The strange thing about Williams was that nobody had ever seen him. The faculty guidebook showed a gray box labeled NOT PICTURED; group photos in the Winchester yearbooks only showed Williams’s hand or arm, even though the captions advertised his presence. The college’s website gave a brief curriculum vitae but no photographic evidence. By that Monday afternoon, the first day of classes for the fall term at Winchester University, the search for Williams had, for some of his students, become almost compulsive.
It was as if Williams were hiding himself from them, as if he were teasing them somehow. It had become a tradition at Winchester for students to find a picture of their professors before classes began; in this way, it was commonly believed, they could allay some of the anxiety when the man or woman strode into the room. It was a method of one-upping the faculty, of stealing some of their precious authority.
And so this thing with Williams had become a big deal. Some of the students of Logic and Reasoning 204 were so incensed over Williams’s invisibility that they were convinced they were being tricked. One student, a Young Republican who carried a briefcase to each class, brought out his battered and veined Code of Conduct, and much of the class hovered over him while he searched the index for words like Deception and Faculty Misconduct.
It was as they were doing this that Williams himself walked into the room. He was wearing faded blue jeans, which was highly unusual for a professor at Winchester. He was also carrying nothing, which was even more curious than his dress. No papers, no manila envelopes, no coffee mug. He was wearing a flannel shirt that he had tucked in. No belt. Nikes. The professor was clean-shaven, another anomaly on campus, and his face was youthful (for a man clearly in his early sixties) and pitted with acne scars on the left side that brought to mind, both in their color and shape, pennies flattened on a railroad track. Yet he was handsome in a certain light, and he moved so softly and quietly that he gave the impression of extreme gentleness, his hands sometimes out before him as if he were feeling his way into the dark or perhaps gesturing, Don’t be scared; I’m right behind you.
Professor Williams took his place at the podium at the front of the room. There were fifteen students in the class. Eight female, seven male. They were all white, which was the rule rather than the exception in a Winchester classroom. They were all sharply dressed in clothes their parents had bought them over the summer. Many of them were upperclassmen, as this course was a prerequisite for third-year seminars in philosophy and English. Because the students were mostly philosophy and lit majors, the room had an air of uncertainty. These were students who did not know where they were going in life but were generally accomplished. “Smart kids,” a Winchester professor once wryly said of his philosophy students, “who were all seduced by Descartes’ brain-in-a-vat theory in Philo 101.”
Williams opened his mouth to speak, but before he could say a word, someone’s cell phone chirped. He waited while the student shamefully dug in her bag to find the offending object. In fact, the professor seemed more anxious than the girl: he looked down, red-faced, at his podium while the girl furiously mashed buttons. Some professors would embarrass the girl further, make her hum the ring tone or have the conversation while standing in front of the class or something just as discomforting.
But Williams simply waited. And when the phone had been silenced he said, in a voice that was soft and commanding at the same time, “There’s been a murder.”
No one knew how to take this announcement. A young man in the back row laughed aloud.
Williams smiled. He stared down at his podium again and brushed something off the surface. “Not a real murder,” he said. “No. This is a murder that may happen in the future. A…” The man paused, looked up at the class, waved his hand in the air as if he were trying to come up with the word by catching it in his palm.
“A hypothetical,” said a girl in the front row.
“Yes!” said Williams. He was pleased with the word, as it suited the conditions of his story quite well. “A hypothetical. A potential murder. Murder in the future tense. Because, you see, many things have to happen before this murder is to occur. Many things that you, if you are clever enough, can keep from happening.”
He fell silent. They met in the Seminary Building, the oldest of Winchester’s classroom buildings. Sunlight poured in through the high, bare windows and a few students were shielding their eyes from it. This was a bane of this particular classroom, Seminary East. The sun thing, as it was referred to, had become such a problem that afternoon classes, as Logic and Reasoning 204 was, were often canceled because the fierce light would give the lecturer or the students migraine headaches.
“What kinds of things?” someone finally said.
Williams turned toward the dry erase board and searched the tray for something to write with, but because it was the first day of classes and professors were hoarding their supplies, no one had left a marker there. Sighing, he turned back to the class.
“Time, for instance,” he said. “There is the variable of time. If the victim and her killer or killers-”
“Potential killer,” said the girl who had offered hypothetical. She was into it now. She was tapping notes on her laptop and nodding feverishly as Williams spoke.
“Yes. If the victim and her potential killer or killers are not found in a certain amount of time, then she will die.”
“How long?” someone asked.
“Six weeks from Wednesday,” the professor said, and everyone noted that the fall term was exactly six weeks long. The fall term was followed by what students referred to as Winchester term, an eight-week session when many students studied abroad. Logic and Reasoning 204-and all the classes during the fall term-promised to be highly competitive, because so many students would be trying to impress the Europe and South America Committees to win a coveted spot on a foreign campus.
“The other variables,” Williams went on, “are these: place, motive, and circumstance.”
It was obvious that Williams would have written these four words on the board if he’d had the means. The girl in front put each word on the screen of her laptop: TIME, PLACE, MOTIVE, CIRCUMSTANCE. Bolded them all.
“So,” he said then. “I’ll see you Wednesday.”
The professor turned to walk out the door of Seminary East, which was still standing open. Class had lasted just ten minutes. Almost imperceptibly, a moment of panic passed over the students. They were trapped between wanting to get out and enjoy the rest of the day (Williams’s class, so late in the afternoon, would be their last) and finding out what Williams and his missing girl were really about.
“Wait,” the girl with the laptop finally said.
Williams was almost out the door, but he spun in the threshold and said, “Yes?”
“How are we supposed to stop it?” she asked.
Williams came back into the room. He had a cautious expression on his face, as if he were wary about his students, so young and innocent, getting involved in such a mess.
“What kinds of questions are pertinent?” he asked.
The girl seemed confused. She looked at Williams over the top of her computer. She knew that she needed to tread lightly here. She was caught, as she often was, between the impulse to dominate the action in the classroom and remaining so silent that the teacher forgot her presence. Thus the laptop; she had found that the sound of her fingers on the keys made her noticeable. She didn’t need to talk, didn’t need to fear getting on the other students’ nerves with her theories and ideas. She could peck at the keyboard during lectures and the professor would know she was engaged. And it had worked. She passed all her classes with high marks and remained well liked on campus, not a bookish nerd at all but rather as popular as a firmly middle-class girl with frizzy, stubborn hair and square-lens glasses (the kind she saw Joan Didion wearing on C-Span) who read Willa Cather in her free time could possibly be. She was most definitely in, as the Delta sisters she hung around with might say. She and her friend Summer McCoy referred to themselves as Betweeners-those girls who were comfortable enough to refuse to rush a sorority but connected enough to party at sorority and fraternity houses. Between worlds: it was, the girl felt, the best place to be at Winchester.
