Obedience Read online

  “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.”

  4

  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.

  5

  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 def
initely 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.”