The God Project

  “But he ran away last summer,” Jim pointed out when she had finished.

  “This is different,” Lucy insisted. “Last summer he ran away in the middle of the night, after that problem with the Semple boy. But nothing’s happened recently—there’s no reason for him to have run away this morning. And I’d have known—I’d have sensed something at breakfast. But he was just like he always is.” She paused, then met Jim’s eyes. “He’s been kidnaped, Jim. Don’t ask me how I know, but I know Randy didn’t just run away. Someone took him.” Her eyes narrowed. “And I’m still not entirely convinced it wasn’t you.”

  “Oh, God …” Jim groaned.

  “It’s just the kind of thing you’d do, Jim. And I swear, if you’ve taken him and hidden him somewhere—”

  “I haven’t,” Jim said vehemently. “Lucy, I wouldn’t do something like that I—well, I just wouldn’t Look. Let’s call the police again. It seems to me that he’s been gone long enough so they should at least be willing to take a report.”

  “They told me they couldn’t do anything for twenty-four hours.”

  “Twenty-four hours!” Jim exploded. “My God, he’s not an adult—he’s only nine years old! He could be lost—or hurt.” Jim stood up and stormed into the kitchen. A moment letter Lucy heard him talking to someone, then shouting. His voice dropped again, and she could no longer make out what he was saying. At last he rejoined her.

  “They’re sending someone out,” he said. But as Lucy looked at him hopefully, he had to tell her what the police had told him. “They’ll take a report, but they said the odds are that he’s a runaway.” He fell silent, and Lucy prodded him.

  “Which means what?”

  Jim avoided her eyes. “I’m not sure. It could mean anything. Kids are—well, they’re running away from home younger every year. They said if he was a little older, we’d probably only see him again if he wants to see us.”

  Lucy frowned. “What does that mean?”

  “Just that with the young ones—the real young ones, like Randy—sometimes they don’t know what to do, and after a night or two, they turn themselves in.”

  “And if he doesn’t?” Lucy asked quietly.

  “I—Im not sure. They said something about a search, but they said searches usually don’t do much good either. If something’s happened to Randy, it’s more likely that someone will … well, that someone will find him by accident.”

  “You mean if he’s dead.” Lucy’s voice was flat, and her eyes cold, and Jim found himself unable to make any reply other than a nod of his head.

  “But he’s not dead,” Lucy said softly. “I know he’s not dead.”

  Jim swallowed. There was one more possibility the police had mentioned. “They said he might have gone to Boston …” he began, but then let his words trail off. Better to let the police try to explain to Lucy what could happen to a small boy in Boston.

  Chapter 5

  AT THE SAME TIME Jim and Lucy Corliss were trying to deal with the loss of their son, Steve and Sally Montgomery were trying to deal with the loss of their daughter.

  All afternoon, and into the evening, ever since they had returned from the hospital and their talk with Dr. Malone, Sally had been strangely silent. Several times Steve tried to talk to her, but she seemed not to hear him.

  Steve had spent several hours with Jason, trying to explain to him what had happened to Julie, and Jason had listened quietly, his head cocked curiously, his brows furrowed into a thoughtful frown. He seemed, to Steve, to accept the death of his sister as simply one more fact in his young life.

  It was, indeed, not so much the fact of Julie’s death that worried Jason, but the reason for her death. Over and over, he’d kept coming back to the same question.

  “But if there wasn’t anything wrong with her, why did she die?”

  His eyes, larger and darker than his mother’s, looked up at Steve, pleading for an answer Steve couldn’t give. Still, he had to try once more.

  “We don’t know why Julie died,” he repeated for at least the sixth time. “All we know is that it happens sometimes.”

  “But why did it happen to Julie? Was she a bad girl?”

  “No, she was a very good girl.”

  Jason’s brows knit as he puzzled over the dilemma. “But if she was a good girl, why did God kill her?”

  “I don’t know, son,” Steve replied through the sudden constriction in his throat. “I just don’t know.”

