Two Little Girls in Blue (25 page)

“That was very nice of you,” Clint said slowly, his
mind scrambling to explain the purchase. Angie had to have charged that stuff on my credit card, he thought. She was stupid enough to leave a paper trail. “My girlfriend babysits all the time,” he explained to Lila. “She drove to Wisconsin with a family to help take care of their kids. She'll be there for a couple of weeks. She bought that stuff because the mother called ahead to say she forgot to bring one of their suitcases.”

“The mother of the three-year-old twins?” Lila asked.

“Yeah. Actually from what Angie told me, the kids are less than a year apart. They're about the same size, though. The mother dresses them alike and calls them twins, but they're not really. Why don't you just leave the shirts here? I'm sending a package to Angie and I'll put them in it.”

Lila did not know how to refuse the offer. This is a wild-goose chase, she decided. This guy looks harmless. People do jokingly call children who are very close in age twins. I know they do. She handed the bag to Clint. “I'll be on my way,” she said. “Please apologize to Angie, or to her employer.”

“Sure, glad to. No problem.”

The phone rang. “Well anyhow, goodbye,” Clint said as he hurried to pick up the receiver. “Hi,” he said, his eyes fixed on Lila whose hand was now on the doorknob.

“Why haven't you been answering my phone? I've called you a dozen times,” a voice barked.

It was the Pied Piper.

For Lila's benefit Clint tried to sound casual. “Not tonight, Gus,” he said. “I really want to take it easy.”

Lila was opening the door slowly, hoping to hear what Clint was saying. But there was no way she could hang around, and besides, she clearly had rushed here on a fool's errand. Jim Gilbert had told her that Angie was a babysitter, and it was reasonable that the mother had asked her to pick up some extra clothes. Now I'm drenched and out the money for the shirts, she thought as she hurried back to the car.

“Who's there with you?” the Pied Piper was demanding.

Clint waited until he saw Lila pass the window, then said, “Angie took off with the kid. She didn't think it was safe to hang around here anymore. She has the cell phone you gave Lucas to pass on to me. She charged the clothes she bought for the kids to my credit card. Some woman was here from the store replacing shirts that were no good. I don't know whether or not she's on the level.” He knew his voice was rising as he said, “I've got to figure out what to do. I don't even know where Angie is.”

He heard the sharp intake of breath and knew that the Pied Piper was nervous, too.

“Take it easy, Clint. Do you think Angie will call again?”

“I think so. She trusts me. I think she knows she needs me.”

“But you don't need
her.
What would happen if you told her a cop had come around looking for her?”

“She'd panic.”

“Then tell her that. Arrange to meet her wherever she is. And remember—what she did to Lucas, she could do to you.”

“Don't think I'm not thinking about that.”

“And while you're thinking about that, remember that if the child really is still alive, she could identify you, too.”

“E
veryone has a breaking point, Margaret,” Dr. Sylvia Harris said gently early Saturday afternoon. It was one o'clock, and she and Kelly had just awakened Margaret.

Now Margaret was sitting up in bed, Kelly snuggled beside her. She tried to smile. “Whatever did you give me to knock me out like that? Do you realize I've been sleeping for twelve hours?”

“Do you realize how much sleep you've lost in the past week?” Dr. Harris's tone was light, but her eyes were watchful. Margaret's so thin, she thought, and so terribly pale. “I hated to wake you up even now, but Agent Carlson phoned. He wants to stop by. Steve is on his way over and asked me to wake you up.”

“The FBI is probably trying to decide what I was up to when I took off last night. I wonder if they think I'm crazy. Right after you left yesterday, I called Agent Carlson. I screamed at him that Kathy was still alive, and he had to find her.” Margaret pulled Kelly into her arms. “Then I went over to the place where I bought the dresses and practically attacked the manager, or whoever she was. I just lost it, I guess.”

“Do you have any idea of where you went after you
left the store?” Dr. Harris asked. “Last night, you said it was a total blank.”

“I don't really remember anything until I saw a sign for Cape Cod. That kind of woke me up, and I knew I had to turn around. I feel so guilty. Poor Steve has had enough stress without
me
going off the deep end.”

Dr. Harris thought of the look of desperation she had seen on Steve's face last night when she returned to the house at eight o'clock and learned that Margaret was missing.

“Dr. Sylvia,” Steve had explained, his voice agonized. “Right after I brought Kelly home from nursery school, as she was taking off her jacket, she let out a yell and grabbed her arm in that same spot where she had the bruise. She must have banged it on the leg of that table in the foyer. But Margaret went
nuts!
She was sure it meant that someone was hurting Kathy and that Kelly was feeling the pain with her. Margaret grabbed the car keys from me and told me she had to talk to someone in that store where she bought the birthday dresses. When she didn't come home, and when I couldn't remember the name of the store, I finally called the police and reported her missing. Dr. Sylvia, she wouldn't harm herself, would she? Do you think she would harm herself?”

It was three more agonizing hours before the call came that the police had found Margaret, sitting in her car near the Danbury airport. When they finally brought her home, she had not been able to tell them where she had been all that time. I gave her a strong sleeping pill, Dr. Harris thought, and it was the right
thing to do. I can't lighten her grief, but at least I am able to give her a chance to escape it and rest.

She watched now as Margaret brushed her finger over Kelly's cheek.

