Will Lavender - Obedience

“What do you mean ‘weird’?” asked Brian.

“I mean some of them were lurid. Some had decapitated heads. Naked bodies. Rapes. They were disgusting. He saw me looking at them and put them away in a closet, but I had already seen enough.”

None of them said a word. The road trundled beneath them, kicking up gravel against the undercarriage. Dennis met the intersection of Highway 72 and took a right. Toward Bell City.

“So are you saying that Williams is leading us through this just because he likes puzzles?” Mary asked. “I don’t know if I buy that or not.”

“What’s the other scenario?” Dennis wanted to know. “That Williams is Deanna’s abductor? Do either of you believe that?”

Mary thought of his strength when she had pushed him that day in class. His tremendous strength. Did he abduct Deanna Ward and was he now, almost twenty years later, leading them on a wild chase to find her? Or was he intentionally leading them off base, putting up foils to their plan, placing “actors” here and there to drive them away from the truth?

Motive, she then thought. What would the motive be for playing this game?

“Well,” Dennis said, “I don’t believe it. I think what Mary said earlier was right: Williams knows who took Deanna Ward. This is all part of his game.”

“Aren’t games supposed to be fun?” asked Brian, his voice determined and lacing. “There’s nothing fun about a missing girl.”

“I’m telling you,” Dennis said, “Williams didn’t do this. I spoke to him. I know if someone is telling the truth, and he was genuine when he said that Polly was a logic puzzle and nothing more. This other thing, Deanna-I don’t know what that is, but I can assure you that Williams is trying to tell us something. Maybe he can’t say it the way he wants to say it. Maybe there’s someone who knows the truth, and Williams is trying to tell us what he knows without alerting this other person.”

Mary thought of the deadline again. She thought of Deanna Ward, and if this could possibly be about her. In a way, it made perfect sense. No wonder Williams’s logic game had been so easy: he was just preparing them for the real test.

She thought about the deadline and what it must mean. As they drove across Cale and toward Bell City, she realized that they had only twenty-four hours to locate Leonard Williams and find out what he knew.

Bell City is one of the poorest communities in the state of Indiana. It has about five thousand residents and rests on the border of Martin County. It became famous years ago for a basketball game played at Bloomington, where Bell East High School beat number-one-ranked Cale High for a shot at its first-ever state championship.

There is a sign commemorating that feat as you pass into the Bell City limits. It has been dented, pocked by thrown rocks, and nearly torn off its post, surely by Cale residents still bitter about a game that was played almost thirty years ago.

In Bell City there is a Dairy Queen, a bait and tackle shop, and the local high school and junior high. There are a variety of churches, most of them Baptist, some of them falling into disorder along the side of Highway 72. The road in Bell City becomes cracked and pitted because the asphalt has not been tended to in so long. The three of them were entering, it appeared, a ghost town.

They were looking for the girl who had been mistakenly taken to Wendy Ward that fateful day. The police had trailed Deanna’s father, Star, to the trailer and arrested him on site. Yet the girl had turned out not to be Deanna. Brian was particularly interested in driving the twenty-five extra miles to see this trailer, though he couldn’t tell them exactly what he expected to find.

Dennis stopped for directions at a gas station just outside of downtown. He went inside while Brian put gas in the Lexus. When Dennis returned, he said the attendant had told him to drive to Gary’s Diner because apparently Gary was the guy you asked if you had questions of particular importance. The diner was right beside the courthouse, which they saw up on a hill, its dome rising out of the tree line like some sort of battlement. They would probably be able to find somebody there, the attendant said, someone they could talk to about Deanna Ward.

The town proper was nearly dead. There was a furniture store that was open across from the courthouse, and two men were carrying out sofas while others were pinning red sales tags to the upholstery. The three parked at the courthouse and walked the three blocks to Gary’s Diner, their jackets tied around their waists and the high sun beating down on their faces.

There were no cars in the parking lot, and the waitresses were all outside the diner, leaning against a picket fence that blocked the patrons’ view of the funeral parlor next door. They were all sharing a cigarette, passing it down the line and taking deep drags with their eyes closed. It was an unseasonably hot day in early October, the trees all aflame with wild color.

The women didn’t move when they saw the three students coming. They just stood there in a row by that white fence and continued to smoke their cigarette. They were wearing pink, frilly uniforms straight out of the 1950s. It was a different kind of pink, a pink that was softer and more subtle than anything you see today. Mary felt as if she had stepped back in time. Everything was unreal, beginning with Brian’s story of the book last week, to Professor Williams’s disappearance. And now here she was, in this strange little town, trying to find answers to a question she didn’t even know how to phrase.

“How are you doing today, ladies?” Dennis asked the waitresses. Always the charmer.

“We’re okay,” one of them said dubiously.

“We’ve just got a couple of questions for you, if you don’t mind.”

A tall black woman who had assumed the role of spokeswoman nodded.

“We heard about a kidnapping that happened years ago out in Cale. We were just wondering-”

“Deanna,” the girl said quickly.

“So you’ve heard of her?”

“Who hasn’t?”

“Wasn’t there some tie to Bell City? Something about a girl in a trailer home out on the outskirts of town that looked like Deanna?”

The waitresses looked at each other. Their glances were telling-they were communicating apprehension among one another, silently wondering how much they should tell these outsiders.

“You’ll have to ask Gary about that,” the woman said.

“Gary?”

“He’s the boss here. He knows everybody in Bell. He’d be able to tell you anything you wanted to know.”

“Gary here right now?” asked Brian.

“He’s on vacation,” the woman said, stubbing out the cigarette on the fence. “Daytona Beach. Be back next week.”

“We don’t-” Dennis began, but Mary cut him off. She could see where this was going, and for all Dennis’s charm he wasn’t going to get answers from these girls. She stepped in front of Dennis and smiled at the girl.

“Listen,” she said. “We’ve got this class. We’re students down in Winchester. You know how it is. We’ve all got a paper do this week about the Deanna Ward case, and we need to just drive by that trailer to look at it. For inspiration, you know.”

“I’m at Cale Community,” said one woman. “Taking twelve hours this semester.”

“I always wanted to go to Winchester,” the black woman said. “But I couldn’t afford it. I made a three-point-five in high school. Got accepted and everything. But the money, you know…” She trailed off. Then she looked at Mary, her eyes steady with some deep knowledge. “You’re talking about Polly,” she said.

Mary felt the breath go out of her. Brian, who was just beside her, took her arm involuntarily, the way you brace yourself as you’re falling. “Polly?” Mary managed to say.