by Diane Hoh
“Professor Donner,” she said, willing her voice to remain as steady as possible because anything else might make her seem guilty, “I do not know where Mindy is or who took her. If I did, I would tell you. I want her found as much as you do.” She would have added, “Maybe more, since that’s the only way I’m going to get out from under this nasty cloud of suspicion,” but looking into his anguished eyes, she realized there wasn’t anyone on earth, not even her, who wanted Mindy Donner found, safe, more than the child’s father.
“I would never have taken Mindy away, never!” she cried when the expression on his face didn’t change.
She waited for him to believe her, to hear the sincerity in her voice, to remember that she loved Mindy and Mindy loved her. The lines in his face would ease then, just a little, as he realized that she spoke the truth.
It didn’t happen. His mouth twisted in frustration and he raised a clenched fist over his head. For one frightening moment, Nora feared that he was actually going to strike out at her.
Instead, he waved the clenched fist in the air above her head. “If I find out that you’ve lied to me,” he shouted, his face reddening with anger, “if I do, so help me …” Leaving the threat unfinished, he turned on his heel and ran down the steps, to his car.
But instead of getting in and driving away, he flung the back door open, reached in and scooped up something, and then turned back toward Nora.
His arms were filled with stuffed, crocheted animals.
Nora hadn’t moved from her spot in the sundrenched foyer. She recognized the toys in Professor Donner’s arms. There was Bounce the kangaroo, his fur worn from years of hugging, and Harry the hippo. And hanging over the white sleeve by her leg was Lucy the llama, her glassy blue eyes staring up at Nora as if to say, “What is going on here?” All were handmade by Nora’s mother, physical therapy designed to battle her bouts of depression, and presented to Mindy many years later out of Nora’s wish that they be enjoyed by another young child as much as she had enjoyed them.
While Nora watched in dismay, Professor Donner angrily flung the toys to the floor of the porch, shouting, “I don’t want these things in my house! Is that how you got her to go with you? By offering her another one of these?”
“I … I didn’t …” Nora stammered, not sure if she was protesting her innocence to the professor, or to the collection of stuffed animals lying at her feet.
A car Nora recognized as belonging to Fitz pulled up the long, gravel driveway. When it came to a halt in front of the house, Sabra, Amy, Lucas, and Fitz spilled out and ran up the porch steps.
Fitz glanced from Professor Donner’s purpled, angry face to Nora’s white, stricken expression and in two purposeful strides was at the professor’s side, gently taking his arm. “Hey, man, take it easy, okay?” he said quietly. “Nora hasn’t done anything. It’s just gossip, Professor, not worth two cents. You’ve got a wrong number here, and if you were thinking straight, you’d know that. Not that we blame you, of course,” he added hastily. “But Nora isn’t involved in Mindy’s disappearance, okay?”
At least Fitz believed she was innocent.
Professor Donner, the fight apparently gone out of him, allowed Fitz to lead him from the house to his car. But Fitz wouldn’t let him drive, taking him instead around to the passenger’s side before returning to the driver’s seat himself.
“He’ll drive Donner back to his house,” Lucas assured Nora. “And while he’s doing that, I think maybe you should sit down.” He led her into the foyer and pushed a chair at her. “Here, sit!”
Nora sat, in the brown wicker chair Mrs. Coates kept beside the telephone table. Her legs shook. She had to cross them to keep them still. Even then, the chair jiggled slightly in response to her involuntary body movements.
“Professor Donner can’t believe that I would do such an awful thing,” she said softly, staring at the open front door. “He can’t really believe that.”
“He doesn’t,” Lucas said emphatically. “The poor guy doesn’t know what he’s doing, that’s all. He’s half out of his mind with worry. Just forget it, Nora.”
Nora shuddered. Forget it? As if that were possible. No matter what happened now, she knew the professor’s shouted accusations, his pleas for help, would ring in her ears for a long time to come. No one had ever accused her of doing anything so horrible. The only accusation her aunt, with whom she lived following her father’s death, had thrown at her was, “Nora, you’re just like your mother. Much too emotional. If you’re not careful, you’ll end up just like her.” That had been terrifying because her mother had died in the same psychiatric facility that she’d repeatedly been admitted to throughout Nora’s childhood and adolescence.
“I’m not anything like my mother!” Nora had shouted defiantly in response to her aunt’s chilly, dire prediction. But she had shouted because she was terrified that her aunt was right. Her mother had suffered from migraines, too, and often had memory lapses. Sometimes she hadn’t even seemed to know who Nora was. She would look up from her crocheting or the book she was reading, see Nora sitting across the room doing her homework, and say in her light, gentle voice, “Nellie? Nellie, is that you?”
Nellie was Nora’s grandmother’s name.
Nora had memory lapses herself, and they terrified her. There seemed to be huge gaps in her childhood memories, extended periods of time when she was very young that were nothing more than a giant black void, as devoid of light as Nightmare Hall’s vast, shadowed cellar. She couldn’t remember a single Christmas or birthday before she was six, had no memory of entering kindergarten, could recall no favorite toys beyond the crocheted animals, and couldn’t envision her grandparents’ faces or even remember what their houses had looked like, although she knew she had visited them each time her mother was hospitalized.