Yet here was Williams asking, What kinds of questions are pertinent?-a question that begged other, deeper questions, and she was stumped. If she answered, whole philosophies might open up and the class might run down an irrelevant current that would take up the full hour. If she remained silent, Williams might take her for a passive-aggressive brownnoser who hollowly pecked on computer keys.
“Who is she?” asked a boy in the back row, saving the girl from having to make her decision. He was the student who had laughed earlier, his normal classroom gesture. So many things seemed, for some reason, ridiculously absurd to him. Meaningless. Logic, for instance. He had signed up for Williams’s class and had immediately wondered why he would waste his time. There was no logic, he knew. There were only vague choices to be made, problems to be contemplated but not solved, areas of the strictest gray to subjectively drone on about (because if you solved those questions, what would future classes have to talk about?). Yet after those choices were made and the problems considered, the world stayed pretty much how it was: maddeningly off-kilter.
His name was Brian House. Like a lot of people, Brian had learned to act at Winchester, to be someone he wasn’t. No one knew, for instance, of the secret pain he had been suffering for the past ten months. No one knew that he didn’t listen to those bands-Built to Spill, Spoon, the Shins-that he wore on his T-shirts. He went about his business-the fraternities, the intramurals, the study sessions-as if he cared, but really he loathed the whole process. He had thought about not returning to Winchester after the summer, but how could he tell his parents that? After the void that his older brother’s death had left in their lives, there was no way they could understand why he, the one who had been spared, would squander his opportunities. His mother had even begun wearing Winchester U sweatshirts; she had slapped a MY CHILD IS A WINCHESTER COLONEL bumper sticker on her Volvo. Brian knew that he couldn’t disappoint her by letting her in on his dirty secret: that it had all become, after Marcus, pitifully insignificant to him.
Brian was tall, nearly lanky, and he had been shaving his head because that’s what his brother had done. The girls at Winchester took Brian’s apathy for a sort of sexy rebellion, and they were often eager to share ideas with him in his dorm room late at night. And that was another thing. He had a girlfriend back home in New York, and shouldn’t he feel bad about deceiving her? He did and he didn’t. On one hand, what he was doing was clearly a kind of betrayal. He knew what that felt like. Yet a part of him, that uncaring and atrophied part of his soul, could not bring himself to feel sorry for his actions. In the end it wouldn’t amount to anything but a girl being hurt. It was, like all things, illogical. It wasn’t life and death.
“That is the first question,” said Williams now. He was becoming more engaged. It appeared that he wanted to give answers to certain questions, but the right questions had to be asked first. “Who is she? Her name is Polly.”
Some of the students laughed. “Funny name,” said someone.
“Yes, it is funny,” agreed Williams.
“‘Polly wants a cracker,’” said Brian, “‘but I think I should get off her first.’ It’s a Kurt Cobain song.” The boy frowned. He did not like artifice, especially artifice that had been stolen from popular culture, perhaps because his own artificialness-his own insistence to put on a face and conform-was what he most disliked about himself. He decided that he was not going to like this class, no matter what happened from this point forward.
“That’s right,” Williams said. “But there are other questions.”
“How old is she?” called a student from the back.
“She is eighteen years old.” The average age of the class when they first came to Winchester.
“What does she look like?” asked another student.
“She’s petite. She wears a lot of jewelry. She has various piercings: high on her ears, in her earlobes, in her navel. She has a tattoo of a Chinese symbol on her lower back. She has auburn streaks in her hair and is self-conscious about her height. She wishes she were taller.” In short, she looked just like many of them.
“Where is she?” asked Brian.
“Place,” said Williams.
“How did she get there?” wondered the boy.
“Circumstance.” The last of the underscored ideas. Translation: we aren’t that far along yet.
“Bullshit,” Brian muttered.
“Maybe,” said Williams. “Maybe it is all bullshit. But Polly is in danger, and if you do not find her before your six weeks are up, then she will be murdered.”
The class was silent once again. Seminary East’s internal clock ticked further forward, the light touching the face of Williams’s podium.
“What does all this have to do with logic?” asked the boy with the briefcase. He was the most practical of the bunch. He was the only student in the class taking Logic and Reasoning 204 as an elective-that is, as a chosen punishment. He was a liberal arts major, a throw-back at Winchester. In the education reform-obsessed 1980s, Winchester had become a university. This small college in the central Indiana town of DeLane would always be overshadowed by the famous Catholic school 150 miles to the northwest, which was unfortunate, considering, as the brochures gladly pointed out, Winchester graduated more Rhodes and Fulbright scholars than Notre Dame and IU Bloomington combined.
When Winchester became a university, the curriculum predictably became more technical. More specific. Almost twenty years later there was still a rift among the faculty, and on some of the old guard’s letterhead the seal still read Winchester College. The father of the boy with the briefcase had gone to the old Winchester and was now a professor at Temple in mathematics. His son was not nearly as brilliant with numbers, but he was always the one to take the straightest and least difficult line to the end of the maze.
His real name was Dennis Flaherty, but on campus he was jokingly called Dennis the Menace, which was irony in the highest degree: Dennis would not menace anyone even if he deserved it. His pragmatism was used mostly to keep him out of confrontation, and because of his ability to play the devil’s advocate so adroitly he was an esteemed member of his father’s fraternity, Phi Kappa Tau. Dennis lived on the top floor of the Tau house in a single room that could have housed ten. He had dark, curly hair that he liked to shake down over his eyes. It was mystifying to the other Taus how he could attract women so effortlessly. These girls would come to Dennis’s room, prompting the brothers to sweep by and cast glances inside to see four feet on the floor, which was an old (and oft-broken) rule of the fraternity houses. But an hour later and the door would be shut and some soft music (Mingus or Coltrane or Monk) would be playing. The Taus wondered, for example, how he had attracted Savannah Kleppers, who was a 9 on the infamous Tau Scale. Yet there she was, disappearing into Dennis’s room almost every evening.
