2
The girl’s name was Mary Butler. She was a junior, an English major like her mother had been. She lived in the largest female dorm on campus, Brown Hall, in one of the dorm’s most expansive single rooms. It wasn’t that she couldn’t get along with roommates. To the contrary: she and Summer McCoy had roomed together for two years and had become very good friends. (When Summer had mono during their sophomore year, it was Mary who took care of her and nursed her back to health. When Mary and Dennis Flaherty broke up, Summer was there every night with Grasshopper cookies and Agatha Christie mysteries on VHS-they both agreed that there was something hot about Poirot.) No, Mary lived alone because for the last year she had found herself wanting some space. Some of her own space: to think, to decide on where she was going with her life, to be silent and careful with her emotions. So her decision to single was a matter of “trust”-a word she used often and without hyperbole.
It hadn’t always been that way. In the time Before Dennis, as she referred to it, she was much more trusting. After Dennis, after he had dumped her and started going with Savannah Kleppers, she drew herself in a little and began to suspect that the world wasn’t as clean-edged as it had once seemed.
She had truly loved Dennis. They had dated their freshman year for about six months. Theirs was a relationship of politeness, of soft awkwardness. He brought her candy, cards inscribed with poetry, flowers. She had dated in high school but was still relatively new at it; he sensed this and treated her like an acolyte, as if she were some precious thing that he was initiating into the adult world. Mary at once hated that and desperately wanted it, and afterward, in the After Dennis phase, she wondered if he had been setting her up for betrayal all that time. It had been, after all, so easy to do.
Mary told Dennis she loved him. She said it aloud, something she had never done before. And she thought-she thought, but she could not be sure-that he had told her that he loved her, too. In those days After Dennis she caught herself thinking, Never again. Never again would she be taken for granted. She was still well liked, still popular, still “so sweet,” as the Delta girls usually said of her, but inside she was always looking out for those who would do her harm. “It’s a different world up there,” her mother said on the phone. “They’ll take you for all you’re worth.” It was easy to dismiss her mom, a woman who had been out of Kentucky only twice, both times on vacation. But there was something truthful about it. Winchester was a different place. There was so much drama here, so many tenuous alliances that it was difficult to decide what you could talk about and what you must keep to yourself.
And that wasn’t a bad thing. In fact, it was quite nice in her single room at Brown, peaceful and quiet and serene. It overlooked the quad, so she could look out the window and see the campus from behind glass, like a diorama, but not be forced to live it 24/7. She loved the parties, the people, the act you put on when you were out there. But After Dennis she found that she couldn’t do it all the time. Up here, Mary didn’t have to act in that soap opera if she didn’t want to. She could stand well outside of it and pity the girls who flung themselves into the game so readily.
Sometimes she looked out that window and wondered what Dennis was doing right then. Sometimes she thought she saw him, his curly hair bouncing along, down below her. Every time this happened her heart squeezed, her breath caught in her throat. For a long time she had gone out of her way to avoid him, but inevitably they had begun to run into each other on campus. And now, of course, he was in one of her classes. She nearly died when he walked in to Seminary East. He saw her and winked-only Dennis Flaherty could wink in the twenty-first century and get away with it-and sat four chairs to her right. It was the closest he’d been to her in two years.
She was thinking about how she was going to drop the class and pick up something else on such short notice when Williams walked in.
Immediately, Mary noticed something different about him. The way he walked, the way he spoke to his class: so not like a professor. And when he launched into his story about the girl named Polly, Mary forgot all about Dennis and was lost in this bizarre class.
“Who’s the prof?” Summer asked her when they met up in the dining commons that evening.
“Williams,” Mary said.
“Hmm. Never heard of him,” the other girl said.
And neither had Mary. Which was strange, because she had gofered for at least ten professors around campus. Surely someone would have mentioned him to her. Surely she would have seen him at a Christmas party or something. Not only did Williams fail to appear in any of her three face books, he was also missing from her annuals. There were no publications listed in the campus magazine, no news of him on the faculty page, no references in the recent edition of the school paper. It didn’t make any sense. It was, as Summer liked to say, freaky.
That night, Mary browsed Winchester’s website, trying to find information about him. He was a member of the philosophy faculty, and he was listed as an associate professor. There was a CV: BA from Indiana University, 1964; MA from same, 1970; PhD from Tulane, 1976. That was all. Google him, she thought, but then she remembered that she didn’t know his first name. All she knew was the initial that was on her schedule of classes: L.
Earlier, she had repeatedly refreshed her screen, attempting to be the first to read the e-mailed clues. But now it was 8:00 p.m., and still no message from Williams had arrived in her in-box.
She took a shower (along with the biggest single room in the dorm, she also had her own bathroom and kitchenette; some girls on the third floor had taken to calling Mary’s room the Hyatt) and tried to take her mind off the class, but she couldn’t. She had been intrigued by Professor L. Williams, and had even found him to be kind of sexy. This was not unusual for Mary. She had formed a nagging and perhaps unhealthy crush on Dr. Cunningham last year. This would not have been odd had Dr. Cunningham not been strange in most every way, from his lisp to the pink ten-speed with a basket that he rode about campus, and it did not escape Mary that maybe she found some professors attractive only because the other students did not. Many of the students in Logic and Reasoning 204 had found Williams creepy-they had said as much in the hallway after class.
Out of the shower now, her hair wet and a towel around her-another perk of the single room was Mary’s ability to walk around naked-she logged on to her Winchester account and checked her e-mail again.
There was a message from Professor Williams. The subject line read, “First Clue.”
Mary opened the e-mail and read.
Time