“Hey, somebody's really quiet,” Margaret said softly. “How are we doing, Kel?”

Kelly looked up at her solemnly but did not answer.

“Our little girl really has been pretty quiet all morning,” Dr. Harris observed. “I slept in with you last night, didn't I, Kelly?”

Kelly nodded silently.

“Did she sleep well?” Margaret asked.

“She was having a little reaction to everything, I think. She was crying in her sleep and doing quite a bit of coughing. That's why I thought it best to stay with her.”

Margaret bit her lip. Trying to keep her voice steady, she said, “She's probably getting her sister's cold.” She kissed the top of Kelly's head. “We'll take very good care of that, won't we, Dr. Sylvia?”

“Indeed we will, but I can assure you that her chest is absolutely clear.” In fact, Dr. Sylvia Harris thought, there is no reason for all that coughing. She doesn't have a cold. She stood up. “Margaret, why don't we give you a chance to shower and dress? We'll go downstairs, and Kelly will pick out whatever story she wants me to read to her.”

Kelly hesitated.

“I think that's a wonderful idea,” Margaret said firmly.

Silently, Kelly slid off the bed and reached for Sylvia Harris's hand. They went downstairs to the study. There, Kelly selected a book and climbed onto the doctor's lap. The room was a little cool. Sylvia reached for the afghan that was folded over the arm of the couch and tucked it around Kelly. She began to open the book, then pushed up Kelly's sleeve for the second time that day.

The purple bruise on her forearm was in almost exactly the same spot as the one that was fading. It looks as though someone pinched her hard, Sylvia thought. “You didn't get that by hitting your arm against a table, Kelly,” she said aloud, and then wondered if it was possible. Is Margaret right that Kelly was actually feeling Kathy's pain? She could not stop herself from voicing the question that was burning in her mind.

“Kelly,” she asked, “can you sometimes feel what Kathy feels?”

Kelly looked at her and shook her head, her eyes frightened. “Ssshhh,” she whispered, then rolled into a ball, put her thumb in her mouth, and pulled the afghan over her head.

S
pecial Agent Connor Ryan had called a meeting in his New Haven office for eleven o'clock on Saturday morning. Grimly determined to track down the kidnappers, he, Agents Carlson and Realto, and Jed Gunther, a captain with the Connecticut State Police, were settled around a conference table, reviewing the status of the investigation.

As head of the Bureau in Connecticut, Ryan led the discussion. “Wohl, as he was known,
could
have killed himself. It was physically possible, but it's not the way most people do it. The typical suicide puts a gun in his mouth or to the side of his head and pulls the trigger. Take a look at these.”

He passed the autopsy pictures of Lucas Wohl to the other men. “From the angle of the bullet we can tell that he would have to be holding the gun above his head when he fired it.”

“Then we have the suicide note, which is another problem,” he said flatly. “Wohl's fingerprints are on it, but not all over it, the way they would be if he had rolled the sheet of paper into the typewriter and then removed it after he finished typing his confession. Unless, of
course, he was wearing gloves when he did the typing.” He handed the note to Carlson.

“Let's reconstruct,” Ryan continued. “We know we have at least two people involved. One was Lucas Wohl. The night of the kidnapping, the babysitter was on her way to the twins' bedroom because one of them had cried out. Then she was grabbed from behind in the upstairs hallway. She believes that there has to have been someone in the room with the children when she was attacked. It makes sense, because we know that two men were seen carrying the ransom money.”

“Do you think one of them was the Pied Piper?” Gunther asked.

“I think the Pied Piper was someone else, a third man, the one who was calling the shots and not in on the actual kidnapping, but that's just a hunch.”

“I believe there may have been another person involved,” Walter Carlson said. “A woman. After Kelly got back home, she said two names in her sleep, ‘Mona' and ‘Harry.' The father was sitting by the bed and heard her. The Frawleys are positive they don't know anyone by either of those names. So Harry may be the name of the other kidnapper, and Mona might be a woman who was minding them.”

“Then let's agree that we may be looking for at least two, and perhaps three people other than Lucas Wohl: the second kidnapper, a man whose name may be Harry, and a woman whose name may be Mona. And if neither one of these three was the Pied Piper, then we're also looking for a fourth person,” Ryan said.

The slight nods of the heads of the other men told him that they were in agreement. “Which brings us to the persons of interest,” he went on. “The way I see it, there may be four of them. There's Steve Frawley's half brother, Richard Mason, who is jealous of Steve, may have had a thing for Margaret, knew Franklin Bailey, and was lying when he claimed he went to Vegas. Then there's Bailey himself. Also, Norman Bond, the man at C.F.G.&Y. who hired Steve, who lived in Ridgefield, whose early life parallels Steve's, who has had several breakdowns, and who referred to his missing ex-wife as ‘his
late
wife.' ”

Ryan's lips tightened. “Finally we have Gregg Stanford, who vigorously objected to voting to have C.F.G.&Y. pay the ransom, who may be in domestic trouble with his rich wife, and who at one time used Lucas Wohl as his personal driver.

“By the time we're finished checking out those four, Mason, Bailey, Bond, and Stanford, we'll know when they said their first baby word and what it was. I'm sure of that. But that doesn't mean we're not off base with all of them. There could be other people involved.”