3

On Wednesday Mary noticed that two or three of the female students were not in class. She wondered if they had been scared away by the picture of the execution. She wondered if any of them would report Williams and if he could get in trouble for sending a picture like that through campus e-mail. But mostly she wondered about Polly, and she was eager to run her theories by Professor Williams. She had spent most of the previous night fleshing out those theories, and even though she had been exhausted for Dr. Kiseley’s lit class that morning, she was feeling that hum again, that electric charge she’d felt Monday after class.

When he came in-today he wore blue jeans again and a Winchester U T-shirt-he was carrying a dry erase marker and a few loose pieces of transparency paper. He took his position at the podium. “Any questions?” he asked without any greeting.

Mary got her first theory organized in her mind, but just when she was about to speak Brian House said from behind her, “We all want to know what this is.”

“What what is?” asked Williams softly.

“This,” said the boy. “All of this. This class. Polly. That…” He couldn’t bring himself to say “picture.”

“This is Logic and Reasoning 204,” Williams said dismissively. A few students laughed.

“That’s not what I mean and you know it,” Brian said. He was sitting up straight now. He was pointing at the professor, accusing him.

“Do you mean to say, Mr. House”-and this was the first time, they all noted, that he had called any of them by name-“that this is all a dupe?”

“Well, yeah. Exactly. That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

“Isn’t all knowledge a dupe? Isn’t the rational world itself full of inconsistencies and tricks? Trapdoors? False challenges? How do you know that every day when you walk across campus, you’re actually swimming through a sea of monads? Because we tell you that it is. How do you know that Pride and Prejudice is a masterpiece? Because we say it is. How do you know that a certain proof explains the meaning of light or the speed of sound? Because it is written in the book. But what if the equation is not square? What if the proof is a little off? What if the measurements were proved to be false? What if that which you had always believed to be logical thought turned out to be-God forbid-wrong. The world is dictated by a set of principles, and most of those principles are granted to you here, in these decorated halls.” Williams raised his arms, encompassing the walls and the light and the dancing dust of Seminary East.

“Are you saying that what we learn at Winchester is a lie?” asked someone else.

“Not all of it, no,” said Williams. “Not all. But certainly some. The trick is finding out what is the real and what is the fake.”

“What’s that have to do with this class?” asked Brian.

“Only this,” Williams said sharply. “I am telling you that the best way to learn logic is to decode a puzzle. And this is what Polly’s disappearance is: an intricate puzzle. Now some of you may take offense to this. Some of you may be bewildered by my choice of pedagogy. But you will learn to think, and induce, and carve out the blight of lazy thought-those fallacies and indiscretions and wrong turns. Only the best thinkers among you will find Polly, and those are the students to whom I will grant As.”

Brian rested. He seemed to be satisfied with that answer. He began to inspect his quick-bitten fingernails.

Mary had her theory formed now. “Polly’s father abducted her,” she said, more quickly than she would have liked. By the time she was finished, she was nearly breathless. She didn’t want to appear desperate, not this early in the game.

“How?” the professor replied.

“Why?” Dennis Flaherty put in, leaning forward in the front row to look quizzically at Mary.

“Motive,” said Professor Williams. “What I want to know now is how? How could the father possibly be responsible?”

“Because…,” Mary began, but she could not go on. The professor was questioning her again, and she failed that test for a second time.

“Because of Mike,” said Brian.

“Ah,” said Williams. “Mike. The father and Mike-they don’t like each other?”

“Probably not,” Brian offered, perhaps because he had experienced a similar situation: a bitter father, a beautiful girl, threatening phone calls from the despondent old man.

“You’re right,” said the professor. “They don’t like each other. In fact, they hate each other. Polly’s father once told Mike that he would kill him if he ever caught him out alone. But this doesn’t answer the question that Miss Butler is implicitly posing: Why the father? Why abduct your own daughter?”

“To protect her!” Mary almost shouted. She was feeling that cold, familiar rush when she put the pieces into place. That old energy in the blood. She had to be close.

“That’s interesting,” said Williams gently. Mary looked at Williams and saw that he was staring at her in a way that betrayed his interest in her. She knew that he was keeping her on a line, tethering her to all the intricate possibilities. Blushing, she finally looked away. “To protect her,” he went on. “So you’re saying that Mike is such a danger to Polly that her own father must abduct her, lie to the police, grieve publicly about his daughter’s false disappearance, and manage to keep the ruse intact for almost a month? That’s impressive for a little old schoolteacher with not much money in the bank.”

Mary realized how ridiculous it sounded now, coming from him. She could only look at the flickering cursor on her laptop monitor.

“But if this Mike is really dangerous,” said Dennis, taking up for Mary, “if he’s psychopathic in some way, maybe Polly’s father feels that her life is threatened enough to hide her.”

“Hide her where?” Williams asked.

“An aunt’s house,” he said. Mary wasn’t sure if Dennis really believed in her theory or was just grabbing the loose strand of the idea and running with it to save her the shame.

“How many of you believe this?” Professor Williams asked the class. The light from the window was approaching him. Their time was running out. No one in the class raised a hand.

“But in a murder-” said Brian now.

“A kidnapping,” the professor corrected him.

“-in a kidnapping, isn’t the father the immediate suspect? Isn’t that the rule? A girl is taken and her father did it. Maybe he’s a sexual deviant.”

“Polly’s father was a suspect,” Professor Williams said then, and Mary’s heart started up again. “But he was never a suspect for the convoluted reason that Ms. Butler suggests he should be. Class: what is the real problem with the theory Ms. Butler is presenting?”

Again she crashed down shamefully, her gaze on the hot light of the screen.

Limply, a girl in Mary’s row raised her hand. “She is going to be murdered,” the girl said, casting a look at Mary that said, Sorry.

“Think about it,” the professor said, his impatience with them showing for the first time. “I’ve told you that she is to be murdered in six weeks. That is a given. So why would the father ‘rescue’ Polly from Mike if he-Daddy-were going to kill her in six short weeks?”

Williams shuffled the papers he had brought in. He turned off Seminary East’s lights, and the room fell as dark as it could given the natural light that poured in through the windows. Then there was the whir of an overhead projector, and a square of yellow, sickly light blanched the northern wall. The professor slipped the topmost sheet off the stack and put it on the machine. It was a photograph of a girl in a summer dress. She was standing barefoot on the grass and holding out her arm, palm forward, as if she didn’t want her picture taken. Williams didn’t have to tell them: this was Polly. He put on the next page. This was a shot of a tattooed young man sitting on a couch. He had drunk too much and his eyes were rimmed red. He was shirtless and sunburned, his bare shoulders pink and peeling. An invisible girl, who was off to the right of the shot, had her arm around him. Mike. The third page: an overweight man standing to the right of a class of young children. Polly’s father. The children all had their eyes censored out by thin black bars. And then a fourth page: a house, a simple Cape Cod with a dead vegetable garden off to one side and an American flag blowing against the eaves. Polly’s house, the last place she had been seen.