They Never Came Home

by Lois Duncan

  And yet, there couldn’t be anyone really important, or he would not be with her on Sundays. There was no reason for him to spend his one free day with Peggy Richards if he was truly interested in someone else. No, “the girl,” if she existed, couldn’t be anyone he had met here in California. She was back in New York, probably—one of those smooth, sophisticated career girls—a society girl with a big city background and enough money to afford all the right clothes and the poise with which to wear them. The kind of girl that somebody like Peggy Richards could never really hope to compete with.

  Still, what could this have to do with that chance comment about building a fort? And if Dave was from that kind of background, why was he here in California, working in a department store? Why didn’t he have nice clothes himself—she could count on the finger of one hand the items of clothing that composed the wardrobe he wore when they went out together—and why didn’t he have a car? His brother had one, a shabby-looking little Volkswagen. Dave had borrowed it once or twice, but generally they walked where they wanted to go or used the bus. And that brother—he was strange in himself. Or perhaps it was the relationship that was strange. They never seemed to go anyplace or do anything together. As much as Dave seemed to enjoy family life, and with his brother his only relative, why weren’t they closer? How could they live together in one room and lead such separate lives that they never even appeared to see each other?

  Suddenly, as though he had been reading her thoughts, Dave said, “There’s Lance.”

  “Where?” They had reached the entrance to the public beach now. Although it was early, already the sand was crowded with bright-colored beach towels and gay umbrellas, and people sporting varied degrees of suntan ranging from bright red to almost black swarmed about like a massive colony of two-legged ants.

  “There.” Dave gestured toward the end of the boardwalk. “The kid in the plaid shorts talking to those two men. The one with the blond hair and the surf board over his shoulder.”

  “That’s Lance!” Peggy could not keep the astonishment from her voice. “Why, he doesn’t look like you at all! I’d never guess you were related!”

  “Brothers don’t always look alike.” There was a defensive note in Dave’s voice.

  “No, of course not. Still …” She stood quietly for a moment, watching the boy with the blond hair. He was listening hard to whatever it was the two men were telling him. There was an intent look on his face as he nodded with understanding, and then suddenly he smiled. It was the bright sweet smile of an angel, and it went straight to her heart.

  “He looks like a darling!” Peggy exclaimed. “And he’s so young! I didn’t realize he was so young, Dave!”

  “He’s not really. He’s just got that kind of a face.” Dave poked her teasingly. “Want me to go get him for you? You can take him home and add him to your brood.”

  “I do think you might bring him over for a meal once in a while. It’s not fair for—” She broke off abruptly. The men had turned, and for the first time she saw their faces clearly. “Dave—those people Lance is talking to—how in the world does he happen to know them?”

  “I don’t know.” Dave looked surprised. “He makes his own friends. I don’t know anything about the guys he runs around with. He meets people at the beach and I guess there’s kind of a surfing crowd. Why? Do you know them?”

  “I know Jack Wesley,” Peggy said, frowning. “He was a couple of years ahead of me in high school. He’s bad news, Dave.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, he was wild even in high school, he’s the kid everyone would go to for fake I.D.s. He never graduated. There was some kind of scandal. It got hushed up, but rumor had it that he was involved in some kind of ring that was peddling dope to students. Since then I know he’s been in and out of jail at least once.”

  “He sure doesn’t sound like a very good influence for a kid like Lance,” Dave agreed seriously. “Do you know the other guy?”

  “No, but I think I’ve seen him someplace. He looks older. I see so many faces at work and here at the beach, it’s hard to remember all of them.” She paused and then said, more slowly, “In the newspaper?”

  “You’ve seen his picture?”

  “I can’t remember. I have a feeling I may have. Maybe it will come back to me.” She dropped the subject as quickly as she had seized it. “Ready for a swim?”

  “Sure! I’ll race you to the water!”

  He grinned at her, and the curtain was gone, as though it had never fallen between them. They were two healthy young people on a beautiful day with sunshine on their backs and salt wind in their faces, and what shadows could there possibly be except imagined ones!

  There’s no other girl, Peggy told herself firmly. There can’t be! If there were, she would never have let him get away from her!

  Laughing at herself and her own silliness, she let the cover-up fall from her shoulders and broke into a run toward the water.

  ELEVEN

  THE LONG MONTHS OF summer moved slowly past, and August became September.

  It was autumn in name only, Joan thought, gazing out across the sun-dried lawn to the hollyhocks, dangling wearily from their stalks along the back fence in heat-drenched fatigue. School had started early this year, even before Labor Day, and it seemed strange to see children still in shorts and sun dresses toting their books and backpacks along the sidewalks in the mornings and home again in the heavy heat of midafternoon.

  “The hottest summer in thirty years,” the weather bureau called it. Besides this, it was the dryest. State rainfall was at a minimum, and a fire broke out in the Gila Wilderness Area, raging for almost a week before it was finally subdued by emergency fire-fighting units borrowed from the Indian reservations. After this, all national parks and forests were closed to campers.

