Hear the Children Calling

by Clare McNally

  Kate frowned at him, the facial gesture sending searing pain through her head. She felt as if her bed were floating on water, rising up and down on slowly moving waves. The lights were too bright in here, and Danny’s voice was too loud. No, it wasn’t loud enough. She couldn’t hear him at all.

  What’s happening to me?

  “It’s the medicine, Kate,” Danny said, trying to reassure her. “They gave you some kind of sedative. The doctor said it’d take hours to wear off, so why don’t you close your eyes and go back to sleep?”

  “But my children,” Kate protested. She tried to lift her head from her pillow, but it flopped back down again as if someone had tied a brick to the back of her skull. So tired . . .

  “Go to sleep, Kate,” Danny said.

  She closed her eyes and almost instantly began to breathe in the even, slow way of sleep.

  Danny waited with her for a few moments, waited to be sure she was really resting and not about to toss around in the throes of another nightmare. It had pained him to hear her calling out the names of their children. His fists had clenched at the thought of Chris and Joey, downstairs in pediatrics, their condition critical.

  Someone was going to pay for hurting them.

  But thank God they’re alive.

  Who had said that? he wondered. He couldn’t quite remember. The past hours had been chaotic, one moment overlapping another. He vaguely recalled phoning for help, Kate screaming in the background and his mother-in-law numbly trying to lift the boys from the tub. Danny couldn’t remember the EMTs arriving, but he could still hear one of them saying with loud relief, “I’ve got a pulse.”

  Who had had a pulse? Chris? Joey?

  Were his boys going to make it, or were those bastards going to rob him of his sons, too?

  No! He’d never let that happen.

  He felt a soft tap on his shoulder and turned to see the nurse.

  “Why don’t you go on now, Mr. Emerson?” she asked in her soft Irish brogue. “Perhaps you’ll be wantin’ to see the boys again? Mrs. Emerson will sleep just fine now, I’m sure.”

  “You’ll call me if there’s any trouble.”

  “You know that, sir,” the nurse said.

  Danny got up and walked from the room, biting his lip. This was all his fault, of course. His unwitting part in Laura’s kidnapping—for he now believed that is what had happened—had never even occurred to him until he remembered the name of the place where Kate said Laura was being held: LaMane Center. It had taken a few minutes, but when he realized the implications of that name, a cold chill gripped his heart. LaMane Pharmaceuticals made a fertility drug called Neolamane. Kate’s inability to have children had prompted Danny to obtain the drug for her from some friends. Ronald Preminger had insisted it was perfectly safe, and Danny was ready to believe him. Preminger was studying to be a doctor, after all, and Neolamane was available on the market with a prescription.

  Riding down the elevator to Pediatrics, Danny was taken back to the day Ronald Preminger had handed him the small brown vial.

  “Are you sure this stuff is safe, Ron?” Danny had asked. “I wouldn’t want to do anything to hurt Kate.”

  “It wouldn’t be on the market if it wasn’t safe, Dan,” Ron had insisted. “Look, I went to a lot of trouble to get this. If anyone found out, I’d be thrown out of med school. I’m doing you a real big favor here, Emerson. So, do you want it?”

  Danny had stood chewing his lips, thinking of Kate. They’d been married a little over a year and had been trying to have a baby for almost as long. Each time Kate had her period, she’d walk around the house in tears. He couldn’t see her go on like that. Her doctor insisted there was nothing to worry about, that they hadn’t been trying long enough. But Danny wanted a baby as much as Kate did, and he had no intention of waiting until some specialist decided they were ready for fertility drugs. He’d read about Neolamane and had started asking questions. Eventually, he met the brother of one of his former classmates, Bob Preminger. Ron was in med school, serving his internship. A brief phone conversation resulted in this clandestine meeting, sitting in a restaurant in Ann Arbor.

  Preminger sat tapping his spoon against his cup, impatient.

  “All right,” Danny breathed. “If it’s available as a prescription, it must be safe.”

