“So if I want to find this Annabel character… You say she was only twelve years old?”
“In Nabokov’s novel. But not in Poe’s poem. And not in Tom’s novel either. But she would be somebody still young enough to have a kind of wounded innocence to her.”
“A wounded innocence.”
“Someone who has been hurt but is still…vulnerable, I guess. Trusting. Not yet jaded. Not yet cynical.”
“Someone like you,” DeMarco said.
Nathan Briessen flinched. “Funny you should say that. Tom said that once.”
Strange irony, DeMarco thought. Huston was writing a novel about an older man who falls in love with a girl, and here was a young man who was in love with the older man.
“Desire,” DeMarco said. “That’s what the title stood for? D for desire?”
“The book was to be divided into four parts: Desire, Deception, Despair, and Discernment.”
“Discernment? It was going to have a happy ending?”
“That I don’t know. In all likelihood, Tom didn’t either. What I do know is that discernment doesn’t always lead to happiness. Sometimes just the opposite.”
“Well,” DeMarco said. Then, a moment later, “Do you know which club it is? Where Annabel works?”
“I know that Tom had been visiting various clubs for a couple of months now, trying to find the one girl who seemed to have the qualities he was looking for. The one who wasn’t faking it, you know? He said that some of them were very good at faking it.”
“Faking interest in him?”
“Faking innocence.”
“Is that possible? For a woman to work as a stripper and still be an innocent?”
“Apparently Tom thought so.”
“And you?”
Briessen shrugged. “I guess it’s fair to say that my own view of life isn’t quite so…conciliatory. Not that I don’t wish I could share Tom’s view. And you, Sergeant?”
“Excuse me?”
“How do you view the world?”
DeMarco smiled. “Did Professor Huston happen to mention the name of the club where Annabel works?”
“He mentioned others, ones he had crossed off the list. But this new one? I don’t think so. I know he’d visited it three, maybe four times already before he invited me to go along. I think he just wanted me to look at the girl too, you know? See if I thought she was the real thing.”
“Very strange place to go searching for innocence.”
“I made the same comment. And you know what he said?”
“I’d like to.”
“He said that’s what makes it worth writing about. The apparent dichotomy. The internal conflict.”
“The human heart in conflict with itself.”
Briessen cocked his head and smiled. “You’ve read Faulkner.”
“Once upon a time,” DeMarco said. “As for the name of this strip club…”
“It wasn’t anything local, I know that much.”
“He couldn’t risk being seen by someone he knows.”
“Right. I mean his wife knew, but even so.”
“She knew he was going to strip clubs?”
“It was research. She understood. They trusted each other completely.”
“And this you know because…?”
“He told me.”
DeMarco smiled and nodded. We believe what we want to believe. He said, “So it wasn’t a local club. Can you give me anything more than that?”
“I think he said something about going north. The first time he went to this club, I mean. Must have been three, four weeks ago.”
“North to Erie?”
“No…no, he asked me about a golf course that was nearby. Twin Oaks something. Twin Oaks Country Club, that was it. He asked if I knew how to get to Twin Oaks Country Club because the strip club was off the same road, just a couple of miles away.”
“Twin Oaks straddles the Pennsylvania-Ohio border. Just north of Pierpont.”
“There you go. That’s where the club is. Somewhere not far from there.”
DeMarco smiled. “You’ve been a great deal of help today.”
“I only wish I knew more.”
“This novel he was writing. The one he called D. I haven’t found it anywhere. Not on his computers, not in any of his papers.”
“You wouldn’t find it on his computers. Bits and pieces maybe. Random notes, things that occurred to him at the time. But he always wrote his first drafts in longhand.”
“You’re sure about this?”
“Positive. He encouraged all of his students to do the same. He said that writing in longhand is less mechanical, more organic and sensual. That it encourages a freer flow of thought.”
“And how much of the novel do you think he had written?”
“It couldn’t have been much because he was still doing his research. He wouldn’t start the actual writing until he knew his subject inside and out.”
“And he had only recently found his Annabel.”
“Right. So I’m sure there’s a journal of some kind because I saw him writing in it in his office. But I wouldn’t be surprised if most of the book still exists only inside his head.”
DeMarco sat motionless for a while. Then he pushed himself to his feet. “So what does this do to your thesis project? Will you ask Denton to take over as your advisor?”