This time Richard Aldiss was waiting for her.
He had wine ready, an immaculate dinner of stewed hare and exotic vegetables on china that spread across a stark white tablecloth. There were two chairs, one on each side of the small circular table, and through the nervous flame of a candle Alex watched the professor smile at her in the half darkness of his little kitchen. At her place setting was an envelope that read, To Alexandra. She had refused to open it.
“Poor Michael Tanner,” the man said when they were seated.
“They’re still searching,” Alex said. “The police have been watching Sally, but they haven’t charged her with anything yet.”
“And is it your opinion that quiet Sally killed her husband?” he asked bluntly. He tore at the rabbit with his fork, a tortured smile stretched across his face.
“No.” The word out there, she drew herself quickly back. “I don’t know.”
“ ‘No,’ ” the professor repeated in a perfect imitation of her voice. “ ‘I don’t know.’ Which is it, Alexandra?”
“I haven’t had time to observe them all yet.” She took a cautious bite. It was luxurious, but she refused to show Aldiss her pleasure. “But I will. They’re staying in Dean Fisk’s—”
“Fisk,” spat Aldiss. “Has the old man trotted out his mythical manuscript yet?” Aldiss laughed, but his eyes didn’t leave her. Alex looked off into the shadows of the kitchen. “Give me something of substance.”
Alex looked at him through the candle’s flame. Bastard. “I saw the house.”
The smile curled upward. He rested his fork on the plate with a gentle tink, steepled his hands beneath his chin. “Go on.”
“You said before that you felt that the person who did this was someone who knew Michael.”
Aldiss nodded almost imperceptibly.
“I think you may have been right.”
“Of course I was,” he said. His hands moved. She watched his fingers dance from glass to knife to cloth and then back again. Glass, knife, cloth. His heart was racing, his mind whirling. She knew it. “You were describing Michael Tanner’s house.”
But Alex didn’t continue. She could feel the balance of power shifting ineluctably away from her, and she couldn’t let that happen. Not again.
“Your turn, Professor,” she said, her gaze steady on him. “Were you in touch with Daniel Hayden before his death?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Aldiss said. But it was too quick, too abrupt. “I am not interested in the past, Alexandra. I could fall silent right now. I could close myself like a book and end this lesson, and where would you turn then? To your hapless detective? To your conspiracy-theorist friends?”
She glared at him, heart thudding. Finally she nodded and said, “It was Dumant. Michael’s house, the crime scene—everything was the same except the kitchen.”
Aldiss went still, looked up at her quizzically.
“There were dishes all over the floor. They had been broken, pulled from the table and strewn across the room. Shards of glass everywhere. The chairs had been toppled and there were marks across the walls.”
Aldiss thought. Then he said, “How many plates?”
“What?”
The professor sighed. “An easy question, Alexandra. How many plates were there?”
She tried to remember the kitchen, the strewn glass. But it was futile. She could remember nothing but the library, the books, the awful silence of the place—
“I don’t know,” she said shamefully. “I can’t remember.”
“You will,” Aldiss said, his smile tightening. “You will dream of those rooms tonight, and you will remember. When you dream, make sure you pay attention. I am wondering if there weren’t others in the house with Michael.”
“Others?”
Aldiss said nothing, took a deep drink of the wine. When he put down the glass his lips were stained a dark red.
“The books,” he said. “Tell me about them.”
“At first I thought they were random,” she said, “but when I looked closer I could see that there was an arrangement there. He was careful, precise. He wanted us to know that the murder was as much about his process as it was about Michael’s death.”
“Randomness does not exist. Not with this man. His obsession with the Dumant murders will have created a situation for him of unsustainability. He is writing a kind of sequel, you see, and in any sequel the writer cannot reach the point where his art matches the original. It is an impossible task.”
“You mean he’s going to go off the deep end?”
“I predict so, yes. He will rattle apart, because what he is doing is not his. It belongs to the real Dumant killer, the one that you—”
“Yes,” she said, and looked quickly away.
