are who you say you are, but—”
“Of course,” Hildie agreed, burrowing into the large bag that she’d dropped on a chair as she’d passed through the living room a few minutes earlier. Dover glanced perfunctorily at both her driver’s license and her university identification, then handed them back to her.
“I can reach you at the same phone number I used this morning?”
“Or the university switchboard,” Hildie replied. “You can usually get me more easily that way during the day. The other number is in my apartment at the Academy. I’m the housemother there.”
Five minutes later she and Jeff were in her car, heading back to the Academy. They drove in silence for more than a full minute. Then Hildie spoke. “I’m sorry about your parents, Jeff,” she said. “I know how hard it’s going to be for you.”
For a moment she wasn’t sure if Jeff had heard her or not, but then he turned to look at her.
“Dr. Engersol is going to have to let me go with Adam now,” he said. “If the police find out what I did, they’re going to come and arrest me, aren’t they?”
Hildie, her hands tightening around the steering wheel, said nothing.
For nearly half an hour Josh had been puzzling out the machinery that was concealed behind the concrete block wall. When he opened the door and switched on the light, he knew instantly that he’d found what he was looking for.
Bolted to the floor were two large motors, each of which was geared to a reel.
One of the motors was old, its brass casing black with grease, its copper-wrapped coils clearly visible through the ornately embossed grillwork that ventilated it.
The second one, though, looked much newer. Yet Josh could still see the footprint of a twin to the older one, clearly visible around the smaller base of the more modern motor.
Had one of the old ones broken down? But if it had, why hadn’t they replaced both of them at once?
His mind still puzzling at the question, he examined the reels, both of which held cable that was thicker than Josh’s forefinger.
On the reel attached to the older motor, only a few turns of cable were wrapped around the drum.
The same was true of the reel attached to the newer motor. But the reel itself was much larger, though the cables were of the same diameter.
With his eyes Josh traced the cables that came off the reels, turned around heavy pulleys bolted into the concrete floor, then crossed the floor itself, to turn on two more pulleys. From there the cables went straight up, disappearing into twin shafts that appeared to lead up through the walls of the house.
In his mind’s eye he pictured them continuing upward through the walls to two more pulleys, which would turn them back toward the shaft in the center of the basement. The last two pulleys would be directly over the two shafts themselves.
It took Josh only a moment to figure out which motor operated which elevator.
The old motor, attached to the smaller of the two reels, must run the brass cage he saw every day, and which he knew was now sitting on the main floor, most of its cable wound off the reel.
Which meant the newer motor, and its much bigger reel, operated the hidden elevator. But that reel, too, was nearly empty, which meant that the second car, like the first, must be all the way down.
But how much farther down than the other one?
His eyes scanned the walls of the room, and a second later he spotted the controllers for the two elevators.
As with the motors themselves, one of the controllers looked as though it had been in place since the house was built.
But the controller attached to the second motor was as new as the motor itself. And from its black metal case, running parallel to the coiled metal electrical conduit, emerged the plastic tube that had branched off from the large pipe clinging to the elevator shaft.
The hidden elevator, then, was controlled by a computer.
While the older one, the one that everyone saw, was still operated by the system that had been installed when Mr. Barrington built the house.
A sudden loud clank made Josh jump back from the controllers. Panic flooded him for a second as he thought he’d been caught in the basement, but a moment later it eased as he realized that what he’d heard was nothing more than one of the elevators starting.
He turned and watched the smaller