Ransom

by Lois Duncan

  “There was a substitute,” a sophomore girl was reported as saying. “He was young and kind of cute-looking with red hair and broad shoulders. My girl friend and I kept talking about what a doll he was.”

  A freshman boy contributed the fact that the new driver had not known the route well, and that he himself had been dropped off on the far side of his regular stop and had been forced to walk back half a block.

  “After that,” another boy reported, “Bruce Kirtland sat up front with the driver and told him where the stops were.”

  When the sheriff’s officer attempted to follow this track to an ultimate conclusion, Steve Kirtland told them, “I’m sorry, Bruce isn’t here right now. I don’t know how I can put you in touch with him. Both he and his brother Glenn have taken off on a weekend camping trip.”

  His hand was shaking when he replaced the receiver on the hook and turned to his wife. “I shouldn’t have lied. I should have told them.”

  “No!” Mrs. Kirtland shook her head violently. “No, Steve. You did the right thing! If word ever gets out that we told the police, we’ll never get the boys back again! People who will do something like this won’t stop at anything!”

  “Murder! Somehow I never thought … I guess I didn’t want to let myself think …”

  “The only safe thing to do,” Mrs. Kirtland said, “is to give them the money just as soon as possible. We have the full amount. We have to get it to them.”

  “It’s not going to work that way,” Steve Kirtland said wearily. “They, whoever they are, aren’t going to flit around picking up money here and money there, releasing one kid and then another. That would be crazy. Picking up the ransom is the biggest risk they will be taking, and they will be doing it only once. All the cash has got to be together in one place.”

  Mrs. Kirtland stared at him, uncomprehending. “But if we have our share of the ransom ready, surely our boys—”

  “No, dear,” Steve Kirtland said patiently. “That is what I am trying to get across to you. Our boys will be held with the others until the total ransom is collected—from us, from the Frenches, from the Donavans. And from any other family involved.”

  “But the Donavans don’t have their part of it!” Mrs. Kirtland exclaimed. “I talked to Marian just a few minutes ago. She finally reached Jack in California, and he isn’t going to contribute one penny.”

  “He isn’t!” Mr. Kirtland exploded. “Good Lord, what’s the matter with the man? Marianne is his own daughter! Didn’t Marian explain to him—”

  “He wouldn’t listen to her. The minute she said the word ‘money,’ he wouldn’t let her go any further. He said he would discuss money only through his lawyer and not to call him about it again and turned off his cell.”

  “What a bastard,” Steve Kirtland said again. He rubbed his hand worriedly across his forehead. “I was sure Jack would come through. I’ve never thought much of the guy personally, but on something like this, when it’s his own kid involved, it never occurred to me he wouldn’t cooperate.”

  “Can’t we help them?” asked Mrs. Kirtland. “For our own boys’ sake, can’t we make up the difference?”

  “We are already doing that for the Frenches,” her husband told her. “Even the deepest well runs dry eventually. I’ve hit every resource we have already. We simply don’t have access to anything more.”

  The first thing Mrs. French saw when she opened the morning paper was the photograph of Peter Godfrey. It was there, facing her, balanced on the crease, before she ever got the paper unfolded far enough to be able to read the headline. It flashed through her mind that he was a pleasant-looking man, bearing a slight resemblance to a cousin of hers in Ohio, and that he had probably been elected president of some local civic group.

  Then she read the name beneath the picture and saw the long black banner stretched across the top of the page:

  SCHOOL BUS DRIVER FOUND MURDERED.

  I don’t believe it, Mrs. French thought numbly. It cannot be true.

  She closed her eyes and opened them, and the banner was still there. With a violent effort she forced herself to read the article beneath it.

  When she finished, she sat quietly with the paper still in front of her. She thought, I very well may never see my daughter again.

  The room was empty and very quiet. The only sound was the ticking of the small Swiss clock over the mantel. It was the Frenches’ clock; most of the rest of the furnishings in the house belonged to its owners, but it had been Jesse who found the clock in a little shop in Lucerne, Switzerland.

