The Vault of Dreamers (26 page)

“I’m sorry. You know I never wanted to get you in trouble,” I said. “Tell me.”

“There was a guy who came through town Monday night,” Linus said. “He’s this truck
driver named Amby from St. Louis. He has a refrigerated truck and he delivers ice
cream for the Forge dairy here sometimes. It turns out he also makes deliveries for
a pre-morgue.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“You know, if you’re an organ donor at the hospital and you’re dead, they harvest
out your eyes or your heart or whatever,” he said. “This one pre-morgue in St. Louis
realized it’s better to ship the organs
in situ
, and let the doctors harvest them at the other end right before they implant them
in the new patient.”

“Does
in situ
mean what I think?” I asked.

“They ship the donors’ bodies intact,” he explained. “Instead of sending a heart on
ice, they super-oxygenate the whole body, send it on ice, and take the heart out once
it arrives.”

I tried to grasp the concept of a whole body on ice. Transporting it would be costly
and cumbersome.

“Okay, this is grossing me out,” I said. I hardly knew where to begin with my questions.
“Are you saying Amby delivers bodies in his ice cream truck?”

“I know. It’s weird,” Linus said. “I just found out about this two days ago. Parker
said something about Amby’s night job, and it seemed too strange, so I looked into
it.”

“Wait. Are you saying this guy Amby delivers bodies to Forgetown?”

“I think he might deliver them to the school,” Linus said.

22

ROXANNE

“THE FORGE SCHOOL?”
I asked.

“Yes,” Linus said. “I saw his truck behind the dining hall at two in the morning,
but there’s no new ice cream in the freezer, and Chef Ted didn’t know anything about
a delivery.”

“Do you think Amby delivered the boy that Dr. Ash was operating on?” I asked.

“That’s what I’m wondering,” Linus said.

He didn’t seem dead.
The vivid images coming out of that boy’s mind were too alive for him to be dead.

A grumbly bark came from Linus’s end of the walkie-ham, and then a soft jangling,
like from a collar.

“Do you have Molly there with you?” I asked, surprised.

“Yes.”

“Do you always bring her with you?”

“No. She just followed me tonight, so I had to bring her up,” he said. “Did you know
Berg went to medical school in St. Louis before he came to the Forge School? He has
connections there. He studied arts law, too. That’s what Parker said today. He had
a long stretch of lucidity while Otis was out, and he got to talking about the old
days.”

“It sort of makes sense,” I said. I considered how Dean Berg’s background as a doctor
and a lawyer suited him to running Forge.

“You know what I can’t get my head around?” Linus asked. “The idea of a body in an
ice cream truck.”

I instantly pictured a blue, frosted body packed in among five-gallon tubs of mint
chip ice cream.

“That’s incredibly revolting,” I said.

“I know.”

I kept picturing it.

“So why do I want to laugh?” I added.

Linus laughed. “I know.”

I rubbed the back of my thumbnail idly against my lips. “I feel like I’m supposed
to do something about all this, like call the police.”

“And say what, exactly?”

“Wouldn’t you call them?” I asked.

“Me? No. This will sound incredibly annoying, but you don’t have any proof.”

I didn’t. It was true. I was worried about that boy. And myself, for that matter.
And Janice, and everyone else. I exhaled slowly, trying to think what to do.

“I have to look for more evidence,” I said.

“Maybe videotape something,” Linus said.

“I tried that once. Somebody erased it.”

“Come again?”

I told him about the night I’d seen Janice taken out. I’d run down to the basement
with my video camera, and then back to the attic where I’d seen Dean Berg watching
me from the dean’s tower, and the next morning, my footage had been erased.

“But how would someone get to your video camera and delete the footage?” Linus asked.

“I don’t know, unless someone took my camera out of my sleep shell.”

“While you were sleeping?” he asked.

I couldn’t tell if his raised voice meant he was angry or incredulous.

“It frightened me,” I said.

He didn’t answer.

“What are you thinking?” I asked.

He still didn’t answer.

“Linus, are you still there?”

“I don’t understand any of this,” he said. “But I don’t think it’s safe for you to
get out of bed. I think you should say you’re sick and you want to go home.”

