Hear the Children Calling (6 page)

“Did you see the bodies?”

“What was there to see?” Jill asked, looking up. “The police told me they were burned beyond recognition.” She felt tears rising. “Can you imagine such a thing happening to a little boy?” she asked, her voice high. “Ryan was only three!”

“Jill, I’m certain your son is alive,” Deliah said. “For some reason, the police lied to you. It’s some kind of conspiracy.”

“How can you say that?” Jill asked, wiping away her tears. “The police had dental records traced. No two are alike.”

The waitress returned to take their orders. Deliah did not speak again until she had left.

“You keep saying ‘records’ in the plural,” she said. “But tell me, what sort of dental records would be available on a three-year-old? Had Ryan even been to the dentist at that point?”

“He—he went when he was two and a half,” Jill answered, unsure what Deliah meant.

“Were X rays taken?”

Now Jill’s mouth dropped open as a thought occurred to her for the first time. Ryan’s teeth had never
been X-rayed! How could there be dental records for him?

“But Jeffrey’s matched,” she cried. “And there was a child in the car with him, strapped in Ryan’s booster seat.”

“Then it was another child,” Deliah said, her voice low. “I heard a name mentioned in my thoughts—Dylan? Does it mean anything?”

Jill shivered. “He was the detective in charge of the case. He was very helpful. But then, he stopped calling on me.”

Deliah nodded. “He is a friend,” she said. “You would do well to contact him.” She reached across the table and took Jill’s hand. “There’s something else I must tell you, Jill. It’s about other messages I’ve been receiving. Evil messages, warning me to be silent about your child. These people are dangerous, monsters. They murdered one child and kidnapped another. God only knows what else they’ve done. But I know your son needs you, Jill. He’s terribly frightened.”

“Do you—do you know where he is?” Jill asked hopefully, ignoring the logical part of her brain that still insisted this was impossible.

Deliah nodded. “The day I heard him calling to me—”

Suddenly, a deafening roar filled the air, and mallards swimming on the water outside the restaurant shot up into the sky. Jill turned to see a huge boat barreling toward the picture windows of the restaurant, a white rooster’s tail shooting out from behind it. Deliah’s mouth froze, her words lost.

People screamed, knocking over chairs and pushing at one another to get out of the way. Jill was on her feet in an instant, running with the crowd. When she reached a safe distance, she turned to see where Deliah was. Jill gasped in horror. The woman hadn’t moved from her chair!

“Deliah!”

Deliah seemed not to hear her. She was staring, as if in a trance, at the speeding hulk.

In truth, she
had
pushed her chair back when Jill did. But then a voice reached her mind, a voice so malevolently powerful it locked on to her like a vise.

You won’t stop us, Deliah. You won’t ever save the child!

The shock was so complete she was frozen solid by it. There was no time to fight back.

Seconds later, before Jill could make a move, the boat came crashing through the windows. Glass flew everywhere, water sprayed like a wave over the tables and chairs. With a great, short
thunk,
the boat came to a stop, its bow striking a column and cracking it almost in half.

For a moment, everyone was frozen in stunned silence. Then, slowly, a waiter made his way through the carnage to the front of the boat. He stared in disbelief at something no one else could see, his face growing pale. A few seconds later, he began to retch, covering his mouth and running from the room.

Others went to the boat, but Jill stood where she was. She knew what they were looking at. She heard them crying out in horror. Jill could see the ring on Deliah’s hand as it hung limply at her side, the only part of her visible from behind the column.

“Let’s help her,” someone insisted. “Maybe she’s still alive.”

“Don’t be an idiot,” a man growled, “that boat cut her in half. Where the hell is its captain, anyway?”

The maître d’, trying to bring order to his demolished restaurant, pushed a table over and used it to climb into the boat. He turned the ignition off, bringing merciful silence to the room. Then he went below, appearing a few minutes later shaking his head.

“You aren’t going to believe this,” Jill heard him say. “But it’s empty. There’s no one on board.”

And Deliah knew that, Jill thought, sickened, thinking how the woman hadn’t moved from her seat. She knew they were coming for her!

Outside, the parking lot was already splashed red with the lights of an ambulance.

