Obedience (6 page)

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.

“Logic tells you,” Professor Williams was saying on Monday afternoon, “that Mike was the abductor. A criminal background check reveals that he has been busted a few times. Driving while intoxicated. Public intoxication. Possession of marijuana. Kid stuff. But there is something dangerous about him. Something dark and mysterious. Something inner. You’ve seen the picture of the man who is playing him for my experiment. I chose this particular actor because in real life this man is brooding, contemplative. Does he look, to you, like he is capable of this?”

The class was silent for a moment, and then two or three students muttered, “Yes.”

“Yes!” Williams said, animated. For the first time he came out behind the podium, but gently, his hands out, easing his way toward them. “Of course. Logic draws a concrete line from Polly to Mike to the abandoned car on Stribbling Road. And your mind-your intuition-will draw an arrow. Intuition fills in blanks for you. If something is
supposed
to fit a certain pattern, then the mind will take you there and you will be biased against any other proposition.”

He wrote two words on the board: invincible ignorance.

“This is a circular fallacy of the highest order,” he said then, placing the marker back in the tray. “X cannot be Y because X clearly
has
to be Z. The mind presents you with rigid-very rigid-maps, and you do not listen to any other suggestions. This is also called, in layman’s terms, ‘tunnel vision.’ It will ruin you in this case.”

“What about randomness?” asked Dennis. He was writing on a legal pad that was resting on his briefcase. Mary noticed that he was a bit sunburned, and she wondered if he had been away somewhere for the weekend with his fraternity brothers-or perhaps with Savannah Kleppers.

“What about it?” replied Williams.

“Well, what about someone at the party? A guy sees Polly, he likes her, he calls her late that night and tells her to meet him somewhere off Stribbling Road. She meets him, and he…” But Dennis couldn’t go on, couldn’t say the word.

“And he what, Mr. Flaherty?” asked the professor.

“And he abducts her,” Dennis mustered. It was just a whisper, so soft it was nearly just a scratch in his throat.

“Randomness is always a possibility, of course,” the professor said. He retreated back behind the podium. “But in how many crimes does someone who is not in the victim’s orbit end up being the perpetrator? I’ll let you guess on that one.”

“Twenty percent of the time,” someone said.

“Less,” said Williams.

“Ten percent,” Mary offered.

“Less.”

“Five.”

“Two percent of the time,” he declared. “Two percent. That means that in five hundred crimes of this manner, about ten random suspects become perpetrators. The odds, then, Mr. Flaherty, are against you.” Williams spun on his heel again and faced the board. He wrote two more words below the last:
tu quoque.
“Latin,” he explained. “‘You also.’ This is a fallacy that suggests that since your theory is poor, then mine is allowed to be poor as well. But there is an inherent problem with wrongness in this class, of course.” The professor smiled and leaned forward on the podium. “If you are wrong here, then Polly dies.”

Some in the class laughed. For them, obviously, it was becoming a joke. A game. But Mary thought of the article she had read, of Leonard Williams’s crime. When she looked at him, she could not fathom someone who had knowingly stolen another scholar’s ideas and language. But of course that was invincible ignorance, because she knew that he had stolen those words.

“What about the dad?” asked Brian House. He had moved up a row for some reason, and now he was sitting right behind Mary. She wondered if he was just trying to show her up with this question, or maybe he had thought about what she had said on the viaduct Saturday night.

“Ah,” Williams exclaimed. “Good old Dad. What about him? He’s a schoolteacher. He teaches science at a local elementary school. He’s overweight. What else?”

“The man in the transparency-your actor-had a military tattoo on his arm,” Dennis said. Mary felt ashamed-she hadn’t noticed it in the picture. She suddenly felt as if she was behind the rest of them, slipping away in the current. While she had been chasing down stupid conspiracy theories about Leonard Williams, the rest of the class had been thinking about Polly.

“The last one to see her,” said the girl sitting beside Mary.

Mary knew that she better say something, or else the day was going to pass her by and she would be two weeks into a class without any headway. “Watches Letterman,” she said.

A few people in back laughed, but Mary had not meant it as a joke. The comment was made in desperation, and again she felt herself flush.

“Good, Ms. Butler,” the professor said, and Mary rose her eyes hopefully to meet his. “He watches Letterman. What could this mean? This is an important clue, I think.”

“It could mean that he likes Letterman,” said Brian wryly.

“Or that he hates Leno,” the professor retorted. “But come on. Think here. He is watching Letterman when Polly returns from the going-away party. She watches the show with him and falls asleep and he carries her to bed. What are the possible meanings of that scenario?”

Mary thought. She closed her eyes and tried to find it, to find the truth in the situation. She saw Polly opening the door, coming into the dark house. Polly was a little drunk, stumbling. She put her purse down on the kitchen counter and saw her father. She came into the living room, which was flickering with the light from the TV, and sat beside him on the couch. He put his arm around her. They didn’t say anything because they had the kind of relationship where you didn’t have to speak. Your actions, your gestures, sounds, and tiny movements, told enough of the story of your day.

“He was waiting for her,” she said.

“Why?” Williams asked.

“Because he was worried about Mike.”

“Of course,” the professor said. He was smiling, proud of her for getting there. “He was waiting for her because of Mike. Because there had-what?-been something going on in the last week before she disappeared. Because he was concerned with the old trouble again. Maybe Mike had been coming around again. Does a guy who teaches elementary school children seem to you like a late-night television fan?”

“No,” half the class agreed.