“Deanna Ward?” she asked, as if it was part of the Cale cultural mythology, as if she had said the name a thousand times before. It implied something larger, an entire multitudinous history in itself.

“Yes,” said Brian.

“You would want to talk to Bethany Cavendish. She was kin to Deanna. She’ll be in room 213 after school lets out.”

Brian waited until the final bell rang at 2:15 p.m. and then he went upstairs to see Bethany Cavendish. She was a short, thin, masculine woman. He found her grading papers in a science room. She was wearing a Cale Blue Hens shirt that had been chemical stained in several spots, and her lab goggles were pushed up into her short, spiky hair. When Brian shook her hand, the woman gripped hard and pumped.

“Deanna was in trouble a lot,” Bethany said when they were sitting. They sat at one of the desks beside a window. “I had to go down to Mr. Phillips’s almost every week and talk them out of expelling her. I wouldn’t have done that if I didn’t love her momma, Wendy. Such a sweet woman. My cousin, you know. One of the only Cavendishes who came back to Cale. I felt so sorry for her, having to put up with Deanna and that man of hers at the same time.”

She said it bluntly, almost spitting the word at Brian: man.

“Deanna disappeared on August first. This was twenty years ago now, back in ’eighty-six. Everybody thought she’d run off and got married to Daniel Jones. They were both in a funny kind of love. Danny was older, and Deanna had fallen for him hard. I mean, like, hard. I had her in Chemistry II that semester, and all her day would consist of was doodling Danny’s name all over her notebooks and skin. She would leave school like a human mural, all hearts and ‘4evers’ and declarations of undying love. It was disturbing to watch, really. It was obsession more than anything.”

“They thought Danny had something to do with it at first, didn’t they?” Brian asked.

“At first. But we all knew. We all knew who was responsible.”

“Her father?” Brian asked.

“Uh-huh. Star. That was Deanna’s daddy. He was accused of that crime out in New Mexico. They thought he’d shot a man and dumped him out in the desert. He probably did, knowing Star. He started out as Stardust, you know, then he became Star. He was into astronomy, telescopes and all that. He got interested in how what we’re seeing when we look up could be the beginning of the universe.”

“The Big Bang,” Brian said.

“He even had stars custom painted on his bike, which cost him and Wendy a pretty penny they didn’t have. He was tatted up with the universe, the whole solar system sketched and labeled on his back and arms. She told me that tattoo had cost almost two thousand dollars. I let him borrow some of my equipment one time, some cheap telescopes I had, and of course he never brought them back. That’s the way he was.”

“Did he kill the man you talked about? In New Mexico?”

“I believe so. No, let me rephrase that: I know so. Star was as dangerous as they come. I have no idea what sweet Wendy was doing with him. He’d probably taken her out on his bike one night and named all the constellations, and she thought he was something. That’s how it always goes in Cale. These girls, smart as tacks and pretty as they come, get swept under by these no-count boys. That’s the legacy of this town. Nothing else to do here, I guess, except run off with some crazy. She should have stayed at Winchester when she was there, but of course she got pregnant and dropped out.”

“She was a student at Winchester?”

“Should have been class of ’sixty-six, but it never turned out like that. She got pregnant and moved out here to Cale, and the rest is…”

“Yes,” Brian said, leading her.

“Anyway, they were all over Star for his New Mexico stuff. I heard they almost had that murder pinned on him, but then Deanna ran off. And suddenly all of Cale was in a frenzy, and we sort of forgot about Star. I never forgot about him, though. I always thought he had killed that girl and hid her somewhere out on his property.”

“His own daughter.” Brian said it more to himself than to Bethany Cavendish. He was thinking of Polly’s father, of Mary Butler’s wild theory. He wondered now if Mary was right.

“When I told anybody this,” the teacher said, “they looked at me like I was sick. It almost goes beyond the human capacity to understand, how a father would kill his own daughter and hide the body. But people don’t know the whole story. This was not your normal, run-of-the-mill dude. He was bitter to the core. Evil. I wouldn’t have put anything past him. Not anything.

“And when Danny came back from Cincinnati without Deanna, it turned into a full-fledged crisis in Cale. The Indianapolis Star ran a front-page story about it. There was pressure on the sheriff to make an arrest, even if Deanna was still missing, and so they focused on Star. He admitted to something when they brought him in as a suspect for the New Mexico shooting, something about having a girl that he wanted to have taken off his hands. This is the way the Creeps were with girls: they used them, beat them, spit on them, and just left them damaged by the side of the road somewhere. This is how it was with Wendy. For all intents and purposes, Star had left her. She was back there in that old crappy house off During Street, taking care of the two little ones, mourning Deanna.”

During Street, he thought. Where Polly lived. Suddenly the two narratives were running perfectly together, and Brian knew he’d come to the right place. He was beginning to see what Professor Williams was doing: leading them to Deanna Ward’s killer by creating this game-this logic puzzle-starring a girl called Polly. But why? There is no logic, Brian reminded himself. Only randomness.

“I went to see her one day. She was broken up by it. Assaulted. A beaten woman. But Wendy wouldn’t give Star up. I pressed her on that. I wanted her to say that he did it, you know, to have it all over with. But she wouldn’t. She said she was horrified at the thought. She told me that Star had some flaws but he wasn’t as bad as all of us thought.”

“The police were on him, though,” Brian interjected. “They tailed him out to Bell City.”

“Yes. The cops followed Star. And I guess they found this little girl. He was keeping her out in Bell City in this trailer, and they raided it and arrested Star, and thinking the girl was Deanna, they took her back to Wendy. But it wasn’t the right girl. I never could figure that, how the police could do something so stupid. I talked to a newspaper writer about it, a few years ago. Nick Bourdoix. He ate breakfast at the McDonald’s every morning, and I finally got up the nerve to talk to him.”

Nick Bourdoix. Brian couldn’t remember where he’d heard that name, but it was familiar.

“Bourdoix said that the girl had been dressed up to look like Deanna. Same hair color. Same clothes. Said she’d been scripted into answering their questions. She lived with her aunt and uncle in Bell City, and police were on those two for a while. Thought they’d been coaching this girl, you know. When the cops asked the girl if she was Deanna, she’d said she was. They never knew what it meant. I never did, either.”

“She said she was Deanna?”

“That’s how I heard it. She told them she was Deanna, she looked like Deanna, and so obviously they thought…” She stopped speaking. She took off her glasses and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “But still, you can’t do that. You can’t make mistakes like that. It’s just inhuman.”

“What happened to Star?” Brian asked.

“They had to let him go, of course. They had nothing on him. He and Wendy and the two boys moved out to San Francisco, where his family’s from. And Deanna was never found. I kept telling them: I said, ‘Dig around the old house on During Street, down by the river. She’s there somewhere, in that field, out by where he kept all the parts of his old motorcycles.’ There’s no doubt in my mind that she’s there.”