And to her right Brian was moving. He was not trying to escape, but rather he was coming into the room, toward the frantic throng of actors and actresses.
He was walking toward Elizabeth Orman with the gun.
“Brian,” Mary said softly.
56
Mary said his name, and he stopped.
That movement-the stopping, the turning around to face her-was what allowed the man in the Red Sox cap to reach him.
“Stop,” the man said. He was dressed strangely, Brian saw. His jacket had been zipped high and the cap had been pulled down low so that his face was obscured. The dog he’d had beside him, the black Lab, had run out of the room. The man held the snapped leash limply in his right hand.
“I couldn’t,” Brian said to this man, this stranger. “I just couldn’t let him continue hurting us.”
“I know, I know,” the man said. “But put the gun down and we’ll figure it all out.” His voice was soothing, familiar.
Suddenly, Brian knew who he was.
Brian reached up and unzipped the man’s jacket and revealed Dennis Flaherty.
57
Dennis took the gun away from Brian and put it on the table. Mary was so close to Dennis that he could hear her voice. “Why?” she said.
“Let’s talk about this later, Mary,” he said. He was holding Brian by the shoulders. Both boys looked vulnerable, weak, as if they had stepped into a nightmare that they couldn’t wake up from.
Dennis took a few steps toward where Williams lay, but he couldn’t get through to the man. Mary went around to the other side and found her way to him. They had him on the floor, and she could see by his pallor that he was dead. He was gray and still. She knelt and touched his hand, and he was unresponsive to her touch. “Professor,” she whispered. Nothing. The man who had played Marco was performing CPR, and all the actors and actresses were watching passively now. The air had been taken out of the room. They had finally reached the end.
58
Some time later, after Marco had stopped trying to save Williams, after some of the actors and actresses had left the room to retch in the hallway, Mary looked at Dennis. She didn’t have to say anything: he knew what she needed him to say.
He took a deep breath. “I was intrigued. When I figured it out, I thought it was so brilliant. A real-life behavior experiment, you know. So I joined them. They sent me to Cale and Bell City. I was their emissary. I made all the phone calls so they could track us. I called the Collinses beforehand; I called the diner from the store where we stopped to get directions. I went in to speak to Bethany Cavendish this morning and we sent out Paul. They needed someone to help them, and so I did. And there was also…” Dennis trailed off.
“Her,” Mary said.
“Excuse me?”
“You wanted to be near Elizabeth.” It was Brian. His head was leaned back against the wall, and Dennis still held him by the shoulders. Mary knew that if Brian wanted to break free he could, but he was resigned to this now. He had conceded defeat.
“That’s absurd,” Dennis said, his voice nearly a whisper. “I was going to say that there was also my father. How I wanted to be like him, more ‘serious-minded,’ as he liked to say. More academic. More worthwhile.” But Mary could see that was also a lie. The truth was that Dennis’s part in the study had, in fact, everything to do with Elizabeth Orman and little to do with his interest in the science or with his father.
“How pathetic,” she said to him. Dennis didn’t respond, and in that silence she saw that in some twisted way he agreed with her.
“No,” Dennis said. “It had nothing to do with her. Not after I got involved with it. Not after I started talking to Leonard and Troy Hardings. It became a-a purely academic thing. I began to see what my father saw. The proof opening up, the answer revealing itself. The study was so perfect, so mathematical.”
“Except you forgot one thing,” Mary said.
“What’s that?” Dennis asked.
“The human element. It’s what you always forget, Dennis. That your actions mean something to other people. That what you do has consequences.”
She looked down and caught Brian’s gaze, and he simply shook his head. His face revealed the gravity of his mistake. Tears streamed down his face, and Mary noticed that his hand, the hand that had held the gun, was trembling slightly.
Then Mary was being led away from them, into the crowd of people. Soon she was in the back of the room with Edna Collins beside her, and through the mass of people she saw the events of Seminary East unfold: Elizabeth Orman sat on the rolling chair and buried her head in her hands; Troy Hardings came to Elizabeth and stroked her hair, and Mary saw what he was saying to her by reading his lips: “It will be okay” the ambulance arrived, the stretcher was rolled in, and they took Leonard Williams away; the word “dead” began to ripple through the room. Then, much later, when only ten or twelve of them remained, a detective came in to talk to her. He was wearing a flannel jacket and had a mustache. He could have been an actor for all Mary knew, but she was too exhausted to care.
“What’s going on here?” he asked, and Mary told him what she knew.
Two Months Later
59
Mary Butler had begun to pick up the pieces of her life.
She was back in Kentucky and planning to enroll at another university next fall. She had answered question upon question about her role in Elizabeth Orman’s study. It was decided, finally, that she didn’t know what Brian House had been planning. It was also decided, by a faceless ethics committee put together by Winchester University, that the mistakes that had occurred in Elizabeth Orman’s Polly Experiment were completely happenstance. There was no breach of ethics, the committee found, and Elizabeth was allowed to continue her studies at Winchester.
None of this mattered now to Mary except for Brian’s fate. She had moved on. It had taken her a while, of course. She had spent three or four dark weeks in her parents’ home, sleeping between those bouts of questions. She thought of Brian often. He was awaiting trial in DeLane, and the district attorney was planning to charge him with first-degree manslaughter. Mary had been subpoenaed, and would testify at the pretrial in two weeks. It would take no preparation. She had memorized the story by now; she knew it so well that she could recite it with her eyes closed.
She took walks with her mother. She cooked dinner for her parents. She tried to regain some normalcy. But it wasn’t easy. She had, once again, trusted too much and had been hurt because of that trust.
Dennis had been dismissed from school. He had been Elizabeth’s and Troy Hardings’ patsy after all. The school had uncovered his relationship with Elizabeth, and they had ruled that he had an “unhealthy obsession with the doctoral candidate and her work.” Mary knew that this was not the case; Dennis had told her the truth in Seminary East that night. He took the fall for Elizabeth, and Mary saw something in that: he still loved Elizabeth. Perhaps she had seduced him into the study, perhaps she had stuck the knife in his back and twisted it, but he could not give her up. Poor Dennis. He called Mary one night and simply sat on the other end of the line, weeping.
Williams, of course, was dead by the time he reached the DeLane Baptist Hospital. One shot to the gut opened him up, destroyed his insides. They found cancer there, Mary heard, and it had been terminal. Eating him away in there, destroying him. She didn’t know if that was true or not. She wanted it to be.