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  Gladys pulled her walkie from the pocket of her white pants and keyed it. “Mr. Stackhouse? This is Gladys for Mr. Stackhouse.”

  There was a pause, then: “This is Stackhouse, go.”

  “I think you need to come out to the playground as soon as possible. There’s something you need to see. Maybe it’s nothing, but I don’t like it.”

  11

  After notifying the security chief, Gladys called Winona to take the two boys back to their rooms. They were to stay there until further notice.

  “I don’t know nothing about that hole,” Stevie said sulkily. “I thought a woodchuck done it.”

  Winona told him to shut up and herded the boys back inside.

  Stackhouse arrived with Mrs. Sigsby. She bent and he squatted, first looking at the dip under the chainlink, then at the fence itself.

  “Nobody could crawl under there,” Mrs. Sigsby said. “Well, maybe Dixon, he’s not much bigger than those Wilcox twins were, but no one else.”

  Stackhouse scooped away the loose mix of rocks and dirt the two boys had put back in, deepening the dip to a trench. “Are you sure of that?”

  Mrs. Sigsby realized she was biting at her lip, and made herself stop. The idea is ridiculous, she thought. We have cameras, we have microphones, we have the caretakers and the janitors and the housekeepers, we have security. All to take care of a bunch of kids so terrified they wouldn’t say boo to a goose.

  Of course there was Wilholm, who definitely would say boo to a goose, and there had been a few others like him over the years. But still . . .

  “Julia.” Very low.

  “What?”

  “Get down here with me.”

  She started to do it, then saw the Brown girl staring at them. “Get inside,” she snapped. “This second.”

  Frieda went in a hurry, dusting off her chalky hands, leaving her smiling cartoon people behind. As the girl entered the lounge, Mrs. Sigsby saw a small cluster of children gawking out. Where were the caretakers when you needed them? In the break room, swapping stories with one of the extraction teams? Telling dirty jo—

  “Julia!”

  She dropped to one knee, wincing when a sharp piece of gravel bit into her.

  “There’s blood on this fence. See it?”

  She didn’t want to, but she did. Yes, that was blood. Dried to maroon, but definitely blood.

  “Now look over there.”

  He poked a finger through one of the chainlink diamonds, pointing at a partially uprooted bush. There was blood on that, too. As Mrs. Sigsby looked at those few spots, spots that were outside, her stomach dropped and for one alarming moment she thought she was going to wet her pants, as she had on that long-ago trike. She thought of the Zero Phone and saw her life as head of the Institute—because that was what it was, not her job but her life—disappearing into it. What would the lisping man on the other end say if she had to call and tell him that, in what was supposed to be the most secret and secure facility in the country—not to mention the most vital facility in the country—a child had escaped by going under a fence?

  They would say she was done, of course. Done and dusted.

  “The residents are all here,” she said in a hoarse whisper. She grasped Stackhouse’s wrist, her fingernails biting into his skin. He didn’t seem to notice. He was still staring at the partially uprooted bush as if hypnotized. This was as bad for him as for her. Not worse, there was no worse, but just as bad. “Trevor, they are all here. I checked.”

  “I think you better check again. Don’t you?”

  She had her walkie this time (thoughts of locking the barn door after the livestock was stolen flashed through her mind), and she keyed it. “Zeke. This is Mrs. Sigsby for Zeke.” You better be there, Ionidis. You just better.

  He was. “This is Zeke, Mrs. Sigsby. I’ve been checking up on Alvorson, Mr. Stackhouse told me to since Jerry’s off and Andy’s not here, and I reached her next-door neigh—”

  “Never mind that now. Look at the locater blips again for me.”

  “Okay.” He sounded suddenly cautious. Must have heard the strain in my voice, she thought. “Hold on, everything’s running slow this morning . . . couple more seconds . . .”

  She felt as if she would scream. Stackhouse was still peering through the fence, as if expecting a magic fucking hobbit to appear and explain the whole thing.

  “Okay,” Zeke said. “Forty-one residents, still perfect attendance.”

