The Third Eye (15 page)

Using her legs for balance, Karen raised her right shoulder and managed to roll partway over onto her left side.

With the weight of her body now off her hands, she tried to restore the circulation in her fingers. They were so numb that it was impossible for her to tell if they were responding when she tried to wiggle them. The twine that bound her wrists was as tight as that around her ankles. She would never be able to slide it off, and there was nothing within reach that offered a sharp enough edge to cut it.

With a moan of defeat, she rolled back into her former
position. It was obvious that she wouldn’t be able to free herself. Her only hope was to attract the attention of someone in another apartment. Sound seemed to travel easily through the thin walls. If only she could find a way to create some really disturbing noise, there was a chance that one of the neighbors would complain to the manager.

The dish towel sealed her mouth as effectively as the twine held her ankles and wrists. The sole mobility she had was in her legs, and they could be lifted and lowered only as a unit. She tried raising them as high as possible and slamming them down against the floor. The warped linoleum soaked up the impact, and the resulting sound was only a muffled thud. Striking her feet against the stove front created a louder noise, but it was one that might easily be mistaken for the rattle of defective plumbing.

Still, doing anything had to be more constructive than doing nothing. Karen continued to kick the oven door, keeping up a steady, monotonous rhythm and praying that if she continued this effort long enough someone might begin to wonder about the repeated clanging.

Time passed; she couldn’t gauge how much. Sounds in the alley changed as the morning moved onward. Several trucks pulled through, and one of them stopped for a few minutes to pick up garbage. There was a cat fight, and then some dogs staged a barking match. Some women strolled past, chatting idly, and Karen could hear the creak of the wheels of baby strollers.

Eventually, there came a burst of voices, accompanied by laughter, and the doors of some of the apartments banged open and shut again. It was noon, Karen realized, and someone must have come home for lunch.

By now her legs were exhausted, but she relentlessly continued to flail them against the stove. No one seemed to notice or question the noise that resulted.

After what seemed like hours, she again heard the sound of doors and voices. Lunch hour was apparently over. One boy shouted directly outside the kitchen window, his voice so loud and immediate that he might as well have been in the room with her. Somebody else jangled a bicycle bell.

There were shrieks and giggles.

A shrill voice cried, “Hey, guys, wait for me!”

Then they were gone. Wearily, Karen let her legs collapse onto the floor. She had been sustaining herself on hope and hiding from reality. Help was there, all right. It was only a matter of yards away in all directions, but she was not going to be able to attract it unless a miracle occurred.

She closed her eyes tightly, forcing back tears.
I
won’t
cry!
she told herself.
I won’t let myself go to pieces. I’ll keep thinking, keep trying to find some answer, as long as I possibly can.

Then something strange happened. Shut off from the world as she was by her own sealed eyelids, Karen experienced the sudden realization that she was no longer alone. It was not as though she heard or felt anything definite, yet she was aware of another presence in the kitchen.

She opened her eyes, and the child was there. It was
the child
, the elf from the garden. Although the little girl had her back turned toward her, Karen recognized her at once by the set of the small shoulders and the flood of corn-silk hair.

Help me!
she tried to cry to her.

The only sound she could produce was a soft moaning deep in her throat.

The child did not acknowledge Karen’s presence directly, but she did seem aware that someone was observing her. Slowly, she tilted back her head and directed her gaze upward toward the top of the kitchen doorway. She held this position until Karen looked up also and saw something that she hadn’t really paid attention to before—the smoke alarm in the ceiling.

The smoke alarm!
Why didn’t she think of this before? On the front of the stove there was a line of dials that activated the burners, and two of them were within reach of her feet.

Quite suddenly, her legs no longer felt tired. Clumsy as the process would be, she was certain that if she worked at it long enough she would be able to manipulate the two nearest dials with the tip of one of her shoes.

The doorway was empty now. The child had gone.
But not too far.

