piece of paper hanging from the knob of a closed door. He saw Mrs. Sigsby coming and immediately looked alarmed. Which was just the way he should look, in Mrs. Sigsby’s opinion.
“Whipple, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.”
“What did you say to me?”
Stevie chewed his lower lip as he considered this. “Yes, Mrs. Sigsby.”
“Better. Now get out of here. If you’re not being tested, find something to do.”
“Okay. I mean yes, Mrs. Sigsby.”
Stevie headed off, casting one glance back over his shoulder. Mrs. Sigsby didn’t see it. She was looking at the sheet of paper that had been pushed over the doorknob. DO NOT ENTER was written on it, probably by the pen clipped to one of Clark’s shirt pockets.
“I would have locked it if I had a key,” Fred said.
The janitors had keys to the various supply closets on A-Level, also to the vending machines so they could resupply them, but not to the exam or residence rooms. The latter were rarely locked, anyway, except when some bad actor got up to nonsense and had to be restricted for a day as punishment. Nor did the janitors have elevator key cards. If they needed to go to one of the lower levels, they had to find a caretaker or a tech and ride down with them.
Clark said, “If that fat kid had gone in there, he would have gotten the shock of his young life.”
Mrs. Sigsby opened the door without replying and beheld an empty room—no pictures or posters on the wall, nothing on the bed but a bare mattress. No different from any number of rooms in the residence wing these last dozen or so years, when the once strong inflow of high-BDNF children had slowed to a trickle. It was Dr. Hendricks’s theory that high BDNF was being bred out of the human genome, as were certain other human characteristics, like keen vision and hearing. Or, according to him, the ability to wiggle one’s ears. Which might or might not have been a joke. With Donkey Kong, you could never be sure.
She turned to look at Fred.
“It’s in the bathroom. I closed the door, just in case.”
Mrs. Sigsby opened it and stood frozen for a space of seconds. She had seen a great deal during her tenure as Institute head, including the suicide of one resident and the attempted suicide of two others, but she had never seen the suicide of an employee.
The housekeeper (there was no mistaking the brown uniform) had hung herself from the shower head, which would have broken under the weight of someone heavier—the Whipple boy she’d just shooed away, for instance. The dead face glaring back at Mrs. Sigsby was black and swollen. Her tongue protruded from between her lips, almost as if she were giving them a final raspberry. Written on the tile wall in straggling letters was a final message.
“It’s Maureen,” Fred said in a low voice. He took a wad of handkerchief from the back pocket of his work pants and wiped his lips with it. “Maureen Alvorson. She—”
Mrs. Sigsby broke through the ice of shock and looked over her shoulder. The door to the hall was standing open. “Close that.”
“She—”
“Close that door!”
The janitor did as he was told. Mrs. Sigsby felt in the right pocket of her suit jacket, but it was flat. Shit, she thought. Shit, shit, shit. Careless to have forgotten to bring her walkie, but who knew something like this was in store?
“Go back to my office. Tell Rosalind to give you my walkie-talkie. Bring it to me.”
“You—”
“Shut up.” She turned to him. Her mouth had thinned to a slit, and the way her eyes were bulging from her narrow face made Fred retreat a step. She looked crazy. “Do it, do it fast, and not a word to anyone about this.”
“Okay, you bet.”
He went out, closing the door behind him. Mrs. Sigsby sat down on the bare mattress and looked at the woman hanging from the shower head. And at the message she had written with the lipstick Mrs. Sigsby now observed lying in front of the toilet.
HELL IS WAITING. I’LL BE HERE TO MEET YOU.
3
Stackhouse was in the Institute’s village, and when he answered her call, he sounded groggy. She assumed he had been living it up at Outlaw Country the night before, possibly in his brown suit, but didn’t bother asking. She just told him to come to the West Wing at once. He’d know which room; a janitor would be standing outside the door.