“Probably not,” Brian offered, perhaps because he had experienced a similar situation: a bitter father, a beautiful girl, threatening phone calls from the despondent old man.
“You’re right,” said the professor. “They don’t like each other. In fact, they hate each other. Polly’s father once told Mike that he would kill him if he ever caught him out alone. But this doesn’t answer the question that Miss Butler is implicitly posing: Why the father? Why abduct your own daughter?”
“To protect her!” Mary almost shouted. She was feeling that cold, familiar rush when she put the pieces into place. That old energy in the blood. She had to be close.
“That’s interesting,” said Williams gently. Mary looked at Williams and saw that he was staring at her in a way that betrayed his interest in her. She knew that he was keeping her on a line, tethering her to all the intricate possibilities. Blushing, she finally looked away. “To protect her,” he went on. “So you’re saying that Mike is such a danger to Polly that her own father must abduct her, lie to the police, grieve publicly about his daughter’s false disappearance, and manage to keep the ruse intact for almost a month? That’s impressive for a little old schoolteacher with not much money in the bank.”
Mary realized how ridiculous it sounded now, coming from him. She could only look at the flickering cursor on her laptop monitor.
“But if this Mike is really dangerous,” said Dennis, taking up for Mary, “if he’s psychopathic in some way, maybe Polly’s father feels that her life is threatened enough to hide her.”
“Hide her where?” Williams asked.
“An aunt’s house,” he said. Mary wasn’t sure if Dennis really believed in her theory or was just grabbing the loose strand of the idea and running with it to save her the shame.
“How many of you believe this?” Professor Williams asked the class. The light from the window was approaching him. Their time was running out. No one in the class raised a hand.
“But in a murder-” said Brian now.
“A kidnapping,” the professor corrected him.
“-in a kidnapping, isn’t the father the immediate suspect? Isn’t that the rule? A girl is taken and her father did it. Maybe he’s a sexual deviant.”
“Polly’s father was a suspect,” Professor Williams said then, and Mary’s heart started up again. “But he was never a suspect for the convoluted reason that Ms. Butler suggests he should be. Class: what is the real problem with the theory Ms. Butler is presenting?”
Again she crashed down shamefully, her gaze on the hot light of the screen.
Limply, a girl in Mary’s row raised her hand. “She is going to be murdered,” the girl said, casting a look at Mary that said, Sorry.
“Think about it,” the professor said, his impatience with them showing for the first time. “I’ve told you that she is to be murdered in six weeks. That is a given. So why would the father ‘rescue’ Polly from Mike if he-Daddy-were going to kill her in six short weeks?”
Williams shuffled the papers he had brought in. He turned off Seminary East’s lights, and the room fell as dark as it could given the natural light that poured in through the windows. Then there was the whir of an overhead projector, and a square of yellow, sickly light blanched the northern wall. The professor slipped the topmost sheet off the stack and put it on the machine. It was a photograph of a girl in a summer dress. She was standing barefoot on the grass and holding out her arm, palm forward, as if she didn’t want her picture taken. Williams didn’t have to tell them: this was Polly. He put on the next page. This was a shot of a tattooed young man sitting on a couch. He had drunk too much and his eyes were rimmed red. He was shirtless and sunburned, his bare shoulders pink and peeling. An invisible girl, who was off to the right of the shot, had her arm around him. Mike. The third page: an overweight man standing to the right of a class of young children. Polly’s father. The children all had their eyes censored out by thin black bars. And then a fourth page: a house, a simple Cape Cod with a dead vegetable garden off to one side and an American flag blowing against the eaves. Polly’s house, the last place she had been seen.
“So now,” said Professor Williams, turning to write on the board, “you know these things.” He wrote August 1. “This is the last day Polly was seen. You also know the date when her car was found.” He wrote, August 2. “You know that Mike was in the house of the party all night on August first. You know Polly’s father was the last to see her late on the evening of August first, and that he watched television with his daughter before she went to bed. And you know that whoever kidnapped Polly is her potential murderer. Is that it?”
No one in the class spoke. Upstairs, in Seminary High, students were getting out of class, their desks scooting almost musically across the floor.
Mary thought, Something else. But she couldn’t organize the thought, much less verbalize it. It was there, right in front of her, floating nebulously.
“All right then,” said Williams. He gathered up the papers and put the marker in the tray, a gift to whomever used the classroom next, and turned off his machine. “It’s important to remember that this class is an NF.” He was referring to a “No Friday” Williams’s class was coveted mostly because it would be held on Mondays and Wednesdays only. The students would have Friday afternoons off, and so Mary knew she would not be able to talk to him again before next week. Any theories she had would have to be laid out now, or else she risked other students beating her to the punch.
“The phone call,” Mary said then. Her heart was beating fast again, and her face was growing hot.
“What’s that?” asked Williams.
“‘I’m here,’” she said. “The strange phone call to her father. The one with the girl in the well. Polly was calling him. She got to a phone somehow. She…”
“Circumstance,” said Brian mockingly, and the back row cracked up.
Williams took up the marker and wrote on the board, August 4.
Then he said softly, “‘I’m here,’ she said. ‘I’m here.’ Was it Polly? Was it a prank? And where is ‘here’?” He didn’t turn on the fluorescents, and the room was yellow, almost golden with the streaking light. He was outside of the light, behind it, frontlit, nearly invisible behind a curtain of Seminary dust. “Now, ladies and gentlemen,” Williams said, capping his marker with a sharp click, “you know that you have just over five weeks to find Polly, or else she will be murdered.”
4
Winchester University is split into two hemispheres: Down Campus, home to all of the classroom buildings and underclassmen dorms, and Up Campus, where the Greek houses are located and where much of the faculty lives. The great creation myth of Winchester comes from the 1950s, when Down Campus was the women’s college and Up Campus was a sparsely attended divinity school. Down Campus was the first to accept a minority, a black woman named Grace Murphy. The students at Up were so incensed over this that they rioted on Down Campus. A now-infamous town cop named Henry Rodram was involved in these riots, and the narrative goes like this: