All Around the Town (3 page)

Sarah helped her mother prepare Laurie's favorite breakfast, pancakes and bacon. Laurie pattered into the room a few minutes later, the nightgown that used to be ankle length now stopping at her calves, her security blanket trailing behind her.

She climbed on Marie's lap. "Mommy," she said, her tone injured. "Yesterday I wanted to go in the pool and Beth kept talking on the phone."

Chapter
10

September 12, 1991

Ridgewood. New Jersey

DURING THE MASS. Sarah kept glancing sideways at Laurie. The sight of the two caskets at the steps of the sanctuary had clearly mesmerized her. She was staring at them, tearless now, seemingly unaware of the music, the prayers, the eulogy. Sarah had to put a hand under Laurie's elbow to remind her to stand or kneel.

At the end of the mass, as Monsignor Fisher blessed the coffins, Laurie whispered, "Mommy, Daddy, I'm sorry. I won't go out front alone again."

"Laurie," Sarah whispered.

Laurie looked at her with unseeing eyes, then turned and with a puzzled expression studied the crowded church. "So many people." Her voice sounded timid and young.

The closing hymn was "Amazing Grace."

With the rest of the congregation, a couple near the back of the church began to sing, softly at first, but he was used to leading the music. As always he got carried away, his pure baritone becoming louder, soaring above the others, swelling over the thinner voice of the soloist. People turned distracted, admiring.

"'I once was lost but now am found...'"

Through the pain and grief, Laurie felt icy terror. The voice. Ringing through her head, through her being.

I am lost, she wailed silently. I am lost.

They were moving the caskets.

The wheels of the bier holding her mother's casket squealed.

She heard the measured steps of the pallbearers.

Then the clattering of the typewriter.

"'...was blind but now I see.'"

"No! No!" Laurie shrieked as she crumpled into merciful darkness.

SEVERAL DOZEN of Laurie's classmates from Clinton College had attended the mass, along with a sprinkling of faculty. Allan Grant, Professor of English, was there and with shocked eyes watched Laurie collapse.

Grant was one of the most popular teachers at Clinton. Just turned forty, he had thick, somewhat unruly brown hair, liberally streaked with gray. Large dark brown eyes that expressed humor and intelligence were the best feature in his somewhat long face. His lanky body and casual dress completed an appearance that many young women undergraduates found irresistible.

Grant was genuinely interested in his students. Laurie had been in one of his classes every year since she entered Clinton. He knew her personal history and had been curious to see if there might be any observable aftereffects other abduction. The only time he'd picked up anything had been in his creative writing class. Laurie was incapable of writing a personal memoir. On the other hand, her critiques of books, authors and plays were insightful and thought-provoking.

Three days ago she had been in his class when the word came for her to go to the office immediately. The class was ending and, sensing trouble, he had accompanied her. As they hurried across the campus, she'd told him that her mother and father were driving down to switch cars with her. She'd forgotten to have her convertible inspected and had returned to college in her mother's sedan. "They're probably just running late," she'd said, obviously trying to reassure herself. "My mother says I'm too much of a worrier about them. But she hasn't been that well and Dad is almost seventy-two."

Somberly the clean told them that there had been a multivehicle accident on Route 78.

Allan Grant drove Laurie to the hospital. Her sister, Sarah, was already there, her cloud of dark red hair framing a face dominated by large gray eyes that were filled with grief. Grant had met Sarah at a number of college functions and been impressed with the young assistant prosecutor's protective attitude toward Laurie.

One look at her sister's face was enough to make Laurie realize that her parents were dead. Over and over she kept moaning "my fault, my fault," seeming not to hear Sarah's tearful insistence that she must not blame herself.

DISTRESSED, Grant watched as an usher carried Laurie from the nave of the church, Sarah beside him. The organist began to play the recessional hymn. The pallbearers, led by the monsignor started to walk slowly down the aisle. In the row in front of him. Grant saw a man making his way to the end of the pew. "Please excuse me. I'm a doctor," he was saying, his voice low but authoritative.

