“Why?” someone asked when Detective Black had escorted Sally out of the room. It was Matthew Owen, still standing behind Dean Fisk. The nurse looked stricken. “Why would Aldiss think that one of you—”
“Because he hates us,” Christian said. “He always did.”
“Christian,” Alex said.
“It’s true, Alex. You didn’t see it, but the rest of us did. He hated it that we were free and he lost most of his life in that prison. He wanted to punish us for that. He wanted to create this, this—dominion over us, even when the class was over. And he did just that.”
“Crazy,” Frank muttered. The others agreed.
“Maybe he’s right.”
Everyone turned to stare at Lucy Wiggins, the outsider in their group.
“I mean, the detective said that someone in this house must have shot that guy downstairs. Maybe this professor of yours knows something that we don’t.” Her eyes seemed to sparkle with the mystery, as if this were a TV movie and she the unlikely heroine.
“Or maybe this is his way of manipulating us,” Keller said.
“Go on, Mr. Keller.” Dean Fisk’s voice crept up from the shadows of the room.
“It would be just like Aldiss to turn this into one of his games. He might have been trying to turn us all against one another, to cause exactly what’s happened, just so he could sit back and watch from afar. That’s the kind of person he is.”
Alex felt a pain in her chest as Keller spoke. No, she thought. Please, not you. She wanted to say to him: Iowa was not a mistake, what we did there was not part of one of Aldiss’s games. But she could say nothing. She was frozen in fear, the locked room and the people inside churning chaotically around her like the dust that raged down from the high, dark shelves.
“But the question still remains,” Lucy went on, gaining confidence in the part of the drama she was playing. Her eyes wide, she pulled herself up to full height and intoned, “Who killed your two friends?”
They all looked at one another. For the longest time no one spoke, and when a voice did come, it belonged to Dean Fisk himself.
“I believe,” he said, “that I know the answer to that question.”