  “Is God going to kill me too?”

  Steve pulled his son to him and hugged him close. “No, of course not. It didn’t have anything to do with us, and it isn’t going to happen to you.”

  “How do you know?” Jason challenged, wriggling loose from his father’s embrace. Steve wearily stood up and began tucking Jason in.

  “I just know,” he said. “Now I want you to go to sleep, okay?”

  “Okay,” Jason agreed. Then his eyes wandered over to the far corner of his room where a black-and-white guinea pig named Fred lived in a small cage. “Can Fred come sleep by me tonight?” he asked.

  Steve smiled. “Sure.” He brought the cage over and set it down next to Jason’s bed. Inside the cage, Fred began patrolling the perimeter, examining his environment from the new perspective. Then, satisfied, he curled up and buried his nose in his own fur. “Now that’s what I want you to do,” Steve said. “Bury your nose and go to sleep.” He bent down and kissed Jason’s cheek, snapped out the light, and left the room.

  A moment later, as he came downstairs, his mother-in-law drew him into the den, and the two of them talked for a long time. At last Phyllis shook her head slowly.

  “I just don’t understand it,” she said. “It seems so strange that a perfect child like Julie could just—what? Stop living? Terrible. Terrible! There must have been a reason, Steve. There must have been.”

  But Steve Montgomery knew there was no reason, at least no reason that the doctors understood. That, he was coming to realize, was the most difficult part of the sudden infant death syndrome: there was nothing to blame, no germ or virus, no abnormal condition—nothing. Simply the fact of unreasonable death and the lingering feeling of failure. Already it was beginning to gnaw at him, but there was nothing he could do about it. He would simply have to live with it and try to put it out of his mind. Even if it meant putting Julie out of his mind too.

  “Life is for the living.”

  The words had sounded reasonable when Malone had spoken them, and Steve knew they were true. Then why did he feel dead inside? Why did he feel as though he might as well bury himself tomorrow along with his daughter? He couldn’t feel that way, couldn’t let himself feel that way. For Sally, and for Jason, he would have to go on, have to function. And yet, would he be able to do any better for them than he had for his daughter?

  He shut the thought out of his mind. From now on, he decided, there would have to be places in his mind that were closed off, sealed forever away from his conscious existence. It was either that or go crazy.

  Now he sat with Sally, tiredness weakening every fiber in his body, his mind numb, his grief pervading him. Sally was looking at him, and he saw something in her eyes that chilled his soul.

  Her eyes, the sparkling brown eyes that had first attracted him to her, had changed. The sparkle had been replaced by a strange intensity that seemed to glow from deep within her.

  “She didn’t just die,” Sally said softly. Steve started to speak to her, but was suddenly unsure whether she was talking to him or to herself. “Babies don’t do that They don’t just die.” Now her eyes met his. “We must have done something, Steve. We must have.”

  Steve flinched slightly. Hadn’t the same thoughts gone through his own mind? But he couldn’t give in to them, and he couldn’t let Sally give in to them either. “That’s not true, Sally. We loved Julie. We did everything we could-”

  “Did we?” Sally asked, her voice suddenly bitter. “I wonder. I wonder, Steve! Let’s face it. We didn’t want Julie
—neither of us did! One child was all we were going to have, remember? Just one! And we had Jason. A little sooner than we’d planned, but we agreed that he was the only child we wanted But it didn’t happen that way, did it? Something went wrong, and we had Julie, even though we didn’t want her. And she died!”

  Steve stared at his wife, his face pale and his hands shaking. “What are you saying, Sally?” he asked, his voice so quiet it was almost inaudible. “Are you saying we killed Julie?”

  Tears suddenly overflowing, Sally buried her face in her hands. “I don’t know, Steve,” she sobbed. “I don’t know what I’m saying, or what I’m thinking, or anything. I only know that babies don’t just die—”

  “But they do,” Steve interrupted. “Dr. Malone said—”

  “I don’t care what Dr. Malone said!” Sally burst out. “Babies don’t just die!”

