by Jan Burke
“On the news!” Caleb said. “The younger girl — she’s my sister!” He had just seen the photos on television. As he spoke to me, I pulled up the image of Genie Fletcher and agreed I could see a strong resemblance to him. He told me he was certain Genie Fletcher was Jenny.
“I don’t want to create false hope,” I said. “And you’ve done enough work in your field to know one photo isn’t enough to make anyone certain of an identification.”
“You sound like Ben,” he complained.
“Ben’s right. I don’t know if Genie Fletcher is your sister, but you and your mom may want to talk to Detective Joe Travers of the Huntington Beach police. Do you think your mom is still awake? Maybe you should call her.”
There was a long silence, then he said, “I’ll call when I know for sure it’s Jenny.”
Despite this, I could tell the bit about false hope had been a useless caveat.
THE television screens in the newsroom were full of stories about the events of the day and showing photos of the children,
Roy, and Bonnie/Victoria. A forensic artist’s sketch of Cleo showed up, too — no one seemed to have any photos of her. Speculation was laid on thick by various commentators, but that would be nothing compared to the hours of live guesswork that were bound to come. I was already thoroughly tired of seeing the clips some of them had captured out in Palmdale. My fifteen minutes of fame, and I looked as if I had stepped out of a sandblaster.
I kept hoping that all the coverage would result in solid leads, thinking that surely someone would have seen Roy and the three children. Calls did come in to the police. Frank told me that if all the sightings were accurate, Roy and the kids had been able to manifest themselves in more than six hundred places in the United States and Canada, almost simultaneously.
As the hours from the time of Roy’s disappearance lengthened, worries grew.
JUST before I left work, Edith Fletcher, a daughter of Graydon Fletcher who lived with him, called on his behalf. She said he wanted me to know that the police had been informed that Giles Fletcher had been seen leaving an SUV — registered to a corporation none of them had ever heard of — parked in front of Graydon’s house. “And apparently Roy came by very early and unloaded it.”
“What did he take out of it?”
“The security cameras didn’t catch many details, but apparently it was sports or camping equipment — duffel bags and an ice chest, things like that. The police have the vehicle and the tape. We’re hoping this might help them to locate Roy before… before anything happens.”
“How often was Roy’s family over there?”
“Oh, Roy would stop by every few weeks or so, but we rarely saw the children. Still, I’m very fond of them. I know the girls better than the boys. They like to help me in the greenhouse. Such smart girls! They were here just after Sheila died.” She paused. “I didn’t really know Sheila, but — well, I’m now wondering if I knew Giles or Victoria or Roy! I can’t believe all of this is happening. And Carrie’s father — to have worried so about her for all those years! Thank goodness you were able to save her. I’m so grateful to you for that, I can’t begin to tell you. As for Genie and Aaron and Troy, I do hope nothing bad has happened—” She wasn’t able to finish. I found myself trying to reassure her. We talked for a while, and I found myself liking her. I thanked her for calling, and passed word on to Mark about the second SUV.
Just when I wanted to write them all off, I’d meet one of the kinder family members. If Edith Fletcher wasn’t genuinely concerned about those kids, and genuinely appalled by what she was learning about certain other family members, she was the best actress I’d encountered since becoming a reporter.
John Walters stopped us on the way out of the newsroom. “Kelly, you look like hell. Take the day off tomorrow.”
“Are you sure? I already took—”
“Don’t argue with me, Kelly.”
“Don’t argue with him,” Frank chimed in, and steered me out the door.
FRANK got another call as we headed home that night, from his new lieutenant, Jake Masuda. I caught Frank’s attention and said, “I wonder if the woman Gerry Serre dated before he was murdered bore any resemblance to Cleo Fletcher?”
“We do sometimes think of these things,” he said to me, and went back to talking to Jake.
Well, if he was going to be like that…
When he hung up, he told me there was a lead on the third child, Troy Fletcher. “A preschool teacher called to say she remembered him as Troy Sherman, one of her brightest, so I’m going to go talk to her tomorrow.”
I smiled and wished him luck, and if my tone made him suspicious, he didn’t say anything.
At home, we found that Caleb and Ben had left, and Ethan had fallen asleep. I made one more phone call, to a night-owl friend down in San Diego, Tonya Pearsley. She’s a school psychologist. Apparently my misadventures had made the news down there, so she was glad I called. I was glad she already had some background on the day’s events. I asked her about IQ testing of young children, and she verified that there were intelligence tests for preschoolers.
“Yes, but it’s not foolproof. There is some question about the reliability of the results based on socioeconomic factors and the home environment. You can’t tell how bright a child is just from a test score, you have to look at the whole child. In general, if you wait until a child is in second or third grade, you’ll get more reliable information from testing.”
“But it can be done?”
“Yes. Beyond reliability, though, the controversy surrounding the testing of preschoolers is mostly over how the information from the tests is going to be used.”
“You mean questions over whether to put kids in accelerated classes early on?”
“Partly, yes. Private testing is becoming more popular with parents who want to push their kids, although the schools are more inclined to try to use the tests to identify kids with learning problems, so that we can help them as soon as possible. Is this associated with a private school in the area?”
