dirty work for him.”
“Does sound far-fetched,” Jack admitted.
“To say the least.”
“So what does that leave us with?”
She shrugged.
Jack thought about Baba Lavelle.
Voodoo?
No. Surely not. It was one thing to propose that Lavelle was making
the murders look strange in order to frighten his adversaries with the
threat of voodoo curses, but it was quite something else to imagine that
the curses actually worked.
Then again . . . What about the locked bathroom?
What about the fact that Vastagliano and Ross hadn’t been able to kill
even one of their attackers? What about the lack of animal droppings?
Rebecca must have known what he was thinking, for she scowled and said,
“Come on. Let’s talk to the neighbors.”
The wind suddenly woke, breathed, raged. Spitting flecks of snow, it
came along the street as if it were a living beast, a very cold and
angry wind.
Mrs. Quillen, Penny’s teacher at Wellton School, was unable to
understand why a vandal would have wrecked only one locker.
“Perhaps he intended to ruin them all but had second thoughts. Or maybe
he started with yours, Penny dear, then heard a sound he couldn’t place,
thought someone was coming, got frightened, and ran. But we keep the
school locked up tight as a drum at night, of course, and there’s the
alarm system, too. However did he get in and out?”
Penny knew it wasn’t a vandal. She knew it was something a whole lot
stranger than that. She knew the trashing of her locker was somehow
connected with the eerie experience she’d had last night in her room.
But she didn’t know how to express this knowledge without sounding like
a child afraid of boogeymen, so she didn’t try to explain to Mrs.
Quillen those things which, in truth, she couldn’t even explain to
herself.
After some discussion, much sympathy, and even more bafflement, Mrs.
Quillen sent Penny to the basement where the supplies and spare
textbooks were kept on well-ordered storage shelves.
“Get replacements for everything that was destroyed, Penny. All the
books, new pencils, a three-ring notebook with a pack of filler, and a
new tablet. And don’t dawdle, please. We’ll be starting the math
lesson in a few minutes, and you know that’s where you need to work the
hardest.”
Penny went down the front stairs to the ground floor, paused at the main
doors to look through the beveled glass windows at the swirling puffs of
snow, then hurried back the hall to the rear of the building, past the
deserted gymnasium, past the music room where a class was about to
begin.
The cellar door was at the very end of the hallway.
She opened it and found the light switch. A long, narrow flight of
stairs led down.
The ground-floor hallway, through which she’d just passed, had smelled
of chalk dust that had escaped from classrooms, pine-scented floor wax,
and the dry heat of the forced-air furnace. But as she descended the
narrow steps, she noticed that the smells of the cellar were different
from those upstairs. She detected the mild limerich odor of concrete
dust. Insecticide lent a pungent note to the air; she knew they sprayed
every month to discourage silverfish from making a meal of the books
stored here. And, underlying everything else, there was a slightly damp
smell, a vague but nonetheless unpleasant mustiness.
She reached the bottom of the stairs. Her footsteps rang sharply,
crisply on the concrete floor and echoed hollowly in a far corner.
The basement extended under the entire building and was divided into two
chambers. At the opposite end from the stairs lay the furnace room,
beyond a heavy metal fire door that was always kept closed. The largest
of the two rooms was on this side of the door. A work table occupied
the center, and free-standing metal storage shelves were lined up along
the walls, all crammed full of books and supplies.
Penny took a folding carry-all basket from a rack, opened it, and
collected the items she needed. She had just located the last of the
textbooks when she heard a strange sound behind her. That sound. The