Poison Most Vial (15 page)

It was a straight-ahead plan that got very twisted, very fast.

In their free period, Ruby and Rex made straight for the library, where Rex again asked a librarian about the spare bathroom. He said the regular one was occupied and he couldn't wait.

“You're going to have to go back into the school then, young man,” the librarian said. “Haven't they told you? The entire area under the library has been declared part of the crime scene. Just this morning. The elevator is blocked. You aren't allowed down there.”

And that might have been that, except that Ruby did what she wished she'd done first thing in the morning. She asked for help.

“I can get you into the computers, Ruby, but not down
there,” whispered Sharon in the middle of the math lesson. “But”—she looked across the class—“I know who can.”

At lunch, Simon Buscombe again joined the three of them, bringing his tray to their corner table in the cafeteria. He nodded, said nothing, and immediately bit into a bright orange hot dog with yellow mustard.

“Can't be anything like meat in them dogs; smells like hair spray. How do you eat those things?” Rex said.

Simon shrugged. “I understand my expertise is again in demand.”

“Uh, right,” Ruby said. “Well, we know you're the maze expert. What we're hoping now is that maybe you know something about the layout underneath the library and the science buildings.”

Simon nodded, polished off the hot dog, and took a large swig from a giant cream soda. Burped.

“The catacombs, Simon?” Sharon said.

He nodded impatiently. “Observe,” he said, pulling a portfolio out of his briefcase. He cleared a space on the table and leafed through a stack of mazes and drawings, some of buildings, others of cars.

“Whoa, stop,” said Rex. “Wait. Lemme see that other drawing, back up, right there. That one. Is that a '69 Cougar XR-7?”

Simon sat stone silent for a moment. He separated the car
drawing and placed it in front of Rex. “How did you know that was a '69?”

“Headlights. See that detail right there?” Rex gawked at the drawing as if it were a real car. He was barely breathing. “Lookit that: '69 is the best year for these. I someday probably might get one.”

Simon still looked shaken. “Color?” he said.

“Black cherry.”

“Interior?”

“I don't know; between cream and that regular white—”

“Are you kidding me?” Ruby said. “It's a car. All right. A drawing of a car, I mean, and it's good, let's all agree on that. But we're trying to do a job, remember? Simon?”

Simon swung his head around as if he'd forgotten she was there. “Oh yeah. Right. Observe,” he said, pushing a fantastically intricate maze to the center of the table. It was all done in red pen, and Simon shooed the others' hands away.

“No touché pas,” he said. “This is a map of the catacombs beneath the library. Copied from the original layout, which I found in the architecture section of the library. The original construction is early 1800s, English Gothic, with lines I know and grace notes familiar to the era.” The car experience with Rex was long gone; he was back to being his pompous self again.

“Where's our bathroom?” Rex said.

“The modern redesign they did twenty years ago ruined the personality of the place, in my estimation,” Simon continued, ignoring the question. “And it screwed up my map; this does not capture every feature. There are blank spots. Dead zones.”

Ruby gaped at the drawing, so different from her work and yet she wanted to have it all to herself, just to look at for a while. “This is . . . amazing,” she said. “I never knew a mess of dank hallways could look so deadly cool.”

“Well, the elevators are blocked, so no way to get down to that mess of hallways now,” Rex said.

Simon gave him a fish-eye. “By my calculation, there are seventy-eight entrances to the catacombs. Maybe eighty-one, if you're willing to use the sewers.”

“Not happening,” Rex said.

“No need for that, young man,” Simon said.

Young man!

Ruby, recovering from the hypnotic grip of the drawing, said, “When? We need to go today, before someone beats us to it.”

“My schedule has been cleared,” said Simon.

“After the bell,” said Sharon, sitting back, arms folded on her chest.

“Where we meet, then?” said Rex, reaching for the drawing.

Simon blocked his hand. “No one touches the reconstruction.” He looked at Sharon. “I cannot work with people who interfere. This is not a play maze.”

“Relax,” Sharon said. “No one's gonna mess up your map. Maybe you'd rather not come, Simon. We'll find our way down ourselves.”

The long, bony face jerked up, eyes glowing. “No. I'm in.”

Sharon again folded her arms. “That's what I thought. Let's meet out in front of the science library.”

The four lingered until well after the bell, waiting for most kids to clear out, and then proceeded to the far side of the library building. They followed Simon, squeezing between the stone flank of the science library and the now-dry hedges, the very same ones Ruby and Rex had crawled through days earlier.

“Everyone is prepared, I'm going to assume,” Simon said. He was crouching by a small garden-level window with bars, looking back over his shoulder.

Ruby hesitated. Rex shrugged. “Let's not talk about it,” he said.

Simon nodded. “Here's our path, very simple,” he said, holding the map up to the light and tracing the path with his finger.

“Everyone got that?” Nods all around. “OK.”

Simon pulled the bars from the window easily. The bolts
had long ago rotted. He lifted the pane up and slid in. The others followed, Rex last, struggling to fit his large body through.

Ruby recognized the smell from the first time. Damp, swampy, with a machine-oil glaze. Blinking in the darkness, she saw shovels, hoes, a few old lawn mowers, rusting against the far wall. Sacks of something piled in a corner, turning to dust.

They were in.

“A simple garden shed,” Simon said. “At one time it would have opened to the outside. Maybe it still does, through there,” he said, nodding toward a thick wooden barn door.

“What's your map say? How far to the bushes?” Ruby said. “I mean, bathroom.”

