Hangman's Curse (19 page)

Nate began to pity this man. “That's quite a philosophy, Mr. Marquardt.”

“It's how I've survived, Mr. Springfield. It's how I fought my way through school and got where I am today. It's how all of us have to survive. We live in a lousy world in case you haven't noticed, and I'm not about to shelter anyone. The tough survive. It's as simple as that.” Then he added with more than a hint of pride, “The tough win games, too. You may have heard, we're heading for the championship on Turkey Day.”

“Without your star quarterback?”

“The tough survive, Mr. Springfield. We'll be ready, make no mistake.”

“The tough survive,” Nate repeated thoughtfully. “So if one kid abuses and harasses another, that's fine with you?”

“I let the kids work it out. That's the way you and I have to do it. They may as well get used to it.”

Nate drew a long, careful breath and then spoke in a low, very controlled tone of voice, his eyes locked on Marquardt's. “Mr. Marquardt, I've never taught a gym class, but I've spent years investigating crime scenes—you know, the aftermath of the strong and ruthless preying upon the weak and innocent. I've had to smell death, sample blood, reconstruct in pencil or clay what people used to look like before they were beaten to death so the police can even guess who they were. Now maybe you consider that ‘life,' the way things are, something everybody has to get used to, but let me tell you something: Cruelty is no sign of manliness, and having dealt with the results of cruelty for years, I can assure you, you never get used to it. Now . . .” Nate repeated the question Marquardt hadn't answered. “I still need to know, did Tod Kramer ever pick on Norman Bloom?”

As if to make a point, Marquardt laughed. “
Of course
he did! What do you expect?”

Mr. Loman stood at the top of the ladder and hollered into the open vent. “How's it going, Norman?”

From where she stood below, Elisha could hear a faint, echoing voice replying, but she couldn't understand what Norman said.

“Okay, fine,” said Mr. Loman. He called down to Elisha, “He's reached the bottom. Now what do you want him to find out?”

Elisha was looking at the building plans, trying desperately to make the best of it, but mortified and angry. “Tell him . . .” She had to take a breath and calm herself. “Tell him if there seems to be a visible connection between . . . I mean, ask him—” She got on the radio. “Mom? Hello?”

Mr. Loman called down the shaft, “Do you see any
spiders,
Norman?” His tone seemed to mock Elisha, as if she were a timid girl afraid of spiders.

Elisha heard Norman's off-handed reply. “Sure.”

“Well, don't let 'em getcha.”

There was a metallic groan, then a clatter.

“What's up, Norman?”

A hollow clunk.

“Norman? What're you doing?”

No answer.

“Norman?”

Elisha gripped the ladder and listened.

Mr. Loman called more loudly, “Norman?”

No answer.

Algernon Wheeling plugged in his “sniffer” and turned it on. It was a black box the size and shape of a VCR, with digital readouts on the front, rows of tiny silver knobs, and a small wand that resembled a microphone on a cord. The wand was the actual “sniffer,” a receptor for airborne molecules that noses interpret as smells.

“A dog like Mr. Maxwell is still the most practical way to go,” Algernon conceded, “but a dog can't tell you exactly what molecules are in a smell, or exactly who left it there. This machine can. And so . . .”

He held the wand over the soda straw that had contained the female spider, and the machine began to blink out rows of numbers on its readout. Just a few feet away, a computer printer began to reel off data. The moment the printing was completed, Algernon grabbed up the paper and studied it. “Don't be, don't be, come on now . . .”

“What are you looking for?” Sarah asked. She could recognize many of the chemical formulas, but only Algernon knew what they meant.

“What I desperately hope not to find,” he answered. He set the sheet of paper on the worktable and grabbed up a reference manual filled with more formulas, more numbers. He flipped through the pages hurriedly, frantically. “00-2-9975, Category 5 . . .” He flipped some more pages, forward, backward, searching. “No, no, too wide a band . . .” Flip flip.

His finger landed on a page and stopped there. His eyes went from the printout to the manual and back again, comparing, comparing.

He sat down, the manual open in his hand, his finger still on the page. “Mmmmm-hm. African spotted wolf. Sarah, could you please call the hospital? I need to talk to the physician in charge of the victims.”