The answer was charm. Dennis had it in spades. He could talk himself out of any lie, any malfeasance, and yet the same skill allowed him to talk himself into situations as well. When the fraternity was fined, as they often were, it was Dennis they sent to the Greek Authority as a liaison. If the head of the committee was a female, the fine would inevitably be lessened or struck from the record altogether. Dennis dressed differently (he favored Brooks Brothers suits and Mephisto shoes and his omnipresent briefcase), he spoke differently (he often used words like corollary and incentive in regular conversation), and he carried himself differently. Indeed, Dennis Flaherty was different from most of the young men on the Winchester campus, and he was well aware of that fact.
“Logic is the destruction of fallacy,” said Williams, answering Dennis’s question bluntly. “It’s an inherently inductive or deductive process that builds meaning out of a set of abstract notions.” Everyone in the class braced for a lecture. Some students took out their notebooks from their backpacks and clicked up the tips of their pens. But Williams veered back to Polly. “Logic will help you find out where she is,” he said. And then, as if it were just an afterthought: “In time.”
“What are our clues?” asked the girl with the computer.
“The first set will be e-mailed to you this evening,” the professor answered.
When there were no more questions, Williams walked out of the room. He did not say good-bye. He did not say anything as he left. Afterward, many of the students of Logic and Reasoning 204 convened in the hallway, which was empty by this time of day, and talked about the strangeness of the class. Some of them were happy that they would ostensibly not have to put in any work. The students at Winchester called these classes “float credits”-classes where you just had to be there to pass. When they speculated on what the e-mailed “clues” might contain, Brian said that he didn’t know and didn’t care because he wasn’t going to access them anyway.
The girl with the computer was intrigued, however. She stood outside the circle of students, her warm laptop clutched to her chest. She was thinking about Dr. Williams and wondering how she was going to crack the code of the class. This is the way it was, at Winchester and at her Catholic high school back in Kentucky. There was always a code, always a design that had to be divined. Once it was cracked, passing the class was easy. But in Williams’s class, there seemed to be no apparent code. Or at least not yet. This appealed to the girl because finally, for the first time in her two years at Winchester, she was going to face a real challenge: how to solve Williams and his strange class. No syllabus, no text, no notes. No code! There was a certain novelty to it all, and this intrigued her-but of course she couldn’t tell anyone that. When Dennis asked her how she had liked the lecture, she muttered a neutral “Okay.” (He, she saw in his face, had liked it very much. But he would, wouldn’t he?) Okay was not how she felt about Williams, however. She felt, as she walked out the doors of Seminary that afternoon, strangely electric.
The girl’s name was Mary Butler. She was a junior, an English major like her mother had been. She lived in the largest female dorm on campus, Brown Hall, in one of the dorm’s most expansive single rooms. It wasn’t that she couldn’t get along with roommates. To the contrary: she and Summer McCoy had roomed together for two years and had become very good friends. (When Summer had mono during their sophomore year, it was Mary who took care of her and nursed her back to health. When Mary and Dennis Flaherty broke up, Summer was there every night with Grasshopper cookies and Agatha Christie mysteries on VHS-they both agreed that there was something hot about Poirot.) No, Mary lived alone because for the last year she had found herself wanting some space. Some of her own space: to think, to decide on where she was going with her life, to be silent and careful with her emotions. So her decision to single was a matter of “trust”-a word she used often and without hyperbole.
It hadn’t always been that way. In the time Before Dennis, as she referred to it, she was much more trusting. After Dennis, after he had dumped her and started going with Savannah Kleppers, she drew herself in a little and began to suspect that the world wasn’t as clean-edged as it had once seemed.
She had truly loved Dennis. They had dated their freshman year for about six months. Theirs was a relationship of politeness, of soft awkwardness. He brought her candy, cards inscribed with poetry, flowers. She had dated in high school but was still relatively new at it; he sensed this and treated her like an acolyte, as if she were some precious thing that he was initiating into the adult world. Mary at once hated that and desperately wanted it, and afterward, in the After Dennis phase, she wondered if he had been setting her up for betrayal all that time. It had been, after all, so easy to do.
Mary told Dennis she loved him. She said it aloud, something she had never done before. And she thought-she thought, but she could not be sure-that he had told her that he loved her, too. In those days After Dennis she caught herself thinking, Never again. Never again would she be taken for granted. She was still well liked, still popular, still “so sweet,” as the Delta girls usually said of her, but inside she was always looking out for those who would do her harm. “It’s a different world up there,” her mother said on the phone. “They’ll take you for all you’re worth.” It was easy to dismiss her mom, a woman who had been out of Kentucky only twice, both times on vacation. But there was something truthful about it. Winchester was a different place. There was so much drama here, so many tenuous alliances that it was difficult to decide what you could talk about and what you must keep to yourself.
And that wasn’t a bad thing. In fact, it was quite nice in her single room at Brown, peaceful and quiet and serene. It overlooked the quad, so she could look out the window and see the campus from behind glass, like a diorama, but not be forced to live it 24/7. She loved the parties, the people, the act you put on when you were out there. But After Dennis she found that she couldn’t do it all the time. Up here, Mary didn’t have to act in that soap opera if she didn’t want to. She could stand well outside of it and pity the girls who flung themselves into the game so readily.
Sometimes she looked out that window and wondered what Dennis was doing right then. Sometimes she thought she saw him, his curly hair bouncing along, down below her. Every time this happened her heart squeezed, her breath caught in her throat. For a long time she had gone out of her way to avoid him, but inevitably they had begun to run into each other on campus. And now, of course, he was in one of her classes. She nearly died when he walked in to Seminary East. He saw her and winked-only Dennis Flaherty could wink in the twenty-first century and get away with it-and sat four chairs to her right. It was the closest he’d been to her in two years.
She was thinking about how she was going to drop the class and pick up something else on such short notice when Williams walked in.
Immediately, Mary noticed something different about him. The way he walked, the way he spoke to his class: so not like a professor. And when he launched into his story about the girl named Polly, Mary forgot all about Dennis and was lost in this bizarre class.
“Who’s the prof?” Summer asked her when they met up in the dining commons that evening.
“Williams,” Mary said.
“Hmm. Never heard of him,” the other girl said.
And neither had Mary. Which was strange, because she had gofered for at least ten professors around campus. Surely someone would have mentioned him to her. Surely she would have seen him at a Christmas party or something. Not only did Williams fail to appear in any of her three face books, he was also missing from her annuals. There were no publications listed in the campus magazine, no news of him on the faculty page, no references in the recent edition of the school paper. It didn’t make any sense. It was, as Summer liked to say, freaky.
