by Diane Hoh
And they thought she knew where Mindy was?
Nora opened the door wider, stood aside, and waved the trio into her room.
Forever after, her mind would fix that moment in time as the moment when her nightmare began.
Chapter 2
“I WANT TO GO home. I don’t like this place. You said my daddy would be here, and he’s not. You take me home now.”
“We’re not going home just yet. Your daddy’s busy. He told me to take care of you.”
“No, he didn’t. I don’t like you. I want Norrie.”
“Nora. Her name is Nora. You’re old enough to say it right.”
“She don’t care if I call her Norrie. You’re not the boss of me.”
“Yes, I am. For now, anyway. You go lie down on that bed and I’ll tell you a story.”
“A story? Good as what Norrie tells me? She tells the best stories.”
“Better. Hush, now. Just be quiet and listen. I’ll sit over here in this rocking chair, so you can see me the whole time and know you’re not alone.”
“Once upon a time there were two little children, about your age. They weren’t twins, but they were only two years apart. One was five, and one was three. Their parents were very nice to the children. They lived in a big house out in the country. They had a pony and they had rabbits in a pen. The children were very, very happy.”
“I like this story.”
“Hush. But one day when the daddy was gone off to work and the mommy was inside the house ironing the children’s clothing, and the children were playing outside with their pony and their rabbits, a woman in a long, gray coat came rushing out of the woods behind the house and plucked the older child out of its own backyard and ran back into the woods with it. The younger child didn’t do anything. It just stood there, holding one of the rabbits, and it didn’t yell for help or run after the woman or go get its mother, not for the longest time. Just stood there.”
“You got on a mad face. I don’t like it when people gets mad. And I didn’t even do nothing bad. Can I go home now?”
“Shh, don’t interrupt. Anyway, I’m not mad at you. You’re being a very good little girl. The woman took the older child, crying for its mommy, to an ugly, rusty old truck hidden in the woods. She threw the child into the front seat, climbed in beside it, and raced away before the child’s mommy even knew anything had happened. Because the younger child hadn’t told yet. And it wasn’t as if this child was too young to talk. Okay, it wasn’t very big, that’s true. Only three, like you. But it could talk, and it could scream. If the child had just screamed for the mommy, she would have come running, and maybe she could have stopped the terrible thing from happening.
“But by the time the child went running for its mommy, it was too late to catch up with the truck.
“No one had seen anything suspicious.
“No one had heard anything suspicious.
“The only person who knew what had happened, had seen the whole thing, was too young to describe the woman. She was no help at all.
“Hey, you’re not falling asleep, are you? I just got started. There’s lots more, I promise. Mindy?
“Oh, well, you might as well sleep. The rest can wait. It’s waited all this time to be told.
“As long as you’re asleep, I may as well go do the things I have to do. Have to. Can’t leave anything out. Not now. Now that I’ve started, I have to do it right.
“Sleep tight. Back as soon as I can. When I come back, I’ll tell you some more of the story. But I can’t tell you all of it. Because there isn’t any ending just yet.
“But there will be. Soon. Very soon, that’s a promise …”
The door opened, then closed, and a key turned in the lock.
The child with the golden curls slept on.
Chapter 3
“COULD WE HAVE A little light in here?” Officer Adelphi asked Nora as they entered the room.
“I was sleeping. Migraine,” Nora explained as she moved to the window to release the shade. She winced as the light flooded in.
“Sleeping?”
Nora turned back to face the officers and Mrs. Coates. “Yes. It’s the only thing that works when a migraine hits.” She clasped her hands together in front of her and leaned against the old wooden dresser. “Sometimes. Sometimes it works.”
She remembered then why they were there. Mindy was missing? Why weren’t they out looking for her? “Are you sure Mindy is missing?” she asked anxiously. “She must have wandered up the street to play with a friend.”
“Anyone else in the house?”
