Obedience (28 page)

She responded to Kiseley and told her that she would e-mail the paper within the week, blaming a family emergency for the delay. Then she threw some clothes into her old suitcase and went out to her mother’s old Camry. Her heart was thudding, but it was a plaintive noise. There was a certain sadness inside her: the knowledge that Deanna would not be found, and that she, Mary, was at least a bit responsible for that fact. She had been so close to the truth but had been unable to find the missing girl.

Yet Mary had a feeling that if she looked, if she tried hard enough, logic could still lead her to Deanna.

Ed Orman, she thought. Elizabeth Orman, his wife. Deanna Ward. Wendy Ward, Deanna’s mother. Star Ward, Deanna’s father and Wendy’s husband. Polly Williams, Ed’s secret daughter. Jennifer Williams, Deanna’s aunt, Polly’s adopted mother, and Leonard Williams’s wife. Professor Leonard Williams. Pig Stephens, the potential abductor and murderer of Deanna Ward.

Even after all this time it was still a puzzle, one of Williams’s tangrams. Paper silhouettes. Yet she had been given a wealth of information by Williams, some of it definite and some of it presumed, and she still was no closer to finding Deanna. Maybe, like Williams had said, she just had to resign herself to the fact that some crimes remain unsolved-and hidden. After all, she had to get on with her life, didn’t she? Mary sighed and started the car. She saw on the dashboard clock that it was 6:05. Williams’s six weeks had finally passed, but Mary felt like she was moving toward another, more pivotal, deadline. Mary’s mother would be expecting her at 9:00 for dinner at the Bristol Café, where they always met when Mary came home.

She turned out of the parking lot at Brown and then took a right onto Montgomery. In three hours, she would be in Kentucky and this nightmare would be behind her.

Mary drove along Montgomery and came to the stoplight at the corner of Pride Street. Students carrying overstuffed suitcases passed in front of the car. It was just a six-mile drive to I-64, which would lead her back to Kentucky. But Mary was feeling the tug of something. It was a conscious thing, an awareness of something left unopened, like a wound. A lack of closure. An imperfection.

I love my study. Have you seen it, Mary?

She turned right onto Pride. She narrowly avoided a student who was crossing the street, and he cursed at her as she hit the gas and sped down Pride. She had no idea where she was going-she just drove, hoping her intuition would take her wherever she needed to go.

Professor Williams’s house was just down on the right. She slowed in the front and noticed that his pickup was not in the driveway. She stopped at the curb and got out.

What are you doing, Mary? she asked herself.

But she was already walking toward the front door. She rang the doorbell and waited. The maple tree that towered above the Williams’s house was blazing orange.

When no one came to the door, Mary went around the side of the house and looked in one of the windows. She expected bare walls and dusty floors, just like at the tavern or the Collinses’, but it was the same living room she had seen on the night of the party. There was the couch Williams had been sitting on when she’d left that night, and the dinner table was cluttered with dishes that had recently been used. Even the butter was still out.

Mary went around to the back door. She walked up the landing steps and looked through the inlaid glass on the back door. The same thing from this angle: a normal house that looked positively lived in. She saw the kitchen, and beyond it the hallway that led to the Williamses’ bedroom.

You’re an idiot, Mary. You’ve let this get to your head. Now let’s go home. Let’s get as far away from this as we possibly can.

As she was turning to leave, something inside caught her eye. She could see a door at the front of the hallway. Williams’s study. The door was open, and inside was a desk. On the desk, something was glinting in the shifting evening light. Mary squinted to see this object, and just as she got her face to the glass someone was behind her, stepping through the fallen leaves in the yard.

“Can I help you?” the person said.

Mary turned and saw the woman.

Polly.

“I…I’ve…” Mary stammered. “I have Professor Williams in logic class, and he has a paper of mine that I need.”

