Stackhouse was in the Institute’s village, and when he answered her call, he sounded groggy. She assumed he had been living it up at Outlaw Country the night before, possibly in his brown suit, but didn’t bother asking. She just told him to come to the West Wing at once. He’d know which room; a janitor would be standing outside the door.

Hendricks and Evans were on C-Level, conducting tests. Mrs. Sigsby told them to drop what they were doing and send their subjects back to residence. Both doctors were needed in the West Wing. Hendricks, who could be extremely irritating even at the best of times, wanted to know why. Mrs. Sigsby told him to shut up and come.

Stackhouse arrived first. The doctors were right behind him.

“Jim,” Stackhouse said to Evans, after he had taken in the situation. “Lift her. Get me some slack in that rope.”

Evans put his arms around the dead woman’s waist—for a moment it almost looked as if they were dancing—and lifted her. Stackhouse began picking at the knot under her jaw.

“Hurry up,” Evans said. “She’s got a load in her drawers.”

“I’m sure you’ve smelled worse,” Stackhouse said. “Almost got it . . . wait . . . okay, here we go.”

He lifted the noose over the dead woman’s head (swearing under his breath when one of her arms flopped chummily down on the nape of his neck) and carried her to the mattress. The noose had left a blackish-purple brand on her neck. The four of them regarded her without speaking. At six-three, Trevor Stackhouse was tall, but Hendricks overtopped him by at least four inches. Standing between them, Mrs. Sigsby looked elfin.

Stackhouse looked at Mrs. Sigsby, eyebrows raised. She looked back without speaking.

On the table beside the bed was a brown pill bottle. Dr. Hendricks picked it up and rattled it. “Oxy. Forty milligrams. Not the highest dosage, but very high, just the same. The ’scrip is for ninety tablets, and there are only three left. I’m assuming we won’t do an autopsy—”

You got that right, Stackhouse thought.

“—but if one were to be performed, I believe we’d find she took most of them before putting the rope around her neck.”

“Which would have been enough to kill her in any case,” Evans said. “This woman can’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds. It’s obvious that sciatica wasn’t her primary problem, whatever she may have said. She couldn’t have kept up with her duties for much longer no matter what, so just . . .”

“Just decided to end it,” Hendricks finished.

Stackhouse was looking at the message on the wall. “Hell is waiting,” he mused. “Considering what we’re doing here, some might call that a reasonable assumption.”

Not prone for vulgarity as a general rule, Mrs. Sigsby said, “Bullshit.”

Stackhouse shrugged. His bald head gleamed beneath the light fixture as if Turtle Waxed. “Outsiders is what I meant, people who don’t know the score. Doesn’t matter. What we’re seeing here is simple enough. A woman with a terminal disease decided to pull the plug.” He pointed at the wall. “After declaring her guilt. And ours.”

It made sense, but Mrs. Sigsby didn’t like it. Alvorson’s final communication to the world might have expressed guilt, but there was also something triumphant about it.

“She had a week off not very long ago,” Fred the janitor volunteered. Mrs. Sigsby hadn’t realized he was still in the room. Somebody should have dismissed him. She should have dismissed him. “She went back home to Vermont. That’s prob’ly where she got the pills.”

“Thanks,” Stackhouse said. “That’s very Sherlockian. Now don’t you have floors to buff?”

“And clean those camera housings,” Mrs. Sigsby snapped. “I asked for that to be done last week. I won’t ask again.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Not a word about this, Mr. Clark.”

“No, ma’am. Course not.”

“Cremation?” Stackhouse asked when the janitor was gone.

“Yes. We’ll have a couple of the caretakers take her to the elevator while the residents are at lunch. Which will be”—Mrs. Sigsby checked her watch—“in less than an hour.”

“Is there a problem?” Stackhouse asked. “Other than keeping this from the residents, I mean? I ask because you look like there’s a problem.”

Mrs. Sigsby looked from the words printed on the bathroom tiles to the dead woman’s black face, the tongue protruding. She turned from that final raspberry to the two doctors. “I’d like you to both step out. I need to speak to Mr. Stackhouse privately.”

