Will Lavender - Obedience

They walked up and down the aisles, checking the many storage garages for markings or anything that would suggest that one had something of interest inside it. They all knew they had been sent here. There was no question about it. Everything that had happened in the last two days had led them here. But now that they were here, the question became where to look. There were perhaps five hundred garages in the facility-too many to check one by one.

Dennis suggested that they stand at the very spot the photograph was taken and look at the facility from that vantage. They tried to remember the photograph exactly as it was, but it proved to be difficult, considering all that had happened in the last forty-eight hours. They stood across the road, in the yard of a little white clapboard house. They were pretty sure that was where Williams had stood to take the picture. They could see both rows of garages. The photo had been taken to the side, so that the easternmost bank of garages was in the foreground.

“That one there,” Dennis said, his fingers making a lens. He pointed toward a garage.

“Which one?”

“The one in the middle. Center of the shot. It has to be that one. He was trying to point us there.”

They walked in a straight line, trying to keep their eye on the door of the garage Dennis had spotted, and when they got there Brian tugged on the lever.

Nothing. The garage was locked.

Mary leaned on the garage door, her back against it. She felt so tired, so zapped, that she could have lain down on the gravel and gone to sleep for a hundred years. There was so much weight on her, so much awful tension.

Brian was walking down the bank of garages, which contained about a hundred in all, pulling on every lever. “Brian,” Mary whispered. But he was intent. She could hear him grunting with every failed pull from where she stood, the sound of it guttural, animalistic.

Dennis was crouching beside her, tossing gravel. The sun was high and hot now, blistering down on them. She could still taste the metallic residue of the gravel dust on her tongue.

“It has to be here, doesn’t it?” Dennis asked her.

“Why else would he show us those photographs? Why else-”

“I found it!” Brian shouted from the other side of the wall.

They ran around the first bank of garages and found him in the middle of the other bank, the ones Williams had left in the background in his photograph. To confuse us, Mary thought. To keep the puzzle going on just a little longer. He was standing in front of the garage, which was still closed. “I think this is what we’re looking for,” Brian said matter-of-factly.

They all stepped back and looked at the garage door. Mary’s breath caught in her throat, and she nearly choked again on the dust. The door had two giant red letters spray painted on the front:

Dennis opened the door.

Sitting inside the garage, at a small table, was Leonard Williams.

He was sitting in a rolling chair that could have been the one from Seminary East. His hands were tied behind him. There was a typewriter on the table with a sheet of paper rolled onto the platen. “Professor Williams?” Mary asked. The man’s head was hung, and there was a dirty gag stuffed in his mouth. He didn’t look up at his students, but it was clear he was alive: he blinked away the sunlight when it fell through the open door on him.

There was nothing in Mary’s mind but raw, coursing fear. Brian had her hand now and he was pulling her inside.

They entered the garage. Williams was still looking at the floor. His eyes, however, were open and aware. Someone had assaulted him. He had a shiny knot under his right eye. He looked, Mary thought, more ashamed than anything.

They approached Williams, but he did not acknowledge their presence. His eyes remained down, at the concrete floor. “The typewriter,” Dennis whispered. They made their way around the table and looked at the sheet of paper. When she saw what was written there, Mary’s knees buckled and Brian had to hold her upright. “I want to go home,” she said, although she didn’t even realize she was speaking aloud. It was just a string of words, a sort of notation, an expression of her fear. It was an involuntary reaction-nothing so much as her mouth sending out a distress signal for the mind that was locked up now, frozen with a kind of obliterating dread.

For the, read the page. Over and over again, filling up the white sheet entirely until there was no white space.

For the for the for the for the for the

8 hours left

They untied Williams and got him to the car. He was mumbling, despondent. He had been beaten badly. His eye was swollen almost shut, and a couple of teeth were bloody and loose. Mary used her cell phone to dial 911, but they were so far removed from civilization that the call wouldn’t connect.

As they were driving back toward campus, Williams began to speak. His words were like a bomb in the nervous silence of the car.

“I set it all up,” he said weakly. His head was still down, his eyes trained on the floor. Mary thought he looked like a child who had been caught stealing candy from a store.

“Set what up?” asked Dennis. They were passing through Cale, where they had spent the previous night. Mary didn’t know if it had all been worth it. She wondered, as she had six weeks ago, what Professor Williams’s role was in his own game. It was the last day of the quarter. The deadline. In three hours, at 6:00 p.m., when Logic and Reasoning 204 officially ended, would something happen, or would the time pass with no incident? Would it all turn out to be, in the end, just a puzzle? The beaten man next to her told her no.

“The whole thing,” said Williams flatly. “The Collinses’ house. The detective. The party at the house on Pride Street. The bar owner at the tavern who led you to me. The little boy and the woman, Della, whom I hired to play my wife. My wife’s name is Jennifer, by the way. She wanted nothing to do with all this, so I had to bring in someone else to…play her role. We don’t have any children of our own. The call from the policeman that night to your room, Mary. Marco and the inn, of course. And the storage facility. But of course you weren’t supposed to find me in that garage. You were supposed to find…other things.”

“What other things?” asked Mary.

“Information. Facts. Evidence I found when writing my books.”

“But the book is a fake. We saw it. It’s just those two words over and over again.”

“That’s the work of my enemies,” he said.

“Your enemies?” Dennis asked.

“These are people who didn’t want that book to be seen by the people in Cale or Bell City. Didn’t want them to read about Deanna and Polly. So they censored me. My enemies-they have powerful friends. They can do these things. This is why I have to speak in code. This is why I have to create a puzzle.”

“Who are they?” Mary wanted to know.

Williams mumbled something. He looked down again at the floor and closed his eyes.

“Talk to us, damnit!” shouted Brian. He was in the back with Williams, and he grabbed the man and shook him. Williams pulled away from Brian and stubbornly turned his gaze out the window.

“Brian,” Mary said calmly.

“What had you found out about Deanna Ward?” asked Dennis.

Williams inhaled before he spoke. As always, his gestures were soft, unassuming, almost meaningless in their simplicity. “Five years ago, I started writing another book,” he told them. “I had gotten some new information from one of my contacts in Cale. It was solid stuff. As I was writing the book, I learned that I would not be asked back to Winchester. They were going to fire me if I continued on with what I knew. Well, I couldn’t lose my job. You can’t be disgraced like that in the academic profession. Word gets around. You don’t get hired again. So I ceased and desisted, and I put all my information in that storage garage in Bell City.”