“Left,” he said.
With resignation she made the turn, and almost instantly there were deep woods on both sides of the blacktop road. When they came to the juncture with Staley Road that led to Jordan’s property, he told her to turn left again, and she realized he wanted to make a circuit of the perimeter of the college grounds. The deep woods continued on the left; there were fields on the right now. At Washington Street she turned again without waiting for his instructions, but she came to a stop when they reached Crystal River Road. Town was to the right, the campus to the left. He said left, but then he had her turn again at the first road, which curved around the faculty housing.
“Who actually lives there?” he asked.
“Temporaries, visiting lecturers; some of the instructors stay on even though they’re permanent. They’re cheap and they’re convenient.”
The houses, like the other buildings, were well separated, surrounded by mature trees and shrubs; the school brochure described them as “modest,” but in fact they were tiny with tiny garages, but very private and quiet. There were nine of them.
“I understand Philip Seymour turned them down,” Haliday said. “He opted for privacy, an apartment in town, just a few blocks from your dad’s place, I understand. Ayers lived here a while; Melton lived here with her husband for nine years.”
“They had a house on the coast,” Ellen said. “Since he was gone so much, I guess this was a good deal for her.”
“Okay,” he said then. “Good job, Blair. Let’s go to town. You can drop me at your place and I’ll walk.”
What was he after? she asked herself later. She had taken a shower, put on a warm robe, and was scrounging in her refrigerator. Just what was he after? Why was he focusing on the college and not the town? There must have been a dozen women in town then who were still around, and who might have been involved with Philip. Only those between twenty-one and forty, she recalled Patty’s saying years before. Those between the age of consent and the age of desperation. Plenty of women in town would have fallen in between, she thought bitterly, remembering his chaste kiss on her forehead. She scowled and slammed the refrigerator door. Such arrogance! Such egotistical arrogance! She had loved him at seventeen, and two weeks later she had hated him at eighteen. How many other women had done the same kind of abrupt about-face?
Later, she watched the clock hands edge to nine, nine-thirty, a quarter to ten... At ten-thirty she went to bed. Bev had not come by; no one had come by. If they had called, she didn’t know it because she had not listened to the calls. She realized she had not checked her mailbox since Monday, had not read a newspaper all week. Neither had she called Jordan, she remembered, still wakeful and twitchy after midnight. There had been nothing to say to him.
Thursday was a repeat of Wednesday; she and Winona Kelly pulled files until noon. She was invited to lunch in Conference Room D again, but today Janice Ayers was there, too.
Haliday was at the end of the table, Janice at his elbow, with papers spread out between them and on down the table.
“Help yourself,” Haliday said, waving toward the tray at the other end of the table. She took a sandwich and sat down at that end.
“Okay, this one,” Haliday said, pointing to a paper.
“Psychodrama and Other Games,” Janice said. “Easy. He taught personality types out of Jung, had them role-play characters, and go into the fallacies of the method, and the strengths.” She straightened up. Apparently they had been at this for some time. “That’s how he taught. By involving them in every possible way. Demonstrations, role playing, participation.” She pointed to the same paper. “Like this one, Psychohistory and Myth. He had them choose an historical subject from a list he provided and then research that person thoroughly and psychoanalyze him or her. Afterward, he extracted quotes from their papers, ran the list down the side, and had them try to link the quoted words to the proper name. Most of them failed entirely, which was his point. What people do and what they say are often at variance.”
“Good teacher. That’s your point?” Haliday said.
“Good! My God, I’m good, everyone who stays here is good. Philip was the most brilliant teacher I ever knew.” She leaned back in her chair. “Do I get to eat?”
Haliday laughed. “Sorry. I forgot. Let’s, before Blair finishes it all off.”
They got up and took sandwiches from the tray; Haliday poured milk. Janice got coffee from the automatic machine on the other table. Eating, Haliday returned to the list. He put his finger on an item, glanced at Janice, who was taking a bite, waited, and then said, “What about this one, Shamanism and Modern Cult Figures?”
She finished chewing and took a swallow of coffee. “What it says. He was convinced that with the proper buildup, normal healthy people would believe whatever the cult leader wanted them to believe.” At the other end of the table Ellen stopped eating. “He had an experiment he was anxious to try and couldn’t, for obvious reasons. He believed he could convince a group of pretty random people that a totally inert substance was a powerful hallucinogenic, and that they would then hallucinate exactly as if they had ingested LSD.”
“You believe that?” Haliday asked.
Ellen got up to pour coffee that she didn’t want, and stood at the window with her back to them. It was raining again. She was remembering Patty’s answer to her question, what had they done with the mushrooms. We ate them and went to sleep. He had been playing a game with them, she thought, and listened to what Janice was saying.
“I didn’t, but now I’m not so sure. Some people have power naturally, we call it charisma. Philip had it. I’m sure every good shaman had it.”
“Why couldn’t he try it?”
“It’s a very dangerous game to put anyone under your spell, Lieutenant. It’s dangerous to teach anyone how to hallucinate, to start a process you may not be able to control.”
There was a long pause; Ellen didn’t turn from the window to look at them. He had been playing a game that he had known could be dangerous...
“What about the book he was writing? Did he show you the manuscript? You know what it was about?”
“I never saw it,” she said, “but he talked about it from time to time. Part was about his work with his students. He was very innovative, and honest about his failures and his successes. He said I was in it, and did I mind? He wanted a reaction. I laughed and said if he used my name, I’d get a hefty cut of the Seymour millions.”
“He was using his love affairs as material?”
“Everything he did was material one way or another. What you have to understand, Lieutenant, is that the whole world was a petri dish for Philip, and he found everything in it interesting.”
“While he stayed on the outside,” Haliday said. “Did you love him, Dr. Ayers?”
She laughed. “No. I might have come to love him, but I woke up. Have you ever watched a snake feed?”
Ellen felt her whole body tense with the words. Why was she talking about that particular experiment, talking about snakes?
“It unhinges its jaw and swallows its prey whole,” Janice was saying. “You can watch the lump that was a living creature as it moves down the body, slowly diminishing. I was fascinated by Philip, but after you’ve seen the snake feed a time or two, the fascination also diminishes. I preferred to stay on the outside, and after a time I didn’t care to remain a Philip watcher; we became friends in a way, I suppose.” There was a rustle of motion. “Now I’m going back to my own world. It’s been fun.”