Obedience (30 page)

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the man said.

“Ed Orman thinks you do.”

They let that hang between them. Down the bank, the Thatch rocked and swayed, and the boats banged in their slips, making a cacophony of sound in the night. Just as she opened her mouth to speak, the flashlight exploded on again and she lost her vision. Mary held her arm up to her eyes, and she was able to see his feet-just his boots, walking toward her. She scrambled away from him, but he was grabbing her, forcing her back toward him. Still blind, she smelled his breath, musty and thick and strangely earthy.

Mary pulled away from him and ran. She felt him, felt his heat, close behind her. She saw her Camry, its door still open. There was a ringing coming from inside it: her cell phone. It seemed like a thousand miles away, but the car could have been no more than a hundred feet in front of her.
Oh God, Mary. What have you done?
Somehow, she made it to the driver’s seat and shut the door. Pig was a step behind her, and when she tried to slam the door his hand was inside. “Arrrrrll,” he growled, falling back onto the car beside hers. Behind the wheel, she backed out onto Montgomery Street and gunned the engine toward Winchester. By the time she was out on the highway, she had forgotten the phone.

Mary drove the long way toward campus, trying to lose Pig Stephens. There was a wail in her ears, a piercing red scream, and she could barely hold on to the wheel. She knew that if Pig caught up to her, he would surely kill her. She had gotten herself into something she could never imagine. But now-now, she knew, there was no way out.

She drove toward Professor Williams’s house. If she could somehow tell him that she was in danger, maybe he would help. Her mind was spinning, torturing her with fear. Repeatedly, she checked her rearview mirror for Pig Stephens’s truck.

What have you done, Mary? What have you gotten yourself into?

Mary drove into the Winchester campus, going sixty miles per hour in a thirty-five zone. It was 10:30 p.m. now, and the campus was almost entirely deserted. Only a few remaining students strolled around here and there. She stopped at the light on the corner of Pride and Montgomery, her car rocking violently to a stop. She checked behind her, but there was no sign of Pig.
Please,
she thought. Please God turn, please turn.

Finally, the light turned green.

As she began to pull through the light, something flashed in the corner of her vision. She jammed the brakes and lurched forward, the seat belt snapping her back into the seat. When she managed to look up, she saw someone crossing in front of her. It was a man. He was leading a dog on a leash.

A black Lab.

Mary watched him cross the street. He was wearing a Windbreaker he had zipped high on his face and a Boston Red Sox cap pulled low over his eyes, and when he got directly in front of her car he glanced at her. That was all, one short glance. But she knew what it meant.

The man began to walk down Pride, and she turned right and followed him. He broke into a jog, but he did not turn into the trees of the campus proper; he kept on Pride so that she could easily stay behind him. He passed Professor Williams’s house, and then Dean Orman’s mansion on Grace Hill. At the corner of Pride and Turner, he took a right and headed into the heart of campus. Mary stayed close behind. The man ran all the way to the edge of Up Campus, and then he cut into the woods beside the gymnasium. She pulled to the curb and watched him disappear into a ground floor entrance of a shadow-cloaked building about a hundred yards from where she had stopped.

Seminary.

The spires of the Seminary Building were unlit. The high stained-glass windows were dark and devoid of the religious imagery that burned through them during the day. The building had been the convocation hall when the school had first unified into one college, and just a decade ago it had been turned into a classroom building. On this night it had the look of a fortress, something that the darkness protected and kept hidden.

Mary got out of her car. The wind was still sharp, almost bitterly cold now. She walked under the canopy of oaks, which were shuddering in the wind. She made her way through the darkness to the door on the east side of the building, and she went inside. The steps loomed in front of her. She went up, her footsteps echoing in the dark.

Brian House had reached the Indiana state line when his obsession got the best of him.

He drove with the radio off. His plan was to drive to I-71, get into Columbus, Ohio, and then rest for the night before making the second leg of the trip to Poughkeepsie tomorrow morning. It was already 6:00 p.m. He couldn’t turn around or he would lose two hours and wouldn’t get home until tomorrow evening. No, he had to go on. He only wished there were some way to turn off his thoughts, to silence his roaring mind.

