“That’s right.”
Mary stared at Williams. A tiny vein pulsed on his neck. The gag had been knotted so tightly that they could only slide it down onto his throat, and now it was cinched there, dripping sweat.
“But you haven’t answered the question,” Mary said. Many holes had been filled in by Williams’s story, but the hole, the evidence that would clearly implicate Ed Orman, hadn’t been discussed at all. “Where is Deanna?”
“Ah,” said Williams. “The question of questions. In my book, I wanted to push forward the idea that Pig Stephens-an ex-cop, but still a horrifically violent man, a deviant who had been disgraced by the police department-had accidentally killed Deanna in a struggle and he and Ed Orman had been forced to hide her body. But my publisher wouldn’t let me go through with it. Not enough hard evidence, you see. Every time I got close to finding Deanna, she would disappear. This has been going on for nineteen years now, and I really am no closer to finding her than I was back in nineteen eighty-seven.”
They were on Montgomery Street now, driving into campus. It was a normal Wednesday at Winchester. The quarter was ending, and parents’ vehicles were pulled into the service entrances behind the dorms. It was 4:30 p.m. Soon, they would all be going home for the fall break and these questions would still be unanswered. Mary had just one more thing to ask Williams.
“Where’s Polly now?”
“She’s getting her degree in criminal justice at Indiana State, down in Terre Haute. It’s difficult, this forty-year-old woman sitting in a classroom with teenagers. Kids your age. She’s lived a tough life, as you would expect. But she got things turned around, and now she’s going to school full-time. She visited me on campus just a couple of weeks ago and she’s supposed to be coming back into town today or tomorrow for the break. She knows everything, of course. It was difficult to keep it from her after A Disappearance in the Fields was published, but she knows who her real father is, and she has her own suspicions about Ed Orman. He knows that he’s too old to stop us from living our lives now. He was against Jennifer and me moving onto campus a few years ago, but that passed.”
“And what about Wendy Ward?” Mary asked. “Does he still obsess over her?”
“I wouldn’t know. All I know is that he doesn’t interfere with Polly, thank God. He has resigned himself to the knowledge that he has a daughter, even though I know she must bring back terrible memories of what he did to Deanna and the cover-up that has gone on for years. That’s one reason he locks himself up in his office: he’s ashamed of his history at Winchester. I think it eats at him every day, and I intend to see to it that it continues to for the rest of his time at the university.”
“Locked away,” Dennis said, “writing his book on Milgram.”
“Did you know he and Milgram were never colleagues?” Williams said. “Not really.”
“How so?” Dennis asked.
“I mean-”
But they were on campus now, and he fell silent. They crept down Montgomery and hit the light at Pride Street, the boundary that separated the two hemispheres of Winchester.
“What are you going to do?” asked Mary. She was desperate for some conclusion, some kind of closure to the game. Finding Williams was not enough; it seemed incredibly cruel to leave Deanna still missing, and Ed Orman’s deception unchallenged.
“I’m going to do the same thing I’ve done for all these years,” Williams admitted. “I’m going to keep quiet. I’m not going to say anything. I’m going to teach Logic and Reasoning in the Winchester term, just like I always have, and I’m going to hope I have students who are as inquisitive as you three. Right now? Right now I’m going to return to my study to have a bourbon.” He paused. “I love my study. We added it on to the house a few years ago. Have you seen it, Mary?”
Mary turned to look at him. There was something in his eyes, a gleaming and almost imperceptible trace of secret information.
They fell silent, each of them gazing outside the car. It was finally fall. The sun that had been out earlier was gone behind a bank of clouds, and the air was crisp and sharp. The wind whistling through Mary’s cracked window had the bite of winter.
“Where to?” asked Dennis as the light turned green.
“Home,” replied Professor Williams.
So Dennis drove him to the house on Pride Street, and standing outside waiting for him was Polly’s adoptive mother, Jennifer Williams. She did not look anything like Della-this woman was plump and short, and her face contained a multitude of hurt lines. The professor got out of Dennis’s car and ran up the drive toward her, and they embraced as if they hadn’t seen each other in many, many years.
41
4 hours left
“So this is it?” asked Brian. They were in Mary’s room in Brown. Dennis had dropped them off with the promise that he would call them before he left campus, and now they were sitting at what Mary called her “dinner table,” which was really a card table with a frilly tablecloth draped over it, eating McDonald’s cheeseburgers.
“I guess so,” admitted Mary. She would be going back to Louisville this evening, and all of this would be left behind. Since her cell phone had apparently been out of range in Bell City, her mother had left five messages since Tuesday afternoon asking if she was coming home for the week. The last message bordered on hysteria, so she texted her mother a brief message: Been studying hard for exams. Everything’s still a go for tonight.
“It doesn’t seem right,” Brian said. “Orman shouldn’t be allowed to just get away scot-free.”
“If Williams’s story is true.”
Brian flinched. “You think he’s lying?”
“I think it’s difficult to trust him considering what he made us go through.”
“He said it himself, Mary. He was trying to protect himself. He was trying to lead us to the clues that would tell us what we needed to know about Ed Orman and his role in Deanna’s disappearance.”
She couldn’t get the feeling out of her mind, though-the feeling that Williams was somehow deceiving them again. It’s just your paranoia, she told herself. You’ve just freaked yourself out during the two days in Bell City and Cale.
After they ate, she walked Brian out. A moment passed between them before he walked away, the knowledge that whatever they had begun wasn’t over. He took her hand, and for a moment they stood on the quad, looking in each other’s eyes. They had shared something, something so significant that neither of them would ever forget it. “Be careful in Kentucky,” he told her. “We’ll see each other after the break and we could…” He didn’t finish the thought. He didn’t have to. He walked away from her, off toward Norris Hall, leaving her standing alone outside her building.
Back inside, Mary checked her e-mail. She had nineteen new messages. There were forwards from her mother, petitions and jokes and recipes that she found-the detritus of the Internet. There was a note from Dr. Kiseley, her lit professor, asking her where she had been this morning. She would have to e-mail Kiseley before she left and figure out how to get her final paper to her. There were four or five institutional messages from Dean Orman concerning the cancellation of Professor Williams’s Logic and Reasoning 204. Nothing else of significance.
She responded to Kiseley and told her that she would e-mail the paper within the week, blaming a family emergency for the delay. Then she threw some clothes into her old suitcase and went out to her mother’s old Camry. Her heart was thudding, but it was a plaintive noise. There was a certain sadness inside her: the knowledge that Deanna would not be found, and that she, Mary, was at least a bit responsible for that fact. She had been so close to the truth but had been unable to find the missing girl.