Darkness

  “I searched it,” Ted repeated for what seemed like the fifth time. He felt his temper rising, but struggled to control it. After he’d left his father early that morning, he’d gone to Warren Phillips’s house and then to the hospital.

  Phillips had been in neither place, nor did anyone know where he might be. “I’ll page him,” Jolene Mayhew had told him, but after five minutes with no reply to the page, he’d demanded an ambulance, and gone back out to the construction site.

  To find that his father was gone.

  Taking the paramedics with him, he’d searched every house on the site, every possible place where his father could have been hiding. When the crew had arrived for work, he’d sent them out, too, certain that somewhere on the hundred acres of Villejeune Links Estates his father would be found.

  But there had been nothing.

  Nothing, until one of the men had found tracks at the edge of the canal. That was when he’d come to the police station and tried to enlist Tim Kitteridge’s help. He’d told him the whole story, but even as he talked, he’d seen the skepticism in the police chief’s eyes.

  “Now come on, Anderson,” Kitteridge had told him after he’d described how his father had looked early that morning. “Nobody ages like that overnight. And I know your father—he’s strong as an ox, and works harder than most men half his age.”

  “And he looks half his age, too,” Ted had shot back. “Phillips has been giving him some kind of shots. I don’t know what they are, but I saw what happened to him a week ago. It was like watching the fountain of youth or something. He was feeling really bad, and looking terrible, and an hour later he was fine! But this morning he looked like he was dying!”

  Kitteridge’s eyes rolled. “If he was really dying, I find it hard to believe he took off into the swamp. And I can’t start sending out search parties every time someone goes in there. Especially not for someone who’s lived here all his life. If your dad wanted to take off for a while, that’s his business, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

  Ted glared angrily at the police chief. “What about Phillips? Dad saw him this morning—he told me so himself. And now he’s gone. He’s not home, and he’s not at the hospital. Where is he?”

  Kitteridge felt his own temper rising now. “Look, Mr. Anderson,” he said, his voice hard. “I don’t know what you think my job is, but I can tell you it’s not to go hunting for people who are minding their own business. You told me yourself that Phillips was out of whatever medicine he was giving your father. Maybe he went to get more of it. Did that ever occur to you?”

  “Jesus Christ,” Ted swore, making no attempt to check his anger any longer. “If whatever he was giving Dad was something he could just pick up in Orlando, why the hell would he run out? Dad says he makes it himself. Aren’t you even interested in what he might be giving the people around here? It’s drugs, goddamn it! And you don’t seem to give a shit!”

  Kitteridge rose to his feet, but just as he was about to speak, the phone on his desk jangled loudly. He snatched it up. “Yes?” he snapped into the mouthpiece. But as he listened, the angry scowl that was directed at Ted Anderson began to fade. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll be right out there. And I’m bringing Ted Anderson with me.” He placed the receiver back on the hook. When he looked back at Ted, his impatience had turned to uncertainty. “That was Phil Stubbs,” he said. “One of the tour boats just came in. There’s been a kidnapping. He said an old man came out of the swamp and lifted a baby right out of the boat.”

  Ted said nothing, but felt a cold knot of fear forming in his stomach.

  “Your daughter was there,” Kitteridge went on. “She saw the whole thing, and says she knows who the man was.”

  “Dad,” Ted breathed. “It was my father, wasn’t it?”

  Kitteridge nodded.

  Together, the two men left the police station.

  Barbara Sheffield barely nodded to her husband’s secretary as she passed through the small front office of his two-room suite over the hardware store and walked into the large room where Craig worked. He was on the telephone as she came through the doorway, but when he saw the look on her face, he abruptly cut his conversation short, rising to his feet.

  “Barbara? What’s happened?”

  She silently crossed the room to drop a folded sheet of heavy yellowed vellum onto his desk. He picked it up, stared at it blankly for a moment, then looked curiously at his wife. “What’s this?”