Karen raised her feet and began to nudge at the dial that was situated closest to her. She had been kicking at it for several minutes when it occurred to her that what she was attempting to do might be dangerous. From her prone position, there was no way that she could determine with any
certainty whether the stove was gas or electric. If it was gas, and she kicked the burners on, she would be releasing poisonous vapor into the room.

She assessed this possibility and then discarded it. Although she had nothing more than intuition upon which to base her assumption, she felt strangely confident that the stove was electric and that this escape scheme was going to work. She trusted the child; it was that simple. She felt a quiet sense of certainty that the little girl loved her and would do nothing that would hurt her.

Twisting her ankles, Karen struggled to work her feet into a better position to rotate the knob. She tried to recall if this was the burner across which her mom’s rain scarf had been thrown. She had been so frightened at the time that the scarf was ripped from her head that she hadn’t taken notice of exactly where it had fallen.

Please let this be it,
she prayed.
Let this be the one.

Time moved by slowly. The muted light in the kitchen grew even dimmer, and Karen became aware that in that outside world beyond the curtained window it had once again resumed raining. Dampness seeped into the room, calling up other musty odors from cabinets and walls and warped linoleum. Neighborhood children returned from school with a clatter of bikes and voices and went banging and shouting into their apartments. TV sets and stereos went on. The sound of rock music slid through the walls and meshed with the beeps and shrieks of voices on video games.

Karen continued to work at turning the dial. She never knew the exact moment she reached her goal. The room was so dim by then that she could no longer see what she was doing.

Her first indication of success was when she began to smell what she would afterward remember as the most beautiful fragrance in the world: the acrid odor of wet and melting plastic.

It didn’t surprise Karen to learn that the children
were gone. It was as though, during the course of that endless and unbelievable day, she had reached a point where nothing could ever surprise her again.

She listened stoically as a balding police officer named Sergeant Rice informed her of what had occurred.

“They took twelve children,” he told her, “all of them infants. They had a laundry truck parked in the alley behind the building. A couple of people in the neighborhood remember seeing it there, but they assumed it was making a delivery. The woman who was passing herself off as your aunt evidently let the man in through the back while her assistant was across the street getting a Coke. He carted those babies out like they were dirty laundry. Then she got into the van with him, and they took off.”

“There was another car besides the van,” Karen said.

“We know about that. It’s still parked in front of the day care center. We checked it out and found out that it’s a stolen vehicle. The owner lives in Dallas.”

They were talking in the Connors’ living room. Karen’s parents had refused to take her over to the center.

“That place is a madhouse,” her mother said. “The police are dusting for fingerprints, parents are screaming and crying, and Mrs. Dunn is having hysterics. The last thing you need right now is to be exposed to all that.”

“You’ve been over there?” Karen asked her.

“Of course, for hours! I tried calling you there around the middle of the morning and couldn’t get anyone on the phone. When it was still busy twenty minutes later, and you didn’t answer your cell phone, I got in the car and drove over to see what was going on. The police had just gotten there. It was pure chaos even
then
!”

Now, at seven thirty in the evening, Mrs. Connors looked almost as exhausted as Karen felt. Her eyes were bloodshot, and her face had a haggard, caved-in look.

“Are you finished with Karen now?” she asked the police sergeant. “If so, she needs to get some rest.”

“I think we’ve covered everything.” Sergeant Rice consulted his notebook. “Your daughter’s description of the woman, ‘Betty,’ matches the one that was given to us by the people at the center. Nobody else seems to have seen the man, ‘Joe,’ so in
his case Karen’s description is all we have to go on. Maybe somebody at the Tumbleweed can add something. We’ll be interviewing the other tenants later this evening.”

“Let us know if there’s anything we can do,” Mr. Connors said. “We’re so grateful to have our own daughter home safe. I can imagine the hell those other poor parents are going through.”

“The van was blue,” Karen volunteered. “It had ‘Sanicare Laundry’ printed on the side.”

