Deborah pushed on the dumbwaiter to see if it would move enough to give her a view down the shaft, but it was rock solid. It was obviously a highly engineered piece of equipment. Deborah stepped back and eyed the unit. She guessed the back of the shaft was common with the wall of the main corridor.
Leaving the incubator, she went back out into the main hall and gauged where the dumbwaiter shaft was located. Then she paced off the distance to the stairwell near the fire door to the central tower. Using the old metal stairway, she climbed up to the third floor. When she opened the door she was surprised.
Although she vaguely remembered Dr. Donaldson saying the vast old institution, save for the small portion occupied by the Wingate, was like a museum, she was unprepared for what she was looking at. It was as if sometime in the nineteen-twenties everybody, professional staff and patients alike, had just walked out leaving everything behind. There were old desks, wooden gurneys, and antique-appearing wheel chairs lining the dark hall. Huge cobweb-like strands hung like garlands from Victorian light fixtures. There were even old, framed Currier and Ives prints hanging askew on the walls. The floor was covered with a thick layer of dust and pieces of plaster that had fallen from the shallowly vaulted ceiling.
Superstitiously Deborah covered her mouth and tried to breath shallowly as she paced off the distance from the stairwell. She knew intellectually that any of the tubercular organisms and any of the other miasma that had at one time roamed the halls were long gone, but she still felt vulnerable and uneasy.
Once she had an approximate fix on where the dumbwaiter shaft was, she entered the nearest door. Not unexpectedly, she found herself in a windowless room which had served as a butler's pantry complete with cupboards full of institutional dishes and flatware. There were even some old warming ovens with their doors ajar. In the semidarkness they looked like huge dead animals with their mouths open.
The dumbwaiter shaft's doors were where she expected them to be. They were designed to open vertically like a freight elevator, but when Deborah pulled on the frayed canvas strap, it was obvious there was a fail-safe mechanism to keep them locked until the dumbwaiter itself had arrived.
Brushing her hands free of the dust, Deborah retraced her steps back to the stairwell and climbed to the fourth and top floor. She found the situation the same as on the third floor. Returning to the stairwell, she descended to the first floor.
When Deborah emerged from the stairwell, she knew instantly that the eggs did not come from there. The first floor had been renovated even more dramatically than the second floor to house the Wingate Clinic's clinical operations, and at that time of the morning it was in full swing with a constant flux of doctors, nurses, and patients. Deborah had to step to the side to allow an occupied gurney to go by.
Dodging the crowd, Deborah paced off the distance from the stairwell to where she guessed the dumbwaiter shaft was, behind the corridor wall. Leaving the corridor, she found herself in a patient-treatment area. Where the dumbwaiter shaft's doors should have been located, she was confronted by a shallow linen closet. It was immediately obvious to her that there was no opening for the dumbwaiter on the first floor.
A simple process of elimination left only the basement as the eggs' origin. Deborah headed back to the stairwell. To get down there she had to descend three flights instead of the two that had separated each of the upper floors. This suggested to her that the basement would have a higher ceiling, but it turned out not to be the case. There was a mezzanine floor of sorts between the basement and the first floor, composed of a myriad of piping and ductwork.
The basement had the appearance of a dungeon with infrequent bare-bulb lighting. The walls were exposed brick with arched ceilings, and the floor, granite slabs. The unease Deborah had felt up on the third and forth floors was magnified in the gloomy basement. It, too, contained a multitude of mementos of its mental-institution, TB-sanitarium past, but here they were more decrepit as if abandoned in dank, shadowed recesses. Deborah's immediate feeling was that if there were any of the old infectious agents lingering in the building, this was where they'd live.
Girding herself against the power of her own imagination, Deborah proceeded to pace off the distance from the stairwell as best she could. The floor plan did not have the simple central corridor like all the floors above. It was considerably more mazelike, requiring her to be more creative in judging the distance while proceeding in a zigzag course around massive supporting piers.
As she passed through an archway and skirted a large kitchen with spacious metal countertops, huge ovens, and soapstone sinks, Deborah confronted something she'd not expected: a blank, modern, metallic door with no handle, hinges, or even lock.
Tentatively Deborah reached out in the semidarkness and lightly touched the shiny surface. She guessed it was stainless steel. Curiously, however, it was not cold but rather felt comfortably warm to her touch. She glanced around in the half-light at all the old kitchen equipment, then back to the shiny door. The incongruity was startling. Placing her ear against the door, she could hear the hum of machinery within. She listened for several minutes, hoping to hear voices, but she didn't. Moving back from the door, she caught sight of a card swipe just like the one outside the server-room door. At that moment she wished she had Wingate's card.
After a moment of indecision and a brief argument with herself, Deborah reached out and knocked on the door with her knuckle. It resonated solidly as if thick. She wasn't entirely sure she wanted anyone to answer, and no one did. Gaining in confidence, she pushed against the door, but it was immovable. Using the heel of her fist, she hit around the periphery of the door just to see if she could determine where the latch was. She couldn't.
Shrugging her shoulders in the face of such an impenetrable barrier, Deborah turned and retraced her steps back to the stairwell. It was almost noon, and time to return upstairs to wait for Joanna's call. Deborah had learned little on her foray, but at least she'd tried. She thought that maybe, if all went well, she could come back in the afternoon with Wingate's card. The stainless-steel door and what might be behind it had definitely piqued her curiosity.
THIRTEEN
EARLIER IN THE DAY, JOANNA had developed more respect for data-entry-level office workers. Now she had significantly more respect for thieves. She couldn't imagine doing anything like what she was currently doing for a living. Deborah had talked her into returning to the server room with a compelling argument and plan that seemed to have worked. Joanna had been in the server room now for almost twenty-two minutes and no one had bothered her. Her biggest enemy had been herself.
The immobilizing panic she'd felt on the first visit had come back with a vengeance the moment she'd come through the outer server-room door and had let up only enough to allow her to function, although not all that efficiently. The worst part of the whole episode had been the agonizing wait for the brute-force cracking software to come up with a password to unlock the server keyboard. While it ran, Joanna had been reduced to a pathetic, quivering mass of anxiety beset with intermittent jolts of fear from constantly hearing noises that were either innocuous or completely fabricated by her overwrought brain. She was actually surprised at herself. It had been her misconception that she would been a cool person under the kind of stress she was experiencing.
Once she'd gotten into the system, her terror had been ameliorated a degree just from the mere fact of doing something rather than just watching. The main trouble had then become her tremor. It had made operating the mouse and the keyboard difficult.