Richard Aldiss’s eyes remained open, that permanent smile etched on his face. He appeared to be waiting for something. An answer, perhaps. A solution to the puzzles of the dead. Alex’s hands, meanwhile, fluttered to her jacket pocket. The nicotine gum was there, and she had to fight the urge to slip it out, press a square from the package and chew like mad.
Instead she merely watched the professor. Watched and said nothing and thought, Please tell me you had nothing to do with this.
“There is a type of very rare puzzle,” Aldiss said finally. “It is called a cyndrot. Its pieces are found in the world. A sharp stick, perhaps, the page of a book. The rules are moving and unfixed, as in any good game. Chaotic. You will receive a clue, a sheet with the number two written on it, and then you will begin your search. Two sticks, two pages, two socks. The best players, however, go outside the game. They do not collect objects in exact pairs, they collect objects that reciprocate each other. A stick and a seed. A seed grew the tree that formed the branch that created the stick. A book and a pen. The pen wrote the page that made up the book. Everything is genesis, evolution.”
“What does this have to do with Michael Tanner?”
Aldiss waited. His breathing was soft, plaintive.
“Perhaps nothing, Alexandra. Or perhaps it is heavy with meaning.” He stood up, whirled out of the dark toward her. His hands were out. Instinctively Alex leaned back, away from him. “Please,” he said. “Let me show you what I mean.”
He took her wrist. It was a simple gesture, a lover’s gesture. She felt a brief shock when he touched her. The professor’s thin, feminine hands circling the delicate bones of her wrist and pulling her toward him. She had always been amazed at his strength. The first time she had touched him—she had brushed against him on a visit here four years ago, when she had stolen off from Dean Fisk’s house on the day of Daniel Hayden’s funeral; his body, so tight and muscular before the stroke, dripped gray water from the lake and as her arm touched his, Alex felt something coiled in him, something rock-hard—she found herself amazed at the strength of even this accidental touch. It was a brutish power, consistent with the way his mind moved.
“Stand here,” he said now, pulling her to the center of the room. “And I will stand behind you. I am the killer.”
He was in the doorway. It was just after nine o’clock, the morning light gashing the balled carpet into light-dark slats. The professor with his jagged smile stood half in and half out of darkness, looking at her.
“I come inside as a friend,” Aldiss said. “Because as you and your slave masters believe, Alexandra, Michael knew the one who did this. So, slowly, I approach.” He moved into the room, shadows throbbing around him. “Perhaps I sit. Or maybe I do not. Maybe I want to be ready, prepared for what I have to do.” He was close now, close enough to smell. The smell of books, of old paper, clung to him. “Here we have two friends, two acquaintances, together in a room.”
“Do you think the murderer is a student of Michael’s?”
Aldiss scowled. “You are jumping to conclusions again, Alexandra. We have spoken about this. Here.” He pulled her to the armchair. She sat. “The man is sitting. It is his own library, after all. His comfort zone. His killer moves about him. Their conversation becomes more intense. They speak of great literature, because this is what two friends do when they meet at night.”
Now Alex saw him only in shadow. Aldiss was moving behind her, flitting this way and that, playacting the crime. She wanted to see exactly what he was doing, but she was taken in by the lake outside the window. Enraptured by it. There was something about the way the ice drifted, the weak April ice, the way it dissolved and fell to loose, gauzy shreds . . .
The professor touched her again. Ran his fingers through her hair.
“This crime,” he whispered. “You said before that it is different from the ones I was accused of. What did you mean?”
Alex closed her eyes and said, “There were mistakes. The crime scene—it isn’t as clean as the two at Dumant. He was more nervous, perhaps . . . weaker than that man. But there was something else.”
“What?”
“The struggle seemed to be staged. Manipulated to mirror the Dumant scenes.”
“The police told you this?”
“Yes.”
Aldiss scoffed. “Do not listen to them. They are men of a false science. They do not know what we know.”
“And what do we know, Professor?”
“We know . . .”
She let him touch her. Let him move his fingers in and out of her hair, play against her neck. She tried not to imagine his face. She closed her eyes.
“Is it the game?” she breathed. “Has the Procedure begun again?”
No answer. Aldiss’s shadow twisted on the wall.
“What kind of person do I tell them to look for?” she pressed.
Again: nothing. He only kept moving his hands about her hair, his fingers so sure and powerful as they began to massage her scalp.
“Who killed Michael Tanner?”
