Two Little Girls in Blue (41 page)

Maybe Frawley's other child was still alive. It's all about the ransom, Norman thought. Someone was counting on the company paying it.

At seven o'clock, he made himself a drink. “A suspect
in the kidnapping was believed to have been spotted on Cape Cod,” a news brief reported.

“Norman . . . please . . . don't . . .”

Weekends are always the hardest, he thought.

He had given up going to museums. They bored him. Concerts were tedious, a form of torture. When Theresa and he were married, she would tease him about his restlessness. “Norman, you'll do very well in business and may even become a patron of the arts, but you'll never understand why a sculpture or a painting or an opera is a thing of beauty. You're hopeless.”

Hopeless. Hopeless. Norman made himself another drink, then sipped it as he ran his hand over Theresa's wedding rings that he kept on the chain around his neck—the one he had given her that she'd left on the dresser, and the circle of diamonds her rich, cultured, second husband had given her. He remembered how he had to struggle to pull that one off her finger. Her slender fingers were swollen because of the pregnancy.

At eight thirty he decided to shower and dress and go out for dinner. Somewhat unsteady on his feet, he got up, went to the closet, and laid out a business suit, white shirt, and one of the ties the Paul Stuart salesman had assured him complemented the suit.

Forty minutes later, as he was leaving his apartment building, he happened to glance across the street. Two men were getting out of a car. The streetlight shone on the face of the driver. He was the FBI agent who had come to his office and who had become hostile and suspicious when he'd made his slip about “my late wife.” In
a sudden panic, Norman Bond darted uncertainly down the block, then dashed across Seventy-second Street. He did not see the vehicle that was making a U-turn.

The impact of the truck hitting him was an explosion that seemed to rip him apart. He felt himself lifted into the air, then the awful pain as his body crashed against the sidewalk. He tasted blood gushing from his mouth.

He heard the clamor around him and the demands for an ambulance. The face of the FBI agent was swimming above him. The chain with Theresa's rings, he thought. I've got to get rid of it.

But he could not move his hand.

He could feel his white shirt becoming soaked with blood. The oyster, he thought. Remember when it slithered off that fork and all the sauce dripped on my shirt and tie? The memory usually brought a wave of shame, but now he felt nothing. Nothing at all.

His lips formed her name: “Theresa.”

Agent Angus Sommers was kneeling beside Norman Bond. He put his finger on Bond's neck. “He's gone,” he said.

A
gents Reeves, Carlson, and Realto entered Clint's holding cell.

“They got the little girl out of the car, but she may not make it,” Carlson said angrily. “Your girlfriend, Angie, is dead. They'll do an autopsy, but you know what? We think she was already gone before she hit the water. Someone punched her hard enough to kill her. I wonder who that was.”

Feeling as if he'd been hit by a cement block, Clint realized that it was all over for him. He bitterly decided that he wasn't going down alone. Telling them who the Pied Piper is may or may not help me with my sentence, he thought, but I'm
not
going to rot in prison while he lives it up on seven million bucks.

“I don't know the Pied Piper's name,” he told the agents, “but I can tell you what he looks like. He's tall, I'd guess a couple of inches over six feet. Sandy blond hair. Classy looking. Early forties. When he wanted me to dump Angie, he told me that I should follow him to Chatham Airport where he had a plane waiting.”

Clint paused. “Wait a minute!” he exclaimed. “I
do
know who he is. I thought I had seen him someplace before. He's the big shot from that company that paid the
ransom. He was on TV saying that he shouldn't have paid it.”

“Gregg Stanford!” Carlson said as Realto nodded in agreement.

Reeves was instantly on his cell phone.

“If only we can grab him before his plane takes off,” Carlson said. With contempt and fury in his voice, he told Clint, “You better get down on your knees, you lowlife, and start praying that Kathy Frawley pulls through.”

“T
he Frawley twins have been rushed to Cape Cod Hospital,” the announcer on channel 5 reported. “The condition of Kathy Frawley is extremely critical. The body of one of the kidnappers, Angie Ames, has been recovered from the sunken van at the Harwich marina. Her accomplice Clint Downes, in whose Danbury, Connecticut, home the twins were kept, is under arrest in Hyannis. The man believed to be the mastermind of the kidnapping, the ‘Pied Piper,' is still at large.”

They don't say that I'm on the Cape, the Pied Piper thought frantically as he sat in the departure lounge of Chatham Airport and watched the breaking news on television. That means Clint hasn't described me to them yet. I'm his bargaining chip. He gives me up in return for a lighter sentence.

