With

by Donald Harington

  Later, she asked Hal Knight, “Do you think she heard me?”

  He nodded his head. “She heard you,” he said. “I know, as I’ve never known anything, that she is still alive.”

  “But what if that creep has her somewhere where there’s no television?”

  “That’s possible,” he admitted. “But still she heard you.”

  Even with all the help she had from dear Agent Knight, and even though she had stopped crying, Karen felt helpless, and there was nothing she could say to her journal which would make her feel there was anything more she could do. What she needed was a book on the subject. Unfortunately Harrison didn’t have a good bookstore. She phoned the library and spoke to the librarian. “Would you happen to have any books with a title like What to Do If Your Child Is Missing?”

  “Is this Karen Kerr?” the librarian asked, and said she would check the card catalog and phone her back. Sometime later she phoned back to say that she’d even contacted larger libraries in Fayetteville and Little Rock, but there simply wasn’t any such book. There were books on child victims of sexual offenses, and books on pedophilia, and books on abduction, but there were no manuals advising heartbroken mothers of missing kids on how to deal with their problems and their heartbreak.

  The librarian said she was sorry, and then she said, “Have you considered trying a psychic? Don’t laugh. I know a woman over at Batavia who is truly incredible. It’s worth a shot.” And she gave Karen the name and phone number.

  Karen asked Agent Knight what he thought of the idea of using a psychic. She expected him to laugh but he didn’t. And she hoped he understood: she didn’t need a psychic to deal with her psychological problems. She needed a psychic to help her locate Robin.

  “It’s been known to pay off,” Hal said. “Let’s be sure the person won’t try to gouge you.” And he offered to drive her over to Batavia to interview the woman. The woman gave her directions over the phone and told her to bring something that had been special to Robin. Karen took Paddington.

  “I certainly know who you are,” the woman said, when they arrived. “You’re becoming famous, and my heart goes out to you. Now y’all have a seat and I’ll tell you my terms.” The woman would require a down payment of “only” fifty dollars, but if the child was found as a result of any information given, the total fee was five hundred dollars. Karen was ready to leave, but Agent Knight said he’d gladly fork up the down payment out of his own pocket, and he did.

  The woman proceeded to do her “reading.” She took Paddington and hugged the bear and sat with it on the sofa with her eyes closed, for a very long time. Karen and Hal waited and Karen resisted the urge to drum her fingers on the table, as Robin would have done. But she thought of Robin and kept Robin fixed in her thoughts while the woman was doing her “reading.”

  The woman’s eyes suddenly snapped open and the woman smiled broadly. “She’s alive,” she said.

  Karen’s heart ought to have leapt up but she remained emotionless. She waited and heard the rest of it: a man was keeping Robin in captivity, not tied up or anything but free to move about as she wished, although she couldn’t run away because the place where they were was so far off in the wilderness that the child could never find her way out of there.

  “Which wilderness?” Hal wanted to know. “There’s wilderness all over the Ozarks.”

  “I’m sorry,” the woman said. “I can’t pinpoint it. It’s remote but it’s bright. It’s a very bright place surrounded by deep forests. There’s an old farmhouse. There are chickens all about. There is a dog.”

  “Can you tell what the man looks like?” Karen asked, wishing she’d brought a picture of Leo to show to the woman.

  “He’s not a young man,” the woman said. “He’s coarse. He’s misguided. He’s not very bright.”

  And that was all she could do for them. But she was so sincere in her belief that Robin was still alive that Karen’s own belief was reinforced. One of the thoughtless cops had told her that the chances of finding the girl alive this late were “practically nil;” he’d quoted to her some statistic that nine out of ten girls abducted for sexual purposes, if they are found at all, are usually dead.

  So she had a glimmer of hope, and life returned to Karen. Her landlord appeared on the Saturday he usually collected the rent and told her that a certain FBI agent had persuaded him to let her live rent-free until Robin was found. The Harrison Rotary and Lion’s Clubs had taken up a donation to offer a reward for Robin’s return. In celebration, Hal invited her to have dinner with him. It was only Western Sizzlin’ but eating out is eating out, and it was her first date in nine years.

