Will Lavender - Obedience

“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 Deanna Ward’s disappearance. I had implicated him in the book, even though I didn’t have the concrete information to accuse him outright.”

“But why would Ed Orman abduct Deanna?” asked Mary. They were entering DeLane and were only about ten minutes from the Winchester campus. Any information they wanted out of Williams they had better get now, because Mary had a feeling that he wasn’t going to be as receptive to their questions once he got home, with the presence of Ed Orman and Pig Stephens bearing down on him again.

“Ed was wildly in love with Wendy; he still had this burning passion for her. Wendy was beautiful. Just like Deanna and Polly. I think it started as a game, as something he was doing just because he felt like he could get away with it. This is the kind of man Ed Orman is. He is brutally egotistical. He believes that his brilliance is unmatched, that he can intimidate you until he gets what he wants.”

“He feels the same way about you,” Dennis said dryly.

“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 Deanna.”

“Why would he do that?” asked Mary.

“To ruin Star and Wendy. He wanted to pin Deanna’s abduction on Star, the crazy father. Maybe, just maybe, Orman thought, Wendy would return to him if Star were out of the picture, or at least suspected of such an awful crime. Star had a massive criminal record from his time with the Creeps, so it wasn’t that much of a leap to suggest that he might have had a hand in his daughter’s disappearance.”

“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 Deanna, and I think those cops wanted it to be Deanna so bad. Polly was confused. She was just a girl. Nineteen at the time. They were asking her questions and answering them for her. When they looked at her, she turned her face away because she didn’t want to be Deanna. She told me later that it was the way they were looking at her-as if they were trying to see this other girl, this lost girl. It was all illogical-the police drawing conclusions from evidence that just wasn’t there. It came out in the papers that Polly was asked if she was Deanna, and she said yes. That’s a lie. That never happened. They made a mistake, and it was never responsibly acknowledged.”

“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,” Dennis whispered.

“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 Deanna?”

“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 Deanna in a struggle and he and Ed Orman had been forced to hide her body. But my publisher wouldn’t let me go through with it. Not enough hard evidence, you see. Every time I got close to finding Deanna, she would disappear. This has been going on for nineteen years now, and I really am no closer to finding her than I was back in nineteen eighty-seven.”

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 Jennifer and me moving onto campus a few years ago, but that passed.”

“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 Deanna and the cover-up that has gone on for years. That’s one reason he locks himself up in his office: he’s ashamed of his history at Winchester. I think it eats at him every day, and I intend to see to it that it continues to for the rest of his time at the university.”

“Locked away,” Dennis said, “writing his book on Milgram.”

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