Except what would Williams want to prove by doing that? What was he supposed to do with the information the girl had given him? The more he thought about it, the more pissed off he became. It was his private life that Williams was screwing around with, after all. Was Williams fucked up, some sort of psycho who liked to play with his students’ heads? Was he trying to expose Brian somehow, set him up, or possibly-
“House?”
Brian turned around and saw the guy he had seen that night in Chop. “That’s me,” he said.
“Were you in here last Friday?” the guy asked. Brian remembered: the guy had been drinking coffee; steam had come out of the cup in little wisps.
“I might have been.”
“Who was that girl you were with?”
“I have no idea. Just some girl.” Brian thought he knew where this was going. “Look, man. We were really drunk. I don’t even remember what I said. I-”
“I think I know that girl.”
“Oh yeah?” Brian was intrigued now.
“Yeah. She…It’s funny. This is going to sound crazy, but that girl is dead.”
Brian stared at the boy. “What are you talking about?”
“At least that’s what they told us. She went missing from my hometown a long time ago, back in the eighties, and when I was in school they found her remains out in California somewhere. Near San Francisco. Murdered, you know. Her family had all moved away by that time. But I swear to God, dude-she looked just like the pictures I’ve seen of her. But the girl you were with was…younger. It couldn’t have been her. The girl from my town would have to be almost forty years old by now. I wanted to stop her, you know, but she looked pretty upset.”
Brian, embarrassed, looked away. But then something else occurred to him. “Where you from?”
“Cale, Indiana,” the boy said. “Home of the Blue Hens. You know us?”
“No,” Brian said, thinking.
“Jason Nettles,” the boy said, putting out a color-streaked hand for Brian to shake. “Call me Net. Painting, with a minor in glass.”
But Brian had already drifted off. Those tumblers in his mind were falling into place, one by one by one.
Cale. Where the detective had worked. The detective had told a story about a missing girl. Could the girl that Brian brought to the kilns be connected in any way to the detective’s story?
Williams, he thought. Williams is planting it. Setting it up.
Before he knew it, Brian was jamming his shirt over his head and brushing past the other boy, on the way out of Chop and into the crooked world.
18
That night Mary was back into City of Glass. Quinn was decoding Stillman’s steps through the city into letters that read the Tower of Babel. Mary was finally intrigued by the story. Auster had her, and she was beginning to worry about Quinn’s sanity-how he was going to cope with this addiction to Stillman, this obsession for not necessarily solving the puzzle but for the puzzle itself.
It was all familiar to her. Even though she knew now that cracking the code of Williams’s class-really cracking, really solving it completely-was going to be impossible because there were too many twists and turns and inconsistencies and false leads, she was going to have to decide on a theory and go with it. Run with it, headlong. There was no other way to placate her mind. Two years ago she had told herself that Dennis had simply changed. (Boys just change, Mary, Summer McCoy had told her.) That allowed her some peace, finally.
Now she was going to have to decide on a plan and work through it. Damn the consequences if she was wrong. She had to start working, had to put her mind to the task of finding Polly. Dithering now would only cost her time, and with only three weeks left to find the missing girl, time was something Mary couldn’t waste.
“A note to himself?” Quinn was thinking in the book. “A message?”
The phone rang.
“This is Brian,” the voice on the other line said. “I’ve found something.”
“Why did you leave class today?” Mary asked.
“Personal reasons. Look, I didn’t know who else to call. I found you in the campus directory. I-I thought you would want to hear it.”
“Hear what, Brian?”
“That detective? Thurman? He was a fake.”
Mary let it sink in. For a second she thought that Brian might be trying to fool her by playing some nasty trick on her. Or, worse, that Williams had somehow gotten to Brian and they were in on the deception together. Perhaps the game-the class, the professor, the students, the Summer McCoy photo-was all some clever hoax at Mary’s expense. All this flashed through her mind so fleetingly that she could not grasp it, any of it. It had come and gone before she had had time to register its impact, and then Brian was talking again.
“I called the Cale Police Department. No one had ever heard of him down there, Mary. I checked around. Bell City. DeLane. Shelton. Nothing. No Detective Thurman. No record of him anywhere.”
“What does this mean?” she asked. The world was at a roar now on each side of her, whooshing across the plane of her perception. So much chaos out there. So much disorder. Randomness.
“It means that Williams is toying with us. It’s part of the class.”
“It’s not against the law, Brian,” she said. Taking up for Williams now. Protecting him.
“Not against the law, no, but there must be some ethics regulation. Some policy on the books that prohibits this kind of thing.”
He was breathless, ragged, nearly desperate.
“I called around, tried to see what I could do. To-to stop this bullshit. The people in Student Services told me to call Dean Orman, so I did,” he said.
“No,” she said. Later, she would wonder why she had said it.
“Told him all about it: Polly. The detective. The fake story Thurman had given us. He seemed…disturbed by it. Told me that he would have it taken care of. Told me not to meet with Williams if he asked me to his office. If I saw him on the sidewalk, keep walking. Orman sounded as if he had maybe had some thing with Williams in the past. It was like he wasn’t even surprised by what I was telling him.”
Mary told Brian about the plagiarism issue. She told him all that she knew, about the note on Williams’s desk and her meeting with Troy Hardings, about the weird phone call she had received from the campus police that night, even how strong Leonard Williams had been blocking her at the classroom door. She could hear his labored, quick breath on the other end of the line following her through the story.