It was just after eleven o’clock when she returned to the mansion. She found Christian Kane smoking outside. She walked up the drive, scanning the windows of the Victorian for Keller’s room, wondering if he was still awake.
“How is the good professor?” Christian called as she approached. The writer’s cigarette flared in the shadows.
“Adamant about his innocence,” she said.
“No heads in the closet, then?”
“I’m afraid not.” She nodded at his cigarette. “Bum one?”
He knocked a smoke out of the pack and handed it to her, lit it as she leaned close. She smelled liquor on him, wondered what they had all talked about while she was away.
Now the man watched her, his arms crossed to fend off the wind.
“If I told you something,” he said, “do you promise not to tell the rest of them?”
Alex regarded him. “Of course, Christian.”
“I plagiarized from Fallows.”
“What?”
The man shifted, his breathing faster than it had been. Alex saw that he’d been wanting to tell someone for the longest time but didn’t have the courage. Now, back at his old college with one of his friends murdered, he’d brought himself to the confession. Maybe there’s more there, Alex thought.
“Not word for word, nothing like that,” he said. “I simply stole his style, his rhythm. In my last novel, Barker in the Storm. I got stuck. Maybe I had this crazy notion that people would be playing the Procedure to my novels, I don’t know. I was going with Michael every weekend to Burlington and Dumant, we were deep inside the Procedure. I was getting swept away by it, I was losing myself, Alex. My editor started calling me, asking when the next book would be ready. I kept telling him, ‘Soon. Soon. Soon.’ Months turned into a year, and I almost lost everything . . .” Christian trailed off, looked away into the shadows as if he’d heard something. Alex followed his gaze but saw nothing but darkness, only the flickering spread of the college down below them. “One day I went into my library and I took down The Golden Silence, started reading through it. And I thought to myself, ‘This. This is it.’ So I read a few passages and tried to emulate them. It was like stealing from Fallows. And it felt . . . my God, Alex, it felt so good. I felt powerful again, like when I first started writing. It was magnificent.”
“Someone will find out,” Alex said. “The scholars—they catch those kinds of things.”
He smiled darkly. “I hope they do. I hope they find me out.” Again he looked into the fringe of trees, took one last drag on the cigarette, and flicked it into the brush. “And I hope I’m punished.”
* * *
Inside the house the crowd had dispersed. She found Frank Marsden and Lucy Wiggins by the fire, snuggled tight and talking in low voices. She went into the kitchen and drew a glass of water from the tap. Stood there drinking, listening to the silent old house and thinking of Aldiss. Of his persistence about one of her friends being guilty. Someone who was here.
Laughter, then. Coming from somewhere in the darkness.
“Hello?” Alex said. She waited.
Nothing at first. Then the laughter again, trilling and feminine. Alex stepped deeper into the room.
A man’s voice. Familiar, but she couldn’t place it. She took another step.
There was a door beyond the refrigerator. The laundry room, perhaps—she had never explored this part of the dean’s house. She took another step, then another. Finally she reached out and pushed the swinging door open and saw—
Melissa Lee knelt before the nurse, Matthew Owen.
Embarrassment rushed through Alex, but she didn’t turn. She stood for a moment, hidden in the darkness, the door cracked open. She saw Melissa’s face in the man’s lap. Saw Owen’s head upturned, heard the low moan of his pleasure. When she looked down again she saw Melissa watching her, a kind of wicked amusement in the woman’s eyes.
Not such a soccer mom after all, Alex thought. Quietly, she stepped back into the kitchen. Then she walked out into the great room, into the flushing heat of the fire, and ran right into Frank Marsden. He was drunk but solid, and she was nearly knocked to the floor.
“Alexandra,” he slurred. The fire’s reflection burned in his eyes.
“Hello, Frank.”
The man smiled and said, “Lock your door.”
“Excuse me?”
“That’s what they’re saying on campus.” Frank got close to her, the liquor on his breath strong and thick. Some mad vision of revenge burned in his eyes. “Lock your doors tonight. Whoever did this to Michael—the guy’s still out there.”
* * *
“Is that you, Alex?”
She was upstairs now, her heart pounding from what she had seen in the kitchen. At the sound of the voice Alex stopped midway down the corridor and looked into the dean’s study. The room was mostly dark, lamplight streaming weakly across the old man’s form. He sat in his wheelchair, the limp wig hanging askew on his head, his lipstick smeared and his breathing thick and wet. She waited for him to go on.
“Your eulogy tomorrow,” he said. “Do you have something planned?”
She didn’t, but she was going to try to get her thoughts down in her room before sleep. That was how she always wrote her lectures: exhaustion coming on, the conscious mind being peeled back and laid bare, inhibitions stripped away.
“I’ll be ready,” she said.
“Good. Sally is broken, I think. There are police watching her every move. It’s a horrible thing. She will need some relief, some proper remembrance of him.”
“Of course.”
The dean shifted, pulled back out of the light. “And how was Richard tonight?”
“He didn’t do this, Dean Fisk.”
“He told you that.”
“I know him. I know he’s not capable.” Do you have a weapon? I can get that for you.
“We change,” the man said, and then he coughed harshly into his fist. When the spell was over he repeated, “We change. My falling-out with Richard was the genesis of it. When you finished the night class and he was released from prison, I began to see the man’s capabilities. I started to see him for who he really is.”
“He isn’t like this,” she said. “This is . . . evil.”
“An overused word. I believe it is much more simple than that.”
“Simple?”
“I believe Michael had found something. Discovered something. And his killer was forced to silence him. It is pure Shakespeare, to snuff the truth with the greatest silence. ‘Truth is truth, to the end of reckoning’—the reckoning has come to Jasper, Alex. Michael had fallen upon the wrong secrets.”
