The Children

by Ann Leary

  Soon we were on Railroad Street. The old Connecticut Valley Railroad track runs alongside this road, and we followed it into Harwich Center, which used to be a train depot. The railroad stopped service to this area in the early 1950s, and the old train station is now an antiques shop. The railroad bed is used by hikers and equestrians. You can follow it for miles, all the way up into the Berkshires. Right after the depot, the railroad bed curves away from the road. If you follow the trail into the woods a short distance, you’ll come to a tunnel that was blasted into the hill over a hundred years ago. Go through the tunnel and you’ll come out just behind the Holden campus. It’s a shortcut Sally and I often took when we snuck onto campus in our teens.

  “So I have no idea how it got in,” Fuentes said.

  “Are any of the windows missing screens?” I asked. My heart was racing but I tried to keep my voice calm. I was thinking about Sally and the tunnel.

  The way to the tunnel is dark at night. You have to take an abandoned service road to get there. You have to park on the road and walk a short path to get up to the tunnel. I’ve only gone there once at night in a car. It was in Everett’s truck. He had left the headlights on to light our way, but the path swerved out of their glare, and I held on to Everett’s belt as we scampered up the little incline to the railroad bed. We were both out of breath as we ran, stumbling, up over the frozen bank, over the slippery rocks. Long, stiff, winter-dead weeds stabbed at my hands when I tripped and fell. Everett helped me back up.

  “No, and all the doors were closed,” Fuentes said.

  The old railroad bed is lined with stone dust. We really started running when we got there, Everett and me. Our eyes were adjusting to the dark, but we ran toward a towering black hole that cut into the night sky. I remember the way the air changed when we stepped inside the tunnel. There was a sudden stillness. Everett called Sally’s name and the echo of his voice gave us comfort. The tunnel was empty; there was nothing but hard ledge bouncing Everett’s voice from one end to the other. When it stopped, I heard the slow drip of water on stone. Then the moaning.

  “Hey,” Fuentes said. “I know I look a little rough, but do you wanna grab something to eat or something?”

  I liked that Fuentes assumed that I did stuff like that—going to restaurants.

  “Thanks, I already ate,” I said.

  We drove past a woman pushing one of those jogging strollers. We passed old Norm Hungerford’s house—Whit’s old friend Norm—and I saw him out on his lawn, filling a bird feeder with birdseed. My breathing eased up a little.

  “I don’t understand. You slept in your car because of a bat? I mean, you’re not supposed to kill them, but I guess you could have if you were so scared.”

  “I would have if it wasn’t dive-bombing my head. I would have shot it if it had landed someplace, but it was flying all over the place. Scary as hell.”

  “Shot it?” I laughed.

  “I know. There’s no way. All I have is a pistol, and I’m not the best shot. But I would have shot at it, you know, just to let it know I meant business. Just to scare it away.”

  “They’re not like bears—you don’t scare them away with gunshots. You need a tennis racket, that’s all. You just have to sort of guide it out. Or you can throw a towel over it if it lands on a wall, then carry it out. I can’t believe that scared you. You’re a member of the Major Crime Unit?”

  “I’m not afraid of people. But…” He shuddered. “Bats. I just have a thing, okay? I have a thing with bats. I don’t mind mice or rats. But bats? No.”

  “What is it specifically, though?” I said. I couldn’t help teasing him. I loved that this very macho trooper was afraid of a little bat. “Is it just because they’re like rodents that fly? Little beady-eyed rodents. That fly?”

  “Okay, okay,” he said. “Stop.”

  “And they have little faces that are sort of half pig, half human?”

  “Stop it,” he said.

  “They’re ugly but harmless. They eat mosquitoes,” I said. “I actually love them.”

  “Let’s see how much you love them when one bites you in the neck and starts sucking your blood.”

  “Are you in a Twilight fan club or something? You just need a tennis racket.”

  “Then, the next day, you wake up, and you have fangs,” he continued. “You’re a vampire. Let’s see how much you like ’em then.”