  Relief cooled her face like a breeze. “All right, that’s good. That’s very—”

  Stackhouse took the walkie from her. “Where are they currently?”

  “Uh . . . still twenty-eight in Back Half, now four in the East Wing lounge . . . three in the caff . . . two in their rooms . . . three in the hall . . .”

  Those three would be Dixon, Whipple, and the artist-girl, Mrs. Sigsby thought.

  “Plus one in the playground,” Zeke finished. “Forty-one. Like I said.”

  “Wait one, Zeke.” Stackhouse looked at Mrs. Sigsby. “Do you see a kid in the playground?”

  She didn’t answer him. She didn’t need to.

  Stackhouse raised the walkie again. “Zeke?”

  “Go, Mr. Stackhouse. Right here.”

  “Can you pinpoint the exact location of the kid in the playground?”

  “Uh . . . let me zoom . . . there’s a button for that . . .”

  “Don’t bother,” Mrs. Sigsby said. She had spotted an object glittering in the early afternoon sun. She walked onto the basketball court, stooped at the foul line, and picked it up. She returned to her security chief and held out her hand. In her palm was most of an earlobe with the tracker button still embedded in it.

  12

  The Front Half residents were told to return to their rooms and stay there. If any were caught in the hall, they would be severely punished. The Institute’s security force totaled just four, counting Stackhouse himself. Two of these men were in the Institute village and came quickly, using the golf-cart track Maureen had expected Luke to find, and which he had missed by less than a hundred feet. The third member of Stackhouse’s team was in Dennison River Bend. Stackhouse had no intention of waiting for her to turn up. Denny Williams and Robin Lecks of the Ruby Red team were on-site, though, waiting for their next assignment, and perfectly willing to be drafted. They were joined by two widebodies—Joe Brinks and Chad Greenlee.

  “The Minnesota boy,” Denny said, once this makeshift search party was assembled and the tale was told. “The one we brought in last month.”

  “That’s right,” Stackhouse agreed, “the Minnesota boy.”

  “And you say he ripped the tracker right out of his ear?” Robin asked.

  “The cut’s a little smoother than that. Used a knife, I think.”

  “Took balls, either way,” Denny said.

  “I’ll have his balls when we catch up to him,” Joe said. “He doesn’t fight like Wilholm did, but he’s got a fuck-you look in his eyes.”

  “He’ll be wandering around in the woods, so lost he’ll probably hug us when we find him,” Chad said. He paused. “If we find him. Lot of trees out there.”

  “He was bleeding from his ear and probably all down his back from going under the fence,” Stackhouse said. “Must have got it on his hands, too. We’ll follow the blood as far as we can.”

  “It’d be good if we had a dog,” Denny Williams said. “A bloodhound or a good old bluetick.”

  “It would be good if he’d never gotten out in the first place,” Robin said. “Under the fence, huh?” She almost laughed, then saw Stackhouse’s drawn face and furious eyes and reconsidered.

  Rafe Pullman and John Walsh, the two security guys from the village, arrived just then.

  Stackhouse said, “We are not going to kill him, understand that, but we are going to zap the living shit out of the little son of a bitch when we find him.”

  “If we find him,” Chad the caretaker repeated.

  “We’ll find him,” Stac
khouse said. Because if we don’t, he thought, I’m toast. This whole place might be toast.

  “I’m going back to my office,” Mrs. Sigsby said.

  Stackhouse caught her by the elbow. “And do what?”

  “Think.”

  “That’s good. Think all you want, but no calls. Are we agreed on that?”

  Mrs. Sigsby looked at him with contempt, but the way she was biting her lips suggested she might also be afraid. If so, that made two of them. “Of course.”

  But when she got to her office—the blessed air-conditioned silence of her office—she found thinking was hard. Her eyes kept straying to the locked drawer of her desk. As if it wasn’t a phone inside, but a hand grenade.

  13

  Three o’clock in the afternoon.