Sarah grabbed the telephone and dialed a direct number Dr. Stuart had given her. “Hello? Dr. Stuart? Sarah Springfield. I'm going to hand you over to Algernon Wheeling, professor of entomology at the University of Washington.”

She handed the receiver to Algernon.

“Hello?” he said. “Dr. Stuart? Hello, sir. Very well, thank you. Do you mow your own lawn, sir? Yes, sir, I am serious. Okay. Do you put the grass clippings in a pile somewhere? All right. So you know what hot, composting grass smells like? Okay, great. I'm ecstatic. Can you do something for me? Check your patients' breath, smell their skin, particularly under the arms. We're looking for that smell—oh, and could you check the base of their gums? There should be a concentration of greenish plaque under there with the same odor. Okay, we're standing by.” He addressed Sarah. “He's checking.”

“And if he finds it?” Sarah asked.

Algernon gave a shudder. “It'll be the Kenyan disaster all over again.”

Mr. Loman looked worried. “Norman!” He eyed the vent opening. There was no way
he
would fit through.

Elisha made a decision. She dropped the building plans on the floor, then put on her protective hood and headlamp. “Excuse me, Mr. Loman.”

He took his cue and hurried down off the ladder.

Elisha spoke into her radio. “Mom, we have an emergency. I have to go in. Call me when you can.” She clambered up to the opening, clicked on her head-mounted lamp, and crawled through.

Elijah and Mr. Maxwell arrived at the school just as the buses were pulling up. This was going to complicate things a little. Everyone was going to wonder what he was doing with a dog in school.

Just then, Trevor and Carl, Elijah's two buddies from calculus, got off a bus.

“Hey! Nice dog!”

“Is that yours?”

Elijah was trying to figure out how he would explain even as he answered, “Yeah, sure is.”

They looked at him strangely, then exchanged a glance with each other. Carl said, “Elijah, is there something going on here? I mean, first you hang out with Ian Snyder, and now you bring a dog to school.”

Elijah looked them both in the eye and admitted, “Yeah. There's something going on. Could you kind of . . . play along for a while? I'll tell you all about it when it's over.”

They looked at each other, made faces that meant they were impressed, then hurried into the building.

“Okay, Max,” Elijah said, leading Max up the stairs toward the main door, “it's now or never.”

Elisha made a decision. She dropped the building plans on the floor, then put on her protective hood and headlamp. “Excuse me, Mr. Loman.”

Algernon was a bundle of nervous energy as he waited for Dr. Stuart to return to the phone. Pressing the receiver to his ear with his shoulder, he swiveled in his chair and began tapping the keys on his computer. “The, uh, the brown recluse has a distant cousin in East Africa, the African spotted wolf—that's not a dog, it's the name of a poisonous spider. The poison works slowly, causing paranoia, then hallucinations, then dementia—you know, the victim goes crazy, babbling nonsense, fleeing from everything, being generally out of his mind, just like the victims in this case—are you with me, Sarah?”

“I'm with you.”

“Some of the primitive tribes in Africa found a way to use the poison against their enemies. The poison could eventually kill them, but not before they went crazy and killed each other. It was a perfect weapon.”

He tapped one final key, and an image formed on the computer screen. “The African spotted wolf. Not big as spiders go, less than half a centimeter. The bite hardly leaves a mark—but you've seen what it can do.”

Sarah stared at the greatly magnified image with loathing. It was a thin, spindly thing, brownish-red with black spots, slick in appearance.

Algernon responded to a voice on the telephone. “Yes, hello.” He listened, then sighed, his shoulders dropping. “Yes, sir. Thank you. That's good news and bad news. We'll get right back to you. Yes, as soon as we have something. Thank you, doctor.” He handed the receiver to Sarah, who hung it up. He pointed to his computer screen. “We've found the culprit.”

The old airshaft was dusty and filled with decades of spider webs. Sure. Just as Norman had replied, there were spiders in here. There had always been spiders in here. Suddenly the whole question of finding spiders in this place seemed a bit silly, like going to an ocean beach to find out if there was any sand.

