Suffer the Children (2 page)

The rocks had grown slippery with the wetness of the storm, and the wind seemed to be trying to pluckhim
from his perch. Each time his foot slipped, his hands bled a little more, but he didn’t feel it. He felt only the firmness of the earth below him, and the fury of the elements around him.

Then he had gained the top of the embankment, and he plunged back into the woods as if the sea would reach up to take him if he hesitated for even a second. When the forest closed behind him, he began to relax.

He walked purposefully through the woods now, past the trampled ground where he had so recently lain with the child, to the spot where the empty bottle still lay where he had dropped it.

And the rabbit.

He stopped then, and stared down at the rabbit, whose rain-soaked body lay pitifully still.

He picked it up, cradling it in his arms like a baby, and began to make his way across the field to the house beyond.

He didn’t pause in the field, didn’t take even a moment to look once more at the place where she had played. Instead he kept his eyes on the house, with the same hypnotic concentration with which he had earlier watched the child.

He left the field, crossed the lawn, and entered the house through the wide front door.

No one was there to watch him as he bore the body of the rabbit down the hall and into his study, nor were the gaslights yet casting the shadows he feared to see.

He closed the door to his study, then went to sit in a chair in front of the fireplace, the dead rabbit in his lap.

He sat there for a long time, huddled forward as if to draw warmth from the cold hearth in front of him, his hands stroking the rabbit’s wet fur. Now and then he glanced up at the portrait of the beautiful child in the cornflower silk dress that hung above the mantel.

He didn’t hear the carriage arrive, or the sound of the knocker as it fell against the front door.

He didn’t hear the light tapping at his own door; didn’t hear the slight click of the door opening, or the soft step of the maid who came into his study. She waited quietly by his chair until at last he noticed her.

“Yes?” The word was strange-sounding on his ear, as if someone else had uttered it.

“I’m sorry, Mr. John,” the maid said softly. “I’m looking for Miss Beth. Her grandmother’s asking for her.”

“Miss Beth? Isn’t she in the house? She was in the field.”

“No, sir,” the maid replied. “She doesn’t seem to be in the house at all. I thought perhaps—”

He held up a hand wearily. “No,” he said. “She isn’t with me. Not any more.”

The maid turned to go, then turned back.

“Mr. John?” He looked up at her. “What’s that in your lap?”

The man looked down, and for the first time seemed to be conscious of the small creature on his lap.

“It’s a rabbit,” he said slowly.

“But what’s wrong with it?” the maid asked.

“It’s dead,” he said. “It was so innocent, and now it’s dead.”

The maid left the room.

He sat there for a few more minutes, then he stood up. Carefully, he placed the rabbit on the chair, then glanced once more at the portrait above the mantel.

He left the study, closing the door after himself once more, and retraced his steps down the hallway.

He passed through the front door, then turned to follow a walkway around the corner of the house.

He followed the walkway until it ended, then followed the path that picked up from the end of the walk.

At the end of the path, a cliff fell away to the sea below.

He stood for a moment, staring at the sea that battered far below him, and his lips moved almost silently. And over the wind, lost in the noise of the surf, a word drifted soundlessly away.

“Beth,” he whispered. Then he repeated the name, and as the sound fell away from him, he flung himself into the waiting sea.

For him, it was over.

Port Arbello perched snugly on the bluffs above the ocean, its trees flourishing the last of their fall finery with a bravado that belied the nakedness soon to come. The breeze off the Atlantic signaled an end to Indian summer, and Ray Norton smelled the first signs of winter in the air as he turned the town’s only police car onto Conger’s Point Road.

Ray had grown up in Port Arbello and now, in his mid-fifties, he was beginning to feel old. He had watched himself change and grow older as Port Arbello stayed the same. He tried to remember what changes had come to the town since he had been born, and realized that there just weren’t enough to make much of a difference.

There was the new motel, doing its best to act as if it had been there since the beginning of time. It hadn’t been, and as he passed it Ray wondered what would become of it when the losses finally became too great for even its management to tolerate. Maybe the town could buy it and turn it into a country club. Get rid of the neon sign. Put in a golf course.

Then he remembered that Port Arbello had already tried a country club, or at least a building near the old golf course. That had failed too, and the building now stood vacant and dying, serving only as a shelter for the few people who still used the golf course. There weren’t more than forty or fifty of them, and it was
all they could do to keep raising the funds to pay the greenskeeper each year.

All in all, other than the new motel (which was already fifteen years old), there wasn’t much that was new in Port Arbello. A store occasionally changed hands, a house came on the market now and then, and once in a while a new family came to town. For the most part, though, the town kept to itself, passing its homes and its businesses from one generation to the next. Its small farms remained small farms, and its small fishing fleet continued to support a small group of fishermen.

But that was the way they liked it, Ray realized. They had grown up with it, and they were used to it They had no intention of changing it He remembered a few years back—how many he was no longer sure, but it must have been right after the War—when a real-estate developer had bought up a lot of acreage outside the town limits. He was going to turn Port Arbello into a summer town, filled with A-frames and summer natives.

The town had caught wind of the plan, and for the first time in its history, Port Arbello had moved quickly. In a single town meeting, with the support of everybody except the farmer who had sold his property, Port Arbello had passed zoning ordinances to prohibit such projects, then annexed the property that was to be developed. The developer fought it through the courts, but Port Arbello won. In the end, the developer had been unable to sell the property, and the farmer, a couple of hundred thousand dollars richer, had foreclosed on the mortgage, bought himself all the newest equipment he could find, and was still happily working his land at the age of eighty-six. Ray grinned to himself. That was the way of things in Port Arbello.

