Later, after the badly injured Matthew Owen was removed from the building and Aldiss was taken for questioning, she and Keller sat together in a hospital room and held each other.
They did not speak at first. There was no need. Everything they might have said had been spoken.
Keller’s head was bandaged and his eyes were black, but otherwise he would be fine. For Alex there would be no lasting injuries. Frank Marsden had lost his battle in the last couple of hours, and a group of entertainment reporters scrambled up and down the hallway. Everything that had happened in the last two days at Jasper College would heal—but it would not go away. It would never go away.
She said, “I’ve always wanted to tell you something.”
Keller turned to her. He was leaning over her hospital bed, and a deep memory came to her: Iowa, morning light falling through the curtains, both of them so uncertain of what was outside those hotel walls.
“What?” he said.
“I found something. It was a message in an old book. It said that Aldiss was—”
“I know,” Keller said. “I mean I figured it out. It took me a few years, but I got there.” He smiled. “Dean Fisk—he was working with me as well.”
“Don’t look so surprised, Alex. You’re not the only hero in this room.”
She laughed, reaching out for his hand. Their easy silence descended again.
“I’m sorry,” Keller said finally. “For the manuscript. For not reaching out to you after Iowa. For—”
“Shhh. It doesn’t matter now.” She leaned against him.
“I think,” he said, “I should probably plan a road trip to Cambridge now.”
Alex nodded. “I think you should.”
Then someone knocked on the hospital door, and she turned. It was a nurse; the woman was holding an envelope.
“Professor Alex Shipley?” she asked.
“That’s me.”
The nurse gave Alex the envelope and left.
“You going to open it?” Keller asked.
Alex shrugged and tore out the note inside.
It was from Richard Aldiss. As Keller breathed softly beside her, she read.
Dearest Alexandra,
That blank space, the last piece of the puzzle, was what she did when she returned to Dumant.
I punished myself for not going to her that morning. There had been a snow, a whiteout—the roads were impassable. She and Abigail Murray returned to campus, and I waited. I had sent her, you see; had given her the information she needed. Everything—all that I had discovered on my own trip to Iowa with Benjamin Locke, all that I had learned as a scholar. Shawna Wheatley’s mind was afire. Like you, I knew that she would go.
And when she returned to Vermont she spent the night finishing her thesis. The last chapter, the identity of Paul Fallows, was so easy now. She’d discovered everything. She finished and brought the manuscript she had stolen from the house on Olive Street and dropped it off at the campus copy center. This would be her last act as a Dumant student.
The next time I saw her was in a photograph. Her face had been masked with a book. On the wall above her was a Rorschach stain. One hand grasped at nothing.
I always feared that Fallows was never really dead. It’s a fear you live with when you have come that close to evil.
Eleven years. Eleven years I waited, biding my time in that animal’s cell. I had nearly given up. Then one day a visitor arrived. A man I knew then only as a fellow scholar. Stanley Fisk brought with him a box inscribed with my name. It had been brought to Fisk by a graduate student who’d gone through my things at Dumant. The box must have arrived at my office the day I was arrested. Inside were documents, sheaves of dusty paper, detritus—and at the bottom, wrapped in brown paper, was Shawna Wheatley’s thesis. Two copies, neatly bound, with a prepaid invoice. A model of efficiency, the copy center shipped them off to the address on Shawna’s cover letter: mine.
I destroyed one copy immediately. It was exquisite, scattering pieces of Fallows over the prison yard, sending his words up in smoke, plotting my next move. The other I kept very close.
For it contained Charlie Rutherford’s confession.
And a lost Fallows.
This was my new information. My reason for teaching the night class.
Now we are here again, past and present having collided, and yet you are alive. If you don’t mind, I have a simple request for you: I would like to see you, Alex, one last time. I have something important to show you before you leave. Please.
Richard