“Secrets about Fallows?” she asked.
“More than likely, yes.”
“I know he’d been playing the Procedure again. With Christian.”
“Yes,” Fisk said, his blind eyes moving more quickly now. “As I said to you earlier, Matthew tells me that he sees them playing it on his walks across the east quad. The students. Rudimentary versions, mostly on weekends. Nothing complex enough for Michael to be interested in. But it is here on this campus. It has spread.”
She wondered about the significance of what the dean had just said. “What does it mean?”
“It means that Richard is perhaps more connected to this college than he is letting on. And that makes him a suspect.”
Fisk slumped back in his wheelchair. His face was ashen and doughy, the bald scalp pink and irritated. Alex bid the dean good night and left the room. She no longer felt exhausted, even though it was getting late. Instead, her senses were sharp and her mind was calm, precise. She walked purposefully down the hallway and entered the library she’d been in hours earlier.
Once again she felt her way across the shelves in the weak light, searching for the modernists. Easily she retraced her steps to find Aldiss’s Ghost, the marker she had given herself to find the secret space. She pulled it off the shelf and—
The manuscript was gone.
She reached into the space and groped madly in the darkness, splayed her fingers across the dusty shelves. She ran her hands over the spines, pulling out book after book, her heart hammering and sticky sweat pooling beneath her arms. No, she thought. Please, no.
Anger. It all came out in that instant, the bitter, gnawing frustration. Michael’s murder and the task Aldiss had given her and all the rest of it.
Keller, she thought. Goddamn him.
She spun on her heel and left the room. It was pitch-black in the hallway now, and for a moment she couldn’t find her way. Her thoughts were still swimming, the fact of the manuscript being stolen blurring her vision and making her stumble into the tattered wall. So much darkness here.
A sound. A footstep behind her.
Alex turned and put her palms to the wall, bracing herself in fear.
“Hello?” she said into the shadows. “Keller, is that you?”
She listened, her pulse pounding in her jaw. Nothing.
She began to walk again but stopped. Something moved, the form of someone darting across the room at the end of the hall.
“Who is it?” she called. “I can’t see anything. I can’t—”
Again there was stillness. Damn it, Alex, you’re creeping yourself out.
She backed again into the darkness, palm over palm against the curling wallpaper, until she found her room. Then she went inside and shut the door. Locked it.
For a moment she stood there, breathing, with her back to the door. Cursing herself for being here, for putting herself into this situation.
Then she went to the bed, opened an end-table drawer, and found a pen inside. There was her copy of Christian Kane’s Barker at Play, and she put the paperback on her knees and began to write in the margins of a page what she had learned so far.
Melissa Lee. Distance from campus: lives in downstate Vermont. Motive: unclear. Still using sex as she did as a student—for power, leverage?
Frank Marsden. Distance from campus: resides mostly in California. Motive: possible dislike/jealousy of Michael Tanner, just as in night class.
Sally Tanner. Distance from campus: lives here. Motive: possibly found something of interest on her husband, something incriminating (re: Fallows?).
Lewis Prine (hasn’t arrived yet; remember to call again before sleep). Distance from campus: lives and works in upstate Vermont. Motive: connection with last existing Fallows manuscript. May be right about its existence and it being hidden in the Fisk mansion.
Christian Kane. Distance from campus: close. Motive: became involved with Michael Tanner while in the Procedure. Included a crime scene in one of his novels that matches the Dumant/Tanner scene. Seems overly willing to absolve himself from the situation.
Jacob Keller. Distance from campus: close. Motive:
She sat back and looked at what she had written. She wondered again if Aldiss was right about one of her old friends. Wondered if Keller could somehow be involved. Inexplicable, but still . . .
She went back to her notes:
Jacob Keller. Distance from campus: close. Motive: stole Fallows manuscript.
She put the pen down and looked at the six names. As she studied them a vision appeared: the crime scene photos she had seen earlier that morning. Michael’s body, broken and destroyed, the—What had Keller said? The brutality of it. The awfulness of it. And someone here, one of the people she had once trusted and studied with in the night class, might be to blame.
Almost at once exhaustion fell over her. She felt herself falling, tumbling softly down—
Another sound from the hallway. Alex sat up in bed, her senses alive now. Readied.
She stared at the door. Heard it again: a scuffling noise, the sound of someone walking. Approaching.
“Who—” Alex began, but she was cut off by a knock.
She went to it and pulled it open a crack. “Yes?”
“Hey, it’s me.” Keller.
“Tired,” she said.
“Yeah. Of course.” Disappointment in his voice. “Something came for you.”
“What?”
“Here.” He handed her something through the crack. It was an envelope, thick and chunky, nothing on the outside but ALEXANDRA SHIPLEY in a jagged, slashing hand. “There was a knock on the front door. We thought it was another reporter, so we didn’t answer. When Christian went out to smoke, he found this on the porch.”
“Thanks, Keller.”
“No problem.”
The man hesitated there at the door. She thought about letting him in, and then she remembered Peter, her boyfriend back in Cambridge. She remembered the missing manuscript.
“Good night,” she said, and closed the door.
Alex took the envelope to her bed and opened it in the pale lamplight. Tipped its contents onto the bed: a book. It was a Fallows, a first edition of The Golden Silence. She turned it around, saw the photograph of Charles Rutherford on the back.
What is this?
She opened the book and saw what was inside.
The pages had been cut out. The text had been carved into a precise shape, and an object had been placed inside the space that was left. It was a perfect fit, the gun falling out slowly into her hand when she turned the book upside down.
She had her weapon.