The shaft was like a square box, framed from aging two-by-fours and plywood, and only a few feet across. It was difficult for Elisha to move her body, to bend, reach, or turn. Hanging by one hand from the lip of the vent opening, she raised the face shield of her hood for a better view downward, tilting her head to direct the beam of her headlamp. It was like looking down a square, bottomless well. The dirty, cobwebbed walls dropped away into inky blackness. Tiny flecks of dust drifted upward through the beam of her light, riding on a slow, warm updraft that reeked of dust, mortar, and rat droppings.

“Norman?”

No answer.

Her right foot had already found a horizontal framing member. There were plenty, spaced about two feet apart, perfect footholds for climbing down. Norman's footprints and hand-prints had already gone before her.

“Mr. Loman, I'm going to go down and find him. Maybe you should get us some help.”

“Maybe you should wait!” he said, sounding quite nervous.

“Maybe he's hurt. Maybe he isn't breathing. There isn't time.”

She saw his face disappear from the vent opening and turned away, lowering one foot, then the other, easing and sliding down the shaft from foothold to foothold. She still couldn't see the bottom.

“The culprit is an African spotted wolf?” Sarah asked, studying the image on Algernon's computer screen.

Algernon fidgeted in his chair, drummed his knee, swiveled from side to side. “A
male
spotted wolf, to be exact.” He shook his finger in Sarah's direction. “Every soda straw but one was occupied by a male. It's an old war tactic used in Africa, particularly Kenya: plant female pheromone on your enemy—give them a gift, an article of clothing, anything, but first confine it with some females to get the scent planted on it. Then put a male spider nearby so he's attracted by the pheromone. He crawls onto the victim, doesn't find the female he thought he'd find, he gets upset, he bites the victim. Victim goes crazy and eventually dies, and no one even knows it was the act of an enemy.”

Sarah was stunned. “So somebody planted the spiders in the lockers, and the duffel bags, and the jacket, trapped in soda straws.”

“And planted the pheromone on the victim. The male smells it, eats and claws his way out of the straw . . .”

“It's too perfect.”

“Exactly. That's why we have such a terrible mistake here.”

“The female.”

“Exactly, exactly!” Now Algernon jumped up and pointed to the straw he'd dissected. “This straw had a
female
inside. The female doesn't get as upset as the male, so she usually doesn't bite, and that's why Blake Hornsby never showed any symptoms. BUT!” Algernon was too upset to stand still, so he paced, spun on his heels, paced some more. “Never, never,
never
turn a female spotted wolf loose in North America! She might mate with a brown recluse, and while the venom of the African spotted wolf is poisonous, it's nothing compared to the venom of the hybrid! Remember? The last two victims died within twenty-four hours, not several weeks! It's fair to say they were probably bitten by hybrids.”

“Oh, Lord help us!”

“It gets worse, Sarah! Are you with me?”

“I'm with you.”

“The hybrid breeds like crazy! It's like a cancer, like an invasion from another planet, it's, it's
unreal!
Once a brown recluse and an African spotted wolf find each other, you could have hundreds— NO! You'd have
thousands
of hybrids in a matter of days! Thousands of brown wolf hybrids! The Kenyan disaster!”

“Elisha . . . !” Sarah raced for the kitchen and found her handheld radio. “NO! Oh, no!”

Algernon raced after her. “What, what, what?”

“This thing's been turned off all this time! Elisha may have tried to call me.” She switched it on and called, “Elisha!” No answer. “Elisha, come in!”

Elisha had reached the bottom of the shaft. It had emptied into a long, narrow space between a wall of the new building and a remaining wall of the old building, and her theory was right. There was space enough for her to crawl from behind Blake Hornsby's locker to behind Amy Warren and Crystal Sparks' lockers upstairs. If she could do it, obviously a tiny spider could do it.

And there were plenty in here. She could see their tiny dark shapes moving along the walls, scampering through the cracks, hanging from their webs. In fact, as she continued to look below, ahead, and above her, it became frighteningly clear that there were far
too many
. They were everywhere. The boards, the masonry, the dusty walls seemed alive with them.

She made sure her face shield was snapped securely shut. This was weird, so weird it was getting scary.