Two Little Girls in Blue

  “Mr. Mason, will you please accompany us quietly?” a voice asked.

  Richie looked up. Two men were standing there. “FBI,” one of them said.

  The stewardess was about to collect Richie’s glass. “There must be a mistake,” she protested. “This is Mr. Steven Frawley, not Mr. Mason.”

  “I know what it says on the passenger manifest,” FBI Agent Allen said pleasantly. “But right now, Mr. Frawley is on Cape Cod with his family.”

  Richie took a last gulp of the single malt scotch that he had been nursing. That’s my last scotch for a very, very long time, he thought as he stood up. His fellow passengers were staring at him. He gave them a friendly wave. “Enjoy the trip,” he said. “Sorry I can’t join you.”

  106

  “We have stabilized Kelly, but even though her lungs are clear, she still is having difficulty breathing,” the doctor in pediatric intensive care said gravely. “Kathy, though, is much worse. She is a very, very sick little girl. The bronchitis has developed into pneumonia, and she has obviously been given heavy doses of adult medicine which has depressed her nervous system. I wish I could be more optimistic, but . . .”

  Steve, his arms heavily bandaged, sat with Margaret next to the crib. Kathy, almost unrecognizable with her short dark hair and the oxygen mask on her face, was lying perfectly still. The alarm monitoring her respiration had already gone off twice.

  Kelly’s crib was down the hall in the pediatric wing. Dr. Harris was with her.

  “Kelly must be brought in here right away,” Margaret ordered.

  “Mrs. Frawley. . . .”

  “Right away,” Margaret said. “Kathy needs her.”

  107

  Norman Bond had stayed in his apartment all day Saturday, spending much of the time sitting on the couch, staring out over the East River and catching updates of the Frawley kidnapping on television.

  Why did I hire Frawley? he wondered. Was it because I wanted to pretend I could start all over again, that I could turn back time, and be in Ridgefield with Theresa? Did I want to pretend that our twins had lived? They’d be twenty-one years old now.

  They think I had something to do with the kidnapping. I was such a fool to refer to Theresa as “my late wife.” I’ve always been careful to say that I believed she was alive, and that she’d dumped Banks the same way she dumped me.

  Ever since the FBI had questioned him, Bond hadn’t been able to get Theresa out of his mind, not for one single minute. Before he killed her, she had begged for the life of the twins she was expecting the way Margaret Frawley had begged for the safe return of her children.

  Maybe Frawley’s other child was still alive. It’s all about the ransom, Norman thought. Someone was counting on the company paying it.

  At seven o’clock, he made himself a drink. “A suspect in the kidnapping was believed to have been spotted on Cape Cod,” a news brief reported.

  “Norman . . . please . . . don’t . . .”

  Weekends are always the hardest, he thought.

  He had given up going to museums. They bored him. Concerts were tedious, a form of torture. When Theresa and he were married, she would tease him about his restlessness. “Norman, you’ll do very well in business and may even become a patron of the arts, but you’ll never understand why a sculpture or a painting or an opera is a thing of beauty. You’re hopeless.”

  Hopeless. Hopeless. Norman made himself another drink, then sipped it as he ran his hand over Theresa’s wedding rings that he kept on the chain around his neck—the one he had given her that she’d left on the dresser, and the circle of diamonds her rich, cultured, second husband had given her. He remembered how he had to struggle to pull that one off her finger. Her slender fingers were swollen because of the pregnancy.

  At eight thirty he decided to shower and dress and go out for dinner. Somewhat unsteady on his feet, he got up, went to the closet, and laid out a business suit, white shirt, and one of the ties the Paul Stuart salesman had assured him complemented the suit.

  Forty minutes later, as he was leaving his apartment building, he happened to glance across the street. Two men were getting out of a car. The streetlight shone on the face of the driver. He was the FBI agent who had come to his office and who had become hostile and suspicious when he’d made his slip about “my late wife.” In a sudden panic, Norman Bond darted uncertainly down the block, then dashed across Seventy-second Street. He did not see the vehicle that was making a U-turn.

