She told them about the fake rooms and Norman finding her. She hadn’t trusted his look, that curious gaze he had given her. She thought he knew something that he hadn’t told them.
“Maybe they were really doing a renovation,” Dennis said.
“Come on, Dennis,” Brian huffed. “Where do they live? That house is tiny. If all the rooms are bare, where do they sleep?”
“What is it, then?” Dennis came back. “They knew we were coming? They just happened to be there when we arrived in a…in a fake house? And are they in on this, too? Williams killed Polly-”
“Deanna,” Mary corrected him.
“-and they’re all trying to cover for him? The woman at the school. Cavendish. This Troy guy at Winchester. The fake wife. Now this old couple. How big is this thing?”
“That’s what we’ve been asking,” Brian said flatly.
“How is he doing it?” asked Dennis. “These people are forty miles apart. How is he conducting it on the fly? What, are the Collinses his relatives? Has he paid them to lie for him? Is he trying to-”
Mary had it before Dennis did. She sat up straight and asked, “Is he trying to lead us to something?”
They all thought about that for a moment. The car rolled out During and hit the chip and seal of the connecting road, and Dennis drove back toward Highway 72.
“Maybe Williams didn’t have anything to do with Deanna,” she said, “but he knows who did. Maybe the deadline…maybe it’s still applicable.”
“The deadline?” Brian asked.
“Tomorrow,” she said. “The class was going to end tomorrow. I think something is going to happen.”
“But Deanna Ward disappeared twenty years ago, Mary,” Dennis said.
“I just think…” She trailed off. Her mind was spinning. The answer was somewhere out there; the meaning of all this could be divined, if she could just concentrate hard enough, if she could just focus…
“He knows who did it,” she said.
“Why would he do that?” Brian now. “To withhold evidence like that is criminal, isn’t it? I mean, it makes Williams as culpable as anyone in this thing. In that case he’s an accomplice. If he has information, like Bethany Cavendish said, then why not just say it?”
“Puzzles,” Dennis said. His eyes were on the road, and the sunlight glinted harshly against his sunglasses.
“What?” Brian urged him on.
“He loves puzzles. You should see his study. He had these ancient puzzles from China. They’re called tangrams. You cut out these shapes, these silhouettes, and you place them in the puzzle. He had made some…weird ones.”
“What do you mean ‘weird’?” asked Brian.
“I mean some of them were lurid. Some had decapitated heads. Naked bodies. Rapes. They were disgusting. He saw me looking at them and put them away in a closet, but I had already seen enough.”
None of them said a word. The road trundled beneath them, kicking up gravel against the undercarriage. Dennis met the intersection of Highway 72 and took a right. Toward Bell City.
“So are you saying that Williams is leading us through this just because he likes puzzles?” Mary asked. “I don’t know if I buy that or not.”
“What’s the other scenario?” Dennis wanted to know. “That Williams is Deanna’s abductor? Do either of you believe that?”
Mary thought of his strength when she had pushed him that day in class. His tremendous strength. Did he abduct Deanna Ward and was he now, almost twenty years later, leading them on a wild chase to find her? Or was he intentionally leading them off base, putting up foils to their plan, placing “actors” here and there to drive them away from the truth?
Motive, she then thought. What would the motive be for playing this game?
“Well,” Dennis said, “I don’t believe it. I think what Mary said earlier was right: Williams knows who took Deanna Ward. This is all part of his game.”
“Aren’t games supposed to be fun?” asked Brian, his voice determined and lacing. “There’s nothing fun about a missing girl.”
“I’m telling you,” Dennis said, “Williams didn’t do this. I spoke to him. I know if someone is telling the truth, and he was genuine when he said that Polly was a logic puzzle and nothing more. This other thing, Deanna-I don’t know what that is, but I can assure you that Williams is trying to tell us something. Maybe he can’t say it the way he wants to say it. Maybe there’s someone who knows the truth, and Williams is trying to tell us what he knows without alerting this other person.”
Mary thought of the deadline again. She thought of Deanna Ward, and if this could possibly be about her. In a way, it made perfect sense. No wonder Williams’s logic game had been so easy: he was just preparing them for the real test.
She thought about the deadline and what it must mean. As they drove across Cale and toward Bell City, she realized that they had only twenty-four hours to locate Leonard Williams and find out what he knew.
30
Bell City is one of the poorest communities in the state of Indiana. It has about five thousand residents and rests on the border of Martin County. It became famous years ago for a basketball game played at Bloomington, where Bell East High School beat number-one-ranked Cale High for a shot at its first-ever state championship.
There is a sign commemorating that feat as you pass into the Bell City limits. It has been dented, pocked by thrown rocks, and nearly torn off its post, surely by Cale residents still bitter about a game that was played almost thirty years ago.
In Bell City there is a Dairy Queen, a bait and tackle shop, and the local high school and junior high. There are a variety of churches, most of them Baptist, some of them falling into disorder along the side of Highway 72. The road in Bell City becomes cracked and pitted because the asphalt has not been tended to in so long. The three of them were entering, it appeared, a ghost town.
They were looking for the girl who had been mistakenly taken to Wendy Ward that fateful day. The police had trailed Deanna’s father, Star, to the trailer and arrested him on site. Yet the girl had turned out not to be Deanna. Brian was particularly interested in driving the twenty-five extra miles to see this trailer, though he couldn’t tell them exactly what he expected to find.
Dennis stopped for directions at a gas station just outside of downtown. He went inside while Brian put gas in the Lexus. When Dennis returned, he said the attendant had told him to drive to Gary’s Diner because apparently Gary was the guy you asked if you had questions of particular importance. The diner was right beside the courthouse, which they saw up on a hill, its dome rising out of the tree line like some sort of battlement. They would probably be able to find somebody there, the attendant said, someone they could talk to about Deanna Ward.
The town proper was nearly dead. There was a furniture store that was open across from the courthouse, and two men were carrying out sofas while others were pinning red sales tags to the upholstery. The three parked at the courthouse and walked the three blocks to Gary’s Diner, their jackets tied around their waists and the high sun beating down on their faces.
There were no cars in the parking lot, and the waitresses were all outside the diner, leaning against a picket fence that blocked the patrons’ view of the funeral parlor next door. They were all sharing a cigarette, passing it down the line and taking deep drags with their eyes closed. It was an unseasonably hot day in early October, the trees all aflame with wild color.
The women didn’t move when they saw the three students coming. They just stood there in a row by that white fence and continued to smoke their cigarette. They were wearing pink, frilly uniforms straight out of the 1950s. It was a different kind of pink, a pink that was softer and more subtle than anything you see today. Mary felt as if she had stepped back in time. Everything was unreal, beginning with Brian’s story of the book last week, to Professor Williams’s disappearance. And now here she was, in this strange little town, trying to find answers to a question she didn’t even know how to phrase.