Nora stared at the officers as Officer Adelphi moved to her closet to peer around inside, and Officer Blount took a position at the foot of the bed, a white notebook in his hands. She couldn’t be sure which one of them had asked her the question. “Anyone else in what house?” she asked, confused.
The male officer, holding the notebook and a pencil, sighed. “This house,” he said. “While you were … asleep. Anyone else here at the time?”
She stood up straighter. When she spoke, her voice was thick with confusion. “No. I’m the only one here right now. Why? I mean, why do you want to know that? Even if there had been someone else here, they wouldn’t have known if I was sleeping or not, would they? Who would be nosy enough to open the door and look in my room?”
He shrugged. “Friends. Looking for you. Maybe wanting to go shopping at the mall or take a bike ride in the park or go for a boat ride on the river.”
“I don’t have time to do those things. I work full-time at the campus day care center.” Nora almost added, “And I don’t have many friends, either,” but she stopped herself in time. Her social life wasn’t any of his business. Or … she felt a sudden chill … was it? Wasn’t he making it his business?
Who had told the police that Nora Mulgrew might know where Mindy Donner was? Why would someone say that?
Mary? Did she think Nora had come back and taken Mindy for a walk? But I would never do that without asking first, Nora thought.
But the officer had said, “The housekeeper and some other people …”
What other people?
“Could I answer your questions some other time?” Nora asked politely. “If Mindy really is missing, I’d like to go help look for her. I’m sure she’s just in the neighborhood somewhere.” Of course she was. Mindy couldn’t really be missing.
“No, I’m afraid not, Ms. Mulgrew,” Officer Adelphi said. “In fact, we were kind of hoping you’d take a ride up to campus with us so we could have a nice, quiet little talk.”
Nora froze in place. Wait a sec here! What was happening! Were they serious?
Her eyes, filled with deepening confusion, and a hint of panic, moved to the elderly housemother’s kind face. “Mrs. Coates?”
The woman shook her head sadly. “I’m sorry, dear, but if these officers want you to go with them, I suppose you should go. It’s the only way to straighten things out.”
Nora couldn’t give in that quickly or easily. The only thing that seemed important just then was finding Mindy. How could she help do that if she was sitting in an office on campus talking to security officers? “Mrs. Coates, you know I have migraines! I told you about it when I first arrived. Tell these people!”
Mrs. Coates cleared her throat. “Well, yes dear,” she said uncertainly, “you did say that, of course. But … you haven’t had any up until now, so I don’t know …” Her voice trailed off, then she added more briskly, “But I’m sure if you say you were here sleeping, that’s exactly where you were.”
Thanks a whole bunch, Nora thought resentfully and then quickly tried to tell herself that the housemother couldn’t possibly have realized how damaging that sounded. “If you say you were here sleeping” … not, “Of course you were here sleeping.”
“Let’s just come along now, Miss,” Sergeant Adelphi said, moving forward to take Nora’s arm lightly. “No one’s accusing you of anything. We just want to clear up a few details, th
at’s all, and you might be able to help us do that. You want the Donner child found, right? I understand you two were pretty close. So I’m sure you’re eager to help.”
“Yes, of course I am. I just don’t see how sitting around talking can help, if she’s really lost.”
“Oh, we don’t think she’s lost,” Officer Blount said. Then his square, ruddy face changed expression, became grim. “We know for a fact that someone abducted the child from her backyard while the housekeeper was on the telephone.”
His words hit Nora with all the force of a baseball bat against her temple. She gasped, wavered, leaned against the dresser for support. “Abducted? Kidnapped? You know for a fact that someone … someone took her?” she whispered, her face paper-white. “You mean … are you saying that Mindy has been kidnapped?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying. So you can see how serious this is. You can see why we need all the help we can get. You’re not the only person we’re talking to. There are others. So if you’ll just come with us …”
Everything had changed so suddenly that Nora wasn’t even sure exactly how it had happened. One minute, she’d thought they were talking about a child wandering out of her yard, and the next minute the horrible word “kidnapping” had snaked its way into her room.