  She ran from the room. Steve listened to her heavy step as she went upstairs.

  A little later he followed her and found her already in bed. He undressed silently, slipped into bed beside her, and turned out the light. He could hear her crying and reached out to take her in his arms.

  For the first time in all the years of their marriage, Sally drew away from him.

  Jason lay in his bed, listening to the silence of the house and wondering when things would get back to the way they used to be.

  He didn’t like the way his mother had been crying all the time. Up until last night, in fact, he’d never seen her cry at all.

  It had frightened him at first, seeing her standing in Julie’s room, holding Julie just like she always did, except for the tears running down her face. Usually, when she held Julie, she laughed.

  His first thought when he saw her was that she had found out about what he’d done to Julie and was going to be mad at him. But that hadn’t been it at all-she was crying because Julie was dead.

  Julie hadn’t been dead when he’d gone in earlier to look at her.

  She’d only been sleeping.

  He knew she was sleeping, because he could hear her snuffling softly, like his mother did when she had a cold. So he’d wiped her nose with a corner of the sheet.

  That couldn’t have hurt her.

  But it did wake her up and she’d started crying.

  And that was when he’d put the blanket over her face, so no one would hear her crying.

  But he hadn’t left it there long enough for her to smother. It couldn’t have been that long; as soon as she’d stopped crying, he’d taken the blanket off her face and tucked it back around her just the way it had been when he went in to look at her.

  But had she still been breathing?

  He tried to remember.

  He was sure she had. He could almost hear her now, in the silence of the house, even though she was dead.

  He listened hard and was sure he heard, very faintly, the sounds of tiny breaths.

  And then he remembered: Fred was sleeping next to his bed.

  He slid out of bed and knelt next to the guinea pig’s cage. The sounds Fred were making were just like the sounds Julie had made after she stopped crying.

  Very quiet, but there.

  He opened the cage, and Fred, hearing the slight rattle, woke up, opened his eyes and stared at Jason through the gloom. Jason reached in, gently picked up the guinea pig, and took it into bed with him. Soon Fred fell asleep again, this time curled up in the crook of Jason’s arm.

  Jason listened to the guinea pig breathe, sure that he had heard the same sounds in Julie’s room last night just before he had left it So he hadn’t done anything to Julie, not really.

  Still, tomorrow or the next day he’d talk to Randy about it. It was, he realized, sort of like what had happened to Randy after Billy Semple jumped off the roof. Even though Randy hadn’t really done anything to Billy, he’d still gotten blamed for Billy’s broken leg.

  As he fell into a fitful sleep, Jason wondered if the same thing would happen to him, and he’d get blamed for Julie’s dying.

  Maybe the next time Randy came over they’d do the same thing to Fred that he’d done to Julie and see if Fred died.

  At least then he’d know for sure.…

  Chapter 6

  RANDY CORLISS SCRUNCHED UNDER the covers, trying to avoid opening his eyes to the morning light. He was cold, and all night long his sleep had been broken by nightmares. But now the sun was warming his room, and he wanted to drift back to sleep, wanted to forget the loneliness that had overcome him the previous afternoon when he realized his father was not coming for him, at least not that day.

  “But if’s going to be all right, Randy,” Miss Bowen had explained, “Your father is very busy, and for the moment he wants us to take care of you.”

  “Why?” Randy had asked. Since he’d seen the fence around the Academy, he’d wondered why his father had had him brought here. It didn’t, to Randy’s eyes, look quite like a school For one thing, you couldn’t even see it from the road. There was just a long driveway and then a gate without a sign. And there weren’t any of the kind of school buildings he was used to, only a huge house that looked almost like a castle, with the windows of the second floor covered with bars. He’d seen a couple of boys who looked like they were about the same age he was, but hadn’t been able to talk to them. Instead, he’d been taken into an office, where Miss Bowen had told him why he was there.

  “It’s a special school, for special boys,” she assured him. “Boys like you, who’ve had problems in regular school.”

