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WORLD ENOUGH AND TIME
When it comes to ideas for novels, I’m a packrat. My office shelves are crammed with file folders dating back several decades. Scribbled summaries of radio reports and TV interviews are bundled with yellowing pages ripped from magazines and newspapers. Stacks of them. Anytime something grabs my interest, a part of my imagination wonders why. The theory is that, if a topic catches my attention, maybe it will catch the attention of my readers. Over the years, I put together so many files that I never had time to organize them into categories, let alone develop their contents into stories.
On occasion, curiosity makes me explore them. With great expectation, I put some on the floor, blow away dust, and read them. But nearly always, the brittle pages in my hands refer to issues and events that seemed important at the time but now are lifeless. The narrative themes and situations they suggest no longer speak to my imagination. Musty artifacts of the mind, they show me the gap of years between the person who put those fragments into file folders and the changed person who now reads them.
In rare instances, however, a topic clings to my imagination so insistently that I keep returning to it, trying to find a way to dramatize the nagging emotions it arouses in me. For example, my previous novel, Creepers, was inspired by a Los Angeles Times article about urban explorers: history and architecture enthusiasts who infiltrate old buildings that have been sealed and abandoned for decades. The page sat under accumulating file folders, but it kept rising to the top of my imagination, and I couldn’t help wondering why it insisted. The breakthrough came when I suddenly remembered an abandoned apartment building I explored when I was a child. I used it as an escape from unrelenting arguments between my mother and step-father that left me afraid to remain at home. The memory of my fear and the need to retreat into the past made me want to write a novel in which the reverse occurs: urban explorers obsessed with the past discover that it no longer soothes but instead terrifies them.
A similar article that kept nagging at my subconscious led me to write Scavenger. In fact, it sat under accumulating file folders for eight years, silently shouting, until I finally surrendered. This time, the newspaper was the New York Times. The date was April 8, 1998, the place West New York, New Jersey. I love the off-balancing idea that a town called West New York is so far west that it’s in the neighboring state of New Jersey. But for me, the contents of the article were far more unbalancing. “From Time Capsule to Buried Treasure,” the title announced. “Somewhere in West New York may be a slice of town life in 1948.”
I learned that, as West New York planned celebrations for its hundredth anniversary, someone suggested burying a time capsule. “Great idea,” everyone agreed. Then a retiree remembered that the same thing had been done for the town’s fiftieth anniversary. Whatever happened to it? they wondered. Where the heck was it buried? Searchers spread through the town. They pored through cobwebbed community ledgers and tracked down people old enough to have witnessed the 1948 semi-centennial. At last, they found a possible answer in the town’s library, where an out-of-print volume by a local historian referred to “a copper box containing documents and souvenirs.”
That box supposedly was deposited under a bronze fire bell outside the town hall, but there the search ended in frustration, for the bell honored community firefighters who died while protecting West New York, and no one would sanction tampering with it. Moreover, the bell was attached to several tons of granite. Moving it would be costly and difficult, and what if, after desecrating the monument, the time capsule wasn’t under it? In the end, nothing was done.
But as the New York Times reporter indicated, the town had a powerful need to be inspired by a message from the glory days of fifty years earlier. Back in 1948, the area was prosperous, largely because of the New York Central Railroad and the products it transported from the local embroidery factories. But by 1998, the railroad and the factories were gone, and the streets looked bleak. In the context of a misplaced past, I couldn’t help noting that the reporter didn’t receive a by-line.
Moved in ways that I didn’t understand, I added this article to my chaotic collection. I forgot it, remembered it, and forgot it again, but never for long. Finally, after eight years, I dug through a stack of files, took yet another look, and made a commitment to try to understand the article’s hold on me by writing a novel that involves a time capsule. That the time capsule would be a hundred-years-old and that the hunt for the past would involve modern instruments such as global positioning satellite receivers, BlackBerry internet capability, and holographic rifle sights hadn’t yet occurred to me. I needed to do my customary research and learn everything I could about the subject.
My first step was to go to the World Wide Web. When researching my previous novel, Creepers, I typed “urban explorers” into Google and was amazed to find over 300,000 hits. Now I did the same with “time capsules.” Imagine, my astonishment when I got over 18 million hits. Clearly, this was a topic that obsessed a lot of other people, and with each discovery, my fascination intensified. I learned (as Professor Murdock explains in Scavenger) that, although what we call time capsules are as old as history, the actual expression didn’t exist until 1939 when the Westinghouse Corporation created a torpedo-shaped container and filled it with contemporary objects that its designers believed would be fascinating to the future. As gongs were struck, the capsule was buried in Flushing Meadows, New York, where a World’s Fair was taking place. Intended to be opened five thousand years in the future, the capsule is still fifty feet underground but largely forgotten. If you have a GPS receiver like those used in Scavenger, you can insert the capsule’s map coordinates and let a red needle guide you to the capsule’s marker. But to learn those map coordinates, you need to find a copy of The Book of the Record of the Time Capsule. In 1939, copies were sent to every major library in the world, including that of the Dalai Llama. These days, however, locating that book almost requires a scavenger hunt of its own.
I learned that the Westinghouse time capsule was inspired by the eerily titled Crypt of Civilization, begun in1936 at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta. Disturbed by the increasing Nazi domination of Europe, Oglethorpe’s president believed that civilization was on the verge of collapse. To preserve what he could, he drained an in-door swimming pool and filled it with objects that he believed were essential to an understanding of 1930s culture. Among these is a copy of Gone with the Wind, an apt title inasmuch as the Crypt, which isn’t scheduled to be opened for almost seven thousand years, was nearly as forgotten as the Westinghouse capsule. If not for a student who explored the basement of a campus building in 1970, the Crypt would have faded from memory. After his flashlight reflected off a stainless-steel door, the student asked questions that eventually led to the basement being turned into a public area, where a book store was established and people could pass the Crypt’s door every day. Eventually, that student became Oglethorpe’s registrar and the president of the International Time Capsule Society.
I found this lore so fascinating that I couldn’t stop telling friends about it. Usually, about this point, they said, “The Crypt of Civilization? The International Time Capsule Society? You’re making this up!” But I’m not. The Doomsday Vault in the Arctic Circle is real also, as is the Hall of Records under Mt. Rushmore and the millions of copies of the ill-fated E.T. video game buried under concrete in the New Mexico desert. The weirdness wouldn’t end. I learned about the town that buried 17 time capsules and forgot all of them . . . and the college students who buried a capsule and then suffered a group memory blackout, never able to recall where they put it . . . and the town committee that buried a time capsule in honor of the community’s centennial, only to die before any of them thought to make a record of where they put the capsule.
Who would have thought that there was a list of the most-famous, lost time capsules or that thousands of capsules have been misplaced, many more than have ever been found? Even if located, they often create a further mystery, for the containers frequently fail to keep out moisture and insects, with the result that these messages to the future that we open in the present to learn about the past are nothing but indecipherable scraps.
As I tried to understand my fascination with time capsules, I couldn’t help thinking of the pride that motivates people to create them, the assumption that a particular moment is important enough to be frozen in time for the eyes of the future. Against the background of the Doomsday Vault in which millions of agricultural seeds are supposedly protected from a global catastrophe, the optimism of time capsules astonishes me. But it’s not just pride or optimism. As a character in Scavenger says, the obsessive thoroughness with which some capsules are prepared implies that the designers have a poignant fear they’ll be forgotten.
“World Enough And Time.” That’s the title of the time-capsule lecture Professor Murdock delivers in Scavenger. It’s a quotation from Andrew Marvell’s seventeenth-century poem, “To His Coy Mistress.” The poem expresses the emotions of a young man who feels time speeding by and wants to persuade a lady friend to help him embrace life fully while they can. If we cut some lines and juxtapose others, the poem applies to one motivation for preserving time capsules.
Had we but world enough, and time . . .
But at my back I always hear
Time’s winged chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Maybe it’s not the future that prompts us to create time capsules. Maybe it’s the pressure of time itself, the speed with which it passes, the awareness of our mortality. Prior to 1939, time capsules were called boxes and caskets: funereal metaphors. That same metaphor is in the title of the Crypt of Civilization. Could it be that the emotion implied in time capsules isn’t hope, optimism, or even fear, but rather sorrow?
The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.
A community buries what it sees as the ingredients for a golden moment, a distillation of their world. Many years later, another community digs up the capsule, if the capsule can be located. People gather eagerly around. “What’s the secret?” they want to know. “What important message did the past want to send us?” They open the casket or the crypt or, if you prefer, the capsule and find that the contents have decayed or that the objects are so quaint as to be meaningless. “It’s hard to believe they thought this stuff was important,” someone murmurs. In the end, that might be the message of every time capsule. From the long-dead past, they warn us that the here-and-now doesn’t endure, that the objects around us aren’t as important as we think, that what matters isn’t the promise of the future but the value of each passing moment. As a character notes in this novel, “Time is the true scavenger.”
My stacks of file folders are time capsules, I suppose, representing the interests of the person I no longer am. So are my novels, preserving how I felt and thought in the past, just as novels by my favorite authors are time capsules, taking me back to Dickens’s fog-enshrouded London or Edith Wharton’s old New York or Ernest Hemingway’s Paris in the 1920s. Those books not only transport me to the past that those authors experienced but also to my past and what it was like to experience those books for the first time.
Researching Scavenger, I walked through its Manhattan locations to verify physical details. When I reached Washington Square next to New York University, I was certain I’d come to the wrong place. The last time I visited there was the mid-1980s. In those days, Washington Square arch was covered with graffiti while junkies bought drugs in a park so treeless that the buildings on the neighboring streets were clearly visible. But now those buildings are obscured by massive, sheltering trees beneath which parents laugh and play with children while, in a park of their own, dogs scamper with their owners. Impressed by the gleam of the spotless arch, I was suddenly reminded that twenty whole years had passed, that I’d gotten older, but instead of depressing me, the moment felt alive with the fullness of my memories. Nothing passes as long as we remember it. Each of us is a time capsule.
LEVEL ONE
THE CRYPT OF CIVILIZATION
1
He no longer called her by his dead wife’s name, even though the resemblance was strong enough to make his heart ache. Sometimes, when he woke and found her sitting next to his hospital bed, he thought he was hallucinating.