Mindy? Kidnapped?
“I’ll do anything I can to help,” Nora said, and walked out of her room and down the stairs and through the foyer to the front door with the two officers. Then they all went outside and she climbed into the back seat of their car.
In the small, bright security office on campus, she described her Saturday over and over again until it began to sound even to her own ears as if she’d memorized it. As if it had been written down for her and all she’d had to do was learn her lines.
She could see by the expression on the officers’ faces that they’d had the same thought.
There was so little to tell. She had, she told them, found another toy for Mindy that morning and decided to take it to her. The housekeeper, Mary, had left, Nora had stayed with Mindy, then the housekeeper had returned, and Nora had gone home in the throes of a migraine headache. Had taken two aspirin and gone straight to bed. Had been there ever since, hadn’t even known Mindy was missing or that there was anything wrong. Had been asleep.
It sounded lame, even to her. But it was the truth.
The entire time that she was talking and repeatedly answering the same questions, maddening questions of her own were running through her mind, agonizing questions that the officers couldn’t, or wouldn’t, answer for her. When exactly had Mindy disappeared? Where was the housekeeper? Had she seen anyone approaching the house? Had any of the neighbors noticed anything suspicious? How was Mindy’s father, Professor Donner, holding up?
Through a small window facing her, she watched a stream of familiar faces going in and out of the office across the hall. A tearful, pasty-faced Mary, glaring at her through the glass, then Helen Kieffer, her boss at the day care center, pointedly refusing to glance in Nora’s direction. Helen was followed by a succession of employees of the center: Fitz, his thin shoulders hunched, his cheeks red because, Nora guessed, he knew she was in there and didn’t want to look at her. Then Sabra Nicks, slightly taller than Nora but almost as thin, dark brown hair in braids. Sabra looked directly at Nora and gave her a friendly wave, as if to say, “Don’t sweat it, it’s no big deal.”
“The housekeeper tells us,” Officer Adelphi said to Nora in a friendly voice, “that you were a little angry with the child this morning. That you yelled at her. Is that what happened?”
“Oh, no, I wasn’t angry with her” Nora said hastily, feeling her face flushing with guilt. “It was the headache, that’s all, and the heat. I’d never spoken to her sharply before, and it upset her. I felt really bad. But I couldn’t stay to make it up to her because I was getting really sick.”
Adelphi nodded and said, “Um-hum. Well, that can happen, can’t it? Three-year-olds can be annoying, we all know that. And it’s certainly easy to lose your temper when you’re not feeling up to par, and it’s hot as an oven out there.” She glanced over at her partner, who was sitting opposite her at a small wooden table in the security office. Nora sat at the head of the table, facing both officers.
“But the thing is, Ms. Mulgrew,” Adelphi continued, “we don’t have a single person who can confirm that you actually were in bed, in your room, sleeping at the time the kidnapping took place. And we understand that the director of the day care center where you work, and where the Donner child is enrolled, had to warn you about becoming too emotionally involved with the child. Is that true?”
Nora felt sick. “Look, if I’d taken her,” she said wearily, “where would I be hiding her? You were in my room at Nightingale Hall. There wasn’t any little girl in there, was there?” Tears of anger, frustration, and fear stung her eyelids, but she was determined not to cry in front of these people. “Where is it that you think I’ve stashed Mindy?”
“If we knew that,” Officer Blount said darkly, “we’d go get her, wouldn’t we?”
Another blow, this one the harshest of all. It was the closest anyone had come to saying they actually believed that Nora Mulgrew had kidnapped Mindy Donner and was hiding her somewhere. Nora had never felt so totally alone in her life.