  “Look,” she had cried, “only sixty francs! Isn’t it beautiful?” Her quiet face had been alight with the joy of her discovery. “You had better like it, Mother, for I am going to buy it, and you are going to get it for Christmas!”

  Jesse had liked Switzerland. She had liked France. She had liked, Mrs. French thought now, every place she had ever been. For happiness, to Jesse, was not people and activity. It was a self-made thing, deep within herself.

  This was something that her gregarious mother had never been able to accept or understand.

  “What did you do all day?” she would ask, on her own return from some organized activity, and Jesse would answer, “I read,” or, “I walked,” or, in Paris, “I went to the Louvre” or “the Bois de Boulogne” or “the Luxembourg Gardens.”

  “Alone?” her mother would ask, and Jesse would say, “Of course,” surprised at the question. “Of course, alone.”

  “But what about Major Macomber’s daughter, that attractive girl we met at dinner the other night? And her brother. Wasn’t his name Mike? I’m sure they would have been glad to go with you.”

  “I just didn’t think about asking them,” Jesse said casually.

  “I worry about her,” Mrs. French had said later to her husband. “It’s just not natural, her being alone so much or with us and our older friends. She should be frisking around, being a normal teenager with youngsters her own age.”

  “She seems happy,” Colonel French had commented.

  “Well, possibly she is now, but what about later? How is she going to have a normal social life if she doesn’t have any association with her own age-group? Do you realize that Jesse has never even had a boyfriend? By the time I was her age, I had been in love a dozen times already.”

  “Don’t worry so much,” Colonel French had said, laughing. “Jesse isn’t like you, and she never will be. She’ll fall in love, all right, when she’s ready to. And when she does decide to share herself with somebody, she is going to have an awful lot to give him.”

  Jesse, reading—serious, intent, dark hair falling smooth across her cheek …

  Jesse, on skis—a slim, bright-clad figure, her face lifted to the sun …

  Jesse, dreaming—Jesse, laughing—Jesse saying gently, as an adult pacifying the whim of a beloved child, “Why, yes. Yes, of course, Daddy. If it will make Mother happy, I’d be glad to live in Valley Gardens.”

  Jesse—Jesse—Jesse …

  Mrs. French sat alone in the quiet living room, the newspaper open on her lap. Her eyes were on the clock, not seeing the hands, concentrating instead on the slow, rhythmic swing of the pendulum.

  It is not true. It can’t be true. Nothing like this could possibly happen to Jesse.

  Mark Crete was wakened at ten thirty by the hotel maid, who came in to change the towels in the bathroom.

  “Of all fool things!” Mark groaned pitifully. “It’s as bad as the nurses in hospitals who come in to take your temperature at the crack of dawn every morning!”

  He shut his eyes again with the momentary hope of returning to sleep, but the clatter of cleaning equipment in the hallway outside his door shattered this possibility.

  “Oh, well.” Mark sighed resignedly and reopened his eyes, hauling himself to a semisitting position. He fished a cigarette out of the pack that lay on his bedside table, lit it, and leaned back against the pillows to think about getting up.

  To Mark, business and
pleasure trips were one and the same, and every trip he took sufficed for both. His Friday night in Los Angeles had been spent nightclubbing; Saturday morning had been planned for sleeping, and the rest of Saturday, until far into the evening, would be a series of meetings and business discussions of great financial importance both to Mark and to the electronics firm which he represented. At these meetings he would be serious, knowledgeable, and completely dependable.

  It was these two things, frolic and business, that made up the life of Mark Crete, with no middle road of domesticity. The only element of family life in his whole bachelor existence was the breakfasts and occasional off evenings that he spent with Dexter.

  Now, drawing on his cigarette, he thought about his nephew, as he had found himself doing lately, at odd moments, with a nagging sense of inadequacy. He wished he had seen the boy or at least talked to him before taking off like this for the weekend. Actually, when you came right down to it, he had not seen him since Thursday morning, when the two of them ate pancakes and grunted at each other over separate sections of the morning paper and took off in their separate directions with a minimum of conversation.