That night, Mary browsed Winchester’s website, trying to find information about him. He was a member of the philosophy faculty, and he was listed as an associate professor. There was a CV: BA from Indiana University, 1964; MA from same, 1970; PhD from Tulane, 1976. That was all. Google him, she thought, but then she remembered that she didn’t know his first name. All she knew was the initial that was on her schedule of classes: L.
Earlier, she had repeatedly refreshed her screen, attempting to be the first to read the e-mailed clues. But now it was 8:00 p.m., and still no message from Williams had arrived in her in-box.
She took a shower (along with the biggest single room in the dorm, she also had her own bathroom and kitchenette; some girls on the third floor had taken to calling Mary’s room the Hyatt) and tried to take her mind off the class, but she couldn’t. She had been intrigued by Professor L. Williams, and had even found him to be kind of sexy. This was not unusual for Mary. She had formed a nagging and perhaps unhealthy crush on Dr. Cunningham last year. This would not have been odd had Dr. Cunningham not been strange in most every way, from his lisp to the pink ten-speed with a basket that he rode about campus, and it did not escape Mary that maybe she found some professors attractive only because the other students did not. Many of the students in Logic and Reasoning 204 had found Williams creepy-they had said as much in the hallway after class.
Out of the shower now, her hair wet and a towel around her-another perk of the single room was Mary’s ability to walk around naked-she logged on to her Winchester account and checked her e-mail again.
There was a message from Professor Williams. The subject line read, “First Clue.”
Mary opened the e-mail and read.
Time
Polly was last seen on Friday, August the first at a party. This was a going-away party in Polly’s honor, because she would be leaving for college soon. All her friends were there, including an ex-boyfriend named Mike. Mike and Polly had problems. Mike would sometimes hit Polly.
One night toward the end of their relationship Polly had to call the police, but she refused to press charges once they showed up. Polly returned from the going-away party that night to her father’s home on During Street, where she was staying for the summer. Her father was awake when she came home, watching David Letterman. He told the police that he had sat with Polly and watched television, and when she fell asleep he carried her to bed, “like I used to do when she was a girl.” He hasn’t seen her since.
Police speculate that early in the morning of August the second, Polly left the house. Her red Honda Civic was found beside Stribbling Road, about twenty miles out of town. When Mike Reynolds, Polly’s ex-boyfriend, was questioned, he of course denied seeing Polly after the going-away party. The problem with Mike’s culpability in Polly’s disappearance is this: Mike was at the party until the next morning, and many witnesses told investigators that they had seen Mike sleeping on the couch. In Polly’s car, investigators found no traces that Polly had been planning to leave for an extended time: there were no bags in the trunk, no changes of clothes in the backseat. The only fingerprints in the car were Polly’s. There was no sign of struggle.
Polly’s father received a telephone call on Monday, August 4. The caller sounded distant, as if she were “at the bottom of the well.” Polly’s father thought he had heard the caller say, “I’m here,” but by the time he was questioned by police he couldn’t be sure. Investigators traced all calls made to the During Street residence on the fourth of August, and there was one unusual call made at 7:13 that evening. Unfortunately, the number was unknown.
When Mary returned to her in-box, she saw that Professor Williams had sent another message. It was called “The Syllabus.” Mary clicked on it and waited while an image materialized on her monitor. The image was of a man being executed at the gallows. Mary could see the smudged expressions of some onlookers who stood below, watching. There was a blurring around the edges of the photograph, as if it had been taken just as the man dropped through the trapdoor. The man was hooded, and someone had cropped an image onto the velvet hood. Mary squinted to see it, and finally she made it out.
It was a question mark.
The mark was like a shadow, vaguely discernible. It was, Mary thought, as if it had been knitted into the fabric.
On Wednesday Mary noticed that two or three of the female students were not in class. She wondered if they had been scared away by the picture of the execution. She wondered if any of them would report Williams and if he could get in trouble for sending a picture like that through campus e-mail. But mostly she wondered about Polly, and she was eager to run her theories by Professor Williams. She had spent most of the previous night fleshing out those theories, and even though she had been exhausted for Dr. Kiseley’s lit class that morning, she was feeling that hum again, that electric charge she’d felt Monday after class.
When he came in-today he wore blue jeans again and a Winchester U T-shirt-he was carrying a dry erase marker and a few loose pieces of transparency paper. He took his position at the podium. “Any questions?” he asked without any greeting.
Mary got her first theory organized in her mind, but just when she was about to speak Brian House said from behind her, “We all want to know what this is.”
“What what is?” asked Williams softly.
“This,” said the boy. “All of this. This class. Polly. That…” He couldn’t bring himself to say “picture.”
“This is Logic and Reasoning 204,” Williams said dismissively. A few students laughed.
“That’s not what I mean and you know it,” Brian said. He was sitting up straight now. He was pointing at the professor, accusing him.
“Do you mean to say, Mr. House”-and this was the first time, they all noted, that he had called any of them by name-“that this is all a dupe?”
“Well, yeah. Exactly. That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
“Isn’t all knowledge a dupe? Isn’t the rational world itself full of inconsistencies and tricks? Trapdoors? False challenges? How do you know that every day when you walk across campus, you’re actually swimming through a sea of monads? Because we tell you that it is. How do you know that Pride and Prejudice is a masterpiece? Because we say it is. How do you know that a certain proof explains the meaning of light or the speed of sound? Because it is written in the book. But what if the equation is not square? What if the proof is a little off? What if the measurements were proved to be false? What if that which you had always believed to be logical thought turned out to be-God forbid-wrong. The world is dictated by a set of principles, and most of those principles are granted to you here, in these decorated halls.” Williams raised his arms, encompassing the walls and the light and the dancing dust of Seminary East.
“Are you saying that what we learn at Winchester is a lie?” asked someone else.
“Not all of it, no,” said Williams. “Not all. But certainly some. The trick is finding out what is the real and what is the fake.”
“What’s that have to do with this class?” asked Brian.
“Only this,” Williams said sharply. “I am telling you that the best way to learn logic is to decode a puzzle. And this is what Polly’s disappearance is: an intricate puzzle. Now some of you may take offense to this. Some of you may be bewildered by my choice of pedagogy. But you will learn to think, and induce, and carve out the blight of lazy thought-those fallacies and indiscretions and wrong turns. Only the best thinkers among you will find Polly, and those are the students to whom I will grant As.”
