“You don’t have another week or two, not with Amy Carlson. She was going to leave.”
“You could have talked her out of it,” Engersol said tersely.
“If I could have, I would have,” Hildie replied, remembering the conversation she’d had when she found Amy exactly where she’d looked for her, hidden within the circle of trees that made up the Gazebo on the school’s front lawn. She’d tried her best to reason with Amy, to calm her down, but it had done no good.
“I’m going home,” Amy had insisted. “And if you don’t let me call my mother, I’ll run away. I won’t stay, even if you lock me in my room!”
So Hildie had given in. “All right, Amy,” she’d said. “Let’s go to my office and call your parents. If you don’t want to stay, we certainly don’t want to keep you here.”
Amy, apparently mollified by Hildie’s unexpected agreement to her demands, had allowed herself to be led to Hildie’s office. “Why don’t I get you a glass of water?” Hildie had offered. “Then, by the time you drink it, you’ll feel better, and be calm enough to talk to your mother. All right?”
Amy, still sniffling, had nodded. Hildie had given her a box of Kleenex with which to blow her nose, then disappeared for a moment. When she returned, she had a glass of water. Amy promptly gulped it down.
It had taken no more than thirty seconds for the drug to take effect and drowsiness to overcome the little girl. Hildie had carried her quickly to the ornate brass elevator, which brought them up to Engersol’s apartment, then down again to the laboratory beneath the Academy’s basement.
Amy had been there ever since.
Now, still unconscious, she lay on the operating table.
Hildie glanced dispassionately down at the girl’s sleeping face and the tangle of red hair that framed her freckled cheeks. Then she shifted her attention to all the equipment that was arranged around the table, equipment that would keep Amy alive through the next four hours.
A respirator was waiting, and a blood pump.
Nearby was a dialysis machine, along with an array of special equipment that George Engersol himself had invented.
“Shall we begin?” Hildie asked.
Nodding, George Engersol picked up a scalpel. A moment later he’d made a slit that began behind Amy’s left ear and went around the back of her head, ending at her right ear.
Working quickly, he began peeling her scalp away from her skull.
He didn’t worry too much about how carefully he treated Amy’s face, for George Engersol knew that at the end of the operation, Amy’s face wouldn’t matter anymore.
Indeed, when they finally found her, if they ever did, he doubted whether anything would remain of Amy’s face at all.
Or any of the rest of her, for that matter.
Certainly, there wouldn’t be enough left for anyone to figure out what he’d done to her
19
George Engersol, with Hildie still at his side, finished the operation at four o’clock in the morning. “It’s done,” he sighed, stepping back from the operating table, peeling the mask from his face and wiping the perspiration from his brow with the sleeve of his scrub gown. He glanced at his watch, surprised at how late it was; the operation had taken nearly an hour longer than he’d expected. His eyes shifted to Hildie, who was already dressing Amy Carlson’s lifeless body in the clothes she had worn yesterday afternoon. “What are you going to do with her?”
Hildie’s expression hardened. All night long she’d taken orders from Engersol, silently following his every instruction. But now, as with Adam Aldrich a week ago, it was her turn. “Don’t ask,” she told Engersol. “All you need to know is that it won’t look anything like what happened to Adam. Nor will there be many questions, since everyone here already knows how depressed Amy was. When they find her, she’ll be listed as a suicide.”
“Why don’t we just put her in the incinerator?” Engersol suggested. “It’s almost light. If anyone sees you—”
“Don’t be a fool, George,” Hildie replied. “If she doesn’t turn up at all, there are going to be police all over the campus, searching for her. And sooner or later someone’s going to think of the incinerator. If they find so much as a single tooth, they’ll keep after it until they find out how she got there. And no one, no matter how unhappy he might be, is going to crawl into an incinerator and wait to be burned up, note or no note!”
Engersol seemed about to protest, but changed his mind when he saw the cold look in Hildie’s eyes, a look that told him she knew exactly what she was doing and that she wouldn’t let anything go wrong.
So far, certainly, nothing had gone wrong.
Of the four “suicides” the two of them had arranged so far, not one had been questioned. After all, they had been careful, selecting only children who had already attempted suicide at least once.
With Amy, though, it had been different. Though they had arranged for dozens of people to witness her humiliation, there was little in her records to suggest that she might become suicidal. Yet that, too, could be fixed. All it would take would be a few minor adjustments to the results of her personality inventories, and the warning signs would be in her files for anyone to see.
Indeed, he could make those adjustments while Hildie was disposing of Amy’s body. “All right,” he agreed. “Let’s get started.” He helped Hildie wrap Amy’s now-dressed body in a sheet of plastic, then lifted it into his arms and carried it to the elevator. Coming to the fourth floor, he stepped out of the car into his apartment, followed closely by Hildie. From there she led the way, Engersol following.
They left his apartment, stepping out onto the landing at the top of the narrow stairs that led down to the third floor. Signaling Engersol to stay where he was, Hildie silently moved down the flight of steps until she came to the bottom, where she checked the long corridor that ran the length of the mansion. Satisfied, she signaled Engersol to follow her.
They repeated the procedure at the second floor, and in less than a minute had reached the main floor. Leaving the building by the back door, Hildie opened the trunk of her Acura, then stood aside as Engersol deposited Amy Carlson’s shrouded body into it.
“All right,” Hildie whispered just loudly enough for Engersol to hear her. “I can take care of the rest.”
Engersol glanced anxiously at the faintly silvering sky. “If anyone sees you—”
“They won’t,” Hildie assured him. “And if they do, it’s quite logical that I’ve been out looking for Amy all night, isn’t it? Believe me,” she added, reading the next question in Engersol’s expression, “I won’t do anything that will get the car searched.”
Before Engersol could make another objection, Hildie firmly closed the trunk, then got into the car.
A moment later she was gone, and George Engersol quickly returned to the house, moving up the four flights of stairs as silently as he had come down them a few minutes earlier.
In his room, Josh MacCallum stirred in his chair, twisted uncomfortably, then sank back into the restless sleep that had overcome him despite his intention to stay awake all night long.
He neither heard nor saw any of what had taken place as dawn began to break.
Hildie left the car’s headlights off until she passed through the Academy’s gates. Using a series of winding back roads, she headed north, twisting along the flanks of the hills until she was well out of town. Every few seconds she glanced in her rearview mirror, but no headlights followed her, nor were there any lights on in the few houses she passed. Not that it would have mattered if anyone had glanced out a window, for in this part of Barrington, the lots were large and the houses set so far back from the road that most of them could barely be seen. The car would be all but invisible, even from the houses closest to the road. Driving carefully within the speed limits, Hildie finally turned left down a road that eventually intersected the coast highway two miles north of the village. Across the highway a viewpoint had been constructed at the end of a huge finger of rock that jutted into the sea.