Mary lay down on her bed and propped Auster on her knees, trying to take her thoughts off Polly and her creator. Yet the novel’s words wouldn’t make sense. She would read a sentence and stop, float off somewhere, imagine Williams. She imagined him at home, walking barefoot across the wood floor in his pajamas, staring out a back window, drinking coffee from a cracked mug. She admitted it: she was fascinated by him. So curious, how he had refused to give them anything substantial to work with, how he had led them into those questions. There was something dangerous about it-and it was that danger, that adventure, that had been missing from her experience at Winchester since she and Dennis had broken up.
And this is what Polly’s disappearance is, Williams had said, an intricate puzzle.
Polly. Williams had tried to make her more real by presenting those weird photographs in class. Mary imagined that transparent Polly standing on the grass, smiling playfully in her summer dress, holding out her arm to block the camera. Where was that grass? Who was the girl, the real girl in the picture? Someone Professor Williams knew? His daughter? And the red-eyed Mike. Mary thought she recognized that couch from somewhere on campus, but she couldn’t place it. Was “Mike” a student here? Had Professor Williams taken these photos himself and not told his subjects what they were for?
Mary went to the computer and ran a search. She typed in “Professor L. Williams” and got more than a thousand hits. There were Professor L. Williamses at Southern Oregon University, at DePaul, at East Carolina, at Bard College. She narrowed the search: “Professor L. Williams at Winchester University.” Forty hits. She got his bio again, that useless and broken link. She found a couple of program newsletters where he was mentioned as “Dr. Williams.”
It was getting late, past 10:00 p.m. now. Mary had an early class on Monday, and she knew that if she didn’t get to bed soon she would regret it in the morning. She browsed through a few more links, still only coming up with vague references to Williams by his title and not his name. She needed his name. She didn’t know why, but she needed it. She was certain it would help her with Polly’s case somehow.
On the third page of results, she found what she was looking for.
It was a press release for an article he had written in 1998. The article was called “The Components of Crime,” and the author was Leonard Williams.
Leonard. Mary said it aloud, registered the taste of it in her mouth. It almost made her laugh. Professor Williams was definitely no Leonard, yet there it was on her screen. Undeniable fact. If you would have given her a thousand guesses, Leonard would not have been one of them.
She returned to Google and searched it in fulclass="underline" “Professor Leonard Williams at Winchester University.”
Forty-five hits this time, and her heart nearly stopped when she read the title of the first result: “Distinguished Winchester Professor Accused of Plagiarism.”
The phone rang.
Breathlessly, Mary picked it up and found herself saying, “Hello?”
“Mary?” It was her mother calling from Kentucky. The line, as it always did, scratched and tweaked across the miles. Mary often wondered if there was an electrical storm, perpetually firing off in the distance somewhere out there, nicking at her mother’s and father’s I love yous and I miss yous. Then a strange thought occurred to her: In a well. The girl sounded as if she was at the bottom of a well.
I’m here.
Mary closed her eyes, put her head down on the corner of the desk as was her habit when she was nervous about something. She managed to say, “Yeah, Mom. Are you all back home?”
“Who is this?”
“It’s me,” said Mary. “It’s me, Mom.”
“You just…you don’t sound like yourself. It’s like-like you’re miles away.”
At the bottom of a well.
“I’m here, Mom,” said Mary, pressing her forehead hard into the desk, the pain spreading across her brow and over her scalp. She didn’t want to look at the screen, didn’t want to face it. She was afraid of what was there.
“Anyway,” said her mother casually. “Your father and I are home. We just got back. It…was…magnificent. Mary, you should have seen it. Key West is just beautiful in September. Thank God all those wild kids were gone. We went out to Fort Zachary Taylor and spent the day. We saw Hemingway’s home, all those six-toed cats. Anyway. You should get the postcard soon.”
“Mmmm,” Mary murmured, head still down, eyes shut tight.
“Tell me,” her mother said.
“Tell you what?”
“Tell me what’s going on.”
“There’s nothing going on, Mom. Really. Seriously. Everything is fine.”
“I can tell by your voice. Something’s the matter.”
“It’s just-” Dennis, Mary thought. Lie to her. “It’s just that I saw Dennis.”
“He called you, didn’t he? He asked you out again.”
“Absolutely not. I haven’t really spoken to Dennis since freshman year. He’s just-” Mary stopped short. She didn’t want to tell her mother about Professor Leonard Williams and this strange class she couldn’t get off her mind. Her monitor blacked out into the screen saver, startling Mary for a moment.
“Except what? Tell me.”
Mary knew it was futile. Her mother was like a sort of leech for information, a kind of walking, talking, cooking truth serum. “Except he’s in one of my classes,” Mary said gently.
“That’s it!” her mother said. There was nothing her mother enjoyed more than bleeding secrets. Cracking codes. In that way, she was just like her daughter. She would search for kinks in your language, squeeze details out of you, break you across the static-laced distance. “That’s it. I figured it out. Harold!” She was calling for Mary’s father, who would be off somewhere in the house, getting back to whatever project he was surely in the middle of when they’d left for Key West: fixing the lawn mower, rebuilding the busted computer the neighbors had thrown out. “Harold, Dennis and Mary are taking classes together!” Then, “I feel really good about this, honey. You know I liked Dennis so much even though your father didn’t trust him. Tell him-tell him that I don’t blame him for what he did. That’s just what boys do when they get bored. Will you tell him that, please?”
“I’ll tell him, Mom,” said Mary.
“Anyway. I better get going. Have to get unpacked and all. Sweetie, listen. I want you to call me if you need anything. Please.”
There was silence on the line. It snapped and cracked and scratched like a needle at the end of a record. “Okay,” Mary finally said, her eyes still down at the floor. She saw all the great wads of dust under her desk, balls of dirt and hair.
“Good-bye, honey,” her mother said.
“Bye, Mom.”
It was another minute or two before Mary could look at the screen. Slowly, her heart going mad inside her chest, she read the short article on Leonard Williams’s crime.
DISTINGUISHED WINCHESTER PROFESSOR ACCUSED OF PLAGIARISM
A Winchester University professor, in his fourteenth year at the institution, has been accused of plagiarism. Associate Professor Leonard Williams was accused of lifting multiple passages of John Dawe Brown’s famous 1971 book, The Subliminal Mind, and placing them, almost word for word, in the text of his published dissertation Tragedy and Substance: Logic as a Way of Figuring Out the World, which was first published in 1986. John Dawe Brown was the author of more than twenty books of philosophy. He taught at Yale University for thirty-five years, beginning in the early 1960s, and recently succumbed to colon cancer. His wife, Loretta Hawkes-Brown, has made no public comment on this incident. Professor Williams has been suspended by the university, with pay, until a special faculty committee can investigate the incident.