From Andrew Neiderman comes a haunting tale of a son’s terrifying legacy . . . .
Fifteen-year-old Solomon Stern was the perfect teenager: an ideal student, an outstanding athlete, and a valued friend.
But when Solomon ended his life with a hangman’s noose, he shattered every dream that Joe and Martha Stern held dear. His legacy: guilt to a father who didn’t know his own son…despair to a mother who loved him too well.
The foster child was a second chance for the Sterns—Jonathan, a boy of Solomon’s age, intelligent and charming. But there were other similarities between Jonathan and the dead son. Disturbing similarities. And there was also something different about Jonathan. Something chilling. Something deadly.
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THE FACE OF DEATH
She took a deep breath, took hold of the door and slid it open. Solomon stood there looking out at her.
The rope burn on his neck looked even more hideous this close up, but what was more revolting was the way his eyes bulged and his lips thickened. His skin was scaly and pale, his hair disheveled. He said nothing; he simply stared, that hateful smirk on his face.
“You pushed him, didn’t you?” she said. “You pushed him so he’d fall off the ladder.”
“He’s clumsy and awkward. He fell himself. I didn’t have to push him.”
“You pushed him and I know you did. He knows it, too.”
“That’s a laugh. He doesn’t know anything unless I want him to know it. Actually, now that I see what’s going on, I’m rather happy you brought him here. Things were getting rather boring watching you and Joe mope about the place. Now I have someone to play with . . . .”
Also by Andrew Neiderman
Sisters
Weekend
Pin
Brainchild
Someone’s Watching
Tender, Loving Care
Imp
Night Howl
Child’s Play
Teacher’s Pet
Sight Unseen
Love Child
Reflection
Illusion
Playmates
Perfect Little Angels
After Life
Duplicates
Bloodchild
The Devil’s Advocate
Immortals
Sister, Sister
The Need
The Solomon Organization
Angel of Mercy
The Maddening
The Dark
In Double Jeopardy
Surrogate Child
Published by POCKET BOOKS
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc.
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Copyright © 1988 by Andrew Neiderman
Published by arrangement with the author
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
ISBN: 0-671-04161-4
ISBN: 978-1-45168-262-5 (eBook)
First Pocket Books printing November 1999
POCKET and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster Inc.
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Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Epilogue
PROLOGUE
“I like him,” Martha said. She and Joe stared through the window into the office and looked at the foster child. “He’s Solomon’s age and Solomon’s height. He’ll be able to wear all of Solomon’s clothes.”
“Maybe he’ll want to wear his own clothes,” Joe said.
“He won’t have much to bring with him. Mrs. Posner told us that.”
“Maybe he’ll want us to buy him new clothes.”
“Why?” She turned around, her eyes wide. “You remember how Solomon was about his clothes, how everything was kept so neat and clean. Most of it still looks brand-new anyway.”
“He just might not like wearing someone else’s clothes,” Joe said in a subdued tone. Martha looked at him a moment and then turned to look back through the window at the boy. She considered him, and she considered what Joe said.
“I don’t think that’s a fair thing for him to do or a grateful way for him to behave.”
“I’m not saying he definitely won’t wear Solomon’s clothes. I just said he might not want to.”
“He’ll want to,” she said. “When he sees all those beautiful things, he’ll want to,” she added, and nodded her head.
“Well, for that matter, he’ll just have everything that Solomon had,” Joe said.
“Yes,” she said. She took a deep breath.
“You want to go in now and meet him.”
“Wait . . . just a few more moments. I want to look at him without his knowing.” She continued to study the boy. Joe shifted the weight from his right foot to his left and looked down the corridor of the county government building. Soon someone would see how they were just standing there looking through the window of the door to the child-care agency. He was impatient and nervous.
“We can’t stand here much longer, Martha. Besides—”
“All right, all right.” He started to reach for the knob, and she seized his wrist. “Do you realize the color of his hair?” she said. He paused and looked through the window.
“Yes,” he said. “It’s the same color as Solomon’s was.”
“Do you think that’s just a coincidence?”
He studied her for a moment.
“Of course, Martha. I mean, except for what we told them about the age of the child we wanted and the physical measurements you gave . . . you didn’t call Mrs. Posner and add color of hair, did you?”
“No, of course not. That’s why I’m asking you whether or not it’s just a coincidence.”
“It’s not such a rare color, light brown, you know. Of course, it’s just a coincidence,” he repeated, but she smiled up at him as though she knew something he didn’t and then turned the doorknob herself.
