There were two attached files in the message. Mary clicked on the first one, and a picture of a red car beside a road appeared. Polly’s Civic on Stribbling Road, she assumed.
She clicked on the second one and another photograph loaded on her screen. It looked as if it could have been of a party in one of the frat houses. The foreground was harshly lit by the flash. It was a wider shot of the photo Williams had shown on the transparency that day, the one of Mike sitting on a couch. There was Mike again, his eyes red and his hair mussed.
Sitting beside him, with her arm around his peeling shoulders, was Summer McCoy.
The wind went out of Mary.
What the hell? What were the chances of that? Summer didn’t even like frat parties. And this Mike guy was definitely not her type. Yet there she was with her arm around him, her face sun-kissed and a drink in her right hand. Did Summer know Williams? Maybe the photograph was simply random, something Williams had torn from an annual and used.
Yet-what were the chances of the girl in the photo being Summer?
Mary forwarded the message to her best friend.
To: smccoy@winchester.edu
From: mbutler@winchester.edu
Subject: weird stuff
Do you know this guy?
/attached
Mary
Mary waited. She knew she should be reading City of Glass, but her mind was whirring. She closed her eyes, rubbed her forehead with her fingers trying to-
Her computer pinged with an incoming message.
To: mbutler@winchester.edu
From: smccoy@winchester.edu
Cc: admin2654@winchester.edu
Subject: Re: weird stuff
****ADMINISTRATIVE WARNING****filtertapspace/winchester servelistaccidentaladministrat/firewall/parse/messageblock*****ADMINISTRATIVE WARNING****please do not continue sending these messages, you are outside the limits of the school code****ADMINISTRATIVE WARNING**** ///do not reply to this message!///
What the hell was the “school code”? Mary thought that she may have mistyped Summer’s name, so she tried the same message again. And again, she waited. When the ping didn’t come, she refreshed her screen-still no message. She stood up and walked around her room. It felt good to stretch her legs. She would have to do some yoga tomorrow. Maybe Summer would-
Her phone rang.
“Summer?” Mary said.
“Is this Mary Butler?” said a sharp, even voice on the other end.
“It is.”
“Stop,” the man said.
“Stop what?”
“You know what. Stop. Stop sending those e-mails.”
“I don’t know what you’re-”
“Come off it, Mary. We’re sitting out here in the Gray Brick Building looking at every e-mail that’s sent. With all the shit that’s pirated at this school, they pay us twenty bucks an hour to sit out here all night. But what you’re doing is…”
“What am I doing?”
“The picture. I mean, there’s porn and then there’s that. You’re lucky we don’t send this right to the campus police. Or to Dean Orman. It’s just sick. I’m sure you think it’s a joke, I’m sure you and your girls are laughing it up, but we have to do our job.”
“My professor sent this to me,” she pleaded with the man. “I didn’t know…I didn’t-”
“Listen, I don’t have time for this. If you don’t want your Internet privileges taken away, I’d delete that picture immediately. Clean it from your hard drive. Good night.” He hung up.
Mary found the original file again and clicked on it. It would not load this time. All that appeared on her screen were lines of unbroken and meaningless code.
10
The next day Mary was so shaken by seeing Summer in Williams’s photograph that she almost didn’t go to class. But she needed to ask him what it had meant. The thought crossed her mind that perhaps Williams hadn’t even sent the photo. But there was his name in her in-box. Was he trying to impart some message about Mike? Was he trying to give Mary some kind of inside track?
It took everything she had to leave her room, but when she was outside she was glad she had decided to go to class. Surprisingly, after the cool morning, it had turned into one of the nicest days of the month, the sun high and white in the sky, the clouds thin as gauze. On the yard in front of Brown Hall, some girls were sunbathing. They were all on their stomachs with textbooks open at their noses, studying for the first set of quizzes that were coming up next week.
As she was entering Seminary, the girl who sat beside Mary in Williams’s class came out the side entrance. “No class today,” the girl told Mary. “There’s a note on the door.”
Mary stepped into the dim foyer of Seminary. Normally she would be pleased that her entire afternoon was free-she now had five chapters in City of Glass to read-but today she was anxious to discuss the photograph-and that weird phone call, too-with Williams. There were no students in Seminary at this time-it was too early before the 4:00 p.m. classes and now fifteen minutes after the last set of classes had ended.
I’ll leave a note under his office door, she thought. Even though Williams had not given them a syllabus with any of his contact information, she was pretty sure his office would be in the philosophy wing, which was right upstairs, on the top floor of Seminary.
She climbed the three flights of stairs. She passed other students in the class, including Brian House, who was hopping down the stairs three at a time. “You hear?” he asked breathlessly. She told him that she had, but he was already sliding down the rail, letting out a whoop as he disappeared down the well.
The top floor of Seminary was another world. Professors’ offices lined the halls, and students sat passively outside in uncomfortable chairs, waiting to be called in. The hum of a Xerox machine punctuated everything. Mary followed the first wall, reading the nameplates on each door. She went all the way down the hall and around the corner, toward the west side of the building, which led down a second set of stairs and into the Orman Library. Near the end of the hall she found an open door, and as she leaned inside to read the name, a voice said, “Can I help you?”
Mary started. She backed out of the room as if she had been doing something wrong. Something illegal.
“Are you looking for Dr. Williams?” the voice asked. She peeked in and saw the boy. He was standing by the bookshelves on the far side, a stack of index cards in his hand.
“Yes,” she said.
“He’s out for the day. Something about his kid.” The boy looked back at the shelves, wrote something on one of the cards. Then he looked at Mary and said, “I’m sorry. I’m Troy Hardings. I’ll be Dr. Williams’s assistant this term.” He came toward her and offered his hand, and she shook it. He was tall, reedy, his movements awkward. His hair had been shaved into a buzz, and his scalp was unhealthy and pink. “You need to leave him a note or something?” He nodded toward the paper she had torn and was holding now, limply. “You can just give it to me and I’ll make sure he gets it.”
“Oh,” she said. “Okay.” She stepped out into the hall and put the paper to the wall and wrote, Dr. Williams, but the surface was bubbled and she could not write smoothly. She went down the hall a bit and sat down on a chair outside a professor’s office. She used City of Glass as her desktop to write her note. As she was writing, she saw Troy leave the office and walk the opposite way, down the hall, and enter a room just before the exit.
Mary suddenly had a funny idea. She stood and returned to Dr. Williams’s office. Troy had turned on just one light, a desk lamp that emitted a pale glow on the shelves. She wanted to look at his books, but she knew she didn’t have much time before Troy came back. She put her note-it was a bit unfinished, certainly not all she wanted to say, only the part about Summer McCoy, but none of the other stuff, not the Pig and Polly hypothesis that she’d been thinking about-on his desk, her eyes scanning its surface. What was she looking for? She didn’t know. But she couldn’t leave. Now that she was here, in his presence, she had to find something, didn’t she? She’d been brave enough to come this far. There was his mail, for instance. There were a few coffee mugs on the shelves. There was a poster of Einstein on the wall with the heading HE COULDN’T TIE HIS OWN SHOES. But there was nothing of substance that she could see without searching the desk drawers. Quickly she scanned the books-logic texts, philosophy treatises with their spines veined, a whole row of John Locke. But nothing else. She felt ashamed for coming, for-