It seemed ironic to her that she felt alone, when there was a parade of her acquaintances flowing in and out of the office next door. After Sabra had come Lucas, short, stocky Lucas, with neatly combed blond hair and ruddy cheeks, looking healthy and fit, just the kind of person to become, one day, “the most famous pediatrician since Benjamin Spock.” Nora didn’t know Lucas that well, but it seemed to her that if that was what he wanted to be, that’s what he would be. He seemed determined. He smiled at her, and waved. Amy Tarantino, small and dark-haired, came next. She’d been crying, Nora noticed, and she didn’t smile when she glanced Nora’s way. Nor did she wave. Amy was very fond of Mindy Donner.
This is ridiculous, Nora thought, watching them all come to tell everything they knew about Nora Mulgrew to anyone who asked. That wouldn’t be much. She was glad now that she hadn’t been friendlier. It gave them less ammunition to use against her. What did they know about her, anyway? Very little.
Nora Shane Mulgrew hadn’t had an easy time of it. An only child, her adolescence had been marred by her mother’s repeated hospitalizations in psychiatric facilities and then her death, followed fairly soon afterward by the death of Nora’s father. They’d been told “heart attack,” but Nora felt that her father had simply been too tired to continue living. He’d been worn out, after years of caring for an invalid wife and dealing with a daughter whose adolescence could only be called “emotionally charged.” At least, that was what one high school counselor had called it. Nora, frightened that she had inherited her mother’s emotional instability, had pulled herself together with sheer force of will, and resolved to stay out of the hospitals where her mother had so often been a patient. Except for one brief period, she had succeeded.
An unmarried aunt, Aunt Colleen, a schoolteacher, had taken sixteen-year-old Nora in out of duty, not love. She’d made that very clear right from the start. As long as Nora kept to herself, did as she was told, and didn’t upset the household in any way, the two lived in a cool but civil atmosphere in the cramped city apartment.
When Nora cried at her father’s funeral, her aunt had awkwardly patted her on the arm and said, “Anything that doesn’t break you makes you stronger, Nora. You remember that now.”
So many things had happened to her, and she hadn’t broken into pieces yet, had she? Except for that one time. So didn’t that mean she was strong? Not frail, like her mother? She wanted to believe that. Needed to believe it. Marjorie Dumas, blonde and heavyset, walked by, glowering at Nora as she passed the window. Marjorie adored Mindy Donner, and had resented Nora’s friendship with the little girl. She had made no secret of her feelings. She’d done everything in her power to come between them, fa
iling miserably.
I would love, Nora thought as Marjorie stomped sullenly past the window, to be a fly on the wall when Marjorie Dumas is asked questions about Nora Mulgrew.
Well, maybe not.
Nora had been slumped wearily in the hard-backed chair at the table. Now, she sat up very straight. Who were these people asking her all these questions, and asking other people questions about her, anyway? They weren’t real police officers. They were campus security, employed to keep an eye out for theft and the occasional fistfight and any suspicious characters lurking about on campus. What did they know about a serious crime like kidnapping? Who did they think they were, the FBI?
“Do I need to stay here?” she asked sharply.
“No,” Officer Adelphi said, shaking her head. “You can leave now. But don’t go anywhere, okay? If that girl hasn’t been found by tonight, we’ll need to talk to you again.”
Too many messages coming at her at once made Nora’s head feel stuffed with cotton. Too much, too full, her head was too full. She couldn’t think, couldn’t get it all straight.
Snap out of it! she ordered silently, and began methodically sorting out the messages.
She could go. That was one message. A good message, a relief. A wonderful thing, being let go. But there was another message, this one a warning. They still suspected her, or they wouldn’t be telling her not to leave town.
And there was still another message, a much more frightening one. “If that girl hasn’t been found by tonight …”
Nora stood up. Her legs felt stiff and her back ached. There was a chance that Mindy wouldn’t be found by tonight? The darkness of night might fall with Mindy still in the hands of the person who had snatched her out of her backyard? Oh, no, she’d be so scared. She was only three years old, and she, too, hadn’t had such an easy time of it. How could someone do this?
Filled with a sudden, hot rage, Nora cried, “What is being done to find her? Is this all you’re doing, sitting around asking innocent people stupid questions? Why aren’t you out there looking for her?”