herself. Waves of dizziness rushed over her. She had twisted her bad leg somehow, and there was the warm wetness of fresh bleeding.
“Tad!” She swallowed harshly. “Tad, can you hear me?”
His head nodded. A little. His eyes remained closed.
“Take it as easy as you can. I want you to relax.”
“. . . want to go home . . . Mommy . . . the monster . . .”
“Shhh, Tadder. Don’t talk, and don’t think about monsters.
Here.” The Monster Words had fallen to the floor. She picked the yellow paper up and put it in his hand. Tad gripped it with panicky tightness. ”Now concentrate on breathing slowly and regularly, Tad. That’s the way to get home. Slow and regular breaths.”
Her eyes wandered past him and once again she saw the splintery bat, its handle wrapped in friction tape, lying in the high weeds at the right side of the driveway.
“Just take it easy, Tadder, can you try to do that?”
Tad nodded a little without opening his eyes.
“Just a little longer, hop. I promise. I promise.”
Outside, the day continued to brighten. Already it was warm. The temperature inside the small car began to climb.
Vic got home at twenty past five. At the time his wife was pulling his son’s tongue out of the back of his mouth, he was walking around the living room, putting things slowly and dreamily to rights, while Bannerman, a State Police detective, and a detective from the state Attorney General’s office sat on the long sectional sofa drinking instant coffee.
“I’ve already told you everything I know,” Vic said. “If she isn’t with the people you’ve contacted already, she’s not with anybody.” He had a broom and a dustpan, and he had brought in the box of Hefty bags from the kitchen closet. Now he let a panful of broken glass slide into one of the bags with an atonal jingle. “Unless it’s Kemp.”
There was an uncomfortable silence. Vic couldn’t remember ever being as tired as he was now, but he didn’t believe he would be able to sleep unless someone gave him a shot. He wasn’t thinking very well. Ten minutes after he arrived the telephone had rung and he had sprung at it like an animal, not heeding the A.G.’s man’s mild statement that it was probably for him. It hadn’t been; it was Roger, wanting to know if Vic had gotten there, and if there was any news.
There was some news, but all of it was maddeningly inconclusive. There had been fingerprints all over the house, and a fingerprint team, also from Augusta, had taken a number of sets from the living quarters adjacent to the small stripping shop where Steven Kemp had worked until recently. Before long the matching would be done and they would know conclusively if Kemp had been the one who had turned the downstairs floor upside down. To Vic it was so much redundancy; he knew in his guts that it had been Kemp.
The State Police detective had run a make on Kemp’s van. It was a 1971 Ford Econoline, Maine license 641-644. The color was light gray, but they knew from Kemp’s landlord—they had routed him out of bed at 4 A.M.—that the van had desert murals painted on the sides: buttes, mesas, sand dunes. There were two bumper stickers on the rear, one which said SPLIT WOOD, NOT ATOMS and one which said RONALD REAGAN SHOT J.R. A very funny guy, Steve Kemp, but the murals and the bumper stickers would make the van easier to identify, and unless he had ditched it, he would almost certainly be spotted before the day was out. The MV alert had gone out to all the New England states and to upstate New York. In addition, the FBI in Portland and Boston had been alerted to a possible kidnapping, and they were now running Steve Kemp’s name through their files in Washington. They would find three minor busts dating back to the Vietnam war protests, one each for the years 1968-1970.
“There’s only one thing about all of this that bothers me,” the A.G.’s man said. His pad was on his knee, but anything Vic could tell he had already told them. The man from Augusta was only doodling. “If I may be frank, it bothers the shit out of me.” ”
“What’s that?” Vic asked. He picked up the family portrait, looking down at it, and then tilted it so the shattered glass facing tumbled into the Hefty bag with another