“If you need anything,” Dean Orman was saying, “all you have to do is come to Student Services and talk to Wanda. She will be happy to assist you with any questions you have. And of course you will all be reimbursed for this class and awarded the full three credits.”
Afterward, Mary immediately went to find Brian. He was in the Orman Library, sitting at a table in the back. He was staring out a window, a textbook open in front of him. He had still not recovered from Monday night and their discussion with Troy Hardings, it appeared.
“Williams is gone,” she told him.
He blinked at her. “You’re kidding.”
“Cleaned out his office. Orman came to class to break the news.”
“Troy must have told him about our discussion.”
Mary didn’t say anything, but her silence betrayed her. She knew as well as Brian did that the two events could not be isolated. As Williams had told them so long ago, randomness was not the rule but rather the exception to the rule.
“What do we do now?” he asked.
“We could find Hardings and ask him about it. Find out what’s going on. Threaten him in some way.”
“Already did it,” Brian said somberly. “His roommate said he went home for the week. I had a chat with him earlier. He wasn’t very…forthcoming.”
“Of course he wasn’t.”
They sat in the silence of the library, thinking about what they should do next. It seemed they were at the end now, at the apex of the game, yet neither of them was quite sure how to proceed.
And then something dawned on her, something so obvious that Mary wondered why she had not thought about it before now.
“Dennis Flaherty,” she said.
“Dennis the Menace?” asked Brian skeptically.
“Let’s go visit him. He owes me one, anyway.”
Dennis Flaherty was grilling hot dogs on the Tau house roof. He was wearing a tank top and rubber flip-flops, and Mary thought he looked like somebody’s dad. “Mary Butler!” he greeted her, with too much enthusiasm in his voice.
“We’re here to talk about Williams,” Mary told him.
Dennis looked at Brian, a puzzled expression on his face. “Yeah, what a thing, huh?” he asked, turning one of the wieners. “You gonna join us for dinner?”
“We don’t buy our friends,” replied Brian. There was a moment of charged hesitation between the two boys, and finally Dennis broke it by looking down, smirking at the grill.
Mary stepped between them. “What happened to him, Dennis?”
“Why are you asking me?” he asked, shock in his voice. “I’m just as surprised as you are.”
“I know you were talking to him. I could tell when we were-when we spoke at his house that night.”
“What are you talking about?” He shut the grill’s lid and hung his spatula on the side. The Taus had a gigantic Weber, a veritable legend on campus, and they had been forced to chain it to the house itself to keep the Dekes from stealing it.
“Cut the shit, Dennis.” Brian took a step toward Dennis, his finger jabbing accusingly toward the other boy. “We’re not playing a game anymore.” But of course that was the problem: they were playing a game. It was all part of Williams’s game, and that was what made it so confoundingly difficult to understand.
“I talked to him once,” Dennis said, looking off the roof, toward Up Campus, where some students were staging a protest about the tuition hike that was about to come into effect. The protesters walked slowly across the viaduct, their signs bobbing in the air above them. “Maybe twice. We just talked about Polly. About the class. It was nothing. Look, if you two think that I may have had something to do with Williams skipping town-”
“It’s not that,” Mary said sharply. “It’s just that there are other things. Things you don’t know about yet.”
“What other things, Mary?”
Brian produced the book. He showed it to Dennis carefully, as if it contained a terrible secret. Brian flipped through the book, pausing on some of the pages as if a story could be told in the nonsense language.
“What the hell is it?” Dennis asked.
“It’s Williams’s book about the girl, Deanna. The girl from Cale that detective talked about.”
“Except it’s not a book,” Dennis said flatly, as if he was still trying to grasp the concept of the two words-for the for the for the for the for the-on those pages.
“Right,” Brian put in. “This is why I believe-we believe-that this is all part of some kind of…ploy on Williams’s part.” Brian explained it all to Dennis: uncovering the detective, Brian’s trip to Cale High and his discussion with Bethany Cavendish, the cryptic phrase Mary had seen on that typed page in Williams’s office, Della Williams’s note to Mary on the night of the party, and finally his and Mary’s e-mails to Troy Hardings.
“Shit,” whispered Dennis. He opened the Weber and transferred the hot dogs to a plastic plate. For a few moments he was silent, contemplating what he had heard. “So you think Williams had something to do with this girl in Cale?”
It was the first time anyone had expressed it in words. Yet it had been there, unspoken between Brian and Mary, from the moment he had showed up at Brown late two nights before. Bethany Cavendish had told Brian, It was as if he was there. An innocuous admonition at the time, but now, looking back with all the information they had gathered in the last day, it carried an undeniable weight.
“I think so,” Brian said.
The knowledge of what they were involved with now fell on them, and they stood silently on the hot roof of the Tau house, contemplating their roles in what was happening.
“What do we do?” Dennis asked. His brothers were at the door asking for the food, and he passed the plate inside.
Brian and Mary had already spoken about it on the way to the Tau house. They had decided that there was no other way around it, that if they wanted this thing to stop they had to go the whole way, and to do that they must get to the root of it. They must find a missing girl, again, for a second time, and then Williams’s role might be revealed. Mary had already resigned herself to the fact that she would not be going home this weekend to study as she had promised; in fact, she had already called and told her mother. When her mom asked if Dennis was somehow involved in Mary’s decision to stay at school, Mary had neither confirmed or denied it.
“We have to find her,” she told Dennis now, referring for the first time not to Polly but to Deanna Ward.
27
That night, he met Elizabeth at the Cossack, a little bar on the border of DeLane and Cale. She was already drunk. He slid across from her and she looked at him, her glare unfocused, sloppy. “What’s wrong with you?” he asked. They had been talking again in the library, and while Dennis had to admit it wasn’t like before, there was still a certain charge to it. She was at least acknowledging him again, looking at him and considering his thoughts.
“Nothing,” she slurred. “This-this damned dissertation.” The word was dirty on her tongue, a swear.
“So, I’m going to be busy these next few days,” he told her.
She only nodded heavily.
“I’m going with some friends of mine on a trip,” he said.
Again, that slow nod. She knew all of this, of course, but he was making sure. Making sure she knew so that she would remember when he returned, so that maybe-maybe that old energy would return. Who knew: maybe that would be his reward. In just a week, he had gone from angry at her-the kind of anger that is unhealthy, vile-to something else. Something like desperation. Yes, he admitted it: he was desperate for Elizabeth now that she had turned him away. Dennis stayed awake at night thinking of ways to bring her back.
They were silent for a moment. And then she said, “I got a tattoo.” When Dennis didn’t say anything, she continued, “Want to see?”