“You saw the kids in the newscast. They weren’t all at one private school — in fact, they were home-schooled. But they seem to be exceptionally bright — I mean off-the-charts smart. It’s the one factor I know they all have in common.”
“So you wonder who identified them as being so bright at such a young age? You’re probably looking for an educational psychologist. Not that many people do testing of preschoolers, so that may help you.”
I thanked her and promised we’d try to get down that way sometime soon.
When I hung up, I realized Frank had been eavesdropping.
“Sorry I was sarcastic earlier,” he said, proving he does figure out some things on his own. He had an impish smile on his face as he apologized, though, so he hardly presented a portrait of contrition. Alas, I’m a sucker for that smile.
“You want to know what Tonya said, I suppose.”
The smile grew. “Yes. But I really am sorry.”
“Hmm. If you hadn’t driven all the way out to Antelope Valley and hung around with me in the newsroom, I’d have my doubts. But you’ve scored big points.” I explained what Tonya had said. “Roy and Bonnie took Carrie to live with them in Huntington Beach. She’s especially bright. But then, three other especially bright kids from Las Piernas came to live with them — I find it too unlikely those are chance adoptions, especially given the cloistered lifestyle these kids were leading.”
“I agree. We aren’t talking about two people who were blithely unaware that someone was handing off stolen kids to them.”
“Caleb’s sister was a relative, so even if Richard Fletcher was estranged from the extended Fletcher family, Giles or someone else could have observed her intelligence. I keep wondering who might have flagged these two boys for them — identified them as especially bright.”
“I’ll ask the preschool teacher I’m meeting tomorrow about who did Troy’s testing.”
“No AMBER Alert on the
se kids?” I asked.
“That was debated by the task force they’ve formed on these cases. You know an AMBER Alert only gets used if the child may be seriously injured or killed — no one wants the public to become complacent about those alerts, so they try not to overuse them. You ask me, Roy Fletcher conspired to kill his wife and represents a threat to the kids. He could be suicidal at this point. But given everything Carrie said about the family, the higher-ups in the task force decided it was parental abduction. I hope that won’t come back to bite them.”
Not wanting the children to come to harm, I hoped so, too.
We agreed to call it a night. As we got into bed Frank said he’d like it very much if I’d stay away from people with guns for a while, but I reminded him that in that case, I would have to avoid him and most of his friends. So he amended the request: I was to avoid anyone with a gun who was not officially on the list of Frank Harriman Approved Gun Owners, which was a pretty darned short one. I said that was fine with me, really.
CHAPTER 52
Wednesday, May 3
9:30 A.M.
SAN BERNARDINO MOUNTAINS
GENIE had fed the boys breakfast an hour ago and was now trying to get them to settle down enough to get their jackets and mittens on. Dad and Cleo had come downstairs just as the boys finished eating, and had a not-so-quiet argument about the TV, which had been settled with a compromise. The compromise was that the kids could go outside with Dad while Cleo watched TV. The boys wanted to stay inside and watch TV, too, of course, but Dad snapped at them and they gave up on the idea. They were always full of energy after breakfast, and now they were being little devils. It would be good to get them outside and let them run around a little.
Genie tried not to show how excited she was about going outside. She had addressed and stamped the letter, and now she had it tucked inside her jacket pocket.
The air was cold, but most of the snow was gone. A few patches could be found under the shadiest trees or near the biggest rocks. The little snowman they had built yesterday was already a lump of ice and dirt and sticks. She was glad she had used Carrie’s camera to take a picture of him before he melted.
Dad didn’t come outside right away, and so she took her chance. “Race you to the road!” she called to the boys.
They took the challenge and headed up the drive.
They had not reached the first bend when she heard Dad yell, “Kids, no!”
The boys stopped immediately, but Genie pretended she didn’t hear him. She kept on going.
“You two stay right there!” she heard Dad yell at the boys. “Genie! Genie!”
She kept running, turning up the bend, now out of sight of the cabin.
But Dad’s legs were long and it didn’t take even a minute for him to catch up to her. He grabbed hold of her arm, clutching it hard. It hurt, and something about that grip made her go crazy. All her worry, all her fears about Carrie and Mom and their family came boiling up inside her, and she did something she had never done before in her life — she tried to hurt Dad.
He was not quite on balance as he took hold of her, or it never would have worked, but she twisted and kicked and thrashed, and the combination of her movements made him stumble and fall. She fell, too, but got up faster and ran.
He quickly caught up with her again, and this time he grabbed her and completely overpowered her, pushing her to the ground, pinning her. His face, looming over hers, was red with anger.
Now she was frightened in an entirely different way.
He stood up and pulled her up by the shoulders. He shook her. “What the hell are you doing?” he shouted. “Are you trying to get us all killed?”
She looked at him, wide-eyed. She nearly began to cry. This man wasn’t Dad, not the Dad she loved. At this thought, her anger rose up again and she shouted back at him, “What happened to my father?”
His face went pale.
“You aren’t my dad! You act like someone I don’t know!”
