Hear the Children Calling Page 5

  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

  AS THEIR DAUGHTER SLEPT UPSTAIRS, STUART 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?”

  “How should I know?” her mother demanded.

  Jenny’s father smiled, holding out a hand to help her to her feet. At ten, she was nearly as tall as he was, and when she gazed at him, her eyes met his.

  “Well, everything’s going to be okay now,” her father promised. “You’re Daddy’s big girl; you’ll be okay.”

  Jenny smiled. She hated it when other people called her a big girl, knowing they were making fun of her large bones and long legs. But when Daddy said it, she knew it was out of love.

  “Well, get back into bed,” her mother said. “You’ve got a busy day at the clinic tomorrow.”

  Jenny’s mouth dropped open.

  “Tomorrow?” her father said, protesting for the child, who couldn’t. “Isn’t that a bit soon?”

  “She’s got a lot to make up for,” her mother said sternly. “After the nonsense she pulled today—”

  “I’m sure that wasn’t Jenny’s fault.”

  “Oh, and whose fault was it?”

  Another argument was brewing, and her father turned quickly away to stop it. He pulled Jenny’s covers up and leaned down to kiss her good night. “Don’t you worry,” he said. “There’ll be no clinic tomorrow if I have anything to say about it.”

  Jenny smiled, but the smile faded as soon as her door closed. She didn’t want to go back to the clinic. Not tomorrow, not ever!

  She closed her eyes and tried to sleep, but all she could think of was that big chair and all the weird machines around it. And the grown-ups’ voices asking her to send thought messages to someone in another room. And demanding that she tell them what voices she was hearing.

  Jenny tried to think of the woman with the dog. After a short time, she saw her again. This time she was sitting on a couch. There were two little boys to either side of her, leaning toward a book she held open in her lap. In her mind, Jenny walked closer to the couch.

  The woman looked up at her and the book dropped to the floor. She cried out with such fright that Jenny backed quickly away, opening her eyes and ending the dream.

  10

  KATE EMERSON WAS SITTING WITH A PICTURE BOOK on her lap, her boys tucked warmly to either side of her, when the little girl appeared to her. She noticed movement in the doorway and looked up to acknowledge Danny’s presence. Instead, a child with long, dark hair stared at her from the shadows.

  “Laura!”

  The book crashed to the floor, and in that instant the child vanished. Kate shot to her feet, knocking the boys away in her haste. She ran toward the now-empty doorway.

  “Laura! Laura, come back!”

  “Mommy, where’re you going?” Chris demanded. He climbed from the couch and followed his mother into the hallway.

  Joey tried to keep up, stumbling forward on chubby toddler legs.

  “Mommy, stop,” Chris yelled. “Come back and read our book.”

  “Mommy, stop,” Joey echoed.

  They caught up with her in the kitchen, where they watched in confusion as she spun circles. Her eyes were enormously round. At the sight of tears streaming down her cheeks, Joey burst out crying.

  Chris went to her and tugged at her robe. “Mommy, what’re you doing?” he demanded loudly.

  The back door opened now, and Danny came in with Boston Blackie. The dog ran to Joey and began to lick the tears on his face.

  Danny looked from his wife to his sons, then back to Kate again. “What’s going on here?”

  Kate waved her hands in front of her, as if she didn’t know what to do with them. With his big, strong hands, Danny took hold of her smaller ones and held them steady. “Oh, Danny,” she whispered. “She was here. I saw Laura. I saw Laura standing in the doorway of the living room.”

  For a moment, Danny just gazed at his wife, uncomprehending. Then he pulled his hands away and turned quickly to the boys. “Hey, it’s getting late, you guys,” he said. “You should have been in bed an hour ago. Let’s go.”

  Despite their protests, he took them firmly by the shoulders and steered them out of the kitchen.

  “But I wanna know what’s wrong with Mommy,” Chris yelled. “Why’d she throw the book on the floor? Why’d she run away? Why’s she crying? Why—”
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  “I don’t know, Chris. You go on to bed and we’ll discuss this in the morning.” Danny went upstairs with the boys. A few minutes later, he returned, to find Kate sitting on the living-room couch.

  “She was standing right there,” Kate said softly.

  “Kate, what the hell is this?” Danny said. “You scared the crap out of those boys, you know. It’s been years since you even mentioned Laura. Why now? And why, for God’s sake, in front of Chris and Joey?”

  Kate looked up at him, her teeth set hard. “Because she was there,” she said defiantly. “Laura was standing right there in that doorway.”

  “Kate, that’s impossible,” Danny said, sitting beside her. “Laura’s been gone for nearly six years. She’s dead, Kate. I thought Dr. Lee helped you come to grips with that.”

  Kate slid away from him. “I could never come to grips with my child’s death! I’ve never felt right about it. Why didn’t anyone see her fall overboard? Why didn’t anyone ever find a body?”

  “We live near the ocean,” Danny said, in a patient tone used for repeating the same information for the umpteenth time. “Strong currents—”

  “No, there were no currents,” she said, shaking her head vehemently. “Danny, I know Laura is alive. I’ve seen her . . .”

  “You’ve seen dreams!”

  “I’ve seen Laura,” Kate said. “She’s sending messages. Just like the ones she used to send me years ago. Don’t you remember, Danny, how she could do that?”

  Danny picked at a loose thread on the couch, saying nothing.

  “I can remember one time she did it,” Kate went on. “It was when she was three and a half, when Mrs. Ginmoor first started sitting for us. I was driving home from the boutique and I saw Laura running down the block crying. By the time I swung around to catch up to her, she was gone. But when I got home, Mrs. Ginmoor said she had never left the back yard.”

  “You saw a child who looked like Laura,” Danny said.

  “It was Laura,” Kate insisted. “I know my own daughter, for God’s sake. And I found out something: a big stray dog had come into our yard just moments before, and it frightened Laura so much she started crying out for me. Her physical body was in that back yard, but she sent her spiritual body out looking for me.”