The Third Eye (20 page)

“Take the bag on the left,” he said. “That’s the one Chris uses. It’s a little thicker than this other one.”

“I’m so tired, I’ll never know the difference,” Karen told him.

Once she was settled in the bag, however, she was surprised to find that, despite her weariness, sleep did not come easily. The hard ground was alien to her back. The wind sang strange songs in the darkness, and bushes rustled and twigs snapped, and somewhere off to the right, something small and scurrying dislodged some pebbles and scampered away.

She was suddenly very aware that she was in the middle of nowhere with a man she didn’t know very well and that she had no idea what she was doing. Was he a stranger? She felt so comfortable with Rob, she sometimes forgot he was older and a police officer. He was just… nice. She decided to stop examining how she felt about him.

The night sky stretched above her like a sleek purple drop cloth. Pale, strange colors seemed to be moving and shifting beyond it, causing the star holes to flicker with varying degrees of brightness. Staring up into them, Karen felt like a voyeur
peeking through a million keyholes to observe the activities in an alien world.

“Karen?” Rob said softly. “Are you still awake?”

“Yes. Sort of.” She rolled over to face him. She could see him only as a blurred mound of darkness.

“You were right about what you said about Steve and me. No matter what he decided to do or be, I should have had enough sense to stay in college. Dropping out was the dumbest mistake of my life.”

“You didn’t drop out totally,” Karen reminded him. “You did attend the Police Academy.”

“That was another mistake. I’m not cut out to be a cop. Finding that girl in the river left me shaky for days.”

“Then why not go back and start over?” Karen asked him.

“Leave the force and go back to college?”

“And then to law school. Do what you planned to do in the first place.”

“That would take years.”

They lay for a while in silence. Then Rob asked suddenly, “Are you still dating that guy with the Honda?”

“No,” Karen said. “Why?”

“I thought if there wasn’t a problem, I might kiss you good night.”

When she didn’t respond, he raised himself up on his elbow and leaned across the space between the sleeping bags. His lips brushed her cheek. “Good night, Karen.”

“Good night,” she whispered. Her stomach did a small flutter.

“Is Chris’s sleeping bag comfortable?”

“Yes, it’s fine.” She paused. “You didn’t mention. Is Chris a guy or a girl?”

“Christopher Summers, Anne’s son. We’ve been friends since elementary school.” From the tone of his voice, she thought that he might be smiling again.

She saw a movement, a pale moth in the darkness, fluttering across to light beside her. When Rob’s hand closed around hers, however, she knew that she had been mistaken. There was nothing fragile about the strong, warm grasp.

The night arched above them, no longer a drop cloth, but a canopy studded with diamonds. Holding fast to Rob’s hand, Karen let her eyes fall closed. In the final instant before sleep overtook her, she realized, with a feeling that was a blend of fear and exaltation, that, at some point during the past two horrible days, she had begun to fall in love.

Karen woke when the first rays of sunlight
touched her eyelids, and, on waking, she knew that the children would be found that day.

There was no reasoning behind this knowledge; it was simply there, as though it had slipped into her consciousness while she lay sleeping. She could feel the children’s presence not too far from her. They were so real, so immediate, that she could almost see their faces. For an instant she could have sworn that she could smell warm milk and talcum powder and that the echo in her ears was the sound of Matthew Wilson’s laughter.

Then she registered that the sound had been a birdcall. Opening her eyes, she found herself confronted with a scene that was unlike anything she ever could have imagined. She was lying in the midst of a dazzling fairy-tale world composed
of giant spires with sculptured bases, all glinting an impossible shade of salmon in the stinging brilliance of the glittering morning light. Behind these rocks there glowed a sky that was the same vivid, incredible blue as Rob Wilson’s eyes.

Rob himself lay sleeping soundly an arm’s length away from her. His lips were slightly parted, and he was breathing through his mouth with a soft, whistling sound. The slanted morning sunlight accentuated the clean, strong line of his jaw and the high cheekbones with the shadowy hollows beneath them. A stubble of blond beard had materialized during the night and contrasted oddly with the vulnerable boyishness of his face.