“What’s my name?” she asked.
“Amanda,” he was careful to answer.
“Excellent,” a doctor said. The watchful man never mentioned his specialty, but Balenger assumed he was a psychiatrist. “I think you’re ready to be released.”
2
The taxi entered the Park Slope district of Brooklyn. Trying not to stare at Amanda’s long blonde hair and soft blue eyes that reminded him so much of Diane, Balenger forced himself to peer out the window. He saw a huge stone arch with a statue at the top: a winged woman with flowing robes.
“Grand Army Plaza,” Amanda explained. “You like history, so you’ll appreciate that the arch commemorates the end of the Civil War.”
Even her voice reminded him of Diane.
“All those trees–that’s Prospect Park over there,” she continued.
Down a narrow street, the taxi stopped in the middle of a row of four-story brownstones. While Amanda paid the fare, Balenger mustered the effort to get out. He felt the cold bite of a late October wind. His legs and ribs throbbed as did the abrasions on his hands.
“My apartment’s on the third floor.” Amanda pointed. “The one with the stone railing.”
“I thought you said you worked in a book store in Manhattan. This is an upscale district. How can you afford—” The answer quickly occurred to him. “Your father helps.”
“He never stopped hoping, never stopped paying the rent all the months I was missing.”
As Balenger climbed the eight steps, which felt like eighty, his knees became unsteady. Even though the wooden door was freshly painted brown, it gave the impression of age. Amanda put a key in the lock.
“Wait,” Balenger said.
“Need to catch your breath?”
In fact, he did, but that wasn’t his motive for stopping her. “Are you sure this is a good idea?”
“Do you have another place to go, anyone else to take care of you?”
In both cases, the answer was “no.” During the previous year, while Balenger searched for his missing wife, he stayed in cheap motel rooms and could afford to eat only once a day, mostly sandwiches from fast-food restaurants. His savings account was drained. He had no one and nothing.
“You barely know me,” he told her.
“You risked your life for me,” Amanda responded. “Without you, I’d be dead. What else do I need to know?”
Neither commented that at the time Balenger believed the woman he saved was his wife.
“We’ll try it for a few days.” Amanda unlocked the door.
3
The apartment had one bedroom, a living room, and a kitchen. The ceiling was high, with molding around it. The floors were hardwood. Although everything looked bright and well-maintained, Balenger again had the sense of age.
“While we were in the hospital, my father stocked the refrigerator and the cupboards,” Amanda said. “Do you want something to eat?”
Balenger sank onto the leather sofa. Before he could answer, exhaustion overwhelmed him.
When he woke, it was dark outside. A blanket was over him. Amanda helped him to reach the bathroom and return to the sofa.
“I’ll heat up some soup,” she told him.
Afterward, she changed his bandages and dressings.
“While you were asleep, I went out and bought some pajamas for you.” She helped him put on the top, frowning at his injuries.
4
A nightmare jerked him awake, memories of shots and screams. Through frightened eyes, he saw Amanda hurry from the bedroom. “I’m here,” she assured him. In the pale light from a corner lamp, she looked even more like Diane, making him wonder if impossibly Diane’s spirit had merged with Amanda’s. She held his hand until his heart stopped racing. “I’m here,” she repeated. He lapsed back into a troubled sleep.
A cry from the bedroom jolted him upright. Wincing, he mustered the strength to rise from the sofa and struggle through the doorway, where he saw Amanda thrash beneath the covers, fighting her own nightmares. He stroked her hair, trying to tell her she was safe from the darkness and violence and fear, safe from the Paragon Hotel. Clang. In the back of his haunted memory, a flap of sheet metal slammed against the side of an abandoned building, clang, the mournful, rhythmic toll of doom.
He fell asleep next to her, the two of them holding one another. The next night was the same. And the next. They always had a light on. They kept the bedroom door open. Closed rooms gave them the sweats. Two weeks later, they became lovers.
5
He managed increasingly long walks. One gray December afternoon, as he returned from the snow-covered monuments in Grand Army Plaza, two men got out of a car in front of the brownstone. They wore somber overcoats. Their faces had pinched expressions. The cold air made their breath white with frost.
“Frank Balenger?” the taller man asked.
“Who wants to know?”
They pulled out identification: UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF THE TREASURY.
“Sign this.” When they reached the apartment, the heavier agent handed Balenger a pen and a document.
“It’d be nice if I could read it first.”
“It says you relinquish any claim to evidence you gave the Asbury Park police.”
“The double eagle,” the taller agent said.
Now Balenger understood. He disliked them even more.
“The Gold Reserve Act of 1933 makes it illegal to use gold coins as currency,” the heavier agent said. “It does permit citizens to own them as collectibles. But you can’t own something if you stole it.”
“I didn’t steal it.” Balenger felt heat rise to his face. “The original owner died in 1939. The coins were hidden in the Paragon Hotel. For all these years, nobody owned that coin until I put it in my pocket.”
“The only coin that survived the fire. Did you take a close look?”
Balenger worked to steady his voice. “I was a little preoccupied, trying to stay alive.”
“It’s dated 1933. Before the government made it illegal to use gold as currency, the mint manufactured the double eagles for that year. All the coins needed to be destroyed.” The taller agent paused. “But some were stolen.”
“Including the one you put in your pocket,” the other agent said. “Which means it’s the property of the U.S. government. They’re so rare, the last time we got our hands on one, it was auctioned at Sotheby’s.”
The first agent added, “For almost eight million dollars.”
The number had so much weight that Balenger didn’t trust himself to speak.
“Because of legal technicalities, we gave the person we got it from a portion of the money,” the agent continued. “We’re prepared to offer you a similar deal. We’ll call it a finder’s fee. Something generous enough to get a lot of publicity and encourage collectors to surrender similar illegally acquired coins, no questions asked.”
Balenger tried to sound casual. “What kind of fee are we talking about?”
“Assuming this coin sells for as much as the previous one? You’ll keep two million dollars.”
Balenger needed to remind himself to breathe.
6
A glorious Saturday in May. Sweating after a long jog around Prospect Park, Balenger and Amanda unlocked the brownstone’s front door and sorted through the mail the postman had shoved through the slot.
“Anything interesting?” Amanda asked as they climbed the stairs.
“More financial advisors eager to tell me what to do with the money we got from the coin. Pleas from more charities. Bills.”
“At least, we can pay them now.”
“Weird,” Balenger said.
“What’s wrong?”
“Take a look.”
Outside their apartment, Balenger handed her an envelope. Its old, brittle feel made Amanda frown. She raised it to her nostrils. “Smells musty.”
“It ought to. Check the stamp.”
“Two cents? That’s impossible.”
“Now look at the postmark.”
It was faded with age but readable.
“December thirty first?”
“Keep reading.”
“Eighteen ninety-nine? What the . . .” Amanda shook her head. “Is this a joke?”
“Maybe an advertising gimmick,” Balenger said.
After they entered the apartment, Amanda tore open the envelope and removed a sheet of paper. “Feels as brittle as the envelope. Smells as musty.”
The message was handwritten in thick strokes. Like the postmark, the ink was faded with age.
Mr. Frank Balenger
Dear Sir,
Forgive the intrusion. Knowing your fascination with the past, I took the liberty of using an old postmark to attract your attention. I invite you and Ms. Evert to join me and a group of guests on the first Saturday of June at one p.m. at the Manhattan History Club (address below). After refreshments, I shall deliver a lecture about messages to the future that we open in the present to understand the past. I refer, of course, to those fascinating future-past artifacts known as time capsules.
Yours,
Adrian Murdock
“Time capsules?” Amanda looked bewildered. “What on earth?”
“The first Saturday of June?” Balenger leaned into the kitchen and glanced at a calendar. “That’s next weekend. The Manhattan History Club?”
“You’re right. It’s got to be an advertising gimmick.” Amanda examined the paper. “Sure seems old. It ought to, considering it comes from a history club. They’re probably looking for new members. But how did they get our names and address?”
“Last fall, when everything happened, the newspapers indicated you live in Park Slope,” Balenger said.
“The club waited an awfully long time to get in touch with us.”
Balenger thought about it. “When the coin was auctioned last month, there was more publicity. The media dredged up what happened at the Paragon Hotel. They mentioned my fascination with history. Maybe this guy thinks he can persuade me to give his club a donation.”
“Sure. Just like those financial advisors eager to get commissions from you,” Amanda decided.
“Time capsules.” Balenger’s tone was wistful.
“You sound like you’re actually tempted to go.”
“When I was a kid . . .” He paused, transported by the memory. “My father taught high-school history in Buffalo. His school was tearing down an old classroom building to make space for a new one. There was a rumor about a time capsule—that a graduating class from years earlier put one in the foundation when the building was new. After the demolition workers went home each day, a couple of kids and I used to search for the capsule in the wreckage. Of course, we had no idea what something like that would look like. It took me a week, but by God, I finally spotted a big stone block in an excavated corner of the building. The block had a plaque that said CLASS OF 1942. ALWAYS TO BE REMEMBERED. AT THE THRESHOLD OF OUR FUTURE. What happened was, over the years, grime covered the plaque. Shrubs grew in front of it. People forgot.”
Amanda gestured for him to continue.
“Anyway, the block had a hole in it,” Balenger explained. “I saw a metal box inside. When I ran home and told my father, at first he got angry that I was playing in a demolition area and could have gotten hurt. But when he learned what I’d found, he made me take him there. The next morning, he asked the workers to pry open the block. ‘For God’s sake, don’t damage what’s inside,’ I remember him saying. The workers were as fascinated as we were. In fact, a lot of teachers and students heard what was happening and came over, too. A worker used a crowbar and finally pulled out a metal box about the size of a big phone book. It was rusted shut. The students urged the worker to break it open, but my father said we should make a ceremony of it and have a fundraiser. People could buy tickets to watch the time capsule get opened. The money would pay for library books. ‘Great idea,’ everybody said. So the principal called the newspaper and the radio and TV stations to publicize the event, and the grand opening was scheduled for a Sunday afternoon in the school auditorium. TV cameras were there. A thousand people paid a dollar apiece to watch.”
