Suffer the Children (27 page)

“Of course not,” Jack said. “Any time you want. But, God, I hope they don’t find anything.”

“So do I,” Norton agreed. “So do I.”

An hour later Jack Conger was home. He went upstairs to say good night to his daughters, and it seemed to Rose that he was staying much too long with Elizabeth. She was on the verge of going up to see what was keeping him when he came down. When he entered the study he looked tired but he was smiling.

“Well,” he said, fixing himself a nightcap. “If nothing else, at least I’ve bought us some time.”

Neither Rose nor Jack slept that night, but they were quiet, each of them with their own thoughts, each of them wanting to postpone the time when they would have to make decisions.

They tried to avoid their thoughts as they lay in bed, side by side, separated by their fears. Jack kept repeating the story be had told to the town meeting, over and over, until even he began to believe it. Before the blackness of night began fading into a gray dawn, he had almost convinced himself that Sarah had not been playing in the field with Jimmy Tyler, that instead Elizabeth had seen Jimmy at the quarry and instructed him to go home. But with the dawn the truth came back at him, and reality reentered his life along with the sun.

As if by mutual consent, they began talking about it at breakfast They had risen early, since neither of them had slept, and they sat in the silent house, sipping coffee and trying to figure out what they should do.

“I suppose we should call Dr. Belter,” Rose said.

“No. Not yet” Jack knew she was right, but somehow calling Dr. Belter symbolized defeat for him, and he wasn’t ready for that yet “I mean, what could we tell him?” he went on, and he knew he was rationalizing as much for himself as for his wife. “Because Elizabeth saw Sarah and Jimmy playing together is no reason for us to jump to conclusions.”

“No,” Rose agreed. “It isn’t But it seems to me we have a duty that goes beyond our own family. If Sarah
has anything to do with this, even if she only has something to do with Jimmy Tyler, I think we have to tell
somebody
. And Dr. Belter seems the logical person to tell. And, of course, there’s Sarah to be considered.”

“Sarah?”

Rose wore a pained expression, and Jack knew it was difficult for her to say the things she was saying. He wondered if it was as difficult for her to speak as it was for him to listen.

“What about her?” Rose said. “If she is doing something, and I’m not saying she is, she isn’t responsible. She needs help. How can she get the help she needs if we aren’t even willing to talk about what she’s doing?” She stopped talking for a moment and stirred her coffee fitfully. “Maybe we ought to search the woods,” she said. “If something did happen, it must have happened there. Unless they got as far as the embankment.” She smiled, but there was no warmth in it “At least we know there’s no cave, so we don’t have to look for that.”

“I don’t know whether there’s a cave or not,” Jack said quietly. Rose looked at him sharply.

“What do you mean? Didn’t you tell Ray Norton last night that you’d spent most of your boyhood looking for it and it doesn’t exist?”

“Yes,” Jack said uncomfortably. “That’s what I told him. But it wasn’t any truer than anything else I told anybody last night.”

Rose set her cup down and stared at him. “You mean you lied about the cave, too?” she said incredulously.

He nodded miserably, and it struck Rose that he looked very much like a small child caught with his hand in the cookie jar. For some reason it made her want to laugh, though she felt anything but mirthful.

“Why on earth did you lie about that?” she asked him when her laughter died. Her voice was mocking, and it made Jack flush.

“Because I didn’t want them poking around the
woods and the embankment, that’s why”, he said vehemently.

“But they’ll poke around the woods anyway,” Rose said, taking on the voice of a teacher with a recalcitrant pupil. “Besides, they’ve already searched the woods. They did that when they were looking for Kathy Burton.”

Then a thought came to her, and she searched Jack’s face carefully, looking for the answer to the question that had come into her mind. It was there, in his hangdog expression, in the defensive light that glimmered in his eye.

“You believe it, don’t you?” she said. “You believe in the legend. Is there a cave there?”

“I don’t know,” Jack said softly. “I never looked.”