  The rivers that had roared through the Mogollons in the spring dwindled to sluggish creeks. For a brief time the search was renewed for the “bodies of two Las Cruces boys, Daniel Cotwell and Lawrence Drayfus, Jr., lost in the Wilderness Area the end of April.” But even though the rivers were now shallow, no traces of the boys were found.

  The newspaper articles that accompanied the new search were repetitions of those that had run previously. They reviewed the boys’ backgrounds, the fact that Dan had been an honor student and captain of the high school football team, the news that Larry had been accepted by one of the state’s top military academies and was to have begun classes there in the fall. They described the canteen, identified as Dan’s, which had been found on the bank of the river.

  “The families still hope,” one article said, and Joan read it with a flash of anger.

  “How can they say such a stupid thing!” She exclaimed to her father. “How can the families possibly hope after this long! There can’t be any hope. We know that and have accepted it.”

  “Newspapers just look for things to say to fill up their columns,” Mr. Drayfus said soothingly. “Actually, the end of hope is a good thing. Your mother’s proved that.”

  Joan nodded, light returning to her face.

  “Oh, Daddy, won’t it be wonderful to have her home again!”

  “It certainly will,” Mr. Drayfus said quietly. “It’s been a long summer for all of us.”

  On their last visit to the sanitarium, Mrs. Drayfus had voluntarily talked to them about Larry. It was the first time she had mentioned him since the day of her breakdown.

  “He is dead.” She spoke the words slowly and deliberately. “I know that now. I’ve known it, really, I think, all along, but I wasn’t able to accept it. It was as though by refusing to admit the fact, I was keeping it from being real.

  “The doctors here have helped me to realize that I can’t spend the rest of my life dwelling on Larry. I have my memories of him, and they are happy ones. He was a wonderful boy—sweet and fine and good—a son to be proud of. He only had seventeen years of life, but they were happy years, filled with love. Think of the mothers who lose their
children and don’t have this knowledge to sustain them.”

  “He would have been a fine man,” Mr. Drayfus agreed. “Whatever misunderstandings he and I had, I never doubted that fact for a minute. I loved him too, Margaret, deeply and strongly. Can you believe that now?”

  Mrs. Drayfus smiled a little shakily.

  “I never didn’t believe it, Lawrence. I was just so busy agonizing over my own grief that I wouldn’t let myself acknowledge anyone else’s. Of course, you loved him—we all loved him. And he loved us. We were a close, happy family, and the memory of that will be something we’ll share always.

  “But, now”—she made an effort to steady the smile and blink back the tears that filled her eyes—“Larry’s gone, and we’ve still got a lot of life ahead of us. And we’re still a family. I have a fine husband and a wonderful daughter. I guess that makes me a pretty lucky woman.”

  “It’s we who are lucky,” Mr. Drayfus said quietly. “We were afraid we had lost you as well as Larry. Thank God—oh, Margaret, thank God we’re going to have you back again!”

  The doctor, when they talked with him afterward, had told them that, if she continued improving as steadily as she was, Mrs. Drayfus would be ready to come home in October.

  “Of course, we can’t expect miracles,” he said warningly. “This is not a strong woman and she probably never will be. She has made remarkable recovery this summer, but that doesn’t mean that she has turned into an emotional mountain. She has led a very protected existence here at the sanitarium. Coming home will not be easy for her.”

  “Do you think”—Mr. Drayfus looked worried—“that it will be too difficult for her? Are we rushing things? Would it be better to postpone the homecoming a little while longer?”

  The doctor shook his head. “I can’t see that there would be anything to be gained by that. The adjustment will have to be made sometime, and probably the sooner it is started, the better. Protect her as much as you can—make home life easy and pleasant. Speak naturally about your son and recall the happy memories you have of him. Show her you love and need her. She’ll make it all right.”

  They carried the encouraging words back with them and repeated them often to each other:

  “Show her you love and need her—she’ll make it …”

  “And I’ll be home,” Joan added. “That should make a difference. It won’t be as though she’ll be here alone in the house.”

  “You’re sure you don’t mind too much, Joanie?” The old frown of worry fell into its familiar creases in her father’s forehead. “It can’t be easy having all your friends going off to college without you. I know how long you’ve planned on attending the university. You and Dan used to talk about it so much.”

  “It doesn’t matter now the way it used to,” Joan told him truthfully. “So much has happened that things are in a different perspective. It doesn’t seem important to go to college just because everybody else is doing it. Oh I still want to go,” she added quickly. “And I will go. I still want to become a teacher. But whether it’s this year or next or even the year after that doesn’t matter. Not if I’m needed here. I can get a head start by taking classes online.”

  “You’ve grown up this year, daughter.” Her father smiled at her affectionately. It was a tired smile. Joan noticed, as she watched it, the new lines in his face and the deepening of the gray at his temples.

  “Maybe,” he added with a touch of wryness, “we all have.”

  Despite her brave words, however, Joan had a struggle with self-pity when Anne Tonjes came to say good-bye on her way to the airport. The sight of the car filled with luggage and Anne’s bright fall suit (“I’ll swelter in it!” she admitted, “but I refuse to arrive at U.C.L.A. looking like I’m fresh off the mesa!”) brought back with a rush the excited plans they had made together the summer before.