“None of this belongs to him,” Aldiss repeated. “This is a man who will feel an incredible amount of inferiority. He will be angry. He will burn with anger, radiate with it. He is in someone else’s playground now. Someone else’s mind. He is a thief, and all thieves are caught eventually. But . . .”
“Yes, Professor?”
“The damage will be done,” Aldiss said softly.
Alex sat, staring at the man. His smile pulled apart into an O, and a hand drifted to his face so slowly that she could follow it all the way across, over the tablecloth and almost through the licking candle flame and to his cheek, where it sat on the flat, dead skin, fingers spidering the mandible closed. She looked away as the man worked on himself.
“You’re thinking about something,” Aldiss said finally. “Something I’ve said—it doesn’t fit with your theories of the crime?”
“No,” she said. “It’s just . . . Can I ask you a question, Professor?”
She saw him hesitate, the black hearts of his pupils crushed flat as he drew his gaze down on her. Then he said, his voice knife-sharp, “Only if you plan to be polite this time.”
“Did you ever hear of anyone being murdered while playing the Procedure?”
The vein in Aldiss’s forehead jumped. He considered the question before he spoke. “It was played in different ways on different campuses,” he said at last. “We each had our own set of rules.”
“And Benjamin Locke. What were his rules?”
Aldiss opened his mouth to speak but stopped himself. Then, his voice smooth and measured, he said, “I don’t want to talk about this right now.”
She nodded, her eyes passing over him and into the hallway. There was a room there, its closed door setting off alarms inside her.
“Where is she?” Alex asked.
“You mean fair Daphne,” the professor said. “Safe. She has her own life, her own friends.” He stood and walked across the kitchen, passing through a knife blade of moonlight. He was not wearing shoes, and his bare feet smacked against the gnarled linoleum. When he passed behind the table he stopped, hovered above Alex. He was inches away from her now.
“Talk to me about Dumant,” she said with her back still to him. “About what happened there.”
“Is this a crisis of conscience, Alexandra? Do you not believe in your own findings during the night class? Do you doubt my innocence after all this time?”
“I believe in what we did in Iowa,” she said, her voice faltering. “I believe . . .” In you, she wanted to say.
“The person who committed those crimes is dead,” Aldiss continued. “You remember what happened. You were there. What you and your boyfriend discovered while you were in Iowa was true. It was all true. It was the one thing you have done correctly and thoroughly since you have been under my charge. You helped me reclaim my life, and I will never forget that.”
She turned and faced him. “Why have you never spoken about it?”
Aldiss said nothing.
“You’ve never spoken about anything before,” she went on, gathering courage now. “About your previous life, the one before Dumant. Before Fallows and Locke and—”
“Stop this!” Aldiss shouted, and Alex shrunk back. The smile held but his eyes brimmed with rage. Some of the wine had sloshed out of the flute and stained the crease of his hand. “I have no intention of talking to you about any of this. You are still my student, Alexandra. You will remember that you are beneath me in every way imaginable.”
The thought came to her like a flash: At least I don’t prey on my students.
Aldiss’s eyes lit up. He’d read the direction of her thoughts. “Yes,” he hissed. “Say it. Please.”
She didn’t. She refused to give him the pleasure.
The man moved out into the living room and sat down on the couch. He had thrown a yellow sheet over an end-table lamp for ambiance, and he sat in its sickly glow, staring into the maze of shadows on the other side of the room.
“In Fallows,” he said softly, “there is a moment where the narrative turns. The scholars call it a volta, this moment where the novel becomes something else. In The Coil, you remember, we go from a novel of manners into a character study of Ann Marie. We begin to see that she is not as powerful as she seemed at first, that she is a scared Iowa girl lost in the big, bad city. In The Golden Silence there are many voltas, sometimes multiple turns on a page. Remember that that book is full of trapdoors.”
Alex stared at the man. The feeling of being back in that basement classroom, of being a student again and waiting desperately for Aldiss to fill in the blanks, was palpable. “Professor,” she said. “Why are you telling me this?”
Aldiss looked at her. “It’s about to turn, Alexandra.”
“What do you mean?”