8

A
S THEIR DAUGHTER SLEPT UPSTAIRS
, S
TUART AND
Natalie Morse held each other close. The house was so quiet now it seemed impossible that just a short while ago they had had to call a doctor to calm their hysterical, screaming child.

Elizabeth had told them about the boy in the school yard, the one who looked like Peter.

“But it didn’t just look like Peter, Mommy,” Beth had protested. “It
was
Peter. He was crying out for me to help him.”

“Beth, you know Peter is gone,” Stuart had said. “Why are you talking about him now? Why today?”

“Because I saw him.”

“You saw a boy who resembled your brother,” Natalie insisted. “Honey, it couldn’t have been—”

Beth’s head swung back and forth. “No,” she yelled. “It’s him. I saw him. I saw him like I used to do when we were little and we weren’t even in the same room. And he called me Bethie. Peter’s the only one who ever called me Bethie. Peter’s in trouble. Peter needs us.”

Beth’s voice had become so shrill that her parents finally decided to call her pediatrician, a close friend of Stuart’s who agreed to come to the house. Finding the child hysterical, he gave her a shot and recommended she be kept in bed for a day or two.

So now, sitting on the couch in their quiet Victorian house, a distant view of the Golden Gate Bridge visible
through the picture window behind them, Stuart and Natalie tried to make sense of what had happened.

“Beth says he was calling to her,” Natalie reported. “She said it was like when they were little and used to ‘talk’ from different levels of the house.”

“We called it Channel Twin,” Stuart said with a nostalgic smile. “Funny how each one always seemed to know what the other was doing or thinking.”

Natalie sighed. “Beth hasn’t talked about Peter in years,” she said. “I just can’t understand how it happened today.”

“Because someone played a trick on her,” Stuart said darkly. “Someone asked a young boy to play a role, to call out to our daughter as if he were her long-lost brother.”

“But why, Stuart?” Natalie asked. “Why would anyone play such a cruel joke?”

“Unfortunately, I do have enemies,” Stuart said. “People are jealous of my success as a builder. The environmentalists hate me, and I’m sure there are a lot of people who don’t want to see me build that office complex just outside of town.”

“But to torment a disturbed child!”

“Nobody’s going to torment Beth again,” Stuart said. “We’ll keep her home for a while, like the doctor says. If someone is using her to get at me, I won’t let them near her.”

They heard the faint rattle of mail being shoved into their box. Natalie got up off the couch and went to open the front door. There were art-supplies catalogs, a packet of coupons from local merchants, a few charity pleas, and a brown manila envelope. Natalie’s eyebrows went up, disappearing under a thick curtain of auburn bangs. She put the other mail on a mirrored table and walked back into the living room with the large envelope. The address was written in grease pencil, in carefully printed block letters. There was no return address. She opened it and pulled out what seemed to be a drawing. She took one look at it and
let out a gasp. It fell from her hands, sailing to the floor in slow, back-and-forth motions. Stuart was on his feet in an instant to retrieve it. He picked up the paper and studied it with a frown.

“Natalie, what’s wrong?”

“This is sick.”

It was a pastel portrait of a young boy, gazing out from the paper with wide green eyes. A spattering of freckles lay across his pug nose, and tousled red hair framed his round face.

“It looks just like Peter,” Natalie whispered.

“It’s not Peter,” Stuart said. “It’s a sick joke, like the boy in the school yard—”

“But it’s what he would look like now,” Natalie said. “If he’d . . . uh . . . ” Nervously, she ran her fingers through her hair.

“If he’d lived through that plane crash,” Stuart said. “But he didn’t, so we know this can’t be him. I’m sure it’s the same people who played that trick on Beth.”

He looked around the rug and found the envelope on the floor behind his wife. “No return address,” he said.

Natalie pointed to the postmark. “Stuart, it says Santa Fe,” she said. “Someone sent this from Santa Fe! We don’t know anyone there.”

Stuart frowned. “Your parents live in Albuquerque,” he reminded her. “Could you possibly have relatives in Santa Fe?”

“No one that I know of,” Natalie said. “What’s the sense of it, Stuart? Why make us think our boy is alive?”