“Why not?” Rose demanded. “Are you going to sit there and tell me that, with a wonderful legend like that, you never once, you and your friends, never once went looking for that cave?” Her eyes widened in astonishment as he shook his head. “Well, for heaven’s sake. That legend actually worked.” Now her laughter came in gales, partly at the idea of her husband putting enough faith in the legend never to investigate it, but mostly as a simple release. A release of the stress she had been carrying. It was not pleasant laughter, and it did not make the house ring. Instead it echoed dully through the room, and then came back to hang heavily between them.

“I think,” Rose said finally, “that it’s time we had a look at that embankment. If there is a cave there, I think we should know about it. I think the whole town should know about it.”

“You look if you want,” Jack said softly. “Frankly, I’d rather not know.”

Jack Conger arrived In his office early that morning, before any of the staff had gotten in. When they arrived, at eight thirty, they found his office door closed and the
red light above it lit. All of the staff except Sylvia Bannister respected the warning light.

Sylvia ignored it.

She walked into the inner office without knocking. Jack looked up but did not speak.

“Bad night?” Sylvia said sympathetically.

Jack put down his pencil and leaned back, rubbing his eyes. “It depends on what you call a bad night If you call lying to the whole town, lying to the chief of police, asking your oldest daughter to lie too, getting no sleep, and then topping the whole thing off with making yourself look like a fool to your wife—if you call that a bad night, then I suppose I had a bad night Otherwise it was fine.”

Sylvia sat down. “Do you want to tell me about it?”

“No,” Jack said irritably, “I don’t. I want to be left alone, to try to get my head straightened out. If that’s all right with you.”

He was already staring again at the piece of paper on the desk in front of him, and chewing on the end of the pencil, so he couldn’t see the look of hurt that came into Sylvia’s face. She stood up and smoothed her skirt.

“Of course,” she said coolly. “I’m sorry I bothered you.” She left the room, and when Jack heard the door close he looked up again, looked helplessly at the door through which the woman had just passed. He wanted to call her back. He didn’t.

He worked for an hour, writing and rewriting, and when he was finished he read what he had written. Then he crumpled the pages and threw them into the wastebasket.

It had been an editorial, and when he had finished writing it and reread it he realized that it could as easily have been written by Martin Forager as himself. He had attacked the police chief, even suggested that perhaps it was time Ray Norton was replaced. He had demanded some answers about what had really happened to Anne Forager. And he had suggested, but in terms
that denied then: own content, that it was time for the citizens of Port Arbello to form a lynch mob. He had not, of course, used that term. He had called instead for a “protective association,” but it amounted to the same thing. In short, he had written a hypocritical, self-serving editorial, designed to undermine the police chief and at the same time entrench Jack Conger as a concerned citizen. Jack Conger realized that he was trying to throw Ray Norton off a trail that Ray Norton didn’t even know he was on. A trail that could lead only to Sarah, who couldn’t possibly be considered responsible for anything she might have done. He retrieved the editorial from the wastebasket and read it once more. He decided, objectively, that the editorial had served its purpose very well.

He burned it in the wastebasket and picked up the telephone. It was time to talk to Charles Belter.

Dr. Charles Belter listened carefully to everything Jack Conger told him. It took more than three hours for Jack to put it all together for the doctor, and several times he had to backtrack, going over a point several times, filling in background or amplifying. Dr. Belter listened patiently, interrupting as little as possible; he felt it was important to listen not only to what was being said but also to how it was being said, and in what order. The mind tended to attach priorities to things, Dr. Belter knew, and often much could be learned not from the points being made, but from the order of the points and their relative importance to the person making them. When Jack finished Dr. Belter leaned back, his hands folded comfortably over his ample stomach.

“So you don’t know whether or not there really is, or was, a cave?” he said.

“Was?” Jack repeated. “What do you mean, was?”

“Only that there might have once been a cave, but that it got filled in, or collapsed. It isn’t important Just a mind that deals with details functioning in its usual
picky way. Forget I said it. The important thing is that you don’t know whether or not the cave is real.”

“No, I don’t. And I don’t see how it matters.”

Dr. Belter lit a cigarette and shook the match out before he spoke again. “I don’t know,” he said at length. “Does it matter?”

“What are you getting at?” Jack asked suspiciously.

