Obedience

“Why would he be afraid of the information you found?” Mary asked.

Williams breathed in, steeled himself before he answered. “Ed Orman is Polly’s father.”

The weight of Williams’s revelation nearly doubled Mary over. Of course, she thought. Ed Orman lied to us about Williams’s disappearance because he was afraid of where we were going. When Brian called him to complain about the class, that was his chance to take Williams out of the picture.

“So what’s the co

“She’s Polly’s half sister,” Williams said. “Why do you think they looked so much alike? A woman named Wendy Ward went to Winchester for a semester back in the midseventies. She studied under Ed Orman, and they had a thing. This was before he was a dean. He was a respected professor, one of the finest researchers the university had. He had worked with Stanley Milgram at Yale, of course. That was his claim to fame. He didn’t want to sully his reputation, you see, and so he kept the affair secret. A man of his stature, admitting an affair with a student? A townie at that? It would have been professional suicide.”

Mary said, “But he couldn’t hide the fact that she was pregnant.”

“When Wendy got pregnant with Polly, he had it arranged so she would go back to Cale. I don’t know how he got her to stay quiet, but I assume he paid her a good deal of money. A year later, Wendy met Star, this biker who was the complete opposite of Ed Orman, and they had their first child together, Dea

“Je

“Yes. My wife is a cousin of Star’s. I was just finishing my PhD at Tulane and was looking for a job. Je

The plagiarism incident, thought Mary. Ed Orman tried to frame him.

“At the begi

“What did Ed Orman think about your role in Polly’s life?” Mary asked.

“He distrusted me. He was paranoid, constantly worried that I would blow his cover and tell someone who Polly really was. But of course I didn’t want to sacrifice my relationship with Polly. For all she knew, we were her parents. She was just a little over one when we adopted her, and she never knew anything else but Je

De

“Of course,” Williams admitted wearily. “I was living a lie. I never talked about Polly. I couldn’t. Ed had a muzzle on me. It sent me into a dark depression. Finally, we were able to get away from it. I was offered a job in Strasburg, and in nineteen ninety I taught in France. But when that was over, I returned to Bell City and resumed my daily commute to Winchester. To my lie of a life. I wanted to be open about my family, to not live in this secrecy, but of course Wendy and Star would have none of it for fear of Orman.”

“Did Star ever come to visit Polly?” Mary wondered.

“All the time. I think he was trying to understand Wendy’s old life. Her life before him, the one she’d had with Ed Orman at Winchester. That’s what started the whole thing, of course.”

“Started what?” De

“Star came out to visit Polly two days after Dea

“In your…game,” Mary said, “you led us to believe Star did it. Why?”

“I needed to get you to the trailer and then to the Wobble I

De

“I began what Je

“Yet they kept you on,” Brian said. “Why?” He had moved as far away from Williams as possible, his body wedged against the back door of the Lexus. The professor’s story had not allayed Brian’s fears, Mary knew.

“I would have been forced out of Winchester completely if not for Dr. Lewis and some of my allies in the Philosophy Department. They were longtime enemies of Orman’s. I confided in one of them, Drew Peasant, and he became my research assistant on A Disappearance in the Fields. When they found out Drew was working for me, they got rid of him. At this point, I had tenure and he didn’t. I still think about him. I should have never brought him in to this mess, but at that time I didn’t know the lengths they would go to, to protect themselves.”

“The book is nonsense, though,” Brian said. “It’s blank. We thought it was…” He faltered. A prop, Mary thought. That’s what he wanted to say.

“When the book was published,” Williams said, “Orman tried to have it censored. He wrote an anonymous letter to the Cale Star blasting me and my credibility. And of course he somehow got copies altered so that they were unreadable. Many people in Cale have never read the book because Ed has made it so that the library and the bookstore on 72 do not stock copies.”

“Oh, they stock them,” Brian said.

“Let me guess,” Williams added. “They’re mostly gibberish.”

Brian nodded.

“The book went out of print faster than most books even though it sold fairly well,” Williams said. “There’s no doubt in my mind that Ed was threatening my publisher. But at that point I couldn’t do much. I could just wait and see if he confessed to his role in Dea

“But why would Ed Orman abduct Dea

“Ed was wildly in love with Wendy; he still had this burning passion for her. Wendy was beautiful. Just like Dea