  I’m not giving the kid much family life, Mark thought with a twinge of guilt, but then, I’m not a family-type guy. I’m forty years old, and I can’t swing my whole life around to start playing the father role to an eighteen-year-old who would probably resent it like mad if I tried to anyway. Actually we get along pretty well together. Dex is a nice enough kid, runs his own life, doesn’t make any problems.

  Mark had had little contact with Dexter during the earlier years of his life. He had had a very real affection for his sister, Dexter’s mother, in their childhood, but time, distance, and the difference in their ways of living had prevented them from retaining a closeness in their adult lives. On the few occasions that he was in the New York area, he had stopped to visit with the family. On the first of these Dexter had been two, a husky, round-faced toddler with an amazing shock of dark hair; on the second he had been eight and away at Scout camp.

  When, at twelve, the boy had come down with polio, Mark had been deeply concerned and had insisted on taking over the payment of a number of medical bills.

  But this was quite different from taking on personal responsibility for a teenage boy.

  It was after the funeral that he had brought up the subject, almost apologetically. “I know it’s hard for you to think ahead at a time like this, Dex, but in their wills your parents named me as your guardian. For business reasons I’m not going to be able to stay here in the East for as long as I would like to, and we’re going to have to make some kind of plan for your future.”

  “I’ll be going to college,” Dexter said. “Dad always meant for me to do that. He set up a fund for it.”

  “I know; that’s all taken care of. But you have another year of high school to complete first, don’t you? It’s a little late to register, but I could try to get you into one of the good prep schools …”

  “Thanks, but no, thanks,” Dexter said decidedly. “I don’t want to live with a bunch of guys on top of me all the time. I’d rather stay on in the apartment and finish up in public school.”

  “That’s out of the question. You can’t live by yourself in New York City.” On this Mark was definite. “There must be prep schools that have private rooms rather than dormitories. We’ll pick up some of the catalogues.”

  Dexter’s eyes glinted defiantly. “I’m nearly eighteen! I don’t need anybody looking after me! I haven’t needed anybody for a long time now!”

  His jaw was set and stubborn; his left hand was gripped into a fist. From his right sleeve his other hand hung limply, giving him a vulnerable, lopsided look, which tore Mark’s heart. For an instant there flashed before him the memory of the round-cheeked baby who had toddled to him across the living room of his sister’s first, postage-stamp apartment—a baby with two good arms and two good legs and loving parents, cheering him onward.

  The boy before him stood, braced for his decision.

  “Look”—Mark heard his own voice speaking—“what would you think of coming back to Albuquerque with me? There’s a good public high school in the Valley Gardens area.”

  “You mean, to live with you? Would there be room for me?”

  “There’s no problem about that. I’ve got a real party house—plenty of room—I could put up an army in there if I wanted to.”

  Dexter was hesitant. “Wouldn’t I be … kind of … a drag on you?”

  “I won’t let you be,” Mark said honestly. He was more startled by his own impulsive invitation than Dexter was, and he was already beginning to have qualms about it. However, he had made the offer, and there was no withdrawing it. “I have a bachelor pad,” he said, “and I lead a bachelor life. I’m not home a lot—I take trips, I’m out a lot in the evenings. There’s a cleaning woman who comes in once a week, but I do my own cooking, and if you live with me, you’ll do yours. I’m not offering you a replacement for what you’ve lost, Dex. … I can’t be a parent to you—I won’t even try. But I loved your mother very much and—well, if you’d rather live with me than go off to school someplace, I’d like to have you.”

  “Thank you,” Dexter said quietly. “I—I’d like that. I won’t be any trouble, I promise.”

  And it had been true.