Her friends in high school all seemed to know much more about their childhoods than Nora. That had scared her. Shouldn’t she remember, too?
So when her aunt said, “You’re just like your mother,” it had terrified Nora. Only once had she herself ever been hospitalized. Briefly, but still …
The psychiatrist who treated her had said drily, “Well, of course your aunt thinks you’re overemotional. For one thing, you’re fifteen, and for another, your aunt is a stranger to her own emotions, let alone anyone else’s. Don’t judge yourself by her standards.” She’d laughed. “That could really make you nuts.”
The doctor’s attitude had helped a lot. But her brief stay in the hospital hadn’t allowed Nora to retrieve any childhood memories.
In spite of the fact that her aunt’s accusation had eventually sent Nora into the hospital, it still didn’t seem as terrible as the accusation Professor Donner had hurled at her. Taking Mindy, hiding her somewhere? Never, never!
Unless … could you do something like that, and then forget that you’d done it? The way she’d forgotten her childhood?
Her mother could have. Incidents resulting from her mother’s terrible illness came flooding back in a dark rush. Nora coming home from school one hot, stifling day in early June to find the furnace going full-blast, the house dangerously suffocating, her mother huddled on the couch wrapped in blankets, insisting that this was the coldest December yet and wanting to know if Nora and her father had had any luck finding the perfect Christmas tree.
Coming home to a completely bare bedroom after playing at a friend’s house on an autumn Saturday morning when she was eight. Her mother had donated all of Nora’s bedroom furniture to a charitable organization. The truck was just pulling out of the driveway as Nora came up the sidewalk. Her mother had insisted that she had ordered all new furniture. “It’s beautiful, Nora, with a canopy bed and bookcases and a triple dresser. You’re going to love it.”
But the furniture never arrived, because it had never been ordered. Nora had to sleep on the living room couch for two nights, until her father, in what Nora thought must have been a truly humiliating confrontation, had retrieved her furnit
ure.
The worst incident had been the baby stroller. On what Nora and her father had mistakenly thought was one of her mother’s “good days,” the family had been enjoying an unaccustomed outing to buy a new pair of sneakers for Nora. While she was trying them on, her mother had slipped out of the store and walked over to a woman standing beside a baby stroller that held a sleeping toddler. The woman, deep in conversation with a friend, didn’t even notice as Margaret Mulgrew walked casually away, pushing the baby stroller, the baby still in it.
The ensuing commotion when the friend saw what was happening brought Nora and her father racing out of the store.
The following day, Nora’s mother had returned once again to the hospital. This time, her stay had lasted a year.
If my mother, Nora thought, sick at heart, could do all of those things, and Aunt Colleen, her own sister, thinks I’m like her, how can I be so sure I didn’t really take Mindy?
The question, one for which she had no answer, made her ill.
Chapter 10
“I TRIED TO RUN away, of course. When I got older. But not when I first got there. I believed the woman when she told me I wasn’t wanted back at the house in the country. So where could I run to? Even if I hadn’t been only five years old, even if the house hadn’t been out in the middle of nowhere like it was, there wasn’t any place to run to.
“What did I know about police and other authorities like social workers, ready and willing to help me? I didn’t even know that I’d been kidnapped, so how could I know what to do about it? There was no phone in the cabin, only a shortwave radio that I didn’t know how to work: When I was older, she sent me out of the room whenever she used that radio, usually when a storm was due and she wanted the details. I knew she was afraid I’d learn to work the thing, but I didn’t know why she was afraid. Couldn’t figure out who she was afraid I’d contact. By that time, when I was eight and nine and ten, I’d given up thinking about my other family. I would never have called them. Because I believed they didn’t want me.”
“Here, try these cookies. I have to go out again in a little while, and I don’t want you to be hungry. You won’t be able to sleep if you’re hungry. I went to bed hungry lots of times, and I never could sleep. Here’s some milk, too. Drink it up now. It’s good for you.”
“I’d already started kindergarten when I was taken, so I knew about school. I knew that I’d liked it, a lot. I already knew how to read. My mother taught me when I was four. I missed that so much, my mother sitting on my bed with me, her reading to me from Winnie-the-Pooh, then me taking a turn reading to her. All the books the woman had in the cabin were old and smelled musty and were for grownups. When I started crying a lot, saying I wanted to go to school, she went into town in the truck and brought back a bunch of kids’ books from the public library. I wanted to go there, too, but she said children weren’t allowed in town. She said there was an ordinance against it because children were noisy and messy and caused trouble. I was five. I believed her. For a while, anyway.
“The books helped. As long as she kept bringing me books, I didn’t whine about not going to school. But when the weather got bad and she couldn’t get the truck out of the snowdrifts to go into town, I must have driven her crazy, nagging and whining because I was so bored I thought I was going to jump right out of my skin. There was nothing do in that stupid cabin! She taught me to play checkers and all kinds of card games, but when I started winning all the time, we quit playing. And she taught me to cook on that old, black iron stove. I wasn’t really interested, but it took up some time, so it was better than nothing. And then after a while, I figured as soon as I could, I would get away from there and live by myself, so I’d need to know how to cook, anyway.