“Easy does it,” Simon said. He held his hand out, and Sharon passed him a tiny flashlight. Simon clicked it on and studied the maze drawing. “I will remind you that I have not drawn every corner. I don't know exactly where every hole-in-the-wall whirligig is. I can get us close to the hallway where that bathroom is. I think. Then it's up to you.”

“Whirligig?” Ruby said.

Simon led them out through a door and into a stone corridor. Ruby followed, then Sharon, then Rex. All OK so
far. The corridor sloped down, turned, and seemed to slope up again. Patches of outside light leaked in, just enough for the four to see their way.

“We going under the library now, I feel that,” Rex said.

“Obviously,” said Simon.

A clang and hiss of machine noise stopped Simon. He turned the flashlight on the left wall, looking for something. He settled on a small metal door, a half door, no more than waist-high. He pulled it open, and the noise filled the corridor.

“Why don't we just go straight there? Why we want to mess with this?” Rex said over the clanging.

“Because that hallway turns, and by the time you get to the end, you're way under the main school,” Simon yelled. “Now, are you following me or not?”

Rex did not want to go through the door. Neither did Ruby, and she peeked over her shoulder to signal that she knew what he was thinking. By the time she turned around Sharon was gone—through the door. Ruby stood aside and let Rex push his way in, headfirst, like some pudgy old dog through a broken fence.

She followed, and the four huddled for a moment on the other side, looking around. Hard to see anything much. A boiler room or something. Huge cylinders, hot to the touch. A tangle of pipes overhead. Nobody in sight.

Simon didn't consult his maze. He seemed to know where he was. He motioned them to follow, around one boiler and then another, hugging the dirty wall, until they'd crossed the room and reached another door.

He put his hand up to stop. “OK. On the other side is where they've modernized. Where we might make visual contact with some random actor. Understood? We'll need to move fast and use door wells, if there's some security or whatever.”

Simon dropped to all fours, cracked the door, and stuck his head out. He recoiled, pulling the door shut. “As I anticipated. Occupied. Footsteps out there. Ruby?”

She crept forward on her hands and knees and peeked for herself. Bare bulbs bathed the hallway in wasted yellow light. She blinked once and held her breath. A security person of some kind was down at the right end of the passageway, about forty yards away, where it crossed another hall. Not a city cop, but university security, and now she saw another and another. Had they taken over the investigation?

“Weird,” she said when she pulled her head back in.

“What, Ruby?” Rex asked. He was crouched behind the others. He hated being down on the ground.

“Campus security. Lots of 'em. I thought this case was for the real cops.”

“Weird is right,” said Sharon, moving forward to have a
peek of her own. “At this hour, most of the campus security people are posted outside or in the main lobbies of the buildings, and there aren't that many of 'em working. Now, here's three way down here?”

Sharon took another look, left the door ajar, and said over her shoulder, “All clear now. Should we?”

No one had a better idea. Out into the lighted hallway they stumbled, Simon turning left, the opposite direction from where they'd seen the security person, Ruby behind, Rex, and then Sharon.

Simon was counting under his breath. Ruby could hear it—“one Mississippi, two Mississippi”—and she wondered,
Why is it Mississippi and not Arkansas?
And then,
Why am I thinking about this now? Like this is all a joke, a prank
. After three Mississippi, Simon all but dove into a deep door well, the others piling in behind him, their breath heavy now.

“Minimize exposure,” Simon said. “No more than three or four seconds out. That's my rule.”

“Your rule?” said Sharon. “What, you got rules now?”

“Hey, it's my map, hacker-girl. I get to make some rules.”

“Hacker-girl? Where'd you get that, skater-boy, at architectural drafting club? Oh, I forgot, at drafting club no one speaks. It's a deaf-mute ranch.”

“Whoa, you two friends, right?” Rex said.

Ruby was relieved to hear him say something; he looked
terrified. There was so much more to do, and it was a long way out.

Simon craned his neck around the corner of the door well and jerked it back. He put a “be quiet” finger in the air.

A campus cop sauntered right by them:
click, click
went her shoes. Ruby saw clearly the campus officer's profile under the cap. The shadow in the door well covered them, and she went right by. The woman was texting on her cell phone.

Ruby looked at Rex, who seemed to have relaxed. Maybe he just needed to see evidence that they had some luck on their side. The good kind. He gave her an almost-smile. She knew what that meant. No turning back now.

Four Mississippis later was an intersection, and Simon peeked around the corner, waved, and they all but sprinted to the next door well. The first one had been buried in shadow. This one was not.

“We need to do better than this,” Simon said. “This here is a showroom.”

Ruby peered into the new corridor and motioned for Rex to take a look. He nodded. Neither knew where exactly they were, but the look of the hallway was familiar: green walls, gold numbers on a couple of doors. The same look, the same feel as when they'd been down to the bathroom the first time. Years ago, it seemed to her now.

A clicking of shoes came again. Simon stiffened. He
turned, stricken, shaking his hands in a desperate gesture:
Do something!

Sharon put a hand to her mouth. She shuffled, turned, tried the door behind them. Locked, of course, with a keypad under the handle. Her hands moved fast, punching one combination, another, and another—nothing. Now prying the faceplate off of the keypad with a set of keys—jamming a key into the wiring behind, hard.

The door clunked—they were in, crouched on the other side of the door now, just as the guard's heels clicked by. This was crazy, Ruby thought. Every five steps, there was some campus security guard.

She sensed someone behind her and swung around. A large, bright lab room. Forensics territory. A chemistry lab of some kind probably, Ruby thought, maybe the place where they made some of the agents used in the main lab. And there at the end of the lab bench—could it be? Yes. A student she didn't recognize sat on a stool in front of a rack of test tubes, his head on the table. Fast asleep.