Scavenger (11 page)

The voice sounded too resigned, Amanda decided. “Wait! You said it’s unfortunate she took off her headset. You said you wanted to reason with her. If I can catch her . . .” A terrible premonition made Amanda breathe faster. “If I can stop her ...”

“Yes?”

“Will you let me bring her back?”

The voice didn’t answer.

Before Amanda realized what she was doing, she ran. “Bethany!” she yelled. “Stop!” The vast openness swallowed her words.

Amanda charged across the brittle grass. She passed sagebrush, a kneehigh boulder, and a stunted pine tree.

“Bethany!”

But Bethany kept racing along the bottom of the gully. Her gray cap and the gray shoulders of her jumpsuit were more visible. She never looked back.

“Stop!”

Amanda increased the speed and length of her stride. “Listen to me!” she managed to shout between hoarse deep breaths that burned her throat.

Ahead, the gully became less deep. Bethany was visible to her waist now, rushing toward the far-away gap in the mountains.

“Stop!” Amanda yelled. Sweat slicked her skin, making her jumpsuit cling to her. “He knows!”

Now the gully was so shallow that Bethany’s hips showed. The lack of cover increased her frenzy. She charged toward a sandy depression, where water presumably gathered during rainy periods. On the opposite side, another gully began.

“You’re not stopping her,” the voice said in Amanda’s ears.

“Trying.” Amanda fought to muster strength, to run even faster. A rock dislodged under her, making her stumble. “Bethany! Stop! Please!”

The urgency in Amanda’s words finally had an effect. Halfway across the depression, Bethany seemed to lose energy. She faltered and turned. Chest heaving, she peered back toward Amanda.

“He can get to you!” Amanda yelled. “I don’t know how, but he can!”

Bethany’s features glistened with sweat. She looked ahead toward the opposite side of the depression and the continuation of the gully. Abruptly, she ran toward it.

“Don’t!” Amanda’s plea was directed to the voice as much as to Bethany.

“She hates open spaces,” the voice said. “It was only a matter of time.”

Amanda strained to increase speed but found it impossible. Like the gap in the mountains beyond, Bethany seemed to recede.

“Better that it happened soon,” the voice told Amanda. “This way, the rest of you will learn not to waste time and strength on futile efforts.”

“No!”

“But I’m disappointed that she didn’t surprise me.”

The moment Bethany reached the continuation of the gully, Amanda felt a shock wave. Amid a roar, Bethany’s gray-covered torso erupted in a spray of red. A hand flew one way while her skull flew another. The vapor of her blood misted the air as parts of her body pelted the ground.

Amanda staggered to a halt, her ears in pain from the explosion. She wavered in shock at the sight of the blood vapor spreading in a sudden breeze. Then the vapor drifted down, speckling the sand.

Amanda felt as if someone kicked the back of her legs from under her. She dropped to her knees. Tears streamed down her face, burning her cheeks.

3

It is a wonderful place, the moor.

Hunched in the back seat of a taxi, Balenger studied the photocopy in his hand, wondering what the hell the paragraph on it meant. A faded copy of a stamp read NYPL HUMANITIES & SOCIAL SCIENCES LIBRARY. Given the context, he decided that NYPL stood for New York Public Library. He used his cell phone to call information and learned that the Humanities & Social Sciences Library was at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue.

The Avenue of the Americas was the nearest uptown route from Greenwich Village. Stop-and-go midday traffic slowed the taxi. Frustrated by blaring horns and the lurch of the vehicle, Balenger told the driver to let him out at 40
^th
Street. He paid and ran, relieved to be moving, to find an outlet for his tension.

But impatience wasn’t his only reason for leaving the taxi. He continued to feel shocked by the fire. Someone wanted to stop him from finding Amanda, and that person would almost certainly keep trying.

He ran faster. Feeling exposed on the crowded sidewalk, he glanced behind him, wanting to know if anyone got out of another taxi and hurried in his direction. No one did. He looked ahead just in time to avoid crashing into a man with a briefcase. Veering, he charged through the intersection of 41st Street. A truck beeped and passed close enough for Balenger to feel a rush of air.

