“Deer Heather. Theirs something wrong with my toilet. It wont flosh and keeps making this sond. Pleaze help.”

Here’s another:

“To who it conserns: My bed is not long enuf. Can I have new bed. Thanx.”

I swear I am not making this stuff up.

Sarah and I don’t hear the scream, although later we hear that she apparently screamed the whole way down.

What we do hear are running footsteps in the hallway, and then one of the RAs, Jessica Brandtlinger, skids into the office.

“Heather!” Jessica cries. Her normally pale face has gone white as paper, and she is breathing hard. “It happened again. The elevator shaft. We heard a scream. You can see her legs through the crack between the floor and the car—”

I am up before she’s gotten half a sentence out.

“Call nine-one-one,” I yell to Sarah, on my way out. “Then find Rachel!”

I follow Jessica down the hall toward the guard desk and the stairs to the basement. Pete, I see, is not at his desk. We find him already in the basement, standing in front of the elevator bank, shouting into his walkie-talkie as Carl, one of the janitors, is trying to pry open the elevator doors with a crowbar.

“Yes, another one,” Pete is yelling into his walkie-talkie. “No, I’m not joking. Get an ambulance here fast!” Seeing us, he lowers the walkie-talkie, points at Jessica, and shouts, “You: Go back upstairs and call this car”—he slaps the door to the left-hand cab—“to the first floor and hold it there. Don’t let anyone on or off, and whatever you do, don’t let the doors close until the fire department gets here and turns it off. Heather, find the key.”

I curse myself for not grabbing it on my way downstairs. We keep a set of elevator keys behind the reception desk: an override key, like the ones the Allingtons were issued when they moved in, so they can bypass floors on their way to the penthouse; a key to the motor room for repairs; and a key that opens the doors from the outside.

“Got it!” I yell, and tear back up the stairs, right behind Jessica, who has run back up the stairs to call the elevator to the first floor and hold it there.

When I get to the reception desk, I tear open the door and rush through it, heading straight for the key cabinet, which is supposed to remain locked at all times—only the desk worker on duty is allowed to hold the key.

But with the building maintenance staff, and resident assistants constantly borrowing keys so they can make repairs, clean, or let locked-out students into their rooms, the key cabinet is rarely, if ever, locked, the way it’s supposed to be. I find the doors to it yawning wide open as I flash by Tina, the desk worker on duty.

“What’s going on?” Tina asks, nervously. “Is it true there’s another one? At the bottom of the elevator shaft?”

I ignore her. That’s because I’m concentrating. I’m concentrating because I have found the elevator override key, and the key to the motor room.

But the key to the elevator doors is gone.

And when I check the sign-out sheet hanging on the door to the key cabinet, there is no signature for it, or any indication it was ever checked out in the first place.

“Where’s the key?” I demand, swinging on Tina. “Who has the elevator door key?”

“I—I d-don’t know,” Tina stammers. “It wasn’t there when I came on duty. You can check my duty sheet!”

Another change to the way Justine had run things that I’d implemented upon being hired—besides the key sign-out sheet—was forcing the desk workers to keep a log of what happened during the shift. If someone borrowed a key—even if they signed it out—the desk worker was still supposed to record the fact on his or her duty sheet. And the first thing a desk worker was supposed to do upon arriving at the desk was jot down which keys were in and which were out.

“Then who has it?” I cry, grabbing the logbook and flipping to the previous desk worker’s duty sheet.

But while there are entries for every other key taken during the previous worker’s shift, there’s nothing about the elevator door key.

“I don’t know!” Tina’s voice is rising to dangerously hysterical levels. “I swear I didn’t give it out to anyone!”

I believe her. But that doesn’t help the situation.

I whirl around to run back downstairs and tell Carl to break down the doors, if he has to. But my way is blocked by President Allington who, along with some other administrative types, has come out of the cafeteria to see what all the commotion’s about.

“We’re trying to have an event in there, you know,” is what he snaps to me.

“Yeah?” I hear myself snapping back. “Well, we’re trying to save someone’s life out here, you know.”

I don’t stick around to hear what he has to say in reply to that. I’ve grabbed the first aid kit from the desk and am racing back down the stairs…only to encounter Pete, looking pale, making his way slowly back up them.

“I couldn’t find the key,” I say. “Someone’s got it. He’s going to have to force the doors open…”

But Pete is shaking his head.

“He already did,” Pete says, taking my arm. “Come on back upstairs.”

“But I’ve got the kit,” I say, waving the red plastic case. “Is—”

“She’s gone,” Pete says. Now he’s pulling on me. “Come on. And don’t look. You don’t want to look.”

I believe him.

I let him steer me up the stairs. As we enter the lobby, I see that the president is still there, standing around with some basketball players and the same administrators in their gray suits. Beside them, Magda, who has emerged from behind her cash register to see what’s going on, makes a bright splash of color in her pink smock and fuchsia hot pants.

Magda takes one look at my expression, and her face crumples. “Oh no! Not another of my movie stars!”

Pete ignores her, goes to the phone by the security desk, and holding up a key chain, on which is attached a student ID card—and a little rubber replica of the cartoon character Ziggy—begins reading the information from the ID card to his superiors at the security office.

“Roberta Pace,” he reads tonelessly. “Fischer Hall resident. First year. ID number five five seven, three nine—”