Brian rested. He seemed to be satisfied with that answer. He began to inspect his quick-bitten fingernails.
Mary had her theory formed now. “Polly’s father abducted her,” she said, more quickly than she would have liked. By the time she was finished, she was nearly breathless. She didn’t want to appear desperate, not this early in the game.
“How?” the professor replied.
“Why?” Dennis Flaherty put in, leaning forward in the front row to look quizzically at Mary.
“Motive,” said Professor Williams. “What I want to know now is how? How could the father possibly be responsible?”
“Because…,” Mary began, but she could not go on. The professor was questioning her again, and she failed that test for a second time.
“Because of Mike,” said Brian.
“Ah,” said Williams. “Mike. The father and Mike-they don’t like each other?”
“Probably not,” Brian offered, perhaps because he had experienced a similar situation: a bitter father, a beautiful girl, threatening phone calls from the despondent old man.
“You’re right,” said the professor. “They don’t like each other. In fact, they hate each other. Polly’s father once told Mike that he would kill him if he ever caught him out alone. But this doesn’t answer the question that Miss Butler is implicitly posing: Why the father? Why abduct your own daughter?”
“To protect her!” Mary almost shouted. She was feeling that cold, familiar rush when she put the pieces into place. That old energy in the blood. She had to be close.
“That’s interesting,” said Williams gently. Mary looked at Williams and saw that he was staring at her in a way that betrayed his interest in her. She knew that he was keeping her on a line, tethering her to all the intricate possibilities. Blushing, she finally looked away. “To protect her,” he went on. “So you’re saying that Mike is such a danger to Polly that her own father must abduct her, lie to the police, grieve publicly about his daughter’s false disappearance, and manage to keep the ruse intact for almost a month? That’s impressive for a little old schoolteacher with not much money in the bank.”
Mary realized how ridiculous it sounded now, coming from him. She could only look at the flickering cursor on her laptop monitor.
“But if this Mike is really dangerous,” said Dennis, taking up for Mary, “if he’s psychopathic in some way, maybe Polly’s father feels that her life is threatened enough to hide her.”
“Hide her where?” Williams asked.
“An aunt’s house,” he said. Mary wasn’t sure if Dennis really believed in her theory or was just grabbing the loose strand of the idea and running with it to save her the shame.
“How many of you believe this?” Professor Williams asked the class. The light from the window was approaching him. Their time was running out. No one in the class raised a hand.
“But in a murder-” said Brian now.
“A kidnapping,” the professor corrected him.
“-in a kidnapping, isn’t the father the immediate suspect? Isn’t that the rule? A girl is taken and her father did it. Maybe he’s a sexual deviant.”
“Polly’s father was a suspect,” Professor Williams said then, and Mary’s heart started up again. “But he was never a suspect for the convoluted reason that Ms. Butler suggests he should be. Class: what is the real problem with the theory Ms. Butler is presenting?”
Again she crashed down shamefully, her gaze on the hot light of the screen.
Limply, a girl in Mary’s row raised her hand. “She is going to be murdered,” the girl said, casting a look at Mary that said, Sorry.
“Think about it,” the professor said, his impatience with them showing for the first time. “I’ve told you that she is to be murdered in six weeks. That is a given. So why would the father ‘rescue’ Polly from Mike if he-Daddy-were going to kill her in six short weeks?”
Williams shuffled the papers he had brought in. He turned off Seminary East’s lights, and the room fell as dark as it could given the natural light that poured in through the windows. Then there was the whir of an overhead projector, and a square of yellow, sickly light blanched the northern wall. The professor slipped the topmost sheet off the stack and put it on the machine. It was a photograph of a girl in a summer dress. She was standing barefoot on the grass and holding out her arm, palm forward, as if she didn’t want her picture taken. Williams didn’t have to tell them: this was Polly. He put on the next page. This was a shot of a tattooed young man sitting on a couch. He had drunk too much and his eyes were rimmed red. He was shirtless and sunburned, his bare shoulders pink and peeling. An invisible girl, who was off to the right of the shot, had her arm around him. Mike. The third page: an overweight man standing to the right of a class of young children. Polly’s father. The children all had their eyes censored out by thin black bars. And then a fourth page: a house, a simple Cape Cod with a dead vegetable garden off to one side and an American flag blowing against the eaves. Polly’s house, the last place she had been seen.
“So now,” said Professor Williams, turning to write on the board, “you know these things.” He wrote August 1. “This is the last day Polly was seen. You also know the date when her car was found.” He wrote, August 2. “You know that Mike was in the house of the party all night on August first. You know Polly’s father was the last to see her late on the evening of August first, and that he watched television with his daughter before she went to bed. And you know that whoever kidnapped Polly is her potential murderer. Is that it?”
No one in the class spoke. Upstairs, in Seminary High, students were getting out of class, their desks scooting almost musically across the floor.
Mary thought, Something else. But she couldn’t organize the thought, much less verbalize it. It was there, right in front of her, floating nebulously.
“All right then,” said Williams. He gathered up the papers and put the marker in the tray, a gift to whomever used the classroom next, and turned off his machine. “It’s important to remember that this class is an NF.” He was referring to a “No Friday” Williams’s class was coveted mostly because it would be held on Mondays and Wednesdays only. The students would have Friday afternoons off, and so Mary knew she would not be able to talk to him again before next week. Any theories she had would have to be laid out now, or else she risked other students beating her to the punch.
“The phone call,” Mary said then. Her heart was beating fast again, and her face was growing hot.
“What’s that?” asked Williams.
“‘I’m here,’” she said. “The strange phone call to her father. The one with the girl in the well. Polly was calling him. She got to a phone somehow. She…”
“Circumstance,” said Brian mockingly, and the back row cracked up.
Williams took up the marker and wrote on the board, August 4.
Then he said softly, “‘I’m here,’ she said. ‘I’m here.’ Was it Polly? Was it a prank? And where is ‘here’?” He didn’t turn on the fluorescents, and the room was yellow, almost golden with the streaking light. He was outside of the light, behind it, frontlit, nearly invisible behind a curtain of Seminary dust. “Now, ladies and gentlemen,” Williams said, capping his marker with a sharp click, “you know that you have just over five weeks to find Polly, or else she will be murdered.”