  “You’ll come out for a visit, won’t you?” Anne asked giving her a hard hug. “For a football weekend or something? Just for a few days before your mother gets home? The change of scene will do you good, and a few dates with college men won’t hurt you any either. You can’t spend the rest of your life as a recluse because of Dan.”

  “Oh, I don’t intend to,” Joan assured her. “If somebody nice comes along, I’ll be glad to date him. I can’t imagine right now falling in love again, but I suppose even that will happen eventually. Dan was—Dan—there can’t be anyone like him. But I know there will be other people I’ll care about in other ways.”

  Still, she kept Dan’s picture on the table by her bed. She knew that some people would consider this morbid and she was a little guilty about it. When her mother returned, she vowed, she would remove the picture from its frame and place it in her scrapbook as the memory it was. For the time being, however, she left it there. Strangely enough, she did not find it depressing. Just the thought of Dan was a happy thing, and it was much less difficult to sleep at night with the knowledge that a strong face and steady blue eyes were standing guard over her dreams.

  She and Frank had made the trip to Mexico four times since the first of what they now termed their “jewelry runs” in early July. Each trip was identical to the first one with the same long wait while the jewelry was packaged and the same envelope of papers containing the designs.

  From the first there had been no difficulty about passing through customs. They gave their names and places of birth, and the customs officials gave a quick glance at the receipt they offered. One time they had been asked to unwrap the package, and they were always asked if they had anything other than this to declare—pottery, furniture, liquor, clothing. Except for one occasion, when they stopped on the far side of the border to pick up some Mexican slippers as a present for Mrs. Drayfus their answers were a consistent “No.”

  Back in Las Cruces they delivered the jewelry to Mr. Brown at his room at a motel called the Tumbleweed. This too was usually a lengthy procedure, as they were expected to wait while he inspected the jewelry and designs in detail and then wrote them out a receipt in return for their safe delivery.

  Looking at him now, at the thin, almost delicate face behind the metal-rimmed glasses, Joan wondered how she could ever have found John Brown a frightening figure. He was a little man, always perfectly dressed, with a brisk, businesslike manner and a politeness that even Frank could not find fault with.

  “You can see, I’m perfectly safe,” Joan assured him after the second of their trips. “Nobody’s going to harm me. All they care about is this delivery. And I know my way now. You don’t have to come with me every time.”

  “I don’t want you going down there alone,” Frank answered stubbornly.

  “Why?” Joan asked curiously. “What are you afraid might happen?”

  “That’s just it—I don’t know. Like I’ve said since the beginning, I don’t understand any of it. I just know I don’t like it. I don’t like Mr. Brown, I don’t like the guy at El Mercado, I don’t like that skinny kid José. And Dan wouldn’t like them either.”

  “Frank … Frank …” Joan shook her head in affectionate exasperation. “You’re the worst worrywart I’ve ever known. But thank you for wanting to come. For … everything.”

  With the start of school in September, it became more difficult to keep the “jewelry runs” concealed from her father. Before then the four-hour round trip could easily be staged during the course of a weekday while Mr. Drayfus was at the office. Now, however, Frank did not get out of classes until three-thirty and some reason had to be offered for her absence from the house when Mr. Drayfus returned home in the evenings.

  “I won’t lie to him,” Joan insisted. “I can’t tell him the whole truth, but I won’t lie to him either.”

  She settled finally on simply saying she was “out with Frank,” and her father accepted it, as he always did her statements, with a complete faith that left her feeling like a criminal.

  “He’s a little young for you, isn’t he, daughter?” he asked. “He seems like a nice young man, and he certa
inly resembles Dan, but you can’t replace one person with another, you know. Don’t you think you might do better to look for somebody entirely new? Maybe go visit Anne the way she suggested? That sort of thing?”

  “Oh, Daddy, Frank’s just a good friend,” Joan told him quickly. “He is much too young for me in any romantic way. Besides, he has a girl friend, or at least he’s right on the edge of having one. One of the girls in his class, Marcie Summers, has her eye on him.”

  “I wish you would find somebody to be interested in in ‘a romantic way,’ Joanie,” Mr. Drayfus said worriedly. “You used to go out so much. I hate to see you sitting around the house all the time.”

  “All in good time, Daddy. You can’t rush these things.” She answered him lightly, but she knew in her heart that he was right. She was spending too much time brooding. With all her high school friends from the year before working at jobs or off at college or, in the case of the boys, in the service, she was finding the long days dull and lonely. Keeping house and cooking for only herself and her father took very little time and effort, and only so many hours a day could be spent in reading and taking some classes on the Internet.

  I know what I ought to be doing, she admitted to herself grimly, and I keep putting it off because I don’t want to face it.

  Larry’s room still stood with its door closed, just as she had left it the day she had made the search there for the missing money. His things were there, she knew, in the same neat piles in which she had left them, in which Larry himself had left them almost five months before. Her mother must not be allowed to come home and find them there.