He hesitated, for the first time feeling that this was the greatest mistake of their lives.
ONE
Martha Stern stood by the front door of her house and stared out through the small panel windows at the quiet, country back road beside which they had built their modest three-bedroom two-story home a little more than sixteen years ago, one year after Solomon had been born. Joe and she had picked the lot out years before they could afford to build th
eir own home.
She recalled how during their first two years of marriage they often drove down Old Creek Road and stopped by this location. They played a game with their imaginations then. In the springtime, they would get out of the car and walk through their imaginary house, calling out the locations, pretending to do things in different rooms. They even had a picnic lunch in what they dreamed would be their kitchen. The back window would look out to the west, and if the window was big enough, they could sit at the kitchen table and watch the sun set behind the soft, rolling blue-ridge mountains that shaped the horizon.
When it came down to the actual construction, though, the window didn’t turn out to be as big as they would have liked. Reality had a way of pinching and squeezing dreams. Costs had to be considered, and in order to meet the limits of their mortgage, a great many of their original plans were modified.
Despite that, those early days lingered in Martha’s memory like a beautiful old tune in a fragile music box. Sometimes, for no reasons she could see, it would start playing, and the images, the sounds, the laughter, and the blue skies would flow. She could close her eyes and sit back and be twenty again.
The long silences that often fell between her and Joe now didn’t exist then. They were always at each other in little ways, touching, kissing, talking excitedly. Even if there was a silence between them, it was a different kind of silence. They looked at each other with longing and exchanged thoughts with their eyes.
Perhaps the worst part of being without Solomon a little over a year, she thought, was the silences. The emptiness and the void had quickly slipped into the spaces once filled with Solomon’s laughter and talk, even his tears. This silence spread like a cancer and infected every aspect of their lives. They caught it as they would catch a cold, and the conversations that had once linked Joe and her together dwindled until they practically disappeared. Monosyllabic words replaced whole sentences. Without Solomon to talk about and ask about, they stared at each other like patients in a mental ward, both bankrupt of thoughts, their minds filled with echoes.
It was no wonder, then, that she looked forward with such eagerness to the arrival of Jonathan. It would be so good to hear another voice in the house, to hear someone else’s footsteps besides hers and Joe’s, to be concerned with someone else’s needs and wants, and to drive the silences away. The decision to take in a child about Solomon’s age was not an easy one. They both recognized that there would be pain. She saw that Joe was visibly afraid of it, and she realized he was not just afraid because of her. He was afraid because of himself.
“It’s going to be hard, starting again,” he said. “I don’t know if I can do it. I don’t know if I’ll be good for such a kid. He’s got his own problems to deal with, much less mine, too.”
“We’ll help each other,” she told him. “It won’t be easy, I’m not saying it will be easy, but it will be good for us and for him. You’ll see. Trust me.”
And so they began their search for a foster child. It was her idea that the child be similar in age and appearance to Solomon. Joe wasn’t for that. He said it would be too painful because it would stimulate memories.
“And comparisons. You won’t be able to help making them, and you could be very disappointed. You might even take out your disappointment on the child.”
“I would never do that.”
“Sometimes . . . often, we do things we can’t help,” he said. Even though he said it with a tone of sadness, it also carried a note of warning.
Nevertheless, she persisted until he gave in, and they went to the agency. Mrs. Posner, the woman in charge, was surprisingly sympathetic and apparently saw nothing unusual in their request, not that she had had any like it before. She made a point of saying that. Joe thought she was sympathetic because she was desperate to find homes for foster children under her care, but Martha thought her sympathy was drawn from a well of common feeling, since she was a wife and mother herself.
It took time before they found Jonathan. They were presented with a number of other boys who were about Solomon’s age, but there was always something about those others that made Martha hesitate. Joe didn’t understand her reasons for rejecting one or the other, but he didn’t pursue it. At this point there was a sameness to all teenagers for him.
But as soon as Martha set eyes on Jonathan, she knew she had found the boy she wanted in her house, the boy she wanted to sleep in Solomon’s room and wear Solomon’s clothes and use Solomon’s things. It was instinctive; she couldn’t explain it.
Joe didn’t see what she saw—at least, not at first—but later he admitted he sensed resemblances. Once again he warned her that this might not be good for any of them, but by this time she was committed to the child.