  And then Leo returned. The cops spotted his pickup and pulled him over. On the seat beside him he had a large roll of U.S. Topographic Survey Maps in a scale of 1:24000 for all of Northwest Arkansas and Southwest Missouri. Questioning him, the police relayed his answers to Agent Knight, who told Karen. Leo was quoted as having said, “What if I was one of these here child molesters? Where would I take her? Why, sure as shootin I’d take her to an abandoned farmhouse at the end of a dead-end road.”

  So all this time, with the help of those detailed topographic maps, Leo had been trying to locate each and every abandoned farmhouse in the Ozarks that was at a dead-end road. But his search, so far, had been a dead-end. He still had hundreds of other roads to explore, if only they would let him go.

  Chapter sixteen

  The first thing he did when he woke up, before he woke her, was to feel the davenport beneath them to see if she had peed on it. But she hadn’t. That was good news. It had been such a terrible storm he’d come mighty nigh to wetting the bed hisself.

  The bad news was that he still hadn’t been able to get any lead in his pencil. Even now, with her still sound asleep against him, her face against his chest sweeter than ever, he couldn’t get it up. He was just as out of commission as he had been ever since he’d first taken her. He’d thought at first it could just be from the same kind of anxiousness that had made him into what Arlene had called a premature ejaculator. But this kind of anxiousness, if that’s what it truly was, was caused by something else. Did he really feel guilty or evil? No, he sure didn’t. Did he feel sorry for the poor girl? No, there wasn’t no reason whatsoever that he should feel any such thing, because he was doing everything in his power to create a new home and a new kind of life for her to make her happy and keep her happy forevermore.

  Maybe it wasn’t any kind of anxiousness but just plain old overwork. It was true he had been working awfully hard lately, getting the garden ready and tidying up the place, and there was a good chance he just didn’t have any energy left over for thoughts of getting it on. Yeah, maybe that was it. The least little thing he did lately left him plumb tuckered out. Maybe he needed a rest before he’d be able to stand up stiff and salute again.

  He’d hoped that when she took off all her clothes at the beaver pond he’d be able to feel his old dinger getting stiff just at the sight of her. And sure enough she was a sight to behold, much better in the flesh than any of the pictures in his Nudist Moppets book, and although he’d spied on her the entire time she was trying to give herself a bath, practically drooling at the loveliness of her little body, he hadn’t been able to feel even a twitch of stiffening down below.

  The two roosters were doing not a duet but a duel of crowing, the Rhode Island Red trying to drown out the Barred Plymouth Rock. It woke her up. She smiled up at him! It was the first time he’d seen her smile since that first time he’d laid eyes on her in the parking lot of the Harrison supermarket. She had such a lovely smile. He couldn’t resist wrapping his arms around her and giving her a big hug, but even that failed to arouse his dead dood. She climbed off the davenport and said “I gotta go” and for a awful moment he thought she was fixing to try and run off again but he sat up and watched as she went out the door in the direction of the outhouse. Bitch followed her out, and he realized the dog had been in the house all night and he hoped she
hadn’t gone wee-wee or worse anywhere.

  He got up and put on his overalls and started breakfast. When Robin came back, he said, “Maybe things is gonna get better. You didn’t wet the bed last night.” She had to go see for herself, but came back from the bedroom with a big pout on her face.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked.

  “The Tooth Fairy didn’t come,” she said, biting her lip as if once again she was just on the verge of having a good cry. “I left one of my teeth under my pillow last night.”

  “The pillow on your pallet?” he said. “Well heck, no wonder. That wasn’t your pillow last night. I was your pillow last night. What does this here Fairy generally leave you?”

  “Fifty cents.”

