by John Saul
“Let me put it this way. I have to say that, yes, it is possible for Sarah to have killed all three of the missing children. I say that not because I think she did, but because at the moment we don’t have any alternatives to choose from. If I were you I’d keep searching. If this snow lasts through the winter, I’d continue looking in the spring. Somewhere out there is the rest of that body, and maybe two more bodies besides. And I certainly don’t think that you can charge Sarah with anything on the basis of one arm. I admit, it’s ugly. I admit, at the moment we don’t have much else to think. But you should also be aware that if you try to claim that Sarah is responsible for the dismembering of one chlid and the disappearance of two others, nothing is going to happen. Any psychiatrist you find will tell you the same thing I will. Sarah is not responsible for what she does. She is almost hopelessly schizophrenic. I say almost because with her kind of disorder there is always a chance that she’ll come out of it. But even if she does, there’s no guarantee that she’ll be able to tell you what happened. She probably won’t remember. Frankly, if I were you I’d keep the case open.”
“And what about Sarah?” Ray Norton said uneasily, “What if she is responsible?”
“I don’t think there’s too much question about Sarah’s future. I’m sure that after the last couple of days the Congers will agree that it’s time she was institutionalized. It’ll be the best thing for her, and the best for them. They can’t go on living as they have been.” He looked to Jack, and Jack nodded his agreement.
“When?” Jack said.
Dr. Belter thought it over. “Tonight, I think. I don’t see any reason why your wife should have to go through it. It isn’t easy to see your child leave your house for the last time. And it will be better for Sarah, too. I can take her to White Oaks for tonight, and we can talk tomorrow about the best place for her.”
Jack nodded mutely. He wondered why he didn’t feel anything, but he didn’t.
“I’m sorry,” Ray Norton said. They had moved into the hall, and Ray was standing uncomfortably by the front door, wanting to get away. “If there’s anything I can do …” His voice trailed off as Jack shook his head.
“Thanks, Ray,” he said. “I don’t know. I guess I’m feeling numb.”
Jack started up the stairs to pack a suitcase for Sarah, and Ray Norton put his hand on the front door.
“Wait a moment, please,” Dr. Belter said softly to the police chief.
Norton’s hand dropped from the doorknob, but he didn’t meet the psychiatrist’s eyes. For the last hour he had heard a lot of things he hadn’t wanted to hear, and he was embarrassed. He was acutely aware that there was such a thing as knowing too much about your friends, and he had a distinct feeling he was about to hear even more. He was right. Dr. Belter led him back to the study and quickly filled him in on every detail of the Conger cases, both Sarah’s and Jack’s.
When the doctor was finished Ray Norton stared at him, unable to conceal the animosity he was feeling toward the man.
“Just exactly why are you telling me all this?” he asked. “It seems to me that what you’re doing is unethical at best and probably illegal at worst.”
Dr. Belter stared at the fire in front of him. He was very much aware that what Norton was saying was true. What he was doing was both unethical and illegal, but he had thought it over carefully before deciding to go ahead. And now it was too late—he had already begun.
“You’re right, of course,” he said uncomfortably. “And believe me, if I thought there was any other way of going at this thing I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing right now.”
“I don’t see what you hope to accomplish,” Norton said.
“You mean you don’t want to see.” Belter’s reproach was mild. “What I’m suggesting,” he said, his voice hardening, “since you want me to spell it out, is that I think there’s a distinct possibility that Jack Conger might be involved in all this mess.”
“I don’t see how,” Norton observed. “You yourself admit that he was in your office when at least one and possibly two of the disappearances took place.”
“That’s not quite true. We don’t actually know when the disappearances took place. All we know, really, is when and where the children were last seen. And, as it happens, they were all seen on or near the Conger property. As for when they actually met with … whatever it is they met with, we don’t know, do we?”
