“I got the idea from Lydia Rutherford,” Keller explained.
They were in a lonely Main Street diner, a few suspicious regulars bellied up to the bar, waxing poetic about the cold. A waitress whisked by and refilled their drinks, hovered there for a moment. “Studying on a Friday night?” she asked.
Alex looked up at the woman. Said, “If we don’t finish this lesson, then a man in prison for murder is going to be really disappointed with us.”
The waitress shook her head disapprovingly. Then she was gone and Alex turned back to Keller.
They had come from Lydia Rutherford’s to the diner, hunger having been temporarily eclipsed by the shocking image of a Charlie Rutherford who was identical to the photo Keller had received. Someone had been pointing them toward Charlie even then. “It’s him, Alex,” Keller had said breathlessly as she drove them away from the house. “Holyfuckingcrap it’s him.”
Now they ate burnt cheeseburgers and sucked at chocolate milkshakes, and Keller reached into his pack and removed a book. It was Fallows’s The Golden Silence. As Alex finished off her burger, he went through the pages, making tick marks in the margins.
“It was something she said back there,” he said. “Something about Charlie.”
Then he was flipping through the text. The Golden Silence was the second of Fallows’s novels, the book that had really begun the search. He gestured for Alex and she scooted into the booth with him. It had been hours since she’d been this close to him, and she wanted to stop, slow the scene down so she could just be with him. Alone, relaxed. But there was no time—in less than two days they would be on their way back to Vermont, and what they’d found in that house had changed everything. The two leaned over the book, looking down into the page as if it were a well.
“The Golden Silence is about many things,” Keller explained to her. “We never got to it in the night class, but I did.”
“You what?”
“I cheated, Alex. I read on.”
“Show-off.” Alex nudged him with an elbow. “What’s it about?”
“Well, it’s a story about Iowa, for one. The Coil was a New York novel, but this book is about here. Where we’re sitting now.”
“Page’s Diner?” asked Alex playfully.
Keller made a face. “You can tell Fallows loved his home. Even if Rutherford is not Fallows, I still think we’re dealing with an Iowan.”
“Go on.”
“The Golden Silence is a story about a man in prison.”
Alex broke away from the text and craned her neck to look at Keller. “A what?”
“Yeah, I know. Right up Aldiss’s alley. But this guy escapes.” He paused, looking down at the book as if its very existence troubled him. “He’s in there because of something. Something happened a long time ago. A crime. But it’s never explained what this crime is. It’s something awful. A murder, maybe—I don’t know. Fallows is intentionally trying to throw the reader off. This thing is like Finnegans Wake on steroids.”
“And the main character is put in prison,” Alex said, guiding him back.
“Yes. But, like I said, he escapes. He pretends to be someone else and then—this is strange, Alex. Really damn strange. People start believing him.”
“He tells them he’s another man. He starts using this alias. First on his cellmate, and then on the guards. And slowly . . . well, it’s like he hypnotizes them. They just start believing that he’s a different man. Surrealism, of course—but Fallows was after something else with this. The Golden Silence has all these trapdoors, these broken passageways. In a lot of ways the book is this house of mirrors. But it’s also poetic and, in its own way, sad.”
“What happens to him when he gets out?”
“Not much,” Keller said. “He lives the rest of his life. He writes and reads poetry. That part is nonessential. What is essential, and what made me think about the book tonight when we were at that house on Olive Street, is this.”
And then he moved his arm and showed her the page he had marked. Alex saw his notations at the edges of the text. But she could make sense of none of it—at least not yet.
“What is it?”
“It’s the connection,” said Keller, as if it were all right there, on that ink-heavy page under his heavy right arm. “In this scene he’s talking to someone in the prison. Telling them this false story about his identity, this lie about who he is. A throwaway conversation, you think. But . . .”
“What is it, Keller?” Alex urged.
“See for yourself.”
He turned the book around, and Alex scooted out of the booth so that she could get right above the page. She began to read the lines Keller had highlighted.
The prisoner looked into the shadows. The guard stood outside his cell, looking in at him. The guard’s eyes glowed. Everything was dark. These, the prisoner thought, these feral beasts who kept him here. He couldn’t wait to spring himself, to free himself from this . . .
“Where did you grow up, prisoner?” the guard asked.
“Iowa,” he said. “In its very heart.”
“And your youth?”
“Troubled.”
The guard nodded. He had expected this, was used to being around torn and broken men. Somewhere deep in the prison a man screamed.
“And your first crime?” the guard said, tapping a finger on the cold steel bar. “Your baptism?”
“Theft,” the prisoner said slowly. “I stole books.”
The guard smiled, teeth parting slightly. He was interested now. This man, this prisoner—he wasn’t like the rest.
“And what did you say your name was?” the guard asked.
The prisoner looked at him. Gauged him. Readied himself for the lie, the tale. As always, his heart grew and the golden silence descended. He was ready. “My name,” he said, “is Morrow. Dr. Isaac Morrow.”
She read the section twice, then sat back, slumped down beside Keller in the booth, and turned it over in her mind. What’s happening? she thought. What’s he doing to us?
“I don’t understand it, Keller.”
“Lydia Rutherford,” he said. “She used that name tonight. Dr. Morrow. She said it plain as day, Alex. We both heard it.”
Alex stared forward. The diner had fallen away. “Why would she do that?”
“I have no idea. My only thought is Lydia Rutherford is in on it somehow. She’s trying to tell us something without telling us.”
The last stragglers were leaving the restaurant, looking at the two college kids as if they were beings from another planet. Alex felt unmoored, rattled loose—again she wanted to move closer to Keller. Take comfort in his warmth, his strength. She moved her arm so that it touched his.
“The timing,” she said finally.
Keller looked up. “What about it?”
She reached across and took his pencil, made a notation on a napkin. “Fallows wrote The Golden Silence in what year?”
Keller turned hurriedly to the front of the book, found the copyright date. “Seventy-five,” he said. She scribbled the year.
“Charlie Rutherford Jr. would have to be how old?”
“Wait, I remember. Lydia said he was nine in ’74, when his father died.”
“That means he was born in the midsixties. And she told us Dr. Morrow cured him after her husband died. If Charles Rutherford is Fallows, how could he have known about Morrow?”
Keller said nothing. He kept his eyes down, staring at the napkin Alex had just written on as if it might tell him a secret. Reveal something. Then he sat up, his eyes opening wide. He closed the book with a heavy thump.
“Maybe it doesn’t have anything to do with any of that.”
Alex blinked. “What are you talking about?”