Karen rolled over onto her side to watch him sleeping. How could she ever have failed to realize that he was handsome? She tried to remember the first impression she’d had of him. All she could recall of that initial meeting at the Zenners’ was the police uniform and the well-gnawed fingernails and the feeling that he was too young to be doing what he was doing.

Now, as though in response to the intensity of her scrutiny, Rob stirred, stretched, and shifted his position. He brought his right hand up and tucked it under his cheek.

Karen wondered at what point in the night their hands had parted. Had he consciously let go to turn away from her, or had he fallen asleep, as she had, with his hand in hers?

She said, “Rob?” Speaking his name in this mystical setting at this unfamiliar hour gave her a heady feeling, as though
she were sipping champagne for breakfast. “Rob, it’s morning. It’s time to wake up.”

He opened his eyes. For a moment he lay unmoving, gazing blankly up into the great, blue bowl of sky. Then, he seemed to register where he was and who it was that was with him.

“Hi,” he said softly, turning his head to look across at Karen. “How did you sleep? Did the great outdoors really make that bad a bedroom?”

“Not at all,” Karen said. “I slept hard, and it’s just like you said—I do have a feel for things now. I’ve got a sense of the children. I can’t say where they are exactly, but I
feel
them. I know they’re near us, and I think I can find them. No, I don’t just think it. I
know
it. We
are
going to find them.”

“That’s the news I’ve been waiting for!” Rob said excitedly.

It took only minutes to roll up the sleeping bags and load them back into the car trunk. There was no sign of life to be seen in any direction. The quiet of the campground was so all-encompassing that it was almost as though they were situated on another planet. When Rob started the car to pull out onto the highway, the roar of the engine could have been that of a spacecraft taking off from the desert surface of an alien world.

Several miles down the road they pulled into a combination service station and coffee shop to pick up take-out food for breakfast and to buy gas.

While Rob was filling the gas tank, Karen went inside to use the restroom. Once there, she gave her hands and face a much-needed scrubbing and attacked her tangled hair with a
pocket comb. Her mouth still held the taste of the hamburger she had eaten the previous night, and she wished she had thought to slip a toothbrush into her purse before she had left the house.

At that point, of course, she had not known that she would be gone for more than one day. If she had, she would have brought a change of clothing with her also. Her suitcase had been partially packed in readiness for the trip to San Francisco. It would have been a simple thing to close it and bring it with her.

Abandoning the wishful thinking, she did the best job she could at smoothing the wrinkles out of her shirt and dusting the coarse red sand off her jeans. When she reentered the coffee shop, she found Rob there waiting for her with a Styrofoam cup in each of his hands and a package of cinnamon rolls tucked under one arm.

“Don’t you think you should call your parents?” he asked her.

“I should, yes,” said Karen. “I don’t know, though, if I can deal with it. By this time, my mother will be ready to kill me.”

“Probably,” Rob agreed. “When you explain to her, though, about that postcard, she’s bound to understand.”

“Explain to my
mother
?” Karen said incredulously. “You’ve met her, Rob. You know what she’s like. Nobody ever ‘explains’ anything to Mom. She was furious enough that I came up here in the first place. When I tell her that we haven’t even left to drive back yet, she’s going to go berserk.”

“You have to call her,” Rob said reasonably. “You told her she could expect you home this morning. If you don’t check in, she’ll think we’ve been in a car accident.”

Karen sighed and nodded.

“I know you’re right,” she agreed reluctantly. “Okay, I’ll make the call, but don’t be surprised if you hear screaming out of the phone.”

To her surprise, however, when she did make the call outside the coffee shop, the voice that answered was not her mother’s, but her father’s.

“Where are you?” he demanded. “We’ve been worried to death. We expected you home hours ago. What’s happened?”

“Everything’s fine,” Karen told him. “There’ve been some new developments, that’s all. We’ve decided to keep on driving for a little while longer.”

“Do you mean to say that you’re still in Colorado?” Her father’s voice was sharp with irritation. “You haven’t even started back yet? Where on earth did you sleep last night?”

