Brian said, “If you saw a note about her and this guy, his assistant-”
“Troy.”
“If you saw a note about her, then that must mean-”
“It’s true. I went through the EBSCOhost database and found an old article about her. Written by-I’ve got it printed out here. Written by a guy named Nicholas Bourdoix. August nineteen eighty-six.”
“My God, Mary,” Brian said. “Why would Williams do this?”
“I really hadn’t thought about it,” she told him. But that wasn’t true. She had given the question considerable thought ever since she’d found the Bourdoix article. Did Williams have something to do with Deanna Ward’s disappearance? She found herself thinking about Williams’s awful strength again, his tremendous weight pushing against her.
Stay.
“My question is why,” Brian said, snapping Mary out of her reverie. “Why is he still at Winchester? Don’t you think there’s something wrong with him, Mary?”
She didn’t answer. She thought of Dennis, for some reason, about when he had gone back with her to Kentucky for Thanksgiving two years ago. Her father had found her late that first night, watching television alone. Don’t you think there’s something wrong with him, Mary? he’d asked. When she had castigated him for saying it, turned her face so that he couldn’t see that she was crying, he had softly apologized. A month later Dennis was with Savannah Kleppers.
“I mean, he’s mysterious,” Brian went on. “The way he talks. The way he acts. There’s something forced about him, Mary. Scripted. I know it. I’ve seen it before. My brother-”
“What?” Mary asked. Something was holding Brian back, some internal boundary he was afraid to cross.
“My brother was an actor. He did Shakespeare, mostly. Some local stuff up in the Hudson Valley. He was brilliant. He’d just landed a commercial when he shot himself.”
Neither of them spoke for a few moments. Their silence was broken when some girls screamed with delight out on the quad in front of Brown. It was Friday night, and Mary suddenly had a great urge to be back in Kentucky, at home. It came up on her so quickly she had to choke it down. She was into something, she thought, for the first time, something larger than herself.
“Anyway,” said Brian, “I’m not going back to his class.”
“You’re not?”
“Hell no. That class scares the shit out of me. I made up my mind as the good detective was giving his spiel. They can have it. I’ll take the F. Polly is just a game anyway, deception on a mass scale.”
It’s just a game, he’d said. But she’d known that. Hadn’t they known that all along? Williams had admitted that it was a logic puzzle on the first day, designed to teach them rational thinking skills. What had changed? A fake detective, a false story? A story about another girl who had gone missing? It was possible that the real world had encroached too far into the ruse and scared them both away. Mary thought of Quinn in City of Glass. The mystery had become his life, had turned into something as tangible as a red notebook that he held in his lap and scribbled wild entries into. Ceaselessly, confoundingly, those entries went into the notebook until they made up a record of his obsession and his fall.
“Brian,” Mary whispered. And when he didn’t answer, she said it louder.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m still here.”
“I think Williams is…” She closed her eyes, unable to find the word.
“I know what you mean,” Brian said.
19
Mary showed up at Professor Williams’s house early on Sunday. It was a warm night, and she had walked across the Great Lawn, in front of the Orman Library, and cut back onto Pride Street. It was only a block up. Mary had passed his house many times on her jogs around campus. An unassuming house, nothing really, just some dark brick and a gravel driveway with a pickup truck parked in the front. A dog barking out back, running along a clothesline. It was all normal, quaint even-not in the least what she had expected.
Dennis had called and asked Mary to meet him there. He had spoken to Professor Williams, he told Mary, and there were going to be surprises at the party. Mary imagined it as extra credit, a leg up on the rest of the class. Williams was worried that no one would come, Dennis told Mary, and so he had lined up an exciting evening pertaining to Polly.
Oh, she had fought the urge. With everything in her she had fought it. She thought about Brian House, how distraught he had sounded on the phone. She knew better. As she walked across the lawn that evening, she knew she was wrong and he was right. She was like the girl in the horror movie, opening the door although no one was home. She was exactly like that girl. But still she walked, her heels digging in to the moist grass, the leaves above her rattling and dropping into her hair.
Dennis met her at the door and took her jacket. In that one action she knew: he had been speaking with Professor Williams. How else to explain his ease in Williams’s home? It was really undeniable. He took the jacket away toward the back of the house, into some dark bedroom. There were a few people buzzing around, drinking beer out of plastic cups. Some Mary recognized from the class and some were unfamiliar. Troy was there. He was talking to one of the girls from the class, and when he saw her he nodded. She gave a little half wave back. A slightly older woman was standing in the kitchen, leaning against the bar, drinking wine. Williams’s wife, Mary figured. A little boy, maybe five years old, screeched through the room, the bowl of his yellow hair bouncing on his head like a helmet.
She saw Williams outside on the patio, talking to someone and smoking a cigarette. They were both laughing, heads thrown back, as if nothing in the world were wrong.
“Della Williams,” someone behind her said.
Mary turned and the woman from the kitchen was right in front of her. Heavy mauve lipstick, a low-cut blouse-she was beautiful. Too beautiful for Williams. She was younger than the professor by ten or fifteen years, which explained the age of the boy. The dark ringlets of her hair fell gracefully on her shoulders and caught the light. The wineglass, Mary noticed, was mauve all around its circumference, as if the woman had been rotating the glass with each sip.
Mary introduced herself to the woman.
“That’s Jacob,” Della said, as the screaming boy ran back through the living room at their knees. She smiled as if to say, What can you do?
An awkward silence came between them. Mary looked at the floor and noted the vacuum lines were still fresh.