“In the cyndrot,” he said finally, hands clasping her skull, “you look for what mirrors the original object. Its twin opposite, the illusion of sameness it creates. In this case we are looking for someone who knows the Dumant murders so intimately that he or she can replicate those crimes perfectly. To do this one must have secret knowledge of the events. This person must have studied that brutal history so carefully that nothing—no detail, no gesture—could be left unused. The killer has created a cyndrot. For this reason I believe the person we are now searching for is . . .”
“Who?” she pleaded. “Tell me.”
“Someone who was part of the night class.”
Alex inhaled deeply, kept her hands perfectly still on her lap.
“The killer was there with you in that lecture hall. It is someone you know, Alexandra. There are things about Dumant University that I have shared, both during the class and afterward, with only the nine of you. If I am correct, as I fear I am, then a few of these details will have been used in the murder of Michael Tanner. This oversight might be the killer’s first mistake.”
“But how do I know who it is?” she asked.
“There are two ways to find your killer,” Aldiss said. “First, you must get into Michael’s home. See how the killer arranged the books, which ones he chose to highlight. You have to make them let you see what the killer saw that night.”
“I don’t know if they will—”
“You must.”
She looked down at her hands, at the pyramid of books at her feet. “And the second way?”
“You must bring the students from the class back together,” the professor said softly. His voice, the way he said the words, suggested a kind of pity; it spoke to Alex of a keen apprehension that she had never heard out of Aldiss. “You are the only one who truly understands these people and their motivation, the only one who knows what they desire. And when you have done this, when they are back on the Jasper campus, then you will observe them. That is how you will find the one who committed this murder.”
“But how do you know?” she asked, desperation in her voice. “How can you be sure one of us did this?”
Aldiss pulled away. He removed his hands but left something behind, an indentation, a phantom pressure on her scalp.
“It is someone who was there,” he said again, and then: “I know it in my blood.” Alex thought about what this meant, the path it would take her down. She thought about the others—There are seven of us now, she reminded herself—and imagined them all there, back again on campus for the first time since Daniel Hayden’s funeral. But this time it would be different. This time one of them could possibly be watching her, watching and—
A voice at the door. The trance was broken, and both Alex and the professor turned. Alex thought she saw a blush, a flash of purple deep beneath the mask of the professor’s face.
“Richard, who is she?”
The girl was young. A college student. She was model pretty, with full lips and green, intelligent eyes. She wore a Jasper College sweatshirt and torn blue jeans. She had clearly just awakened.
“Daphne,” the professor said, “this is Alexandra Shipley, one of my former students.”
The girl said nothing, only stared at Alex. There was the flare of a challenge in her eyes. Alex got up, dusted down the wrinkles in her trench, and forced a smile. The girl is fifteen years younger than you, Alex, and you’re intimidated by her? Christ.
“I was just going,” she said weakly. “Professor. Daphne.” Alex nodded awkwardly and went to the doorway. The girl hesitated there in the threshold, then she moved to the side and Alex inched past her to navigate the corridor of books.
She found the front door and pushed into it, hard, reaching for the air.
But Aldiss was behind her again, pulling her back by the shoulder. Alex stopped on the porch, almost out. Almost free of him.
“She’s just a child,” she spat into the wind.
“A toy,” the professor said. “Nothing but a plaything.”
Alex jerked away.
“We could continue our session, you know,” he said, his lips close to her ear now. Alex looked out at the small rental car, at the steep drive that would take her back to Route 2 and toward the college. “Fair Daphne wouldn’t have to know.”
Alex yanked free of him. She heard him laugh behind her as she went for the car, opened the door, and began to get in.
“Alexandra, wait.”
She paused, hunched inside the car, one foot still planted on Aldiss’s drive.
“If I am right,” Aldiss said, “and it is one of them, then you will be putting yourself in grave danger. When the students from the night class have returned and you have begun your observation, be careful, Alexandra, because one of them will also be observing you . . .” He trailed off, ran his eyes beyond her as if he were searching the woods behind his small house. “I would die if anything happened to you. First I would kill the person who did it, and then I would take the axe to myself. I promise you that.”
Before she pulled away she looked back at the house. She saw him there in a front window. He watched her descent.
* * *
Later, when she returned to Jasper, Alex paid a visit to a trusted old friend.
And then she began to call them, one by one, until all those who remained had agreed to return and honor the life of Michael Tanner.