  He’d taken the drug home and he’d discussed it with Kate, and she’d agreed to try it. Miraculously, her periods stopped. Her doctor confirmed it: she was pregnant! Kate’s joy overshadowed the strange stories Danny was beginning to hear about Neolamane, stories of minor deformities. He prayed and prayed the baby would be all right. Laura was perfect when she was born.

  It wasn’t until she started walking that he realized she wasn’t really all right. Just as Kate had reminded him soon after Laura began appearing to her, the child had had the gift of precognition. She would sit babbling in her crib and would look up at Danny with big brown eyes and say, “I tell Grandma, ‘Turn off stove!’”

  Danny would call his mother and she’d tell him she almost burned a pot of potatoes. There were so many incidents like that, showing Laura’s unique talents. Someone else knew of them. Danny wondered who had followed them here all the way from Michigan just to watch Laura grow? Someone who knew the effects of the drug, of course. He’d tried getting through to Ron Preminger, with no luck. Wherever the bastard was, he knew what had happened to Laura.

  Instead of stopping in Pediatrics, Danny went down to the main floor and out to his car. He had to find out just where the LaMane Center was. As soon as he was certain where Laura was, he would hop on a plane and go to her. Maybe those people had been smart enough to kidnap a three-year-old girl and make her parents believe she was dead. But they weren’t smart enough to stop her father from getting her back again.

  32

  BETH KNEW THE POLICE WERE COMING LONG BEFORE Natalie heard the sirens. She saw the squad car in her mind, red light splashing over the stony lawns and brick facades of adobe-style houses. And she knew there was trouble, because she had seen Peter running in the darkness, a look of terror on his face. She’d tried calling out to him, but he hadn’t heard her.

  It wasn’t until she heard the doorbell ring that Beth crawled out from under her grandmother’s quilt and walked barefoot to her bedroom door. She heard mumbled voices, sensed questions being asked. Her mother’s screams started her running toward the front door.

  In the foyer, a red-haired policeman caught her by the arm. His pale-green eyes and the bright scar that ran along his hairline frightened the little girl. But his voice was soothing as he spoke to her. Beth gazed out the open front door, watching her mother being helped into a police car. Why hadn’t her mother waited for her? What had happened?

  “We’re taking your mother to the hospital,” the redheaded cop said. “I’m afraid there’s been an accident and your father was badly hurt. You can come with me, and I’ll take you to see him.”

  Basic childish instinct, having nothing to do with Beth’s unusual talents, set off a warning bell in her mind. But before she could protest, he led her out the door to his own car. They followed the squad car that held her mother for several miles. But at the exit to the highway, the car Beth was in swerved off in a different direction.

  “Where are we going?” Beth demanded.

  “To see your father,” the cop insisted.

  “We are not. My mother’s not in front of us.”

  The reflection of his eyes thinned as he looked up at the rearview mirror. Beth leaned back in her seat, her heart pounding. Something was wrong here . . .

  Softly, in a voice almost too small to hear, she said, “You’re taking me to Peter, aren’t you?”

  The “cop” shook his head. “No, kid. You are going to bring Peter back to us.”

  33

  IN THE WAITING ROOM JUST OUTSIDE THE IC UNIT OF San Felipe Hospital, Lou Vermont paced the floor. He had been waiting for an eternity for permission to speak with Lillian Blair, the only person who mi
ght be able to give him a clue as to what happened back at the airport terminal. After checking the ID of the victims, he sent a squad car to the Blair residence, only to find it empty.

  “But something doesn’t seem right, sir,” the young officer told him over the telephone. “There’s food left out on the table, as if they’d been eating, and the television is still on. And none of the doors was locked.”

  Lou stopped at the window and peered through the vertical blinds at the nearby mountains. It seemed that Oscar, Lillian, and their son-in-law, Stuart, had left in a hurry for the airport. Someone had confronted them there, murdering Stuart Morse and the shop-owner, causing Oscar Blair to have a heart attack and sending his wife into such a state of shock that her doctor refused to let the cop talk to her.

  Someone . . .

