She’d done it so many times before, talked to so many frightened little boys who had lost their friends, told so many lies to so many children.
With Randy she wouldn’t lie.
“We don’t know what happened to Eric,” she said at last.
Randy was silent for a moment, digesting what he’d just been told. Then he asked, “Is that what’s going to happen to me? Am I gonna die too?”
It happens to all of you here, Louise thought. But how could she tell Randy that? She couldn’t. She felt Randy tense in her arms and knew her silence must be terrifying to him, but still she couldn’t bring herself to lie to him. Not to him, not to any of them, not ever again. And yet, did she have the right to frighten Randy so? She tried to think of something she could say that would ease his terror. I don’t think it hurt Eric very much. I think it happened very quickly. I suppose it must have been sort of like fainting. “Have you ever fainted?”
“No.”
“I have. Just once, but I remember it very well. I was fine one minute, and then all of a sudden I started sweating, and things started going black. And then I woke up, and it was all over. It didn’t hurt. It just felt sort of—funny.”
“But you woke up,” Randy said. “Eric won’t.”
“No,” Louise whispered. “He won’t.”
And it does hurt, Randy added to himself. Miss Bowen hadn’t been there and didn’t know. But he’d seen Eric’s eyes and the expression on his face. He’d heard the awful sounds Eric had made and watched him turn blue. He’d seen Eric’s arms waving helplessly in the air and watched him wiggle on the floor.
Deep in his heart, Randy was sure that dying hurt a lot.
He didn’t want to die, and he didn’t want to hurt. But he didn’t know what to do about it. All he knew was that he’d just found out what happened to all the boys who disappeared. They died. And they died because they were at the Academy.
Here. It happened here.
So, if he could get away …
But where could he go? He couldn’t go to his father. His father had sent him here, so his father must have—
The thought was too horrible, and he made himself stop thinking it.
His mother.
Somehow, he would have to get away from here and find his mother.
He snuggled closer to Louise Bowen, but in his mind he was nowhere near her. In his mind, he was with his mother.
If he was with his mother, he wouldn’t die …
Sitting at his desk in the Eastbury police station, Carl Bronski loosened his necktie, opened the collar of his shirt, and cursed the anachronistic regulation that forbade the wearing of summer uniforms before June twenty-first. But even as he felt the freedom of releasing his neck from the too-tight collar, he realized that it was neither the heat of the day nor the weight of his uniform that was keeping him from concentrating on the file that lay open and unread on his desk.
Rather, it was the conversation he’d had last night with the Corlisses and Sally Montgomery. It had been on his mind all morning, and now, in mid-afternoon, it kept picking at him, niggling at him, demanding his attention when he should be thinking about other things. At last he stood up, retrieved the Corliss file from the cabinet, and took it to the chiefs office.
Orville Cantrell, whose florid face and close-cropped white hair had never quite seemed to fit with the warmth of his personality, waved Bronski into a chair, and brought his telephone conversation to a close. Dropping the receiver back on the hook, he rolled his eyes toward the ceiling. “Wanna go out and bust Harrison’s peacock again? Old Mrs. Wharton still swears she hears a baby crying in his barn.” When Bronski failed to respond, Cantrell held out his hand for the report his sergeant obviously wanted him to see. He glanced at it, dropped it on his desk, and shrugged. “Runaway. I’ve already seen it.”
“Except I’m not so sure it’s a runaway.”
“Aw, come on, Carl, they’re taking off younger every year. And this one’s got a previous.”
“Still, I don’t believe it.”
“I’ve got a couple of minutes—explain.”
As carefully as he could, Bronski tried to explain what Lucy Corliss and Sally Montgomery had discovered, leaving nothing out, including Sally’s suspicions about Dr. Wiseman. But even as he