The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  And the third time the fit had wracked her with helpless sobs was when, at the police station, they had made her take a polygraph test. Her! Did they think she would do something to her own daughter?! The cop had tried to explain that it was “just by the book,” as he put it, part of routine procedure. They had to delay the test for a whole hour until she could get control of herself.

  “If you ask me just one more question I’m going to start screaming,” she had said, several times that night and the next day, to several people, not just the cops but the television people and the reporters. But they had not stopped asking her. And she had stifled her screams. She had broken into tears again when they had asked her to describe what Robin had been wearing, and she was almost ashamed that Robin’s jacket was cheap and too small for her. She had really bawled when they had made her show them Robin’s room. They had “secured” the room and wouldn’t let her touch anything in it, although again she was embarrassed that her whole house was a mess and needed straightening at least. They had taken several items of Robin’s dirty clothes to be used for the bloodhounds to sniff. They had practically moved into her house and for several days she was a stranger in her own home.

  The time she had cried the hardest was the worst, in the sense that it screwed up her first carefully planned television appearance. They had given her several hours to prepare her “message” and to rehearse it, but those hours hadn’t been sufficient to prepare her against the possibility that she would break down so completely in front of the television cameras.

  “Whoever you are,” she had said into the camera, clutching the stuffed bear that Robin had called Paddington, “wherever you are, I know that you are listening, and I want to say just a few things to you. Robin Lee Kerr was my daughter, my only child. She is my daughter, my only child, and I say ‘is’ because I know that you are keeping her alive, that you have not done any harm to her. Not yet. I can imagine what you plan to do with her, and I can only believe with all of my heart that you are going to keep her alive. I know why you selected her, of all the girls her age in this world. Because she is so beautiful. Oh, she is also full of mischief and spunk and humor, as you are discovering every minute she’s in your company, but most of all she is so very, very beautiful….” At that point Karen had lost it. The cameras had had to avert their eyes and go to the announcer, who had tried to finish the message for her, begging him, whoever he was, wherever he was, to let Robin go.

  Her doctor had given her sedatives for the first week only. After that, he said, the Lord would take care of it. Her doctor was also an elder in her church, and when she told him how much and how helplessly she was crying, he told her that her tears were necessary for her to come to terms with her grief.

  She had thought she had cried so much that she simply had no tears left, and after a week off from work, the week when she was drugged with the sedatives and assaulted every day by contacts with strangers, she had needed to go back to work to pay the bills. But she had cried again when her fellow employees presented her with a check in the amount of the wages she had lost during her week off. They had taken up a collection for her.

  And she had cried when she realized that if Robin were here, Robin would call her a “crybaby.” Karen couldn’t remember the last time that Robin herself had cried, although she had a fairly good guess: when Robin was about three, and they (including Billy) were at the supermarket (not the one where she eventually went to work), and Robin was crying about something she wanted to get, in the typical fashion that three-year-olds learn to cry for whatever they crave, and Billy, who wasn’t in good humor for having been dragged out to help with the grocery shopping, had snapped at Robin, “If you don’t stop that crying, I’ll give you something to really cry about!” Karen didn’t believe that those simple words were enough to have turned the trick, but for whatever reason Robin had never cried again.

  “Are you crying now, Baby?” Karen asked of her missing child, having acquired the habit of talking aloud to Robin. “Is he doing something to you, and making you cry?” Karen waited for an answer with a real hope that somehow the words of Robin’s answer might come back to her, but they did not. And once again Karen would see Robin at a younger age, lying in bed asleep, or sucking her thumb, or both. “Have you started sucking your thumb again?” she asked. But there was no answer.

  Robinsville still lay untouched on the table where she had left it. Karen took literally the instructions not to disturb anything, and Robinsville was still spread out with its crudely cut and labeled store and school and post office and its houses with the dozens of people young and old in their paper clothes that Robin had designed and cut out for them. Karen would pause to stare down at the village, and would think it was a ghost town now despite its paper citizens. The thought gave her something else to cry about.