Norton reluctantly agreed. “Just what are you proposing? That I charge Jack Conger with killing three children? Granted, I suppose we could use your files to establish a record of previous assault, but where does that get us? Without any bodies, and with you yourself acting as a witness for an alibi, there isn’t a chance in the world of making it stick.”
“And, of course,” the doctor added, “you don’t think he had anything to do with it.”
“No,” Norton said flatly. “I don’t.”
Dr. Belter leaned back in his chair and folded his hands across his stomach. “Then what do you propose to do?”
“Nothing,” Norton said. “Come spring, I’ll have those woods searched again, and I’ll have a good search made for that cave. Other than that, I propose to see what happens next If any more children disappear, I’ll reassess the situation. But if you want my opinion, I think it’s over with.”
“You really think Sarah did it all?” the psychiatrist asked in disbelief.
Norton nodded. “I’m no shrink, but for my money she did it. And I’ll stick to that opinion till I have something more solid to go on. The word is already all over town that Sarah Conger went berserk—those aren’t my words, but they’re the ones that will be used—and she’s going to be put away. And in a town like Port Arbello a story like that counts for a lot. The town will calm down, and when the word gets out that Sarah’s been taken wherever you take her it’ll calm down even more. I don’t propose to stir it all up again, and I don’t propose to have the whole town talking about something that happened to Jack Conger a year ago. I assume I can count on you not to tell anyone else what you’ve told me?”
“That goes without saying,” Belter said stiffly. “But do me a favor, will you? Talk to Jack Conger. Don’t grill him, just talk to him. You don’t even have to do it officially.”
“Why?” Norton demanded.
Belter smiled thinly. “Just to prod him. You might be absolutely right—he may have nothing to do with all this. But then again, he might. In any case, my professional opinion is that he’s pretty near the end of his rope emotionally. If you let him know that you’re aware of that, it might make him nervous. Nervous enough to make himself get some help before something happens that he is mixed up in.”
“I’ll think about it,” Norton said noncommittally. “If there’s nothing else, I have a lot of work to do.” He stood up, and the two men shook hands formally and coldly. When the police chief had left the house Dr. Belter thought for a while about the two folders in his office and the look on the policeman’s face as he’d left. Norton, he knew, would not be coming for the files. And he wouldn’t press the matter himself. Tomorrow he would seal Jack Conger’s folder and put it away in the dead files, the special cabinet he kept for the records of patients he didn’t think he’d be seeing again.
Suddenly weary, he turned and went upstairs to help Jack, who was just finishing with the packing. He looked as though he’d been crying.
“I’ll give her a shot,” Dr. Belter said, “and she won’t even wake up. You can be at school tomorrow morning if you like. It might make things easier. For you and your wife, if not for her. Frankly, I doubt she’ll even be aware of what’s happening. I’m sorry, but I imagine all this will make things worse for her.” Then he smiled, seeing the expression on Jack’s face. “Don’t forget,” he went on, “we don’t really know what goes on in the mind of a child like Sarah. Often I suspect that a child’s schizophrenia is much harder on the family than it is on the child. A person’s mind generally takes him where he wants to go. Sarah
will be all right. Maybe not by your standards, or by mine, but she’s living where she wants to live. All we can do, really, is wish her well.”
“But what’s going to happen to her?” Jack asked dazedly. He picked up his child and began carrying her downstairs. He knew it would be the last time.
Dr. Belter waited until they had reached the front door before he answered Jack’s question.
“It’s hard to say,” he murmured at last “With Sarah, only time will tell what’s going to happen. All I can advise you to do is go on with your life. There’s literally nothing you can do for Sarah.” At the look of pain in Jack’s eyes, he relented. “I didn’t say forget about her. By all means go on loving her. But it’s time to stop living your lives around her. You and your wife and Elizabeth are still a family, you know.”
Jack wondered how much of a family they would ever be again.
“If I can be any help to you, please let me know,” Belter went on. “It isn’t the end of the world, you know. It’s just been a very bad year. For you, and everyone else in Port Arbello. But it’s over now.” He held out his arms to receive the sleeping child.
