“It does, doesn’t it,” Williams agreed.
“Mike or Pig,” someone else said.
“Or Trippy himself,” put in Dennis Flaherty.
Wait, she thought.
Williams had given it to her. Yes. It was right there in front of her.
Interstate 64.
That’s where that college is. Grady Tech.
Suddenly, with startling clarity, it came to her. It was there before she knew it, flashing across her mind. She realized that she had always known it, she had just needed the slightest provocation to give her the proof.
“The bike,” Mary said.
“Ms. Butler?”
“The motorcycle. Pig’s. He kept it in a storage facility off Interstate 64. That’s where Polly is.”
Everyone in the class now was wide-eyed. They were all looking straight at her. She felt the buzz of success, the nearly electric whistle in her ears. She was suddenly euphoric. She almost couldn’t contain it: it ricocheted within her, snapped this way and that and made her, for the first time that term, alive with the possibilities her discovery had presented.
“Motive?” asked Williams slyly. But she could see it in his eyes: she had broken him. She had tied the clues together and had given him his man.
“Obsession,” Dennis Flaherty replied, still looking at Mary. His eyes said all she needed to know: Well done, Mary.
“Yes,” Williams said. He was disoriented, looking away. Mary had shocked him, and now he didn’t know how to carry on with the class. “Well. Check your e-mail tonight. There might be a little more information about Polly there. We will review for our final exam on Wednesday, and we will take the exam next week.” With that, he walked out of the classroom. Even his walk was hesitant, disturbed somehow. None of the students moved from their seats; they sat listening to his footsteps recede down the hallway toward the stairs that would lead him up to his office.
Afterward, as the others stood in the hallway and talked, Mary again stood off to the side. They were all pleased, chattering excitedly as if they had received their final marks in the class. Now, of course, everyone would receive an A for Logic and Reasoning 204. “Mary, you trumped my theory,” Dennis Flaherty said, faux hurt in his voice. “I thought for sure it was Mike.” They all agreed. Everyone had thought it was Mike, the boyfriend, the most obvious of the suspects. Williams seemed, they said, like someone who would be big on obvious misdirection-present something so apparent that everyone would discredit it because of its simplicity. It had to turn out to be Mike in the end, they had all thought. But Mary had seen through his ruse and connected the storage facility to Pig. “Did you see how he walked out of class?” said one girl. “It was like he was an angry child.” And Williams had looked like a child, stunned and pouting. Mary should have been pleased, but something was bothering her. She stood with her laptop clutched to her chest, her mind wandering.
Dennis walked her back to the Tau house for her shoes. He apologized for Saturday night, claimed that she had misinterpreted what he’d actually said. “It was just a thing you say, you know,” said Dennis, looking at the sidewalk. “It turned out to be the wrong thing, though.” It was drizzling in one of those sideways manners, coming down cold against their faces. Mary should have been happy, and at first she had been. But seeing Williams walk out of the room had disturbed her for some reason.
An act.
“Is something wrong?” Dennis asked her. She didn’t say anything, but yes-something was wrong. Something was very wrong, but of course she couldn’t tell Dennis. He left her in the great room of the frat house, which was nearly empty. At 5:00 p.m. everyone was out to the dining commons or on a beer run to the Border. Someone was playing Oasis in an upstairs room. She could smell the moistness of marijuana in the air. She looked around the room. There were bookshelves built into one wall. Instead of books, the Taus had lined the shelves with DVDs and CDs, many of them pirated from the Internet and labeled with crude, markered covers. She rifled through some of the movies-action flicks, the Austin Powers films, directors’ cuts of kung fu movies-and as she was doing this she saw something etched on the back wall of the shelf. She leaned closer, squinting so that the image became clear in the shadow.
She had seen the image before. It was a serpentine S and the soft P tangled together. It had been carved into the shelf. Mary traced her finger over it, felt the harshness of the cut rubbing across her finger.
Troy Hardings’s hand. His tattoo.
She wanted to get closer, to look-
“Ready?” Dennis asked. She spun around as if she had been caught stealing. He was holding her shoes.
He walked her back to Brown. He was quiet the entire way, and Mary found herself feeling sorry for him. “I didn’t know Troy Hardings was a Tau,” she said.
“Who?” Dennis asked.
“Troy. Professor Williams’s gofer.”
“I don’t know who that is.”
Mary thought about this. She wondered what it meant, that aggressive S and the passive P tangled up in a casual dance. And then something absurd came into her mind. A bizarre thought.
Save Polly.
Perhaps a Tau had taken Williams’s class long ago and had etched the symbol on the wall. Maybe Troy Hardings saw the image there at a party one night and liked the way it looked so much that he tattooed himself with it.
Maybe, Mary thought. But still-there was something about the image that frightened her. She didn’t like how the feminine P was being squeezed and taunted by the more masculine S. There was something cultish about the image, something mockingly boyish. It was an inside joke. She tried to imagine Dennis tattooing himself with the image, sneering at the needle as it bit into his flesh-but the thought was so ludicrous that it fell apart.
Later, back at Brown Hall, she took the elevator up to her room and sat at her desk, watching the rain slant off the room’s only window.
Later, when it got dark and the rain began to fall harder, she checked her e-mail. There was a message in the box titled “Where Is She?” Mary opened the message and another photograph appeared on the screen, this one of a U-Stor-It beside a busy freeway.
That was the only message, which meant that Williams was admitting Polly’s location and her abductor.
But still there was that feeling inside Mary, that incomplete feeling. It was the same feeling she had gotten in high school when the teacher left the room one day during an exam, and the students had taken out their textbooks from under their desks, furiously paging through them to find the answers.
Her victory, then, if it could even be called that, had been Pyrrhic.
Finding Polly had been too easy.
23
A Disappearance in the Fields had been checked out of the Orman Library. Brian knew what that meant: someone else in the class had beaten him to it. But there was still hope. He searched the computerized card catalog and found that the public library had a copy of the book. He drove there, Johnny Cash howling “Ring of Fire” on the stereo, with the rain falling hard on his windshield.
As he drove, Brian thought of Deanna Ward. And he thought of her doppelgänger, the girl from the trailer in Bell City.
It struck us alclass="underline" how similar she looked to Deanna, the man playing Detective Thurman had told the class. She was almost an identical copy, except she was…different somehow.
By Monday afternoon, as the rest of the logic class was meeting in Seminary East and Mary was solving Polly’s disappearance, Brian was working on another vase for his mother at the kilns. He was trying to get his mind off Polly.
But by that night he was thinking of the book Bethany Cavendish had told him about earlier in the day. The thought of it was like a hunger pang. He couldn’t shake it no matter what he did. He went back to Chop, started a second glass vase, but before he could get the blowpipe into the kiln he was thinking about the book again.