“Didn’t the term end today?” Polly asked. She was wearing a pea-coat and she had her arms crossed in front of her, protecting herself from the cutting breeze. Polly didn’t look forty years old to Mary. She carried herself like a young woman, but her face was damaged from years of tragic worry. She had the dog on a leash, and she reached up and clipped the leash to the clothesline that ran between the two maples in the Williamses’ backyard.

“Yes,” Mary explained, “but I’ll get an incomplete if the paper isn’t finished before the Winchester term starts.”

“Oh,” said Polly. “Do you know where it is?”

“Yeah. I think he told me that he would leave it on his desk.”

“I’ll let you inside, then. Dad is off God knows where. He keeps everything important in his study, though, so I’m sure you’ll find it somewhere in his clutter.”

Polly unlocked the back door and the two women went into the house. As Polly went about cleaning up the dishes that were spread across the table, Mary found her way to the study. She checked to see if Polly was watching her, and then she began to search Williams’s desk.

What the hell are you looking for?

She didn’t know. She opened drawers and shuffled papers, still keeping her eye on Polly in the other room. Outside the clouds passed across the day’s last sunlight, and again an object glinted on the desk.

Mary located it, right there in the center. A paperweight.

The paperweight was sitting atop a manila envelope. As Mary removed the weight and picked up the envelope, Polly said from the other room, “Do you like his class?”

“Oh, sure,” Mary called. “He’s…interesting.”

“Other people tell me that his class is weird. He won’t tell me what he teaches, but I know he’s into puzzles. My father is the kind of guy who won’t tell you the answer to anything. He makes you figure it out for yourself. He’s always been like that.”

“Yeah,” said Mary, her tone distracted. Inside the envelope there was a note addressed to her.

Dear Mary,

I knew you couldn’t leave it alone. There were some things that I couldn’t tell you in the car. I have a feeling that you are one who will not rest until you know the whole story. Well, that I can’t give to you. But here is the rest of what I know. This is what Orman and Pig did not find in the storage garage. I hope it helps.

Sincerely,

Inside the envelope there were two photographs she had already seen: the red Honda Civic and the black Labrador. Nothing else.

“Did you find it?” Polly asked. She was standing at the door. She had taken off her coat and was drying a plate with a dish towel. She had long dark hair, and Mary looked in her eyes. She saw in them a lifetime of secret pain.

“Yep,” Mary said, holding up the envelope.

“Good. Dad keeps this room such a mess that you’re lucky to find anything in there. Every time I come home to visit I spend most of my time picking up after him.”

Polly led Mary out, this time through the front. There was much that Mary wanted to ask the woman, but of course she could not. As she was walking to her car Polly called, “Have a great break.”

“I will,” Mary said.

Polly closed the door and turned on the porch light. It was, after all, getting dark.

Across campus, Dennis Flaherty was in his room at the Tau house waiting for the phone to ring. He was thinking of Elizabeth, as he often did, wondering how it had come this far. On the bed beside him was the black garbage bag. He was having trouble opening it. They were at the end now, and it was difficult to finish it even though he knew he had to if he wanted to go on with his life-and if he wanted to find a way back to Elizabeth.

The phone rang.

“You ready?” asked the voice on the other end.

“Yes,” Dennis lied.

The man hung up, and Dennis sat in the crackling silence. He wondered if there was another way to do it. Another way to finish this thing.

But there was no use. He knew that soon he would have to be ready to go.

For the first time in as long as he could remember, he crossed himself.

Then he opened the garbage bag and took out what was inside.

Mary pulled into the parking lot of the natatorium on Pride Street and studied the pictures again. The red car she had seen in the photographs Williams had sent, of course. But it had also come up in their time in Bell City. It was the car that Paul said was for sale at the house on St. Louis Street. Was Williams trying to lead her back there, to where he had once lived with Jennifer and Polly?

The Camry idled as night fell. She had to turn on the interior light to see the pictures. It was almost 7:00 p.m. and her mother and father would be getting ready, her father showering, her mother out of the tub with a towel around her wet hair. But Mary wouldn’t be meeting them at the restaurant. She still had business to attend to at Winchester, and she intended to finish what she had started. She called her mother’s cell. She would be home later, she explained, but don’t wait up. Yes, everything was okay. Yes, she had done well on her tests. No, she didn’t need anything. She would see them both later, and promise-
Promise me, Mom
-that you won’t wait up.