  Lou pounded at the window, making the blinds clap against one another. He heard a heavy sigh and turned to see another woman waiting, her eyes brimming with tears. Lou whispered an apology, and the woman returned her gaze to the door, lost in her own private worries. Lou tried to keep his emotions under control, arguing with himself in the silence of his mind.

  Just someone? The shop had looked as if a pack of wild dogs had gone at it. The doctor who arrived first said that the marks in the owner’s neck were like snake bites, but that there was no trace of venom. Of course not! Who the hell would keep a poisonous snake in a public shop?

  But, then, who the hell would bisect a man at the waist as cleanly and efficiently as if a giant scalpel had been used? It was almost as if the window itself had sliced through him. But the window was intact except for the small area where the man had jutted through.

  Now, that was another oddity: if a man jumped through a plate-glass window, wouldn’t it make sense that his face and arms and upper body would be cut to pieces? Other than the hideous mess of his waist, there wasn’t a mark on him.

  Grunting, Lou hurried through the open door to the nurses’ station. “Is Mrs. Blair available yet?” he demanded.

  “Dr. Simeone said—”

  “I know what she said,” Lou cried. “Don’t you people realize there’s a murderer on the loose?”

  The nurse’s eyes thinned. “Our immediate concern is the health of our patients,” she said. “Mrs. Blair was in shock when she came in, and I doubt—”

  “It’s all right, Karen,” a woman’s voice said.

  Devon Simeone walked toward the nurses’ station, carrying a silver clipboard. She was barely a head taller than the top of the counter, though her fluffy brown hair added two inches to her height. Lou thought she looked about seventeen years old. But when she turned to him, there was such an air of authority about her that he backed up a step.

  “Mrs. Blair wants to speak with you,” Dr. Simeone said in a tone that indicated she thought better of the idea. “But I warn you, she’s very agitated, and the slightest upset could be very detrimental. You have five minutes, Officer Vermont.”

  “Thanks,” Lou said. He hurried through the heavy swinging doors to Lillian Blair’s room. She was sitting up in bed, an IV running from her wrist, looking as pale as someone who’d been sick for months. Lou realized she must have seen everything, watched her son-in-law die and her husband’s collapse. He breathed deeply to stay his own eagerness to pursue the matter and approached her as gently as he could.

  “Mrs. Blair, I’m Officer Lou Vermont.”

  “I remember you,” Lillian said, her voice small.

  “Mrs. Blair . . .” He took the liberty of sitting on the edge of her bed, taking her hand. There was no nurse in here to scowl at him and his germs, and he had found in his experience that a tactile approach often worked wonders. “Can you tell me what happened? Who hurt you?”

  Lillian squeezed his hand. “I—I don’t know.”

  “Were you going somewhere?” Lou asked. “Is that why you were at the airport?”

  “No,” Lillian said softly. “We were—were trying to remember something.”

  “What was that?”

  Lillian was silent for a long time, staring up at the IV bag that dripped into her vein. What had she been trying to remember? She had gone to the airport with Oscar and Stuart because Stuart wanted her to recall something that had happened there . . .

  When?

  A picture of her grandson flashed in her mind, Peter Morse at age three.

  “I know,” she said. “I was retracing steps I took six years ago when I brought my grandson to the same gift shop.”

  She explained how Peter had come to visit, accompanied by his schoolteacher.

  “But they never made it home,” she said. “The plane crashed. Oscar and I couldn’t clearly remember putting Peter on the airplane, so Stuart thinks something happened to him. He believes Peter never got on that plane. Beth thinks so, too.”

  Lou shook his head, befuddled.

  “You’ve got me, Mrs. Blair,” he said. “Who’s Beth? Maybe you’d better start at the beginning.”

  But the mention of her granddaughter’s name had resurrected some of the feisty Lillian Blair that Lou had never met. She jerked her hand away from him and met his gaze with a wild expression.

  “Beth,” she cried. “My granddaughter. They’ll be after her, too. And her mother, my daughter, Natalie. We left them home when we went to the airport. You’ve got to get to the house. You’ve got to protect them. If those horrible people get—”

  “What people?” Lou interrupted.