Ahead, he saw a crowd on benches amid the trees of Bryant Park. He glanced over his shoulder again and still didn’t see anyone coming after him. Traffic remained motionless.

Turning right, he sprinted to Fifth Avenue and reached the library, a massive stone building, whose wide steps and pillared entrance were guarded by two marble lions.

He hurried through a revolving door and entered a massive hall, where people waited for a guard to examine their purses, knapsacks, and briefcases. As he wiped sweat from his forehead, he got curious looks from some of the people in line. He moved forward, glancing over his shoulder. Feeling seconds tick away, he worked to catch his breath. The high ceiling and stone floor had the echo of a church, but he paid little attention. His sole focus was on people coming through the entrance.

The guard waved him through. After asking directions, Balenger climbed two flights of wide stairs. Off another huge hallway, he reached an information desk.

“May I help?” a spectacled woman asked.

“I hope so.” Balenger gave her the photocopy. “Do you have any idea where this comes from?”

The librarian peered over her glasses, studying the passage.

“It is a wonderful place, the moor,” said he, looking round over the undulating downs, long green rollers, with crests of jagged granite foaming up into fantastic surges. “You never tire of the moor. You cannot think the wonderful secrets which it contains. It is so vast, and so barren, and so mysterious.”

She sounded puzzled. “Everything else has been blanked out.”

Trying for a simple explanation, Balenger said, “It’s kind of a game.”

The librarian nodded. “Yes, we get that on occasion. Last week, somebody came here with a list for a scavenger hunt. She needed to find a particular novel, but the only clue she’d been given was, ‘The sun goes down.’ We finally decided it was Hemingway’s
The Sun Also Rises
.”

The thought occurred to Balenger that the paragraph might indeed be part of a game, one of the cruelest anyone ever imagined.

“The problem was, even though people often call us the main branch of the New York City library system, actually we’re a research facility,” the woman said. “We don’t lend books. Patrons can study them only on the premises. I needed to send the game player over to the branch on Fortieth Street.” The librarian continued to study the paragraph. “
‘It is a wonderful place, the moor.
’ Interesting.” She debated for a moment, then motioned to a man at a computer next to her.

He approached.

“Brontë or Conan Doyle?” the woman asked.

After reading the passage, the man nodded. “Those are the two that come to mind.”

“I don’t think it’s Brontë,” the woman said.

“Exactly. Her style is more emotional.”

Balenger gave the woman a quizzical look.

“Mention a moor as a setting, and two novels stand out. Emily Brontë’s
Wuthering Heights
takes place on the Yorkshire moors in northern England. It’s very atmospheric, Heathcliff talking to Cathy’s ghost as he wanders the moors, that sort of thing. In contrast, the description here is compressed into one sentence: ‘. . . undulating downs, long green rollers, with crests of jagged granite’.... It gets the job done, but what the author seems really to care about are ‘the wonderful secrets’ the moor contains: ‘. . . so mysterious.’
That’s
the author’s focus. I’d be very surprised if this person didn’t write mysteries. I think this is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
The Hound of the Baskervilles.
”

“
The Hound of the Baskervilles
?”

“Dartmoor in Devon, England. That’s where most of the novel takes place. In fact, it’s one of the most famous settings in
any
novel. As I mentioned, we don’t allow books to leave the building, but if you go to the reading room—” She pointed behind her. “—someone will bring you a copy.”

Time
, Balenger kept thinking. He made himself appear calm when he thanked her. His experience with Conan Doyle’s detective story was only through an old black-and-white film starring Basil Rathbone. He remembered it as dark and moody with plenty of fog over rugged, sometimes swampy terrain.

The spacious reading room had the rich, warm tones of wood that had been polished for many decades. A guard stood at the entrance. Next to him, a sign warned Balenger to turn off his cell phone.

Balenger complied and went to a counter, where he requested a copy of the novel. His nerves calmed only a little when he noticed the reading room’s computer area. After receiving an access card, he found an empty computer station. He concentrated to keep his breathing under control and felt a persistent urge to massage the nagging ache in his left forearm. When he pushed up his jacket and shirt sleeves, he saw that the punctured area was more red and swollen. It looked infected.

