Some in the class laughed. For them, obviously, it was becoming a joke. A game. But Mary thought of the article she had read, of Leonard Williams’s crime. When she looked at him, she could not fathom someone who had knowingly stolen another scholar’s ideas and language. But of course that was invincible ignorance, because she knew that he had stolen those words.
“What about the dad?” asked Brian House. He had moved up a row for some reason, and now he was sitting right behind Mary. She wondered if he was just trying to show her up with this question, or maybe he had thought about what she had said on the viaduct Saturday night.
“Ah,” Williams exclaimed. “Good old Dad. What about him? He’s a schoolteacher. He teaches science at a local elementary school. He’s overweight. What else?”
“The man in the transparency-your actor-had a military tattoo on his arm,” Dennis said. Mary felt ashamed-she hadn’t noticed it in the picture. She suddenly felt as if she was behind the rest of them, slipping away in the current. While she had been chasing down stupid conspiracy theories about Leonard Williams, the rest of the class had been thinking about Polly.
“The last one to see her,” said the girl sitting beside Mary.
Mary knew that she better say something, or else the day was going to pass her by and she would be two weeks into a class without any headway. “Watches Letterman,” she said.
A few people in back laughed, but Mary had not meant it as a joke. The comment was made in desperation, and again she felt herself flush.
“Good, Ms. Butler,” the professor said, and Mary rose her eyes hopefully to meet his. “He watches Letterman. What could this mean? This is an important clue, I think.”
“It could mean that he likes Letterman,” said Brian wryly.
“Or that he hates Leno,” the professor retorted. “But come on. Think here. He is watching Letterman when Polly returns from the going-away party. She watches the show with him and falls asleep and he carries her to bed. What are the possible meanings of that scenario?”
Mary thought. She closed her eyes and tried to find it, to find the truth in the situation. She saw Polly opening the door, coming into the dark house. Polly was a little drunk, stumbling. She put her purse down on the kitchen counter and saw her father. She came into the living room, which was flickering with the light from the TV, and sat beside him on the couch. He put his arm around her. They didn’t say anything because they had the kind of relationship where you didn’t have to speak. Your actions, your gestures, sounds, and tiny movements, told enough of the story of your day.
“He was waiting for her,” she said.
“Why?” Williams asked.
“Because he was worried about Mike.”
“Of course,” the professor said. He was smiling, proud of her for getting there. “He was waiting for her because of Mike. Because there had-what?-been something going on in the last week before she disappeared. Because he was concerned with the old trouble again. Maybe Mike had been coming around again. Does a guy who teaches elementary school children seem to you like a late-night television fan?”
“No,” half the class agreed.
“Are guys with military tattoos normally Letterman fans?”
“No.”
“So what was Polly’s father doing watching television late that night? Of course, he had to be waiting on her. Which means that Mike may have been-may have been-up to his old tricks.”
Williams wrote one more word on the board: retroduction.
“This is a type of logic that suggests that we can account for a truth based on an observed set of facts. It has been proven, or observed, that Polly watched television with her father. It has been observed that Mike and Polly’s father had had run-ins in the past, and that, according to a police report, the two men ‘hated’ each other. It has been observed that Mike physically abused Polly in the past. So we know retroductively, based on Letterman and her father taking Polly to bed, that perhaps he was waiting for her to come in. And thus Mike becomes more of a suspect.”
“It doesn’t fit,” said Dennis then. The familiar light was moving forward, almost to the podium now.
“Mr. Flaherty has an objection!” said Professor Williams. He was still smiling, playing with them, seeing how far they could go with these theories.
“Mike was at the party,” Dennis said.
“He was at the party, yes,” agreed the professor. “Many people saw him that night. That’s what you call a rock-solid alibi. Go on.”
Dennis did not know how to go on. Mary could see the doodles and shapes all over his legal pad, boxes and stars and squares. Dennis had the habit-or perhaps the gift-of listening and not listening at the same time, of being there in spirit and off somewhere simultaneously. Whenever they had been at a restaurant eating, Dennis could look off, his eyes darting here and there, while she spoke. When she questioned him about it, saying, “If you were listening to me, what was I just saying?” he could repeat what she’d said word for word.
“Well,” he finally said, “this means that Mike could not have abducted Polly.”
Another phrase went up on the board: tainted data.
“And why was the data tainted?” the professor asked the class.
“Because everybody at that party was drunk,” Brian said.
“That’s one reason. But there’s something else, something that you don’t know about yet. What was Polly doing that night? Where was she that night?”
“Place,” the girl beside Mary said.
“That’s right, Ms. Bell. Place. And tonight you will find out just a bit more of this intricate puzzle. Be sure to check your e-mail.”
With that, he was through the open door and out of their lives once again.
8
It was not that Dennis Flaherty regretted doing it. Quite the opposite-he wished that he could do it again. All day he had been craving her, starving for her as if the woman were some kind of sustenance. The only respite had been Dr. Williams’s creepy logic class, but now that he was back in his room at the Tau house, he was feeling it again.
Elizabeth. Somehow her name was more powerful than her body, a body he had roved across for an entire afternoon in the inner sanctum of the old man’s yacht. The old man sleeping above deck, the creek and whisper of the river below them, and Elizabeth teaching him things about himself that he had never dreamed could be true.