“The only things I knew about the outside world, I learned from magazines and books and television. So I knew there were other people out there, living a different kind of life. Not like mine at all. And I wanted that kind of life. The nicer kind, with a nice house and people around. The girls I read about in teen novels went to parties and did cheerleading and played musical instruments. They were pretty and popular and always dated the cutest boys. I hadn’t seen a boy since I was five years old. I remembered him, too. His name was Justin Langley, and he was taller than anyone else in kindergarten. He had red hair and blue eyes and he used to kick my chair whenever he walked by, just to make me mad.
“I wondered if Justin ever thought about me, if he ever wondered why my parents had given me away. I wondered if he knew my sibling, if they were friends, if they ever talked about me.
“Could someone really talk about a sibling who had been given away by its parents? What would they say? How would they phrase it? Well, I had this brother or sister once upon a time, but it was a nuisance so my parents got rid of it and now I have the whole house to myself?
“No, no one would ever say that because people would think they were weird.
“I guessed that no one ever talked about me.
“That was how I grew up. In a tiny cabin in the woods, miles from anything and anyone, my only companion a strange woman who needed very little in the way of entertainment or socializing or money or comforts, and didn’t think that I should need those things, either.
“So you can complain all you want about missing your daddy and Mary and that stupid Norrie, but it’s not so bad here, is it? At least it’s summer, and warm out. Now I have to go out for a while, so you curl up there, nice and cozy, and sleep. I’ll be back in a little while. Sleep tight. I’ll be back soon, I promise.”
Chapter 11
WHEN FITZ RETURNED, NORA was still seated in the wicker chair, but her legs had stopped shaking.
Fitz walked over to place a comforting hand on her shoulder. “He didn’t mean it,” he said of Professor Donner. “He’s out of his skull with worry. He knows you didn’t do it. Just not thinking clearly, that’s all.”
“He meant it,” Nora said darkly, and would have added more bitter words if Jonah Reardon, in jeans and a deep-blue T-shirt, hadn’t appeared in the doorway just then.
Nora didn’t recognize him at first. No uniform, no cap, his brown, wavy hair blowing slightly in the morning breeze. He seemed taller than she’d first thought, and well-muscled in the T-shirt.
Taken by surprise, she said bluntly, “What are you doing here?” Realizing how rude that sounded, she added quickly, “I mean, you must be off-duty, or you’d be in uniform. So if you’re off-duty,” standing up, grateful that her legs were willing now to support her, “what are you doing here?”
“Can I come in?” He smiled. “Even without my uniform?”
“Sure,” Amy said enthusiastically, “come on in. Nora here has had a horrible experience. Maybe you can help us cheer her up.”
Nora shot her an annoyed glance. Amy didn’t live at Nightingale Hall. She had no business inviting people inside. What if Nora didn’t want Reardon in the house?
But she did, so the annoyance dissipated as quickly as it had come. Maybe he could tell her what to do, how to yank herself out of this horrible nightmare. He was a police officer, after all. Shouldn’t he have some answers for her?
A second thought occurred to her then as Reardon walked over to her. A policeman wouldn’t be given any time off while a small child was still missing. Could the fact that this one was out of uniform mean that Mindy had been found and was now safe at home? Was the search over?
Nora’s heart began to pound with hope. Which died a quick death when Reardon read the expression in her eyes and shook his head. “Nothing yet. I’m sorry.” He let that sink in, his dark eyes filled with regret. Then he glanced at Amy and asked, “What did you mean about Nora having a bad experience? What happened?”
“I can speak for myself,” Nora said tartly, disappointment washing over her. She told him about the visit from Professor Donner.
“Sorry,” was his comment. “Must have been pretty ugly.” He bent to pick up Harry the hippo. “These are the toys you gave the Donner girl?�
��
Nora nodded. “They were mine when I was little. My mother made them for me.”
Reardon examined the stuffed hippo, turning it over repeatedly in his hands. He frowned. “These the only ones like this on campus?”
“I guess so. I mean, they’re handmade. Not sold in stores. Unless other mothers make them for their kids, too.” That didn’t seem likely. Besides, how many college freshmen brought so many stuffed toys to campus? “Why?”
“Because I could swear I’ve seen one just like this before.” Reardon held the hippo out in front of him. “Not this particular one. Not a hippo. It was …” he thought for a minute … “I think it was a bear. Big and round and dark brown. But it looked old, like this one, and it was made the same way.”
“Well, it wasn’t one of mine,” Nora said flatly. “I never had a bear.” They had moved several times when she was young. Maybe her father had believed that a new house was the key to her mother’s peace of mind. It wasn’t. During each move at least one member of her stuffed animal collection had been lost. But those missing creatures would hardly be turning up here on the campus of Salem University, miles from where she’d lived and so many years later. “I guess other people crochet stuffed animals, too.”