Unable to answer, Stuart put his arms around her. Inside his chest, his heart thumped hard and his lungs seemed to constrict. There was just a glimmer of feeling, just a tiny bit of hope that this wasn’t a hoax, after all. Maybe Beth really had seen her brother this afternoon—or an image of him. And someone had gone to a lot of trouble to send them a picture of what their little boy Peter might have looked like today, at
age ten. He tried to fight the hope, but it was growing stronger.

Maybe, by some miracle, Peter was still alive.

9

A
DARK-HAIRED CHILD HUDDLED IN THE SPACE
between her bed and night table, her knees pulled tightly into her chest. Her nightgown was soft, smelling of lavender soap, but she found no comfort in it. The shouting outside her room made her feel very afraid, and she wished her parents would stop their fighting.

Maybe, if she’d been a good girl at the clinic today, Momma and Daddy wouldn’t be arguing. But ever since the dream she’d had a few nights ago, she had begun to wonder if the people at the clinic were really her friends.

In the dream, there was a lady with glasses walking a big black dog. She seemed very kind, but when the little girl tried to talk to her, some people she recognized from the clinic came to stop her. They waved burning torches at her, threatening to punish her severely if she ever spoke to the woman again. If the people at the clinic were her friends, why did she have such a bad dream about them? And why did she still feel, days later, that they really would hurt her with fire?

At that thought, Jenny Segal looked up and glanced quickly around the room. Everything was okay. She knew there would be a price to pay for fighting the doctors this afternoon, and she prayed it would have nothing to do with fire. Fire would be the worst thing they could do to her.

Maybe they’d burn her favorite doll, or all her books . . .

Jenny bent one foot up and started tearing off a too-long nail, remembering this afternoon. It had started out like all the other visits to the clinic, which had been going on for so long that the child could not even remember not going.

“Here’s my best girlfriend,” Dr. Adams had greeted. “You get prettier every time I see you, Jennifer. How old are you now—ten?”

He always asked a lot of questions, all the while taping things the grown-ups called “electrodes” to her. She liked Dr. Adams, who was almost as handsome as her daddy. But she didn’t like the wires. And she hated the needles. More than that, she hated the scary things they were always asking her to do.

Still, she had only protested once before.

“Why do I have to go there?” she’d asked her mother as they’d walked to the low, brick building that housed the clinic.

“You know why,” her mother had said. “It’s to help find out why you have people talking inside your head. The doctors are trying to find out a way to make them stop.”

But years of tests and treatment hadn’t made them stop at all. If anything, they’d grown louder as she’d grown older. For some reason, the doctors were always asking her to try to talk to some of the people. But the little girl never could, no matter how hard she tried.

That was until this afternoon. As Jenny was sitting there in the big chair, wires poking out in every which way, a voice came to her that was louder than all the others. And among the strangers that surrounded her—unseen by others in the room but clear to the little girl with her eyes closed—she spotted the kindly woman with brown hair and glasses. The woman had reached out to her.

Don’t let them do this, baby.

The child had cried out, grabbing for the wires and ripping them away.

“Who’s talking to you?” Dr. Adams had demanded. “Tell us, Jenny.”

But Jenny had only thrashed about in the big chair, knocking shiny metal instruments from a tray draped with a white cloth, kicking at Dr. Adams. It was as if something else was in control of her body and she couldn’t stop the tantrum.

They’d stopped it for her, with a sharp pinch of a needle. Next thing she knew, she was in her bedroom, slowly awakening to the sounds of angry voices. She touched her head, but realized these voices were on the outside.

At the sound of her mother’s angry voice, she nervously grabbed hold of the lamp cord dangling over the edge of the night table. It crashed to the floor. A moment later, her door opened and her parents came rushing to her.

“What happened, Jenny?” her father asked, the hall light making his blonde hair glimmer like a halo.

Her mother picked up the lamp and set it right again. She was dressed in a silky red robe that hugged her tightly, her dark hair falling free to her waist.

“I—I fell out of bed,” Jenny said, sniffling. “I had a bad dream.”

“Another one?” her father asked. He looked at his wife. “Why is she having so many nightmares these days?”