“Some people say Polly looked like his daughter,” Brian said.

“If by ‘looked like’ you mean that they were both teenage girls, then ‘some people’ are right. That’s about the extent of it. I saw Polly all the time around Bell, and I saw pictures of Deanna of course on the news when it happened, and there wasn’t much of a resemblance. The police fucked that one up. They said he confessed to it and everything. I never believed that. If he confessed to it, then why didn’t they arrest him?”

“Maybe the confession wasn’t about Deanna,” Dennis offered.

“You mean that New Mexico bullshit?” the bartender said. “No, there’s something more to this. I’m not a conspiracy theorist”-though, clearly, he was-“but come on. Any idiot can see that Polly was not Deanna Ward.”

He stopped talking and poured himself a beer. His hands were shaking a little, and it was obvious that the story had rattled him. The men in the back resumed their game. No, thought Mary. There’s more. There’s something that he left out.

“That’s about all I know,” he said, his voice scratchy now and nearly gone.

“Thank you,” Dennis said.

They turned to leave. As they were walking out of the bar, Mary whispered to Brian, “There’s more to find here. He didn’t tell us anything that we didn’t already know. The guy-Marco-said that we would get our answers from this guy.”

“That’s all he’s got, Mary,” Brian said. They reached the door and opened it. The world outside had the thick and heavy smell of rain. As Marco had said, she could hear the nearby echo of eighteen-wheelers surging down I-64. The trees dripped, and somewhere nearby a creek rushed noisily down through the hollow on its way toward the Thatch River.

A sudden thought came to Mary. She stopped at the door, one foot outside.

“Do you have the book?” she asked Brian. He removed it from his pocket, just as he had done for Dennis that day on the Tau roof.

She returned to the bar and got the bartender’s attention. “Yeah?” he asked, clearly disturbed to see her again.

“Have you ever seen this man?” Mary asked, holding the book into the bar light so the bartender could see Leonard Williams on the back flap.

The man’s eyes widened. “Oh yeah,” he said. “I’ve seen him. That’s Polly’s uncle.”

33

It was late when they made it back onto Highway 72. It began to rain again, harder even than before, and when Dennis could not see the road any longer he pulled into a Days Inn, the students deciding to stay overnight in Cale. They pooled together all the money in their pockets, sixty-five dollars exactly, and got the cheapest room at the hotel.

There was an uncomfortable moment when Brian and Mary were in the room together and Dennis, who had sprinted to be the first in the bathroom, was changing. They were all wet from their run from the car, and Brian and Mary looked at each other warily, their clothes dripping on the carpet. Finally, when it was clear that Dennis was showering, they turned their backs on each other and got undressed, putting on some golf clothes that Dennis had in the trunk of the Lexus. Mary wore a long PING oxford and her underwear, and before Brian could turn around she dove into the bed so that he could not see her. Brian had put on a pair of bright-colored, checkered shorts, and he stood by the mirror shirtless, looking at himself. Mary had to laugh at the sight of it, and she lost it when Dennis appeared from the bathroom wearing pants in an identical pattern. He and Brian climbed into bed together as if they were twins, regarding each other suspiciously and creating a boundary down the middle of the bed with pillows so their skin couldn’t touch during the night.

When the lights were off, Mary said, “What next?”

The boys shifted in their bed. A car passed in the parking lot and spread a white arc of light into the room, blanching the walls.

“What are our choices?” Brian asked, his voice muffled in the pillow.

“We could go back to Winchester,” she said, “and tell people what we know. We could tell Dean Orman, get the folks at Carnegie to take action.”

“But what do we know?” Dennis asked skeptically.

“We know that Williams was Polly’s uncle,” replied Mary. “We know that Polly and Deanna Ward were connected somehow, not just because they looked alike, but also because Deanna’s father was driving out to Bell City to see Polly. In that way, we have Williams tied to the missing girl. We have the telephone call from the campus cops, which was clearly rigged by Williams. We have Williams’s ‘wife’ giving me that note, and then the weirdness at the Collinses’ house on During Street.”

“And Troy,” Brian put in. “We’ve got Troy Hardings admitting to a conspiracy over e-mail.”

“It’s not enough,” Dennis offered. He kicked off the covers, and Mary could see his plaid legs doing bicycle kicks in the bed. Mary remembered this tic. When he was nervous, Dennis always lay on the floor and began his bicycle routine. Sometimes he would go for a half hour or more; it made her tired just watching him. “They’ll just ask what we were doing, wasting our time in Cale looking for a girl the police have been searching for for at least twenty years. I shouldn’t even be out here on this-this wild chase. Christ, Mary, I’ve got an exam tomorrow.”

It was the first time Mary had thought about her other class. She had her lit class in the morning. They were wrapping up City of Glass, and she didn’t want to miss their last discussion of the novella. But right now, it certainly wasn’t looking good that she would get back to Winchester in time to make it.

“We might as well go to the police if we’re going to go that route,” Dennis scoffed then.

“Maybe we should,” she said diffidently.

“And tell them what? Tell them that we have all these fake leads and this fake book and that we think we might be a part of an intricate game with a professor from the university who has disappeared off the face of the planet? They’ll laugh us right out of the station. None of it makes sense, Mary. None of it makes a damn bit of sense.”

They lay there, each of them looking up at the dark ceiling. She had to agree with him, of course. Sense was not a word that could be rationally applied to their situation at the moment. Across the room, Dennis churned his legs and counted under his breath.

“What do you think, Brian?” Mary asked. Over on his side of the bed, he was quiet.

“I don’t know,” he sighed. Mary knew that, like her, he was exhausting himself from turning all the complexities of the game around and around in his mind. “I seriously…I seriously think about hurting him.”

“Hurting who?” Dennis asked.

“Williams. At all this shit he’s caused. I haven’t slept in a week. I can’t-I can’t seem to get my mind off it. If I could get to him and demand answers, you know. Even if he told us Deanna was dead, then that would at least be something.”

“She’s not dead,” Mary said softly.

“It makes me wonder about Dean Orman’s wife,” said Brian.

Dennis stopped kicking. “What does?” he asked.

“This,” Brian replied. “All this. After seeing her that night, I just wonder if she was part of this thing or if Williams was somehow…” He trailed off, couldn’t define the thought.

“That night?” Dennis asked.

“I saw her out on Montgomery Street. By the Thatch River. She’d been beaten. She said that something had happened between her and the guy that looked after their boat for them. A former cop, she said. She wouldn’t let me tell the dean because she was afraid Orman would kill the guy.”

“Pig,” Dennis whispered.

Brian bolted upright in the bed. “What did you say?” he asked Dennis.

“The guy who looks after their boat,” Dennis said. “He’s called Pig. That’s where Williams got his name for the bad guy in his Polly story.”