“We’ll get that out on the radio,” Sergeant Rice said. “I would guess, though, that they’ve long since gotten rid of the lettering. It was probably put on with something that could be peeled right off.”

“I wish I’d thought to memorize the license plate,” Karen said. “Everything happened so fast. I realize now that I didn’t do any of the things I should have.”

“You got yourself out,” the police sergeant reminded her. “If you hadn’t gotten the manager’s attention by setting off that smoke alarm, you’d still be lying there in that kitchen two months from now. That’s how far in advance those people paid their rent.”

“She was incredibly lucky,” Mr. Connors said.

“She made her own luck.” Sergeant Rice heaved himself up out of the depths of the armchair in which he had been sitting and got heavily to his feet. “Karen, if you think of anything you haven’t already told us, call immediately. Keep going
back over things in your mind. Details that didn’t seem important at the time may turn out to be something that helps us find them.”

They exchanged good nights, and Karen’s father accompanied the police officer to the door.

The moment the two men were out of the room, Mrs. Connors turned accusingly to her daughter. “Since you were a little girl, I’ve warned you against accepting rides from strangers. How could you have done such a stupid and dangerous thing?”

“It seemed so harmless,” Karen said. “The woman looked nice and so… sort of… ordinary. She said she was trying to find the center, and that was where I was going. It seemed natural to try to help her.”

“You could have died in that apartment,” her mother said. “Did you hear what that policeman just said? It would have been months before anybody went in there and found you! It’s a
miracle
that you’re here and alive right now.”

“Yes, I know,” Karen agreed.

“And those poor little children!”

“Mom, I know I was responsible for this awful thing happening. You don’t have to keep reminding me; I feel terrible enough already.” She regarded her mother miserably. “I can’t keep talking about it. I’m going upstairs.”

“Don’t you want some dinner?” Mrs. Connors asked her.

“I’m not hungry.”

“You need to eat something. I’ll heat up some soup. None of us have eaten since breakfast.”

“All right,” Karen said, giving in, because it was easier than arguing. “First, though, I want to take a shower.”

She left the room quickly, in hopes of avoiding further discussion. When she reached the foot of the stairs, however, something made her pause.

For a long moment she stood there, frozen, her hand already on the banister and one foot half-raised to place on the lowest step. Then, slowly, she lowered her foot, turned, and retraced her steps back down the hall to the living room.

Her mother was still seated on the sofa. Her shoulders were slumped, and she looked older than Karen could ever remember having seen her.

“Why did you try to call me?” Karen asked her.

Her mother’s eyes sharpened. “What do you mean?”

“You said that you tried my cell phone and called me at the center,” Karen said. “You don’t usually do that. What did you want?”

“I don’t recall,” Mrs. Connors said. “It couldn’t have been about anything important.”

“What were you doing when you decided to call me?” When her mother didn’t answer, Karen asked, “Were you folding laundry?”

“Why do you ask a thing like that?”

“I saw you,” Karen said. “Just as I fell, I saw you. You were standing in front of the dryer, folding a sheet. You looked as though you’d just seen a ghost.”

“You and your visions!” Mrs. Connors exclaimed in
exasperation. “Haven’t they caused us enough unhappiness? I don’t want to discuss it any further, not now or ever.” She changed the subject. “What kind of soup do you want, chicken noodle or split pea?”

There was a moment of silence.

“Which kind?”

“Chicken,” Karen said wearily.

“I’m going to go ahead and start cooking,” her mother told her. “Hurry up with your shower, or the food will be ready before you are.”

With a sigh of defeat, Karen reentered the hall and climbed the stairs. Ensconced in the second-floor bathroom, she pulled off her top and skirt and let them drop to the tile floor. The smell of smoke and the sour stench of nervous perspiration almost overwhelmed her. Trying not to gag at the combination of odors, she gathered up the soiled clothes and stuffed them hastily into the laundry hamper. When she slammed down the lid, she told herself determinedly that she was sealing away the whole horrible day.