The old man, her trusted friend, had gone blind. He lived now among his books and the memories of the college he once reigned. There was a photograph, curled with age and hanging above the walnut desk, of him with a former president. Another with a Nobel laureate, now long dead, the two men with their socks falling and drunken grins on their faces. But his prized possession was a childlike jigsaw puzzle, strip-glued and mounted to thin board, adorned with the fragmented and Cubist images of a man’s distorted face. An inscription below: To my friend Dean Fisk, we will find Fallows. Richard Aldiss. The puzzle was dated December 25, 1985. Aldiss had made it while in prison.
Alex ran her eyes over the cluttered desk, grazed through the yellowed documents with wandering fingertips. Her heart sounded in her chest but otherwise she was quiet.
“Awful,” the old man said. He sat in his wheelchair back in the corner shadows, his rheumy eyes quick and wet. “Awful what has happened to our Michael. What has happened to our college. What are you doing over there, Alex?”
Her hands stopped. Heat rushed to her face.
“Nothing, Dean Fisk,” she said. “Just looking at the history in this room.”
The dean breathed. Something was coming in the darkness; the air pressure dropped in the room, the feeling of electricity before a kiss, a secret.
“It doesn’t exist,” he said.
The words dazed her. Her eyes rose from the desk.
“I don’t know what you mean,” she said weakly.
“Whatever you’ve heard, Alex, whatever they have told you—you will not find the manuscript in this house.”
“I haven’t heard anything.” This wasn’t like lying to Aldiss; the dean was gone now, his mind turned to mush. He was ninety-four years old and wasted away. She looked at him, saw spittle glisten on his paper-gray cheeks. The full-time nurse—a middle-aged man she had met when she arrived—would be in soon to feed him.
“Those old false pieces of Fallows—it’s over, Alex,” Fisk went on. “You put an end to it during the night class. You.”
“Of course,” she said, thinking, You’re wrong, dean. It will never end.
A silence fell, and her eyes drifted instinctively to the desk. She said, “I went to see Dr. Aldiss this morning. He says whoever did this is re-creating the Dumant murders.”
“Richard,” Fisk laughed. “Richard probably murdered Michael himself.”
She was stunned. “You don’t believe that, do you? You can’t. It just isn’t—”
The door opened behind her and the nurse stepped inside. A pale, deliberate man, so precise in his movements that she barely saw his hands dropping the medicines into the old man’s birdlike mouth. He turned to the silver tray he’d set on the desk. A meal for a child: a piece of toast, applesauce. Fisk looked through his nurse in the way of the blind, nodding purposefully. “Thank you, Matthew,” he said, and the nurse left the room, his eyes falling momentarily on Alex as he went.
When he was gone Alex said, “Dean Fisk, tell me you don’t believe that Professor Aldiss murdered Michael. I know you had a falling-out years ago, but he was your friend. Your confidant. You . . .” Helped save him, she wanted to say.
The old man looked into the void, considering. Then he said without context, “They still play the Procedure.”
“The students,” he said. “I can hear them on campus when Matthew pushes me over the sidewalks on our strolls. I can hear them.” He fell silent, and the sound of his raspy breathing filled the room.
“Dean Fisk, about Michael Tanner . . .”
His roaming eyes stopped on her. “If they are coming back for the funeral, they will need a place to stay.”
“Yes.”
He meant the night class students who were on their way to Jasper now. Most of them still lived in Vermont, and of course Sally Tanner was here on this campus already. It had occurred to Alex, as she made those phone calls, how easy it might be, what Aldiss had suggested. How simple to bring them together.
“I want them to stay here.”
Alex’s breath caught. “Here?”
“I want them to be close,” Fisk explained. “This is a grieving time, Alex, and when we are grieving we all need to be together. There is more than enough space in my house. Yes, it is old. There is history here. But it is familiar to them. You can all reconnect, much like you did when Daniel Hayden—”
“Yes,” she interrupted. “I’ll forward your invitation.”
And then the dean nodded, meaning it was time for her to leave. She went out, down a dark hallway that led to the east wing of the mansion, and moved into the heart of the old house.
The air here was musty, unstirred. As she walked the floorboards groaned, and above her the silver spindles of webs clung to the walls. Those walls had cracked, revealing skeins of plaster that seemed to point her deeper into the dark. She knew exactly where she was going; she had spent many days in this house when she was an undergrad at Jasper.
Stanley Fisk, then a spry eighty, had been her ally during the night class. He had shown her how to read the text that was Richard Aldiss, and she would always be indebted to him. If Alex was the most famous Jasper alumna, much was due to him. If he wanted the students to stay in this crumbling place, then who was she to argue?
