When he was back in the room, he thought about all she had said. Mike. Pollyanna Pet Foods. Her father waiting for her when she got home, and how he had carried her to bed. The way she had told him her story, as if she were…as if she had rehearsed part of it. As if it were somehow an act.

Dennis opened Word and began to type. He had a theory about Polly, one that had been given to him by Elizabeth Orman. It was really indubitable: he would be ready for Professor Williams.

Mary was thinking about Professor Williams’s teeth. They were yellowed and crooked and too short. She hadn’t noticed them when she was close to him, or rather she hadn’t acknowledged it if she had, but now those teeth were all she could think about. How he had grinned at her. Stay. Not so much a request as it was a command. His eyes amused and knowing. Testing her.

In City of Glass, Quinn was sitting outside the old hotel by then, watching and waiting for Stillman to come out. It was the dawn of his obsession. He was about to lose control, Professor Kiseley had told them in class that week. Things were about to go off the deep end for Quinn.

But what about Mary? How was she doing? She wasn’t about to go off the deep end like Quinn, but she…she wasn’t doing well. Because of her insatiable need to figure the thing out, to understand Williams and his methods, she had allowed herself to become-what had he said about that scientist, Milgram, that day in class? She had allowed herself to lose herself in the class. She couldn’t go out without wondering if she was missing something. She couldn’t do anything without thinking of Williams. He could do anything now, bend the rules any way he wanted, and she would follow the game.

Now the danger, the adventure she had been craving when the class started was beginning to wear on her. She knew she had to find a way to scale it back, to tone it down, to chill out, as her mother would say. Or…

Or what? Or she might turn out like Paul Auster’s Quinn? Or she might lose herself completely to Williams and become so obsessed with solving his puzzle that she would be able to do nothing else? Because that’s what it was about, wasn’t it? The need to solve it, to figure it out. To rest her mind.

Just like Dennis. She had gotten the single room not because of trust issues, she knew now. No, she had gotten the single room because she needed that time alone to maybe understand why he had dumped her. It was hard for her to be around anyone except for Summer these days.

And now, two whole years later, she was right back in the same state of mind with Williams and Polly. Frazzled, hurt-but still desperately trying to come up with answers that would put her mind at ease. It’s not you, Mary, everyone had told her. It had nothing to do with you. Move on. Life goes on. This, too, shall pass.

Or would it?

What if you were always just stuck in one place, your mind spinning and unable to go forward like tires clenched in mud, because the answers wouldn’t reveal themselves to you? The mind needed answers to satisfy itself. Mary’s did. After all, she deserved them. What had she done to bring this on? Accepted a boy’s invitation to dinner, signed up for a stupid class? It wasn’t enough. She didn’t deserve this-what was it? Torment. Yes, that’s exactly what it was. With Dennis and now again with Williams. Torment. Torture. She didn’t deserve it.

Mary had believed that Summer McCoy meant something in that picture, but she did not. The photos were only points of reference. How had she gone so far off track? How had she lost herself? It was such a stupid mistake, to think that what she was doing existed in the real world. It was an exercise. Nothing more, nothing less. Polly was as real as Quinn; that was to say not at all. Her fate was just as important, in the scope of things, as Quinn’s survival.

But still. Still. Mary felt that what she was doing was important. She felt Polly-viscerally felt her. That meant something. It meant that she was beginning to see Polly as a real person, not just an apparition in Williams’s game. Here was a girl who’d been mistreated, wronged by this boy, this Mike. And here was Mary, who’d been similarly mistreated by Dennis. They were two of a kind. Mary felt as if she owed something to Polly. She felt as if she had no choice but to continue in the game until it was finished.

And yet Mary knew that if she got too close to the situation she would lose herself again in it, be embarrassed by Williams and the rest of the class. She had to keep a considerable distance away, she knew now, yet still find Polly.

Find Polly with the understanding that Polly was, alas, not real.

Find Polly.

She logged on to her account and read the latest e-mail from Williams.

Circumstance

Now you know where Polly was on the last night she was seen. And you know who threw the party for her: the brutish yet kind Pig, who was a father figure to Polly. You know that she returned home to her father, watched television, and went to sleep early on the morning of August 2. In fact, you have already been told about the circumstances of Polly’s disappearance. But what about Polly’s circumstance: the facts of her life that may or may not play a part in her disappearance and potential murder?

First, we know that Polly was going away to college. She was planning to major in nursing at Grady Technical College in Piercetown, which is forty miles away from where Polly grew up. The college sits out at the end of a road and overlooks Interstate 64; she had already put some of her things in the U-Stor-It storage facility that was beside campus. She had secured an apartment, where she would be staying with her friend Nicole. For the last two weeks, Polly and Nicole had driven to Piercetown to survey the campus. They partied with some people there and had a good time. Polly was looking forward to going to school, to finally getting started with her life. Nicole dated a man named Lawrence Tripp. Everyone called him Trippy, for short, because he was always high on something. Polly didn’t trust him, but she didn’t worry about Trippy too much because he and Nicole had been on the outs recently, and Polly was fairly confident that once they moved to Piercetown, Trippy would disappear.

There was also the circumstance of Polly’s mother: for the first time in a long while Polly’s mother was back in the picture. Her mother had been gone for almost a year, having left for San Francisco with a lithographer. Now her mother was calling again and Polly was afraid that her mother was going to return and, like she always did, ruin things for her.

And what about Polly’s father, Eli? Eli was an elementary school teacher at the Butler School on During Street. He had been teaching for almost thirty years and was on the verge of retirement. He enjoyed his job, but for the past few years things had begun to wear on him. When Polly disappeared, he took a leave of absence. He couldn’t imagine himself ever going back. To make matters worse, he had a run-in with an irate parent just a week before Polly disappeared that had left him cynical about the current administration at Butler. This man approached him in the parking lot after school one day and threatened him. Apparently Eli had sent this man’s son to the principal’s office “for no good reason,” as the father put it. As Eli remembered it, the boy had drawn a naked woman on the chalkboard, her legs spread. The father was incensed. Eli, for the first time in a long while, was afraid. He was a large man and could have handled this father easily, but he was timid, shy. Reserved. People referred to him as “quiet.” And here was this spark plug of a man with his finger in Eli’s face, accusing him of something he clearly didn’t do. Eli didn’t say anything to the man, just kept walking to his truck. He got in and shut the door, but the man was still there, at the glass. He was spitting mad. Eli pulled out of the parking lot and watched the man recede into the distance. When he was called on the 4th of August by the girl, the girl in the well who had said, “I’m here,” his first and immediate thought was this: The boy’s father has her.