  “I haven’t had any problems,” Randy said.

  “I mean problems making friends.” Miss Bowen smiled at him, and a little of Randy’s apprehension dissipated. “Lots of boys your age have that kind of trouble, you know. Boys who are special, like you.”

  “I’m special?”

  “All the boys here are special. Most of them come from families just like yours.”

  “You mean where their parents are divorced?”

  “Exactly. And most of the boys here didn’t want to live with their mothers anymore and didn’t like the schools they were going to. So their fathers sent them here, just like your father sent you.”

  “But where is he?” Randy’s face darkened belligerently, and as he watched her, he could see that she wasn’t going to answer him. That was the trouble with grown-ups, even his father. When they didn’t want to answer your questions, they never even explained why not. They just said you weren’t old enough to know. Or sometimes they just pretended they hadn’t heard the question, which was what Randy thought Miss Bowen was about to do.

  “Wouldn’t you like to meet the other boys?” she asked, confirming his suspicions.

  “I want to talk to my father,” Randy replied, his voice turning stubborn. He was sitting uncomfortably on a high-backed wooden chair, but he folded his arms, and his eyes sparked angrily. “Why can’t I call him? I know his number at work.”

  “But he’s out of town. That’s why he sent me to pick you up. He couldn’t come for you. But hell be back in a few days.”

  “How many days?” Randy demanded. He was beginning to squirm in his chair now, and his face was flushing. The woman opened her desk drawer and took out a small bottle filled with white tablets. “What’s that?” Randy demanded.

  “It’s some medicine. I want you to take one of these.”

  “I’m not sick, and I don’t ever take pills.”

  “It’s just to calm you down. I know all this is very strange, and I know you’re frightened. This pill will help.”

  “What’ll it do to me?” Randy stared at the pill suspiciously. “Will it make me go to sleep?”

  “Of course not. But you won’t be frightened anymore, or worried.”

  “I won’t take it, and you can’t make me.” Randy’s mouth clamped shut, and his body stiffened. His eyes began darting around the room as he searched for a way out. There was none. The woman was between him and the door, and there were no windows in the office.

  “Then you??
?re going to sit there until you change your mind,” she told him. “You can make up your own mind. Take the pill, and come with me to meet the other boys, or sit there all day. It’s up to you.” She set the pill in the center of the blotter on her desk and picked up a file folder. Five minutes passed.

  “It won’t make me go to sleep?” he asked, coming to the desk and picking up the pill, studying it as if it were an insect.

  “It won’t make you go to sleep.” She got up to go to the water cooler, keeping her eyes on Randy in case he tried to bolt out the door. He didn’t.

  She handed him a cup of water, still watching closely to be sure he really swallowed the pill. Ten minutes later, when he began to relax, she took him outside and introduced him to his schoolmates.

  There were five of them, and they eyed Randy with all the suspicion of preadolescence, silently daring him to pick a fight. He watched them, trying to decide which of them to challenge, but none of them stepped forward, nor did any of them back away. Only when Miss Bowen left them alone with the newcomer did any of them speak.

  “Did she give you the pill?” one of them finally asked. His name was Peter Williams, and when he spoke, his voice was neither friendly nor belligerent.

  “Uh-huh,” Randy replied. “What is it?”

  “I think it’s Valium,” another of the boys said. “My mom used to take it when she was nervous.”

  “Do you have to take it every day?”

  “Nan. Only the first day. Then they don’t make you take anything. How come you’re here?”

  Randy thought about it before he answered, and when he finally spoke, he avoided the others’ eyes. “My dad sent me. Mostly to get me away from my mom, I guess.”

  There was a silence as the other boys exchanged glances and shrugs. “Yeah,” Peter said at last “That’s why we’re all here, except Billy.” He gestured toward the skinny brown-haired boy who stood slightly behind him. Billy stared at his shoes, as Peter explained importantly. “His mom sent him here to get him away from his dad. But who cares? It’s better than being at home.”