by Lois Duncan
With a tremendous effort of will, she turned away from the beckoning bed and, as was her custom when under stress, crossed to stand at the window. In the world outside, the summer twilight was thick and golden as honey. Cicadas chanted in the trees in a drowsy, monotonous chorus. In the house next door, someone was playing the piano. The faint, silver tinkle trickled across the space between the houses and blended with the sounds of children playing in a neighboring yard.
“Oll-y—oll-y—oxen—free!” a young voice shrilled.
Hide-and-seek in the gathering dusk: a game of childhood.
In her own childhood, she had never been asked to play.
Karen Connors: seeker of missing children. I will play the game now as an adult for the rest of my life.
Time passed, and Karen waited. At last, she heard the footsteps she had been anticipating. They came clicking down the hall and stopped at the open doorway. There was a long moment of silence.
Her mother’s voice spoke hesitantly. “May I come in?”
Wordlessly, Karen nodded. The footsteps advanced into the room and muffled themselves in the bedroom carpet. The door closed with a gentle click.
Karen spoke without turning.
“Don’t you think it’s time that you told me the truth?”
“You already know it,” her mother said quietly. “You’ve figured it out. You know I was the one who made the phone call to Denver. As soon as I realized you’d left this house, I knew you were headed into terrible danger.”
“You knew that, too, on the day the children were taken.”
The pieces of the puzzle were starting to fall together, but the picture they were forming was one she never would have imagined. “You were standing folding laundry when you had the vision. Why didn’t you call the police and send them to the Tumbleweed?”
“I didn’t know where it was,” her mother told her. “It was all too foggy. I knew you were hurt and that you were in a kitchen. I thought, perhaps, it was the kitchen at the day care center. That’s why I tried to call you there.”
“How could you find me in another state when you couldn’t right here?”
“I have no idea. I simply found that I could. I could see that location in my mind as clearly as though it were marked on a map. I saw each turn of the road. I saw the house, the river… I could even see that awful dog. There’s nothing logical about this gift of ours, Karen. I gave up trying to make sense of it years ago.”
Now Karen did turn. She regarded her mother incredulously. “Years ago? Do you mean that you’ve always been a psychic?”
“I am not a psychic,” Mrs. Connors said vehemently. “I refuse to be classified that way. It’s true that I was born with certain abilities, but I’ve never made any attempt to develop and use them. I’ve always hated them. They made my childhood miserable. The other children sensed I was different and I was left out of everything.”
“But you’ve always told me how popular you were!” Karen exclaimed. “You had so many friends! You were in all the school clubs! All the boys were in love with you!”
“That was how I wished my life could have been,” Mrs. Connors said. “It’s what I’ve wanted for you. The truth of it is, I had no friends at all. I never went to parties or to dances. Boys were uncomfortable around me. The first date I ever had was with your father.”
“Your very first date was with Dad?”
“It was the spring I graduated from high school. Your father was doing accounting work for my father. He’d been over at the house all day, working on the income taxes, and my mother invited him to stay for dinner. Your dad was in his thirties and had never been married. He’d been too wrapped up in his work to develop a social life. He thought I was pretty, and I was. I looked a lot like you do now. He didn’t sense anything different about me. As you know, your father is not particularly perceptive.”
“You fell in love?” Karen ventured.
“It was love of a sort, but not the romantic kind. Your father was pleasant and kind, and my parents approved of him. I was afraid I might never have another opportunity to marry. I knew that I had to do something about finding a husband. You were waiting to be born.”
“I was… waiting?”
“I’d seen you in dreams,” her mother said matter-of-factly. “You were there whenever my life was in any way threatened. The first time I saw you was in a fever dream. I had pneumonia, and the doctors were afraid that I wouldn’t pull through. The second time was several years later. I was driving through an intersection, and suddenly, out of the blue, your face flashed in front of me. I was so startled that I instinctively hit the brakes. An instant later, a car came barreling through a stop sign. If I hadn’t stopped when I did, I would have been killed. I can only speculate that on your part it was a form of self-preservation. If my life had ended before you were born, you could never have come into being.”
“Did you ever see other children?” Karen asked shakily. “Did you see lost kids, the way I saw Bobby and Carla?”
“Yes, but they came in nightmares. My ‘black dreams,’ I used to call them, and they were horrible. For years I kept seeing them, those strange, frightened children who kept screaming to me to come to them. If I’d let them, they would have taken over my life. I held strong against them, though, and you can also. Except for these two recent instances when you were the one in danger, I haven’t allowed myself a vision in almost thirteen years.”
“I don’t think I can turn away like that,” Karen said.
“Haven’t you listened to anything I’ve been saying?” Her mother’s voice was sharp with exasperation. “Don’t you want marriage—children of your own—a normal life? No man wants to marry a freak, no matter how pretty she is. Look what happened to your relationship with Tim!”
She paused. When she spoke again, her tone was less strident.
