“Maybe,” said Williams. “Maybe it is all bullshit. But Polly is in danger, and if you do not find her before your six weeks are up, then she will be murdered.”
The class was silent once again. Seminary East’s internal clock ticked further forward, the light touching the face of Williams’s podium.
“What does all this have to do with logic?” asked the boy with the briefcase. He was the most practical of the bunch. He was the only student in the class taking Logic and Reasoning 204 as an elective-that is, as a chosen punishment. He was a liberal arts major, a throw-back at Winchester. In the education reform-obsessed 1980s, Winchester had become a university. This small college in the central Indiana town of DeLane would always be overshadowed by the famous Catholic school 150 miles to the northwest, which was unfortunate, considering, as the brochures gladly pointed out, Winchester graduated more Rhodes and Fulbright scholars than Notre Dame and IU Bloomington combined.
When Winchester became a university, the curriculum predictably became more technical. More specific. Almost twenty years later there was still a rift among the faculty, and on some of the old guard’s letterhead the seal still read Winchester College. The father of the boy with the briefcase had gone to the old Winchester and was now a professor at Temple in mathematics. His son was not nearly as brilliant with numbers, but he was always the one to take the straightest and least difficult line to the end of the maze.
His real name was Dennis Flaherty, but on campus he was jokingly called Dennis the Menace, which was irony in the highest degree: Dennis would not menace anyone even if he deserved it. His pragmatism was used mostly to keep him out of confrontation, and because of his ability to play the devil’s advocate so adroitly he was an esteemed member of his father’s fraternity, Phi Kappa Tau. Dennis lived on the top floor of the Tau house in a single room that could have housed ten. He had dark, curly hair that he liked to shake down over his eyes. It was mystifying to the other Taus how he could attract women so effortlessly. These girls would come to Dennis’s room, prompting the brothers to sweep by and cast glances inside to see four feet on the floor, which was an old (and oft-broken) rule of the fraternity houses. But an hour later and the door would be shut and some soft music (Mingus or Coltrane or Monk) would be playing. The Taus wondered, for example, how he had attracted Savannah Kleppers, who was a 9 on the infamous Tau Scale. Yet there she was, disappearing into Dennis’s room almost every evening.
The answer was charm. Dennis had it in spades. He could talk himself out of any lie, any malfeasance, and yet the same skill allowed him to talk himself into situations as well. When the fraternity was fined, as they often were, it was Dennis they sent to the Greek Authority as a liaison. If the head of the committee was a female, the fine would inevitably be lessened or struck from the record altogether. Dennis dressed differently (he favored Brooks Brothers suits and Mephisto shoes and his omnipresent briefcase), he spoke differently (he often used words like corollary and incentive in regular conversation), and he carried himself differently. Indeed, Dennis Flaherty was different from most of the young men on the Winchester campus, and he was well aware of that fact.
“Logic is the destruction of fallacy,” said Williams, answering Dennis’s question bluntly. “It’s an inherently inductive or deductive process that builds meaning out of a set of abstract notions.” Everyone in the class braced for a lecture. Some students took out their notebooks from their backpacks and clicked up the tips of their pens. But Williams veered back to Polly. “Logic will help you find out where she is,” he said. And then, as if it were just an afterthought: “In time.”
“What are our clues?” asked the girl with the computer.
“The first set will be e-mailed to you this evening,” the professor answered.
When there were no more questions, Williams walked out of the room. He did not say good-bye. He did not say anything as he left. Afterward, many of the students of Logic and Reasoning 204 convened in the hallway, which was empty by this time of day, and talked about the strangeness of the class. Some of them were happy that they would ostensibly not have to put in any work. The students at Winchester called these classes “float credits”-classes where you just had to be there to pass. When they speculated on what the e-mailed “clues” might contain, Brian said that he didn’t know and didn’t care because he wasn’t going to access them anyway.
The girl with the computer was intrigued, however. She stood outside the circle of students, her warm laptop clutched to her chest. She was thinking about Dr. Williams and wondering how she was going to crack the code of the class. This is the way it was, at Winchester and at her Catholic high school back in Kentucky. There was always a code, always a design that had to be divined. Once it was cracked, passing the class was easy. But in Williams’s class, there seemed to be no apparent code. Or at least not yet. This appealed to the girl because finally, for the first time in her two years at Winchester, she was going to face a real challenge: how to solve Williams and his strange class. No syllabus, no text, no notes. No code! There was a certain novelty to it all, and this intrigued her-but of course she couldn’t tell anyone that. When Dennis asked her how she had liked the lecture, she muttered a neutral “Okay.” (He, she saw in his face, had liked it very much. But he would, wouldn’t he?) Okay was not how she felt about Williams, however. She felt, as she walked out the doors of Seminary that afternoon, strangely electric.
2
The girl’s name was Mary Butler. She was a junior, an English major like her mother had been. She lived in the largest female dorm on campus, Brown Hall, in one of the dorm’s most expansive single rooms. It wasn’t that she couldn’t get along with roommates. To the contrary: she and Summer McCoy had roomed together for two years and had become very good friends. (When Summer had mono during their sophomore year, it was Mary who took care of her and nursed her back to health. When Mary and Dennis Flaherty broke up, Summer was there every night with Grasshopper cookies and Agatha Christie mysteries on VHS-they both agreed that there was something hot about Poirot.) No, Mary lived alone because for the last year she had found herself wanting some space. Some of her own space: to think, to decide on where she was going with her life, to be silent and careful with her emotions. So her decision to single was a matter of “trust”-a word she used often and without hyperbole.
It hadn’t always been that way. In the time Before Dennis, as she referred to it, she was much more trusting. After Dennis, after he had dumped her and started going with Savannah Kleppers, she drew herself in a little and began to suspect that the world wasn’t as clean-edged as it had once seemed.
She had truly loved Dennis. They had dated their freshman year for about six months. Theirs was a relationship of politeness, of soft awkwardness. He brought her candy, cards inscribed with poetry, flowers. She had dated in high school but was still relatively new at it; he sensed this and treated her like an acolyte, as if she were some precious thing that he was initiating into the adult world. Mary at once hated that and desperately wanted it, and afterward, in the After Dennis phase, she wondered if he had been setting her up for betrayal all that time. It had been, after all, so easy to do.
Mary told Dennis she loved him. She said it aloud, something she had never done before. And she thought-she thought, but she could not be sure-that he had told her that he loved her, too. In those days After Dennis she caught herself thinking, Never again. Never again would she be taken for granted. She was still well liked, still popular, still “so sweet,” as the Delta girls usually said of her, but inside she was always looking out for those who would do her harm. “It’s a different world up there,” her mother said on the phone. “They’ll take you for all you’re worth.” It was easy to dismiss her mom, a woman who had been out of Kentucky only twice, both times on vacation. But there was something truthful about it. Winchester was a different place. There was so much drama here, so many tenuous alliances that it was difficult to decide what you could talk about and what you must keep to yourself.