Where Are the Children? Read online

  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 cooperate. “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.”

  9

  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 unraveled 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 blond 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 weekend 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 a baby. 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.”

  10

  “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 her others. Studying Ray shrewdly, he guessed that Ray was thinking pretty much the same thing.

  Charred bits of the morning paper were still in the fireplace. The Chief realized Ray was looking at them. From the jagged way the unburned parts were torn, it was obvious they’d been pulled apart by someone in a frenzy.

  “Doc Smathers still upstairs with her?” There was unconscious discourtesy in the question. He’d always called Nancy “Mrs. Eldredge” till now.

  “Yes. He’s going to give her a needle to relax her but not to put her out. We’ve got to talk to her. Oh, God!”

  Ray sat down at the dining-room table and buried his face in his hands. Only a few hours ago Nancy had been sitting in this chair with Missy in her arms and Mike asking, “Is it really your birthday, Mommy?” Had he triggered something in Nancy by demanding she celebrate? . . . And then that article. Had . . . ?

  “No!” Ray looked up and blinked, turning his head away from the sight of the policeman standing by the back door.

  “What is it?” Chief Coffin asked.

  “Nancy is incapable of harming the children. Whatever happened, it wasn’t that.”

  “Your wife when she’s herself wouldn’t harm them, but I’ve seen women go off the deep end, and there is the history . . .”

  Ray stood up. His hands clenched the edge of the table. His glance went past the Chief, dismissing him. “I need help,” he said. “Real help.”

  The room was in chaos. The police had made a quick search of the house before concentrating on the outside. A police photographer was still taking pictures of the kitchen, where the coffeepot had fallen, spewing streams of black coffee onto the stove and floor. The telephone rang incessantly. To every call the policeman answering said, “The Chief will have a statement later.”

  The policeman at the phone came over to the table. “That was the A.P.,” he said. “The wire services have gotten hold of this. We’ll be mobbed in an hour.”

  The wire services. Ray remembered the haunted look that had only gradually left Nancy’s face. He thought of the picture in this morning’s paper, with her hand up as though trying to fend off blows. He pushed past Chief Coffin and hurried upstairs, opening the door of the master bedroom. The doctor was sitting next to Nancy, holding her hands. “You can hear me, Nancy,” he was saying. “You know you can hear me. Ray is here. He’s very worried about you. Talk to him, Nancy.”

  Her eyes were closed. Dorothy had helped Ray strip off the wet clothes. They’d put a fluffy yellow robe on her, but she seemed curiously small and inert inside it—not unlike a child herself.

  Ray bent over her. “Honey, please, you’ve got to help the children. We’ve got to find them. They need you. Try, Nancy—please try.”

  “Ray, I wouldn’t,” Dr. Smathers warned. His lined, sensitive face was deeply creased. “She’s had some kind of terrible shock—whether it was reading the article or something else. Her mind is fighting confronting it.”

  “But we’ve got to know what it was,” Ray said intently. “Maybe she even saw someone take the children away. Nancy, I know. I understand. It’s all right about the newspaper. We’ll face that together. But, darling, where are the children? You must help us find them. Do you think they went near the lake?”

  Nancy shuddered. A strangled cry came from somewhere in her throat. Her lips formed words: “Find them . . . find them.”

  “We will find them. But you must help, please. Honey, I’m going to help you sit up. You can. Now, come on.”

  Ray leaned down and supported her in his arms. He saw the raw skin on her face where the sand had burned it. There was wet sand still clinging to her hair. Why? Unless. . . .

  “I gave her a shot,” the doctor said. “It should relieve the anxiety, but it won’t be enough to knock her out.”

  She felt so heavy and vague. This was the way she’d felt for such a long time—from the night Mother died . . . or maybe even before that—so defenseless, so pliable . . . so without ability to choose or move or even speak. She could remember how so many nights her eyes would be glued together—so heavy, so weary. Carl had been so patient with her. He had
done everything for her. She had always told herself that she had to get stronger, had to overcome that terrible lethargy, but she never could.

  But that was so long ago. She didn’t think about that anymore—not about Carl; not about the children; not about Rob Legler, the handsome student who’d seemed to like her, who made her laugh. The children had been so gay when he was there, so happy. She had thought he was a real friend—but then he sat on the witness stand and said, “She told me that her children would be smothered. That was exactly what she said, four days before they disappeared.”

  “Nancy. Please. Nancy. Why did you go to the lake?”

  She heard the stifled sound she made. The lake. Did the children go there? She must search for them.

  She felt Ray lifting her and slumped against him, but then forced her body to begin to sit up. It would be so much easier to slip away, to slide into sleep just as she used to do.

  “That’s it. That’s right, Nancy.” Ray looked at the doctor. “Do you think a cup of coffee . . . ?”

  The doctor nodded. “I’ll ask Dorothy to make it.”

  Coffee. She’d been making coffee when she saw that picture in the paper. Nancy opened her eyes. “Ray,” she whispered, “they’ll know. Everyone will know. You can’t hide . . . you can’t hide.” But there was something else. “The children.” She clutched his arm. “Ray, find them—find my babies.”

  “Steady, honey. That’s where we need you. You’ve got to tell us. Every single thing. Just get your bearing for a few minutes.”

  Dorothy came in with a cup of steaming coffee in her hand. “I made the instant. How is she?”

  “She’s coming round.”

  “Captain Coffin is anxious to begin questioning her.”

  “Ray!” Panic made Nancy clutch Ray’s arm.

  “Darling, it’s just that we have to have help finding the children. It’s all right.”

  She gulped the coffee, welcoming the searing, hot taste as she swallowed it. If she could just think . . . just wake up . . . just lose this terrible sleepiness.