Hear the Children Calling (12 page)

No! You’re hearing things.

“Mommy! Mommy!”

“Ryan?”

Jill turned around, racing toward the supplies closet on legs that seemed made of lead. Through the darkness, there on the back wall she saw an image of her little boy. Ryan was there, hiding in the closet, cowering in fear.

“Oh, God,” Jill screamed. “Ryan!” She ran in to him, flicking on the switch at the same time.

Ryan was gone.

In his place, there stood a young boy of about fifteen years old. His hair was ash blonde and curly as Ryan’s might have been, but his eyes were dark and his face was marred by acne scars.

“You bastard,” she growled, barely able to get the words out. “You bastard! Who the hell are you?”

She was screaming now, rushing toward the intruder with her fingers curled like talons.

He stepped aside, sending a jar of mercury to the floor. The silver globbed together, shining in the light above. “Lady, don’t,” the boy cried. “Please!” He grabbed a beaker and held it up like a weapon.

Jill stopped herself. “Who are you?” she asked again. “How could you be so cruel? Do you have any idea what kind of scare you’ve given me? I thought—I thought you were my son.”

She covered her face, bursting into tears. The boy saw an opportunity and tried to rush out past her. But in a moment of fury, when her mothering instinct replaced all sense of logic, Jill reached out and grabbed the teenager. At the same time, her other hand curled around a dark, amber bottle. She threw him to the floor, surprised at how lightweight he was. Then she
quickly uncorked the bottle and held it, at a forty-five-degree angle, right over his face.

“You know what sulfuric acid does?” she asked.

The boy’s mouth dropped open. “Oh, God, lady . . .”

“It’d make a pretty big mess of your face, wouldn’t it?” Jill teased cruelly.

“Please!”

“You tell me something, kid,” Jill went on. “You tell me who sent you here and who told you to call me Mommy.”

“I—I can’t!”

“It’ll burn your face pretty bad . . .”

“I’m afraid!”

Something about his words brought Jill’s sense of decency back to her. With a sigh and a shudder, she righted the bottle again and replaced the cork.

“It’s only peroxide,” she said, her voice free of the almost-demonic tone it had taken on a moment earlier. “Listen to me. I’m sure someone paid you to break into this place. They kidnapped my little boy and now they’re trying to stop me from finding him.”

The teenager bit his lip, still sprawled on the floor. “I’m sorry,” he whispered.

“Tell me who paid you to do this,” Jill begged.

“Can’t.”

“What was the money for? Drugs?” Jill asked. “You’re in a lot of trouble. If I call the police . . .”

The word “police” brought out the same reaction as the threat of being doused with acid. The boy shook his head wildly. “Okay. Okay. I’m a janitor’s assistant at the hospital. Some guys came in talking about a job they needed done. They took one look at me and said, ‘He’s just right.’ Then they told me some things to say when you walked by the closet. I guess it was supposed to scare you. I don’t really understand it. But they paid me fifty bucks—”

Jill cut him off. “How did you get into my desk?”

“They told me about the false door,” the boy said. “And the combination.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know,” the boy cried. “Just some guys at the hospital.”

“Guys?” Jill echoed. “Doctors?”

“Looked like doctors to me,” the boy said. “I—I think I remember what it said on one of the name tags. If I tell you, will you let me go?”

Jill could tell he was a boy who had already had many brushes with the law. Still, in spite of the cruel thing he had done, she felt pity for him. He was being used, much the same way she was certain Ryan was being used.

“They’ll never know you botched up,” she promised, “Tell them I went a little crazy when I saw you, but don’t tell them I turned on the light. You can say you got away first.”

The boy seemed to relax, his shoulders sinking back a little. “I can go?”

“Tell me the name,” Jill ordered.

“Sure, sure,” the boy said, standing at last. “I’m not one hundred percent certain. But it was something like Sampson, or Safson.”

“I can find out for myself,” Jill said. “Get out of here, kid. And please, try to think who you’ll be hurting next time you try to earn money this way. You can’t begin to know what pain you’ve caused me tonight.”

“I’m sorry,” the teenager said. “Really sorry.” He raced down the stairs on sneakers that made no sound.

