Where Are the Children? (6 page)

Regretfully, he left the telescope. He'd laid the children on opposite ends of the musty-smelling velour couch. The little girl was crying in earnest now. 'Mommy . . . Mommy.' Her eyes were squeezed shut. Her mouth was open . . . Her little tongue was so pink! Tears were running down her cheeks.

He sat her up and unzipped her jacket. She shrank away from him. 'There, there,' he said soothingly. 'It's all right.'

The boy stirred and woke up too. His eyes were startled, just as they had been when he had seen him in the yard. Now he sat up slowly. 'Who are you?' he demanded. He rubbed his eyes, shook his head and looked around. 'Where are we?'

An articulate child . . . well spoken ... his voice clear and well modulated. That was good. Well-trained children were easier to handle. Didn't make a fuss. Taught respect for older people, they tended to be pliable. Like the others. They'd come with him so quietly that day. They had knelt in the trunk of the car unquestioningly when he had said they were going to play a game on Mommy.

'It's a game,' he told this little boy. 'I'm an old friend of your mommy's and she wants to play a birthday game. Did you know it was her birthday today?' He kept patting the little girl while he spoke. She felt so soft and good.

The boy - Michael - looked uncertain. 'I don't like this game,' he said firmly. Unsteadily he got to his feet. He pushed aside the hands that were touching Missy and reached for her. She clung to him. 'Don't cry, Missy,' he said soothingly. 'It's just a silly game. We'll go home now.'

It was obvious that he wasn't going to be fooled easily. The boy had Ray Eldredge's candid expression. 'We're not going to play any of your games,' he said. 'We want to go home.'

There was a wonderful way he could make the little boy co-operate. 'Let go of your sister,' he ordered. 'Here, give her to me.' He yanked her from the boy. With the other hand he took Michael's wrist and pulled him over to the window. 'Do you know what a telescope is?'

Michael nodded uncertainly. 'Yes. It's like the glasses my daddy has. It makes things bigger.'

"That's right. You're very smart. Now, look in here.' The boy put his eye to the viewer. 'Now tell me what you see . . . No, squeeze your other eye shut.'

'It's looking at my house.'

'What do you see there?'

'There are lots of cars . . . police cars. What's the matter?' Alarm made his voice quiver.

He looked down happily at the worried face. A faint pinging sound came from the window. It was starting to sleet. The wind was driving hard little pellets against the glass panes. The visibility would be very poor soon. Even with the telescope it would be hard to see much. But he could have a wonderful time with the children - the whole, long afternoon. And he knew how to make the boy obey. 'Do you know what it's like to be dead?' he asked.

'It means to go to God,' Michael answered.

He nodded approvingly. 'That's right. And this morning your mother went to God. That's why all the police cars are there. Your daddy asked me to mind you for a while and said for you to be good and help me take care of your sister.'

Michael looked as though he'd cry too. His lip quivered as he said, 'If my mommy went to God, I want to go too.'

Running his fingers through Michael's hair, he rocked the still-wailing Missy. 'You will,' he told him. 'Tonight. I promise.'

CHAPTER NINE

The first reports went over the wire-service tickers at noon, in time to make bulletins on the news broadcasts throughout the country. Newscasters, hungering for a story, seized upon it and sent researchers scurrying to the

files for records of the Nancy Harmon murder trial.

Publishers chartered planes to send their top crime reporters to Cape Cod.

In San Francisco, two assistant district attorneys listened to the bulletin. One said to the other, 'Have I always said that bitch was as guilty as if I'd seen her kill those kids myself? Have I said it? So help me, if they don't hang this one on her, I'll take a leave of absence and personally comb the globe to find that Legler slob and get him back here to testify against her.'

In Boston, Dr Lendon Miles was enjoying the beginning of his lunch break. Mrs Markley had just left. After a year of intense therapy she was finally beginning to get pretty good insight. She'd made a funny remark a few minutes ago. She'd been discussing an episode from her fourteenth year and said, 'Do you realize that thanks to you I'm going through adolescence and change of life all at once? It's a hell of a deal.' Only a few months ago she hadn't been doing much joking.

Lendon Miles enjoyed his profession. To him the mind was a delicate, complicated phenomenon - a mystery that could be unravelled only by a series of infinitely small revelations . . . one leading slowly, patiently into the next. He sighed. His ten-o'clock patient was in early analysis and had been extremely hostile.

He switched on the radio next to his desk to catch the balance of the noon news and was just in time to hear the bulletin.

A shadow of an old pain crossed his face. Nancy Harmon . . . Priscilla's daughter. After fourteen years he could still see Priscilla so clearly: the slender, elegant body; the way she held her head; the smile that came like quicksilver.

She had started working for him a year after her husband's death. She'd been thirty-eight then, two years his junior. Almost immediately he began taking her out to dinner when they worked late, and soon he realized that for the first time in his life the idea of marriage seemed logical and even essential. Until he met Priscilla, work, study, friends and freedom had been enough; he'd simply never met anyone who made him want to alter his status quo.

Gradually she'd told him about herself. Married after her first year in college to an airline pilot, she had one child, a daughter. The marriage had obviously been a happy one. Then on a trip to India her husband had come down with viral pneumonia and had died within twenty-four hours.