“You have a chance to build a whole new image for yourself at college. You can meet somebody nice there and never let him find out about this. You can build yourself the same sort of happy life I have.”
“Mom,” Karen asked softly, “are you really all that happy?”
“Well, of course,” her mother said.
“Then why do you seem worried all the time? Why do you keep having migraines?”
“I’m headache-prone. Lots of people have that problem. I’ve been having migraines since you were five years old.”
“Mom, I’m sorry,” Karen said. “I know you want what you think is best for me, but I can’t live my life the way you do yours. If, for some reason known only to God, I’ve been blessed with extra sight, I’m going to learn how to use it as well as I can.”
“That vision I had thirteen years ago when you were five,” her mother said. “That final vision was the one that made me close it all off.”
“Was it Mickey Duggin?”
Her mother nodded.
“You weren’t the one who found him. I was. What followed after that was a total nightmare. Those letters and phone calls, the strangers ringing our doorbell, the people on our front lawn, trying to see in our windows. Your father was horrified. The pressure it put on our marriage came close to destroying it.”
“It won’t be like that for me,” Karen said with confidence. “The man I marry will accept me for what I am.”
“I hope so,” her mother said softly. “Oh, baby, I hope so.”
She reached out her hand and touched Karen’s cheek. The unfamiliar gesture, the gentleness of it, was so much out of character that Karen could not answer her at all.
That night she dreamed again of the small blond girl. The child was standing in a living room that was decorated in the same shades of blues and lavenders as Karen’s current bedroom. Behind her, on a low bookcase, there stood a framed photograph of two women posed together on a stairway. The younger woman was dressed in a graduation gown. The photographer had evidently caught them at a moment at which they had not been expecting it, for the second woman was not looking into the camera lens.
She had turned, instead, to gaze at the girl beside her, and on her face there was an expression of such pride and love that the intensity of it was almost unbearable to contemplate.
But it was the dream-child that Karen stared at in fascination.
My dear little daughter, who will your daddy be?
The girl raised her head. For the first time ever, Karen was able to see her eyes.
They were blue as a mountain lake. Blue as the summer skies of Colorado.
They were the strange sort of brilliant, heaven-sent blue that might run in one special family. As a dominant trait.
Q&A WITH THE AUTHOR
Young adult authors Jessica Morgan and Heather Cocks
sat down with Lois Duncan to ask her all about
THE THIRD EYE
Lois: I’m Lois Duncan, the author of THE THIRD EYE.
Heather: And I’m Heather Cocks…
Jessica: … and I’m Jessica Morgan, and we are the authors of Spoiled.
Heather: Lois, we have both read your books. I basically grew up with them—I would steal them out of my sister’s bedroom. I can’t even count the number of times I’ve reread A GIFT OF MAGIC, so it’s very exciting for me, as a new young adult author, to be able to talk to you.
Lois: Well, I read SPOILED and I enjoyed it thoroughly, so thank you very much for wanting to do the interview.
Heather: Of course, it is our pleasure. So I guess it would make sense for THE THIRD EYE to first talk about the concept of a third eye. You wrote about it with such authority; it makes us wonder if you ever experienced anybody who has that sort of a third eye, or where you got this idea for the book.
Lois: I got the idea from reading about the Atlanta Child Murders that occurred between 1979 and 1981. There were, oh, I don’t remember how many children who went missing in Atlanta, and the police could not find the abductor, and many psychic detectives offered tips. That was the first introduction I had to the way psychics could be used by police. It’s what was really behind my writing this book—the inspiration for it. At that time, I had never met a psychic. I could only imagine what Karen must have been feeling. Since then, I’ve become all too familiar with the process. As you may know, in 1989, our own teenage daughter Kaitlyn was murdered, and when we became frustrated with the lack of resolution in the case, our family turned to psychics for help. I actually met and got to know several professional psychics who work with law enforcement, and their accuracy has made me a believer. But I hadn’t had that experience before I wrote this book.
Heather: It’s fascinating how this book became so personal to you after you’d written it.
Lois: And it is dedicated to Kaitlyn, which was ironic.
Jessica: I saw. It’s very touching and sad. One of the things I think is so relatable to me is that Karen is someone who is so outwardly unremarkable, but she can do this remarkable thing. Is that a contrast you chose deliberately because it would appeal to young adult readers?
Lois: I think everybody wants to feel remarkable, and I think everybody is remarkable in his or her own way. What I’ve come to realize now that I’ve known psychics in person is that they are very normal people in most ways. This just happens to be their gift, in the same way you gals and I received the gift of storytelling. There are other people who have the gift of music or art—and we are all otherwise normal. This is just the gift Karen happened to be born with.
Jessica: I think that’s a very interesting way to look at it, because I think those of us who are obviously not psychic look at it as being a very unusual gift.
Lois: Well, I bet you that most of us are psychic to some degree. We have hunches about things, and if you are very close to somebody and something happens to them when they are not with you, you often sense it. I think twins particularly do. But most of us have it at a very low level, whereas for someone like Karen, it is just much more developed.
