Free Dominance by Will Lavender Page B

Iowa and check it out?” Lewis Prine asked.
    Aldiss nodded. “The scholars got to the Rutherford widow, of course. When the second and final novel, The Golden Silence, appeared, we—they had to know. And so yes, they flocked to Iowa. Sometimes they would just sit outside the house where Rutherford had once lived.”
    â€œJesus,” Melissa Lee muttered.
    â€œSome of them gathered the courage to speak to his widow. At first she was polite, but then she saw how obsessed they were. To know. To put the mystery to rest. And she became angry. She and Charles Rutherford had a son, a young boy who was so ill that he had to be institutionalized for a time, and she had to think of his safety. This Fallows character, this crazy writer—he was not her husband. He could not be. She scolded them, drove them off any way she knew how, called the local police on them. Soon they drifted away and left the poor woman and her boy alone.”
    The class thought about this. Frank Marsden, his lashes still thick with mascara from rehearsals for Richard III, asked, “So Rutherford, your ‘man in the dark coat’—there is no chance that he is really Paul Fallows?”
    Aldiss said nothing at first. The students sat silently, waiting, the red-eyed camera mounted in the corner of the room recording everything. “I am not ready to answer that question,” Aldiss said at last. “There are indeed connections between the two men. Connections that it has taken me twelve years to uncover. It is so very difficult to work with the resources this prison can offer, but I believe I am finally close to the answer. Very close. I have discovered things about Fallows that I never knew when I was outside these walls.”
    With that Aldiss paused, and everyone in the class sat forward.
    â€œWith the help of a few of my trusted colleagues,” the professor went on, “including my old friend Dr. Stanley Fisk, professor emeritus at Jasper, I have uncovered new information. Information that no Fallows scholar has seen.”
    â€œWhat kind of information?” Alex asked breathlessly.
    â€œDocuments, mostly. But also clues hidden inside the two novels. Clues that you, students, will be following as this class goes forward. But these clues will not be given to you. You must earn them. This is a classroom of higher learning, after all, and in any good class the strong rise to the top. I will give you what I have discovered, but only if you earn your keep.”
    â€œWhere do we start?” asked Michael Tanner.
    â€œYou have already begun. By solving the first riddle you are on your way to uncovering the writer’s true identity. But know this: I am notPaul Fallows, as some of the more sensationalist literary critics have come to believe.” Again the professor laughed and the class followed suit, but theirs was stilted laughter—they had done the math, of course. It was definitely possible. “Also know that you will go nowhere without the knowledge of who Charles Rutherford was, and of the shining city he came from. The trail begins with him, and that is where we will continue on our journey.”
    *   *   *
    They spoke then about The Coil. The opening scenes in Manhattan, circa 1900. The voyage of the woman named Ann Marie as she moves from Iowa and learns her purpose in the world. The novel was one of manners: Ann Marie comes to discover that the culture even of the greatest city in the world is not accommodating of an educated, self-assured woman. Everyone in the classroom had seen this kind of novel a hundred times before—but Paul Fallows put his own stamp on it. This book was different. There was something intense about Ann Marie’s rise, something almost destined. A covert, sustained violence thrummed just beneath the surface of the book. At one point in their assigned fifty pages Ann Marie brings the novel’s antagonist—a ghost-pale, misogynistic lawyer