said Doris Makepeace, “the moment you saw the difference. You’re now hours behind on the medication.”“I’ll take it at once when I return to my room,” he promised.“Yes. You must.”She had been in the pharmaceutical closet long enough to make him suspicious, long enough to have transferred the medication from one capsule to another. This might appear to be Bryce’s original prescription, when it was really a sedative.In his room, he flushed the capsule down the toilet and dropped the crushed cup in the waste can.Earlier, he had stripped the bottom sheet off his bed and had arranged the remaining bedclothes to conceal what he had done. In the bathroom, using Travis’s pearl-handled penknife, he cut the sheet into strips and made of them a braided rope with regularly spaced knots that served as gripping points. At a length of over twelve feet, it would come close enough to the ground to convince them that it had facilitated his and the boy’s escape.Now, Bryce took the blanket off his bed, folded it lengthwise, and rolled it for easy carrying.