“This is not about poor Michael Tanner and his broken dishes. This is about something else entirely. It’s about something older than the night class or the Dumant killer or any of that. I thought at first that the man who is doing this—I thought he was weak. To steal another’s crime is not flattery; it is not literary at all, no matter how much our invisible man wants it to be so. It is destruction.” Aldiss took another sip of the wine, the final liquid in the cup spinning down toward his ruined mouth. “This man isn’t continuing something. He’s trying to finish it.”
Alex looked at him. She felt weak, suddenly. Dizzy. “I’m sorry, Professor,” she said. “Excuse me.”
She went out into the hallway and found the bathroom she had seen earlier. She stepped inside and closed the door, turned on the light, and looked at herself in the mirror. It was streaked glass, bone-gray with age. Alex leaned on the sink and took a cleansing breath, splashed cold water on her face. Finish it, she thought. Finish . . .
Her cell phone vibrated in her pocket. She took it out and looked at the face. She had two texts. One was from Peter; she didn’t open it. The other was from Dean Rice:
Report back to us when you are finished with him.
“Asshole,” she whispered to herself, turning off the water. When she returned to the living room, Aldiss was still sitting on the sofa. His face was flushed with drink and his hands were clasped in his lap. His shirt was open at the collar and she saw the puzzle tattoo in the delta of his throat and chest, just the topmost edge of it. He followed her with his eyes as she sat down.
“Are you afraid in that house with them, Alexandra?” he asked.
She lied. “No.”
“You should be. What I said this morning—I am even more sure of it now. The killer was part of the night class.” He paused, twisting the flute between his fingers. “Do you have a weapon?”
“No. Of course not.”
“You will need one. Just in case. I can get that for you.”
She shook her head softly. There were a million things roaring and collapsing through her, but all she could think about was Keller. Keller, standing before those shelves, urging her to be careful.
“You’re thinking of something, Alexandra,” Aldiss said. “Tell me.”
She gathered herself. “How do you know it was someone from the night class?”
Nothing. Silence spun out.
“How do you know? You must tell me how you know one of them murdered Michael, Professor. You can’t just put me up in that house, make me observe them all like some fucking Judas without telling me!” Alex was on the edge now, pushing him as hard as she had ever pushed. She felt a burning in the pit of her stomach as hot as a red wire. It was desperation. “Something happened,” she continued. “Something went on between you and one of them to cause you to think this way of them. Was it Daniel, Professor? Is he the connection?”
Aldiss’s eyes registered a hit, but again he said nothing.
“This is ridiculous,” she said. “They’re going to come for you, Professor.”
Aldiss laughed.
“They’re going to come out here and destroy your books and papers, rip the place apart seam by seam. And Daphne—they will find out what she knows. You will end your life the way you would have if you had never met me—cast in a net of suspicion, believed to be a murderer by most of your own colleagues. This, here, everything you’ve built—it will become Rock Mountain all over again.”
He swung his gaze toward her, only one side of his face visible in the lamplight. The smile wavered. “I did not kill Michael Tanner.”
She waited a beat. Then: “If you know who did—”
“I know. It was someone from the night class. That is all I can tell you.”
“But who?” she said, shrieking now, her hands thrown up in front of her. “Which one of them?”
The man was silent. The smile split apart, revealed teeth.
“Good night, Professor,” Alex relented. “And good luck.”
Then she was walking to the rental. The night was high and clear, the lake behind the house shining in the moonlight. She got in and started the car, felt the heat pour over her chilled face. For a moment she sat in the drive, cursing herself, pounding the steering wheel. Fuck fuck fuck, Alex! It was a simple thing, the easiest job in the world, and you wrecked it. You—
Something cracked against her passenger window.
Alex looked over, saw Aldiss’s face at the glass. She rolled the window down.
“Here,” he said. “You forgot this on the kitchen table.”
The professor passed her the card he had given her earlier. Alex took it and slipped it between the covers of one of the books on Fallows she had brought on the trip with her but had yet to take out of the car. Then she rolled the window back up, reversed down the driveway, and drove out of Richard Aldiss’s life for what she hoped was the very last time.