They killed Deanna Ward, he thought.

Shut up.

Dean Orman had Deanna Ward killed.

No.

Williams tried to stop them.

Quit this, Brian. Stop.

Williams couldn’t stop him, but-

But?

But Williams will not tell the police. He only invents a puzzle for-

For?

For us. To terrorize us. Like Polly at the kilns that night, but-

But he didn’t mention Polly.

He didn’t mention Polly, did he?

In the car he hadn’t mentioned the girl Brian had met. He’d explained everything, the fake wife and Dean Orman and Pig Stephens, but he hadn’t mentioned Polly.

Was that his daughter? Had Williams’s own daughter been in on the game?

No. Impossible. She would have to be in her forties. The girl at the kilns was much younger.

And so what did that mean?

It meant that there were still hidden truths. It meant that the deception was still ongoing. Williams told them he had explained it all, but he hadn’t. There were still pieces to the puzzle that needed to be added.

And if the puzzle is unsolved, then that means-

What?

That means he’s still lying.

And if he was lying, then the story about Dean Orman was false. It was just another ruse. A hoax. It meant that Williams was trying to implicate Orman. For what? For some long-standing grudge? Professional jealousy. It meant-

What? Say it.

It meant that Williams had killed Deanna Ward.

It was the only logical solution. The thought plagued Brian, scratched at him like a sort of mad itch. At some point-perhaps as he passed the Bell City exit-the thoughts became geometric. Physical. They dashed and prodded their way inside his skull. They had edges that scraped at him sharply.

Leonard Williams killed Deanna Ward.

I think it’s difficult to trust him considering what he made us do, Mary had said to him.

And it made perfect sense. Williams killed Deanna, and his guilt continually drove him to the brink of madness. To assuage his guilt he tried to implicate a man who had always been his better, a man who had overstepped him in the academy, who had a legendary friendship with a famous scientist named Stanley Milgram: Ed Orman.

Slowly, pitifully, the crime had driven Leonard Williams crazy. He orchestrated a scenario where he set the lies in place. A system of intricate mistruths. A false book that made it look like his interest was merely professional. The adopted daughter, Polly. Williams as a hero. Williams as a savior. Yet-

Yet? His conscience egged him on.

It was much easier to link Williams to Deanna Ward than it was Ed Orman.

After all, it was Williams, not Orman, who had lived close to Cale and Deanna Ward in Bell City. It was Williams, not Orman, who had the unhealthy interest in the case, who devised the Polly story with its horrifying details. It was Williams, not Orman, who loved those gruesome and violent tangrams Dennis had told Brian and Mary about.

He wanted to see Williams punished for what he’d done to him. Williams was a potential murderer, and he had entrapped his students in his twisted game because-

Because why? Because the man was fucking sick. It was clear to Brian now. He had finally seen through the lies Williams had told them as they drove back from Bell City this morning. It was all just a smokescreen.

Suddenly he felt an uncontrollable hatred for Williams.

The viaduct. The Thing buried there.

Can you do it? he asked himself.

Could he?

What choice do you have when your world has been turned upside down by a cruel game? What do you do, Brian wondered, when all the clues and signs point to one solution? What do you do when place, time, motive, and circumstance point to one man?

You turn around. You go back to finish it.

Which is exactly what Brian House did.

“Hello?” Mary called after the man in the Red Sox cap.

Silence. Inside Seminary there was a high, fixed silence. Nothing moved.

She climbed the flight of stairs to the second floor and went in. Down the hall, a light was burning in Williams’s classroom. She walked down the hall toward that light. What if Orman is in there? she thought. What if I’m being drawn into a trap?

But she couldn’t stop now. The game was ending, and she had to complete it or else she could not forgive herself for coming so close to finding the answers and failing. She had to find out how it ended. Deanna Ward was still missing, and someone in that room knew where she was. Stopping now would sacrifice everything she had learned in these six weeks.