Winchester University is split into two hemispheres: Down Campus, home to all of the classroom buildings and underclassmen dorms, and Up Campus, where the Greek houses are located and where much of the faculty lives. The great creation myth of Winchester comes from the 1950s, when Down Campus was the women’s college and Up Campus was a sparsely attended divinity school. Down Campus was the first to accept a minority, a black woman named Grace Murphy. The students at Up were so incensed over this that they rioted on Down Campus. A now-infamous town cop named Henry Rodram was involved in these riots, and the narrative goes like this:
Rodram and some divinity students carried twenty gallons of gasoline the half mile between Up and Down and poured it around the base of Trigby Hall, where Grace Murphy lived. Trigby and all the buildings around it-Norris, Filmont, the Gray Brick Building-went up in flames. In fact most of Down Campus burned that night: May 27, 1955. The next day Grace Murphy withdrew from Winchester, and it was not until the mid-1960s, a year after Winchester became a coed liberal arts institution, that a minority was allowed to enroll.
A small stream called Miller’s Creek cuts through the geographic middle of campus, a viaduct connecting the two hemispheres to take students from Down Campus to Up. This is where Brian House was walking on Saturday evening. The viaduct had myths of its own: attempted suicides, accidental deaths, an infamous and botched demolition attempt by a mentally ill student in the 1980s. During the Vietnam War, students had formed a makeshift boundary at one end of the bridge so that professors could not get from Up to Down without driving Route 17 all the way into downtown DeLane. The faculty was too proud to do this, so for a week classes were canceled altogether or held on the banks of the creek, the professors on one bank and the students sitting on the muddy grass of the other. After a six-day standoff, the students grudgingly returned to class.
Brian had already had a little to drink, and he planned on drinking much more as the night went on. It was a cool, breezy twilight in early September. High up in Norris Hall, some freshmen had their window open, and the sound of a basketball game wafted down and echoed off the buildings on each side of Miller’s Creek. Brian stopped midway across the bridge and looked down, as he often did, and listened intently to the metallic burble of the creek. Standing here always reminded him of being a kid, of the tinny sound of a faraway stream in the woods when he and his father and brother would take long hikes through the Catskills. On one of these excursions they got lost, and his father had told Brian and Marcus, “We’ll stay right here. You aren’t supposed to panic when you get lost. People walk these trails all the time.” But three hours later they were still in the same spot and no one had come for them. It was getting dark. Brian could see that his father was scared, or maybe he was cold, because he was trembling, legs and arms and shoulders all vibrating as if he had been strummed. Finally, when it was almost too dark to see, they began to walk. It was much later, probably around midnight, when they heard the sounds of a highway. They found the road and hitchhiked back to town, and for three days Brian’s father wouldn’t even look at his boys.
The creek ran off into the purple edge of the woods, snaked around Up Campus, and then disappeared near the Geary Economics Center, where it would meet the Thatch River about two miles from campus. Sometimes Brian fantasized about following it, jumping in and losing himself in the current and ending up miles away, floating faceup on the Thatch, sailing toward home.
The cool wind blew against his face, and the pink skin of the water shimmered. He tried to focus on its most distant point, out toward the mouth of the woods. Out there, under the canopy of trees, was where he buried it freshman year. The Thing, as he and his family called it. They couldn’t even give the object a name; it was just the “Thing,” as if actually calling it something would give it credence. Validity. They wanted to keep it obscure, hide it from their thoughts. And so it became, to all of them, the Thing. To this day Brian thought of it as nothing else.
It was just a disturbance of the earth down there, a claw mark in the creek’s bank. He came out here every night to check, to make sure that someone hadn’t disturbed it. No, it was just as he’d left it, the dirt-
“Brian?”
Startled, he turned to see a girl standing beside him. They were the only two people on the viaduct. Most students were on Up Campus, at one of the frat houses, getting ready for Saturday night.
“Were you…?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “I was just looking at the water, at how it…” He couldn’t explain. Hell, he didn’t need to explain himself to anyone. Who was she, anyway?
“I’m Mary,” she said, noting his confused expression. “I’m in your logic class.”
“Ah,” said Brian. “Dr. Weirdo.”
She looked off, the insult to Professor Williams stinging her. “He’s not that bad,” she whispered.
“So who did it?” Brian leaned back onto the concrete rail of the viaduct, his back turned to the girl.
“Her father did, of course,” Mary said. She wondered if she should lean on the bridge next to him. Was he inviting her over there, next to him? Did he want a long, drawn-out conversation or was he simply being casual, just idly passing the time?
“And he’s going to kill her?”
“He thinks he’s protecting her,” she said.
“But Williams is saying ‘murder.’ What kind of protection is murder?”
“Have you wondered whether Williams is telling us the truth about everything?”
“Hell yes,” Brian said sharply. “He’s misdirecting us all the time. That’s a given. But there are rules, and that must be one of them. What good is the game if it doesn’t have rules. Williams said it himself. The kidnapper is the murderer.”
“I guess,” she sighed. Defeated.
“Anyway, that whole theory is crap,” said Brian, still looking away into the trees. “Mike’s the man.”
“Mike?” asked Mary playfully. This was her first discussion out of class with anyone about the case, and she found herself enjoying it. She wasn’t supposed to meet up with Summer and the Deltas for another hour. She had just been out on campus getting some fresh air and-she had to admit-thinking about Polly and Professor Williams.
“Yes, Mike,” Brian said. “Mike told the people at the party that he was going to sleep on the couch, slipped out when no one was paying attention, drove to Polly’s house. He broke into her room, took her to some distant location. You know how it is: drunk people can’t remember anything anyway. They thought they saw Mike on the couch, but was it really Mike?”
“Hmmm,” Mary said, placating him.
“Yeah. Hmmm.” He was still looking off at that fixed point.
They stood there in the wind with night falling around them. Some of the streetlights along Montgomery were coming on, casting half the viaduct in a blanched, angular white.
Finally Brian said, “I better get going. I’m off to the Deke house to get plastered.”
“Oh, yeah,” Mary said demurely. “I should be going, too.”
He turned to face her. She noticed his eyes: how red they were, how unsettled. It was as if the pupils had been shattered like a dropped plate, skimming off into a thousand different fragments. There was something in them. Disappointment, maybe, or hurt. He looked away. “So you like the Shins?” she asked him, noting his shirt.
“Yeah,” he said. “No doubt.”
“What’s your favorite song?”
He turned away from her again. He didn’t really know any of the song names. His roommate had the record, and he knew that he was supposed to like the band because a lot of kids on campus whose majors were the same as Brian’s liked them, but it all sounded like noise to him. “The one on the first record,” he said.