  When she spoke, Barbara heard the hollowness in her own voice. “Kelly Anderson’s birth certificate. Except that nothing on it is true. And I’m sure Warren Phillips forged the signature.” The emotions she’d been holding in check by the sheer force of her will suddenly boiled up inside her. She sank into the chair in front of Craig’s desk, her eyes flooding with tears. Moving around the desk, Craig dropped down to kneel next to her, putting his arm around her.

  “Honey, what’s going on? What are you doing to yourself?”

  Doing to myself? Barbara echoed silently. The fear she’d been feeling turned into anger, and she pulled herself free of her husband’s embrace. “I’m not doing anything!” she exclaimed, her voice rising. “All I’m trying to do is find out what’s been done to me! To me, and to our little girl. She’s not dead, Craig! Can’t you understand?”

  “Barbara, honey,” Craig began as he stood up again, but Barbara cut him off.

  “It’s Sharon,” Barbara told him. “Something’s wrong, Craig! Sharon’s not dead! Dr. Phillips took Sharon when she was born and did something to her. Then he arranged for her to be adopted by Mary and Ted Anderson.”

  Craig stared at her in shock. What was she talking about? The whole idea of it was so bizarre …

  “I know it sounds crazy, Craig,” Barbara went on as if she’d read the thoughts spinning through his mind. “But just listen to me. Just give me five minutes.”

  She told him about the pictures she’d looked at, first in her own album, then in Mary Anderson’s. But it wasn’t until she told him about the phone call to the hospital in Orlando that she saw the disbelief in his eyes begin to give way to a worried frown. “You can call them yourself,” she said, handing him the birth certificate once more. “In fact, I wish you would. Maybe the woman I talked to made a mistake. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe …” She floundered for a moment, trying to sort through her conflicting emotions, but finally gave up, leaning tiredly back in the chair. “I don’t know what I think.”

  Craig picked up the phone and made the call, but as he spoke to the woman in Orlando, his eyes fixed on the signature at the bottom of the birth certificate. He’d seen Warren Phillips’s signature hundreds of times over the years, and he knew Barbara was right. Despite the fact that the name was different, it was still clearly only a variation on the doctor’s distinctive scrawl. Even so, when the phone call was finished, he tried to think of some other meaning for the anomaly. “It doesn’t mean Kelly is Sharon,” he said. “It could be some kind of coincidence—”

  Barbara cut him off. “I thought of that,” she told him. “I’ve tried to think of everything. But we never saw Sharon, Craig. Neither of us. Not after she was born. Not at the funeral. We simply believed what we were told.” Her voice held a note of self-condemnation that tore at Craig’s heart.

  “What do you want me to do?” he asked, and for the first time there was no challenge in his voice.

  “We have to open the crypt,” Barbara told him. “We have to find out if Sharon is really dead. If we don’t, I think I’m going to go crazy. I can’t stand it anymore, Craig. Ever since I met Kelly, I’ve had the feeling that she’s Sharon. I can’t explain all of it, and I know her resemblance to Tisha could just be a coincidence, but I just can’t get over the feeling that she’s our daughter.”

  Craig felt as if he was standing at the lip of a great yawning abyss, and that if he weren’t very, very careful, he might slip over the edge and be swallowed up by the emptiness below. If the baby they’d both looked forwar
d to so much, and then lost even before they’d seen it—if that baby were still alive …

  He wasn’t sure he could bring himself to finish the thought, consumed as he was by a great wave of black fury that had risen inside him and threatened to sweep all reason away from him.

  “Mary,” he said, turning away from the dark thoughts. “What did Mary say?”

  Barbara closed her eyes for a moment, wishing there were some way of avoiding what Kelly’s mother had told her. But she couldn’t. “She—She says she wants to know, too. She says there’s always been something about Kelly she couldn’t understand, as if something inside her is missing.” She hesitated, then went on. “She’s always thought it was her fault, that she’d failed Kelly. But if Phillips did something to her—”

  Craig grasped at the straw. “What?” he demanded. “What possible motive would Phillips have? My God, he’s a doctor! Doctors don’t steal babies from their mothers.”

