“It was a few years ago,” Dennis explained. “She didn’t think anything of it, you know. Just a fling, to her. But Williams was smitten with her. He fell in love with her, I think. When she tried to break it off, he wasn’t happy. He started getting crazy. Sending her flowers every day. Showing up at their home and just standing outside, watching her. She got scared. She finally told Dr. Orman, and the dean was furious. He confronted Williams at a faculty meeting. It got real bad. Drama. The two men almost came to blows, right there on the third floor of the Carnegie Building. Williams was reprimanded, put on some kind of suspension. They sent him overseas to teach. Sort of to get him out of the way, you know? When he came back, the dean got worried about him again. That’s when he hired this guy, this former cop, to watch after his boat. He was afraid Williams was going to deface it or something. Apparently he’d threatened to set it on fire. This former cop, of course-his name is Pig Stephens.”
“Do you think he’s part of this thing?” Brian asked.
“No,” Dennis said. “I think that Williams put Pig into his narrative just to get a dig in at the Ormans. He was into irony like that. A coal black sense of humor. He told me about Elizabeth when we talked. Was real forthcoming. He claimed the affair was nothing but Dean Orman, who had always been intimidated by him, made it into something much more than it really was. But…”
“What?” Brian urged.
“But I don’t know what this means. I don’t know why Pig would hurt Elizabeth. Unless, you know, unless it’s just random. Unless it’s just a random thing and Pig just flew off the handle one night. Hell, I don’t know.”
“Williams says there is no randomness,” Brian said, sarcasm thick in his voice. “Everything happens for a reason.”
The two boys laughed at that, but Mary had stopped hearing them. She could only think of Dennis and Elizabeth Orman. The image kept flashing through her mind, the sickening image of the two of them together. It shouldn’t have bothered her. She knew that. She and Dennis had had a thing once, a long time ago-freshman year, for goodness sake-and now they were through. At least she thought so. Hoped so. But still the image was there, dogging her, teasing her. She shut her eyes against it but that only made it stronger, more vivid. Suddenly she wanted to be home, away from this mess, this game. She felt hot tears in her eyes, and she had no choice but to let them come.
35
In the morning Mary found Brian outside on their little balcony, sitting on a plastic chair and looking out at the bustling traffic moving down Highway 72. She took a seat beside him, and they silently watched the gray Wednesday morning shift in the early, diffuse sunlight. “We’re at the end, aren’t we?” she asked him.
“Six weeks to the day,” Brian replied. “Williams’s deadline.”
Neither of them knew exactly what it meant. But something was going to happen today-something horrible, perhaps. They just had to figure out what it was. That was the only way they could stop it: by going back, back to the clues Williams had supplied them regarding Polly.
Polly is Deanna. Deanna is Polly.
When they had all showered, they decided to return to Cale Central. Even if Bethany Cavendish was a player-an actor-in this thing, she might be able to lead them somewhere they hadn’t been. The book was the key, Dennis offered. If they could understand the book, then they could understand it all. So it was decided. He would go in to talk to Bethany Cavendish this time, show her the book, and try to get an answer from her about what it was, what it meant.
They arrived before 8:00 a.m. School had yet to begin. Students were pulling into the parking lot in their converted cars, trucks that rode low to the ground and had been painted outrageous colors, sports cars that were blinding with chrome. Brian and Mary waited for Dennis outside, under that manic American flag. “What do you think about him?” Brian asked Mary.
“Him?”
“Dennis. You like him?”
“I dated him once,” she said. There was no reason to keep it from him now.
“I know,” Brian said.
They let that hang between them. Mary sat on the curb and Brian kicked pebbles around the parking lot. It was now 8:15. Dr. Kiseley’s lit class would have started by now back at Winchester. They would be discussing the book City of Glass, pondering on Quinn’s last days, talking about the symbolic meaning of the red notebook that the main character used to document his life. Existentialism and all that. The meaning of real. “To write it down is to make it become real,” Kiseley had told them. “What Quinn is doing is fighting off the idea of the interior. By writing in the red notebook, he is admitting that he is invested in facts and not the imagination. In this way, he is bringing into the world the details of his own demise.”
“I could tell by the way you two acted together,” Brian was saying. “It’s nothing. Don’t worry about it. We all have our own past. I don’t begrudge you for it.” He smiled, cuffed her on the arm playfully.
Mary looked away, her face hot. “It was…” She didn’t know what word to use. Nothing probably, but she was sure Brian would see through the lie.
Out of her periphery she saw two students leave the school grounds. They were walking briskly, their heads down, going toward the woods beside the school. Playing hooky, thought Mary. One of them had a shock of white-blond hair. When he turned, checking to see if anyone was following him, Mary recognized him immediately.
He was in one of the pictures at the Collinses’ house. One of the grandsons.
“I know that kid,” she told Brian.
He looked over, but the boys had already gone down the hill and were out of sight.
At first, she didn’t know what to think. But the longer they sat there, she began to wonder if this was not another test. Was Williams trying to tell them something else? Another plot twist, maybe?
She told Brian that she would be right back and jogged over to the edge of the woods. She looked into the dark trees, to the clearing that seemed to open up at the bottom of the hill, but she couldn’t see the boys. A light fog had descended, pulled down like a cloak through the tree line. Mary took a few steps into the woods, but she still couldn’t see the boys. “Hello?” she called. It’s no use, she thought. They’re gone by now. All the way out to the highway. She could hear I-64 out in the distance, the rock of those big trucks passing through Cale on their way to Indianapolis.
But then-a noise. Just off to her right.
Mary turned and saw something darting. Some presence. A boy, crouched and low.