Some instinct made Allan Grant slip into the aisle and follow him to the small room off the vestibule where Laurie had been taken. She was lying on two chairs that had been pushed together. Sarah, her face chalk white, was bending over her.

"Let me..." The doctor touched Sarah's arm.

Laurie stirred and moaned.

The doctor raised her eyelids, felt her pulse. "She's coming around but she must be taken home. She's in no condition to go to the cemetery."

"I know."

Allan saw how desperately Sarah was trying to keep her own composure. "Sarah," he said. She turned, seemingly aware of him for the first time. "Sarah, let me go back to the house with Laurie. She'll be okay with me."

"Oh, would you?" For an instant gratitude replaced the strain and grief in her expression. "Some of the neighbors are there preparing food, but Laurie trusts you so much. I'd be so relieved."

"'I ONCE was lost but now am found...'"

A hand was coming at her holding the knife, the knife dripping with blood, slashing through the air. Her shirt and overalls were soaked with blood. She could feel the sticky warmth on her face. Something was flopping at her feet. The knife was coming...

Laurie opened her eyes. She was in bed in her own room. It was dark. What happened?

She remembered. The church. The caskets. The singing.

"Sarah!" she shrieked, "Sarah! Where are you?"

Chapter
11

THEY WERE STAYING at the Wyndham Hotel on West Fifty-eighth Street in Manhattan. "Classy," he'd told her. "A lot of show business people go there. Right kind of place to start making connections."

He was silent on the drive from the funeral mass into New York. They were having lunch with the Reverend Rutland Garrison, pastor of the Church of the Airways, and the television program's executive producer. Garrison was ready to retire and in the process of choosing a successor. Every week a guest preacher was invited to co-host the program.

She watched as he discarded three different outfits before settling on a midnight blue suit, white shirt and bluish gray tie. "They want a preacher. They're gonna get a preacher. How do I look?"

"Perfect," she assured him. He did too. His hair was now silver even though he was only forty-five. He watched his weight carefully and had taught himself to stand very straight so that he always seemed to stand above people, even taller men. He'd practiced widening his eyes when he thundered a sermon until that had become his usual expression.

He vetoed her first choice of a red-and-white checked dress. "Not classy enough for this meeting. It's a little too Betty Crocker."

That was their private joke when they wanted to impress the congregations who came to hear him preach. But there was nothing joking about him now. She held up a black linen sheath with a matching jacket. "How's this?"

He nodded silently. "That will do." He frowned. "And remember..."

"I never call you Bic in front of anyone," she protested coaxingly. "Haven't for years." He had a feverish glitter in his eyes. Opal knew and feared that look. It had been three years since the last time he was brought in by local police for questioning because some little girl with blond hair had complained to her mother about him. He'd always managed to scorn the complainant into stammering apologies, but even so it had happened too often in too many different towns. When he got that look it meant he was losing control again.

Lee was the only child he'd ever kept. From the minute he spotted her with her mother in the shopping center, he'd been obsessed by her. He followed their car that first day and after that cruised past their house hoping to get a glimpse of the child. He and Opal had been doing a two-week stint, playing the guitar and singing at some crummy nightclub on Route 17 in New Jersey and staying in a motel twenty minutes from the Kenyon home. It was going to be their last time singing in a nightclub. Bic had started gospel singing at revivals and then preaching in upstate New York. The owner of a radio station in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, heard him and asked him to start a religious program on his small station.

It had been bad luck that he'd insisted on driving past the house one last time on their way back to Pennsylvania. Lee was outside alone. He'd scooped her up, brought her with them, and for two years Opal lived in a state of perpetual fear and jealousy that she didn't dare let him see.