He tooted his horn as he passed the old farmer, but didn’t wave. He didn’t have to, for the farmer, intent on what he was doing, didn’t look up from his field.

But Ray knew that the next time he saw him in town, the old man would touch the brim of his hat and say, “Nice to see you the other day, Ray.” That, too, was the way things were done in Port Arbello.

A mile out of town the Conger’s Point Road made the left turn that would take it partway out to the Point before it cut back inland on its way south. Ray supposed that this, too, was something new, though the road had been extended far beyond Conger’s Point long before he was born. But in the old days, the really old days, it had probably ended at the Congers’ front door, a direct pipeline from the heart of the town to the residence of its leading citizens.

The Conger family, though not the founders of Port Arbello, had been at the top of the sodal heap there for so long that it was now a tenet of faith with the people that not much could go on in Port Arbello without the approval of the Congers. It was also a tenet of faith that the Congers were rich. Not as rich, perhaps, as the Rockefellers and the Carnegies, but close enough so that, to Port Arbello, it didn’t make any difference. They still remembered the days when the railroad had built a special spur into Port Arbello to accommodate the needs of the Admiral’s private car. They still remembered the days when the staff at Conger’s Point was twice the size of the Conger family (which, until recently, had never been small). They assumed that the Congers, being people of taste and sensitivity, had let the staff go not because they could no longer afford them, but because large staffs had come to be considered ostentatious.

Ray Norton, who lived on the Point Road himself, and had grown up with Jack Conger’s father, knew better. Ray had been of an age that fell between Conger generations, and felt himself privileged to be on warm social terms with two generations of Congers, even though the older one was now dead. Ray had been seventeen years younger than Jack Conger’s father, andwas
fifteen years older than Jack. That, plus the fact that he was a neighbor and the chief of police, had put him in a position of being close to power. He enjoyed that position. And he was careful not to undermine it by talking about what he knew of the Congers.

He pulled the car off the road and into the Congers’ driveway. You could see the house even before you turned into the drive. Indeed, you could see it from the moment the road passed the end of the forest that flourished along the north bank of the Point, and began flanking the field that separated the house from the woods. But Ray was always careful not to look at the house until he had reached the end of the driveway. From there, he could absorb it, could enjoy the grandeur with which it sat at the end of its lane, its full veranda staring austerely through the double row of ancient oaks that lined the drive. It was a saltbox, nearly two hundred years old, but its simple square lines seemed to fit with the bleakness of the lonely point on which it stood. It had a pride to it, as if it were challenging the sea to reach up and sweep it away. So far, the sea had not met the challenge, and Ray Norton doubted that it ever would.

He parked the car and crossed the porch to the great oaken door. As always, he was tempted to raise the antique brass door knocker and let it crash against its plate to cause the resounding boom in the house that always brought visions of times past into his head. But, as always, he resisted the impulse and pressed the button that would sound the door chimes in the main hall within.

“Newfangled gimcrack,” he muttered to himself, parodying his New England background.

Rose Conger opened the door herself, and her face broke into a pleased smile at the sight of Ray Norton.

“Ray! If you’re looking for Jack, you’re in the wrong place. He really does work these days, you know.”

“I’ll get to him later,” Ray said. “Right now I need to talk to you. Have you got any coffee on?”

Rose stepped back to let him in.

“I don’t, but I’m sure Mrs. Goodrich does. If anything ever happens to her, I don’t know what well all do. Is this a social visit, or are we talking seriously? It makes a difference, you know. When this place was built, they had separate rooms for all kinds of conversations. Take your pick.”

“How about the back study? I always liked that room. But only when a fire’s lit.”

Rose smiled. “It’s laid, but it’s not lit. Let’s go fix that. Why don’t you get the fire started while I find Mrs. Goodrich?” Without waiting for an answer, she started toward the back of the house, but turned toward the kitchen, leaving Ray to continue into the back study.

He lit the fire, then seated himself in the old leather wing chair just to the right of the fireplace. He glanced around the room, and realized how comfortable he was here. Often he wished the house were his.

When Rose Conger joined him, Ray was staring at the picture above the mantel.

“That’s new, isn’t it?” he said.

“Only for us,” Rose replied. “I haven’t any idea how old it is. We found it in the attic a year ago, but just got around to having it cleaned last month.” She shuddered slightly. “Have you any idea how much it costs to have a portrait cleaned?”

“I don’t have any ancestors worth cleaning. Who was she?”

“I haven’t the vaguest idea. From the way she’s dressed, I’d say the portrait must be just about ninety years old. We can’t figure out who she was. There’s no one in any of the family albums who looks like that, or who might have looked like that when she was young.”

“Ray looked at the picture carefully.” Well, it’s obvious
who she looks like. She looks like Elizabeth.

Rose nodded her head. “She does, doesn’t she? She definitely has Elizabeth’s eyes, and the hair seems to be the same color, too. But she looks like she’s two or three years younger than Elizabeth.”

They looked at the portrait together, and were still staring at it when Mrs. Goodrich appeared with their coffee.

“How children were expected to play dressed like that,” she said, following their eyes to the painting, “absolutely beats me. No wonder there were so many servants around here. It’d take one girl all week just to wash that child’s clothes. And with no machines.” She shook her head. “All I can say is, I’m glad times have changed.” She set the coffee down, nodded to Ray, and left the room.