  “Well, if I was your pillow the Fairy must’ve left it under me.” And he went to the davenport and pretended to fish around with one hand while with the other hand he found two quarters in his pocket. “Sure enough, what did I tell ye? That old Tooth Fairy thought I was your pillow, which as a matter of fact I was.” And he gave her the two quarters. “I can’t imagine what you could spend those on, though.”

  “I’d put them in my piggy bank,” she said. “At home I have a razorback piggy bank, and I probably have a whole lot of money in it. Maybe ten dollars.”

  “You wouldn’t need a piggy bank around here,” he said. “One of these days I’ll tell you where there’s all the money you could ever dream of.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. I’ve got it stashed away in a good place. Hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

  “You’re kidding. Where’d you get it? Did you rob a bank?”

  He wondered if he ought to tell her. There was never going to be any chance for her to tell on him. He wanted her to know that as far as money was concerned he was her sugar daddy, even though there would never be any need whatsoever for money. So he went ahead and told her the whole story about the drug runner he’d stopped on the highway who had taken a few shots at him and been killed in return. He wasn’t bragging but he hoped it would increase the respect she had for him. He’d never told the story to anyone and it was good to be able to tell it to somebody.

  When he was finished, all she said was, “If you spent so much money buying all that stuff you’ve got in there, why didn’t you get some scissors and some paper and some crayons?”

  “Crayons?” he said. “Well now, I do believe we’ve got some of them.” And he went into the storeroom and fished around in the bags and sure enough there was a big yellow box of Crayolas. A real big box, with maybe over a hundred Crayolas in it, of every color you could imagine. She was real tickled to have it, but made that pout again and said, “If only I had some scissors.”

  “Tell you what,” he said. “You help me out around the house this morning, and this afternoon I’ll take my pocketknife and get it real sharp and see if I can’t cut out for you anything you want to trace on a piece of brown paper.”

  So they had them a deal. Since the rain had left it too wet to work in the garden, and it looked like it was a-coming up another rain anyhow, he put her to work sweeping the house and washing windows, although she had trouble reaching some of the cobwebs. “I’ve never seen a cob,” she said. “What do they look like?” While she worked in the house, he went out to the cooper’s shed and started to saw some pickets for building a picket fence to surround the garden, to keep the chickens out of it. And maybe the rabbits and any other critters that Bitch wasn’t smart enough to shoo away. He ought to have thought to bring along a good big roll of chicken-wire to make a garden fence, but that was one more thing he hadn’t even thought about, and besides he was going to have to learn how to make do. A picket fence, even if he didn’t have any paint to paint it nicely white, was a lot more sightly than chicken wire anyhow.

  There was old tools in the cooper’s shed that he wanted to learn how to use to shape the pickets for that fence—adzes and froes and augers—but every time he went into that workshop he felt a kind of strange feeling like as if there was somebody else there, although there sure wasn’t. Once, in there, he had without even thinking about it said “Hello?” as if he expected somebody to answer.

  He couldn’t do it. Not because of whatever or whoever was haunting the place, but because the effort of sawing just wore him completely out. He didn’t have the strength to take a spit. It was all he could manage just to drag hisself back to the house and plop down on the davenport, where he could only laze around and watch busy Robin redding up the house. For such a little thing she did a fair job, and then she even got some lunch for both of them, and after lunch, true to his word, he took his pocketknife and used one of the whetstones from the shop to get the point real sharp so he could cut into pieces of paper on which she traced the outlines of teeny-tiny clothes: dresses and hats and pants and coats and what-all. It wasn’t easy, and he felt dizzy with fatigue. It sure would have been a lot easier with a pair of scissors, but he rolled his tongue out and bore down and managed to cut up enough clothes for one paper doll.

