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,” Stackhouse 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