  “I don’t know who they are,” Lillian wailed. “But Stuart said they were from that place called the LaMane Center. They’re evil, Officer. They’ll murder my grandchildren. You have to stop them.”

  Her words had risen to a shrill cry, bringing Devon Simeone and a nurse running. Lou jumped away from the bed and watched as they administered a sedative, trying to help the frantic woman calm down. Dr. Simeone dismissed him with a hard glance, but Lou had not planned to stay anyway.

  Something had happened at the Blair house. Lou hurried down to his squad car and got on the radio to headquarters. They not only had a double murder on their hands, but unless he found that woman and child there would be two more victims.

  34

  JILL WANTED TO DRIVE UP TO THE GATES OF THE LaMane Center, to barge through them and demand the return of her son. But her training as a scientist slowed her down, making her follow every lead. After reading the paper given to her by Professor Juárez, she understood fully what Jeffrey’s colleagues had wanted from her son. Those late-night meetings, the times he had insisted Ryan join his “friends” at their club, his almost-fanatical concern about Ryan’s health—they were all indicative of the sick plans Jeff had for their baby boy.

  Jill realized that she had been an unwitting human guinea pig, a woman so desperate to have a baby that she’d agreed to try a drug newly introduced to the market. Jill knew that all drugs had years of testing behind them before they appeared at the prescription level, and she had trusted her ob/gyn. In truth, Neolamane had not given her any troubles during pregnancy. Everything was normal, right up to the birth. And then, from the time Ryan was able to crawl, he began to show signs of being different.

  Jill could remember him scooting over to the front door every evening, a few minutes before Jeff’s car turned the corner to their home. It was as if the baby had a built-in clock and knew when his father was going to arrive. Once Jeff had told a friend a joke, and the baby had laughed out loud before the grown-ups did, as if he understood. Then there was the extraordinary part—the stuffed animals that seemed to come to life, dolls Ryan had made dance by themselves, and a leather puppy dog with a sewn mouth who began to bark. Ryan had had the ability to bring inanimate objects to life.

  And Neolamane had given him the power.

  Jill ran over the words of the medical report as she drove back toward the mountains. It hadn’t said a word about psychic abilities, but it did lambast LaMane for not pulling the drug off the market at the very first signs of trouble. The trouble these doctors were
talking about was physical—minor birth defects like sixth and seventh toes, bones already fused in adult formations, missing eyebrows. Nothing life-threatening, but the writers had said continued use of Neolamane might very well lead to other, more tragic incidents. The article had been written eleven years ago, and according to further research, the drug had been removed from pharmacists’ shelves a year later. Which meant that Jeffrey had given her an illegal drug to help her conceive.

  Jill remembered the cold way Jeff had behaved toward her after Ryan’s birth. He’d doted on the child, panicking at the slightest sniffle, insisting Jill was either nursing too little or too much. Many nights, he was off at his club, having secret meetings with his colleagues. Jill knew what the bastards had been up to, now. They’d realized that, in some cases, Neolamane affected the brain and caused it to develop superpowers. That’s why they’d taken Ryan away, killing Jeff in the process. They’d wanted to study him, like some specimen under a microscope.

  And from the size of the LaMane Center, Jill was certain there were many other children in the same predicament.

  Jill glanced into her rearview mirror, planning to change lanes. There was a car behind her, and when she crossed over the avenue, it followed her. Her fingers tightened around the steering wheel and her foot depressed the accelerator. That man was following her again.

  She exited the main highway. The car behind her followed. At the first opportunity, Jill pulled to the side of the road and pretended to be busy with a map. The car passed her, and she sighed with relief. If the car was following her, the driver didn’t have the nerve to make himself obvious by stopping when she did. If she tried, she could lose him again and make it safely back to the mountains without her lookout being discovered.

  But as soon as she’d driven two blocks, the same car turned the corner and began following her again from about a half-block distance. Realizing there was no use in driving up to the Sandias now, she looked around for a way out. Then she saw a sign that read OLD TOWN. She decided she’d park her car, pretend to browse through a few stores, and leave the major tourist attraction of Albuquerque as soon as she felt it was safe.