It would make her job easier.
She took another step, thinking—
Alex spun around. Behind her was the nurse.
“Who’s here, Matthew?” she asked, managing to conjure up his name as if he were a student who’d raised his hand during lecture.
“A woman. She wants to see you. She looks freaked.”
She looked at him. Older than she had thought at first, his skin so pale it appeared translucent. Why was he here? she wondered. To keep the dean alive, to postpone the inevitable? And what might he know, she thought almost guiltily, of the dean’s possessions?
“Tell her I’m on the second floor.”
“Of course, Dr. Shipley.” So he knew her name too.
The nurse left, the whisper of his tennis shoes disappearing down the hall, and Alex entered a room to her left. It was a relic from another time—two upholstered chairs covered with sheets perched in the middle of the floor, a bookshelf along a back wall, a minor Rothko hanging at a tilt. The room had been fresh once, back when Stanley Fisk ruled the campus and all the college’s decisions went through him. He was known as a man of letters, which was something of a novelty among college royalty. He hosted parties that were attended by Philip Roth and Joan Didion, reinvented the literature program long before Aldiss was brought in for his strange and experimental night class. Fisk was Jasper College, and like this room and its pitiful furniture, the man had been all but forgotten.
I want them to stay here. There were seventeen rooms in this Victorian-style mansion that had been specifically built for Fisk in the sixties, most of them empty now. Undoubtedly spacious enough to host the students who would return. And to allow Alex free rein to follow Aldiss’s instructions.
To observe without them knowing.
She walked deeper into the room, stepping into the funneled light that slanted through a window. She studied the bookshelves. More Fallows here, a spray of Aldiss prison texts. She took out a volume and shook it, maybe hoping for something to fall out. A page, a key? Nothing. The manuscript, the third Fallows—it had to be somewhere. She had been assured by Lewis Prine that it was in this house: The person who sent me this page says Fisk has the rest. He’d sent the page to her four years ago, not long after the death of Daniel Hayden. Scanning the book spines, Alex thought, Did you know, Lewis? Did you know it was here when we all came to this house to grieve Daniel, damn you?
“Alex.”
She turned and saw the woman standing in the doorway, leaning as if she was fatigued, as if she had traveled a great distance. Her hair was tangled and stuck to her cheek. She had been crying.
“Sally, I’m so sorry.” The women came together and embraced between the two empty chairs. Alex thinking: How cold she is, how unhealthy, could she have killed—
“I saw him,” the woman moaned, her breath low and hot in Alex’s ear. “I saw Michael lying there on the floor. At first I thought he was sleeping, but then I saw—I saw all those books, Alex, all those awful books . . .”
“Shhh,” Alex said, and they swayed together silently.
Finally Sally Tanner pulled away and took a deep breath. Her knees buckled. Alex reached out, caught the woman by the elbow. Held her upright.
“The cops have been asking me questions since that night,” Sally said. “This detective named Black. He thinks— He doesn’t say this, Alex, but I can see it in his eyes. He thinks I had something to do with Michael’s murder. Can you fucking believe that?”
Alex shook her head. She didn’t know what to say.
“Black asked me something else.” She steadied her gaze. “He asked about Aldiss.”
Alex tensed. “And what did you say?”
“I told the truth, of course. I haven’t spoken to the professor in years. Not since Daniel.”
“What about Michael?”
Something glinted in the widow’s eye, something hard and firm. It said, Too soon. Then it was gone.
“Michael wouldn’t go out there. I know Aldiss lives nearby, but the class—it was over for him. He never spoke about what happened to us back then.”
Then something in her broke, and she fell forward again into Alex’s arms.
When the spell was over, Sally stood up and looked past Alex, over her shoulder at the books. Even those silent objects stirred her, made her tremble and turn away, her hands cupped to her mouth as if clapping quiet a scream. Again Alex thought, Is she the one? Then: Don’t do this, treat them this way just because Aldiss has given you another task. He could be wrong. He could be playing with you.
“I saw him,” Sally repeated. “And I will never get over it. Never.”
“Sally, if you know who might have done this—”
Quickly, the widow turned to look at Alex. The light in her eyes had changed, gone to the flint of anger. Alex saw the girl from the night class in that instant, the youth springing out like a hidden figure, anger and spite stitched across her brow.
“Don’t you dare,” she said.
“I was just—”
“Don’t do this to me. Not here, not after what I’ve been through. We were all different people when we took that class. All of us. And if you’ve come back here to be a hero again, that is between you and your dear Aldiss. I will grieve for my husband and live with what I saw in that library, and you stay the hell out of my and Michael’s life.”