“The house is still out there.” It wasn’t a question. He was thinking of Williams’s transparencies, of Polly’s house. Williams had been there to take those pictures. Brian thought about driving by Deanna Ward’s house to see it for himself.
“I drive by it sometimes. Think about getting out and poking around. A family lives there now, an elderly couple. The Collinses. I knocked on the door one day and they let me in. I didn’t tell them what I was there for, and they didn’t ask. I guess they were just happy to have somebody to talk to. I didn’t tell them the history of that place, about the girl who had gone missing. I suppose they knew. We just talked, like me and you are doing right now, but the whole time I was wondering how I could get outside and dig up their field.”
“Are they still living there?”
“I don’t know. That was five years ago. I still think about her. And Wendy, too. There was a rumor a few years ago that Deanna had been found dead out in California. But it wasn’t true. Just kids spreading tales. I fantasize sometimes-that she’s still out there, that Wendy will come back to Cale and buy her mother’s old house. With what money, I don’t know. But I envision it, the mother and the girl living out there so happy, with the past all behind them.”
Bethany Cavendish stopped speaking again. Her hands were shaking, her rings scuffing the table a bit. She looked away, out the window and down to the football field, where the team was hitting, forming lines and rushing across and knocking each other flat to the ground.
“Is this for the school newspaper?” she asked.
Brian told her that he was writing a paper on unsolved crimes.
“They come over here sometimes,” she said. “Students from Winchester. They’re interested in it. I guess in the fact that it’s unsolved. They want answers to everything, as if there are answers to everything. You young idealists. I know: I believed the world was perfectly rational when I was young, when Wendy and I were students at Winchester. We commuted every Tuesday and Thursday night in her daddy’s old Chevrolet.” Brian tried to imagine this woman at Winchester, walking over the viaduct, partying on Up Campus. He couldn’t. “There was that book that one of their professors wrote a few years ago.”
“Book?”
“Yeah, some true-crime nonsense. It made him a lot of money, though, I guess. It was called A Disappearance in the Fields. ‘The Fields’ referring to, I suppose, cornfields. I don’t know. It was all a shot at Cale, at how backward we are. I thought it was damn insulting, but it got everybody interested in Deanna again. He came to Cale High to speak. This funny man who looked like an insurance salesman.”
“What was his name?” asked Brian, thinking, Actors. Actors. His heart felt squeezed, tightened and strummed like a rubber band.
“Williams, I believe. Leon Williams. He’s still teaching over there as far as I know. I heard they reprimanded him for the book, though. A good Presbyterian school having a professor who is interested in the abduction of young girls is a no-no, I suppose. I heard he was planning a follow-up to A Disappearance in the Fields-some new information or something. But that was three or four years ago and a book never came.”
He’s planning a follow-up, Brian thought. Some new information.
“I tried to get into contact with him. Wrote him an e-mail telling him about the stretch of dirt over at During Street, but he never responded. Never even sent me a thank-you note for my information.”
“He’s probably busy,” said Brian sarcastically.
“Yeah. Anyway, you should check out the book sometime. He knew a lot more than I know about Deanna, that’s for sure. The details. The sights and sounds. It was almost like-you’re going to think this is crazy, but it was like this guy, this professor-it was like he was there.”
21
Williams sent the next clue early this time, on Monday afternoon, two hours before Logic and Reasoning 204 began.
Motive
Whenever one is attempting to solve a crime, one of the first questions that must be asked is this: What was the motive of your suspect? Motive asks the fundamental question, Why? Because it is not enough to suspect someone of committing the crime; in a court of law there has to be a clear and identifiable motive that suggests-either implicitly or explicitly-why this person is the culprit. In the disappearance of Polly, there are five main suspects that we have encountered along the way: Mike, the abusive boyfriend; Pig, the protective father figure; Eli, Polly’s biological father; Trippy, the boyfriend of Polly’s friend Nicole; and the man who approached Eli at the elementary school, the vindictive father. Let’s look now at the possible motives for each man.
MIKE: We can say without any hesitation that Mike was abusive toward Polly. He hit her on more than one occasion, and the police had to investigate a domestic disturbance once at Mike’s apartment in Needlebush. Mike’s motive is clear: he is obsessive about Polly. Polly is going away to Grady Tech in the fall, and Mike knows that he is going to lose her. If he can’t have her, then nobody should. He has been heard in town talking about what a “bitch” Polly is. He has been threatened by Pig at Polly’s going-away party, and everyone assumes that Pig has warned Mike to stay away from her. Mike is a loose cannon. He drinks too much, smokes too much dope, is finding himself losing control in the weeks leading up to Polly’s leaving.
PIG: Pig’s motive is less clear than Mike’s, of course, but there are still some inconsistencies of character that could be investigated. First, Pig is almost forty years old. He considers himself a father type to Polly, but many have observed that Pig’s relationship with Polly borders on the unhealthy. Pig has not dated a woman for over a year, and many of his closest friends assume that he is waiting for Mike to step out of the picture so that he can have Polly. Because you have been told that Polly is to be murdered in the next two weeks, you know that if Pig has abducted her then his incentive to do so has to be malevolent-as does his motive. One theory is this: Pig feels that Polly will never give up Mike. He is tired of waiting for her to come to a decision, tired of seeing her be harmed. In his mind, Polly is harming herself with her indecision. Pig has a criminal record that is at least as long as Mike’s, and there are more violent marks in his record. He is quick with his temper. Perhaps he has abducted Polly and, in a fit of jealous rage, has demanded that she leave Mike. Perhaps Polly has refused to do this, and so Pig has given her an ultimatum. An ultimatum that will run out when the term ends next Wednesday. Nine days.
ELI: Eli is the most mysterious of our characters. He seems like the perfect family man: his wife has left him for a West Coast artist, and he has taken on the challenge of raising a teenage girl on his own. We know that he has threatened Mike in the past, so he is aware of the disputes between the lovers. We also know that Eli was waiting for Polly to return from the party, and that when she went to sleep he carried her to bed. Eli was the last person to see Polly before she was abducted. A motive here could be, simply, malice. Eli could possibly see something in his daughter that he saw in his wife: the same flightiness, the same inability to be content. In his despondency over his wife’s leaving, he could possibly be to the point where he is at his end, ready to take it out on the only person who is readily available to him. Eli’s colleagues say that he has walked around for the past few months in a fog. They are all worried about him. He is not, for all intents and purposes, the same man he was before his wife left. “I wonder sometimes if he’s not just going to snap,” one of his colleagues said. “Fly off the handle and just smack one of those kids. He lets them just run all over him. I watch him sometimes, although he doesn’t see me. I’ll observe from the open doorway of his classroom. The kids are going crazy. And there’s Eli in the middle of it, reading from the chapter, the noise of the classroom making it impossible for anyone to hear. Mr. Dry, our principal, asked Eli about it once, but Eli said that he was fine. But everybody knows he’s not. We all know that he hurts inside. You can see it on him: the pain. It’s indescribable, really.”