“Leave the school?” I asked.

“I think you should leave tomorrow.”

“Now you’re scaring me,” I said.

“Think about it, Rosie. If half of what you say is true, this school is being run
by a madman. A genius, but a pathological one. Nobody’s safe here.”

Now that somebody else was saying it, and it wasn’t only me thinking it, I realized
why I couldn’t just leave. This wasn’t only about me.

“I just have to get some proof,” I said. “Then we can go to the police and leave it
up to them to get to the bottom of it.”

“Don’t do anything tonight,” he said.

“When else is any better? I have to go tonight,” I said.

“No. Dean Berg called in a night crew to run an upgrade of the computer system. The
fifth floor of the dean’s tower is lit up with techies, and they’re going building
to building checking some of the cameras. You have to stay in bed.”

I craned my neck, trying to see the dean’s tower out the nearest window, but the angle
of my sleep shell was wrong. I eased my head back onto my pillow and slid the walkie-ham
beside my ear again.

“Could they be coming in here?” I asked.

“Possibly, but they’re just regular techies. They can’t do anything to you,” Linus
said. “There are too many people around. They wouldn’t dare.”

“So you think they don’t know? What about the teachers and the rest of the staff?”

“No, I don’t think so. You can’t have a lot of people keeping a secret. It has to
be just Dean Berg and Dr. Ash, like you say.”

“And one other guy,” I said. “There’s one other guy with a beard. I’ve seen him, too.”

“Let me talk to Otis about this. We’re just making guesses,” Linus said. “He knows
a lot about the school.”

“He’ll tell. He works for Berg.”

“Maybe Parker, then. His memory’s spotty, but when he’s on, he’s incredibly sharp.”

I didn’t have high hopes for the man with Alzheimer’s.

“Maybe I should write Burnham a note and get him on it,” I said. “He’s smart. He’s
been interested in my surveillance of the school.”

“The Fisters supply the sleeping pills for the school,” Linus said. “His loyalty would
be to his family.”

“Do you think the Fisters are involved?”

“No, I’m only saying Burnham might not be the best person to confide in at this point.
His family business is tied up with the school.”

I chewed at the inside of my lip, considering. Burnham was a complicated person, but
I trusted him. I needed to think things through before I made a decision. I wasn’t
sure about Parker, either.

“When’s the last time you donated blood to Parker?” I asked.

“Last month. I’m due to donate again tomorrow.”

“Really? Do you go to a clinic or something?”

“We do it at home, in the afternoon, when Parker’s at his best,” he said. “Otis cooks
meatballs and we put on Parker’s favorite old movie and watch it all together.”

“What’s the movie?”

“
Shakespeare in Love
.”

“That sounds like a nice tradition.”

“It is, actually,” he said, laughing.

It made me envious. “Will I see you tomorrow?” I asked.

“I’ll be around until lunchtime. Come surprise me.”

I smiled slowly. “I can never surprise you. You can always see me on my way.”

“Do you think I spend every moment of my day watching your feed?”

“Well, not every moment. I thought you said Franny kept my profile up in the kitchen,
though.”

He laughed again. “She does. To torture me.”

“It’s not torture.”

“It’s something,” he said.

I couldn’t tell quite what he meant. “Something bad?”

“I’ve been trying to remember the story of Cyrano de Bergerac,” he said.

“Non sequitur,” I said. “Tell me what you meant before.”

Linus kept going. “That girl Roxanne thought she had just one boyfriend, but he was
essentially two men and she didn’t know it.”

“Cyrano had a big nose.”

“Right. Anyway, Roxanne had one boyfriend during the day, and the other one at night,”
Linus said. “The body and the voice.”

“I never thought of it that way, but it’s true,” I said. “And your point?”

“We’re like that, you and I,” he said. “By day, our bodies are together, but we can’t
say what we’re thinking. By night, we can talk but we can’t touch.”

I gazed out the window again, considering the idea. “I think I like the night better,”
I said.

“Me, too,” he said. “I’ve been trying to remember if the story had a happy ending.
I suppose I could look it up.”