  No news from the men hunting for Luke Ellis in the woods. Plenty of communications, yes, but no news. Every member of the Institute staff had been notified of the escape; it was all hands on deck. Some had joined the searchers. Others were combing the Institute village, searching all empty quarters, looking for the boy or at least some sign that he’d been there. All personal vehicles were accounted for. The golf carts the employees sometimes used to get around were all where they belonged. Their stringers in Dennison River Bend—including two members of the town’s small police force—had been alerted and given Ellis’s description, but there had been no sightings.

  With Alvorson there was news.

  Ionidis had shown initiative and guile of which Jerry Symonds and Andy Fellowes, their IT techs, would have been incapable. First using Google Earth and then a phone locater app, Zeke had gotten in touch with Alvorson’s next-door neighbor in the little Vermont town where Alvorson still maintained a residence. He represented himself to this neighbor as an IRS agent, and she bought it without a single question. Showing no signs of the reticence Yankees were supposedly famous for, she told him that Maureen had asked her to witness several documents the last time Mo had been home. A woman lawyer had been present. The documents were addressed to several collection agencies. The lawyer called the documents C-and-D orders, which the neighbor rightly took to mean cease and desist.

  “Those letters were all about her husband’s credit cards,” the neighbor lady told Zeke. “Mo didn’t explain, but she didn’t need to. I wasn’t born yesterday. Handling that deadbeat’s bills is what she was doing. If the IRS can sue her for that, you better move fast. She looked sick as hell.”

  Mrs. Sigsby thought the Vermont neighbor had it right. The question was why Alvorson would do it that way; it was carrying coals to Newcastle. All Institute employees knew that if they got into any kind of financial jam (gambling was the most common), they could count on loans that were next door to interest-free. That part of the benefits package was explained at every new employee’s intake orientation. It really wasn’t a benefit at all, but a protection. People who were in debt could be tempted to sell secrets.

  The easy explanation for such behavior was pride, maybe combined with shame at having been taken advantage of by her runaway husband, but Mrs. Sigsby didn’t like it. The woman had been nearing the end of her life and must have known that for some time. She had decided to clean her hands, and taking money from the organization that had dirtied them was not the way to start. That felt right—or close to right, anyway. It fit with Alvorson’s reference to hell.

  That bitch helped him escape, Mrs. Sigsby thought. Of course she did, it was her idea of atonement. But I can’t question her about it, she made sure of that. Of course she did—she knows our methods. So what do I do? What will I do if that too-smart-for-his-own-good boy isn’t back here before dark?

  She knew the answer, and was sure Trevor did, too. She would have to take the Zero Phone out of its locked drawer and hit all three of the white buttons. The lisping man would answer. When she told him that a resident had escaped for the first time in the Institute’s history—had dug his way out in the middle of the night under the fence—what would that person say? Gosh, I’m thorry? Thath’s too bad? Don’t worry about it?

  Like hell.

  Think, she told herself. Think, think, think. Who might the troublesome housekeeper have told? For that matter, who might Ellis have t—

  “Fuck. Fuck!”

  It was right in front of her, and had been ever since discovering the hole under the fence. She sat up straight in her chair, eyes wide, the Zero Phone out of her mind for the first time since Stackhouse had called in to report the blood-trail had disappeared just fifty yards into the woods.

  She powered up her computer and found the file she wanted. She clicked, and a video began to play. Alvorson, Ellis, and Dixon, standing by the snack machines.

  We can talk here. There’s a mic, but it hasn’t worked for years.

  Luke Ellis did most of the talking. He voiced concern about those twins and the Cross boy. Alvorson soothed him. Dixon stood by, saying little, just scratching his arms and yanking at his nose.

  Jesus Christ, Stackhouse had said. If you have to pick it, go on and pick it. Only now, looking at this video with new eyes, Mrs. Sigsby saw what had really been going on.

  She closed her laptop and thumbed her intercom. “Rosalind, I want to see the Dixon boy. Have Tony and Winona bring him. Right away.”

  14

  Avery Dixon, dressed in a Batman tee-shirt and dirty shorts that displayed his scabby knees, stood in front of Mrs. Sigsby’s desk, looking at her with frightened eyes. Small to begin with and now flanked by Winona and Tony, he didn’t look ten; he looked barely old enough for first grade.

