TRIPPY: Trippy is engaged to Nicole. They are all friends with Pig, and after Mike and Polly moved out of the upstairs apartment at Pig’s house, Nicole and Trippy moved in. Trippy is a two-bit criminal. He has a drug habit that borders on severe, and it is not an exaggeration to say that Polly worries that he is going to kill Nicole. Nicole has told Trippy, in one of their arguments, that Polly doesn’t like him. She has also told him that she and Polly are going to be staying in an apartment near Grady Tech next semester. So a motive here is clear: Trippy abducted Polly to save his relationship with Nicole, which would clearly end if Polly and Nicole rented the apartment near Grady Tech. In the weeks before she was abducted, Trippy was becoming more volatile toward Polly. It started as playful ribbing, but turned malevolent in the week or so before the going-away party. The group of friends went together to the swimming hole on Porch Creek one day, and Trippy repeatedly asked Polly to jump from the highest rock into the creek, even though he knew-everyone knows-that Polly is afraid of the rocks. Trippy kept on until Polly was in tears, and indignantly she climbed the muddy bank up to the rock. Terrified, she jumped. Trippy’s manic laughter followed her all the way down until she crashed, feet first, into the water. Polly told Pig about this incident, and he told her to “stay away from him.”

THE MAN AT THE SCHOOL: The man at the school has a clear motive: he abducted Polly because of the perceived slight toward his son. Yet a motive, to be admissible in court, must be grounded in reality. Is it realistic to say that this man, who may have been simply angry about his son being punished, would have taken things to such a severe level as to abduct a girl and be willing to murder her? What else do we know about this man? Very little, right now. All we know is that he had a confrontation with Eli, and when the mysterious phone call was made on August 4, Eli’s first thought was of this man.

Mary clicked on the second e-mail, which was titled “What About That Phone Call?” Inside the message, there was a sound clip. When she clicked on the link, a female voice emanated from her computer’s speakers. “I’m…here.” A faraway voice. Polly. Mary dragged the play bar back, held it, let it go again.

I’m…here.

22

“Let’s talk about Polly,” Professor Williams said on Monday afternoon.

“You first,” Dennis Flaherty replied. A joke. Everyone laughed but Mary. For the past day, after she received the note from the woman playing Della Williams at the party, she had been anxious. She could not shake the fear that everyone was a potential player in this game. She went through the line at the dining hall and felt the servers’ eyes on her. She listened to the students in her lit class talk about Auster and Quinn, and she wondered if City of Glass was somehow part of Williams’s plan. She felt as if it was reaching a critical point now, this game, racing toward its climax. She was a week and a half away from the deadline and she had still not found any hard evidence. In a lot of ways, she felt that she wasn’t at all closer to solving the case than she had been in the first week of class.

“Okay,” agreed Williams. “What do you think Polly is feeling right now? Imagine her. Everybody close your eyes and imagine her.” They sat thinking about this fictional girl and her possible emotional state.

“She’s scared,” said someone in the back. Mary turned and saw that it was the girl who usually sat beside Brian House who had spoken. His seat was empty.

“She would be, wouldn’t she?” asked Williams softly. “So close now to the end. Just nine days away.” They all felt it in the classroom, the jarring concussion of the words: nine days. “Where is she?”

“She’s in a cellar, I think.”

“In a cellar.” Williams. “She can’t see out. He has her tied up. How does she eat? How does she live?”

“He brings her water and food every day.” Dennis Flaherty. “Maybe he feeds her like she is a child. Maybe he takes care of her.”

Eli, thought Mary.

“Does she scream for help?”

“Often.” Mary now. She was beginning to feel the exercise; she saw the girl, trapped and struggling, the ropes burning her arms, the air heavy and choked with dust. She awaited him, the man who opened the door every afternoon and entered to feed her. What else did he do? Wash her face for her? Was he gentle with her? Did he tell her that there were only a few days left unless someone found her, or did she know that she was going to be murdered?

“Trippy says she’s in a storage facility, just off of Interstate 64 in Piercetown.”

“That’s where that college is,” said someone. “Grady Tech.”

Mary opened her eyes. She felt it: the electricity, the closeness of vital information. It was right there, behind Williams’s closed eyes. If she could only know what he knew then she could find Polly.

She wasn’t being logical enough. She knew that. She wasn’t seeing the thing the way it was presented. She had been playing wild cards this whole time when she should have been safer. Not anymore, she thought.

“If Trippy knows where she is, then that limits our suspects,” she said, her voice definite and rigid.

“It does, doesn’t it,” Williams agreed.

“Mike or Pig,” someone else said.

“Or Trippy himself,” put in Dennis Flaherty.

Wait, she thought.

Williams had given it to her. Yes. It was right there in front of her.

Interstate 64.

That’s where that college is. Grady Tech.

Suddenly, with startling clarity, it came to her. It was there before she knew it, flashing across her mind. She realized that she had always known it, she had just needed the slightest provocation to give her the proof.

“The bike,” Mary said.

“Ms. Butler?”

“The motorcycle. Pig’s. He kept it in a storage facility off Interstate 64. That’s where Polly is.”

Everyone in the class now was wide-eyed. They were all looking straight at her. She felt the buzz of success, the nearly electric whistle in her ears. She was suddenly euphoric. She almost couldn’t contain it: it ricocheted within her, snapped this way and that and made her, for the first time that term, alive with the possibilities her discovery had presented.

“Motive?” asked Williams slyly. But she could see it in his eyes: she had broken him. She had tied the clues together and had given him his man.

“Obsession,” Dennis Flaherty replied, still looking at Mary. His eyes said all she needed to know: Well done, Mary.

“Yes,” Williams said. He was disoriented, looking away. Mary had shocked him, and now he didn’t know how to carry on with the class. “Well. Check your e-mail tonight. There might be a little more information about Polly there. We will review for our final exam on Wednesday, and we will take the exam next week.” With that, he walked out of the classroom. Even his walk was hesitant, disturbed somehow. None of the students moved from their seats; they sat listening to his footsteps recede down the hallway toward the stairs that would lead him up to his office.

Afterward, as the others stood in the hallway and talked, Mary again stood off to the side. They were all pleased, chattering excitedly as if they had received their final marks in the class. Now, of course, everyone would receive an A for Logic and Reasoning 204. “Mary, you trumped my theory,” Dennis Flaherty said, faux hurt in his voice. “I thought for sure it was Mike.” They all agreed. Everyone had thought it was Mike, the boyfriend, the most obvious of the suspects. Williams seemed, they said, like someone who would be big on obvious misdirection-present something so apparent that everyone would discredit it because of its simplicity. It had to turn out to be Mike in the end, they had all thought. But Mary had seen through his ruse and connected the storage facility to Pig. “Did you see how he walked out of class?” said one girl. “It was like he was an angry child.” And Williams had looked like a child, stunned and pouting. Mary should have been pleased, but something was bothering her. She stood with her laptop clutched to her chest, her mind wandering.