  “There’s something else,” Barbara said, her voice sending a chill through Craig. She opened her purse and took a picture out of it, handing it to her husband. “Remember when that picture was taken? Just before Sharon was born?”

  Craig gazed down at the picture, nodding. “I don’t see—”

  “Look at some of the men in that picture, Craig. Warren Phillips and Carl Anderson. Orrin Hatfield and Fred Childress. Judd Duval.”

  Craig’s eyes scanned the picture, quickly picking out the men Barbara had named. “They haven’t changed much, have they?” he said. When Barbara said nothing for several long seconds, he looked up and found her staring at him.

  “They haven’t changed at all, Craig. Not one of them has aged a day in the last sixteen years. And I keep thinking about that. Orrin Hatfield is the county coroner. He signed the death certificates for Sharon and for Jenny. Fred Childress buried them both. Judd Duval found Jenny in the swamp. And Carl Anderson is Kelly’s grandfather.”

  Craig didn’t want to look at the picture that was coming together in his own mind, didn’t want to accept what his wife was suggesting. And yet he couldn’t deny her words.

  “They’re doing something,” Barbara said. “They’re doing something with our children, and it’s keeping them young. They’re taking something from them, Craig. I don’t understand it, and I can’t prove it, but I know it’s true. They stole our daughters, Craig!”

  Craig felt himself slipping over into the abyss. “We don’t know that,” he said, his voice desperate.

  “And what about Michael?” Barbara asked.

  Craig looked at her numbly, but understood instantly what she was asking. He got up, went to the safe, and a moment later found what he was looking for. After studying it for a moment, a cold knot of fear forming in his stomach, he handed Michael’s birth certificate to Barbara.

  She felt an odd dispassion as she stared at the document, as if it merely proved what she already knew.

  The same hospital.

  The same signature.

  “Barbara, it’s all supposition—” Craig began.

  “Don’t you think I know that? Don’t you think I hope I’m wrong? That I’m just refusing to adjust to Jenny’s death? But what if she’s not dead, either, Craig? What if I’m not wrong? There’s only one way we can find out.”

  Craig said nothing for a long moment, but at last he took a deep breath and met her eyes. “All right,” he said. “Let’s go see what we can do.”

  27

  Kelly looked fearfully at Tim Kitteridge. “It wasn’t anybody’s fault,” she insisted. She’d done her best to repeat to the police chief exactly what had happened, but with her father’s eyes on her, she still felt oddly guilty, as if somehow she’d let him down again.

  “And you told Phil Stubbs that the man who took the baby was your grandfather?” Kitteridge asked.

  Kelly’s eyes flicked once more toward her father. He was watching her, his eyes boring into her. If she said the wrong thing … But she couldn’t lie, couldn’t pretend she might have been mistaken.

  Because she wasn’t mistaken. The man in the swamp had been her grandfather, even though he’d looked much worse than he had when she’d seen him early this morning, when he left the house. Finally she nodded. “It was him,” she breathed. “He—He looked different from the way he usually does, but it was him.”

  Ted Anderson started to say something, but Kitteridge silenced him with a look. “How, Kelly?” he asked. “How did he look different?”

  Kelly hesitated. If she told them the truth, they were going to think she was crazy. But there were other people who had seen her grandfather, and even though they didn’t know who he was, they knew what he looked like. “He—He looked sick,” she finally said, her voice trembling. “I mean—well, it was like he’d gotten old. I mean, really old, like he was going to die or something.” She paused, anticipating her father’s accusation that she was lying, but when her father said nothing, she went on. “It was really weird. I saw him this morning, when he went to work, and he looked funny then, too. But in the swamp it was worse. His hair was falling out, and his face was all covered with wrinkles. And his eyes were all sunken in.”

  She saw the look that passed between her father and the police chief and fell silent again. But when her father spoke, he didn’t challenge her words at all.

  “It’s what I told you,” Ted said. “There’s something wrong with him, and whatever it is, it has to do with the shots Phillips has been giving him. It sounds like they’ve made him go nuts or something.”

