Free Adam and Evil by Gillian Roberts Page B

Or perhaps this is how a palace’s basement looks. The guts and intestines of the building were everywhere visible, pipes and other innards jutting at odd angles. “Put in air-conditioning way after the fact,” my guide said as we ducked to avoid a diagonally running duct.
    This was a subterranean attic, a massive junk drawer, where lamps, tables, file cabinets, at least one piano, and lots of books looked as if they’d been tossed down the stairs to stay wherever they landed. There seemed miles of storage rooms, side rooms, rooms with doors, open spaces, all so convoluted and impossible to examine that I gave up hope. A truck could be hidden here and not be found, so it wasn’t the least bit surprising that we didn’t see or hear Adam.
    “Is there anywhere left?” I asked. “Anywhere?”
    The maintenance man was silent. There were countless places left. “There’s the between floors, but …” He shook his head, eliminating that possibility.
    “The what?”
    “The between floors, storage … what would the word be—corridors—is that it?”
    I nodded.
    “They’re between the floors of the building, like between the first and second floors.”
    I must have still looked blank, because he sighed. “Okay,” he said. “You got these two–three-story-high public rooms, like, say, the lending library, right? But then, you got space behind its wall, before the room across the way actually begins, so there’s these other floors fit into those spaces. Whole building’s more or less lined with them. Makes my life a lot harder ’cause they’re crazy, go every which way, like a maze. You go down a flight of stairs in one department and come out the other side of the building sometimes. Too easy to get lost.”
    “Well, then, couldn’t he be—”
    “The kid wouldn’t know about them. And if he did—if he went into them?” He shook his head again. “No point looking. Never find him.”
    And that seemed that.
    I left the library alone and awash in anger—at myself for letting Adam out of my sight, and at Philly Prep andAdam’s parents. Why did I have a student I had to watch that carefully?
    I had to notify the school and Adam’s parents that he’d left the premises. I had to remember to say it that way—not that I’d lost track of him, but that he’d taken it upon himself to leave, unauthorized. All the same, and whatever I said, what I was really doing was taking my little shovel and digging myself a still-deeper grave.
    B Y EIGHT, NOT YET HAVING HEARD FROM M ACKENZIE , I WAS bone-, muscle-, and mind-tired, tired in more ways and of more things than I wanted to admit or enumerate. The phone call to the Evans household had been frosty enough to usher in another ice age—and yet his parents hadn’t sounded sufficiently concerned. As if their subtext was
You have allowed a reprehensible thing to happen and we will have your hide for it—but it’s okay. We ’re not really worried about Adam.
    Which made me think they knew his whereabouts.
    And when I’d called the school to put it on record that Adam Evans had left the library unsupervised, Helga the Office Witch didn’t run for the troops and didn’t rake me over the coals. Which pretty much confirmed the theory that Adam was safe, but that neither the Evanses nor Helga wanted to give me the comfort of knowing that. Need I mention that this theory, the only one that made sense, did not further endear either my place of employment or the Evans family to me?
    Whatever the case, I needed to stop thinking about dead Ms. Fisher. She’d been such an odd woman—so tense and rigid. She hardly seemed the type to inspire whatever twisted passion might end in murder.
    Unless the murderer was crazy. I couldn’t help but keep returning to that place I didn’t want to go to at all.
    I turned to schoolwork for diversion. I had half prepared the props for a writing lesson later in the week, and I decided to finish that up. It was an enjoyable assignment,