“What was in it?” Amanda asked.
“Nobody ever found out.”
“What?” Amanda looked surprised.
“The principal had the time capsule locked in a cabinet in his office. The night before the grand opening, someone broke into the office, pried open the cabinet, and stole the box. You can imagine how disappointed everybody was. I always wondered what those students from 1942 thought was important enough for the future to see.”
7
The building was one block south of Gramercy Park, on East 19th Street, in the area’s historic preservation district. Saturday traffic was quiet. An overcast sky made the air cool enough for light jackets. Balenger and Amanda stood outside the brick row house and studied a weathered brass plaque that read 1854. Above the entrance, another plaque read MANHATTAN HISTORY CLUB.
They climbed steps and entered a shadowy vestibule that felt as if it hadn’t changed in its century and a half. A poster sat on an easel, showing a distinguished-looking, gray-haired man with an equally gray mustache. He was thin, with lines creasing the corners of his eyes. He wore a conservative suit and held a metal cylinder in his hands.
THE MANHATTAN HISTORY CLUB
WELCOMES
ADRIAN MURDOCK
PROFESSOR OF HISTORY,
OGLETHORPE UNIVERSITY, ATLANTA.
“WORLD ENOUGH AND TIME:
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF TIME CAPSULES.”
JUNE 2, 1 P.M.
Balenger heard voices beyond the vestibule.
A matronly, fortyish woman in a plain dark dress entered the corridor from a room on the right. When she noticed Balenger and Amanda, she smiled. “I’m glad you could join us.”
“Well, the invitation was so clever, we couldn’t resist,” Balenger said.
The woman blushed. The rising color in her cheeks was emphasized by her lack of makeup. Her brunette hair was pulled back severely in a bun. “That was my idea, I’m afraid. Our lectures haven’t always been well-
attended, so I thought a little drama was in order. I never dreamed how much work it would take for the committee to deliver the invitations. I’m Karen Bailey, by the way.” She offered her hand.
“Frank Balenger.”
“Amanda Evert.”
“Of course. You’re the couple who had the coin. The newspaper article about the auction mentioned your interest in history. I thought this lecture would be perfect for you.”
“You’re not by chance having a fundraiser, are you?” Amanda asked.
“Well . . .” Karen looked embarrassed again. “We always welcome donations. But you needn’t feel obligated.”
Balenger ignored Amanda’s knowing look. “Hey, we’re glad to contribute,” he said.
“The invitation promised refreshments. What can I get you? Tea? Coffee? A soft drink?”
“Coffee,” Balenger told her.
“Same here,” Amanda said.
They followed Karen along a corridor that displayed sepia-tinted photographs of Gramercy Park, with cards next to them indicating that the photos were from the 1890s. Faded images showed horse-drawn carriages, men wearing hats, suits, ties, and vests, and women wearing dresses that came down to their buttoned shoes.
Old carpeting muffled Balenger’s footsteps. The air retained the musty smell of the past. Turning to the right, Karen led them into a long room that had rows of folding chairs. Sepia-tinted photographs decorated these walls, too.
Balenger glanced at a screen. A laptop computer sat on a lectern, linked to a projector. He switched his attention to a half-dozen people who sipped from Styrofoam cups and took bites from quartered sandwiches.
Karen pointed. “Let me introduce you to Professor Murdock.”
She guided them to a gray-haired, gray-mustached man who held a portion of a sandwich and spoke to a man and woman in their thirties. He looked thinner than in his photograph. Although he wore a suit, the couple he spoke to were dressed in jeans, as Balenger and Amanda were.
“. . . term wasn’t used until 1939. Before that, they were called boxes or safes or even caskets. And then, of course, there’s the famous . . .” The man interrupted himself to nod at Balenger and Amanda.
“Professor, I’d like you to meet . . .” Color again rose in Karen’s cheeks. She evidently failed to remember their names.
“Frank Balenger.”
“Amanda Evert.”
They shook hands.
“I was just explaining about the Crypt of Civilization,” the professor said.
“The what?” Balenger wasn’t sure he’d heard correctly.
“That’s the name of arguably the most famous time capsule. Of course, I’m biased because it’s located at Oglethorpe University where I teach.”
“Did you say ‘the Crypt of Civilization’?” Balenger asked.
“Interesting name, don’t you agree? The Crypt’s the reason the International Time Capsule Society is at Oglethorpe.”
“There’s a time capsule society?” Amanda sounded amazed.
More people entered the room.
“Excuse me,” the professor said. “I need to make sure everything’s ready for my presentation.”
As he went to the lectern, Karen Bailey brought their coffee. “Cream and sweetener are on that table. The sandwiches are catered. Please, try one.” She walked to the front of the room and pulled the draperies shut.
Balenger studied the sandwiches. Their crusts were cut off. He picked one up and bit into it. “I don’t normally like tuna salad, but this isn’t bad.”
“It’s the lettuce,” Amanda said.
“Lettuce?”
“It’s crunchy. The mayonnaise tastes homemade. The bread’s still warm.” Amanda took another bite.
So did Balenger. “I hope he talks about this Crypt of Civilization.”
8
The professor stood in shadows at the lectern and pressed the laptop’s keyboard. On the screen, an image appeared, showing a long, shiny metal tube that reminded Balenger of a torpedo. A group of solemn, white-coated men stood next to it.
“Even though the practice dates back to antiquity, this is the first object to be called a time capsule,” Professor Murdock said. “It was created for the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Its sponsor was Westinghouse, an appliance corporation with a reputation for quality. Because the time capsule wasn’t due to be opened for five thousand years, the implication was that Westinghouse products were designed to last. Why five thousand years? Because it was assumed that recorded history was five thousand years old. Thus, the World’s Fair was midway between the past and the future. The capsule’s designers announced, ‘We choose to believe that men will solve the problems of the world, that the human race will triumph over its limitations, that the future will be glorious.’ Of course, the horrors of the Second World War would soon make them feel differently.”
When the professor touched the computer, another image appeared on the screen. This one showed a futuristic-looking building, part of what presumably was the 1939 World’s Fair. A banner in the background proclaimed THE WORLD OF TOMORROW. People lined up to enter. Balenger was struck that, even though going to the fair would have felt like a holiday, most of the men wore jackets, ties, and dress hats.
“The capsule was made from an extremely hard, copper alloy resistant to moisture,” the professor said. “After being filled, it was lowered into a shaft during the autumnal equinox in what was almost a religious atmosphere, complete with Chinese gongs. The shaft had a cap from which a periscope projected, allowing visitors to see the time capsule interred fifty feet below them. After the fair concluded, the shaft was filled and sealed, then covered with a concrete marker. ‘May the Time Capsule sleep well,’ the Westinghouse chairman said. Because more capsules have been lost than have ever been found, Westinghouse prepared The Book of the Record of the Time Capsule. Thousands of copies were printed on acid-free paper with fade-resistant ink and dispersed to libraries and monasteries throughout the world, even in Tibet. Among other information, the book contained the latitude and longitude for the capsule’s location, a wise precaution because the concrete marker in Flushing Meadows, where the fair took place, has been reduced in size over the years.”
Another image appeared, showing an array of various objects.
“And what did the capsule contain?” Professor Murdock asked. “What were the precious items that the designers felt would best show a society five thousand years in the future the things that made 1939 significant? An alarm clock. A can opener. A fountain pen. A nail file. A toothbrush. A Mickey Mouse cup.”
Someone in the audience laughed.
“There were numerous other items, but these examples suggest how difficult it is to decide what’s important in any society. Will there be can openers in the future? Alarm clocks and nail files? Perhaps the things we take most for granted are what a future world will find most incomprehensible. To echo the title of a novel that was placed in the capsule, all cultures eventually vanish, gone with the wind. The 1939 World’s Fair was proud to tell the future what the world was like at that moment in history. But there’s a desperation in the thoroughness with which the capsule was prepared, as if the designers were afraid they’d be forgotten.”
A new image showed what appeared to be a sprawling castle.
“This is the campus at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, where I teach,” Professor Murdock said. “The idea for the Westinghouse capsule originated there in 1936. Oglethorpe’s then-president, Thornwell Jacobs, drained an indoor swimming pool and filled it with thousands of items, including microfilmed pages from encyclopedias along with everyday objects such as a toilet brush, a lipstick, a grapefruit corer, a fly swatter, Lincoln Logs, and an ampule of Budweiser beer. The project was so ambitious that Jacobs didn’t complete it until 1940, one year after the World’s Fair. As a result, Westinghouse received credit for creating the first time capsule, even though the idea was borrowed. Jacobs used a burial metaphor and called his project the Crypt of Civilization.”
Balenger heard a noise behind him. Turning in the shadows, he noted that a man and woman were leaving. At the exit, they whispered to Karen Bailey. The man pointed to his watch. Karen nodded with understanding.
The flash of a new image made Balenger look forward. He saw Nazi soldiers frozen in mid-goose-step. The image became a series that showed the rubble of bombed buildings, tanks marked with swastikas, piles of bodies in death camps, and the mushroom cloud of a nuclear bomb.
“When Jacobs conceived of the Crypt of Civilization, it’s possible that the ravages of the Great Depression made him skeptical about the future of civilization. Perhaps his goal wasn’t to brag to the future, as the Westinghouse time capsule did, but rather to preserve something he feared was in danger of being lost. Certainly, by 1940, when the Crypt was sealed, pessimism was rampant as the German army stormed through Europe. In a document Jacobs placed in the Crypt, he said, ‘The world is engaged in burying our civilization forever, and here in this crypt we leave it to you.’”
Balenger heard other movement behind him. Again turning, he noticed a second couple leaving the shadowy room. He frowned.
“The Crypt survived, but most aren’t that fortunate,” Professor Murdock continued. “Their containers aren’t water resistant, or else their contents include organic substances that rot. Moreover, the accidents of human nature defeat the best intentions. An ambitious town in California deposited a total of seventeen time capsules and lost every one of them. At a high school in Virginia, six graduating students helped prepare a time capsule and buried it somewhere on campus. That was in 1965. The school has now been torn down, and those six former students have a total memory gap about what they put in the capsule and where they buried it. It’s as if the event never happened to them. These communities are now engaged in what amounts to a hide-and-hunt scavenger game.”