Dr. Belter smiled at him. “Well, it just seems to me that you’ve attached a lot of importance to that cave. After all, you did go so far as to tell the chief of police that it definitely doesn’t exist. That tells me a couple of things.”

“Such as?” Now there was definite hostility in Jack’s voice.

“First, that you think there is a cave. If you were really sure that there was no cave, and that the legend was only a legend, why would you want to try to talk Norton out of searching for it? After all, if you’re sure it doesn’t exist, then you don’t have to worry about it being found, do you?”

“What’s the second thing?” Jack asked, without conceding the first.

“Why, that’s easy,” Dr. Belter said with a grin, leaning forward over his desk. “You’re not only sure there’s a cave, but you’re afraid of what might be found in it.”

“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve heard of in a long time,” Jack said angrily.

“Is it?”

Jack knew he was reacting more out of fear than out of anger, and he wondered why. What was he afraid of? Then he decided he wasn’t afraid
of;
he was afraid
for
. He was afraid for Sarah.

“It’s Sarah I’m worried about,” he said nervously.

“Are you?” the doctor asked, and Jack thought he heard a mocking tone in his voice. “Let’s talk about that for a minute then. Exactly what are you worried about? Are you worried that Sarah has been terrorizing
little children, then shoving them into a cave? That’s what I would call one of the stupidest things
I’ve
ever heard of. For one thing, take a look at Sarah’s size. She’s not big, is she? In fact, she’s small for her age, and a bit underdeveloped.” He noticed the look of anger that was coloring Jack’s face and held up a hand. “Oh, come on. I didn’t say she was abnormally small or underdeveloped. Physically she’s well within the normal range. But on the small side of the average, rather than the large side. Now tell me, do you really think a girl the size of Sarah could do much to a girl the size of Kathy Burton? Kathy Burton, from what I’ve found out, was big for her age, and somewhat athletic. So, considering that she’s also a year older than Sarah, I don’t see much chance that Sarah could have done anything to her. Anne Forager and Jimmy Tyler I don’t know about. They’re both younger than Sarah, and a bit smaller. But Kathy Burton wouldn’t have taken any guff off of Sarah.”

“I understand that children with … mental problems … sometimes show remarkable strength,” Jack said.

“You’ve been watching too many movies. Oh, sure, it can happen, but it’s rare, and it only happens for short periods of time, under what we call hysterical conditions. The same things happen with so-called normal people. The mother who lifts the car off her crushed child? Those things can happen. Under severe stress, the body simply shoots itself up with adrenalin, and you have a surge of strength. But it’s rare, and it’s for very brief periods of time. Seconds, not the time it would take to do what you’re suggesting.”

“I’m not suggesting a thing,” Jack said coldly.

“Aren’t you? I think you are.” I listen carefully, you know. It’s my profession. And here’s what I heard you saying. Not directly, mind you, but by implication. And all because Elizabeth said she saw Sarah playing with someone who looked like Jimmy Tyler.

“You see Sarah dragging children into the woods,
beating them, and then taking them and dumping them in a cave somewhere. Am I right?”

Jack shifted in his chair with discomfort. The doctor had stated his thoughts too closely. “Go on,” he said, not at all sure he wanted to hear any more, but feeling that he must.

“Well, if you don’t mind my saying so, that theory is ridiculous. Not only would Sarah be totally unable to sustain the kind of abnormal strength that would be necessary for such a feat, but even if she could, can you imagine the difficulties in hauling someone your own size down the face of that embankment? You’ve said yourself that it’s tricky for an adult by himself. It sounds like it would be impossible for a child carrying another child of almost the same size.”

Jack thought it over and felt an odd sense of relief. The doctor was right; it didn’t make sense. He and Rose had been overreacting. And why not? The last days had not been easy for anyone in Port Arbello, and Rose and Jack Conger were no exception. He felt a grin come over his face, and it felt good.

“Well, that’s done with, anyway,” he said. “Have you got any other ideas?”

Dr. Belter leaned forward, and his expression took on a seriousness that made the grin fade from Jack’s face.

“Yes, I have. Mr. Conger, have you ever suffered from blackouts? Recently?”