It had been fifteen years since they dumped her in the schoolyard, but Bic had never gotten over her. He kept her picture hidden in his wallet, and sometimes Opal would find him staring at it, running his fingers over it. In these last years, as he became more and more successful, he worried that someday FBI agents would come up to him and tell him he was under arrest for kidnapping and child molestation. "Look at that girl in California who got her daddy put in prison because she started going to a psychiatrist and remembering things best forgotten," he would sometimes say.

They had just arrived in New York when Bic read the item in the Times about the Kenyons' fatal accident. Over Opal's beseeching protests, they'd gone to the funeral mass. "Opal," he had told her, "we look as different as day and night from those two guitar-playing hippies Lee remembers."

It was true that they looked totally different. They'd begun to change their appearance the morning after they got rid of Lee. Bic shaved his beard off and got a short haircut. She'd dyed her hair ash blond and fastened it in a neat bun. They'd both bought sensible clothes at JC Penney, the kind of stuff that made them blend in with everyone else, gave them the middle-American look. "Just in case anyone in that diner got a good look at us," he'd said. That was when he'd warned her never to refer to him as Bic in front of anyone and said that from now on, in public he'd call her by her real name, Carla. "Lee heard our names over and over again in those two years," he'd said. "From now on I'm the Reverend Bobby Hawkins to everyone we meet."

Even so she'd felt the fear in him when they hurried up the steps of the church. At the end of the mass as the organist began to play the first notes of "Amazing Grace," he'd whispered, "That's our song, Lee's and mine." His voice soared over all the others. They were in the seats at the end of the pew. When the usher carried Lee's limp body past them, Opal had to grab his hand to keep him from reaching out and touching her.

"I'll ask you again. Are you ready?" His voice was sarcastic. He was standing at the door of the suite.

"Yes." Opal reached for her purse, then walked over to him. She had to calm him down. The tension in him was something that shot through the room. She put her hands on the sides of his face. "Bic, honey. You gotta relax," she said soothingly. "You want to make a good impression, don't you?"

It was as though he hadn't heard a word she'd said. He murmured, "I still have the power to scare that little girl half to death, don't I?" Then he began sobbing, hard, dry, racking sobs. "God, how I love her."

Chapter
12

DR. PETER CARPENTER was the Ridgewood psychiatrist Sarah called ten days after the funeral. Sarah had met him occasionally, liked him, and her inquiries justified her own impressions. Her boss, Ed Ryan, the Bergen County prosecutor, was Carpenter's most emphatic supporter. "He's a straight shooter. I'd trust any one of my family with him, and you know that for me that's saying a lot. Too many of those birds are yo-yos."

She asked for an immediate appointment. "My sister blames herself for our parents' accident," she told Carpenter. Sarah realized as she spoke that she was avoiding the word "death." It was still so unreal to her. Gripping the phone, she said, "There was a recurrent nightmare she's had over the years. It hasn't happened in ages, but now she's having it regularly again."

Dr. Carpenter vividly remembered Laurie's kidnapping. When she was abandoned by her abductors and returned home, he had discussed with colleagues the ramifications of her total memory loss. He was keenly interested in seeing the girl now, but he told Sarah, "I think it would be wise if I talk to you before I see Laurie. I have a free hour this afternoon."

As his wife often teased. Carpenter could have been the model for the kindly family doctor. Steel gray hair, pink complexion, rimless glasses, benign expression, trim body, looking his age, which was fifty-two.

His office was deliberately cozy: pale green walls, tieback draperies in tones of green and white, a mahogany desk with a cluster of small flowering plants, a roomy wine-colored leather armchair opposite his swivel chair, a matching couch facing away from the windows.

When Sarah was ushered in by his secretary, Carpenter studied the attractive young woman in the simple blue suit. Her lean, athletic body moved with ease. She wore no makeup, and a smattering of freckles was visible across her nose. Charcoal brown brows and lashes accentuated the sadness in her luminous gray eyes. Her hair was pulled severely back from her face and held by a narrow blue band. Behind the band a cloud of dark red waves floated, ending just below her ears.