24
Mary was sleeping when Brian knocked on her door. It had to be after eleven o’clock at night, maybe later. She bolted upright, banging her head on the bar that ran beneath the top bed. (She had kept the bunks because it was a school rule to have bunk beds in every dorm room. “Just in case,” one of the deans had told her indignantly, “something happens and you have to take on a mate.”)
She found Brian pacing nervously in the hall. “Something’s happened,” he told her when she opened the door.
Inside, she made him some of the cheap Lipton tea that she drank. He didn’t touch it. His attention was elsewhere. He wouldn’t sit for long, even though she had pulled up a chair for him. All he could do was walk, pace the room, and shake his head as if to clear it of unwanted thoughts.
“First,” he said. “Williams wrote a book about that girl, the one that detective told us about. Deanna.”
“What?”
“Yeah,” said Brian. “But here’s the interesting part.” Brian took the book out of his bag and handed it to Mary. He handled it as if it were electric, as if the thing held some deadly power. The cover of A Disappearance in the Fields showed a house bordering cornfields and a pitch-black, ominous sky. It was written by Leon Williams.
“Look in it,” he said. “Flip through it.”
She did.
As the pages crept across her thumb, she felt her heart pattering with the same uneven, clipped rhythm as it had earlier in the day, when she was close to finding Polly.
There were only sentences on the first few pages. The rest of the pages were nonsense, two words appearing back to back for the entirety of the book: for the. Page after page of those two words: for the for the for the for the.
“Why?” was all she could say.
“I don’t know,” Brian admitted.
“Could be a mistake. Could be that the publisher made an error.”
“I thought of that. So I drove all the way out to Cale Community College. They were closed. Had to beg the reference librarian to let me in. Same thing in that book. A few pages of text and then”-he flipped through the book as Mary had done, marveling at the thing-“this. Two books with mistakes this severe? No way.”
“What does it mean, Brian?”
“I think it’s Williams,” he said. “I think he’s doing this. He’s trying to see how far we’ll go with it. Trying to lead us off track. It’s all part of the class.”
Mary thought about that explanation. “But,” she told him, “the class ended.”
“What?”
“I figured it out. Williams said something about a storage facility, and I remembered one of the earlier clues. It’s Pig. Pig has Polly.”
Brian looked distraught, as if he could not quite understand what she had just told him.
“There’s one other thing, though,” she said.
“What is it?”
“It’s just that-”
“Tell me, Mary.”
“It’s just that it was so easy. It was like Williams wanted us to have the answer. After all this, after all these games, why would he just tell us the answer?”
“Maybe it wasn’t the answer,” Brian said.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean maybe there’s more. Maybe there’s a whole other level to this thing.”
Mary considered that. Her tea steamed in her face, and she kept her mug there, feeling the warmth on her eyes.
“But you could tell,” she said. “You could tell that I had cracked it, Brian. The way he talked. The way he walked out of the room. It was like he was…like he was shocked.”
“You said it yourself, Mary,” Brian urged. “You said that it didn’t feel right. It doesn’t to me either. What about this girl, Deanna Ward? What about his book? What parts do they play?”
“Did you know that his wife wrote me a note? Saying that she wasn’t-that none of it was real?”
“A note?”
“At the party Sunday night.”
“You went to the party?”
“Yes,” Mary said. She felt herself blush; she was ashamed for not having told him. “She was trying to tell me something, Brian,” she continued. “She was trying to get me involved, and I didn’t listen to her. I thought it was all part of the hoax. But now…now I don’t know.”
Again, she was beginning to feel the familiar uneasiness that she had felt all along. She was beginning to slip back into it, like Quinn with Stillman in City of Glass, and no matter how she fought it now it was coming on, forcing her to rethink all that she had believed to be true just seven hours earlier.
“What do we do?” she asked him.
“We’ve got to stop the class. It’s madness that he’s been allowed to go on this long anyway.”
“Dean Orman,” she said. “We go to his office tomorrow morning and tell him what we know. We show him the book.”
Brian said nothing. She felt in his silence something else, some other pressing issue that he wanted to tell her but hadn’t yet.
“What, Brian?” she prodded him.
Brian sat down across from her. She pulled two folding chairs up to the card table she used to eat her dinner when she cooked in Brown. He didn’t sit so much as he crashed down, the chair creaking a little under him. He exhaled loudly and rubbed his face with both hands as if to wipe away some of what he had seen. “Orman’s wife,” he said. “Elizabeth? I picked her up tonight in the bushes down by the Thatch River. She’d been beaten by someone.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“As a heart attack. Listen, she told me not to tell anyone. She said Orman would kill the guy if I told. So we have to keep that quiet until I can figure out something else. I really don’t think-Mary, I don’t think that was part of the game. I think she was telling the truth. She looked awful.”
“Oh God,” Mary said. She felt tears in her eyes, the heat of anxiety in the pit of her stomach. She closed her eyes and tried to will herself not to cry. “Oh no. Oh God.”
“Mary,” Brian said gently. “Here.” And then his arm was around her. They were hugging each other, but strangely there was nothing romantic about it. It was just something you did, a healing act. She felt his heat and she stayed there in his chest until he pulled away, and when she was standing up on her own she didn’t regret what she’d done.