Mary walked through the door.

Brian arrived on campus a little after nightfall. The dorms were dark and still. No cars crept down Montgomery, and even the streetlights seemed to be darker, throwing off a misty and incomplete gray rather than the blinding orange they normally did.

They say you become obsessive after tragedies befall you. He wondered if that was it-if his ability to quell his own impulses had been shattered after Marcus’s suicide. That would explain a lot-the nagging obedience he felt to Williams’s game, the paranoia after meeting the girl at the kilns. His craving tonight for some kind of closure.

Brian dialed Mary’s cell phone but got no answer. He drove to Brown, parked on the curb, and left his truck running. This dorm, like all the others, was empty. He had to try, though. He had to warn Mary about Williams before she contacted him.

He took the elevator up to her floor, and when he stepped into the hall he saw the hunched figure of a girl. She was sitting on the floor, her back to Mary’s door.

“Polly?” he asked.

The girl looked up at him. Her eyes were weary and red. She’d been crying.

“Who?” she asked.

It was Summer McCoy, Mary’s friend.

“I was waiting on Mary,” the girl said.

“I’ve been trying to call her,” Brian replied.

“Who are you?”

“My name is Brian. I’m a…a friend of Mary’s.”

“She’s mentioned you,” Summer said. “She thinks you’re cute.”

At another time, Brian might have pursued that comment, might have asked the girl what exactly Mary had said. But not now. All he said was, “Where is she?”

“I don’t know,” she replied. “I’ve been waiting here for an hour. I don’t know what else to do. I just need to tell her…” The girl trailed off. She put her head down again. Her clothes looked too big for her, somehow; her wrists were thin, her cheeks sunken. She looked emaciated, broken down.

“Tell her what?” Brian asked. So slowly, he was walking toward her. The movement was almost unconscious, as if he were separated from his body now. He wanted to be as close as he could possibly get to her. He needed to hear what this girl said to him, needed to understand why she was here, in front of Mary’s door, tonight of all nights.

“I wanted to tell her that what they’ve been doing is wrong,” she said.

“Williams,” Brian gasped. He was tuning up again, just like earlier in the truck. The girl blurred, and he shut his eyes to keep the world from spinning. He leaned against the wall opposite her, forced himself to breathe.

“The professor,” she said, “and the others. I don’t know their names. I never met them in person. Dr. Williams showed up at my dorm one night and asked me if I would do something for him. Take a picture with a boy. It was nothing. Just a snapshot on a couch-the couch was green, I’ll remember that for as long as live-with his arm around me. They told me that they were going to send it to Mary for that class she was taking, the logic class. It was nothing. And I did it. I didn’t know what the picture meant. They paid me, you see. It was nothing but I-I needed the money. But then I heard about Dr. Williams disappearing from campus and I called the number they’d given me.”

“The number?”

“It was on the back of Dr. Williams’s business card,” she said. “Just in case I had problems. Just in case Mary started asking me stuff. Questions. A man answered. It wasn’t Dr. Williams. This guy was younger, like a student. I asked him if Dr. Williams was okay, and he told me not to worry about it. He said that it was nothing, just a rumor. So I drove to his house.”

“You drove to Williams’s house?”

“Yes. On Pride Street. And there in the driveway was Dean Orman’s car. I knew it was his because I’d seen it around campus. He parks it in the lot at Carnegie, where I do my work study.”

“What was Orman doing at Williams’s house, Summer?”

The girl continued. Her stare was broken, her voice wavering. She didn’t want to go on, Brian knew, but couldn’t stop now. “I was going to just knock on the door. Just tell them I wasn’t comfortable with whatever they were doing. I didn’t like to deceive Mary. She’s like my best friend at Winchester. Why would I want to do anything to her, you know?”

“You saw them in there, didn’t you?”

She nodded. “I heard a bunch of voices coming from inside. Like a big party was going on. So I walked around to the side of the house and I saw…I saw…”