Heather: The timing of the rerelease of this book coincides with such a rise in young adult novels that are supernatural or paranormal in terms of their subject matter. It really has come around. You go to bookstores and pretty much every cover in the teen section has something to do with vampires or exorcisms. In a way, your books were very much ahead of their time. Is it interesting to you to see that come back in vogue?
Lois: Very interesting. I’ve never been able to understand what lies behind the trends in reading matter. It is always fluctuating, and right now we are in the middle of a big vampire surge. I don’t think I can bring myself to put a vampire in one of my books, but people seem to like them very much these days.
Jessica: That would have been a really interesting choice for modernizing THE THIRD EYE—make Tim a vampire!
Lois: I think I prefer the werewolf, myself, if I were choosing one to cuddle up with.
Jessica: That would have been quite a large rewrite. Speaking of modernizing, what would you say was the biggest challenge in going through this and modernizing it?
Lois: This book had fewer challenges than any of the others, or most of the others, anyway. The basic plot and characters held strong. The high school cliques and the fear kids have of being labeled as “different”—those are as real today as they ever were. I just updated a bit; I gave the characters cell phones and computers and DVD players, which didn’t exist when I originally wrote the story. I didn’t really have to mess around much with the rest of it.
Heather: Was the technology a challenge the whole way through modernizing your books? It’s such a pervasive thing now—nobody is unreachable, everyone has a cell phone. I feel like that must have been a completely different thing for you to consider when going through all of these books.
Lois: It was much more challenging in certain books than in other books. It wasn’t quite as bad in this book, because Karen couldn’t have reached her cell phone anyway when she was all tied up on the floor in the kitchen. The crucial moments weren’t moments where Karen was desperately trying to reach somebody. In some of my books, it plays a very strong part because that is the case, but in this one that was not a biggie.
Jessica: It must have been very gratifying to find you had written a story that didn’t rely on any of those sorts of easy outs. I feel as if so many stories now rely on mishaps involving e-mails or texting. The fact that you wrote a story that holds up regardless of what’s technologically available must have felt really good.
Lois: Well, technology’s become a big problem for me, and I think for a lot of writers in my generation, because it’s changing so fast. I was not raised with it—I don’t even text—so I would find it very hard right now to keep up with what is current. I even think that young writers like yourselves, who are undoubtedly very familiar with the new technology, are going to be facing this, because it takes about a year from the time you finish writing a book before it makes its way to bookstores. By then, the technology will have changed from what it was when you were writing it. I think that this is going to reduce the shelf life of a lot of today’s writers, even if their books are extremely good.
Jessica: I think that is definitely always a problem. I know for us, we named some actual celebrities in SPOILED, and in the course of doing this, we realized you don’t want to date yourself. I think technology is similar. There is something to be said for being able to write around that stuff so that you don’t immediately date yourself.
Lois: You also date yourself by using teenage slang, which changes so quickly. Another thing I had to change in THE THIRD EYE was that in the original version, the little boy, Bobby, and his friends own roller skates. Now they have skateboards.
Jessica: That’s true! I also enjoyed how Anne the psychic was saved by a meat grinder in the original—but then you changed it to a coffeepot. I mean, you probably had to change the meat grinder, but it made me sad that she wasn’t still grinding her own hamburger at home. I really loved that detail.
Lois: I also had to change people’s clothing. When Karen went to the prom, I put her into a bla
ck dress. Back in my day, when I went to the prom, I wore a fluffy yellow dress. Girls never would have considered going to a prom wearing black. Black was for funerals, not for school dances. So the clothing had to change.
Heather: But it does seem that with this book you didn’t need to do as many updates—it seems to us to be mostly details.
Lois: Definitely. This was a quick, easy one.
Heather: You did update quite a few of them. For you, revisiting them, were there surprises for you? How long had it been since you reread this?
Lois: So many years that it felt like I was reading a book written by somebody else. Over the years I’ve written fifty books, and when I complete one, I put it out of my mind and focus on the next one. I don’t go back and keep rereading the ones I’ve had published. After a while, I lose that personal communication with the book, and sometimes I can’t even remember what happens to the characters. It’s like reading a book by my new favorite author! I can’t wait to read another Lois Duncan book now—she writes so well! [Laughs.]
Heather: I love that! I’m sure you’re reading and going, “This is great!” I’m just so excited by the idea that this is going to expose a whole new audience to your books. They were such staples of my childhood, and now it’s as if we’ve entered into a new era with the CW and ABC Family and networks that are all really keen on finding their next great series idea from a book. Have you ever considered that the next phase in the updating of the Lois Duncan catalog might be a THE THIRD EYE television series or something like that?
Lois: I take what’s offered to me. Hollywood is a world unto itself, and authors pretty much sit back and let their film agents handle film rights. But, to date, nobody’s made an offer for THE THIRD EYE. I find that surprising, because I’ve always thought this story would make an excellent movie. I can see Karen having a TV series and solving case after case!