  The impact of the truck hitting him was an explosion that seemed to rip him apart. He felt himself lifted into the air, then the awful pain as his body crashed against the sidewalk. He tasted blood gushing from his mouth.

  He heard the clamor around him and the demands for an ambulance. The face of the FBI agent was swimming above him. The chain with Theresa’s rings, he thought. I’ve got to get rid of it.

  But he could not move his hand.

  He could feel his white shirt becoming soaked with blood. The oyster, he thought. Remember when it slithered off that fork and all the sauce dripped on my shirt and tie? The memory usually brought a wave of shame, but now he felt nothing. Nothing at all.

  His lips formed her name: “Theresa.”

  Agent Angus Sommers was kneeling beside Norman Bond. He put his finger on Bond’s neck. “He’s gone,” he said.

  108

  Agents Reeves, Carlson, and Realto entered Clint’s holding cell.

  “They got the little girl out of the car, but she may not make it,” Carlson said angrily. “Your girlfriend, Angie, is dead. They’ll do an autopsy, but you know what? We think she was already gone before she hit the water. Someone punched her hard enough to kill her. I wonder who that was.”

  Feeling as if he’d been hit by a cement block, Clint realized that it was all over for him. He bitterly decided that he wasn’t going down alone. Telling them who the Pied Piper is may or may not help me with my sentence, he thought, but I’m not going to rot in prison while he lives it up on seven million bucks.

  “I don’t know the Pied Piper’s name,” he told the agents, “but I can tell you what he looks like. He’s tall, I’d guess a couple of inches over six feet. Sandy blond hair. Classy looking. Early forties. When he wanted me to dump Angie, he told me that I should follow him to Chatham Airport where he had a plane waiting.”

  Clint paused. “Wait a minute!” he exclaimed. “I do know who he is. I thought I had seen him someplace before. He’s the big shot from that company that paid the ransom. He was on TV saying that he shouldn’t have paid it.”

  “Gregg Stanford!” Carlson said as Realto nodded in agreement.

  Reeves was instantly on his cell phone.

  “If only we can grab him before his plane takes off,” Carlson said. With contempt and fury in his voice, he told Clint, “You better get down on your knees, you lowlife, and start praying that Kathy Frawley pulls through.”

  109

  “The Frawley twins have been rushed to Cape Cod Hospital,” the announcer on channel 5 reported. “The condition of Kathy Frawley is extremely critical. The body of one of the kidnappers, Angie Ames, has been recovered from the sunken van at the Harwich marina. Her accomplice Clint Downes, in whose Danbury, Connecticut, home the twins were kept, is under arrest in Hyannis. The man believed to be the mastermind of the kidnapping, the ‘Pied Piper,’ is still at large.”

  They don’t say that I’m on the Cape, the Pied Piper thought frantically as he sat in the departure lounge of Chatham Airport and watched the breaking news on television. That means Clint hasn’t described me to them yet. I’m his bargaining chip. He gives me up in return for a lighter sentence.

  I’ve got to get out of the country now. But the drenching rain and enveloping fog was temporarily grounding all the planes. His pilot had told him that he hoped that the delay wouldn’t be much longer.

  Why did I panic and come up with that crazy idea of kidnapping those kids? he asked himself. I did it because I was scared. I did it because I was
afraid Millicent might have had me followed and discovered that I was fooling around with other women. If she had decided to dump me, I’d be out of a job, and I don’t have a nickel in my own name. I did it because I thought I could trust Lucas. He knew how to keep his mouth shut. He’d never give me away, no matter how much someone offered him. In the end he still didn’t give me away. Clint had no idea who I am.

  If only I hadn’t come to Cape Cod. I could have been out of the country by now with all those millions waiting for me. I have my passport. I’ll have the plane take me to the Maldives. There’s no extradition there.

  The door of the lounge burst open and two men rushed in. One slipped behind him and ordered him to stand with his hands spread out. Quickly he frisked him.

  “FBI, Mr. Stanford,” the other one said. “What a surprise. What brings you to the Cape this evening?”