Jill sank to the floor, burying her head in her knees. She had no desire to go home now. The exhaustion and hunger that had claimed her earlier had vanished, replaced with a need to make sense of what had just taken place. Someone had paid a young kid to act like Ryan. It was pretty easy to see why: they wanted to scare her out of trying to find him. But a question repeated itself in her mind: who could have known about the secret door and the lock combination?

Jill ran over the name the boy had given her. Sampson, Safson . . .

Something familiar about it.

“Safson,” she whispered. “Saf . . .” She slapped the tile floor with the palm of her hand. “My God, I don’t believe it,” she cried, leaping to her feet.

Safton was the name! And Ken Safton had been one of those friends from Jeffrey’s med school.

17

W
HEN
S
TUART
M
ORSE CAME HOME FROM HIS OFFICE
, Beth always greeted him at the front door and led him back to the kitchen. There, he would find Natalie fixing one of her fabulous meals, a ruffled apron tied over her jeans and sweater. It had become a tradition, and Stuart looked forward to it as the signal his busy day had ended.

But tonight when he came home, the front hallway was dark. He pulled off his trenchcoat and hung it in the closet, looking up the staircase, then down the hall. “Beth?” he called. “Nat?”

There was no answer. Because there was no smell of cooking food in the air, he did not walk back to the kitchen. Instead, he hurried upstairs to the second level. Maybe Beth had had a relapse, and was in bed.

He opened her door. Light from a streetlamp illuminated her covers, laid carefully over her mattress. Stuart closed the door and went to his own room, knowing that Natalie sometimes let Beth crawl into their bed when she was upset. But the king-size platform bed was neatly tucked in.

Now he was beginning to worry. Natalie would never go off without leaving a message.

As he passed the door leading to the upper floor, he
heard voices. A sigh of relief passed through him as he realized Natalie and Beth must still be up in the studio. But still he wondered how Natalie could have lost track of the time. She’d never missed a meal before, and knew what it meant to him to sit down with his family when he came home.

He opened the door and headed up the stairs. “Hello!”

There were scrambling footsteps and a busy rustling of papers. Then the door opened wide.

“Stuart,” Natalie cried. “What time is it?”

“Six-thirty,” Stuart said. “Same time I get home every night. What’s going on up here?”

Beth had a look of guilt on her face. She bent her head and stared down at her shoes. It was Natalie who answered. Stuart thought she spoke a little too quickly.

“I was just so busy,” she said. “With Beth sick at home, I haven’t been able to get much work done.”

She turned and hastily began putting caps back on her marker pens. “Just let me clean up,” she said. “I have something ready to go in the microwave. I’ll only be a minute. Beth, you go downstairs and put on a pot of water for noodles.”

“Okay, Mom,” Beth said. She glanced at her mother as she walked to the door, not acknowledging her father’s presence.

“Where’s my kiss, Elizabeth?” Stuart asked, feeling a little hurt. Beth had never rejected him before.

She gave him a perfunctory kiss and hurried out of the studio.

Natalie came to her defense. “She’s been upset, Stuart,” she said.

He nodded. “I understand.”

He went to put his arms around his wife. “Something’s wrong,” he said. “What happened today, Natalie?”

“Nothing,” she insisted.

“Come on—”

“Stuart, nothing,” Natalie cried. She couldn’t tell him about the boy they’d seen in the back yard. He’d
start ranting that it was a prankster again, and Natalie didn’t want to hear that. But she could also tell he wouldn’t let things go so easily. So she grabbed for an answer. “Well, we did get another picture,” she said.

Stuart rolled his eyes. “Did Beth see it?”

“No, thank God,” Natalie said. “It’s there on my desk, in an envelope.”

Stuart did not move. “From New Mexico?”

“Yes.”

“Then I know what I have to do,” Stuart said, his shoulders heaving up and down in a sigh. “I have to hire someone over there to keep a watch on the Santa Fe Post Office and learn who’s been sending these.”

Natalie touched his arm. “Oh, that would be something,” she said. “Then we could find out who has our . . .” She stopped herself. “I mean, who has been tormenting us.”

Stuart gazed at her. “Natalie, you aren’t starting to believe this?” he said. “You don’t really think Peter is alive?”

You can’t, because I suspect it myself, and one of us has to keep his head.

