Dennis walked her back to the Tau house for her shoes. He apologized for Saturday night, claimed that she had misinterpreted what he’d actually said. “It was just a thing you say, you know,” said Dennis, looking at the sidewalk. “It turned out to be the wrong thing, though.” It was drizzling in one of those sideways manners, coming down cold against their faces. Mary should have been happy, and at first she had been. But seeing Williams walk out of the room had disturbed her for some reason.

An act.

“Is something wrong?” Dennis asked her. She didn’t say anything, but yes-something was wrong. Something was very wrong, but of course she couldn’t tell Dennis. He left her in the great room of the frat house, which was nearly empty. At 5:00 p.m. everyone was out to the dining commons or on a beer run to the Border. Someone was playing Oasis in an upstairs room. She could smell the moistness of marijuana in the air. She looked around the room. There were bookshelves built into one wall. Instead of books, the Taus had lined the shelves with DVDs and CDs, many of them pirated from the Internet and labeled with crude, markered covers. She rifled through some of the movies-action flicks, the Austin Powers films, directors’ cuts of kung fu movies-and as she was doing this she saw something etched on the back wall of the shelf. She leaned closer, squinting so that the image became clear in the shadow.

She had seen the image before. It was a serpentine S and the soft P tangled together. It had been carved into the shelf. Mary traced her finger over it, felt the harshness of the cut rubbing across her finger.

Troy Hardings’s hand. His tattoo.

She wanted to get closer, to look-

“Ready?” Dennis asked. She spun around as if she had been caught stealing. He was holding her shoes.

He walked her back to Brown. He was quiet the entire way, and Mary found herself feeling sorry for him. “I didn’t know Troy Hardings was a Tau,” she said.

“Who?” Dennis asked.

“Troy. Professor Williams’s gofer.”

“I don’t know who that is.”

Mary thought about this. She wondered what it meant, that aggressive S and the passive P tangled up in a casual dance. And then something absurd came into her mind. A bizarre thought.

Save Polly.

Perhaps a Tau had taken Williams’s class long ago and had etched the symbol on the wall. Maybe Troy Hardings saw the image there at a party one night and liked the way it looked so much that he tattooed himself with it.

Maybe, Mary thought. But still-there was something about the image that frightened her. She didn’t like how the feminine P was being squeezed and taunted by the more masculine S. There was something cultish about the image, something mockingly boyish. It was an inside joke. She tried to imagine Dennis tattooing himself with the image, sneering at the needle as it bit into his flesh-but the thought was so ludicrous that it fell apart.

Later, back at Brown Hall, she took the elevator up to her room and sat at her desk, watching the rain slant off the room’s only window.

Later, when it got dark and the rain began to fall harder, she checked her e-mail. There was a message in the box titled “Where Is She?” Mary opened the message and another photograph appeared on the screen, this one of a U-Stor-It beside a busy freeway.

That was the only message, which meant that Williams was admitting Polly’s location and her abductor.

But still there was that feeling inside Mary, that incomplete feeling. It was the same feeling she had gotten in high school when the teacher left the room one day during an exam, and the students had taken out their textbooks from under their desks, furiously paging through them to find the answers.

Her victory, then, if it could even be called that, had been Pyrrhic.

Finding Polly had been too easy.

23

A Disappearance in the Fields had been checked out of the Orman Library. Brian knew what that meant: someone else in the class had beaten him to it. But there was still hope. He searched the computerized card catalog and found that the public library had a copy of the book. He drove there, Johnny Cash howling “Ring of Fire” on the stereo, with the rain falling hard on his windshield.

As he drove, Brian thought of Deanna Ward. And he thought of her doppelgänger, the girl from the trailer in Bell City.

It struck us all: how similar she looked to Deanna, the man playing Detective Thurman had told the class. She was almost an identical copy, except she was…different somehow.

By Monday afternoon, as the rest of the logic class was meeting in Seminary East and Mary was solving Polly’s disappearance, Brian was working on another vase for his mother at the kilns. He was trying to get his mind off Polly.

But by that night he was thinking of the book Bethany Cavendish had told him about earlier in the day. The thought of it was like a hunger pang. He couldn’t shake it no matter what he did. He went back to Chop, started a second glass vase, but before he could get the blowpipe into the kiln he was thinking about the book again.

The thing was this: he had possibly played a small part in this drama. By meeting the girl named Polly at the Deke party, he had intervened in the mythology that Leonard Williams had created. And shouldn’t he be interested in something that he had personally been involved in, Brian rationalized in front of the glowing kiln, no matter how indirectly?

And what about the second narrative, the real one? Shouldn’t he be interested in Deanna Ward, a girl who had been missing for twenty years?

He had decided to check the public library, and now, powerless against this urge to find out more, he drove down Pride Street and into the town proper. There was no one in the library when he went in except the librarian, and Brian found the book easily. It had been moved down from its spot on the shelf and was leaning apart from the other books, making it apparent that someone had been there before him. The title was printed large across the front in bold red letters to give the effect of blood writing. On the back, Leonard Williams smiled at him. It was a younger, more polished Williams. His face was thinner, and he had a fine trace of a mustache. The book had been published in 1995 by Winchester University Press. “Leon Williams is a professor at Winchester University in DeLane, Indiana,” the bio on the inside jacket read. “A Disappearance in the Fields is his first book. He lives in DeLane with his wife.”

As Brian was checking out the book, the librarian, an older woman who taught a study skills class at the university, looked at him curiously. Immediately, without hesitation, he thought: Actor.

“Do you reat much true crime?” she asked conversationally, her accent thick and difficult to place.

“No,” he said. “I’m just reading this one for a class.”

“Oh. This is a goot one. He came here for a reating once. Williams. Right after it was published? Ya. He set he had some ‘new information,’ but he couldn’t give it to us. Promised a new book in the spring. That was almost five years ago.”

Brian took out A Disappearance in the Fields and drove back toward campus. He turned right out of the library onto Pride, which was one way in downtown DeLane, and followed it all the way to the bypass and hit Highway 72-the quickest way back to campus. The highway drops down and turns onto Montgomery Street, which winds around the Thatch River and then rises a hill to Winchester.

As he was turning onto Montgomery, he saw a figure crouched in the undergrowth to his right. At first he thought it had been a trick of the light. An animal, probably. But before he could speed up the thing rose and stepped out of the undergrowth. It had one arm up, signaling him to stop. A woman.