  Gregg Stanford looked directly at him. “I was visiting a friend, a young woman. A private matter which is none of your business.”

  “By any chance was her name Angie?”

  “What are you talking about?” Stanford demanded. “This is outrageous.”

  “You know exactly what we’re talking about,” the agent replied. “You won’t be catching a plane tonight, Mr. Stanford. Or perhaps I should ask, would you prefer to be addressed as the Pied Piper?”

  110

  Kelly, still in her crib and accompanied by Dr. Harris, was wheeled into the intensive care unit. Like her sister, she was wearing an oxygen mask. Margaret stood up. “Disconnect her mask,” she said. “I’m putting her in the crib with Kathy.”

  “Margaret, Kathy has pneumonia.” The protest died on Sylvia Harris’s lips.

  “Do it,” Margaret told the nurse. “You can hook it up again as soon as I settle her.”

  The nurse looked at Steve. “Go ahead,” he told her.

  Margaret picked up Kelly, and for an instant held her head against her neck. “Kathy needs you, baby,” she whispered. “And you need her.”

  The nurse rolled down the side of the crib, and Margaret placed Kelly next to her twin, with Kelly’s right thumb touching Kathy’s left one.

  It’s where they were conjoined, Sylvia thought.

  The nurse reattached Kelly’s mask to the oxygen.

  In silent prayer, Margaret, Steve, and Sylvia kept a heartsick vigil by the crib all night. The twins did not stir from their deep sleep. Then, as the first light of dawn filtered into the room, Kathy stirred, moved her hand, and entwined her fingers in Kelly’s.

  Kelly opened her eyes and turned her head to look at her sister.

  Kathy’s eyes opened wide. She looked around the room, going from one person to another. Her lips began to move.

  A smile lit Kelly’s face, and she murmured something in Kathy’s ear.

  “Twin talk,” Steve said softly.

  “What is she telling you, Kelly?” Margaret whispered.

  “Kathy said that she missed us very, very much, and that she wants to go home.”

  Epilogue

  Three weeks later, Walter Carlson sat at the dining room table with Steve and Margaret, lingering over second cups of coffee. All through dinner, he kept thinking of the first time he had seen them, the handsome young couple in evening clothes who had arrived home to learn that their children were gone. In the following days they had become shadows of their former selves, pale and gaunt, clinging to each other in despair, their eyes red rimmed and swollen.

  Now Steve’s manner was relaxed and confident. Margaret, lovely in a white sweater and dark slacks, her hair loose around her shoulders, a smile on her lips, was a different person from the half-crazed woman who had pleaded with them to believe that Kathy was alive.

  Even so, Carlson noticed how, during dinner, her eyes often darted to the living room, where the twins, dressed in their pajamas, were having a tea party with their dolls and teddy bears. She needs to keep reassuring herself that they’re both still there, he thought.

  The Frawleys had invited him to dinner to celebrate their return to normal life, as Margaret had put it. But now, inevitably, it was natural to let them in on some of the information revealed through the confessions of Gregg Stanford and Clint Downes.

  He had not intended to talk about Steve’s half brother, Richard Mason, but when Steve mentioned that his mother and father had been up for a visit, he asked about them.

  “You can understand how tough it is for my mother to know that Richie is in trouble again,” Steve said. “Smuggling cocaine is even worse than that scam he was involved in years ago. She knows the kind of prison term he’s facing and, like all mothers, she’s trying to figure what she did wrong to make him turn out like this.”

  “She didn’t do anything wrong,” Carlson said bluntly. “He’s a bad apple, pure and simple.”

  Then, with a final sip of coffee, he said, “If there’s anything good that came out of all this, it’s that we know that Norman Bond killed his ex-wife, Theresa. Her wedding ring given her by her second husband was on a chain around his neck. She was wearing it the night she disappeared. At least now her second husband can get on with his life. For seventeen years he’s held on to the hope that she’s still alive.”

  Carlson could not stop glancing at the twins. “They’re as alike as two peas in a pod,” he said.