  He was so funny, I was almost sorry when we pulled up to Ramón’s house.

  “So what if they eat mosquitoes? Why are bats better than mosquitoes?” he asked me as he parked the car.

  “They will give you rabies, some bats,” I conceded. “That’s the only danger. Fear is just a feeling, feelings aren’t facts. They’re like ghosts. Nobody’s ever been killed by one. Have you ever seen a photograph of one?”

  I grabbed my mother’s tennis racket. Then I taught Trooper Fuentes how to remove a bat.

  FIFTEEN

  “I’m trying to understand,” Sally said. She had climbed into my bed very early the following morning. I was annoyed. I turned away and she drove her knees into the backs of mine as she whispered into my ear, “You went to Ramón Hernández’s house with that trooper guy? That is the craziest thing I’ve ever heard. I can’t get you to go to the Housatonic Diner with me, but you’ll go to the house of somebody you don’t even know?”

  “I know Ramón Hernández.”

  “But you said Ramón wasn’t there. You were with George Washington Fernandez. You don’t know him. What if he’d started interrogating you?”

  “Fuentes, not Fernandez. What time is it?”

  “Interrogation time!” Sally started tickling me, and I screamed at her to get out of my bed. I’m superticklish.

  “Get out, get … OUT,” I said.

  “What if he probed you? What if he…” Sally suddenly froze. I took the opportunity to drive my elbow into her boob.

  “Ow, fuck. Shhhh, somebody’s walking in the hallway.”

  “It’s probably Spin. He has to go back out this morning with the task force. Poor Laurel.”

  “Poor Laurel,” Sally scolded. “Why would you feel sorry for her?”

  “I like her, Sally. It’s just bad timing that Spin’s so busy this week.”

  “Please,” Sally said, rolling over onto her back and staring at the ceiling. “I wish everybody would get up. I figured something out for that score, but I need the piano, and I know Joan’ll get upset if I start playing too early.”

  “What time is it?”

  “It’s got to be almost seven. I left the city around four, I think. It was still dark.”

  “Did you sleep, Sally?”

  “I’m not tired, and I also don’t want you to keep asking me about my sleeping habits, I’m not a—”

  She stopped abruptly. I turned and saw that my bedroom door was open a little. Laurel was peering into the room.

  “Morning!” Laurel said.

  “Hey, Laurel,” I said. “I hope we didn’t wake you up.”

  “No, not at all, I get up early to write. That’s when I do my best writing. I heard you two in here. Can I come in?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Yeah, come on in,” Sally said.

  There are two beds in my room and a chair at the desk, but Laurel came over and sat on my bed with Sally and me.

  “Oh, okay, why don’t you sit on the bed with us?” Sally mumbled. “Because there’s no place else to sit.…”

  “I heard you went out on a little date last night, Lottie,” Laurel said.

  “What?” I said.

  “A date?” Sally said. “Who told you that? She wasn’t on a date. What the hell?”

  “We saw Everett when we got home last night,” Laurel said, ignoring Sally and squeezing in closer to me.

  “You did?”

  “Yeah, he came over and had a beer with Spin and me on the beach. He seemed a little … unsettled. He wasn’t okay with you taking off with that guy, that’s for sure.”
r />   “I was gone for an hour. I caught a bat for him and he drove me home.”

  “Everett seemed to think there was more to it. He couldn’t understand how you would go off with some guy you don’t know.”

  “I know him now. Anyway, Everett said he played baseball with him. I don’t know what everyone is making such a big deal about.”

  “He was jealous, Charlotte.”

  “No,” I scoffed.

  “He said he was a little freaked when he got home and Joan’s car was gone and you were gone, too. He said you could have left him a note.”

  “He expects you to leave him a note?” Sally said. “Does he leave you notes? What the fuck?”

  I was annoyed, too. And maybe a little pleased.

  “Spin said he was glad that you had gone out and were fine with everything,” Laurel said.

