Archer Mayor - Three Can Keep a Secret

“It’s never that easy, Joe,” Gail said with a conviction born of knowledge.

He didn’t doubt the truth of that. But the source of the prophecy was interesting. Did Gail suspect something she wasn’t admitting to? Or was she simply being watchful?

“Let me know as soon as you get anything, okay?” he asked. “It might really help me in locating her.”

* * *

Their point of departure was a large, unmarked white truck, parked just outside the former admissions entrance to the state hospital. As Joe, Lester, and the two HazMat technicians they’d been assigned clumsily emerged from the back and stepped cautiously onto the slippery mud coating the parking lot, Joe couldn’t help thinking of so many postapocalyptic movies, where the irradiated remnants of buildings, streets, and playgrounds lay abandoned and eerily silent. All around him, he could see only a wet and soiled urban wilderness, bereft of movement or sound.

He flexed and moved his limbs, adjusting to the bulky Tyvek outfit, rubber boots and gloves, and mostly, the tight-fitting respirator and confining helmet.

“Comfy?” the senior tech asked in a muffled voice, a man named Kevin Teater.

“I feel like I’m inside a body bag.”

Teater’s laughter sounded odd, unaccompanied by any visual clues beyond a slight crinkling around his eyes. “You’ll get used to it fast,” he reassured the two cops. “It’s the same for all of us.”

They proceeded toward the building’s front door in a shambling herd, churning up the slime beneath their treaded feet and feeling the weight of it clinging to their boots.

“You can see how high it got,” Teater pointed out with one gloved hand, waving at a distinct waterline some seven feet off the ground. “The whole first floor was wiped out.”

Knowing of the devastation and seeing the dampness still glistening attractively in the morning sun, however, Joe was struck by how normal everything looked.

It didn’t last. As they filed deeper inside, even the respirator couldn’t block the smell of dampness, chemicals, and something more primordial-something hinting at the earth’s very fundament.

The walls were stained and smeared, the furniture moved helter-skelter, and the whole littered with a madcap tossing of files, papers, documents, and books, along with dozens of less recognizable items, making it look like the soggy remains of a tornado’s passage.

Kevin Teater slowly led them down a dark hallway, the sun outside having little influence in this grottolike environment.

“The entrance to the tunnels is this way-at least the one we’re thinking she used.” He twisted around stiffly to address them directly. “You hear what happened to the doors’ electronics?”

The cops nodded, not bothering to shout against their shrouds.

However, at the door in question, separating the facility’s inner core from access to the underground passages, Joe asked in a loud voice, “Why is this even available to people in this building?”

“Convenience, laziness, habit. You name it. The tunnels went in when the complex was built. They’ve ended up serving every purpose you can name, from supplying overflow office space to giving people a shortcut to the cafeteria in winter. Not to mention plumbing, electricity, the Internet, heating pipes, and whatever else. To a certain extent, I don’t think anyone’s ever thought about the security aspects.” He pushed open the unlocked door and ushered them through. “And I never heard of anyone ever escaping this way, either, until now.”

Joe understood that the power was out and the place trashed by recent events, but even so, he found what lay ahead to be dark and threatening, and could only imagine that someone whose paranoia or mental illness was already in high gear wouldn’t want to venture too far down these earthbound corridors.

Teater switched on the lamp attached to his hard hat, prompting them all to do likewise. The sudden darting of lights suggested a mixture of fanciful images: a mud-floored, buried passageway to some long-forgotten burial chamber; a battlefield-blasted building interior, redecorated with the detritus of a full-fledged firefight. The reality amounted to a dank, stagnant, gluey obstacle course, blocked by office furniture and the same stationer’s fodder they’d encountered in the lobby.

“This should be fun,” Lester said with false cheer. “Like a boot camp obstacle course for astronauts.”

Already, Teater was setting the pace, scrambling over the tangle with the ease of years of practice. Joe followed next, feeling clumsy and amateurish, aware of Lester and the utterly silent fourth member of their party standing patiently in line. It was during situations like this that Joe felt his age the most, and was reminded of the decades that he’d spent in this physically challenging job, at first as enthralled by the challenges as were his three younger colleagues right now. He rued the toll it had all taken on his body.

Still, as Teater had promised, it didn’t take long to get used to the awkward suit and forget its restrictions, in the face of simply trying to keep moving.

The piled barriers weren’t the only challenge. They had a double mission here: to find Carolyn Barber’s dead body, and if not that, any evidence that might tell of her fate. The first demanded the shifting of heavy objects and mucking through any slime deep enough to hide a body. The second called for an opposite set of skills-more delicate and interpretive, less disruptive. Here, Joe or Les would briefly stop one of the techs from tackling a desk or file cabinet, in order to quickly read the scene before them.

Like a single blue slipper, shaped for a small left foot, found about an hour into their expedition.

Joe held it up before Teater’s lamplight. “You’re familiar with the hospital’s workings,” he said. “This look like something the patients wear?”

“Sure does,” was the answer. “Standard issue.”

Joe reached into the kit he had slung over his shoulder and extracted an evidence bag into which he placed his discovery.

To their frustration, that single slipper marked their only success for another three hours, during which they covered about half the campus, often traveling down routes that either ended at sealed doors or simply dwindled in diameter to make further progress impossible. More than once, Joe made a point of thanking Teater for his guidance-without which he became convinced that he and Spinney would have gone missing as well.

Finally, mirroring the topography overhead, they began seeing signs of the ground ramping up and the water having leveled off, to the point where the damage became reduced to a thin sloshing underfoot.

It was there, at a Y-shaped juncture-with one shaft leading upstairs-that Lester made their second and final discovery. A single bare left footprint was clearly stamped in drying mud, matching the slipper in size, two steps above the high-water mark. Then, nothing.

“Didn’t Robinson Crusoe find something like this?” Lester asked, readying his camera. They worked together to light their finding properly, placing a ruler beside it as reference, before straightening and looking up the steps, as if anticipating the appearance of a celebrity.

“Where’s that lead to?” Joe asked.

“Out,” Teater said simply. “That’s the bad news, I’m afraid. Above us is one of the least occupied and most open buildings in the whole complex. Anyone can just come and go.”

They headed up, their eyes on the treads before them, hoping to catch another telltale sign, but Teater’s implication was well taken. Assuming that Barber’s feet had dried quickly upon leaving the water, and that she’d met no opposition from either locked door or human being, there remained nothing to pursue. When the four of them stepped into the fresh air, outside a door a few feet from the staircase’s apex, they found themselves in a huge, flat expanse-not far from Main Street-with unlimited access in any direction.