Obedience

“He feels the same way about you,” De

“Yes. Well. Who do you believe?” Again, he gestured toward his scratched and bloody face. “It’s my theory-and this is what I was working on in the follow-up to A Disappearance in the Fields until I was ordered to stop-that Ed had Pig Stephens, this former cop who does all of Ed’s handiwork, kidnap Dea

“Why would he do that?” asked Mary.

“To ruin Star and Wendy. He wanted to pin Dea

“But abducting your own daughter?” Mary said incredulously. She thought of Eli and Polly in Williams’s tale. She thought of how adamant Williams had been that day when she’d suggested Eli might be the culprit.

“It sounds crazy,” Williams said, “but look at it this way: here you have a thug, a man with a violent past who admitted to giving up a girl to possibly be murdered in New Mexico a few months before.”

It did make sense to Mary. There was no randomness, Williams had said. Most every crime is perpetrated by someone in the victim’s orbit. The police must have thought, It’s only logical that Star Ward is to blame.

“The police arrested Star,” Williams said, “and they took Polly back with them. We tried to tell them that Polly wasn’t the girl they wanted, but they wouldn’t listen. She looked so much like Dea

“But his plan backfired,” Mary said. “The charges against Star wouldn’t stick.”

“At first, it looked like Ed Orman got exactly what he wanted. The police were wrapped up in their theories about Star for weeks, and Ed had the husband out of the picture. But of course Star was released. They realized they had nothing on him. He and Wendy and their two boys left Cale for California six months later, and Ed fell into a great despondency. When he came out of it, another student was there to console him. This time she was a master’s student in behavioral psychology. Now she’s in the doctoral program at Winchester.”

“Elizabeth,” De

“That’s right.”

Mary stared at Williams. A tiny vein pulsed on his neck. The gag had been knotted so tightly that they could only slide it down onto his throat, and now it was cinched there, dripping sweat.

“But you haven’t answered the question,” Mary said. Many holes had been filled in by Williams’s story, but the hole, the evidence that would clearly implicate Ed Orman, hadn’t been discussed at all. “Where is Dea

“Ah,” said Williams. “The question of questions. In my book, I wanted to push forward the idea that Pig Stephens-an ex-cop, but still a horrifically violent man, a deviant who had been disgraced by the police department-had accidentally killed Dea

They were on Montgomery Street now, driving into campus. It was a normal Wednesday at Winchester. The quarter was ending, and parents’ vehicles were pulled into the service entrances behind the dorms. It was 4:30 p.m. Soon, they would all be going home for the fall break and these questions would still be unanswered. Mary had just one more thing to ask Williams.

“Where’s Polly now?”

“She’s getting her degree in criminal justice at Indiana State, down in Terre Haute. It’s difficult, this forty-year-old woman sitting in a classroom with teenagers. Kids your age. She’s lived a tough life, as you would expect. But she got things turned around, and now she’s going to school full-time. She visited me on campus just a couple of weeks ago and she’s supposed to be coming back into town today or tomorrow for the break. She knows everything, of course. It was difficult to keep it from her after A Disappearance in the Fields was published, but she knows who her real father is, and she has her own suspicions about Ed Orman. He knows that he’s too old to stop us from living our lives now. He was against Je

“And what about Wendy Ward?” Mary asked. “Does he still obsess over her?”

“I wouldn’t know. All I know is that he doesn’t interfere with Polly, thank God. He has resigned himself to the knowledge that he has a daughter, even though I know she must bring back terrible memories of what he did to Dea

“Locked away,” De

“Did you know he and Milgram were never colleagues?” Williams said. “Not really.”

“How so?” De

“I mean-”

But they were on campus now, and he fell silent. They crept down Montgomery and hit the light at Pride Street, the boundary that separated the two hemispheres of Winchester.

“What are you going to do?” asked Mary. She was desperate for some conclusion, some kind of closure to the game. Finding Williams was not enough; it seemed incredibly cruel to leave Dea

“I’m going to do the same thing I’ve done for all these years,” Williams admitted. “I’m going to keep quiet. I’m not going to say anything. I’m going to teach Logic and Reasoning in the Winchester term, just like I always have, and I’m going to hope I have students who are as inquisitive as you three. Right now? Right now I’m going to return to my study to have a bourbon.” He paused. “I love my study. We added it on to the house a few years ago. Have you seen it, Mary?”

Mary turned to look at him. There was something in his eyes, a gleaming and almost imperceptible trace of secret information.

They fell silent, each of them gazing outside the car. It was finally fall. The sun that had been out earlier was gone behind a bank of clouds, and the air was crisp and sharp. The wind whistling through Mary’s cracked window had the bite of winter.

“Where to?” asked De

“Home,” replied Professor Williams.

So De