They climbed out of their sweaty sports clothes and showered. Jeannie took longer, washing her hair. She was grateful for Lisa’s friendship. Lisa had been at Jones Falls just over a year, and she had shown Jeannie around when she arrived here at the beginning of the semester. Jeannie liked working with Lisa in the lab because she was completely reliable, and she liked hanging out with her after work because she felt she could say whatever came into her mind without fear of shocking her.
Jeannie was working conditioner into her hair when she heard strange noises. She stopped and listened. It sounded like squeals of fright. A chill of anxiety passed through her, making her shiver. Suddenly she felt very vulnerable: naked, wet, underground. She hesitated, then quickly rinsed her hair before stepping out of the shower to see what was going on.
She smelled burning as soon as she got out from under the water. She could not see a fire, but there were thick clouds of black and gray smoke close to the ceiling. It seemed to be coming through the ventilators. There was a fire.
She felt afraid. She had never been in a fire.
The more coolheaded women were snatching up their bags and heading for the door, she observed. Others were getting hysterical, shouting at one another in frightened voices and running here and there pointlessly. Some asshole of a security man, with a spotted handkerchief tied over his nose and mouth, was making them more scared by walking up and down, shoving people, and yelling orders.
Jeannie knew she should not stay to get dressed, but somehow she could not bring herself to walk out of the building naked. There was fear running through her veins like ice water, but she made herself calm. She found her locker. Lisa was nowhere to be seen. Jeannie grabbed her clothes, stepped into her jeans, and pulled her T-shirt over her head.
It took only a few seconds, but in that time the room emptied of people and filled with fumes. She could no longer see the doorway, and she started to cough. The thought of not being able to breathe scared her. I know where the door is, and I just have to keep calm, she told herself. Her keys and money were in her jeans pockets. She picked up her tennis racket. Holding her breath, she walked quickly through the lockers to the exit.
The corridor was thick with smoke, and her eyes began to water so that she was almost blind. Now she wished to heaven that she had gone naked and gained a few precious seconds. Her jeans did not help her see or breathe in this fog of fumes. And it did not matter being naked if you were dead.
She kept one shaky hand on the wall to give her a sense of direction as she rushed along the passage, still holding her breath. When there was no more wall, she knew she was in the small lobby, although she could not see anything but clouds of smoke. The stairs had to be straight ahead. She crossed the lobby and crashed into the Coke machine. Was the staircase to the left now, or the right? The left, she thought. She moved that way, then came up against the door to the men’s locker room and realized she had made the wrong choice.
She could not hold her breath any longer. With a groan she sucked in air. It was mostly smoke, and it made her cough convulsively. She staggered back along the wall, racked with coughing, her eyes streaming, barely able to see her own hands in front of her. With all her being she longed for one breath of the air she had been taking for granted for twenty-nine years. She followed the wall to the Coke machine and stepped around it. She knew she had found the staircase when she tripped over the bottom step. She dropped her racket and it slid out of sight. It was a special one—she had won the Mayfair Lites Challenge with it—but her life was more precious, and she left the racket behind and scrambled up the stairs on hands and knees.
The smoke thinned suddenly when she reached the spacious ground-floor lobby. She could see the building doors, which were open. A security guard stood just outside, beckoning her and yelling: “Come on!” Coughing and choking, she staggered across the lobby and out into the blessed fresh air.
She stood on the steps for two or three minutes, bent double, gulping air and coughing the smoke out of her lungs. As her breathing at last began to return to normal, she heard the whoop of an emergency vehicle in the distance. She looked around for Lisa but could not see her.
Surely she could not still be inside? Still feeling shaky, Jeannie moved through the crowd, scanning the faces.
Lisa was not in the crowd. With mounting anxiety Jeannie returned to the security guard at the door. “I think my girlfriend may be in there,” she said, hearing the tremor of fear in her own voice.
“I ain’t going after her,” he said quickly.
“Brave man,” Jeannie snapped. She was not sure what she wanted him to do, but she had not expected him to be completely useless.
Resentment showed on his face. “That’s their job,” he said, and he pointed to a fire truck coming down the road.
Jeannie was beginning to fear for Lisa’s life, but she did not know what to do. She watched, impatient and helpless, as the firemen got out of the truck and put on breathing apparatuses. They seemed to move so slowly that she wanted to shake them and scream: “Hurry, hurry!” Another fire truck arrived, then a white police cruiser with the blue-and-silver stripe of the Baltimore Police Department.
As the firemen dragged a hose into the building, an officer buttonholed the lobby guard and said: “Where do you think it started?”
“Women’s locker room,” the guard told him.
“And where is that, exactly?”
“Basement, at the back.”
“How many exits are there from the basement?”
“Only one, the staircase up to the main lobby, right here.”
A maintenance man standing nearby contradicted him. “There’s a ladder in the pool machine room that leads up to an access hatch at the back of the building.”
Jeannie caught the officer’s attention and said: “I think my friend may be inside there still.”
“Man or woman?”
“Woman of twenty-four, short, blonde.”
“If she’s there, we’ll find her.”
For a moment Jeannie felt reassured. Then she realized he had not promised to find her alive.
The security man who had been in the locker room was nowhere to be seen. Jeannie said to the fire officer: “There was another guard down there; I don’t see him anywhere. Tall guy.”
The lobby guard said: “Ain’t no other security personnel in the building.”
“Well, he had a hat with SECURITY written on it, and he was telling people to evacuate the building.”
“I don’t care what he had on his hat—”
“Oh, for pete’s sake, stop arguing!” Jeannie snapped. “Maybe I imagined him, but if not his life could be in danger!”
Standing listening to them was a girl wearing a man’s khaki pants rolled up at the cuffs. “I saw that guy, he’s a real creep,” she said. “He felt me up.”
The fire officer said: “Keep calm, we’ll find everyone. Thank you for your cooperation.” He walked off.
Jeannie glared at the lobby guard for a moment. She felt the fire officer had dismissed her as a hysterical woman because she had yelled at the guard. She turned away in disgust. What was she going to do now? The firemen ran inside in their helmets and boots. She was barefoot and wearing a T-shirt. If she tried to go in with them they would throw her out. She clenched her fists, distraught. Think, think! Where else could Lisa be?
The gymnasium was next door to the Ruth W. Acorn Psychology Building, named after the wife of a benefactor but known, even to faculty, as Nut House. Could Lisa have gone in there? The doors would be locked on Sunday, but she probably had a key. She might have run inside to find a laboratory coat to cover herself, or just to sit at her desk and recover. Jeannie decided to check. Anything was better than standing here doing nothing.