“What do you mean?” Brian asked incredulously.
“She says that it had to be just a mistake. A printing malfunction.”
“Did you tell her about the book in Cale?”
“Of course. She said the same thing: printer malfunction. She said that the two books in DeLane and the one in Cale would have been shipped by the same company. Probably all the books in this part of the state would have the same glitch. But she was lying.” Dennis took a bite of his scrambled eggs. Mary was having toast (her appetite was almost nonexistent), and Brian wasn’t eating at all. Only Dennis seemed to have the composure to feed himself.
“What did she say when you asked her about Polly?”
“She told me the same thing she told you. That she didn’t really know anything about Polly. She said that Wendy and Star had left Cale about six months after Deanna disappeared, and now they were living somewhere near San Francisco. She knew there was a girl out in Bell City who looked like Deanna, but she just thought it had something to do with Star. Said that the man was a sleaze-ball. Scum.”
So they hadn’t found out anything more than they had yesterday. They weren’t necessarily back to square one, but they were close. Mary knew that they would have to return to Winchester in the afternoon, and if they returned without finding out what part Leonard Williams played in the Deanna Ward abduction, then why had they even come to Bell City and Cale in the first place?
“Do you think that girl you met at the kilns is still on campus, Brian?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I guess we could go back and find out. She wasn’t a student, because I looked her up. I asked some of the Dekes if they had seen me with her, but they were all drunk and couldn’t remember anything. She had just-appeared there. It’s like she was searching me out.”
They thought about that as Dennis read the newspaper at the table. When he came to the story in the Local section about Williams’s sudden departure, he read it aloud to them. They already knew everything in the story: that Williams had left before the semester ended, that Williams taught logic and philosophy courses at the school, that his office had been cleaned out. There was a statement by Dean Orman that read, “We are very concerned with these goings-on. We will get to the bottom of this. The first thing, of course, is to find out if Dr. Williams is well. Then we will get to the business of discovering why he chose to leave Winchester before the term was out.”
“Why did he leave?” Brian asked. He was drinking slowly from a glass of water, a few sips here and there. Mary noticed that he was as frazzled as she was, maybe even more so.
“You said it yourself,” Dennis said. “He left because he knew you all had gotten to Troy Hardings.”
“But Troy offered up the information about the book himself,” replied Mary. “It wasn’t like we were threatening him or anything. Well, actually Brian did threaten him. But that’s beside the point. He clearly wasn’t afraid of us. He could have just denied that the book was genuine, like Bethany Cavendish did. He could have just remained silent and not responded to our e-mails.”
“Maybe Williams and this Troy Hardings character were trying to tell us something,” Dennis tried. “By just disappearing like that, maybe they were trying to bring it to a head. They were trying to force our hand in some way. Trying to show us that the game was really just beginning.”
Mary thought, The game. Had the first five weeks of the course been simply a test, a sort of exhibition, for the real thing that was happening right now in Cale? How were Williams’s “clues” a part of this? She recalled that hanged man from the syllabus, and wondered who Williams imagined under the velvet hood. She thought about the red Honda Civic and the railroad tracks that the professor had strangely digitally imposed into the image. The house that had turned out to be a real house on During Street, the house where Deanna Ward lived before she disappeared. The dog, that black Labrador that had apparently belonged to Pig. And finally the U-Stor-It facility out by I-64 where Williams’s Polly had been kept.
What’s there? Mary wondered. What are we supposed to find? Something we aren’t seeing because we’re suddenly too close to the situation?
She put a couple of dollars down on the table and went to the bathroom. She washed her face and stood before the mirror, breathing deeply, trying to balance herself. She looked awful. Depleted and exhausted. Horrible.
When she came out of the bathroom the kid was standing there. He had on a big coat, too heavy for this time of year, and his white hair was long and in his eyes. He had been younger in the photos she had seen: a school picture with his smile gapped by missing teeth, and then later, with his mother and father and younger siblings in a family shot.
“What do you want?” she asked.
The boy continued to look at her. He was sizing her up, trying to gauge her intent.
“That name you said before,” he said. “That girl.”
“Polly?”
“Yeah. I know who she is.”
37
His name was Paul. They took him to the Cale Community Park, which had been his destination anyway. He said that some friends were meeting there. School, to him, was just a waste of his time. None of it mattered. The teachers sucked, and he got picked on all the time by the jocks. He was a frail kid, tiny in that big jacket, and Mary could see how he would be a favorite of the bullies at Cale Central. She had gone to Holy Cross in Louisville, and even at that Catholic school there were kids like Paul, kids who were the brunt of jokes, too scrawny to take up for themselves. Kids who had become bitter toward the system, and toward any adult. Paul’s clothes, his look, his face, even, asked the question: Why don’t you help me? Why didn’t you help me?
“My grandparents live in the house where that girl lived,” Paul told them. “Deanna. The one who went missing from Cale. Two or three years ago my friend Tony and me heard about this other girl, the one who looked like Deanna. My friends at school are dogging me all the time, you know, trying to have me get my grandparents to let them come over and have a séance. Sometimes we go over there in the field beside their house and smoke cigarettes. Drink wine coolers and stuff. My girlfriend, Therese, is big on that spiritual stuff. We took a Ouija board out there once and the thing started going crazy. It freaked us all out.”
“You’re lucky you didn’t get shot,” Mary said.
“Oh, Papa wouldn’t shoot anybody,” the boy said. “His shotgun isn’t even loaded. Anyway. Tony told me his older brother went to school out at Bell East with this girl who looked just like Deanna. It didn’t really mean anything to me until I started doing some research. In the computers at the library one day I looked her up on the computer. Saw a picture of her. They could have been the same girl. Polly and Deanna. Deanna and Polly. I started thinking about it, you know. Started wondering where it was leading.”
I know exactly how you feel, thought Mary.
“Well, one day me and Tony were bored and we decided to go out to Bell City to try to find out about this girl. This woman, I mean. We asked around, and someone said she was living down on Rattlesnake Ridge with some guy. Her family had left Bell City, but Polly hadn’t liked it so she came back. This was just down the road from that old bar, the Wobble Inn. Tony-he’s older than me, you know, out of school-we drove over there and talked to them. Acted like we were just interested in buying a car this guy had for sale, this red Honda. I kept looking at the woman, kept trying to place her, and man, was she weird. Kept hiding her face from me, turning it to one side so that I couldn’t, like, get a good look at her. It was almost like she was wearing a disguise.