It was coming back to me. She lost him twice. “I think Cyrano died. In a convent.”

“That seems wrong,” he said, laughing again. “You know what I’d do if I was there
with you?” he asked.

“What?”

“I would talk to you, just like we’re doing, but together.”

I smiled, closing my eyes. “That would be perfect.”

“Who am I kidding? I’d make a move.”

I laughed. “That would be perfect, too.”

“Sweet dreams, Rosie. Molly says good night.”

I whispered good night back.

Then I turned off my walkie-ham and hid it under my pillow. With Linus no longer in
my ear, I felt more alone than before. I was afraid to sleep, afraid to let go, afraid
to hear a hiss of gas, afraid I’d drop into a nightmare. I tried to tell myself I
was safe because the place was crawling with techies, and finally exhaustion released
me.

*   *   *

I slept through the rest of the night, and woke with the other girls at six the next
morning. I listened cautiously for any inner voice to offer a dire warning, but none
came. No shadows of nightmares skittered at the edge of my consciousness. For once,
I felt fine. Normal. With the sunshine bright outside the windows, I felt like wearing
a skirt and leggings, with my brown sweater for warmth.

At breakfast, when I saw Linus, he gave me a wary smile. “Did you like my poem, then?”
he asked.

I had to skim back past our conversation in the night and remember where we’d left
off the day before. Yesterday morning, when he’d been so cold and angry about the
swipe key, felt like forever ago. “Yes, very much,” I said.

He pulled me in for a hug and a kiss, a real one, not the fake kind like yesterday’s.
“You could have written me one back,” he said.

“I guess I’m not as romantic as you are.”

“Maybe that’s why I like you,” he said, and kissed me again.

Soon after, when I arrived in Media Convergence, four of the students were playing
Ping-Pong already. I had to give Mr. DeCoster credit. When people took breaks to play,
it did seem to make them even more creative and productive afterward. He was listening
attentively while the painter Harry talked to him about building a sand castle city
against the rising ocean. Janice was lying on the couch in her Hamletta scarf with
her eyes closed, mumbling. For her impossible project, she was writing a five-act
play in iambic pentameter. Burnham, wearing earphones, was working intently at his
computer.

I took the chair beside his. “How was your diving yesterday?” I asked, and reached
to turn on my machine.

He took out his right earphone and let it hang. “It was good. And thanks, by the way.
My mom says hi back.”

“Hello again, Burnham’s mom,” I said, offering a wave at the nearest camera. “You
have a very nice boy here. Very smart and handsome. You should be proud of him.”

“Okay, enough of that,” Burnham said, shaking his head.

On his screen, an army of cartoon dragons was attacking the clock tower with little
bursts of flame.

“You’re not failing at that,” I said.

“Yes, I am. It doesn’t match what I imagine yet,” he said.

He had to have some imagination.

“Where’s the lady knight?” I asked.

He pointed. “Here. She’s running things.”

I leaned closer. She still had my hair and a nasty scowl. Her cleavage had been augmented.

“Well done,” I said.

I pulled up some of my footage from the graveyard and started working on a ghost I
could superimpose into a sequence of scenes. Burnham worked companionably beside me
for a while, and then he paused to stretch his hands over his head.

“Hey, I want to show you something,” he said.

Beside me, he left his game up on his big screen and skimmed a hand over his smaller
touch screen to pull up some of my own footage. He had it arranged in nine miniwindows
and he zipped through them all with fluid ease.

“You weren’t kidding about taking a look at my footage,” I said.

“I ran them through an analyzer,” he said. “There were two things that caught my eye.
You’ll like this.”

He set his touch screen between us and shifted his chair closer. Then he pulled up
some footage from the clock tower. Purely for the artistic effect of it, I had aimed
a video camera down the pit where the weights from the clock dropped on their chains,
but even when Burnham ran the footage in high speed so a bit of window light streaked
around inside of the cylindrical pit, the chains barely seemed to move. Then the pit
went dark as the clock tower was lost to night.

“That’s it,” I said.

“Just wait,” he said.

A flicker of light smudged the screen. Burnham stopped the footage and reversed back
to a certain frame.