Instead she returned to Harvard and picked up the pieces of her life. Peter was gone, and the rumors were that he was seeing one of his grad students now. Alex wished him the best. She too had moved on.
Keller called on a Friday. “Summer break,” he said.
“When are you taking your road trip?”
“The last day of your term. I’ll be there then. Promise.”
She almost screamed with joy. She had missed him terribly.
* * *
The package arrived that Monday. It came in a simple manila envelope. Her name had been written on the front in Aldiss’s tight, careful hand.
The note inside read, simply, You should have come, Alexandra.
There was something else. A page from a book. Thin, grayed—it was a simple paperback page. Aldiss had X-Acto’d it out, and she stood in her bedroom holding it, her fingers visible on the other side. A name in the top right corner—Christian Kane. It was from Barker in the Storm.
There was nothing else.
“Not this time, Professor,” she said aloud. “I’m not going to play along.” She dropped the page on her bedside table.
* * *
Two days later she graded the last of her semester exams in her office and then rushed home, feeling as if she were walking on air. Just a few hours until Keller arrived.
Back home, she showered and toweled off. Afterward she walked through her cool apartment, trying to decide what to wear. Today was a fresh start, a new life. After what had happened at Jasper, after all the horrors of Matthew Owen—
No. She wouldn’t think of that madman. She sat down on the bed, let her hair down, and began to dry her roots. As she did she glanced over at the bedside table. At the page Aldiss had sent her. That mysterious page . . .
Despite herself she picked it up. Scanned it. It was nothing. Just another one of Aldiss’s games.
Barker in the Storm.
Alex read the title and as she did a memory came to her. There was something about it. Something she remembered from the Fisk mansion.
She scanned the words. Read the paragraphs, then traced her eye back and reread them. As she did a sickening feeling swept through her.
“No,” she said.
She knew what Aldiss wanted her to see. The reason he’d asked her to visit him before she left Vermont. It was a paragraph in the middle of the page:
She called the man she had once loved. He was a simple man now. He lived in an old farmhouse. Divorced, he was able to cultivate his disguise. It was the night when he prowled. He was best in the dark, when nobody could see him for who he was. A large man, hulking and strong, he had always protected her. Had almost died for her. But what she did not know was that he was part of the game just like the rest of them. He had always been part of the game, and that night he planned to show her who he really was. “When can we see each other?” she asked him. “Soon,” he said. “Promise.”
Letting the towel drop, Alex stood. She backed into the corner, fear roiling through her. She tried to remember what Christian had said to her that night at the Fisk mansion. What he’d said about his work, his latest book.
I plagiarized from Fallows. In my last novel, Barker in the Storm. Not word for word, nothing like that. I simply stole his style, his rhythm. Maybe I had this crazy notion that people would be playing the Procedure to my novels, I don’t know.
She took a step toward the door but stopped. Something moved outside, shifted against her bedroom window. She thought of Aldiss, of her first meeting with him. Of how adamant he had been that someone from the night class had turned. That one of her friends was responsible for what had happened.
Playing the Procedure to my novels . . .
The page trembled in her hand. Alex stepped back. She was against the wall now. Her blood ran cold.
The doorbell rang.