“I’m saving myself for you,” she said. Or that’s what she might have said. He couldn’t be sure. The balcony rail was holding him up. Sparks ran across the Deke yard. Naked sparks. Little blurs of men. Tiny men. Scores of them. They wouldn’t stop. They were in a race with each other, running toward something fiercely, fighting for some distant finish line.
Later. They were in the art building. Down by the glassblowing kilns. Someone had spread out a blanket on the concrete floor. Brian was on his back, and the girl was on her knees beside him. She was wearing just her bra and panties. She was doing that face thing again, with her chin on her shoulder. Something was hidden. “Here,” he said, trying to take her face and turn it toward him. But she wouldn’t turn. Her dark hair was over one eye, but she looked at him intently with the other. “Who are you?” he asked.
“Polly,” the girl said.
“What the fuck did you say?” he asked.
“My name’s Polly,” the girl said. And then she laughed. It was a mad and desperate cackle, a screech. Someone was in the building with them, firing up a kiln, the growl of the fire echoing off the wide walls. “I’ve told you that twice already.”
Whatever the hell she wants, he thought. I’ll play along.
“How’s Mike?” he asked.
“Mike,” the girl said. “Goddamn Mike. I wish people would stop bringing him up. I’m through with him. I told them-I love Mike, but he’s so…flawed. It’s just the way he is. That’s Mike, you know.”
Brian let it sink in. He was losing himself here and there, falling into little sharp black trenches every so often. Daylight was coming in through the windows now, and he wondered what time it was.
“Where are you?” he asked the girl. Her face was still on her chin, her eye still on him.
“What are you talking about?”
“I mean where the fuck are you, bitch. Where are you? We’re all trying to find you.”
“Brian, this is crazy. I don’t know-I don’t-”
“Stop fucking with me. He sent you here, didn’t he? Williams. That’s why you’re hiding your face. That’s why you’re scared to show yourself.” He was sitting up now, putting his shirt back on, standing up so that he was over her. There was something about the way the girl demurred to him, stayed on her knees below him, that infuriated Brian. “Stand the fuck up!” he shouted. “Get up, goddamn you! You whore. You two-bit whore. You-”
There was somebody watching him. Some guy. Just behind another kiln, standing there with a mug of steaming coffee, looking right at him. That broke his trance. Brian came back to the world, floated down through the rafters and the glass dust and the smoke to the floor of the building. The descent buckled his knees.
“Fuck this,” he finally slurred.
And then he walked out, leaving the girl behind.
For Weeks Left
12
“So,” Professor Williams said. He was sitting today in a rolling chair in the front of the class. He taken down the podium and had his feet kicked up on the front table. He apologized for missing last week, but he told them that his son had gotten the flu and had to be taken to the pediatrician. A young son, thought Mary. But no pictures in his office. “Any theories?”
“The name Pig,” Dennis Flaherty said.
“Yes?” Williams asked.
“Do you know anyone by that name?”
“There is a man in DeLane named Pig. A former cop. Now he’s a night watchman at the marina. He helped me…research some of my clues, so I paid homage to him.”
“Ah,” Dennis said softly. Mary looked down the row at him. She thought he looked tired, different somehow. He caught her stare and held it, tried to impart something to her, but then he quickly looked away, down at the legal pad that he had balanced on his briefcase.
“Anything else?” the professor asked.
“In the pictures of Polly’s Civic,” said a student behind Mary. Immediately Mary felt herself flush. She hadn’t even looked closely at that one because she had been too focused on the other. Was there a clue in the car photograph, something that she needed to know?
“Yes?”
“There’s a railroad track in the right-hand corner,” the student went on.
“And?”
“And so that could support a staged crime. Her father could have taken her out to Stribbling Road-”
“Are people still on that?” Dennis sighed.
“-and slipped her away on the train.”
“This isn’t nineteen twenty-five, Ms. Davies. People still hop boxcars where you’re from?”
When the girl fell silent, Mary began to speak. But before she could say anything Dennis said, “I want to go back to the ‘Place’ clue.”
“Go on,” Williams led him.
“Pig and Polly had a thing,” Dennis said.
“It’s interesting, isn’t it?” mused the professor. “Here’s a guy about fifteen years older than Polly. He clearly-clearly-isn’t in her class. She’s beautiful, he’s…not.” A few people laughed. Williams rolled his chair around here and there but kept his feet kicked up. “She’s got a family, whereas Pig grew up on the streets. He’s a tough guy. But she sees something in him. What is it?”
“He takes care of her,” a girl said from the back row. “He’s like a father to her.”
“A father,” Williams said. “Go on.”
“She was drawn to him because she had a rocky relationship with her own dad?”
“The same dad who was waiting up for her the last night she was seen?” he asked. “Try again.”
“He protects her.” Dennis had picked up the loose thread. “Mike hits her, abuses her, is generally nasty to her. And Pig is there to nurse her back to health. He tends to her wounds, her broken heart.”
“Sugar daddy,” said Brian. He had his head down and was looking at Williams from the side of his gaze.