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.
He lay on the top bunk and she took the bottom. Mary knew that he wasn’t sleeping by his uneven breath, by the way he could not be still. Like him, her rest was labored, erratic. “Brian,” she said. It was late, sometime after midnight. A siren passed outside, screamed down Pride Street. “Did you know that Williams has an assistant?”
25
They found Troy in the online campus directory. Beside his name they saw the familiar lightning bolt, which meant that he was online. “Let’s e-mail him,” Brian said.
“You mean now?”
“Hell yeah, now. I want to see what he knows.”
Slowly, still pacing the room, Brian dictated the message to Mary.
To: thardings@winchester.edu
From: mbutler@winchester.edu
Subject: Professor Williams
Troy,
We found Williams’s book, A Disappearance in the Fields. A very fine book. A masterpiece. We were wondering-did Williams write that himself, or did he have help from someone in the Philosophy Department? By the way, it was Pig. I guess you know that by now.
M
They waited. Mary refreshed her screen a few times, hoping that Troy would get the e-mail and respond to it immediately. Brian made himself another mug of tea in the microwave. Down on the quad, a fire burned-the every-Monday bonfire of the Delta girls, who were notorious for showing up to their early classes smelling of smoke and with their hands stained with soot.
“Maybe he’s working on a paper,” Brian said.
Mary felt the first signs of exhaustion coming on. It descended on her suddenly, pulling her down toward the floor. If she could just lie down, if she could just-
“Mary.” Brian was pushing her shoulder, waking her. She looked at him. Blinked. He pointed at the screen, and she saw a message from Troy in her in-box.
To: mbutler@winchester.edu
From: thardings@winchester.edu
Subject: Belated Congratulations
M,
Congrats on the solve! I solved the one in the spring of ’04, and it was a great moment. They were all talking about it today in the department. Leonard thought he was going to fool you all this time, but I guess not.
And yes, I have read Leonard’s book. I’m not into true crime, but A Disappearance… is one of the classics of that genre. A shame it never got the recognition it deserved. That girl, Deanna Ward, she’s still missing, you know. Leonard thought he got some new leads a few years ago, but they turned out to be dead ends.
All the best,
Troy
“Why would he lie?” Brian asked.
“Why is anyone lying? Why is the woman at the high school lying, making up a story about a fake book? It’s part of the game, Brian. Obviously Troy is playing it, too.” She still felt the buzz of sleep in her head, that flagging sensation of late-night fatigue.