Scavenger by David Morrell Page A

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?
    His hands continued to tremble, but now part of the reason for that was an increasingly chill suspicion about why Amanda had been taken from him. He thought of what the librarian had said about clues to a scavenger hunt. A game? he thought. Is this really a damned game?
    Breathing faster, he went to the request counter.
    “Yes, sir?” a woman with streaked hair asked.
    “My name’s Frank Balenger. I asked for The Hound of the Baskervilles .”
    “Of course, sir. Let me see if . . .” She smiled. “Here it is.”
    The book was an old, musty hardback with dented corners. Balenger found an empty chair at one of the numerous tables. He opened the novel and skimmed its pages, concentrating on the first sentence of every paragraph, searching for “ It is a wonderful place, the moor .”
    Balenger exhaled sharply when he found it. Page forty-six. Two-thirds of the way down. But that wasn’t all he found. Someone had used a stamp to put words in the margin: THE SEPULCHER OF WORLDLY DESIRES.
    The room seemed to tilt. Balenger was eerily reminded of the unusual name for one of the time capsules the “professor” had lectured about: the Crypt of Civilization. The Sepulcher. The Crypt. Another coincidence? he wondered. He needed to convince himself that he wasn’t grasping at imaginary connections. One way to be sure was to look at all the copies of The Hound of the Baskervilles the library had. This branch didn’t allow books to be taken from the building. Because there was no way for Karen Bailey to control which copy of the novel he was given, the only sure method to guarantee that Balenger got the message was to stamp THE SEPULCHER OF WORLDLY DESIRES in every copy the library owned.
    Balenger stood so fast that the screech of his chair made the other readers at his table glare. But when he hurried toward the request area, he had a nervous feeling that someone stared at him. He turned toward the entrance to the reading room.
    Someone indeed stared at him.
    A matronly, fortyish woman in a plain dark dress. Her brunette hair was pulled back in a bun.
    Karen Bailey.
    4
    The moment Balenger noticed her, she ran toward the corridor beyond the reading room’s entrance. Balenger’s urgent footsteps startled people at the other tables. He charged past the guard, who scowled at the commotion.
    In the corridor, Balenger looked in one direction and then the other. No sign of Karen Bailey. Other people scowled as he ran to the stairway. Again, no sign of her.
    “Hey,” he said to a man with a nylon book bag, “did you see a woman in a navy dress? Prim? Around forty? Her hair in a bun?”
    The man looked at Balenger’s distraught appearance and stepped back, suspecting he was dangerous.
    “All of you!” Balenger called to the half-dozen people in the corridor. “Did anybody see a woman in a navy dress?”
    The guard came out of the reading room. “Keep your voice down.”
    Balenger rushed along the corridor, checking various exhibition rooms. He reached a women’s room and didn’t think twice about shoving at the door, hurrying inside. At a sink, a woman turned and gaped. Balenger peered under the doors to the stalls. Jeans. Slacks. Nobody in a navy dress.
    He bolted from the women’s room and dodged past the guard who tried to grab him.
    “Karen Bailey!” Balenger yelled. “Stop!”
    Pursued by the guard, Balenger reached the stairs and leapt down two at a time. The next level had closed doors to what looked like offices.