'It was so hard to take,' Priscilla told him. 'Dave flew over a million miles. He brought 707's down in blizzards. And then something so totally unexpected ... I didn't realize people still died of pneumonia

Lendon never did meet Priscilla's daughter. She had left for school in San Francisco soon after Priscilla had come to work for him. Priscilla had talked out her reasons for sending her so far away. 'She was growing too close to me,' Priscilla had worried. 'She's taken Dave's death so hard. I want her to be happy and young and to get away from the whole climate of grief that I think is closing in on us. I went to Auberley and met Dave while I was there. Nancy had been with me to reunions, so it isn't as if it's too strange to her.'

In November Priscilla had taken a couple of days off to visit Nancy at college. Lendon had driven her to the airport. For a few minutes they had stood in the terminal waiting for her flight to be called. 'Of course you know I'll miss you terribly,' he'd said.

She was wearing a dark brown suede coat that showed off her patrician blonde beauty, 'I hope so,' she said, and her eyes were clouded. 'I'm so worried,' she told him. 'Nancy's letters are so down lately. I'm just terribly afraid. Did you ever have a feeling of something awful hanging over you?'

Then, when he stared at her, they both began to laugh. 'You see why I didn't dare mention this before,' she said. 'I knew you'd think I was crazy.'

'On the contrary, my training has taught me to appreciate the value of hunches, only I call it intuition. But why didn't you tell me you were so worried? Maybe I should be going with you. I only wish I'd met Nancy before she left.'

'Oh, no. It's probably me being a mother hen. Anyhow, I'll pick your brains when I get back.' Somehow their fingers had become entwined.

'Don't worry. Kids all straighten out, and if there are any real problems, I'll fly out over the week-end if you want me.'

'I shouldn't bother you . . .'

An impersonal voice came over the loudspeaker: 'Flight Five-six-nine now boarding for San Francisco ..."

'Priscilla, for God's sake, don't you realize that I love you?'

'I'm glad ... I think ... I know ... I love you too.'

Their last moment together. A beginning ... a promise of love.

She had called him the next night. To say that she was worried and had to talk to him. She was at dinner with Nancy, but would call as soon as she got back to her hotel. Would he be home?

He waited all night for the call. But it never came. She never got back to the hotel. The next day he learned about the accident. The steering apparatus of the car she'd rented had failed. The car had careened off the road into a ditch.

He probably should have gone to Nancy. But when he finally got through to where she was staying, he spoke to Carl Harmon, the professor who said he and Nancy were planning to marry. He sounded perfectly competent and very much in charge. Nancy wouldn't be returning to Ohio. They had told her mother of their plans at dinner. Mrs Kiernan had been concerned about Nancy's youth, but that was natural. She would be buried out there, where her husband was interred; the family had, after all, been residents of California for three generations until

Nancy was born. Nancy was bearing up well. He thought that it was best for them to have a quiet wedding immediately. Nancy should not be alone now.

There had been nothing for Lendon to do. What could he do? Tell Nancy that he and her mother had been falling in love? The odds were that she would simply have resented him. This Professor Harmon sounded fine, and undoubtedly Priscilla had simply been worried about Nancy's taking such a decisive step as marriage at barely eighteen. But surely there was nothing that he, Lendon, could do about that decision.

He'd been glad to accept the offer to teach at the University of London. That was why he'd been out of the country and had never learned of the Harmon murder trial until after it was over.

It was at the University of London that he had met Allison. She was a teacher there, and the sense of sharing that Priscilla had begun to show him had made it impossible to go back to his well-ordered, solitary - selfish - life. From time to time he had wondered where Nancy Harmon had vanished. He'd been living in the Boston area for the last two years, and she was only an hour and a half away. Maybe now he could somehow make up for the way he had failed Priscilla before.

The phone rang. An instant later, the intercom light blinked on his phone. He picked up the receiver. 'Mrs Miles is on the phone, Doctor,' his secretary said.

Allison's voice was filled with concern. 'Darling, did you by chance hear the news about the Harmon girl?'

'Yes, I did.' He had told Allison about Priscilla.

'What are you going to do?'

Her question crystallized the decision he had already made subconsciously. 'What I should have done years ago. I'm going to try to help that girl. I'll call you as soon as I can.'

'God bless, darling.'

Lendon picked up the intercom and spoke crisply to his secretary. 'Ask Dr Marcus to take over my afternoon

appointments, please. Tell him it's an emergency. And cancel my four-o'clock class. I'm driving to Cape Cod immediately.'

CHAPTER TEN

'We've started dragging the lake, Ray. We've got bulletins going out on the radio and TV stations, and we're getting manpower from all over to help in the search.' Chief Jed Coffin of the Adams Port police tried to adopt the hearty tone that he would normally use if two children were missing.

But even looking at the agony in Ray's eyes and the ashen pallor of his face, it was difficult to sound reassuring and solicitous. Ray had deceived him - introduced him to his wife, talked about her coming from Virginia and having known Dorothy there. He'd filled him with talk and never once told the truth. And the Chief hadn't guessed - or even suspected. That was the real irritation. Not once had he suspected.

To Chief Coffin, what had happened was very clear. That woman had seen the article about herself in the paper, realized that everyone would know who she was and gone berserk. Did to these poor kids the same thing she'd done to the others. Studying Ray shrewdly, he guessed that Ray was thinking pretty much the same thing.