  “Aren’t they?” Margaret said in agreement. “Just last week we took Kathy to the hairdresser and got rid of that terrible dye job and then I had them cut Kelly’s hair so that now they both have the same pixie cut. It’s sweet on them, isn’t it?”

  She sighed. “I get up at least three times a night and check on them, just to be sure they’re still here. We have a state-of-the-art alarm system, and at night it’s set on ‘instant,’ so if a door or window is opened, the noise it makes would wake up the dead. But even with that protection, I still can’t bear to have them out of my sight.”

  “That will ease,” Carlson assured her. “Maybe not for a while, but it will get better in time. How are the girls doing?”

  “Kathy still has nightmares. In her sleep she says, ‘No more Mona. No more Mona.’ Then, the other day when we were out shopping, she saw a thin woman with messy long brown hair who, I guess, reminded her of Angie. Kathy started shrieking and threw her arms around my legs. It just about broke my heart. But Dr. Sylvia has recommended a wonderful child psychiatrist, Dr. Judith Knowles. We’ll be taking the twins to her every week. It will take time, but she assured us they’ll be fine eventually.”

  “Is Stanford going to plea bargain?” Steve asked.

  “He hasn’t got much to bargain with. He plotted the kidnapping because he was panicking. He was afraid his wife had found out about his philandering and was going to divorce him. If she had, he wouldn’t have a penny. He was in on some of the company’s financial problems last year and was still afraid of being caught. He had to have a backup fund, and, Steve, when he met you at the office and you were showing pictures of the twins, he hatched his scheme.

  “Lucas Wohl and he had a strange relationship,” Carlson continued. “Lucas was his trusted driver when he had his little affairs. Then one day during his second marriage, Stanford came home unexpectedly and found Lucas jimmying the safe in which his wife kept her jewels. He told him to go ahead with the robbery, but he had to cut him in on the proceeds. After that, he sometimes would tip Lucas off on houses to rob. Stanford always has lived on the edge. What I like about the way this played out is that he might have gotten away with all of it if he had trusted Lucas not to tell Clint who he was. He was high on our list of suspects and he’d been under surveillance, but we didn’t really have anything on him. That’s what’s going to haunt Stanford for the rest of his life when he wakes up every morning in a prison cell.”

  “What about Clint Downes?” Margaret asked. “Has he confessed?”

  “He’s a kidnapper and murderer. He’s still trying to say Angie’s death was an accident, but lots of luck with that one. The federal courts will deal with him. I’
m sure he’s had his last beer at the Danbury Pub. He’ll never get out of prison again.”

  The twins had finished the tea party and scampered into the dining room. A moment later, a smiling Kathy was on Margaret’s lap and a giggling Kelly was being lifted up by Steve.

  Walter Carlson felt a lump in his throat. If only it was always like this, he thought. If only we could bring all the kids home. If only we could rid the world of all the predators. But this time at least, we got a happy ending.

  The twins were wearing blue-flowered pajamas. Two little girls in blue, he thought. Two little girls in blue . . .

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  I HEARD THAT SONG BEFORE

  MARY HIGGINS CLARK

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  I Heard That Song Before. . . .

  PROLOGUE

  My father was the landscaper for the Carrington Estate. With fifty acres, it was one of the last remaining private properties of that size in Englewood, New Jersey, an upscale town three miles west of Manhattan via the George Washington Bridge.

  One Saturday afternoon in August, twenty-two years ago, when I was six years old, my father decided that though it was his day off, he had to go there to check on the newly installed outside lighting. The Carringtons were having a formal dinner party that evening for two hundred people. Already in trouble with his employers because of his drinking problem, Daddy knew that if the lights placed throughout the formal gardens did not function properly, it might mean the end of his job.

  Because we lived alone, he had no choice except to take me with him. He settled me on a bench in the garden nearest the terrace with strict instructions to stay right there until he came back. Then he added, “I may be a little while, so if you have to use the bathroom, go through the screen door around the corner. You’ll see the staff powder room just inside it.”