“I don’t understand, Dean Fisk. What did you lie about?”
The dean shifted his weight. His eyes searched her, slid across the small bedroom’s only window. The Fallows book with the object hidden inside was on the nightstand, but she made no move to hide it now.
“I wanted Fallows,” the old man said. “I wanted him so badly . . .”
Colder now: “What did you do?”
“I was never sure about Richard.”
Alex sat back on the bed, the dean’s words tearing through her.
“I always had reservations about his involvement in the Dumant murders. Always.”
“But when I visited you during the class you said—”
“I know what I told you,” Fisk said curtly. “But I went along with Richard’s scheme because I needed his information. I wanted Fallows found and the mystery solved. I needed it to end.” Fisk’s eyes closed, as if he was reliving an awful memory. “I went to visit him once at Rock Mountain. He told me about a class he’d been thinking about, and I paid off the board of trustees at Jasper to make it happen. I had so much power at this college that no one challenged me. The next time I returned to the prison Richard told me about a book, about writing a message there . . .”
“The part about his innocence in the book you found, Alex—that was my doing. I wanted to believe it was true, but Richard never flatly denied the murders. Not really. He told me how to do my part, told me that one student would be ‘chosen’—that’s the word he used—from the class to be our eyes and ears, but he never talked about his innocence. It was all about the search for Fallows. In fact he never mentioned Dumant University or those two dead graduate students. Not ever.”
Alex shivered. She looked again to the window, saw the spires of the college in the hazy distance. “Do you think he’s coming after us, Dean Fisk?”
The old man looked at her, seemed to focus on her for the first time. Then he said, “I do. I’m sorry, Alex, but I think I may have led you right into his trap.”
* * *
At 10:00 p.m., Alex’s phone rang. She removed it from her bag and looked at the display. Peter. Damn it. She looked at it, considering. She didn’t answer.
Instead she went out to find Keller.
The house was dark, the only sound the indistinct patter of Black and his men on the bottom level of the mansion. She wondered where Lewis Prine’s body had been taken, wondered what he had seen in his last moments. If Aldiss had surprised him or if the two had spoken before Lewis was killed.
Trust me, she thought. Don’t you trust me?
She shook the thought and went on.
When she got to Keller’s door she stopped. Someone moved off to her right.
She looked up and saw Frank Marsden approaching her.
“Frank.”
“They can’t trap us here, Alex,” the man said urgently, a waver in his voice that suggested he might be cracking. “We aren’t fucking animals.”
“Aldiss will be found soon and—”
“No, to hell with that. I’m leaving as soon as I can. Lucy and I have to get back to a shoot. We don’t have time for this bullshit. If I stay in this house much longer I’m going to go insane and . . .” The man shook his head as if to clear a horrible image and continued up the hall. Alex entered Keller’s room.
He was perched on a stool on the far side of the room, his wide back to the door. Even here, at this late hour, Alex could sense how awake he was, how ready.
“Do you remember when we found Fallows?” she asked. Her eyes were getting heavy and the silence of the house was weighing on her.
“I remember,” he said. “We shouldn’t have even been in Iowa.”
“But we went, and we found what we were looking for. We found out who he really was.”
“A lot of good it did us.”
She stared at the man, at the night table beside him. No sign of the manuscript there.
“What does it feel like?” she asked.
“It . . .”
“Killing someone?”
He stared at her. “You don’t want to know.”
“I do, Keller. I want to know if I could do it. If I had to.”
“You won’t have to.”
He sat down at the foot of the bed, box springs groaning beneath him. An image flashed: the boy in the hotel room the night before everything happened in Iowa, she lying beside him, the shape of her body tucked into his.
There was a quick snap. Alex’s eyes jumped to the window, where one of the beech limbs nicked against the pane. When she refocused, she heard Keller’s voice in the closed room.
“I burned it,” he said.
“You what?”
“I burned the manuscript, Alex. Tossed it in one of the fireplaces and watched it go up in smoke. But I kept one page. I wanted you to see. I wanted you to . . . to know that I was right. That destroying it was the only way. That manuscript would have done nothing but harm. It would have pulled you under.”
She glared at him. Again she thought of the boy he had been, of what he had done in Iowa. For her; everything he had done, all those irrational decisions he’d made during at the end of the night class, had been to protect her. But Alex felt as if this act erased all of that. Obliterated it. She hated him now with a precision she had never known. Standing there, in that cold room with him, a thought rushed through her. It came black and complete, like a door slammed shut: I could kill him.
“Four years,” she growled. “Four years I’ve searched for that manuscript and you destroy it? This is just like you, Keller. Take what we did in Iowa, all we accomplished in the night class, and throw it away. Is this what you did with me? With us? Did you just toss us into some old fireplace too and move on with your life?”
“Maybe I did. And maybe it was best for both of us.”
There was a feeling inside her of something coming loose, of the tether unraveling. She moved toward him. Keller reacted fast, catching her by the arms and restraining her. They were inches away from each other; she could taste his breath, could see the flare and hold of his pupils. You bastard. You coward.
