The two students drove into Hamlet, Iowa, at twilight.
Keller had taken the wheel of the Mazda because he was afraid that Alex would wreck it. But she didn’t mind. She wanted to see the landscape. Wanted to experience the place as Richard Aldiss had years ago, to know it as he had.
Hamlet was a two-stoplight town. The boundaries of the place were flat, the frameless geography running away into the pink sky like the top of a table. An ordinary downtown, sections of cubes abutting one another, fissured pavement and a group of old men sitting on a bench outside an abandoned building. Cars edged down Main Street on their way to the end of town, where better things must have been going on.
“Fucking Iowa,” Keller said.
“Yeah,” she agreed.
They crept on. Their plan was that they didn’t have a plan. At least not yet. Keller had agreed with her that Aldiss had indeed sent them here. The clue inside The Coil, the strange photograph Keller had been given, and the fact that the two Dumant victims had been here not long before they were murdered—all of it suggested this was the heart of the professor’s literary mystery. “Let’s go,” Keller had said that morning. “Let’s go find Fallows.”
Now he drove them past the cubes and they were at the fringe of town, dead brown cornfields stretching away into the distance on either side of the rental car. The sky at this hour seemed to be on fire. Alex thought, That? That was it? She looked out the car’s window to hide her disappointment.
But what had she expected? What had she really hoped to find in this place?
Don’t give up, she reminded herself. They were here. The Dumant killer’s two victims drove down this same street.
This was where the two mysteries had to come together. In Hamlet they would discover Fallows’s identity and exonerate Aldiss for the crimes he did not commit. It was what she had been preparing for since finding the book in the Fisk Library. This was the end.
“Turn around,” she said to Keller now. “I want to go back through.”
“You what?”
“I want to see the town again.”
So he spun the car around right in the middle of the barren highway, and again Alex studied the downtown. The buildings, split and cleaved, and the old men, who stared at them a little longer this time. She marveled at the emptiness of the place, the absolute deadness of it.
“Where now?” asked Keller. There was fatigue in his voice.
“Now we go find him,” Alex said. “We go to Olive Street.”
* * *
It didn’t take them long to find the Rutherford house.
Olive Street ran parallel to Main. The drive there took them four minutes. It was a picket-fence neighborhood, clumps of melting snow pushed off the road, two cars in each driveway. A pack of boys rode past them on bicycles, staring suspiciously inside the car.
“Where the hell is it?” Keller asked, scanning the addresses on the eaves of the houses.
“Here,” Alex answered. She pointed to a woman walking down the street, her head down to stave the wind. Keller pulled over and Alex rolled down the window.
“Excuse me,” she called. The woman stopped, warily, her eyes jumping from face to face. “We were wondering if you could tell us where Charles Rutherford lived.”
The woman relaxed. Clearly this was a question she was used to being asked. She removed a mittened hand from a pocket. “There,” she said, pointing to a redbrick house on the corner. “His widow still lives there. But . . .”
“What is it?” Alex asked.
“You look like students.”
“We are.”
The woman made a face. “Lydia doesn’t care for students.”
“Why not?” asked Alex.
“It’s the house. They believe . . . the students think something happened in that house a long time ago.”
Alex waited.
“But you two look sweet. Maybe she’ll talk to you if you don’t bring him up.”
“Him?”
“The writer. That Paul Fallows. That’s why she distrusts students—that’s all they want to talk about. They’re never interested in her life or how Charlie is doing.”
“Charlie,” Alex said. “You mean her husband?”
“No, of course not. Mr. Rutherford has been dead for years. I’m talking about her son.”
* * *
The house was tiny. It was a throwback even on the block, an antique. The brick had faded, the shutters were cracked, and a ragged American flag snapped in the wind. A fence of tall hedges loomed up outside the front door, perhaps to keep the Fallows scholars at a distance. Alex looked at the place and once again felt nothing; no tinge of knowledge, no whine of electricity. For the first time she wondered if this was truly where Aldiss wanted them to be.
“Doesn’t look the least bit spooky,” Keller said.
“What’d you expect?” she asked. “A haunted house?”
“Obviously.”
They watched from the curb. Nothing moved inside, no one passed across the wide front window. The house was the very same one Charles Rutherford had died in, the same one Aldiss and his mentor, Benjamin Locke, had come to when they’d made this same trip. Thinking of Aldiss, she felt the first spark. He was here.
