Amy shook her head again, her eyes moistening with tears just at the thought of having to climb the ladder, then walk out to the end of the narrow board.
“Come on,” Iverson urged. “Just try it once. If you can’t do it, you can’t. But you really ought to try.”
“She’s scared,” Josh said from the pool, where he was hanging onto the gutter, kicking gently as he treaded water. “How come she has to go off the high board?”
“She doesn’t,” Iverson told him. “But if she doesn’t try, how is she going to get over being scared of heights?”
“Maybe she won’t,” Josh challenged. “Aren’t you scared of anything?”
Joe Iverson’s first impulse was to reprimand Josh for being insolent, but then he remembered the instructions he’d been given by George Engersol. “I’m not interested in turning these kids into athletes,” the Academy’s director had insisted. “I want them to get all the exercise they need, but it’s their minds I’m primarily interested in. So don’t start acting like a drill sergeant with them. If one of them gives you a problem, tell me about it, and I’ll take care of it. But most of these children are already terrified of coaches. They’ve been treated like weaklings and klutzes all their lives, and their self-images have suffered for it. I won’t tolerate that here.”
Iverson, though he thoroughly disliked Engersol, hadn’t bothered to argue, for he’d already been told by the university’s president to do whatever Engersol wanted. “You’d be amazed at the funding he’s bringing in for that program,” Jordan Sanford had told him. “Just do what he asks, and let him worry about the kids. Believe me, he knows what he’s doing.”
So now, instead of reprimanding Josh, Iverson only shrugged his shoulders, made another note on his clipboard, and sent the kids to take showers.
Retreating to his office, Iverson switched on his computer terminal, called up the permanent records of Josh MacCallum and Amy Carlson, and began entering the data he’d collected in the last hour. Though it meant little to him, he supposed George Engersol had some use for it all.
An hour later, in his office, George Engersol called up the same records that Joe Iverson had been looking at sixty minutes earlier. Tapping quickly at the keyboard, he began studying the data the coach had entered.
What intrigued him most was the notation on Amy Carlson’s record that she seemed to suffer from acute acrophobia.
She’d been unable to climb the rope in the gym, and outright refused even to attempt the high diving board.
Apparently, her phobia was more pervasive than he’d thought when he’d watched her make her way down the stairs to the beach ten days earlier.
As he thought about it, an idea began to take shape in his mind. Perhaps there was a way to fit Amy’s phobia into his seminar.
He leaned back in his chair, the idea developing rapidly. The more he thought about it, the more he liked it.
Whether or not Amy Carlson would like it remained to be seen. But of course, what she — or any of the other students — liked, was of no consequence to him at all.
The only thing that mattered was how he could use them.
And he’d just discovered a perfect use for Amy Carlson.
14
Josh put the last of his belongings into the cardboard box. He’d already filled it three times, carried it to the rattling old elevator for the ride down to his new room on the second floor, emptied it, then taken it, and the elevator, back upstairs to repeat the process.
On each trip, as he’d pressed the elevator button and heard the ancient gears mesh and felt the car jerk into motion, he’d remembered once more the night that Adam had died, and the strange sounds he’d heard coming from the motionless elevator. By now, though, he’d all but convinced himself that Amy must have been right — that the whole thing had happened only in his imagination — for ever since that night when he’d heard the elevator operating and run to look at it, the car had always been in motion, and someone had been inside it. In fact, today he’d even stopped going to look.
Now, on the last trip from his old room, the box was almost overflowing, and as Josh crammed the last of his T-shirts into the few remaining crannies between the conglomeration of books, shoes, and the favorite pillow that his mother had brought him from Eden, he took a last glance around the room. He’d occupied it for no more than two weeks. Still, he found himself sort of missing it already, for it had seemed to him to be just about perfect. Big enough to hold all his stuff, but small enough that he’d felt cozy in it right from the start. By now, he’d almost convinced himself that Jeff Aldrich had simply made up the story about what had happened to Timmy Evans. Besides, the room downstairs didn’t have a dormer, with its window seat that was just the right size to curl up on while he was reading.
The room downstairs.
Adam’s room.
He’d felt an odd chill when Hildie had taken him to the room just before lunch. His first instinct had been to tell her he’d rather stay where he was, for although the room was now empty of all of Adam’s stuff, he could still clearly remember Adam sitting at the desk, hunched over his computer. At least he’d never actually known Timmy Evans. When he remained silently at the door, not even attempting to cross the threshold, Hildie had appeared to read his thoughts.
“Why don’t we move the furniture around?” she’d suggested. “That way it’ll be your room, and in a few days you won’t even remember that someone else used to be here.”
Someone else. She hadn’t mentioned Adam’s name, which Josh thought was strange. In fact, it seemed as though the grown-ups had stopped talking about Adam altogether, as if he’d never existed. Did they just want his friends to forget about him?
Before he could protest, Hildie had begun rearranging the furniture, and before he quite knew what was happening, Josh was helping shove the heavy iron bed to the wall where Adam’s desk had stood, and moving the desk over to stand by the window. Amazingly, Hildie had turned out to be right — just changing the placement of the furniture had made the room seem sort of like his own.
Sort of, but not quite. What would happen tonight, when he tried to sleep in Adam’s room?
As he hauled the last boxful of stuff toward the elevator, he heard it suddenly clank into life, and as he came to the shaft itself, he half expected to see the car still waiting where he’d left it, even though the machinery was running.
But this time — as on all the others since the night of Adam’s death — he could see the car descending and hear its door open and close as someone got on downstairs.
He watched as it came back up.
As it passed the third floor, Dr. Engersol looked out at him through the brass mesh that enclosed the car, nodded, then disappeared as the car moved up to the fourth floor and clattered to a stop.
Josh waited until he heard Dr. Engersol leave the car, then pressed the button that brought it back down to the third floor. At least I won’t be able to hear the elevator from my new room, he thought as he hauled the box into the little car.
But it wasn’t his room, he realized as he dropped the box on the bed a few moments later. It was still Adam’s room.
He hesitated for a minute, wondering if it was too late to go to Hildie and tell her he’d changed his mind, that he wanted to keep his old room. Then he decided he was being stupid. It was just a room, and it wasn’t as though Adam had actually died there. The thought alone made him shudder, and he determinedly told himself not to think about it anymore.
But what would happen tonight, he thought again, when he had to sleep here?
He decided not to think about that, either. He began unpacking the box, putting his clothes away in the chest, stacking the books on the shelves that now hung on the wall above the bed, since he and Hildie had rearranged the room. As he put the last of them away, he eyed the shelves suspiciously. If they collapsed during the night, everything on them would crash down onto the bed. Maybe tonight he’d find a screwdriver and move them over so they’d be back above the desk again.