Jack looked once more into the face of his daughter, and kissed her gently.
“I love you,” he whispered. “I always have. I’m so sorry, my baby. So very sorry.”
Then he placed his child in the doctor’s aims, and Sarah Conger was taken away from the house on Conger’s Point. As he watched the car taking his daughter from her home, Jack Conger wondered if it would, indeed, be all over now. He hoped so.
He stood alone in the driving snow and watched the taillights disappear. He raised one hand in a final salute.
“Sarah,” he whispered. And then again: “Sarah …”
25
A week passed, then two. Port Arbello began to return to normal, though it was a slightly different normal. Most of the children returned to walking to school, but some of them kept on riding. “What happened once could happen again,” some of the parents were saying.
Three days after Sarah walked out of the woods, Carl and Barbara Stevens put their house on the market. Rose Conger was surprised when she got the listing for it, and turned it down. She explained that she was taking some time off to recuperate, but that was only part of the truth. The rest of it was that she couldn’t face seeing Barbara Stevens again.
Marilyn Burton continued to operate her dress shop, and people noticed that she was beginning to talk to herself. For a while many of the women in Port Arbello made an effort to drop in on her as often as possible, but it didn’t seem to do any good. After a while they stopped dropping in, and if Marilyn Burton’s habit became worse, no one knew about it.
Martin Forager did his best to keep the talk alive, but as the days dragged on and nothing else happened, people began to tell him to let it be; they’d just as soon forget. He couldn’t, of course, and few nights passed without Marty Forager suddenly standing up in the tavern and drunkenly demanding that someone find out what really did happen to his daughter. After a while people stopped paying attention.
Jimmy Tyler’s parents acted as if nothing had happened. They kept his room just as it had been on the day he disappeared, and always set a place for him at the table. Mrs. Tyler told everyone that she expected Jimmy home any day now, and that the waiting was hard. But she also insisted that she was holding up well under it and it would all be over soon, when Jimmy came home. The people of Port Arbello clucked sympathetically, but shook their heads when Mrs. Tyler wasn’t around. They saw another Port Arbello legend in the making.
For Jack and Rose Conger, the weeks after Sarah left their home were difficult Rose stayed in the house almost all the time; after the second week she telephoned the Port Arbello Realty Company to tell them she would not be back. They were not surprised; rather, they were relieved. They had been trying to figure out the most diplomatic way of telling her that her services would no longo: be necessary, that Conger was no longer a name to be proud of in Port Arbello.
Jack Conger couldn’t stay at home. He had a paper to run, and he had to try to act as if nothing were wrong. It was impossible, of course, and he imagined that people were looking at him strangely even when they weren’t. He found that he was spending most of his time barricaded in his office, talking to no one but Sylvia Bannister.
Sylvia had come into his office on his first day back at the Port Arbello Courier and had closed the door firmly behind her.
“Are you going to be all right?” she had asked him without preamble.
“That depends on what you call all right,” he had said. “I intend to go on living, and go on working, if that’s what you mean.”
“I suppose that’s what I meant,” Sylvia had said. Then she had left his office as abruptly as she had entered it.
The Congers told Elizabeth that her sister had finally had to be put in an institution, and she had accepted it without further explanation. She had not asked any questions about the day Sarah had come out of the woods, and while they thought it was a little odd, they accepted it gratefully. Neither Jack nor Rose wished to discuss that day, and they counted themselves lucky that Elizabeth, too, seemed to want to forget it.
In early November, about a month after Sarah was sent to the Ocean Crest Institute, Jack and Rose Conger were sitting in the small study at the back of the house. Jack was reading; Rose was trying to read. Without knocking, Elizabeth came into the room and sat down on the sofa beside her mother. When Rose looked up to see what she wanted, Elizabeth was staring at the portrait of the young girl that hung above the mantel. Rose glanced up at the picture.