  Dexter had never been trouble. From the moment he entered the house in Valley Gardens, he had lived his own life, quietly and independently, without making demands of any kind. He cooked his own meals, took care of his clothes, moved in and out of the house on errands of his own without causing a ripple in the smooth flow of Mark’s existence. Their schedules of activity overlapped in such a way that often days passed without their so much as seeing each other, with Dexter returning from school just as Mark pulled out of the driveway, and being up and out in the morning before his uncle dragged himself into the kitchen to plug in the electric coffeepot and wake up with a cigarette over the morning paper.

  We get along fine, Mark thought now, the kid and I. He’s happy—at least, I think he’s happy. He can look after himself; he told me that back in New York before I ever brought him out here.

  Yet for some reason he felt an odd uneasiness. He had felt it all the past evening. He had taken a whirl at the nightclubs, had some drinks, done some partying, yet at odd moments, sometimes right in the middle of watching a floor show, the feeling would flash over him, a strange, unsettling premonition, that something was not as it should be.

  It’s all in my head, he told himself firmly. It’s because I drove off and left that damned phone ringing without going back to answer it. It started me off wrong. I can’t shake thinking about it.

  He lay for a moment longer, inhaling on the cigarette, and then said, “Oh, what the hell,” and pulled himself to a sitting position. He reached for his cell and punched in the numbers for Dexter’s. As had been the case earlier, the call went directly to voicemail. Then he called his house phone in Albuquerque.

  The phone began to ring. It had a faraway, lonely sound. He could imagine Dexter sitting up in bed, rubbing the sleep from his eyes, staggering down the hall to his uncle’s room to fumble for the receiver. Or more likely, because of the time difference, he would already be up and dressed, sitting at the kitchen table. Or reading – the kid loved reading.

  He allowed the phone to ring ten times and then gave up. There’s nothing to worry about, he told himself sternly. The kid has taken off someplace for the weekend. Maybe he’s gone skiing—to Santa Fe, perhaps, or even to Taos. After all, I left him the Jaguar.

  The explanation was so logical that relief flowed through him. Of course, that was the answer. Dexter had gone skiing.

  With a grunt of satisfaction, he got out of bed and went into the bathroom to take a shower.

  Rod Donavan did not go to work on Friday. Because of this, he was not at his desk at the Journal when the first news report came in, and he, like the other families, learned about the death of the missing
bus driver by reading about it in Saturday’s paper.

  His first reaction upon doing so was to dispose of the paper before his wife could read it and to plant himself in a chair next to the telephone so that he could monitor incoming calls.

  The one for which he waited arrived around the middle of the morning.

  “Yes,” Rod said, “we have the money, the whole amount. The Kirtlands and the Frenches have their shares also. How is Marianne?”

  “There is another family,” the now-familiar voice on the other end of the wire informed him. “A Mr. Crete. I have not been able to contact him at all.”

  “How is Marianne?” Rod persisted. “I want to speak to her.”

  “You know she is not with me, Mr. Donavan. I have told you that before. Now listen to me—this is important. I have not been able to contact Mr. Crete about his part of the money.”

  “Mr. Crete?” The meaning behind the man’s words began to penetrate. “You mean there is a fourth party, not just us and the Frenches and Kirtlands?”

  “That is what I am telling you. We must have another fifty thousand. It is for Mr. Crete’s nephew.”

  “What are you telling me this for?” Rod asked him. “I don’t know any Mr. Crete. Does he live here in Valley Gardens?”

  “Yes, but he does not answer the phone. He has not answered it at all. I have been unable to reach him. I think he must be out of town.”

  “I can’t help that,” Rod said shortly. “I have the money to pay for Marianne’s release. I want to know where I should bring it.”

  “That is the problem, Mr. Donavan. You cannot bring one share or even three shares. We must have the money for all the children at once.”

  “But how do you expect to collect from someone you haven’t even spoken to?” Rod exclaimed. “If Crete is out of town, he may not even know his nephew is missing.”

  “It matters very little to us,” the voice told him, “where the money for his nephew comes from. If Mr. Crete is not there to provide it, then someone else may do so. All that matters is that the full amount, for all five children, is delivered to us tomorrow.”