Balenger tensed as two more people left the room. What’s going on? he wondered.
“Of the thousands of time capsules that have been misplaced,” Professor Murdock said, “five are considered the most wanted. The first is the Bicentennial Wagon Train Capsule.”
The professor’s voice seemed to lessen in volume. Balenger leaned forward to listen.
“On Independence Day, 1976 . . . ”
The shadows seemed to thicken.
“. . . a capsule containing twenty-two million signatures was driven to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, in a caravan of vehicles known as the ‘bicentennial wagon train.’ President Gerald Ford was to officiate in a ceremony commemorating the U.S. War of Independence.”
The professor’s voice became fainter.
“But before the ceremony occurred, someone stole the capsule from an unattended van.”
Balenger’s eyelids felt heavy.
“The second most-wanted time capsule is at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1939, MIT engineers sealed various objects in a container and deposited it under a huge cyclotron they were building. The cyclotron was . . . ”
9
Clang.
Balenger drifted toward consciousness. The harsh, persistent tolling seemed to come from a fractured bell.
Clang.
It matched the agonized throbbing in his head.
Clang.
He managed to open his eyes, but darkness surrounded him. A chill breeze made him shiver. He heard waves crash. The breeze carried a hint of burnt wood and ashes.
A light suddenly blazed. Groaning, he raised a hand to shield his eyes. His forearm ached.
“Buddy, you’re not supposed to be here,” a gruff voice said. “On your feet.”
All Balenger could do was groan.
“You heard me. Get moving.”
“Where . . .” Balenger’s throat felt raw. He could barely get the word out.
“I won’t tell you again. Move!”
“Where am I?” Balenger squinted toward the glare. He suddenly realized that he lay on sand.
“For God’s sake, you screwed yourself up so bad, you don’t even know where the hell you are?” a second gruff voice demanded. “Asbury Park, buddy. The same place you passed out.”
Clang.
Balenger struggled to stand. The stark flashlight beam illuminated the jumbled wreckage of a building. The smell of burnt wood was stronger. “Asbury Park?”
Clang.
Balanger’s mind cleared enough for him to recognize the sound from his nightmares: a flap of sheet metal banging against the side of an abandoned building. A cold shock of fear seized him.
Clang.
“The city’s working to rebuild the area. Guys like you aren’t welcome here.”
“No,” Balenger said. “Is that . . .” Frantic, he pointed toward the chaotic stretch of debris. “Don’t tell me that’s . . . ”
Clang.
“The Paragon Hotel,” the voice explained. “What’s left of it. When all those killings happened and it burned down, we said, ‘Enough!’ We’re gonna bring this beach back to life. So scram before we put you in jail!”
Emotion made Balenger shake. The Paragon Hotel? he thought in a panic. How did I get here?
“Hold it a second. Eddie, this guy looks familiar. Hey, aren’t you—”
“Balenger,” the other man said. “Frank Balenger. Yeah, that’s who he is. Jesus, man, what’re you doing back here? I’d expect this was the last place you’d ever want to see again.”
“Amanda,” Balenger whispered.
“I can barely hear you.”
“Amanda.” Balenger’s voice was hoarse.
“Who’s Amanda? Somebody’s with you?”
“Wait, Eddie. I think I . . . Amanda . . . Last fall when the hotel burned down. What was her last name? Evert. Amanda Evert. Is that who you mean, Frank? The woman you saved?”
Clang.
“Amanda!” Balenger screamed. “Where are you?” His vocal cords threatened to burst. He staggered through the burned wreckage, searching.
“Frank, talk to us. For heaven’s sake, what are you doing here?”
10
“The Manhattan History Club?” Jeff Cochran frowned. A heavy man with red hair and freckles, he was Asbury Park’s police chief. Two years earlier, before Balenger quit the department to search for his missing wife, Balenger had worked for him. “Time capsules?”
“That’s the last thing I remember.” Balenger rubbed the back of his neck, working to relieve his headache. “Look, you’ve got to keep searching the beach area. Amanda might still be–”
“They’re checking for the second time. I promise I’ll do everything I can. You went to this history club when?”
“Is today Saturday?” The overhead light was oppressively harsh.
“Not anymore. It’s past midnight.”
“Saturday was . . .” Balenger fought to concentrate, to get the correct date. His left forearm remained sore. “June second?”
“That’s right. Man, whatever they gave you sure fouled up your memory. Some kind of date-rape amnesia drug maybe.”
“In the coffee and the sandwiches.” Balenger shook his head, aggravating his headache. “But everybody else drank and ate . . . The woman . . . What was her name? Come on, come on. Karen! That’s what she called herself. Karen Bailey. She brought coffee to us. That’s when it happened.”
“You said she pulled the drapes shut and turned off the lights.”
“Yes.” Balenger felt sick to his stomach. “So the professor . . . Murdock. That was his name. So Professor Murdock could deliver a lecture and show photographs on a screen. After a while, people started leaving. The room seemed to get darker.”
“Why do you keep massaging your left forearm?” Cochran asked.
“It aches.” Balenger took off his sport coat and rolled up his shirt sleeve. The middle of his forearm was red and swollen. Something had punctured his skin.
“Looks like somebody gave you an injection,” Cochran said. “More drugs to keep you sedated while they brought you here.”
Hands trembling, Balenger felt in his pockets. “I’ve still got my wallet. They didn’t take my watch. This wasn’t robbery.”
“Your cell phone?”
“I didn’t bring it with me. Amanda’s just about the only person I talk to on it. Since she was with me, it didn’t seem necessary to carry it.”
Cochran shoved the office phone across the desk. “Does she have a cell phone?”
Balenger touched numbers. Palm sweating, he pressed the phone to his ear.
An electronic voice told him, “The number you are calling is out of service.”
The voice must have been loud enough for Cochran to hear it. “Try your home,” the police chief said. “Maybe she’s waiting for you, worried about where you are.”
“But it doesn’t make sense that someone would drug us, put me in Asbury Park, and take Amanda to our apartment.”
“So far, none of this makes sense. Try home,” Cochran urged.
Balenger quickly touched more numbers. His hand was now so sweaty that it slicked the phone.
“Hello,” Amanda’s voice said.
Thank God, Balenger thought. Abruptly, his spirit sank as he realized what he heard.
“At the tone, please leave a message.” Amanda’s recorded greeting ended.
Balenger forced himself to speak. “I don’t know what happened,” he said into the phone, alarmed by the unsteadiness of his voice. “If you get this message, call the Asbury Park Police Department.” He dictated the number on the phone. “Ask for Chief Cochran.”
“In that case—” Cochran motioned for Balenger to slide the phone to him. “—let’s see what the Manhattan P.D. can find out.”
11
Balenger’s head throbbed as Cochran steered onto East 19th Street. The Sunday morning light, free of workday traffic exhaust, was so clear that it hurt Balenger’s sleep-starved eyes. The dashboard clock showed 8:11.
“The next block,” he told Cochran. “There. The middle row house.”
Balenger saw a tall, thirtyish, Hispanic man in a tie and sport coat standing in front of the building. Next to him was a severely thin woman in a designer pantsuit. Her hair was platinum. Her excessive lipstick and eyeliner made it difficult to tell how old she was.
Cochran managed to find a parking space at the end of the block. Balenger hurried toward the row house.
“Chief Cochran?” the Hispanic asked.
“That’s me,” Cochran said, catching up to Balenger.
“Detective Ortega.” The man shook hands. “This is Joan Dandridge.”
“Frank Balenger. That sign wasn’t here yesterday.” Apprehension swelling inside him, Balenger indicated the top of the stairs, where a FOR SALE sign was attached to the door. The sign read KNICKERBOCKER REALTY and provided a phone number.
“That’s my company,” Joan said. She dropped a cigarette to the pavement and stepped on it.
Balenger stared toward the empty space above the door. “There was a bronze plaque up there.”
“What?” Her voice became sharp.
“Above the door. With the words MANHATTAN HISTORY CLUB.”
Joan climbed the steps, pulled spectacles from her purse, and stared toward the bricks above the entrance. “My God, I see holes where the plaque was attached. He promised he wouldn’t damage the building.”
“He?” Cochran asked.
“The owner bought this place on spec and wants too much for it,” the realtor complained. “I keep telling him, the boom’s over, the price is too high. So when I got a call from somebody offering to rent the building for a day, I encouraged the owner to accept. I negotiated a very nice rate.”
“Rent the building?” Balenger felt off-balance. Amanda, he thought, desperate to get inside.
“For a reception. The man said he lived here until his parents sold it when he was a teenager in the 1980s. He happened to drive by, noticed it was for sale, and decided to have a surprise birthday party for his father, who always regretted selling the place. I kidded him, ‘Never mind renting it for a day. Convince your father to buy it back.’ He laughed and told me, ‘Nostalgia isn’t worth four million dollars.’”
Balenger quickly asked, “What did he look like?”
“I never met him.”
“You never—?”
“We made all the arrangements over the phone. The contract went through the mail. His check didn’t bounce. I got a security deposit and a fee. That’s all I cared about. I did find out who owned the property in the 1980s. Victor Evans. The man who signed the rental contract is Philip Evans. The same family name. As far as I was concerned, everything looked legitimate.” She pulled a key from her purse and scowled again at the holes above the door. “This is a historical district. The damage deposit might not be enough to pay for the repair.”
She unlocked the door.
“Wait here,” Ortega said.
“But I need to find out if anything else is damaged.”
“After we make sure no one’s inside.”
Ortega, Balenger, and Cochran entered. The vestibule smelled musty.
“There was an easel here,” Balenger told them. “A poster with the professor’s photograph was on it.”
They followed the corridor. All the old photographs of Gramercy Park were gone.
Balenger gestured to the right. “The lecture was there.”
They went into the long room. The folding chairs were gone. So were the photographs, the draperies, the lectern, the screen, and the tables for the coffee, tea, and sandwiches.
Ortega cautiously opened a door at the back and looked inside a room. “Empty.”
Balenger listened to the building’s silence. “Amanda!” he shouted.
The echo died. No one answered.
Massaging his forearm, he returned to the corridor and peered up the stairs. Its dark carpet led toward shadows.
