.

“Set what up?” asked Dennis. They were passing through Cale, where they had spent the previous night. Mary didn’t know if it had all been worth it. She wondered, as she had six weeks ago, what Professor Williams’s role was in his own game. It was the last day of the quarter. The deadline. In three hours, at 6:00 p.m., when Logic and Reasoning 204 officially ended, would something happen, or would the time pass with no incident? Would it all turn out to be, in the end, just a puzzle? The beaten man next to her told her no.

“The whole thing,” said Williams flatly. “The Collinses’ house. The detective. The party at the house on Pride Street. The bar owner at the tavern who led you to me. The little boy and the woman, Della, whom I hired to play my wife. My wife’s name is Jennifer, by the way. She wanted nothing to do with all this, so I had to bring in someone else to…play her role. We don’t have any children of our own. The call from the policeman that night to your room, Mary. Marco and the inn, of course. And the storage facility. But of course you weren’t supposed to find me in that garage. You were supposed to find…other things.”

“What other things?” asked Mary.

“Information. Facts. Evidence I found when writing my books.”

“But the book is a fake. We saw it. It’s just those two words over and over again.”

“That’s the work of my enemies,” he said.

“Your enemies?” Dennis asked.

“These are people who didn’t want that book to be seen by the people in Cale or Bell City. Didn’t want them to read about Deanna and Polly. So they censored me. My enemies-they have powerful friends. They can do these things. This is why I have to speak in code. This is why I have to create a puzzle.”

“Who are they?” Mary wanted to know.

Williams mumbled something. He looked down again at the floor and closed his eyes.

“Talk to us, damnit!” shouted Brian. He was in the back with Williams, and he grabbed the man and shook him. Williams pulled away from Brian and stubbornly turned his gaze out the window.

“Brian,” Mary said calmly.

“What had you found out about Deanna Ward?” asked Dennis.

Williams inhaled before he spoke. As always, his gestures were soft, unassuming, almost meaningless in their simplicity. “Five years ago, I started writing another book,” he told them. “I had gotten some new information from one of my contacts in Cale. It was solid stuff. As I was writing the book, I learned that I would not be asked back to Winchester. They were going to fire me if I continued on with what I knew. Well, I couldn’t lose my job. You can’t be disgraced like that in the academic profession. Word gets around. You don’t get hired again. So I ceased and desisted, and I put all my information in that storage garage in Bell City.”

“Polly is your niece,” Mary said.

“Yes. Jennifer and I raised her. We couldn’t have any children of our own, so in 1967, when a relative of Jennifer’s asked us if we could take this little girl, we jumped at the opportunity.”

“Deanna’s father,” Mary went on. “He was seeing Polly. Sleeping with her.”

“Laughable,” Williams said, looking up at her. He had a harrowing look on his face, as if he had seen the unspeakable and was just now trying to rationalize it all. “You all have done well in the class, but there are things that you still do not understand.”

“Tell us, then,” Brian said. “Who put you in that garage?”

“Pig Stephens,” Williams said. “They thought I knew too much. About Deanna Ward. They had heard from someone that the class was getting too
specific.
It used to just be a game, you know, an exercise in logic. But a couple of years ago I began to see the possibilities. If I could tell my students where my information was, and if they could find it, then I would be in the clear and the
students
would solve the crime and not me. It was a kind of cloaking device.”

“But your enemies figured out what you were doing,” said Mary.

“Yes. Somehow he found out about it and sent his henchman. Now they have the information I gathered, and there’s no doubt in my mind that it’s all floating out in the Thatch River by now.”

“Who’s ‘he’?” asked Mary, but of course she already knew.

“Orman,” said Williams. “Ed Orman. If anyone has the answers to this puzzle, it’s him. But if you get close to him…well, you see what happens.” Williams gestured toward his damaged right eye.

“Did you send us that tape?” Brian asked. “The one with Milgram and the…those voices?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Williams whispered. He looked away, out the window to the bare Indiana landscape.

“Why would he be afraid of the information you found?” Mary asked.

Williams breathed in, steeled himself before he answered. “Ed Orman is Polly’s father.”

The weight of Williams’s revelation nearly doubled Mary over.
Of course,
she thought. Ed Orman lied to us about Williams’s disappearance because he was afraid of where we were going. When Brian called him to complain about the class, that was his chance to take Williams out of the picture.

“So what’s the connection to Deanna?” asked Brian.

“She’s Polly’s half sister,” Williams said. “Why do you think they looked so much alike? A woman named Wendy Ward went to Winchester for a semester back in the midseventies. She studied under Ed Orman, and they had a thing. This was before he was a dean. He was a respected professor, one of the finest researchers the university had. He had worked with Stanley Milgram at Yale, of course. That was his claim to fame. He didn’t want to sully his reputation, you see, and so he kept the affair secret. A man of his stature, admitting an affair with a student? A townie at that? It would have been professional suicide.”

Mary said, “But he couldn’t hide the fact that she was pregnant.”

“When Wendy got pregnant with Polly, he had it arranged so she would go back to Cale. I don’t know how he got her to stay quiet, but I assume he paid her a good deal of money. A year later, Wendy met Star, this biker who was the complete opposite of Ed Orman, and they had their first child together, Deanna. It was clear they couldn’t take care of two young children, so Star called a relative to ask her if she would be interested in ‘helping him out,’ as he put it.”

“Jennifer,” Mary said.

“Yes. My wife is a cousin of Star’s. I was just finishing my PhD at Tulane and was looking for a job. Jennifer ran the idea by me, and it was intriguing. I interviewed at Winchester and got the job. Ed was against my hiring, of course, but he had no clout at the time. By the time he moved up into his perch at Carnegie, I had written a book and was tenured. Of course, he even tried to take that from me…”

The plagiarism incident, thought Mary. Ed Orman tried to frame him.

“At the beginning of my career I was a visiting lecturer, making very little money. All Jennifer and I could afford was the trailer out in Bell City. I drove the hour and a half from Bell City to DeLane to teach. Wendy wanted Polly far away from Orman, anyway. At a remove. She was afraid of him for some reason. At that point, you see, I didn’t know what I do now about the man. I thought Polly was just the result of an unfortunate fling, something that happened between two consenting adults. I couldn’t have been more wrong.”

“What did Ed Orman think about your role in Polly’s life?” Mary asked.

“He distrusted me. He was paranoid, constantly worried that I would blow his cover and tell someone who Polly really was. But of course I didn’t want to sacrifice my relationship with Polly. For all she knew, we were her parents. She was just a little over one when we adopted her, and she never knew anything else but Jennifer and me.”

Dennis said, “It must have been awful on you at Winchester.”

“Of course,” Williams admitted wearily. “I was living a lie. I never talked about Polly. I
couldn’t.
Ed had a muzzle on me. It sent me into a dark depression. Finally, we were able to get away from it. I was offered a job in Strasburg, and in nineteen ninety I taught in France. But when that was over, I returned to Bell City and resumed my daily commute to Winchester. To my lie of a life. I wanted to be open about my family, to not live in this secrecy, but of course Wendy and Star would have none of it for fear of Orman.”