She closed her eyes and thought. How was she going to use these photographs, these “clues” of Williams’s, to figure out anything? There was a small roar in her ears, the roar of anticipation, and she knew that feeling would go to waste if she didn’t figure out what Williams was trying to tell her now.

I don’t think it was part of the game, Brian had said regarding the ride he’d given to Elizabeth Orman. I think she was serious.

Mary did a U-turn on Pride Street and went back toward Winchester. On the hill to her right, which the students called Grace Hill, she saw Dean Orman’s house. She turned into the drive and climbed the hill toward the cottage. “Cottage” really didn’t do it justice. It was essentially a mansion fashioned as a nineteenth-century country carriage house. Rising high into the trees was the house’s A-frame. The house, Mary knew, had four stories and was over five thousand square feet.

Mary got out of the car and went to the front door. She had no idea what she was going to tell Elizabeth Orman if the woman answered the door. That her husband was an accomplice in a murder twenty years ago? That she knew the woman had slept with Dennis Flaherty? Mary rang the bell and waited. She heard faint footsteps from inside, and the door cracked open to reveal Dean Orman.

“Can I help you?” he asked.

“I think I have some information you’d like to know about Professor Leonard Williams,” Mary said. She was flying blind now, talking off the top of her head. It was an exhilarating feeling, and she went with it.

The man’s eyes took on a dark and knowing tint. “Come in,” he said.

Mary followed him inside. Orman had his newspaper spread out on the floor next to the couch and ESPN was on the plasma television that loomed in the corner. “Forgive my mess,” he said, pushing some of the paper beneath the couch. He gestured for Mary to sit, and she took a seat on an antique lolling chair beside him. Orman was more disheveled than usual. He was wearing a Winchester U sweatshirt with jogging pants. There were holes in his socks, she noticed. His orange hair was matted and tufted on one side, as if he had just risen from a nap.

“Talk,” he said.

“I was in his logic class this semester,” began Mary. “And some of the things that he told us were-let’s just say they were highly unusual.”

“What sorts of things?” Orman was interested now. He was leaning forward, toward Mary, with his bifocals clutched between his interlaced fingers.

“Things about Deanna Ward.”

The man did not move when Mary said the name. She searched him for something, some tic of recognition, but he was stock still.

“Things about the disappearance of this girl,” Mary went on, “and another girl, named Polly, who he claimed you knew.”

Orman laughed. It was a deep and guttural chuckle, barely registering as an exterior noise at all.

“Leonard says
things
all the time,” Orman said. “He’s been talking off and on for twenty years. Here at Winchester we tend to ignore his theories. Most of them are innocent, but some of them are in bad taste, let alone potentially dangerous. I have talked to Leonard about this more times than you can imagine. He tells me, each time, that he will do better. But he doesn’t. Empty promises, you see. And we think this is why Leonard left.”

“Because you spoke to him about his teaching practices?” Mary asked.

“Because he was tired of playing by our rules,” said the dean. “Well, when you are part of a business you have to read the company line sometimes. It’s the American way, you know. Leonard couldn’t abide by that, so he left in the night and will never teach here again.”

“You’ve fired him?” she asked.

“Of course not. We don’t fire professors with tenure. But we can make it so that Leonard has no course load. Or that he is reading research grants for a living in the basement of Carnegie. Anything to get him out of the classroom. There was a time when he was a brilliant lecturer. But not now. He’s too worried about the nonessential, the clutter of our daily lives, to teach students well.”

“Who is Deanna Ward?” Mary pressed him.

The dean looked at her. Again, there was no stir or awkwardness that told her he knew about Deanna. “A Cale girl who went missing years ago,” said Orman lightly. “Leonard wrote a book about the case, and for years since then he has been trying to sell his crackpot theory to anybody who will listen.”