Obedience Read online

  And then: “Who’s there?” It was the old man’s voice.

  Dennis stayed still, low to the ground, below the light. Strangely, he was calm. It must have been the calm of a soldier, the ease before battle. He did not move until he saw the man’s head peeking out at him. “What are you doing there, son?” Dean Orman asked.

  “I’m trying to figure out how to escape your house, sir,” Dennis answered. He had found that the most brutal honesty worked in these situations much better than embarrassing, fantastical lies. Not that he had ever been in a situation quite like this before.

  “Come in here.”

  Dennis went into the kitchen. The old man was eating a sandwich in the nook. He had pulled out a bar stool and had a magazine open on the counter before him. “Know this,” he said almost dismissively, his eyes down on the magazine. “You’re not the first.”

  Dennis didn’t say anything. He could only stand there, shamefully, and listen. The old man was wearing boxer shorts and a dingy T-shirt, what the Taus might call a “wife beater.” He was just an old man; he was supposed to be vulnerable, weak, maybe even halfcocked—but here he was interrogating Dennis.

  “There was the boy from England,” Dean Orman said ruefully. “The soccer player. There was the kid from California that she was taken with last year. There have been lecturers and such. And now you.” He took a bite of the sandwich, licked his fingers, and turned a page in the magazine. “It’s just something we do. We agreed on it a long time ago. There is no love in this marriage. There never is at our age. My age. Do you think that those vows are still applicable?”

  “I don’t…,” Dennis began.

  “Of course not,” Dean Orman cut him off. “That’s absurd. You get to the point where you can’t stand the way she walks, the way she sits on the toilet, the way she mismatches your goddamned socks. This is the way of the world, son. Get used to it.” Another bite of the sandwich, another turned page. Dennis wondered if he was done, if that was all there was. But the old man went on: “Of course I have my own…debilitas. There are two young secretaries that come over on occasion, and Elizabeth watches us although she doesn’t like it. She says it’s unbecoming. What she really means, of course, is that it’s unbecoming of a man my age in the same space, in the same vicinity, as two young beauties. Ah yes. Ah well.”

  Dennis went to the door. He opened it onto the night, and the sharp wind hit him in the face, chilling him to the bone. “Do you love her?” the dean asked.

  “No,” said Dennis. Too quickly.

  “The boy from England did. It was a messy, messy thing. Just awful. The boy crying on the couch, Elizabeth standing there breaking his heart, bringing him Kleenex like some caring mother. It was a scene. I watched it all from the balcony upstairs.” He laughed at the memory, shook his head as if to clear it from his thoughts.

  “Good-bye, Dr. Orman,” Dennis said.

  “Wait,” the old man called. Dennis stepped back into the kitchen. “I meant to ask you about this class. You mentioned it the other night. With Leonard.”

  “Dr. Williams, yes,” said Dennis. The name was funny to him, unfitting: Leonard.

  “What do you think about it?”

  “It’s…different,” admitted Dennis.

  “Yes, I imagine it would be. How do you like him, though, the old boy who teaches it?”

  “I don’t know how to take him yet. It’s still early.”

  “Let me tell you something about Leonard Williams,” the dean said. He lifted his eyes from the bar to Dennis’s face for the first time, and there was something serious about the movement, something punctuated and dire. “He is not a nice man. In fact, many of us wanted to get rid of him a few years ago when that whole fiasco began with his book.”

  “His book?” Dennis asked, remembering what Orman had said at the party.

  “Yes. The plagiarism thing. Messy indeed. It almost ruined us all, those of us who had been behind his hiring in the first place. Those of us who granted him tenure. It should have been the end of him, but he has loyal friends in the department, people who will swear by his genius. And he is brilliant. I don’t think there’s any doubt.”

  “He plays a game in class,” Dennis said. He didn’t know why he’d said it; it was just something to placate the dean, to win the dean over to his side. Implicate Williams, cast Williams as a fool, he thought. Save yourself.