“Amanda!”
Still, no answer.
The stairs creaked as Balenger hurried up.
“I’m coming with you,” Cochran said.
“You’d better let me go first.” Ortega caught up to them.
“I know how to do this,” Balenger said. “I used to be a police
officer.”
“But are you armed?”
“No.”
“Chief Cochran?”
“I’m out of my jurisdiction. I didn’t bring my gun.”
“Then I’ll go first,” Ortega emphasized. At the top, he checked a murky room, then proceeded along a corridor.
Balenger went into the room. Its carpet had imprints where a bed, a dresser, and a chair once stood. The closet door was open, revealing
a couple of hangers on a rod.
The second room contained two empty packing boxes.
On the next floor, all they found were a few more hangers and a strip of bubble wrap.
Ortega opened the final door. “The attic.”
No one moved for a second. Then they braced themselves and went up a narrow stairway, where the creaking was louder than on the main stairs. Balenger followed Ortega, dust irritating his nostrils. He heard Cochran behind him.
Sunlight struggled through a grimy window. The pitched ceiling was so low that Balenger needed to stoop. He studied an uneven pine floor and an exercise mat, torn at one edge. “A long time ago, this was probably the servants’ quarters.”
“Sort of like a cave,” Ortega said. “I bet kids would enjoy playing up here.”
Cochran pointed. “What’s that in the corner?”
“Looks like a couple of CD cases,” Balenger said.
Ortega pulled latex gloves from his suit-coat pocket, leaned into the corner, and picked up the cases. “Not CDs. Video games. I never heard of the first one, but the other is Grand Theft Auto. My kids play it. I told them to stop—a cop’s kids playing games about stealing cars and beating up prostitutes—but I’m sure they keep playing it behind my back.” Ortega opened the cases. “No wonder they got left behind. The discs are missing.”
Balenger’s forearm continued to ache. The small talk hadn’t eased his tension. “We’re not finished searching.”
“I know,” Ortega said. “There’s always the basement.”
12
Descending, Balenger felt his chest cramp so hard that he had trouble breathing. Dankness surrounded him. The basement was a single, long area, poorly lit, with old brick walls and cobwebbed pipes. The concrete floor had cracks. The furnace was covered with grit. Rust lay under the water heater.
“Four million dollars for this place?” Cochran murmured. “It ought to be condemned.”
The attempt at small talk still did nothing to calm Balenger. No matter how thoroughly he looked, there wasn’t any sign of Amanda.
“When was the last time you checked your home?” Ortega asked.
“The chief drove me there first. I picked up a photograph.” Balanger pulled it from a jacket pocket. It came from a shoebox Amanda kept on a closet shelf. It showed her playing with her parents’ Irish setter in their backyard in Connecticut.
Ortega studied it. “How tall is she?”
“Five six. A hundred and twenty pounds.” Balenger’s throat tightened. When he rescued her from the Paragon Hotel, she’d been gaunt. It had taken a lot of encouragement to get her to eat enough to regain a healthy weight.
“Eye color? It’s hard to tell in the photo.”
“Blue. Soft. Kind of translucent.”
“Hair. Would you call it straw-colored?”
Balenger nodded, overwhelmed with emotion. He gazed longingly at the joyous smile in the image. Shoulder-length hair. Lovely chin and elegant cheekbones. He had an anguished memory of a similar conversation with a detective when his wife disappeared.
“I need to tell you something,” Balenger said.
“Oh?”
“This happened to me once before.”
“I don’t understand.”
“My wife disappeared, too.”
The dim lights in the basement didn’t hide Ortega’s surprise.
“She looked like Amanda.” The dankness penetrated Balenger’s core, making him shiver. “Chief Cochran told you about the Paragon Hotel when he phoned you.”
Ortega nodded somberly.
“I found my wife in that hotel. Dead.” Confronting his memories made Balenger’s hands and feet numb. His rapid breathing caused him to feel lightheaded. “I also found Amanda there.”
Ortega’s gaze intensified.
“The physical resemblance isn’t coincidental.” Balenger rushed on, unable to control the speed of his words. “We know who kidnapped my wife. The same man who kidnapped Amanda a year ago. He was fixated on young women with blond hair, blue eyes, and similar features. If I didn’t know better, I’d say he did this. But I saw Amanda beat him to death with a two-by-four. After it broke, she used it as a stake and rammed it into the bastard’s heart. I keep having nightmares about him. But he couldn’t have done this.” Balenger felt desperate as he turned toward Cochran, needing reassurance.
“Right. That’s all he is–something in nightmares,” Cochran said. “I saw the corpse on the beach. I saw it in the morgue. I saw it in the autopsy. Later, I spoke to witnesses who saw it cremated.”
Balenger’s anguished voice reverberated through the cellar. “So what other son of a bitch would want to make this happen a second time?”
LEVEL TWO
“WELCOME TO SCAVENGER”
1
“But before the ceremony occurred, someone stole the capsule from an unattended van,” a voice droned.
Amanda felt as if she floated upward from a deep pool.
“The second most-wanted time capsule is at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.”
Amanda drifted to the surface.
“In 1939, MIT engineers sealed various objects in a container and deposited it under a huge cyclotron they were building. The cyclotron was eventually deactivated, but the time capsule was forgotten for more than fifty years.”
Her eyes opened.
“It might as well have stayed forgotten. Short of tearing the building apart, no one knows . . . ”
Amanda discovered that she lay on a bed.
“. . . how to remove the capsule from under its eighteen-ton shield.”
She felt groggy and nauseous. Her head throbbed. But its rhythm didn’t match the sudden, frantic pounding of her heart.
“The third is the M*A*S*H Capsule.”
Amanda jerked upright. Where’s Frank? she thought. Stifling a moan, she scanned the room. Beamed ceiling, stone fireplace, log walls, wooden floor. Sunlight streamed through a window, hurting her eyes. In the distance, she saw jagged mountains capped with snow. She feared she was going insane.
“In 1983, cast members of the popular television program M*A*S*H put costumes, props, and other items related to the series into a capsule and buried it on the Twentieth Century Fox film-production lot.”
The voice belonged to a man and came from everywhere around her.
“But the studio changed so much in the intervening years that no one can identify the capsule’s location. Possibly it lies under a hotel constructed on property the studio once owned.”
Amanda rolled from the bed. She realized that the voice came from audio speakers hidden in the ceiling and walls.
“The fourth is George Washington’s Cornerstone. In a Masonic ceremony in 1793, George Washington supervised the placement of a time capsule into the cornerstone of the original Capitol Building.”
Amanda looked down at her clothes. She wore the same jeans, white blouse, and gray blazer that she remembered putting on. Straining to focus her jumbled thoughts, she sensed that she’d been unconscious for quite a while. But her bladder didn’t ache with the need to relieve it, which meant that the drug she was given, like a date-rape drug, allowed her to obey commands. Someone must have carried her to the bathroom, taken her pants off, and coaxed her to urinate.
“The Capitol has grown so much since then that the first cornerstone and its unknown contents have never been recovered.”
Her arms and legs trembled. Her stomach felt heavy. She was as overwhelmed as she’d felt a year earlier when she’d regained consciousness and found herself in the Paragon Hotel. Again, she thought. My God, it’s happening again.
“The fifth is the Gramophone Company Capsule. In 1907, in Middlesex, England, the Gramophone Company placed audio discs into a time capsule in the cornerstone of its new factory.”
The voice was sonorous. Despite her grogginess, she guessed she was hearing the continuation of the speech Professor Murdock delivered at the Manhattan History Club. But the voice did not belong to the professor.
“These recordings included music by several then-famous opera stars. During demolition sixty years later, the capsule was found. But before the recordings could be played for an audience, they were stolen, the irreplaceable voices on those discs never to be recovered.”
Amanda fought to control her breathing. Frank? she thought. Where are you? She started toward a door, only to whimper when the voice returned to an earlier part of the lecture.
“Of the thousands of time capsules that have been misplaced . . . ”
Amanda almost screamed.
“. . . five are considered the most-wanted.”
Chest contracting, she realized that the voice was on a recorded loop. While she was unconscious, it must have played repeatedly. That explained why the words seemed familiar, even though she had no memory of having heard them.
“The first is the Bicentennial Wagon Train Capsule.”
I’m in hell, Amanda thought. She ran to the door and grabbed the handle, fearful that it wouldn’t budge.
“On Independence Day, 1976 . . . ”
The handle moved when she pressed down. Heart pounding faster, she yanked at the door.
“. . . a capsule containing twenty-two million signatures was driven to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.”
When she pulled the door open, she found a log-walled corridor. She peered to the left and right, seeing doors and paintings of cowboys.
“President Gerald Ford was scheduled to officiate.”
She eased out and shut the door, the only sound a muffled continuation of the recording.
A long carpet occupied the middle of the corridor. On her right, Amanda saw a dead end. She crept silently to the left, hearing the faint voice behind the doors she passed.
“But before the ceremony occurred, someone stole the capsule from an unattended van.”
2
She came to a staircase. Its fresh smell of wood and varnish suggested that the building was new. At the bottom, a large open area led to a door with a window on each side.
She hurried down, reached the door, and grabbed its handle.
Electricity jolted her, knocking her backward. Her mind went blank. The next thing she knew, she landed hard, slamming her head on the floor. Pain shot through her. She groaned and managed to focus her vision.
“Jesus,” someone said.
Turning toward the sound, she saw a man charge down the stairs. Mid-twenties. Short, dark hair. Gaunt, rugged features. Beard stubble.
She raised her hands to defend herself, then realized he wasn’t attacking her.
“Are you hurt?” He helped her up.
“Sore.” She wavered, dazed, grateful not to be alone.
“Where are we?” he asked.
“I have no idea.” Amanda stared at her tingling hand. “But I don’t recommend touching that door handle.”
“The voice in my room. . . . The last thing I remember . . .” The man’s haunted eyes scanned the area around them. He struggled to concentrate. “I was in a bar in St. Louis.”
“I was at a lecture in Manhattan,” Amanda told him, baffled. “About time capsules.”
“Time capsules? The same as the recording in my room. What the hell’s going on?”
“I’m afraid to imagine.”