  Mrs. Sigsby offered him a thin smile. “I should have gotten to you much sooner, Mr. Dixon. I must be slipping.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Avery whispered.

  “So you agree? You think I’m slipping?”

  “No, ma’am!” Avery’s tongue flicked out and wet his lips. No nose-pulling, though, not today.

  Mrs. Sigsby leaned forward, hands clasped. “If I have been, the slippage is over now. Changes will be made. But first it’s important . . . imperative . . . that we bring Luke back home.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She nodded. “We agree, and that’s good. A good start. So where did he go?”

  “I don’t know, ma’am.”

  “I think you do. You and Steven Whipple were filling in the hole he escaped through. Which was stupid. You should have left it alone.”

  “We thought a woodchuck made it, ma’am.”

  “Nonsense. You know exactly who made it. Your friend Luke. Now.” She spread her hands on her desk and smiled at him. “He’s a smart boy and smart boys don’t just plunge off into the woods. Going under the fence might have been his idea, but he needed Alvorson to give him the lay of the land on the other side of it. She gave you the directions piece by piece, every time you yanked on your nose. Beamed it right into your talented little head, didn’t she? Later on, you gave it to Ellis. There’s no point in denying it, Mr. Dixon, I’ve seen the video of your conversation. It is—if you don’t mind a silly old lady making a joke—as plain as the nose on your face. I should have realized it sooner.”

  And Trevor, she thought. He saw it, too, and also should have seen what was going on. If there’s a comprehensive debriefing when this is over, how blind we will look.

  “Now tell me where he went.”

  “I really don’t know.”

  “You’re shifting your eyes around, Mr. Dixon. That’s what liars do. Look straight at me. Otherwise, Tony is going to twist your arm behind your back, and that will hurt.”

  She nodded at Tony. He grabbed one of Avery’s thin wrists.

  Avery looked straight at her. It was hard, because her face was thin and scary, a mean teacher’s face that said tell me everything, but he did it. Tears began to well up and roll down his cheeks. He had always been a crier; his two older sisters had called him Little Crybaby Cry, and in the schoolyard at recess he had been anybody’s punching bag. The playground here was better. He missed his mother and father,
missed them bad, but at least he had friends. Harry had pushed him down, but then had been a friend. At least until he died. Until they killed him with one of their stupid tests. Sha and Helen were gone, but the new girl, Frieda, was nice to him, and had let him win at HORSE. Only once, but still. And Luke. He was the best of all. The best friend Avery had ever had.

  “Where did Alvorson tell him to go, Mr. Dixon? What was the plan?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Mrs. Sigsby nodded to Tony, who twisted Avery’s arm behind his back and hoisted his wrist almost to his shoulderblade. The pain was incredible. Avery screamed.

  “Where did he go? What was the plan?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “Let him go, Tony.”

  Tony did so, and Avery collapsed to his knees, sobbing. “That really hurt, don’t hurt me anymore, please don’t.” He thought of adding it’s not fair, but what did these people care about what was fair? Nothing, that was what.

  “I don’t want to,” Mrs. Sigsby said. This was a thin truth, at best. The thicker one was that years spent in this office had inured her to the pain of children. And while the sign in the crematorium was right—they were heroes, no matter how reluctant their heroism might be—some of them could try one’s patience. Sometimes until one’s patience snapped.

  “I don’t know where he went, honest.”

  “When people have to say they’re being honest, that means they’re not. I’ve been around the block a few times, and I know that. So tell me: Where did he go, and what was the plan?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “Tony, lift up his shirt. Winona, your Taser. Medium power.”

  “No!” Avery screamed, trying to pull away. “No zap-stick! Please, no zap-stick!”

  Tony caught him around the middle and lifted his shirt. Winona positioned her zap-stick just above Avery’s belly button and triggered it. Avery shrieked. His legs jerked and piss watered the carpet.

  “Where did he go, Mr. Dixon?” The boy’s face was blotchy and snotty, there were dark circles beneath his eyes, he had wet his pants, and still the little runt was holding out. Mrs. Sigsby could hardly believe it. “Where did he go and what was the plan?”