“I was protecting you,” he said, his voice like a lash. “Trust me: you didn’t want to read it. Didn’t want to know what Fallows was doing with that book.”
She looked at him. “And did you?” she asked. “Read it?”
Almost imperceptibly, he nodded.
“Was it a Fallows?”
“Yes.”
Rage. She felt it again, tasted it like acid on her tongue. She heard herself scream, the sound somehow not of her but primal, terrible. Again she pushed against him, dug her nails deep into the skin of his palms. When she spoke, her voice was tight, ugly. “What was it about, Keller? Or is that another of your secrets?”
At first he said nothing. The branch scratched against the glass beside them; his heart fluttered in his wrists like a thread being unwound. They stood there, locked together in a kind of frozen dance. When he spoke, his voice was full of pity. She had heard it before: it was the voice Keller used when they were students to talk about Aldiss.
“It was about us,” he said.
She blinked. “I don’t know what you’re saying, Keller.”
“It was about what’s happening here, Alex. About this house, these murders. The novel was . . . it was a kind of locked-room mystery. It was about a group of old friends who come together, and each of them gets plucked off the wire. One by one by one.”
She stared into his face, trying to find the words. To understand what it was he was telling her.
I’m sorry, Alex, but I think I may have led you right into his trap.
“Are you saying Fallows is behind all this?” she asked. “Fallows is dead, Keller. You know that as well as I do.”
Keller flinched. Then he said, “Let me show you.”
At first she didn’t budge. She held him, pulled at him with all the strength she could muster. But then she relented. By degrees she pulled away until he was free, massaging his palms where she had torn into him. I have to see, she thought. If I’m ever going to forgive myself for letting him find the manuscript, then I’ve got to see what he kept.
Cautiously, she backed away. Keller turned around and went to a small writing table in the corner of the room. He opened a drawer and removed something. It was a yellowed sheet of paper. When he held it up for her to see, the light shot through, revealing unbroken, heavily struck-through typefont. He held the page at a distance, as if it might infect him.
“One page,” he repeated. “It’s all that’s left.”
He placed it on the dresser beside her. In the half-light, Alex read.
There were nine of them. His job now was to bring them all together. But how?
This question had consumed him for the last few months. He waited on some kind of special knowledge—a secret whispered by a passing stranger, a note handed to him at the library where he spent his evenings—that would explain how it could be done. Instead there was nothing but endless days of confusion, impotent nights where he lay in a sweat and turned the plan over in his mind. And then, almost by accident, it came to him. They could all return to mourn. Perhaps he had been going backward, taking his plan from the end and trying to weave it through the needle’s eye. Here was the way: give them a reason to come back. And suddenly he knew how; stuck there in his darker nature like a shard of black glass was the first act. One of them would die—a suicide, perhaps, so there could be no questions about him—and then he could truly begin. The eight would inevitably return to the old house and he would be there, waiting for them. Observing.
Alex read the page, and then a second time. She traced the bubbled type with her finger. Even the words, the way they were chipped and broken and hanging apart like a busted hinge—tilted e’s, frantic and struck-through lines—held an intensity. A pulse. It’s Fallows.
“The end,” she said then, her voice a hollow croak.
Slowly, Keller looked up.
“How does it end?”
He stared at her as if trying to find the words, to put this awful thing into some kind of context. “They . . .”
“Tell me, Keller.”
“They all die. All of them except one.”
She waited for him to continue. It was the last thing she wanted to hear, but she couldn’t turn away. Not now.
“It was Fallows himself, Alex. The last line of that”—he made a face as if he’d just tasted something awful—“goddamned thing was that Fallows lived. The author himself is the narrator. He killed them all and made it out of the old house. Aldiss must have gotten to the manuscript. Re-created it. Put the game into motion”
It hit her in the gut. She drew back, nearly doubled over. The game. Aldiss is the one. Aldiss was there all along. Aldiss created the cyndrot.
But then she looked up at Keller. She saw him dropping the manuscript into the fire, watching it burn, the paper falling into shreds and the flames licking in his eyes. She saw him smile.
“You’re lying,” she said.
Keller blinked. He looked like he’d been slapped.
“This is all bullshit. I don’t believe a word you’re saying.” He reached out for her, and she yanked her hand away. “Don’t you dare or I’ll scream. I’ll fucking scream for them and tell them that you’re the one who did this. That you’re the reason we’re all trapped in this house.”
But she was walking away, leaving the room. Out in the hallway now, her anger disorienting her, she saw the form of a man standing on the other side of the hall, hidden in shadow. It was Frank again.
“You scared the hell out of me,” she said.
The man said nothing. He was looking out a porthole window down onto the front lawn. Alex stepped out into the hall and Frank still didn’t move. He stood there, leaning against the wall and looking outside—
Alex stopped.
She stared at the man.
Thought, No.
She looked closer. Noticed the unnatural way his head was bent, how his chin cocked at a strange angle. Then she saw something glisten in the window, the thing catching the moonlight and running upward like a spider’s web. And Alex followed the thing up, up, to the top edge of the porthole that had been pushed inward. Saw a wire anchored there, yanked taut to the windowpane.