“‘New Slang,’” Mary said. “That’s a great song.”
“Yeah, whatever.” He said this going away, walking off into the wedges of pale light on Montgomery Street. Mary called after him, telling him that she would see him in class on Monday, but he must not have heard because he didn’t say good-bye.
He hated these fund-raisers. Hated them. The luminaries would all clump together near the wall and sip scotch, leaving the students out on the dance floor with the wives. It was a sort of social fiefdom, the lords away in money talks and the serfs left to tend the harvest. Dennis Flaherty stood in the corner, ginger ale going flat in a plastic cup, thinking about-well, the only thing he could think about these days.
Her. Elizabeth Orman, the dean’s wife.
He’d met Elizabeth in the library that had been dedicated to her husband. He thought she was a reference librarian because she was old-older, she liked to correct him when they joked like that-and because she looked as if she knew where things were. He was writing a paper on Alfred Adler, and when he asked her where he could find Understanding Human Nature, she asked him what he wanted to know.
Turned out she was a doctoral student, and she knew a lot about Adler. He didn’t even need the book after talking to Elizabeth. They sat by one of the east windows and he wrote as she spoke. “Did you know,” she said, “that Adler was a neurologist before he was a social scientist? He was interested in how the eye worked, in how we see the world. That whole thing-seeing-he would later use in his theories about inferiority. But later, it was us seeing us, not us seeing others. The inward eye, the mind’s eye.”
And on and on like that. Dennis writing and Elizabeth speaking, long into the evening. He met her there a week later by accident, and they talked again, this time about regular stuff like politics and music (she was a Mingus fan, he discovered). That second time, he started to look at her, really look at her. She was definitely old-older, he caught himself. She must have been in her late thirties. But there was something different about her on the second evening they met. It was, Dennis thought, as if she had prepared herself for him. She had unbuttoned the top button of her sweater, and her auburn hair was swept to the side, out of her face. The look of the frazzled graduate student was completely gone. It was clear that she cared.
Elizabeth began calling Dennis her buddy. There was a little sexual tension there, he had to admit, but it was fleeting. It would swell up, unannounced, and then taper off for the rest of the afternoon. Dennis would wonder, later, if he had simply imagined it.
It wasn’t until his third or fourth afternoon in the library that he learned who she was. And it happened by accident.
“Mrs. Orman,” a reference librarian whispered, sticking her head into the reading room where Dennis and Elizabeth were sitting. “Telephone for you.”
“Shit. Sorry,” Elizabeth said. “I have to take this.”
Orman, Dennis thought. Of course. Of course. That’s why she was given so much respect in the library. Why everyone smiled at her, stepped to the side for her, asked her if she need anything. She was the goddamn old man’s wife.
When she returned, he noticed her wedding ring for the first time.
“So,” she said. Was there shame in her face?
“So,” Dennis said. “Elizabeth Orman.”
She said nothing.
“I didn’t-” he began.
“I should have told you,” she said softly.
He wanted to say, Of course not, Elizabeth. I just would think that would be one of the first things you’d mention, you know, let it slip out that you were the wife of the most powerful man on campus. But he said none of those things. What he said was, “It’s okay.”
“It’s not okay.”
“Okay,” he agreed. “It’s not.”
That stung her. She turned her face away from him, toward the window. She inhaled loudly, gathering herself.
“As a feminist,” she said, “that’s not how I announce myself. Do you walk around campus saying, ‘Hello, I’m Dennis Flaherty, Savannah’s beau’?”
Dennis thought it was interesting how she knew about Savannah Kleppers though he had never spoken about her. Very interesting.
Dennis stayed in DeLane over the summer and interned for a Republican congressman in Cale. He and Elizabeth met only occasionally for the next few months, but even on the occasions they did meet, Dennis had to admit that something was different. Their occasional sexual tension had disappeared altogether, and their conversations were much more antiseptic. She was a completely different person around him now that he knew who she was. Or, more specifically, now that he knew who her husband was.
Since the beginning of September, things had begun to falter badly. She had been distant, preoccupied. Ashamed, probably. The last time he had gone to the library, she hadn’t been there. He caught her in the hallway of the Gray Brick Building one day and asked, “Are you mad at me?”
“Of course not,” she’d scoffed, and pulled away from him. Then she disappeared down the stairwell.
But there clearly was anger in her voice. Dennis was pretty sure, however, that it was not anger at him, but at herself. For she had been deceiving him for those first few meetings, the ones that really counted in Dennis’s mind, and she knew it. She knew it and she felt bad about it.
The fund-raiser was a black-tie affair the Taus were putting on for the American Cancer Society. It was held in Carnegie Hall, Winchester’s administrative building and the most historic structure on campus. Usually Dennis was able to make it through, smile and grunt while the old men told their stories, but tonight he was feeling particularly out of place. He wanted to leave, but where was he supposed to go? What was he supposed to do? Standing there in Carnegie he pondered these things, wondered if he should just leave Winchester altogether. Maybe transfer to Temple, be closer to his father. Maybe he should…
But then he saw Elizabeth across the room. She was looking at him the way she had so many times across the table in the library: passively, almost quizzically, as if there was something about him she couldn’t figure out. She walked onto the dance floor. She smiled and he smiled back, the only gesture that he could think to use. It was a forced smile, almost crooked. Then they were dancing to something, some sort of slow waltz, and Elizabeth was saying, “Dennis, I want to have sex with you.”
“Yes,” he said stupidly. Like a boy.
“I’m sorry for what happened. I should have told you. But I thought you would get-scared.”
“Scared?”
“Of Ed. Of getting caught with me. Of what would happen if we were discovered.”
“Elizabeth, we were just talking. It was nothing. It was Alfred Adler and the eye.”
“Stop it, Dennis. You know it was more than that.”
“Know?” he choked. His heart was beating fast, thrumming in his chest. His face was hot, and he felt cold sweat on his chest.
“You know you want to fuck me.”
“No,” he lied. “Absolutely not.”
She was sulking now. He had felt her body stiffen, lilt away from him.
“Why haven’t you been there? In the library the last two weeks.”
“I’ve been busy, Dennis. It’s not only you. I have work, too. I’m writing my dissertation, remember?”