“Stuart, I don’t know what to—”

Before she could finish, she was interrupted by her daughter’s ear-piercing shriek, a scream so loud it carried up two flights of stairs.

Hundreds of miles away, in a remote community tucked away in the Rocky Mountains, another child screamed. This was a boy, Michael Colpan. He sat strapped into a big green chair, wires taped to different parts of his body. The chair faced a one-way mirror, and through its glass the adults in the room could see one of their colleagues standing near a stove. On it, there seemed to be a pot of boiling water.

They had asked Michael to force the woman to put her hand in the pot.

“But she’ll hurt herself,” the boy had protested.

“What do you care?” one of the men had said. “You don’t know her. She means nothing to you.”

“I don’t want to,” Michael had cried. “Can’t I make the monkey jump up and down like the other times?”

“We already know you can do that,” a woman said. “Now you must move on to more difficult tasks. Concentrate, Michael. Make her put her hand in the pot.”

“No!” He turned to his father for help.

Ralph Colpan only shook his head sadly. He gave his son a helpless look that seemed to say “Do as you’re told, son. Do it, or they’ll hurt you.”

The other grown-ups were exchanging worried glances. They might have expected defiance from a kid like Tommy, maybe even from a frightened little girl like Jenny Segal. But Michael Colpan had always been so cooperative, so quiet.

“Michael, you don’t want to disobey, do you?” someone asked. “We could turn out the lights in here—”

“I’ll do it,” Michael cried.

He was more terrified of the dark than of doing harm to a complete stranger.

And so he closed his eyes, concentrating on her image as he had concentrated on monkeys and rats and other lab animals over the years. He pictured her hand moving toward the pot . . .

But somehow, the image changed. He no longer saw a strange woman, but a young girl who was somehow familiar. He had seen her face before, but he couldn’t place it. What was she doing in his mind? What happened to the woman in the other room? Now a young girl was standing near a stove, watching a steaming pot. She moved her hand toward the pot, oblivious to danger.

Michael realized she would hurt herself, and he tried to stop it. But it was too late. The command had somehow been given from his thoughts, and she plunged her hand deep into the water. Her mouth opened in a silent scream. Michael’s own scream filled in the sound.

“Michael, wake up.”

He felt the tapes being pulled away as wires were hastily removed.

“Michael, it’s okay! Look!”

Michael opened his eyes. The woman held up her wet but uninjured hand.

“The water wasn’t really hot, Michael,” someone said.

Michael blinked and stared at the woman. Only his father noticed the single tear that ran down his cheek,

Ralph went to the child and hugged him. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, so close to the child’s ear that no one else could hear. “I’m going to find a way to stop this, I promise.”

Michael didn’t hear him. He could only think of the young, familiar girl he had seen in his mind.

In Sandhaven, California, Stuart and Natalie burst into the kitchen to find their daughter holding up her arm. It was bright pink up to the middle of her forearm. She looked at her parents with wide eyes.

“Someone told me to put my hand in the pot,” she cried. “I couldn’t stop.”

“Oh, dear Lord,” Natalie said, rushing to her daughter.

Stuart quickly turned on the cold water. “Put it under here,” he said.

He and his wife helped move the trembling child to the sink. As she ran her arm under the ice water, she seemed to relax.

Stuart finally asked for an explanation. “What do you mean, someone told you to put your hand in the pot?”

Beth did not look at her father.

“It was a voice in my head,” she said. “A boy’s voice. Like Peter when I heard him the other day.”

“Beth, you know you didn’t—” Stuart began.

Natalie shushed him with a tap on his arm. “But, Beth,” she said, “Peter would never make you hurt yourself.”

“Oh, no, Mommy,” Beth cried. “It wasn’t Peter’s
fault. When he realized what was happening, he tried to stop. But it was too late. Mommy, some bad people are making Peter do terrible things.”

Her mother and father didn’t say anything.

Beth moved her eyes back and forth between them. “It’s why he’s sending me messages,” she said. “He’s scared. Mommy, Daddy, we have to help him.”

Stuart flicked off the water. “I don’t want to talk about it,” he said. “I’m more concerned about you, Beth. How does your arm feel?”

“It doesn’t hurt anymore,” Beth said.

“Look, no blisters,” Natalie said.