Will Lavender - Obedience

“Polly is your niece,” Mary said.

“Yes. Jennifer and I raised her. We couldn’t have any children of our own, so in 1967, when a relative of Jennifer’s asked us if we could take this little girl, we jumped at the opportunity.”

“Deanna’s father,” Mary went on. “He was seeing Polly. Sleeping with her.”

“Laughable,” Williams said, looking up at her. He had a harrowing look on his face, as if he had seen the unspeakable and was just now trying to rationalize it all. “You all have done well in the class, but there are things that you still do not understand.”

“Tell us, then,” Brian said. “Who put you in that garage?”

“Pig Stephens,” Williams said. “They thought I knew too much. About Deanna Ward. They had heard from someone that the class was getting too specific. It used to just be a game, you know, an exercise in logic. But a couple of years ago I began to see the possibilities. If I could tell my students where my information was, and if they could find it, then I would be in the clear and the students would solve the crime and not me. It was a kind of cloaking device.”

“But your enemies figured out what you were doing,” said Mary.

“Yes. Somehow he found out about it and sent his henchman. Now they have the information I gathered, and there’s no doubt in my mind that it’s all floating out in the Thatch River by now.”

“Who’s ‘he’?” asked Mary, but of course she already knew.

“Orman,” said Williams. “Ed Orman. If anyone has the answers to this puzzle, it’s him. But if you get close to him…well, you see what happens.” Williams gestured toward his damaged right eye.

“Did you send us that tape?” Brian asked. “The one with Milgram and the…those voices?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Williams whispered. He looked away, out the window to the bare Indiana landscape.

“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 connection to Deanna?” asked Brian.

“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, Deanna. It was clear they couldn’t take care of two young children, so Star called a relative to ask her if she would be interested in ‘helping him out,’ as he put it.”

“Jennifer,” Mary said.

“Yes. My wife is a cousin of Star’s. I was just finishing my PhD at Tulane and was looking for a job. Jennifer ran the idea by me, and it was intriguing. I interviewed at Winchester and got the job. Ed was against my hiring, of course, but he had no clout at the time. By the time he moved up into his perch at Carnegie, I had written a book and was tenured. Of course, he even tried to take that from me…”

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

“At the beginning of my career I was a visiting lecturer, making very little money. All Jennifer and I could afford was the trailer out in Bell City. I drove the hour and a half from Bell City to DeLane to teach. Wendy wanted Polly far away from Orman, anyway. At a remove. She was afraid of him for some reason. At that point, you see, I didn’t know what I do now about the man. I thought Polly was just the result of an unfortunate fling, something that happened between two consenting adults. I couldn’t have been more wrong.”

“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 Jennifer and me.”

Dennis said, “It must have been awful on you at Winchester.”

“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?” Dennis asked. He was driving slowly, trying to take his time so that Williams could tell the whole story.

“Star came out to visit Polly two days after Deanna went missing,” Williams went on. “He sat down on the couch with her and asked her if she would be their daughter now that Deanna was gone. Star was distraught, out of his mind. He was calling Polly ‘Deanna.’ It was excruciating to watch, and it made me hate the son of a bitch who had taken Deanna.”

“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 Inn. The only way to get you to the trailer was through Bethany Cavendish’s story, and the role she played was of the distrustful aunt. She is Wendy Ward’s cousin, but her story about Star was trumped up. She knows what I know: that Ed Orman is the culprit here.”

Dennis asked, “When did you start researching Deanna Ward’s case?”

“I began what Jennifer came to call my ‘crusade’ to find Deanna’s abductor in ninety eighty-seven. Somehow Ed Orman’s people found out about it. That’s when they dove into my dissertation and found that I had borrowed from John Dawe Brown. Everybody borrows from time to time. Yet they planted the information in the paper, and it became a big deal. The word plagiarism was there beside my name, and in academic circles that does irreversible damage to your reputation.”

“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.”