“Sometimes it’s hard to remember that she isn’t you,” Rose mused. Elizabeth looked at her mother sharply.
“Well, she isn’t,” Elizabeth said petulantly. “I don’t think she looks anything like me at all.”
Jack set his book aside and smiled at his daughter. “You wouldn’t have said that two years ago, or three. Of course, you’re older than she was when that picture was painted, but when you were that age you looked exactly like her.”
“I’m not like her,” Elizabeth said flatly.
“Well, no one said you are, dear,” Rose said. “All your father or anyone else ever said was that you looked like her.”
“I don’t want to look like her,” Elizabeth said, her face growing slightly red with anger. “She’s an awful person, and I don’t want anything to do with her. I wish you’d take the picture down.”
“Take it down?” Rose said, puzzled. “Why on earth should we take it down?” She examined it once more, trying to see what her daughter could dislike in it. She could see nothing.
“Because I want you to,” Elizabeth said. “I think it should go back in the attic, where you found it.”
“I don’t see any reason to put it away,” Jack said. “I should think you’d be proud of it. Not every girl has a portrait like that of herself.”
“It isn’t me,” Elizabeth insisted, her anger swelling. Her parents glanced at each other nervously.
“Well,” Jack said, hesitating, “if it means that much to you—”
“It does,” Elizabeth declared. “I never want to see that picture again. I hate it.” She paused and glared at the picture, at the little girl who looked so much like Elizabeth smiling down at her. “I hate you!” Elizabeth suddenly shouted at the picture. Then she ran from the study, and a moment later her parents heard her pounding up the stairs to her room. They looked at each other again, and there was worry in their eyes.
“What do you suppose brought that on?” Jack said.
Rose thought about it a moment, and when she spoke it was in a manner of thinking out loud.
“She seems to be changing lately. Have you noticed it? She isn’t like she used to be. She’s starting to get a little sloppy. Just little things. And she’s started arguing with me. It used to be that if I asked her to do something she either did it immediately or it was already done. Lately she’s started arguing with me, or simpl
y not doing what I ask her to do. And she fiat out refused to do something for Mrs. Goodrich the other day. You should have heard Mrs. Goodrich!”
Jack chuckled. “I have heard Mrs. Goodrich. Thirty years ago I flatly refused to do something she told me to do. I heard her then, and it was the first and last time I ever refused to do anything she asked me to do.”
“I suspect it’ll be the last time for Elizabeth, too.” Rose smiled. Then her smile faded, and her voice grew serious again.
“But, really, Jack, haven’t you noticed it too? Or is it just my imagination?” Rose bit at her lower lip anxiously. “I’m afraid my imagination works overtime these days.”
Jack thought it over and realized that Rose was right Elizabeth had been changing, but it wasn’t anything serious, as far as he could see. Elizabeth, in his opinion, was simply beginning to act like any other thirteen-year-old girl.
“I wouldn’t worry about it if I were you. After all, she’s been through just as much as we have, and her life’s changed just as much as ours. We can’t expect her to be the same as she always was. You’re not and I’m not—why should she be?”
“I don’t know, really,” Rose said thoughtfully. “I’m not sure I’m even worried. In a way, it’s kind of a relief. She was so perfect, she sometimes made me feel incompetent I could never handle Sarah the way she could.”
Jack seemed to stiffen, and Rose realized that it was the first time either of them had mentioned Sarah in a month. They hadn’t been to visit her yet; it was almost as if they were trying to pretend that she hadn’t existed. But she had.
The next day they drove to Ocean Crest, forty miles south of Port Arbello. It was close enough to make visiting Sarah easy, but far enough away so that Port Arbello would be able to feel safe. Sarah would be there for a very long time.
It was a difficult visit. The child sat in front of them, her enormous brown eyes fixed on a spot somewhere in space, somewhere Rose and Jack could not go.