  But she also remembered that the whole idea of Robinsville had been prompted by a gift of reams of paper and pasteboard and even scissors from Leo, and Karen hated to think of Leo. She had not seen that bastard again since chewing him out at the roller rink. Her mother said that her husband had simply disappeared, which reawakened suspicion that Leo was either responsible for Robin’s abduction or was in cahoots with whoever had done it. Karen hated the thought that her mother had been married for a number of years to such a man…although she had often told herself that Leo was precisely what her mother deserved. Her mother offered to move in with Karen temporarily until Leo returned or was captured, but Karen didn’t want it, couldn’t stand the thought. For one thing, she was very resentful of her mother, because her mother had always had such a let-well-enough-alone attitude toward Robin’s upbringing, chiding Karen for being such a worrier. Just recently Karen had lost it with her mother and had yelled, “You told me not to worry and look where it got me!” It was very hard not to blame Louisa Spurlock for Robin’s misfortune; if she was not directly to blame, she was married to a louse who was conceivably at this very moment holding Robin captive somewhere.

  And that “sketch” which Leo had provided for the police artist, which indeed reminded Karen somewhat of that jerk state cop Sergeant Alan, was obviously just a clever ruse that Leo had devised to divert suspicion from himself. State Police Lieutenant Samples, the specialist in child mistreatment, didn’t think that the sketch was valid, and therefore they didn’t have anything to go on.

  The FBI agent assigned to the case, Henry Knight, out of the Little Rock office, seemed to Karen to be the only one who knew, as the expression had it, the distinction between his ass and a hole in the ground. He was efficient and knowledgeable and industrious, and in addition to all that he was kind and good-looking. Mr. Knight—or Hal as he insisted she call him—was the nicest, or the least unpleasant, of all the men she had had to deal with since it happened. She felt close enough to him to make her complaints about the other men to him. There had been a lot of rudeness and thoughtlessness and downright stupidity on the part of so many of the officers she’d had to deal with and answer a thousand questions for. Hal Knight understood her problems and her feelings so well that she wondered if perhaps he himself had lost a child. Finally she came right out and asked him, but he said he’d never had any children of his own.

  It was Agent Knight who suggested to her that she keep a journal, and he even provided her with a spiral notebook. He told her the journal would not only be a good outlet for her feelings but it might also accidentally provide a key word or passage that might give a clue to something she’d previously forgotten. She was so touched at his thoughtfulness that she broke into tears, and he held her while she cried; it was the very first time that anyone held her while she cried. But it was also the last time, because she never cried again after that. Whenever she felt like crying, she would just whip out her journal and write something in it.

  She leaned on Agent Knight and couldn’t have done without him. She couldn’t lean on her mother, or her doctor, or her minister. Billy came back to Harrison briefly at the request of the police,
and spent the night at a motel, and she saw him for only a few minutes. They spoke but didn’t touch. She was surprised to see how grief-stricken he was, but she couldn’t lean on him. Somehow she got the feeling that he blamed her for Robin’s disappearance.

  A couple of weeks after her first dismal performance on television, she was invited back to try again, and she willed herself not to cry, and took her precious journal with her just in case. Agent Knight went with her and helped her get ready for it. She confided to Agent Knight her fear of repeating the break-down she’d had the first time she’d gone before the TV cameras, and was surprised to learn that he had been watching that.

  “Don’t dwell on your loss,” Hal advised her. “Don’t think about what a swell kid Robin is. Think about what a scumbag her abductor is. Get angry. Let it all out.”

  It was good advice. Instead of trying a placating tone as she had in the first TV message, she delivered a tirade. She even imagined she was addressing Leo directly. “We’re going to find you,” she said into the camera. “We’re going to catch you, and if you have harmed a hair on that girl’s head we are going to make you pay for it. You had better be taking very good care of her, and doing all you can to make her happy, because she is going to tell us everything you did, and you are going to be severely punished for every little wrong thing you did to her. The only way you can possibly prevent the terrible reckoning that awaits you is to bring her back now! We have no pity for you, none whatsoever, but if you search your heart you might find just enough common decency to allow you to lessen your hideous crime by ensuring her safe return.” She paused, glowering fiercely at the camera for a long moment, and then she went on. “Now if you have her there with you and she is watching this, I want to say something to her too. Robin? Can you see me, Robin? Can you imagine how much I miss you? Not a moment goes by that I don’t ache to hear your laugh and see your bright eyes and smile. Paddington misses you too, and everybody in Robinsville is counting the seconds until you return. I know you are brave and clever and nothing can hurt you. If only you knew how many people are spending every minute hunting for you. We will find you. We will never stop trying to find you. I love you.”

  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 h
is 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.