her cough convulsively. She staggered back along the wall, racked with coughing, her nostrils burning, eyes streaming, barely able to see her own hands in front of her. With all her being she longed for one breath of the air she had been taking for granted for twenty-nine years. She followed the wall to the Coke machine and stepped around it. She knew she had found the staircase when she tripped over the bottom step. She dropped her racket and it slid out of sight. It was a special one—she had won the Mayfair Lites Challenge with it—but she left it behind and scrambled up the stairs on hands and knees.
The smoke thinned suddenly when she reached the spacious ground-floor lobby. She could see the building doors, which were open. A security guard stood just outside, beckoning her and yelling: “Come on!” Coughing and choking, she staggered across the lobby and out into the blessed fresh air.
She stood on the steps for two or three minutes, bent double, gulping air and coughing the smoke out of her lungs. As her breathing at last began to return to normal, she heard the whoop of an emergency vehicle in the distance. She looked around for Lisa but could not see her.
Surely she could not be inside? Still feeling shaky, Jeannie moved through the crowd, scanning the faces. Now that they were out of danger, there was a good deal of nervous laughter. Most of the students were more or less undressed, so there was a curiously intimate atmosphere. Those who had managed to save their bags were lending spare clothes to others less fortunate. Naked women were grateful for their friends’ soiled and sweaty T-shirts. Several people were dressed only in towels.
Lisa was not in the crowd. With mounting anxiety Jeannie returned to the security guard at the door. “I think my girlfriend may be in there,” she said, hearing the tremor of fear in her own voice.
“I ain’t going after her,” he said quickly.
“Brave man,” Jeannie snapped. She was not sure what she wanted him to do, but she had not expected him to be completely useless.
Resentment showed on his face. “That’s their job,” he said, and he pointed to a fire truck coming down the road.
Jeannie was beginning to fear for Lisa’s life, but she did not know what to do. She watched, impatient and helpless, as the firemen got out of the truck and put on breathing apparatus. They seemed to move so slowly that she wanted to shake them and scream: “Hurry, hurry!” Another fire truck arrived, then a white police cruiser with the blue-and-silver stripe of the Baltimore Police Department.
As the firemen dragged a hose into the building, an officer buttonholed the lobby guard and said: “Where do you think it started?”
“Women’s locker room,” the guard told him.
“And where is that, exactly?”
“Basement, at the back.”
“How many exits are there from the basement?”
“Only one, the staircase up to the main lobby, right here.”
A maintenance man standing nearby contradicted him. “There’s a ladder in the pool machine room that leads up to an access hatch at the back of the building.”
Jeannie caught the officer’s attention and said: “I think my friend may still be inside there.”
“Man or woman?”
“Woman of twenty-four, short, blond.”
“If she’s there, we’ll find her.”
For a moment Jeannie felt reassured. Then she realized he had not promised to find her alive.
The security man who had been in the locker room was nowhere to be seen. Jeannie said to the fire officer: “There was another guard down there, I don’t see him anywhere. Tall guy.”
The lobby guard said: “Ain’t no other security personnel in the building.”
“Well, he had a hat with “Security’ written on it, and he was telling people to evacuate the building.”
“I don’t care what he had on his hat—”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake, stop arguing!” Jeannie snapped. “Maybe I imagined him, but if not his life could be in danger!”
Standing listening to them was a girl wearing a man’s khaki pants rolled up at the cuffs. “I saw that guy, he’s a real creep,” she said. “He felt me up.”
The fire officer said: “Keep calm, we’ll find everyone. Thank you for your cooperation.” He walked off.
Jeannie glared at the lobby guard for a moment. She felt the fire officer had dismissed her as a hysterical woman because she had yelled at the guard. She turned away in disgust. What was she going to do now? The firemen ran inside in their helmets and boots. She was barefoot and wearing a T-shirt. If she tried to go in with them they would throw her out. She clenched her fists, distraught.
The gymnasium was next door to the Ruth W. Acorn Psychology Building, named after the wife of a benefactor but known, even to faculty, as Nut House. Could Lisa have gone in there? The doors would be locked on Sunday, but she probably had a key. She might have run inside to find a laboratory coat to cover herself or just to sit at her desk and recover. Jeannie decided to check. Anything was better than standing here doing nothing.
She dashed across the lawn to the main entrance of Nut House and looked through the glass doors. There was no one in the lobby. She took from her pocket the plastic card that served as a key and swiped it through the card reader. The door opened. She ran up the stairs, calling: “Lisa! Are you there?” The laboratory was deserted. Lisa’s chair was tucked neatly under her desk, and her computer screen was a gray blank. Jeannie tried the women’s rest room at the end of the corridor. Nothing. “Damn!” she said frantically. “Where the hell are you?”
Panting, she hurried back outside. She decided to make a tour of the gymnasium building, in case Lisa was just sitting on the ground somewhere catching her breath. She ran around the side of the building, passing through a yard full of giant garbage cans. At the back was a small parking lot. She saw a figure jogging along the footpath, heading away. It was too tall to be Lisa, and she was pretty sure it was a man. She thought it might be the missing security guard, but he disappeared around the corner of the Student Union before she could be sure.
She continued around the building. At the far side was the running track, deserted now. Coming full circle, she arrived at the front of the gym.
The crowd was bigger, and there were more fire engines and police cars, but she still could not see Lisa. It seemed almost certain that she was still in the burning building. A sense of doom crept over Jeannie, and she fought it.
She spotted the fire officer she had spoken to earlier. She grabbed his arm. “I’m almost certain Lisa Hoxton is in there,” she said urgently. “I’ve looked everywhere for her.”
He gave her a hard look and seemed to decide she was reliable. Without answering her, he put a two-way radio to his mouth. “Look out for a young white female believed to be inside the building, named Lisa, repeat Lisa.”
“Thank you,” Jeannie said.
He nodded curtly and strode away.
Jeannie was glad he had listened to her, but still she could not rest. Lisa might be stuck in there, locked in a toilet or trapped by flames, screaming for help unheard; or she might have fallen and struck her head and knocked herself out or succumbed to the fumes and be lying unconscious with the fire creeping closer by the second.
Jeannie remembered the maintenance man saying there was another entrance to the basement. She had not seen it as she ran around the outside of the gym. She decided to look again. She returned to the back of the building.
She saw it immediately. The hatch was set into the ground close to the building, partly hidden by a gray Chrysler New Yorker. The steel trapdoor was open, leaning against the building wall. Jeannie knelt by the square hole and leaned down to look inside.
A ladder led down to a dirty room lit by fluorescent tubes. She could see machinery and lots of pipes. There were wisps of smoke in the air, but not thick clouds: it must be closed off from the rest of the basement. Nevertheless the smell of the smoke reminded her of how she had coughed and choked as she had searched blindly for the staircase, and she felt her heart beat faster at the memory.
“Is anybody there?” she called.
She thought she heard a sound but she could not be sure. She shouted louder. “Hello?” There was no reply.