  I couldn’t help but bristle at this. “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, Spin told me about your agoraphobia. I had an aunt who had that and she went to a therapist and did cognitive behavioral therapy. It really helped.”

  Sally had been lying back against a pillow, but now she sat up and glared at Laurel. “What are you even talking about? Who has agoraphobia?”

  “I don’t have that,” I said. “Did Spin say I did?”

  Now Laurel looked like she was going to die of embarrassment. She covered her face with her hands and said, “Shit, I did it again.”

  “Why the hell did he say that? My sister doesn’t have anything like that,” Sally said.

  “Guys,” Laurel said. Her voice was trembling. “I’m really sorry. I think I keep coming across as rude.…”

  Now she was crying, her face still in her hands.

  “Wait, no, Laurel, don’t cry,” Sally said. She gave me a look; I could tell that she felt as bad as I did. Spin did once send me a link to an article about agoraphobia. He was concerned that I might end up like that, I guess. He probably told Laurel that he was concerned. She was going to be his wife; of course they told each other everything.

  “Laurel,” I said, “it’s fine. I am a homebody. Spin probably thinks it’s something more than that.”

  “I keep trying to fit in and everybody thinks I’m horrible.”

  “No,” I said. “Nobody thinks that. Laurel? I have had anxiety about leaving the property recently. But something you said yesterday really helped me.”

  “Really?” She sniffed.

  “Yeah, the thing you said about feelings being like ghosts.”

  Sally had moved away from Laurel when she first sat down, but now she moved in closer.

  “Come on, stop crying,” Sally said. “What’s all this about ghosts?”

  “And I … just being with you two…” She was sobbing now.

  “Oh, Laurel,” I said, putting my arms around her.

  Sally pushed in closer and said, “Sister sandwich.” And Laurel giggled through her tears as we hugged her.

  * * *

  We all spent the next few days absorbed with our various projects.

  Laurel liked to write on the porch. She had found a little folding TV table in one of the closets and set it up facing the lake. She worked there during the mornings. I worked, as usual, up in the attic, though I had to move downstairs after lunch because it gets so hot up there.

  I had run into a little bit of a dilemma on the blog. LoneStarLiza, a longtime follower, wanted to raise money for Wyatt’s upcoming spinal surgery. She wanted to set up an online auction of sorts, and a bunch of my readers got all excited and started making plans about how to set the thing up. These conversations were taking place in the comments section of my posts. They kind of took over the blog. I would write a funny post about a hyperactive tiger mom at the playground, and instead of commenting about that, they’d all carry on with their ideas about how people could donate items to the auction, how people would be able to pay for the items. It was getting out of hand.

  I couldn’t let them have the auction, of course. What I was doing with my blog was entertainment. I was providing entertaining content for bored moms; it was almost like a TV show—a show about a quirky family that everybody could relate to. And, like a TV show, I was getting paid by sponsors. I wasn’t breaking any laws, as far as I knew. But accepting donations for a sick child? A child who’s not real? That would be fraud. I never took any law classes at Columbia, but I was pretty sure that would have been illegal. And it was wrong. A lot of my followers have families with struggles of their own. I couldn’t let them continue trying to figure out ways to help my family.

  At first, I thanked them all for caring, and explained that we didn’t need help with medical costs. Our insurance was paying for everything.

  But my kind readers persisted. There must be other expenses, they said. What about all the therapies?

  I replied that, amazingly, our insurance covered most of that. Then I wrote an entry explaining that their loyalty to the blog was helping out more than anything else they could do. The blog’s popularity had been what attracted the sponsors, and the income from that helped with our living expenses. Truthfully, I had a six-figure contract with the diaper company. I didn’t reveal that the blog earned that much, of course. I made it sound like it was just a little extra income to defray some of our living expenses.

  * * *

  Sally spent many hours a day in the music room, working on the film score. One afternoon, when I ran into Laurel in the kitchen, she commented on Sally’s music.

  “She’s really persistent,” Laurel said. “She keeps playing the same thing over and over.”

