“I don’t know,” Rose said. “We certainly don’t have to leave the picture there. It seems to me that if we want to hang our picture in our study in our house, our daughter is no one to tell us we can’t.”
“But if it means so much to her—” Jack began.
But Rose cut him off. “It’s not that. It’s just that she’s starting to act like an only child.”
“In a way,” Jack said softly, “she is, isn’t she?”
The picture of the unknown child stayed in the attic.
BOOK II
The Present
26
Ray Norton drove slowly along the Conger’s Point Road, partly because he was keeping only one eye on the road and partly because he was getting older, and driving more slowly was a part of getting older. He would be retiring next year, and he was ready. Port Arbello was changing, and Ray Norton was changing, and he no longer felt that he was the best chief of police the town could have. He’d kept this feeling a secret, but he knew it was an open secret As the years had worn on he had turned more and more of the work of his department over to his deputy chief. Port Arbello had ten policemen now, and even they weren’t enough.
Not like the old days, Norton thought as he stopped the slowly cruising car entirely. Everything’s changing.
He was parked by the Congers’ field, and he was watching the work that was going on in the woods on the far side of the field. An apartment complex was being built there, and though Ray Norton didn’t approve of it, even he had to admit that, for what they were doing, they were doing a good job. The complex would fit well on the Point, long and low, snug to the ground against the north winds of winter.
As he watched the building progress it occurred to him that what he really resented was not the building itself, but the fact that the building would spell an end to what had become, for him, an annual tradition.
Each spring for the past fifteen years Ray Norton had spent several of his days off searching the woods for some trace of the three children who had disappeared that autumn the snow had come early. The first spring he had been joined by a search party, and they had combed the woods for days, then moved on to the embankment, searching for some trace of the missing children or the entrance to the cave that was supposed to be hidden there. They had found nothing. Whatever might have been there had vanished with the snow. They had continued the search for the cave until one of the searchers lost his footing among the rocks and nearly lost his life when he tumbled to the stony beach below. After that people stopped showing up for the search. From then on Ray Norton had searched alone.
He had never found anything, but the search had become a habit with him, and each spring he would return to the woods, make a careful search, and then move on to the embankment. And each spring he would find nothing. Well, the search was over now. The woods were being torn up, and the foundations of the apartment buildings were being anchored to the embankment.
Ray Norton left his car and began trudging toward the woods. You never know, he was thinking. They might turn up something I missed.
From the old house at the end of Conger’s Point, Elizabeth Conger watched the white-haired police chief making his way slowly across the field. Each spring she had watched him, and each spring she had asked him what he hoped to find.
“Don’t know,” he would say. “But I can’t just let it go. Something’s out there, if something’s anywhere. And I’ll find it, if it’s there.”
She had often wondered exactly what it was he hoped to find, and what he would do if and when he found it. It would have to be this year, or it wouldn’t be at all.
She glanced at a clock and saw that she still had three hours before it would be time to leave for Ocean Crest.
* * *
Sylvia Bannister was driving north, and it had not been her intention to make any stops until she reached Maine. But when she saw the sign for Port Arbello she turned off. As she drove toward the town she wondered why.
She had left Port Arbello a year after Sarah’s commitment,