He set her down but kept his hands on her shoulders. His hands were trembling. He looked awful. Suddenly she felt bad about yelling at him.
He glanced at the ground and frowned, then bent to pick up the envelope, which had fallen out of her pocket. “My God… Genie…”
She didn’t say anything.
“Genie… Genie, sit here with me for a minute, okay?”
She nodded, and they moved over to a big rock. He called to the boys, who were standing still in shock. “Genie and I are going to talk for a minute. Why don’t you build another little snowman out of the snow over there?”
“We could make a snowboy,” Troy suggested.
“Yes, that would be good.”
Despite the coolness of the air, Dad’s face was sweating. Genie tried to catch her breath. Now that she had yelled at him, and all the rest, she felt shaky, too. Although they were sitting close to each other, it seemed to her that Dad was far away, that something important had changed between them. She wasn’t sure she wanted it, and even as she wished that it was a week ago and she and Carrie had never talked about rememberings or called Irene Kelly, she could hear one of Grandfather’s sayings, “What’s done is done, even though we might wish and wish to change it. So when there is no going back, you must go forward.” Until now, that had only been something she thought when she broke a plate or a glass while doing dishes. Now she had broken her whole family.
“Did I hurt you?” Dad asked.
He had, but she shook her head.
“Good. I never, ever wanted to hurt you, Genie. Always remember that, okay?” He started crying. Although yesterday she had wondered once or twice if he had been crying, she had never seen him break down in front of her before. He brought his knees up and put his right arm over them, then rested his forehead on his arm, hiding his face.
Genie, on his left, moved closer to him. She took his free hand and held it tight. “I know, Daddy. I know. Please don’t cry.”
“I’ve ruined everything,” he said.
“We’ll be all right,” Genie said, patting his arm. She quickly glanced over to where the boys were playing and was relieved to see that they were engrossed in gathering snow for their snowboy.
Dad wiped at his face, took some big breaths, and sat up a little straighter. “I’m sorry,” he said again, but in a stronger voice. “It doesn’t help for me to fall apart, does it?” He pulled her closer and said, “Whatever happens, I want you to know that I love you and Troy and Aaron and Carrie.”
“I know, Dad. We love you, too. Don’t be sad.”
He took another big breath. “I don’t know how long Cleo is going to be inside, so I’m going to tell you some things, just in case — well, just in case.
“Genie, I made a big mistake — a lot of big mistakes. We’re here because I — I liked Cleo, and I believed that Cleo would keep us safe. But instead… instead, we’re all in danger here.”
“Why don’t we leave?”
“I want to, but we have to be careful. If we’re not careful, someone could get hurt. Cleo… Cleo has special skills.”
“All those guns—”
“She kills people, Genie. I’m being very serious about that.”
“She’s a murderer? All those guns — Dad — let’s get in the car and get away!”
“She has the keys to the car. Besides, I think she has some kind of alarm and God knows what else set up in the garage now, too. She warned me that it would be unhealthy to try to go in there. And one of the first things she did when she got here was to destroy my cell phone.”
Genie frowned.
“Even though she’s a little… out of control, she likes me, Genie. And she wanted to help us. But she’s not like other people. She doesn’t think like other people do. I don’t want her to hurt you or the boys. For now we have to make sure she stays calm and doesn’t feel threatened by us, all right? Sooner or later we’ll get a chance. Or she’ll figure out that she can do better on her own and leave us.”
Gen
ie frowned. “Dad, she won’t want us to tell people about her. If she kills people…”
“That’s why we have to be cautious, Genie.”
“The guns. The booby trap—”
“You know about the booby trap?” He looked shocked.
“It’s under the house.”
“It’s… it’s like a bomb, Genie. She can easily go back under the house, hook it up again, and trap all of us inside. If someone comes through the door while that thing’s hooked up, it will blow them — and all of us — to kingdom come.”
He took another shaky breath. “From this cabin, someone can look out and see down the slope, right?”
“Yes.”
“She can see people coming up the road. She even has perimeter alarms set. You know what those are?”
“I know what a perimeter is….”
“Those alarms go off if anyone comes close to the cabin. They won’t ring out or anything — they’re a set of lights near her bed and by her desk downstairs. She checks them all the time. If you had gone up the driveway, she would be able to tell.”
“Mom and Carrie will be worried. They’ll look for us.”
She saw the stricken look on his face.
“What? What’s wrong?”
“Mom has been hurt. Very badly.”
Genie tried to take this in. “Did Cleo hurt her?”
“I don’t know. I honestly don’t know. She says she didn’t. She says Mom fell down the stairs before she got there. It’s my fault. It’s my fault….”
Because you gave Mom pills in her drink, Genie thought, remembering the mortar and pestle. Cleo lies, and you lie, too. She suddenly felt cold inside, and wanted to move away from him, but she stayed still. “Carrie…” she whispered.
“Carrie is safe.”
She looked up at him.
He held the letter up. “Did you and Carrie write to Ms. Kelly?”
“No,” she said.
“Tell me why Ms. Kelly came to our house, Genie. Tell me the truth. It’s really important. I mean it.”