  “A game?” the old man asked.

  “It’s very silly. It’s—a forensics game. Like a case we have to solve.”

  “Ah yes,” Orman said. “I’ve heard of it. These puzzles and games—people say he’s obsessed with them. Part of his brilliance, I guess. But that’s not the question, is it? No. Of course not. We’re all brilliant, some more than others. The question is this: what kind of representative is he for this university? And it’s been proven, time and again, that he is a dubious one at best. Oh, they think I’m just paranoid. A silly old man. Crazy. They think that I’m just too old fashioned for Williams’s teaching practices. But there’s something there. Something …off about the man.”

  “I’ve felt it, too,” Dennis admitted. He wanted to go on but he was careful about what he said. It was best, his father often said of academia, not to have too many enemies.

  “Dennis, I urge you—no, let’s make this a demand, considering I have so much leverage over you now. I’m going to demand that you stay away from him. If he asks you to his office, don’t go. If you see him out on campus, keep walking. Your parents wouldn’t want you to get into trouble on my watch, would they?” The old man smiled sardonically, showing his short, yellow teeth. Dennis nodded and went out into that wind, closing the door gently behind him.

  9

  Place

  As you know, Polly was at a going-away party on the last night she was seen. What you don’t know is where this party was or by whom it was given.

  The party was on Slade Road, just outside of town. It was given by a man named Tucker “Pig” Stephens. Pig was older than most everybody else at the party. He was considered a “go-to” guy: you went to him for dope, for alcohol if you were underage, for solace when you were depressed or needing.

  Pig owned a Harley-Davidson that was customized so that it would roar ferociously as he sped down the highway. He called his bike “the Demon,” and he’d painted the snout of a razorback along the sides that seemed to flare in a certain light. During the winter, he kept the bike in a storage facility off I-64 because he was inherently distrustful of all his friends, most of whom were members of a local motorcycle group called the Creeps that Pig also belonged to.

  He was well respected by his circle and feared by cops: he had been arrested many times and had served hard time in Montoya State Prison when he was twenty years old for breaking and entering. His criminal record was long, but for the past five years it had been inactive; everyone who knew him claimed that he had turned over a new leaf.

  Pig had taken Polly under his wing. He protected her. He considered Mike his younger brother, and often when you saw Pig in town Mike was with him. But Pig had soured on Mike recently. He had been heard saying that if Mike bothered Polly again, he was going to personally see to it that Mike was “put in his place.” On the night of Polly’s party, the two men were seen arguing by the pool out back. It was late and by that time everyone was drunk. No one could say for sure what the two were arguing about, but most were sure that it had to do with Polly. Pig, a huge man, weighing more than three hundred pounds, put his finger into Mike’s chest. Not long afterward, Polly left. Some people who had been standing out on the back deck (Pig lived in a duplex and rented out the top floor to his friends, including, at one point last summer, Mike and Polly) saw Polly leaving shortly after the argument. According to these witnesses, Pig saw her off. He may have even hugged her gently before she got in her car and went home, where her father was waiting.

  Mary didn’t know what to do with this new information other than the fact that it brought another suspect into
the equation: the older father figure, Pig. She imagined him. Pig, fat and volatile, was gentle when he needed to be and fierce when he had to be. What did he say to Mike out by the pool? That he would kill him if he touched Polly again? Was Pig secretly in love with Polly? Had they had an affair, even been in love with each other? When Mike found out about them had he hit Polly, leading her to call the police?

  She still had the unread chapters of Auster’s City of Glass to read as well as the new chapters for tomorrow’s class, but she couldn’t make herself focus on the words. In the novel, Quinn was filling his red notebook with facts and observations, empirical designs, emotions and feelings. But Mary was not as fortunate: she had very little at this point. She had seen Polly’s picture on the transparency but had inexplicably forgotten what she looked like, and now she would be murdered by Mike or Pig or, heaven forbid, her own father. What would Leonard Williams think of this, her forgetfulness?