“There’s got to be a way out.”
An archway beckoned on the right. They went through it and reached a long dining table flanked by chairs, everything rustic. Windows provided a view of more mountains. Through a further archway, Amanda saw an old-fashioned wood stove, a refrigerator, other windows, and a door.
Her companion hurried toward the latch.
“Don’t touch it,” Amanda told him. “We’ve got to assume all the doors are electrified.”
“Then we’ll break a window.”
A shadow appeared at the entrance to the dining room. Amanda swung around.
3
In the archway, a woman stared at them. She wore camel slacks and a taupe blouse, highlighted by an expensive-looking necklace, watch, bracelet, and several rings. In her thirties, she was taller than Amanda, thin in a manner that suggested she was a compulsive dieter. Her auburn hair was pulled behind her ears. Her tan features were handsome more than beautiful. Her expression was stark.
“What is this place?”
Amanda gestured in frustration. “We don’t know.”
“How did I get here? Tell me who you are.”
“Ray Morgan.”
“Amanda Evert.”
“Who drugged us? I was at a cocktail party. A boat show in Newport Beach. Suddenly I was in that bed upstairs.” The woman shook her head. “I heard that recording. Time capsules? This doesn’t. . . . Who on earth would do this?”
“I’m getting out of here before I find out,” Ray said. He grabbed a chair and swung it toward a window.
Amanda jerked her arms up to shield her face from flying glass, but all she heard was wood cracking. Twice. Three times. Louder. Ray grunted with effort. When the pounding stopped, Amanda lowered her arms and saw that a leg on the chair had broken off but the window remained intact.
“The glass is reinforced.” Ray studied it. “Almost as thick as a jet canopy.”
“Jet canopy?” The comparison seemed odd.
“I was a Marine aviator in Iraq.”
His tone suggested he meant to impress her, but all the reference to Iraq did was send a further spasm of fear through her. For Frank. It reminded her of the terror he’d endured there. Frank. She was certain that he too had been drugged. Otherwise, if he was conscious, he wouldn’t have let anything happen to her. Where was he?
“You haven’t told us your name,” Ray said to the woman.
“Bethany Lane.” She frowned at her bracelet and watch. “Whatever this is about, it isn’t robbery.”
“That doesn’t encourage me,” Amanda said.
Two more figures appeared behind the woman in the archway.
Ray picked up the broken chair leg, holding it as a weapon.
“It’s okay,” a man said. He raised his hands to show they were empty. “I heard what you said. I don’t know anything more about this than you do.”
A woman was with him. “And we’re just as scared.”
The man was black. In his twenties, he had thick, black hair and a lean build. The woman was Anglo, the same age, with cropped brown hair. She too was lean. They wore khaki pants with numerous extra pockets down the sides. Camping clothes.
“Derrick Montgomery,” the man said.
“Viv Montgomery,” the woman said. She wore a wedding ring. “The last thing I remember, we were drinking tea next to our tent, getting ready to go to sleep.”
“In Oregon,” Derrick said. “But that’s not Oregon out there. This looks like Colorado or Wyoming.”
“Stand back.” Ray grabbed another chair and stalked past them into the front hall, where he swung the chair at the window to the left of the door. He struck repeatedly. The impacts made the window vibrate but otherwise had no effect.
“Son of a bitch,” Ray said.
Derrick reached for the latch.
“No,” Amanda warned. “It’s electrified.”
Derrick jerked back his hand.
“Find the electrical panel,” Bethany said. “Shut off the juice.”
“I like the way you think.” Ray went through the dining room toward the kitchen.
“We shouldn’t split up,” Amanda told them.
They hurried to follow Ray and found him standing in the kitchen, staring down at a trapdoor handle.
“Maybe it’s electrified, too,” he said.
“I’ve got an idea.” Amanda pulled a hair from her head, wetted it with saliva, and eased it toward the handle. When it touched the metal, she felt a tingle and jerked her hand away. “Yes, it’s electrified.”
“Test the handle on the cupboard under the sink,” Viv told Amanda.
Wondering why the cupboard was important, Amanda obeyed. “I don’t feel any current.”
Viv yanked the doors open and groped under the sink. She pushed aside a long-handled brush, a bottle of dish detergent, and a box of scouring pads. “Yes!” She straightened, holding a pair of long yellow gloves, the kind used for washing dishes.
Rubber gloves, Amanda realized.
Viv put them on and went directly to the kitchen door. She hesitated, then tapped the handle with a gloved hand. Nothing happened. “We’re out of here.” But when she pushed on the handle, it wouldn’t move.
“There’s no key hole,” Bethany said. “It must have an electronic lock.”
“Which takes us back to the trapdoor and trying to find the electrical panel,” Ray said.
With her hand protected, Viv lifted the trapdoor. They stared at the darkness below.
“I don’t see a light switch.” Amanda turned toward the counter next to the sink and put the strand of hair against the drawer handles. When she didn’t feel a tingle, she yanked at the drawers.
One contained a hammer, a screwdriver, wrenches, and a flashlight.
Derrick aimed the light through the open trapdoor, revealing a short, wooden ladder and a dirt floor. “Not deep enough to be a basement.”
“To move around down there, you need to be on your hands and knees,” Bethany added.
“Any volunteers?”
No one answered.
“Hell, I’ll do it.” Ray crouched. “Anything to get out of here. Give me the flashlight.”
“Wait,” Amanda said.
“What’s the matter?”
Amanda studied the ladder. “Shine the light over there.”
It revealed an electrical wire attached to a rung in the steps.
“Change of plan,” Viv said. “Back to the door. With the gloves protecting me, I can use the hammer and a screwdriver to take the hinge pins off.”
“Excellent.”
But none of them had said that word.
“Who . . .” Derrick peered up.
From the ceiling, the voice continued, “Really, I’m impressed.”
4
Amanda’s heart lurched.
“Jesus,” Ray said.
Everyone jerked toward the side of the kitchen and gaped above them.
“I never expected you to demonstrate your problem-solving talents so quickly.” The voice belonged to a man. It was deep, sonorous, like a TV announcer’s. Amanda recognized it from the recording that had wakened her.
“A speaker hidden in the ceiling,” Bethany said.
“But how did he know what we . . .” Ray studied the upper corners of the room. His eyes narrowed. “Cameras. They’re small, but once you know what you’re seeing . . . ”
Amanda concentrated and saw tiny apertures in each corner, near the ceiling. She went through the archway into the dining room and frowned upward. “Cameras here also.” Something seemed to turn over in her stomach. “The house must be lousy with them.”
“Welcome to Scavenger,” the voice announced.
“Scavenger?” Derrick asked. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Please, go into the dining room and make yourselves comfortable. I’ll explain.”
“To hell with that.” Viv grabbed the hammer and screwdriver from the drawer. Still protected by the gloves, she rammed the screwdriver under a hinge pin in the kitchen door and whacked the hammer against it. As metal rang, she knocked the pin free.
“Please, go into the dining room,” the voice repeated.
Viv knocked another pin free. She started on the third.
“This isn’t productive. You have only forty hours,” the voice said. “Don’t waste time, Vivian.”
“I’m Viv! Nobody calls me ‘Vivian’! I hate it!”
“Step away from the door.”
Amanda felt cold. “I think we’d better do what he wants.”
“Listen to her, Vivian,” the voice suggested.
“Stop calling me ‘Vivian’!”
“Leave the door alone,” Amanda said. “I’ve got a bad feeling.”
“If you knock that third pin free and attempt to pry the door open, . . .” the voice said.
“Yeah? If I do, what’ll happen?” Viv demanded.
“The building will explode.”
“I don’t believe you.”
The voice became silent.
“You’re lying!” Viv shouted.
The silence deepened.
“Yeah, why don’t we go into the dining room?” Ray suggested.
Viv kept glaring toward the ceiling.
Derrick went over and touched her shoulder. Her glare softened only a little. “It won’t hurt to let him tell us what this is about,” he said. “If we think we don’t have an alternative, we can always pry open the door later.”
The voice broke its silence. “Oh, I guarantee you’ll have an alternative.”
5
Wary, they entered the dining room and sat at the table, glancing nervously at each other and then at the ceiling.
Ray took a Zippo lighter from a pocket. He fidgeted, opening and closing its chrome lid. “Anybody got a cigarette?”
Amanda and the others shook their heads.
“Too much to hope for.”
“Let me tell you about Raymond Morgan,” the voice said.
Ray stopped snapping the lighter’s cap.
“Former lieutenant. United States Marine Corps aviator. Raymond is a hero.”
“No,” Ray said.
“His story was widely reported in the media,” the voice continued. “He was flying a reconnaissance mission when a shoulder-launched missile struck his aircraft. This took place in a mountainous area of Iraq with a strong insurgent presence.”
Again, the reference to Iraq made Amanda think of Frank. Where was he? What happened to him? She prayed he wasn’t dead.
“The missile strike occurred at dusk. In fading light, Raymond parachuted to the ground. This was both good and bad. Dusk prevented the insurgents from aiming at a clear target. But the poor light made it difficult for Raymond to see where he landed. He struck a rocky slope and rolled, severely bruising himself and spraining his left ankle. Regardless of his pain, he hobbled all night to escape the insurgents. Just before dawn, he covered himself with rocks. Throughout the day, he remained motionless under their weight while the heat of the sun scorched him. Judging from sounds, he estimated that the insurgents came within fifty feet of him. As long as they hunted him, Raymond didn’t dare activate a homing device that would have brought rescue helicopters. After all, the signal would have lured the rescuers to the insurgents. Thus began an ordeal of hide-and-hunt in which Raymond hobbled from ridge to ridge each night and buried himself each day. He made the rations in his emergency kit last as long as possible. After that, he ate bugs. When his canteen was emptied, he drank water from stagnant pools. These made him feverish, but he never gave up. Through determination and ingenuity, discipline and self-reliance, he persisted for ten days until he finally outmaneuvered his hunters. U.S. intelligence sources later determined that the insurgents decided he was dead because no one could possibly have survived as long as he did. Only after he reached territory that wasn’t dangerous to the rescue helicopters did he activate his location transmitter. He lost thirty pounds and received a Silver Star. That was three years ago. Raymond is now a pilot for a regional air service in Missouri.”