Hendricks and Evans exchanged a look, then left.

4

“She was your snitch. That’s your problem?”

“Our snitch, Trevor, but yes, that’s the problem. Or might be.”

A year ago—no, more like sixteen months, there had still been snow on the ground—Maureen Alvorson had requested an appointment with Mrs. Sigsby and asked for any job that might provide extra income. Mrs. Sigsby, who’d had a pet project in mind for almost a year but no clear idea of how to implement it, asked if Alvorson would have a problem bringing any information she gleaned from the children. Alvorson agreed, and had even demonstrated a certain level of low cunning by suggesting the story about various supposed dead zones, where the microphones worked poorly or not at all.

Stackhouse shrugged. “What she brought us rarely rose above the level of gossip. Which boy was spending the night with which girl, who wrote TONY SUCKS on a table in the caff, that sort of thing.” He paused. “Although snitching might have added to her guilt, I suppose.”

“She was married,” Mrs. Sigsby said, “but you’ll notice she’s no longer wearing her wedding ring. How much do we know about her life in Vermont?”

“I don’t recall offhand, but it will be in her file, and I’m happy to look it up.”

Mrs. Sigsby considered this, and realized how little she herself knew about Maureen Alvorson. Yes, she had known Alvorson was married, because she had seen the ring. Yes, she was retired military, as were many on the Institute’s staff. Yes, she knew that Alvorson’s home was in Vermont. But she knew little else, and how could that be, when she had hired the woman to spy on the residents? It might not matter now, not with Alvorson dead, but it made Mrs. Sigsby think of how she had left her walkie-talkie behind, assuming that the janitor had his knickers in a twist about nothing. It also made her think about the dusty camera housings, the slow computers and the small and inefficient staff in charge of them, the frequent food spoilage in the caff, the mouse-chewed wires, and the slipshod surveillance reports, especially on the night shift that ran from 11 PM to 7 AM, when the residents were asleep.

It made her think about carelessness.

“Julia? I said I’d—”

“I heard you. I’m not deaf. Who is on surveillance right now?”

Stackhouse looked at his watch. “Probably no one. It’s the middle of the day. The kids will either be in their rooms or doing the usual kid things.”

So you assume, she thought, and what is the mother of carelessness if not assumption? The Institute had been in operation for over sixty years, well over, and there had never been a leak. Never a reason (not on her watch, anyway) to use the special phone, the one they called the Zero Phone, for anything other than routine updates. Nothing, in short, they hadn’t been able to handle in-house.

There were rumors in the Bend, of course. The most common among the citizens being that the compound out in the woods was some kind of nuclear missile base. Or that it had to do with germ or chemical warfare. Another, and this was closer to the truth, was that it was a government experimental station. Rumors were okay. Rumors were self-generated disinformation.

Everything is okay, she told herself. Everything is as it should be. The suicide of a disease-riddled housekeeper is just a bump in the road, and a minor one at that. Still, it was suggestive, of larger . . . well, not problems, it would be alarmist to call them that, but concerns, for sure. And some of it was her own fault. In the early days of Mrs. Sigsby’s tour, the camera housings never would have been dusty, and she never would have left her office without her walkie. In those days she would have known a lot more about the woman she was paying to snitch on the residents.

She thought about entropy. The tendency to coast when things were going well.

To assume.

“Mrs. Sigsby? Julia? Do you have orders for me?”

She came back to the here and now. “Yes. I want to know everything about her, and if there’s nobody in the surveillance room, I want someone there ASAP. Jerry, I think.” Jerry Symonds was one of their two computer techs, and the best they had when it came to nursing the old equipment along.

“Jerry’s on furlough,” Stackhouse said. “Fishing in Nassau.”

“Andy, then.”

Stackhouse shook his head. “Fellowes is in the village. I saw him coming out of the commissary.”

“Goddammit, he should be here. Zeke, then. Zeke the Greek. He’s worked surveillance before, hasn’t he?”

“I think so,” Stackhouse said, and there it was again. Vagueness. Supposition. Assumption.