  Kitteridge nodded curtly, his mind racing. “Whatever’s wrong, the first thing is to find him and get thai baby back.” He pulled his portable radio from its case on his belt and snapped it on. When Marty Templar’s voice crackled through the small speaker, he began issuing a series of orders. “We’ve got Carl Anderson in the swamp, and he’s got a baby with him. We need men, and we need them armed. Anderson’s got a gun, and we have to assume he’s willing to use it. And Marty,” he added. “The Sheffield kid’s out there, too. He went after Anderson. So make sure no one shoots the wrong person, got it?” He listened for a moment, then: “We’ll take off from Phil Stubbs’s place. Kelly Anderson can show us where the old man made the snatch, and maybe we can track him from there.” He shut off the radio, then turned back to Kelly. “Can you find your way back there?”

  Kelly’s tongue ran nervously over her lower lip. “I—I don’t know,” she finally admitted.

  Kitteridge frowned. “You got all those people back here, didn’t you?” he asked.

  Kelly felt numb. How could she explain what had happened? How could she tell them that she hadn’t known where she was going at all, but instead had been simply following unspoken instructions that seemed to come from inside her head? At last she nodded. “M-Maybe I can,” she stammered. “But I’m not sure. I just sort of steered the boat, going whatever way looked right.”

  But Kitteridge had stopped listening, his attention already shifted to the young mother, sitting in the midst of a cluster of her friends a few yards away, her face streaked with fresh tears.

  Left alone with her father, Kelly looked up at him worriedly. “Daddy, what’s wrong with me?” she asked.

  His daughter’s voice held a pathos that twisted Ted Anderson’s heart, and he gently put his arms around her. “Honey, there isn’t anything wrong with you. You’re a heroine—you brought all those people out of the swamp—”

  Before he could finish, Kelly said, “It wasn’t me, Daddy. I can’t even remember doing it. It was like there was a voice in my head, telling me what to do.”

  Ted’s arms tightened around his daughter. He wanted to tell her that everything was fine, that whatever had happened in the swamp this morning, she had been the one to bring the boat out, and that he was proud of her. But before he could say anything at all, he felt her stiffen in his arms.

  “Look!” she said. “Daddy, look! It’s Michael. He’s got the baby!”

  Michael, the baby held securely in hi
s arms, stepped into the shallow channel that separated the island from the mainland and the tour headquarters.

  “Wait!” someone shouted from the other side. “We’ll come over in the boat!”

  Michael paused, then acknowledged the call with a wave of his hand. But while he waited for the boat to come and pick him up, he wondered what he was going to tell them.

  He could see the police chief in the boat, and knew there were going to be questions.

  Questions he couldn’t answer.

  They were going to want to know where Carl Anderson was, and how he had gotten the baby away from him.

  And he could tell them that.

  But what could he tell them about the way Carl Anderson had died, and what he had done to the corpse?

  Nothing.

  His mind had been reeling ever since the moment he had felt that first flush of warmth spread through his body, first felt those hot tears stinging his eyes and running down his cheeks. From that moment everything about the world had looked different to him, and felt different, and he knew why.

  Somehow, in that moment when Carl Anderson was dying, Michael had recovered his soul.

  And he knew now what he had to do.

  As the boat reached him and he handed the baby into the waiting arms of its mother, then let Tim Kitteridge help him into the boat as well, he said nothing.

  Nor did he speak as the questions began to come at him from every direction, first from the baby’s mother, then from the police chief. But at last, after the boat was docked, he told them what happened.

  “I followed him, and finally I caught up to him. He had a heart attack, or something. He didn’t try to hurt me, or the baby, or anything. He just ran as long as he could and then collapsed.”

  “Collapsed?” Kitteridge asked.

  Michael nodded. “He was under a tree. A tall pine— the tallest one around. He was trying to hide in some bushes, but I could see him. And he saw me, too.” Michael’s voice took on a hollow quality. “He died. He just died.”