Over her shoulder, he saw the man staring at him. The inimitable Dean Orman: thirtysome years older than his wife, professor emeritus at Winchester. Orman was one of the most esteemed members of the psychology faculty, best known for his riveting lectures, even though he fumbled for words now and then and forgot his threads and themes. He had studied with Stanley Milgram at Yale in the 1960s, and word was that he had begun a book about Milgram that would redefine the man’s legacy.
The waltz finally ended, and Dennis broke from the woman’s hold and returned to the other side of the room, where the other Taus were waiting. “You going to screw her or not?” asked Jeremy Price. Price was wearing tuxedo pants and a T-shirt that was air-brushed with a vest, cummerbund, and bow tie.
Dennis said nothing. He wondered how much Price had heard, if he’d been listening in to their conversation.
“Here’s what you do,” Price said. He got close to Dennis, turned his back on the dance floor, pulled the other boy up by the lapels. “You get her alone and you just ravish her. Pound her like a jackhammer. Make it good for you and horrible for her. Ha! Pants at your ankles. Buttons skittering across the floor. Make her hurt.”
“Dennis?”
Dean Orman. He was standing just behind Price, over the boy’s shoulder. Dennis had no idea how long the man had been there. “Huh…hello, Dr. Orman,” he said. He had met Orman only two or three times before, at similar fund-raisers, and for some reason was always nervous in the old man’s presence. Orman knew Dennis’s father, had said once of the man that he was a “pioneer in his field.” Dennis felt that the only reason Orman approved the use of Carnegie for the Taus was because of his father.
“It’s about time for us to be going.”
“Of course,” Dennis managed. “Is there anything else I can get you?”
“No,” the dean began. It was as if he wanted to say something more but could not. Price had slunk back into a dark corner somewhere, leaving Dennis alone with the old man.
The dean had been at Winchester since the beginning, when the school was split in half. He was the first provost of the school. Once, in the late seventies, he had coached its tennis team to a conference championship. He had seen the campus burn and had lived through six different presidents. It was said that any historical discussion of Winchester began and ended with Dean Orman.
But his legend was cemented with the marriage to the wife who was nearly half his age, a graduate student at Winchester he had met on a trip to Morocco. Dennis had heard the story, of course, but he had never heard the woman’s name. And now he was caught in something, trapped in this game with Elizabeth. And it was a game, Dennis knew that. Why else would she have hidden her ring? Why else would she have given him only her first name? She was seeing how far she could take him, hoping he would cross a line into a place that he couldn’t come back from.
Tonight, that line had been crossed.
“What classes are you taking this quarter?” the dean asked. It was just something to say, just filler. Another waltz had begun, and Dennis could see Elizabeth dancing with someone else. But she was looking at him.
“Economics and Finance. Philosophy and the Western World with Douglas. And Logic and Reasoning.”
“Logic and Reasoning,” said the dean. “Under whom?”
“Williams.”
Something changed in the dean’s eyes, then. He focused on Dennis more perfectly, let his scotch glass fall to his side. He might have even taken a step forward, closed the gap between them, but Dennis could not be sure.
“How’s that going?” he asked. His voice had changed timbre, become more bearing. Dennis realized he was under some kind of spotlight now, suddenly in a sort of interrogation.
“It’s…interesting,” he offered.
“Williams,” the dean mused, sounding as if he were thinking to himself now. “Williams is a funny character. I remember the terrible fracas over that book of his. All that mess.”
Dennis wanted to hear more. In fact, he badly wanted to hear more, not only because it was taking his mind off Elizabeth but also because he was interested in Williams and his strange class. It was so…
Elizabeth was suddenly there, touching her husband’s shoulder. “Let’s go, Ed,” she said curtly, glancing at Dennis. Dennis couldn’t read her look.
“Dennis, I’ll be seeing you,” the dean said. He had lost his train of thought, which was usual for the dean. Some assumed he had the early signs of dementia; most days he would lock himself away in Carnegie and take no visitors.
It wasn’t until much later, back in the Tau house with dawn spreading out across the sky and falling sharply on Up Campus, that Dennis remembered what Dean Orman had said about Professor Williams. Even though it was early in the morning and he hadn’t rested in nearly twenty-four hours, Dennis could not get to sleep no matter how hard he tried.
By Sunday, Mary had finally gotten her mind off Professor Williams and Polly. She and Summer McCoy had gone shopping at the Watermill Mall, and out to eat at an Italian place called Adige. As Summer dropped off Mary at her dorm late in the evening, logic class, and more specifically Professor Williams, was the furthest thing from Mary’s mind.
But now, two hours later, she was thinking about him again. What was he doing right now, for instance. He was so…mysterious. No office hours. No bio on the website. It was almost as if he, like Polly, needed a set of clues to go with him. Mary opened Paul Auster’s City of Glass, which she was reading for her only other class that semester, Postmodern Lit and the New Existentialism, which she hated. Mary was taking what the students called a “walk term,” which meant you took the minimum six hours. Walk came from the idea that with all your given leisure time, you might walk the campus grounds as Winchester’s founders had surely done, learning deep and profound lessons from nature. (Mary had noticed that most students, when they were on their walk terms, found their lessons through drinking beer and downloading music illegally.)
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 full: “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.
Mary finally could feel herself, her legs and knees and her mind, barely enough to make her way to bed. By the time she was there, it was after midnight and the chapters of City of Glass remained unread for tomorrow’s class.
What did it mean? Perhaps it didn’t mean anything. Her freshman year humanities professor had said that if you weren’t borrowing, then you weren’t doing serious work. He said it just like that: “borrowing.” But Mary knew there was a difference between that and what Professor Williams had done. He had stolen-“lifting multiple passages almost word for word,” the article said-entire chunks of text. Mary imagined him with Professor Brown’s book open, sitting at his desk and wondering, Should I? Or did he feel no compunction? Did Williams, like Polly’s father in Mary’s theory, act on impulse alone, the knowledge of his reward pressing more forcefully on his mind than the possible risk? Did he even understand the implications of what he was doing, sitting there with that old book open in front of him, holding it with two paperweights perhaps on each side of the spine so he could read the text and type at the same time?
Now, at least, she knew something about Williams. But was it good or bad to have this knowledge? Perhaps it meant that he was capable of anything and his use of the Polly story was the mark of some deeper cruelty. Perhaps the man was unstable and using his students to play out his own twisted obsessions. Or maybe it meant nothing at all. Maybe the incident had been a mistake, something he had long since atoned for and forgotten.
It was these thoughts that finally carried her, sometime much later, into a fitful and dreamless sleep.