“I could tell by the way you two acted together,” Brian was saying. “It’s nothing. Don’t worry about it. We all have our own past. I don’t begrudge you for it.” He smiled, cuffed her on the arm playfully.

Mary looked away, her face hot. “It was…” She didn’t know what word to use. Nothing probably, but she was sure Brian would see through the lie.

Out of her periphery she saw two students leave the school grounds. They were walking briskly, their heads down, going toward the woods beside the school. Playing hooky, thought Mary. One of them had a shock of white-blond hair. When he turned, checking to see if anyone was following him, Mary recognized him immediately.

He was in one of the pictures at the Collinses’ house. One of the grandsons.

“I know that kid,” she told Brian.

He looked over, but the boys had already gone down the hill and were out of sight.

At first, she didn’t know what to think. But the longer they sat there, she began to wonder if this was not another test. Was Williams trying to tell them something else? Another plot twist, maybe?

She told Brian that she would be right back and jogged over to the edge of the woods. She looked into the dark trees, to the clearing that seemed to open up at the bottom of the hill, but she couldn’t see the boys. A light fog had descended, pulled down like a cloak through the tree line. Mary took a few steps into the woods, but she still couldn’t see the boys. “Hello?” she called. It’s no use, she thought. They’re gone by now. All the way out to the highway. She could hear I-64 out in the distance, the rock of those big trucks passing through Cale on their way to Indianapolis.

But then-a noise. Just off to her right.

Mary turned and saw something darting. Some presence. A boy, crouched and low.

“Are you there?” she called.

Again she saw something move, low to the ground. Then she saw him, just up ahead to her right. That white hair. Standing in the reeds of fog, the boy was like an apparition.

“What are you doing?” she called.

Nothing. Silence. The forest moved in the wind.

“Are you there?”

“What the fuck do you want, lady?” one of the boys asked.

“I just wanted to see if you knew anything about Polly.”

“Who the hell is Polly?”

Mary felt ashamed. It was getting to her now, all this chasing and uncovering. It was making her paranoid.

“Sorry,” she muttered, and she walked back out of the woods. Brian and Dennis were in the car when she got back. She slid into the front seat of the Lexus and they left Cale Central. On the service road that took them back to Highway 72 she saw him again. It was just him this time, the white-haired boy. He was standing on the shoulder of the road and watching the car pass. She was afraid to look in his eyes, afraid that she might see something that would make her want to go back and ask more questions.

“Bethany Cavendish is in on it,” Dennis announced. They were eating breakfast at a Denny’s near the high school. Mary had missed her lit class and now Dennis had missed his economics exam. It was becoming clear that they would all pay dearly for this little excursion. “She got all nervous. Started walking around the room, you know. Looking out the windows, like she was afraid someone might break in on us. She said that she didn’t know a thing about the book.”

“What do you mean?” Brian asked incredulously.

“She says that it had to be just a mistake. A printing malfunction.”

“Did you tell her about the book in Cale?”

“Of course. She said the same thing: printer malfunction. She said that the two books in DeLane and the one in Cale would have been shipped by the same company. Probably all the books in this part of the state would have the same glitch. But she was lying.” Dennis took a bite of his scrambled eggs. Mary was having toast (her appetite was almost nonexistent), and Brian wasn’t eating at all. Only Dennis seemed to have the composure to feed himself.

“What did she say when you asked her about Polly?”

“She told me the same thing she told you. That she didn’t really know anything about Polly. She said that Wendy and Star had left Cale about six months after Deanna disappeared, and now they were living somewhere near San Francisco. She knew there was a girl out in Bell City who looked like Deanna, but she just thought it had something to do with Star. Said that the man was a sleaze-ball. Scum.”

So they hadn’t found out anything more than they had yesterday. They weren’t necessarily back to square one, but they were close. Mary knew that they would have to return to Winchester in the afternoon, and if they returned without finding out what part Leonard Williams played in the Deanna Ward abduction, then why had they even come to Bell City and Cale in the first place?

“Do you think that girl you met at the kilns is still on campus, Brian?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I guess we could go back and find out. She wasn’t a student, because I looked her up. I asked some of the Dekes if they had seen me with her, but they were all drunk and couldn’t remember anything. She had just-appeared there. It’s like she was searching me out.”

They thought about that as Dennis read the newspaper at the table. When he came to the story in the Local section about Williams’s sudden departure, he read it aloud to them. They already knew everything in the story: that Williams had left before the semester ended, that Williams taught logic and philosophy courses at the school, that his office had been cleaned out. There was a statement by Dean Orman that read, “We are very concerned with these goings-on. We will get to the bottom of this. The first thing, of course, is to find out if Dr. Williams is well. Then we will get to the business of discovering why he chose to leave Winchester before the term was out.”

“Why did he leave?” Brian asked. He was drinking slowly from a glass of water, a few sips here and there. Mary noticed that he was as frazzled as she was, maybe even more so.

“You said it yourself,” Dennis said. “He left because he knew you all had gotten to Troy Hardings.”

“But Troy offered up the information about the book himself,” replied Mary. “It wasn’t like we were threatening him or anything. Well, actually Brian did threaten him. But that’s beside the point. He clearly wasn’t afraid of us. He could have just denied that the book was genuine, like Bethany Cavendish did. He could have just remained silent and not responded to our e-mails.”

“Maybe Williams and this Troy Hardings character were trying to tell us something,” Dennis tried. “By just disappearing like that, maybe they were trying to bring it to a head. They were trying to force our hand in some way. Trying to show us that the game was really just beginning.”

Mary thought, The game. Had the first five weeks of the course been simply a test, a sort of exhibition, for the real thing that was happening right now in Cale? How were Williams’s “clues” a part of this? She recalled that hanged man from the syllabus, and wondered who Williams imagined under the velvet hood. She thought about the red Honda Civic and the railroad tracks that the professor had strangely digitally imposed into the image. The house that had turned out to be a real house on During Street, the house where Deanna Ward lived before she disappeared. The dog, that black Labrador that had apparently belonged to Pig. And finally the U-Stor-It facility out by I-64 where Williams’s Polly had been kept.

What’s there? Mary wondered. What are we supposed to find? Something we aren’t seeing because we’re suddenly too close to the situation?

She put a couple of dollars down on the table and went to the bathroom. She washed her face and stood before the mirror, breathing deeply, trying to balance herself. She looked awful. Depleted and exhausted. Horrible.