  Suddenly, she was asleep and dreaming. In her dream, Mary saw Williams enter a dimly lit room. There was an overhead projector in the middle of this room. He turned it on. There was nothing on the first sheet, just a yellow wall. Nothing on the second. He shuffled through papers, one by one by one. They were all blank, empty, void yellow squares on a bare wall. Professor Williams was very angry now. His face was red, contorted, veins bulging in his neck. Mary was suddenly there—she saw herself sitting in a chair by the projector. She had dressed formally, for a performance, a presentation of some kind. She buried her face in her hands as Williams went through one blank sheet after another. Then she could feel him looking at her, the heat of his glare. Williams was now completely in control of her. He was her authority and her influence. Williams said something but his voice was muted, sliced off. It was painful even though it was soundless, and she felt herself shrinking from him. Suddenly he was coming toward her, stepping through the projector’s light. He was angry, so angry—

  She woke in the early gray of the morning. Brown was silent and she knew by the color of the blinds that it was too early for her to get up. But she could not go back to sleep. She had slept unevenly, and her body was stiff when she stood. The floor was cold. It was finally autumn outside, and soon she would have to turn on the heat to shower.

  As she did every morning, she checked her e-mail.

  There was something she hadn’t seen last night. It had been sent just minutes after the Pig clue, but she had forgotten to recheck her messages after reading that one. This one was simply called “Evidence,” and Mary tentatively, remembering the hanged man, clicked on it.

  There were two attached files in the message. Mary clicked on the first one, and a picture of a red car beside a road appeared. Polly’s Civic on Stribbling Road, she assumed.

  She clicked on the second one and another photograph loaded on her screen. It looked as if it could have been of a party in one of the frat houses. The foreground was harshly lit by the flash. It was a wider shot of the photo Williams had shown on the transparency that day, the one of Mike sitting on a couch. There was Mike again, his eyes red and his hair mussed.

  Sitting beside him, with her arm around his peeling shoulders, was Summer McCoy.

  The wind went out of Mary.

  What the hell? What were the chances of that? Summer didn’t even like frat parties. And this Mike guy was definitely not her type. Yet there she was with her arm around him, her face sun-kissed and a drink in her right hand. Did Summer know Williams? Maybe the photograph was simply random, something Williams had torn from an annual and used.

  Yet—what were the chances of the girl in the photo being Summer?

  Mary forwarded the message to her best friend.

  To: [email protected]

  From: [email protected]

  Subject: weird stuff

  Do you know this guy?

  /attached

  Mary

  Mary waited. She knew she should be reading City of Glass, but her mind was whirring. She closed her eyes, rubbed her forehead with her fingers trying to—

  Her computer pinged with an incoming message.

  To: [email protected]

  From: [email protected]

  Cc: [email protected]

  Subject: Re: weird stuff

  ****ADMINISTRATIVE WARNING****filtertapspace/winchester servelistaccidentaladministrat/firewall/parse/messageblock*****ADMINISTRATIVE WARNING****please do not continue sending these messages, you are outside the limits of the school code****ADMINISTRATIVE WARNING**** ///do not reply to this message!///

  What the hell was the “school code”? Mary thought that she may have mistyped Summer’s name, so she tried the same message again. And again, she waited. When the ping didn’t come, she refreshed her screen—still no message. She stood up and walked around her room. It felt good to stretch her legs. She would have to do some yoga tomorrow. Maybe Summer would—

  Her phone rang.

  “Summer?” Mary said.

  “Is this Mary Butler?” said a sharp, even voice on the other end.

  “It is.”

  “Stop,” the man said.

  “Stop what?”

  “You know what. Stop. Stop sending those e-mails.”

  “I don’t know what you’re—”

  “Come off it, Mary. We’re sitting out here in the Gray Brick Building looking at every e-mail that’s sent. With all the shit that’s pirated at this school, they pay us twenty bucks an hour to sit out here all night. But what you’re doing is…”

  “What am I doing?”