But that was the least of his troubles. As he stared at the computer keyboard, his fingers trembled.
Amanda
, he thought.
Where did they take you
?

He didn’t know why Karen Bailey left the quotation for him or how reading the novel it came from (if it indeed came from
The Hound of the Baskervilles
) would help him find Amanda. He fought to think, to focus on what the quotation was supposed to tell him.

Maybe it’s about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
, he thought desperately.

Then why was everything else on the page, including the author’s name and the title of the book, removed? Why single out the quotation? What was special about it?

The moor.

Balenger reached for the computer keyboard. With shaking hands, he accessed Google and typed DARTMOOR. Several items appeared.

DARTMOOR NATIONAL PARK
DISCOVERING DARTMOOR
WALKING DARTMOOR
DARTMOOR RESCUE GROUP

Balenger learned that Dartmoor National Park covered 250 square miles of low rocky hills that were described variously as bleak, forbidding, and primeval. Mist frequently covered the mostly uninhabited area. The frequent moisture collected in boggy mires, which explained the need for a Dartmoor rescue group.

Am I supposed to conclude that somebody took Amanda to Dartmoor, England? he thought. Why? What would be the point? This isn’t getting me anywhere.

Why did Karen Bailey arrange for me to receive the piece of paper?

A thought made Balenger straighten. She could have mailed it to me, but she added a complication. I wouldn’t have known about the passage if I hadn’t gone to the theater. She told the man who pretended to be the professor to give me the paper only if I showed up.

His temples throbbing, Balenger stared at the other Google references to Dartmoor. He now realized that he needed to look harder. He couldn’t assume anything was irrelevant.

DARTMOOR FALCONRY
DARTMOOR FOLK FESTIVAL
DARTMOOR LETTERBOXING

Preoccupied, he was about to skip to the next item when the subtext of the LETTERBOXING item caught his attention.

History of a hide-and-hunt game begun in 1854 on Dartmoor when a ...

The description jabbed Balenger’s memory. He suddenly remembered the time-capsule lecture, during which the fake professor had said that communities who lost time capsules were engaged in a hide-and-hunt scavenger game.

In a rush, Balenger clicked on the item. The text that appeared, with photographs of low hills studded with granite outcroppings, set his brain on fire.

Letterboxing is a hide-and-hunt game invented in 1854 when a Dartmoor guide, James Perrott, decided to challenge hikers to investigate a difficult-to-reach area of the moor known as Cranmere Pool. To make the hikers prove that they had indeed found their way to the remote site, Perrott placed a jar beneath a cairn of rocks on the bank of the pool. Any hiker who managed to reach the jar was instructed to place a message in it. Sometimes, a self-addressed postcard was left inside. A hiker who found it would replace the card with his or her own and then mail the card to its owner.

Over the years, this activity—similar to a treasure hunt—proved so popular that jars were added at other locations on the moor. Later, the jars were changed to metal and then plastic containers, which became known as letterboxes because of the messages left in them. More than a century and a half after James Perrott placed his jar beneath that pile of rocks, there are an estimated 10,000 letterboxes throughout Dartmoor’s imposing terrain.

The containers are carefully hidden. Clues guide players to the general location. Sometimes, the clues are numbers for map coordinates. Other times, they are puzzles and riddles, the answers to which guide the player.

Because of a 1998 article in Smithsonian Magazine, the popularity of this hide-and-hunt game suddenly spread around the world. In America alone, every state has hidden letterboxes. Not every box is found, of course. Sometimes, on Dartmoor, game players are rewarded by the eerie discovery of a long-lost container that conceals a message left by someone many years earlier.

Balenger stared at the screen for a long time. The reference to a “long-lost container that conceals a message left by someone many years earlier” took him back to the time-capsule lecture. One of the last things he remembered before lapsing into unconsciousness was the fake professor saying that more time capsules had been lost than had been found.

Balenger’s heart seemed to stop, then start again. Coincidences? he wondered. Or did Karen Bailey intend for me to find this article? Why else would she have wanted me to read the paragraph about Dartmoor?