Ray stared down at his lighter and snapped it shut. “Not a hero,” he said bitterly. “Friends of mine got shot down and killed. They were heroes.”
6
“Bethany Lane,” the voice said.
Bethany squirmed.
“Your story was widely reported, too. Bethany sells luxury sailboats. She’s based in Newport Beach, where some of her clients are also her friends. A year ago, she was invited to accompany a group sailing to Bali. Her ex-husband encouraged her to enjoy an overdue vacation. Four days into the voyage, a storm capsized the vessel. Bethany and a twelve-year-old girl were the only survivors. Buoyed by life jackets, they managed to cling to a rubber lifeboat until the water calmed enough for them to crawl in. They had a compass and emergency rations stored in the lifeboat. They had their foul-weather clothes in addition to their life jackets. Bethany pulled wreckage from the water and made a primitive lean-to that protected them from the sun. She had no idea of their location, but she knew mostly open water lay to the west whereas if she headed east, she couldn’t fail to miss the coastline of the United States or Mexico. The trick was to get there. So she used her foul-weather coat to rig a sail, and she used more wreckage to make a rudder, and when the wind didn’t cooperate, she rowed. Tell your acquaintances about how you handled the emergency rations, Bethany.”
Bethany’s cheeks reddened with embarrassment.
“Don’t be modest,” the voice said. “This is the time for everybody to get to know one another. Tell them about the rations.”
“Well, I . . . ”
“Do it,” the voice emphasized. “Tell them.”
“I’ve never been much of an eater.”
“That’s an understatement. You’re anorexic, Bethany.”
“Damn you!”
“No secrets,” the voice said.
“All right,” she yelled. “I’m anorexic. So what? I was fat when I was a kid. People mocked me, and my mother never stopped nagging about my weight. Food makes me sick to look at it. In that damned rubber boat, I told myself, ‘Hey, it’s no big deal about the rations. I hardly ever eat anyhow.’ So I divided the food into daily amounts, and I gave the little girl most of it. I needed to be awfully lightheaded before I allowed myself to eat.”
“Now tell them about the water.”
Bethany stared at her hands.
“Don’t be modest.”
Bethany stayed quiet.
“Very well,” the voice said. “I’ll do the honors. When the meager supply of water was gone, they faced a bigger emergency than the dwindling food supply. A person can survive three weeks without food but only three days without water. Bethany and the little girl had plenty of water around them, of course, but the salt content would eventually have killed them. Their only hope was rain, but the sun blazed relentlessly. Bethany deflated her life jacket and tied it over her head as a sunguard while the little girl lay under the shelter Bethany had rigged. At last, Bethany didn’t have the strength to row. The meager sail provided their only momentum. They drifted for two weeks before a container ship en route to Los Angeles noticed them. But how did you survive that long, Bethany? How did you solve the water problem?”
“You know so much about this. Why don’t you tell them?”
“I’m sure they’d rather hear it from you.”
Bethany studied the group and sounded exhausted, as if suffering the ordeal yet again. “I used the little girl’s foul-weather coat to make a soft pail. I put seawater in it. Then I covered the pail with her deflated life jacket. I held the edges tight with my hands. God, it hurt. After doing that all day, my hands ached so bad, I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to keep the seal tight.”
“And why was a tight seal important?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Because it gives you nightmares, Bethany? But talking might help. Think of this as therapy.”
“Who the hell are you?”
“Someone with the power to let you out of this building. Why was a tight seal important?”
Bethany murmured something.
“Say it so the others can hear you, Bethany. You can see they’re interested.”
“Evaporation.”
“Yes.”
Bethany exhaled audibly. “The heat of the sun on the pail and the life jacket caused vapor to rise from the sea water. The vapor collected on the underside of the life jacket, where it was wrapped over the pail. I waited a long time. Then I eased the jacket away. There were usually about ten drops of water clinging to the underside. I had to be gentle turning it, or else the drops would fall. The point is, the collected vapor didn’t have salt in it. The little girl and I took turns licking the drops. I can still feel the rough surface of the jacket on my tongue. I can still taste the bitterness.”
“Who taught you to get water that way?”
“No one.”
“You just figured it out?”
Bethany didn’t reply.
The voice marveled. “And you did it for days and days.”
7
“Derrick and Vivian Montgomery. I beg your pardon. I mean Viv. They, too, were featured prominently in the news. The fact that they’re a mixed-race couple added a further dimension to the story.”
Derrick’s features hardened. He worked to keep his anger under control.
“They’re two of the finest mountain climbers in the world. In fact, that’s how they met three years ago–on an expedition in the Himalayas. Odd that they went so far before they met—because they both grew up in Washington State. They’ve been climbing a lot of the same mountains since they were children. Famous climbers can earn a reasonable income by endorsing equipment, teaching at mountaineering schools, and organizing expeditions for wealthy adventurers. Indeed, Derrick and Viv were already well known in the climbing world before an incident last year thrust them into global prominence, no doubt with beneficial effects on their income.”
“Why don’t you go to hell?” Derrick told him.
“An example of the independence that typifies this group. Good. You’ll disappoint me if you don’t show spirit. To answer your question, I can’t go to hell. I’m already there.”
The dining room became silent.
“Derrick and Viv were hired to lead an expedition to the top of Mount Everest,” the voice resumed. “The company organizing it set a price of sixty thousand dollars for each person who wanted to join. Eight adventurers were willing to pay. For this particular expedition, they certainly got their money’s worth. It takes almost two weeks just to trek to the base camp. After that, progress upward from camp to camp is increasingly slow. The altitude, the wind, the cold. Everest is more than twenty-eight thousand feet high. By the time the expedition reached twenty-five thousand feet, only two of the original adventurers remained. The others surrendered to exhaustion and the elements, returning to base camp. Derrick and Viv stayed with the two remaining climbers. At twenty-six thousand feet, a storm hit—then an avalanche. The amateur climbers were buried. Derrick and Viv managed to dig them out, but the climbers were injured too seriously to be able to move under their own power. The two-way
radios were lost in the avalanche. There was no way to send for help. The injured climbers needed medical attention. In a struggle that lasted twelve hours, Derrick and Viv each took charge of one of the casualties, lowering them by rope, climbing down to join them, dragging them along icy ridges, lowering them again. At one point and at that debilitating altitude, Derrick even found the strength to carry one of the injured climbers for an astonishing twenty feet that must have felt like miles. When they reached a tent in a camp they’d earlier abandoned, Derrick stayed with the casualties while Viv descended to get help. A second storm hit, but Viv managed to guide rescuers back to the tent while Derrick did everything he could to keep the survivors alive. It’s an amazing accomplishment, and yet Derrick and Vivian look uncomfortable as I describe it.”
Viv scowled toward the cameras, pursing her lips at the sound of the name she hated.
“Neither they nor Bethany nor Ray are proud of what they achieved. Isn’t it interesting that what strikes others as remarkable behavior is minimized by those who lived through it? At the time, they weren’t being heroic. They were just desperately trying to stay alive. Fear is an ugly emotion. No one wants to remember it.”
8
“Amanda Evert.”
Throughout, Amanda’s heart had pounded increasingly faster. Each time her name wasn’t called, she felt relieved, but then her dread increased as the voice ended one account and paused before beginning another.
“No,” Amanda said.
“But yours is the only story I haven’t told.”
“Please, don’t talk about it.”
“How can I make my point otherwise?”
“Don’t talk about the Paragon Hotel.”
But the voice persisted. “Around ten at night, Amanda got off a train in Brooklyn on her way home from working late at a book store in Manhattan.”
“No.” Amanda pressed her hands over her ears. But even then, she dimly heard the voice.
“Amanda’s abductor hid in an alley and used a drug-soaked cloth to overpower her. She regained consciousness on a bed in the Paragon
Hotel.”
The memory of her terror brought tears to Amanda’s eyes. They streamed down her cheeks.
“That Asbury Park landmark was built in 1901, but after a series of disappearances, its doors were sealed in 1971. For five months, Amanda was held prisoner until a group of urban adventurers broke into the hotel to explore its historic corridors. But they soon discovered that some buildings are abandoned for a reason. Only a few survived the wrath of Amanda’s abductor.”
Amanda tasted the salt of her tears as the voice spoke of Frank Balenger, her rescuer, and the agony he endured to save her.
Frank, she thought. Where are you?
A flame of anger swelled inside her.
“Balenger’s heroism was astonishing,” the voice enthused. “It’s difficult to imagine how a man can push himself so long and so hard, to overcome so many obstacles and still manage to survive–not just survive but to save Amanda and a companion in the process. Do you see the theme? Determination and ingenuity, discipline and self-reliance. These are the virtues you share. That is why I brought you here.”
“Frank,” Amanda whispered. Her eyes felt raw, blurred from weeping. “Frank,” she said stronger. She stood with such force that her chair toppled. Fists clenched, she yelled toward the ceiling, “What have you done with him, you bastard? Frank was the hero! I didn’t do anything, except get rescued!”
“Modesty is an over-praised virtue. You did far more that night than you give yourself credit for.”
“Damn it, where’s Frank? Why isn’t he here?”
“Would you change places with him?” the voice wondered. “Would you want him to be here instead of you?”
“He saved my life! I’m proud to take his place! But Frank’s the hero! There’s just one reason I can think of why you didn’t bring him here! You killed him, you son of a bitch!”
The only reply was the sound of breathing.
“Admit it!” Amanda yelled.
“I haven’t included this conversation in your forty hours. But the time will soon begin. I suggest you control yourself, or else you’ll be worthless to the group.”
Ray snapped his lighter shut. “Forty hours? He mentioned that before.”
“All of you, reach under the table.”
“Why?” Bethany demanded.
They looked warily at one another. Slowly, they obeyed.
Amanda was the last. Her emotions so ravaged her that everything seemed distant. She felt a wiry object attached to clips. She pulled it free.
“Earphones?” Viv asked.
Each streamlined headset was identical. A thin, curved metal band had a small ear bud at either end. A piece of metal projected from above the left ear bud.
“A microphone,” the voice explained. “I need to remain in communication with you when you step outside.”
“You’re letting us go?” Viv sounded hopeful.