  “The picture. I mean, there’s porn and then there’s that. You’re lucky we don’t send this right to the campus police. Or to Dean Orman. It’s just sick. I’m sure you think it’s a joke, I’m sure you and your girls are laughing it up, but we have to do our job.”

  “My professor sent this to me,” she pleaded with the man. “I didn’t know…I didn’t—”

  “Listen, I don’t have time for this. If you don’t want your Internet privileges taken away, I’d delete that picture immediately. Clean it from your hard drive. Good night.” He hung up.

  Mary found the original file again and clicked on it. It would not load this time. All that appeared on her screen were lines of unbroken and meaningless code.

  10

  The next day Mary was so shaken by seeing Summer in Williams’s photograph that she almost didn’t go to class. But she needed to ask him what it had meant. The thought crossed her mind that perhaps Williams hadn’t even sent the photo. But there was his name in her in-box. Was he trying to impart some message about Mike? Was he trying to give Mary some kind of inside track?

  It took everything she had to leave her room, but when she was outside she was glad she had decided to go to class. Surprisingly, after the cool morning, it had turned into one of the nicest days of the month, the sun high and white in the sky, the clouds thin as gauze. On the yard in front of Brown Hall, some girls were sunbathing. They were all on their stomachs with textbooks open at their noses, studying for the first set of quizzes that were coming up next week.

  As she was entering Seminary, the girl who sat beside Mary in Williams’s class came out the side entrance. “No class today,” the girl told Mary. “There’s a note on the door.”

  Mary stepped into the dim foyer of Seminary. Normally she would be pleased that her entire afternoon was free—she now had five chapters in City of Glass to read—but today she was anxious to discuss the photograph—and that weird phone call, too—with Williams. There were no students in Seminary at this time—it was too early before the 4:00 p.m. classes and now fifteen minutes after the last set of classes had ended.

  I’ll leave a note under his office door, she thought. Even though Williams had not given them a syllabus with any of his contact information, she was pretty sure his office would be in the philosophy wing, which was right upstairs, on the top floor of Seminary.

  She climbed the three flights of stairs. She passed other students in the class, includin
g Brian House, who was hopping down the stairs three at a time. “You hear?” he asked breathlessly. She told him that she had, but he was already sliding down the rail, letting out a whoop as he disappeared down the well.

  The top floor of Seminary was another world. Professors’ offices lined the halls, and students sat passively outside in uncomfortable chairs, waiting to be called in. The hum of a Xerox machine punctuated everything. Mary followed the first wall, reading the nameplates on each door. She went all the way down the hall and around the corner, toward the west side of the building, which led down a second set of stairs and into the Orman Library. Near the end of the hall she found an open door, and as she leaned inside to read the name, a voice said, “Can I help you?”

  Mary started. She backed out of the room as if she had been doing something wrong. Something illegal.

  “Are you looking for Dr. Williams?” the voice asked. She peeked in and saw the boy. He was standing by the bookshelves on the far side, a stack of index cards in his hand.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “He’s out for the day. Something about his kid.” The boy looked back at the shelves, wrote something on one of the cards. Then he looked at Mary and said, “I’m sorry. I’m Troy Hardings. I’ll be Dr. Williams’s assistant this term.” He came toward her and offered his hand, and she shook it. He was tall, reedy, his movements awkward. His hair had been shaved into a buzz, and his scalp was unhealthy and pink. “You need to leave him a note or something?” He nodded toward the paper she had torn and was holding now, limply. “You can just give it to me and I’ll make sure he gets it.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Okay.” She stepped out into the hall and put the paper to the wall and wrote, Dr. Williams, but the surface was bubbled and she could not write smoothly. She went down the hall a bit and sat down on a chair outside a professor’s office. She used City of Glass as her desktop to write her note. As she was writing, she saw Troy leave the office and walk the opposite way, down the hall, and enter a room just before the exit.