I've got to get out of the country now. But the drenching rain and enveloping fog was temporarily grounding all the planes. His pilot had told him that he hoped that the delay wouldn't be much longer.

Why did I panic and come up with that crazy idea of kidnapping those kids? he asked himself. I did it because I was scared. I did it because I was afraid Millicent might have had me followed and discovered that I was
fooling around with other women. If she had decided to dump me, I'd be out of a job, and I don't have a nickel in my own name. I did it because I thought I could trust Lucas. He knew how to keep his mouth shut. He'd never give me away, no matter how much someone offered him. In the end he still didn't give me away. Clint had no idea who I am.

If only I hadn't come to Cape Cod. I could have been out of the country by now with all those millions waiting for me. I have my passport. I'll have the plane take me to the Maldives. There's no extradition there.

The door of the lounge burst open and two men rushed in. One slipped behind him and ordered him to stand with his hands spread out. Quickly he frisked him.

“FBI, Mr. Stanford,” the other one said. “What a surprise. What brings you to the Cape this evening?”

Gregg Stanford looked directly at him. “I was visiting a friend, a young woman. A private matter which is none of your business.”

“By any chance was her name Angie?”

“What are you talking about?” Stanford demanded. “This is outrageous.”

“You know exactly what we're talking about,” the agent replied. “You won't be catching a plane tonight, Mr. Stanford. Or perhaps I should ask, would you prefer to be addressed as the Pied Piper?”

K
elly, still in her crib and accompanied by Dr. Harris, was wheeled into the intensive care unit. Like her sister, she was wearing an oxygen mask. Margaret stood up. “Disconnect her mask,” she said. “I'm putting her in the crib with Kathy.”

“Margaret, Kathy has pneumonia.” The protest died on Sylvia Harris's lips.

“Do it,” Margaret told the nurse. “You can hook it up again as soon as I settle her.”

The nurse looked at Steve. “Go ahead,” he told her.

Margaret picked up Kelly, and for an instant held her head against her neck. “Kathy needs you, baby,” she whispered. “And you need her.”

The nurse rolled down the side of the crib, and Margaret placed Kelly next to her twin, with Kelly's right thumb touching Kathy's left one.

It's where they were conjoined, Sylvia thought.

The nurse reattached Kelly's mask to the oxygen.

In silent prayer, Margaret, Steve, and Sylvia kept a heartsick vigil by the crib all night. The twins did not stir from their deep sleep. Then, as the first light of dawn filtered into the room, Kathy stirred, moved her hand, and entwined her fingers in Kelly's.

Kelly opened her eyes and turned her head to look at her sister.

Kathy's eyes opened wide. She looked around the room, going from one person to another. Her lips began to move.

A smile lit Kelly's face, and she murmured something in Kathy's ear.

“Twin talk,” Steve said softly.

“What is she telling you, Kelly?” Margaret whispered.

“Kathy said that she missed us very, very much, and that she wants to go home.”

T
hree weeks later, Walter Carlson sat at the dining room table with Steve and Margaret, lingering over second cups of coffee. All through dinner, he kept thinking of the first time he had seen them, the handsome young couple in evening clothes who had arrived home to learn that their children were gone. In the following days they had become shadows of their former selves, pale and gaunt, clinging to each other in despair, their eyes red rimmed and swollen.

Now Steve's manner was relaxed and confident. Margaret, lovely in a white sweater and dark slacks, her hair loose around her shoulders, a smile on her lips, was a different person from the half-crazed woman who had pleaded with them to believe that Kathy was alive.

Even so, Carlson noticed how, during dinner, her eyes often darted to the living room, where the twins, dressed in their pajamas, were having a tea party with their dolls and teddy bears. She needs to keep reassuring herself that they're both still there, he thought.

The Frawleys had invited him to dinner to celebrate their return to normal life, as Margaret had put it. But now, inevitably, it was natural to let them in on some of
the information revealed through the confessions of Gregg Stanford and Clint Downes.

He had not intended to talk about Steve's half brother, Richard Mason, but when Steve mentioned that his mother and father had been up for a visit, he asked about them.

“You can understand how tough it is for my mother to know that Richie is in trouble again,” Steve said. “Smuggling cocaine is even worse than that scam he was involved in years ago. She knows the kind of prison term he's facing and, like all mothers, she's trying to figure what she did wrong to make him turn out like this.”