trembling hands.
At that, Mrs. Sigsby actually laughed. “You read my mind,” she said.
15
Five o’clock in the afternoon.
Ellis gone at least eighteen hours, maybe longer. The playground cams didn’t record, so it was impossible to tell for sure. Mrs. Sigsby and Stackhouse were in Mrs. Sigsby’s office, monitoring developments and listening for reports from their stringers. They had these all over the country. For the most part, the Institute’s stringers did no more than groundwork: keeping an eye on children with high BDNF scores and compiling information on their friends, family, neighborhoods, school situations. And their homes, of course. Everything about their homes, especially alarm systems. All that background was useful to the extraction teams when the time came. They also kept an eye out for special children not already on the Institute’s radar. These did show up from time to time. BDNF testing, along with the heel-stick PKU and the Apgar score, was routine for infants born in American hospitals, but of course not all babies were born in hospitals, and plenty of parents, such as the ever more vocal anti-vaxxer contingent, forewent the tests.
These stringers had no idea to whom they were reporting, or to what purpose; many assumed (incorrectly) that it was some kind of US government Big Brother thing. Most simply banked the extra income of five hundred dollars a month, made their reports when reports had to be made, and asked no questions. Of course every now and then one would ask questions, and that one would discover that as well as killing cats, curiosity killed their monthly dividend.
The thickest concentration of stringers, almost fifty, was in the area surrounding the Institute, and tracking talented children was not their major concern. The chief job of these stringers was to listen for people asking the wrong questions. They were tripwires, an early warning system.
Stackhouse was careful to alert half a dozen in Dennison River Bend, just in case the Dixon boy was mistaken or lying (“He wasn’t lying, I would have known,” Mrs. Sigsby insisted), but most he sent to the Presque Isle area. One of these was tasked with contacting the PI police and telling them that he was quite sure he’d seen a boy who had been in a news story on CNN. This boy, according to the news, was wanted for questioning in the murders of his parents. His name was Luke Ellis. The stringer told the police he wasn’t positive it was that kid, but it sure did look like him, and he’d asked for money in a threatening, disjointed way. Both Mrs. Sigsby and Stackhouse knew that having the police pick up their wandering boy wasn’t the ideal solution to their problems, but police could be handled. Besides, anything Ellis told them would be dismissed as the ravings of an unbalanced child.
Cell phones didn’t work in the Institute or in the village—indeed, not for a two-mile radius—so the searchers used walkies. And there were landlines. Now the one on Mrs. Sigsby’s desk rang. Stackhouse grabbed it. “What? Who am I talking to?”
It was Dr. Felicia Richardson, who had spelled Zeke in the comm room. She had been eager to do it. Her ass was also on the line, a fact she fully grasped. “I’ve got one of our stringers on hold. Guy named Jean Levesque. He says he found the boat Ellis used. Want me to transfer him to you?”
“Immediately!”
Mrs. Sigsby was standing in front of Stackhouse now, hands raised, lips forming the word What?
Stackhouse ignored her. There was a click, and Levesque came on the line. He had a St. John Valley accent thick enough to cut pulpwood. Stackhouse had never seen him, but pictured a tanned old guy under a hat with a bunch of fishing lures stuck in the brim.
“Found dat boat, me.”
“So I’m told. Where?”
“She come aground on a bank about five miles upriver from Presque Isle. Ship quite a bit of water she did, but the handle of the oar—just one oar—was prop on the seat. Left it right where it was. Didn’t call nobody. Dere’s blood on the oar. Tell you what, dere’s a l’il bit of a rapids a little further up. If dat boy you lookin for wasn’t used to boats, specially a l’il one like that—”
“It might have spilled him out,” Stackhouse finished. “Stay where you are, I’m going to send a couple of guys. And thank you.”
“What you pay me for,” Levesque said. “Don’t suppose you can tell me what he do.”
Stackhouse