  “Oh?” I said. “I’m so used to hearing music. Whit and Sally always played instruments in the house. Spin, too, when he was here. You’ll get used to it. I don’t even hear her, to tell you the truth. Is it disturbing your writing?”

  “No, not really,” Laurel said.

  “It’ll be much quieter at Perry and Catherine’s,” I said. Laurel and Spin had one more week with us, then they would be joining Perry’s family in the Hamptons. The following weekend was the engagement party.

  Now that Joan had committed to having the wedding here, she had lost her enthusiasm for the party.

  “It’s too much,” she said one afternoon when Laurel and Spin had gone sailing. We had convinced her to let Ramón and his crew help spruce up the grounds, and Joan had been harassing them all week. They were overpruning the hedges. They were trampling her fresh mint.

  “I think they just want to move some of the mint away from the footpaths. It’s gotten a little out of the gardens,” I said. We had mint everywhere.

  “Everybody’ll be sorry when there’s no fresh mint for the iced tea,” Joan said. We were sitting on the porch, drinking iced tea at the time.

  “There’s still plenty,” I assured her.

  “I wish I hadn’t let them railroad me into having the wedding here,” she griped. “Why wouldn’t they have it at Holden? The chapel is so beautiful.”

  Joan had a point. A lot of people have weddings there. “I think that if you’re a member of the faculty, you can have the reception right there on the green,” I said. “They can put up a tent there.”

  “Oh, look, they almost went over.”

  We could see the sailboat out in the middle of the lake. A gust seemed to have caught them off guard when Spin pulled in the mainsail, and now we could hear their laughter as they scrambled from one side of the boat to the other.

  “I guess Laurel wouldn’t have sailed, growing up in Idaho.”

  “No, I guess not,” I said.

  “I can’t imagine what these guys charge,” Joan whispered a moment later when one of the men pushed a wheelbarrow past the porch.

  “Who cares? You’re not paying for it, right?” I said, opening the door just a little. “The trust is paying for it.”

  “That’s not the point,” Joan said. “The point is that it’s wasteful and Whit wouldn’t have liked it. We could do just as good a job.”

  “No, we couldn’t,�
�� I said.

  “You know, my family once had almost as much wealth as the Whitman family, and it was all frittered away by my great-grandparents, who were very extravagant with just this kind of thing.”

  “But it wasn’t their extravagances that wiped them out,” I said. “It was the stock market crash and the Depression, right?”

  “Other families survived. The Whitmans thrived.”

  “But what good is having so much money if you never spend it?” I asked, though I knew the answer.

  “Dear, the money in the trust was earned by Whit’s great-grandfather, who was an incredibly brave and enterprising man. He made all the money. Whit didn’t earn the money, so he didn’t feel he had the right to spend it. He lived off his earnings from the banjos and some of the interest from the trusts, of course. But he wanted the interest to keep growing, as it had always grown. And, of course, he would never, ever”—here I said the words with her—“dream of touching the principal.”

  “Go ahead and laugh,” Joan said. “I’m just looking out for Perry’s and Spin’s children and grandchildren, as Whit would want me to do.”

  “I don’t know what the trusts amount to,” I said, though I had an idea, just from Internet research I’d done over the years. “But I think there’s plenty available to do some improvements here without touching the principal. Besides, this estate is part of the trust and they might want to sell it someday.”

  “Perry might, but Spin would never,” Joan said.

  “Anyway, they have to keep it maintained, or its value will depreciate.”

  “Well, I have to pay for the engagement party from my allowance, since I’m throwing it.”

  “So, how much could it cost?” I asked. “I’ll help. I’ve got plenty saved, I’ve been selling lots of articles.”

  “No, no, I don’t need your money,” said Joan, as she always did.

  “It’s just a barbecue, right?” I said. “Like we used to have when Whit was here. It can’t be much.”

  “You know, I just got my bill from Anson’s gas station. Spin never paid me back for the charge that Laurel put on there.”