  “I wish you had something stiff,” she said, and his eyebrows lifted in search of her meaning. What she meant was that she needed pasteboard or something to make the actual paper doll with. He suggested they could empty a cardboard box in the storeroom and use the cardboard but she said cardboard was too thick. “I have an idea,” she said, and went out to the privy and came back with the almost-used-up roll of toilet paper. She unwrapped what little was left on it, and took the cylindrical tube or core and picked at it until she found the seam that kept it in its shape, and she unrolled it and flattened it out and showed him how it made a kind of diamond shape of thin pasteboard! Then she took her pencil and drew a paper doll within that diamond shape, head at one point, feet at the other, hands at the others. “Now, can you cut this out?” she asked, and he took his knife and bore down and managed to cut into the outlines of her drawing and liberate the paper doll from the toilet paper tube. How about that? Wasn’t she some kind of genius? And then she took the pencil and the Crayolas and gave the doll features and skin color and a pair of panties. “This is me,” she said. And she dressed it with some of the clothes that had already been cut out of a paper sack.

  “Are you a-fixing to make me too?” he asked.

  “You’re too big to be made out of a toilet paper tube,” she pointed out. “But I have another idea,” she said, and she went and got the board game called Dealer’s Choice and said, “I don’t like this game,” and she showed him how the bottom of the box was just the right size and shape and thickness for making the paper doll of him. He kind of liked Dealer’s Choice himself but if she didn’t he could learn to live without it. So he let her use the box the game had come in. She traced the outlines of a paper doll three times the size of the one she’d done of herself on the toilet paper tube.

  “I reckon you’re right that we sure could use a pair of real scissors,” he remarked.

  They were interrupted by some loud barking right outside the door, and Sog managed to get up and fetch his rifle, and decided to get his revolver too while he was at it. He told Robin to get behind the davenport and stay down. He looked out the window but didn’t see nobody. So he slowly opened the door, and there was old Bitch looking up at him with one of her grins on her face. And she barked again, at him, that silly kind of bark that sounded like “roffa”.

  “What is it, Bitch?” he asked her, but she just said that roffa again. And then he noticed. At her feet, on the porch floor, was a pair of scissors! “Lord God Almighty!” he exclaimed. “Who brought them?” His first thought was that somebody had sneaked up onto the porch and left them there.

  As if to demonstrate that she herself had put them there, Bitch gripped the scissors in her teeth, picking them up. She trotted past Sog into the house, and presented the scissors to Robin. Roffa, the dog said to Robin.

  “Don’t that just beat all,” Sog exclaimed. “Didn’t I tell ye she was the smartest dog on earth? But where did she find a pair of scisso
rs? Bitchie babe, where’d you get them scissors?”

  Robin was just overjoyed with the gift, and even gave the dog a hug. Imagine that. Here she’d been bent on killing the dog and now she was hugging it.

  Well, the scissors needed some work. They was somewhat rusty, but Sog summoned the energy to scrape and clean and file them good as new, and he oiled them, and then Robin was really in business. She went right to work, cutting paper dolls and paper doll clothes all over the place and you never saw anybody happier.

  A good thing she had all that paper doll stuff to keep her busy, because it commenced raining again, raining pitchforks with tines on both ends, and there were howling winds. Sog had meant to get up on the roof while it wasn’t raining and try to patch that one leak, and now he couldn’t do it because it was raining too hard and also because he just didn’t feel like doing anything.

  For days and days it rained off and on, more on than off, and sometimes so mighty on that he feared the whole place would wash away. Robin was happy with her paper dolls but he had nothing much to do except watch her and drink his Jack D and smoke too much and sometimes get up from the davenport and show Robin how to fix some supper. He tried to show her how to bake bread but it turned out wrong and they could only throw the bread to Bitch, who sort of liked it. Sometimes Robin went out in the rain with a slicker on (the Wal-Mart lady had recommended a yellow slicker) to do her chores: bringing in firewood and water and gathering eggs, either in the henhouse or sometimes just out in the grass somewheres. Sog taught her how to fix reasonable scrambled eggs for breakfast, although once she burned herself on the stove and he had to get out the first aid kit and put some ointment and a bandage on it.