Now she stood by the doorway and awaited Jonathan’s arrival. The agency was delivering him. She was sorry that Joe couldn’t be home when Jonathan first arrived, but he couldn’t get out of his assignments. He was the chief IBM repairman for an area nearly seventy-five miles across, and today he was needed to service some word processors at an insurance agency forty miles away. There was no way to get out of it.
When she complained, he said, “It isn’t the same as being there when you gave birth. I know it would be better if I could be there, but I’ll have plenty of time to get to know him, and he’ll have plenty of time to get to know me.”
She was disappointed that he didn’t have the same intensity about the boy as she had, but then, in a strange way she was happy about it. It was almost as if she didn’t want to share the pleasure the way she had shared the pleasure of Solomon. Sometimes she resented the fact that Joe loved Solomon as much as she did. Maybe that was just the possessiveness of motherhood, she thought, but in any case, it was there, the feeling existed, and she couldn’t help it.
Martha stepped to the side when the agency car drove into their driveway. She was anxious to see Jonathan’s expression when he first set eyes on the house, but she didn’t want to appear obvious about doing it. She made up her mind she wouldn’t be obvious about anything. She remembered Joe’s warnings. In no way would she intimidate this child. She could frighten or discourage him if she did, and that would ruin everything.
She pulled a corner of the curtain back and peered out at the car, confident that neither Mr. Frankel nor Jonathan could see her doing so. Jonathan stopped as soon as he emerged from the vehicle. She saw that he carried a small suitcase. It reminded her of the time Solomon insisted on having his own little suitcase when they took that motor trip to Toronto. How cute he looked carting it about . . . a little man dressed in his sport jacket and slacks. Everyone fell in love with him no matter where they went.
They could fall in love with Jonathan, too, she thought. At fifteen he was already five feet eight inches tall. He had the same thick, light brown hair with a natural wave, and like Solomon, Jonathan had a medium build, but with broad shoulders and a narrow waist. He would grow into a handsome and physically impressive man, just the way Solomon would have if he hadn’t—she couldn’t say it, much less think it.
She saw the way Jonathan squinted at the house, scrutinizing it carefully, almost scientifically analyzing, weighing, judging. Solomon had been just as exacting. Unlike most young people his age, he was rarely impulsive. Whenever he was asked a question of any importance, she could practically see his mind working. In school he was the play maker for the junior varsity basketball team. The coach told her Solomon was unique.
“He has a maturity about him. He doesn’t lose his cool out there; he holds the others together and forces them to get back into position.”
She saw what he meant when she went to the games with Joe and sat quietly in the stands. Other parents were boisterous and active, but she and Joe sat quietly observing and admiring Solomon for his grace and his skill, and yes, his poise. Occasionally, he would look up at her in the stands, and she would nod and smile.
Maybe Jonathan will go out for the team, she thought. He should get involved in the extracu
rricular activities. It’s the fastest way to make friends.
She saw Mr. Frankel come around to Jonathan and offer to take his suitcase or his small carry-on bag. He reached out for one of them, but Jonathan simply glared. Oh, how Solomon could do that, she thought. He could drive people away with a cold, piercing look. He didn’t need words.
She opened the door as the two of them came up the walkway.
“You found us,” she said. The detailed directions she and Joe had given to Mr. Frankel left him concerned. He had a bad habit of getting lost on back country roads, he told them. He said it was easier for him to find his way around Brooklyn.
“The road signs up here are so small, and some roads have homemade signs painted on slabs of wood,” he explained.
“Thanks to Jonathan,” he replied, stepping forward to shake her hand, “we found it.” Jonathan came forward, expressionless. “I nearly made the wrong turn twice, and twice he stopped me. It was almost as if he had been here before,” Frankel said.
Martha smiled. Her gaze met Jonathan’s and for a long moment, they simply stared at each other. The silence embarrassed Sam Frankel. It made him feel like an intruder at a dramatic homecoming.
Frankel knew that Martha and Joe Stern had had a very good first meeting with Jonathan. Although Jonathan wasn’t an overtly difficult child, there was something about his personality and his manner that made all his previous foster parents nervous and uncomfortable. His most recent pair of parents admitted to locking their bedroom door at night. Obviously, that couldn’t go on.
Frankel thought he knew what they meant. He and Jonathan had barely exchanged a dozen words during the entire trip up here, yet he felt a tension the whole time. It wasn’t something easily explainable. No adult liked to admit to being afraid of a child, but after spending only a short time with Jonathan, he could understand why the boy’s most recent foster parents locked their bedroom door at night.
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