They approached the front door. Alex stopped and let Keller walk up the steps of the porch between the hedges; she felt that he should be the one to greet the widow. He was better at this sort of thing than she was.
Keller knocked and the two waited, listening. Movement from inside, and then the door dragged open and a woman stood before them. She was at least fifty-five, her face wrinkled and sagging. Yet there was something alive about her, something that suggested a former beauty.
“Mrs. Rutherford?” Keller asked.
“Yes?”
“We’re . . . we just wanted to, um . . .”
The woman eyed the boy, leaning against the frame of the door.
“We wanted to . . .”
“What my friend is saying,” Alex said, stepping forward, “is that we wanted to speak to you about your son.”
Something changed in the woman’s eyes. “Charlie?”
She and Rutherford had a son, a young boy who was very ill.
“That’s right,” Alex went on, so perfect with her lie that she surprised even herself. But she knew these lines, this script—Aldiss had given it to her in an early lecture. “We heard about his illness in an article we read in school and we wanted to see how he was doing. He still lives here with you, doesn’t he?”
“Yes,” the woman said. “He has his own room upstairs. Where did you say you were from?”
“Vermont,” Alex said.
“And you’ve come all this way to . . .”
“We really do think Charlie has an amazing story.”
What are you doing, Alex? This is something Aldiss would do. We shouldn’t be—
But Lydia Rutherford was moving out of the way, and Keller was pushing inside the small house. Alex had no choice but to follow.
* * *
“My husband died in 1974,” the woman said when they were all in the kitchen. “Charles Jr. was nine. He grew up without a father. His condition made it that much more difficult. But we made it—somehow we made it.”
“Your husband,” Keller said. “What did he do?”
“A salesman,” Lydia said. “He sold encyclopedias door to door. We think that’s what killed him. He exhausted himself. He wanted to work up to the main office one day, get up there with the suits. He just ignored the symptoms. Died right there on the front porch. I never remarried.”
The woman’s eyes drifted away.
“Sometimes people like you come here,” she went on.
“Like us?” Keller asked.
“University students. They call themselves scholars. They think . . . this is going to sound crazy.”
“Not at all.”
“They think my Charles was a famous writer. That he wrote these novels under a different name. That he was this—what is it called? A ghostwriter. It’s all this crazy game to them. But some of them are so adamant. They used to take pictures of our house from the street. There was even a couple who got married on our lawn once. We were going to move—my sister lives in Des Moines. But we never did. Charlie loves it here, and the neighborhood has always been so forgiving of his problems.”
His problems, Alex thought. What’s wrong with her son? What kept this woman here, alone, all this time?
“He used to be much worse,” Lydia went on. “He used to be so angry. Some people in the neighborhood think he still is. But I know the truth. I know how much better Charlie is than before.” The woman paused and Alex studied her. What happened to her? What is she protecting? “Charlie’s father wanted to institutionalize him. He knew there was something . . . different about our son. And, well, I’m not proud of this, but we sent him to a home.” The woman blanched. “I was weak, and Charles was very firm about these things. Then, when he died . . .” She trailed off. “It was a miracle. Dr. Morrow changed Charlie into the man he is today. He saved my son.”
There was a sound from behind them, the sound like the coo of a small child.
“There’s Charlie now,” Lydia Rutherford said softly. “I’ll tell him he has company.”
The woman left the kitchen. The two students sat around a small dinner table, neither of them saying a word. In the next room Alex heard muffled talk, the widow’s feminine trill, and then a long silence.
“They’re going to find out about us,” Alex whispered. “She’s going to catch on. It’s only a matter of time.”
“You lied to her,” Keller hissed. “You got us into this.”
“I didn’t know that she would actually—”
Footsteps approaching. Alex sat up and folded her hands on her lap.
“He’s ready to see you now,” came the woman’s voice at her back.
They went into the living room. It was semidark, just a small lamp spilling light into the room. A man sat in a recliner, rocking gently, his eyes straight ahead.
“Charlie hates the light,” Lydia Rutherford whispered. “Always has.” Then to her son, in a voice that suggested the man may be hard of hearing: “Charlie, here are your guests. They’ve come all the way from Vermont. They read about you at their school. About you and Dr. Morrow.” She looked expectant.
The son turned to face them, and Alex drew in a sharp breath.
She was looking at the photograph on the back of the Fallows novels. She had finally found the man in the dark suit.