The voice ignored the question. “The batteries on these units are strong. They’ll last the necessary forty hours.”
“Forty hours? Why do you keep talking about—”
“There’s something else under the table.”
Puzzled, Derrick sank to his knees and peered under it. Metal scraped as he pulled something free. He showed the group a small object.
Amanda thought it was a cell phone. Emotionally exhausted, she didn’t realize she’d said it out loud until Derrick looked at her.
“No.” He frowned. “It’s a global positioning satellite receiver. We use them on climbing expeditions.”
“And for sailing,” Bethany added.
“And flying,” Ray said. “But the GPS units in jets are considerably more sophisticated.”
“Some new cars have them, also,” Viv said. “But why do we need—”
“There’s one for each of you,” the voice told them.
Amanda watched the others reach under the table. Apprehensive, she did the same. The object her fingers unclipped was silver gray. It had a screen similar to a cell phone, but there wasn’t an array of buttons. Instead, just a few buttons protruded on each side. The top had an image of a globe, then the word ETREX. The name of a particular model? Amanda wondered. At the bottom was another word that she guessed identified the manufacturer: GARMIN.
Viv noticed her confusion. “Never used a GPS receiver?”
“No.”
“It has maps, an altimeter, and a compass. When you turn it on, it orients itself to the signals from global positioning satellites. Then you enter map coordinates to chart a course or find a location. Hey!” Viv yelled at the ceiling. “What are we supposed to do with these?”
The voice ignored the question. “Go to your rooms. Each closet has a change of clothes. Return to the front door in ten minutes.”
“And then what?”
“The forty hours begin.”
9
“This is what I learned so far,” Detective Ortega said.
Tortured by his emotions, Balenger sat rigidly at a desk in the Missing Persons office of Manhattan’s One Police Plaza. The echo of phones and conversations filled the corridor outside.
“First, I called Oglethorpe University in Atlanta,” Ortega said. “They never heard of a professor named Adrian Murdock. Not in the history department. Not in any department. I described the man you spoke to: gray hair, gray mustache, thin. That fits a lot of professors. Oglethorpe agreed to email faculty photographs for you to look at.”
“The man I saw won’t match any of them,” Balenger said.
“You know how this works—keep asking questions, keep getting information, even if it eliminates a possibility. I contacted the city clerk’s office. Up until 1983, that property was indeed owned by someone named Victor Evans. I checked with the phone company and got the numbers for all the people with that name in the New York City area. One of them turned out to be the man who owned the building back then. But he doesn’t know a Philip Evans, and he never had a son.”
Balenger looked dismally at the cardboard cup of tepid coffee in his hand.
Ortega checked his notepad. “Yesterday afternoon, my partner and I spoke to people who live on that block of Nineteenth Street. They say a truck arrived Saturday morning and unloaded the chairs and tables. Late in the afternoon, the truck came back to take the furniture away.”
“That’s when Amanda and I were removed from the building,” Balenger said.
“Probably. If a date-rape drug was used, no one would have needed to carry you. You’d have been marginally conscious and able to walk. True, you’d have been unsteady. But the truck would have blocked the view from the opposite side of the street, and the tables and chairs being carried out would have distracted anybody watching from the buildings on either side. You and your friend would have seemed just a couple of people being helped into a car.”
“More likely a van. Something without windows.” Balenger’s hands felt cold. “A lot of people were involved. The woman who called herself Karen Bailey.”
Ortega read a description from the notebook. “Matronly. Fortyish. No makeup. Brown hair pulled back in a bun. Plain navy dress.”
Balenger nodded. “Plus, the people who showed up for the lecture.”
“You said several of them walked out during the presentation?”
“Yes.” Balenger concentrated, remembering. “A lot of people,” he emphasized, “too many to keep a secret. Maybe the audience didn’t understand what was really happening. Maybe they were paid to stay only for a limited time. The delivery people. All they needed to be told was a man and woman felt ill and were being helped into a van. It’s possible only the professor and Karen Bailey actually knew what was going on.”
“The delivery people.” Ortega indicated a list on his desk. “My partner and I are contacting all the companies in the city that rent tables and chairs for events. We’ll eventually find the company that delivered to that address. Maybe they can give us a description of whoever hired them.”
“Any bets they were hired over the phone and paid with a check in the mail?” Balenger asked.
Ortega studied him with concern.
“And any bets the bank account was established for the sole purpose of paying the Realtor and the rental company and maybe some of the people who showed up for the lecture?” Balenger added. “That bank account won’t be used again, and whoever established it no doubt gave a false name, address, and social security number.”
“You know,” Ortega said, “this is something new for me.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve never had a case in which someone with law-enforcement experience reported a loved one missing. I feel like I’m a magician trying to work with another magician. You’re familiar with the procedures. You realize what goes on behind the curtain. While I was making inquiries with Oglethorpe University, the city clerk’s office, and the residents of that block on Nineteenth Street, I heard about someone else who made the same inquiries. That wouldn’t have been you by any chance?”
“I couldn’t bear just sitting and waiting.”
“I hope you didn’t imply to those people that you’re still in law
enforcement.”
“I did nothing illegal.”
“Then the best thing you can do right now is make yourself sit and wait a little longer. You’re too emotionally involved to go around questioning people. Don’t try to do my job.”
“The thing is,” Balenger said, “I realize how hard this is for you. You and your partner have plenty of cases, and there’s only so much time in a day, and speaking of magicians, you and I know magic doesn’t exist.”
“Okay, show me how to do my job. If you were me, where would you look to find the people who attended the lecture?”
“I was about to suggest they played their parts with such assurance, maybe that’s what they do for a living. Maybe they’re actors,” Balenger said.
10
“There’s the son of a bitch.” Balenger gestured toward a photograph in a glassed display. “Minus the mustache and with darker hair.”
He and Ortega stood outside the Bleecker Street Playhouse in Greenwich Village. They’d spent the previous hour phoning talent agencies and actors’ groups, asking about anyone hired for a Saturday afternoon gig on East 19th Street.
Leaving the noise of traffic, they entered a small, dingy lobby, where they paused to assess their surroundings. The box office was behind them. On the left, Balenger saw a coat closet, on the right a counter for refreshments. The stained carpet looked worn, although not much of it was visible because of folded tarpaulins, stacked scaffolding, paint cans, buckets, and brushes. The smell of turpentine hung in the air.
“Definitely needs an overhaul,” Ortega murmured, glancing toward a water stain on the ceiling.
“I hate old buildings,” Balenger said.
Straight ahead, past a double door, muffled voices spoke unintelligible words.
Ortega opened one of the doors and went inside. After a moment, he came back and motioned for Balenger to follow him. The door swung shut behind them. They stood in an aisle that descended past rows of seats toward a bottom area illuminated by overhead lights. On stage, the curtains were parted. Two couples, one middle-aged, the other young, held scripts and recited lines. A tall, thin man stood before the stage, motioning with a pointer to let them know where to stand.
Looking small down there, the young woman glanced toward the back. “They’re here,” she said, her voice echoing.
The tall, thin man turned toward Balenger and Ortega. “Please, come down and join us.”
Concealing his agitation, Balenger was conscious of the sound of his footsteps in the deserted aisle. The theater exuded a sense of gloom, the old seats unnaturally empty, desperate to be filled with applause.
Ortega introduced himself and showed his badge. “I believe you’re already familiar with Mr. Balenger.”
Balenger recognized them. The tall, thin man was Professor Murdock. The four people on the stage had been at the Saturday lecture.
“I certainly remember you,” the man with the pointer said, “and the young woman you were with. Her name was . . .” He glanced up, searching his memory. “Amanda Evert.”
“And your name was Adrian Murdock, except I’m sure it isn’t.”
“Roland Perry. The professor’s name was assigned to me.”
“Is something wrong?” the young man on the stage asked.
Ortega addressed Perry. “On the phone, you said your group was hired to be at that house on East Nineteenth Street.”
“That’s right. The event was described as performance art.” Perry’s voice sounded vaguely British. “I was given a speech to deliver. Our playhouse actors received directions about how to behave, plus a description of Mister Balenger and his friend. We were told this would be a practical joke of sorts. Throughout my lecture, the audience would gradually leave. Then I’d stop talking. As the visual demonstration continued, I’d step into the shadows and leave the building. After that, the images would stop, and Mister Balenger and his friend would find themselves alone in the room.”
“Doesn’t sound like much of a joke,” Ortega said.
“It was supposed to involve a surprise birthday party. As Mister Balenger and his friend wondered what on earth was going on, friends hiding upstairs would shout ‘Happy birthday!’ Food and drinks would be carried down. The party would start.”
Ortega looked at Balenger, then asked Perry, “How much were you paid?”
“For the group, for what amounted to an hour’s work, we received two thousand dollars. It was a much-needed contribution to our remodeling efforts.”
“How were you approached?” Balenger asked.
“A woman phoned and arranged to meet me here at the playhouse.”
“Did she give a name?”
“Karen Bailey. The woman you met at the lecture.”
“I had the feeling she was part of your group,” Balenger said.
“Not at all.”
“Do you have a contract?” Ortega asked. “An address or a signature I can look at?”
“No. It didn’t seem necessary. The arrangement was unusual, yes, but the two thousand dollars couldn’t have come at a better time. We were thankful for the windfall.”
“But why are you here?” the older woman asked. “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing for you to worry about.” Ortega gave Perry his business card. “If she contacts you again, let me know.”
“Karen Bailey did leave a photocopy of something,” Perry said. “She told me to give it to Mister Balenger if he came to the theater.”
“A photocopy?” Balenger frowned. “Of what?”
“I put it in my script bag.” Perry tucked his pointer under an arm, went to a worn canvas bag next to a seat, and searched through it. “Here.” He offered Balenger a folded piece of paper.
But before Balenger touched it, Ortega said, “Wait.” He removed the latex gloves from his sport coat. After putting them on, he opened the paper.
Balenger stood next to him and looked down at it. The paper had streaks from a photocopy machine. It showed a book page on which everything was matted out, except one paragraph and an imprint of a stamp: NYPL HUMANITIES & SOCIAL SCIENCE LIBRARY. The stamp was faint.
Ortega read the paragrap |