“At the Garden of the Gods,” Karen told him. “We’re in a state park. Rob had brought along sleeping bags, and we slept out in the open on the ground.”

“Well, I want you to get yourself back here, and I mean
pronto
!” Mr. Connors said. “If Officer Wilson refuses to drive you, then take a bus or hire a car. Do you have money? If you don’t, you can charge it on our card. We want you home, Karen. We’re very worried.”

“I can’t come home just yet, Dad,” Karen tried to explain
to him. “I was starting to tell you, I think I can find the children. I have this feeling they’re somewhere right up ahead of us. If we drive just a little way farther—”

“Karen, I’ve
had
it with this sort of thing!” her father exploded. “This whole business is getting more and more ridiculous! I don’t want to hear any more about these crazy premonitions. Running off the way you did was cruel and irresponsible. Your mother has been worried sick about you. You know she can’t take pressure like this. She’s in bed right now with a migraine.”

“Please tell her to stop worrying,” Karen said. “There’s nothing for either one of you to be upset about. Rob and I are together, and he’s looking out for me. He’s a police officer! He’s trained to take care of people. Everything here is fine, and we
are
going to find those kids. You can believe it or not, your choice.” Before her father could respond, she said hastily, “I’ll call you tonight. Well, I will if I’m not home by then, which I might be. Good-bye, and please, stop worrying about me.”

She turned off the phone.

Rob was sitting in his car, munching on a roll and washing it down with coffee. Karen hurriedly crossed the parking lot and climbed in beside him.

“Well, that’s done,” she said with relief. She picked up the coffee cup that he had set out for her on the dashboard and took a grateful gulp of the hot black liquid. “I could have used this reinforcement
before
making that call.”

“I didn’t see any sparks fly,” Rob said, extending the
package of rolls so she could take one. “Was it as bad as you expected?”

“Not quite,” Karen told him. “Luckily, it was Dad who answered and not my mother. He’s mad enough, but Mom must be even worse. Dad says she’s collapsed with a migraine.”

“You don’t sound too sympathetic,” Rob commented.

“I would be, except that she always does that. Mom gets headaches when things don’t go her way.”

She took a roll from the package, bit into it, and chewed on it thoughtfully. “You know, of course, that Mom and I don’t get along very well. Despite that, though, my mother’s the one who believes me. I’ve never understood that—why my mother should accept the fact that I’m psychic, when my father doesn’t.”

Rob turned the key in the ignition and started the engine.

“Maybe your dad doesn’t want to believe it and your mother does.”

“No, that’s the weird thing about it. Mom hates my being ‘different.’ She wants me to hide it and not tell anyone. She’s always wished that she had a ‘normal’ daughter, as well-adjusted and popular as she was when she was a teenager. To hear Mom talk, she was a cheerleader, homecoming queen, a sorority girl—Miss Popularity.”

“That doesn’t sound like the kind of person who gets migraines. I thought they were stress-related.”

“I don’t know what causes them, really. I just know she gets them.” Karen leaned back in her seat. “Are we ready to get started?”

“I guess we’re as ready as we’ll ever be. Where to?”

“Just keep driving north, the way we’ve been going,” Karen told him. “I’m pretty sure that I’ll know when we come to the turnoff.”

They drove for over an hour without much talking, watching the lush mountain scenery roll past the car windows on either side of them. Karen finished her cinnamon roll and then ate a second. She kept her mind directed toward the children. Every so often she closed her eyes and attempted to call up a vision of what they were doing. On one occasion, she found that she could see light and movement, but the scene that leapt and wavered upon her mind’s dark screen would not come into focus.

As time passed, however, she began to experience a steadily growing sense of physical nearness to the house by the river that Anne had described to them. With every mile they traveled, she felt them drawing closer. When Rob broke the silence to say, “We’re on the outskirts of Denver,” she immediately responded, “That’s not where we want to go. There should be a side road coming up soon on the left. We want to take that.”

Rob nodded, accepting the statement. When, after they had driven another mile or so, the side road did appear, he slowed the car without comment and turned off the smooth asphalt highway onto a narrow pitted lane that ran off to the west.