“No,” Elizabeth whispered. “Let’s get her out now. There’s a ladder here. Look.” She showed him the ladder. “It won’t hold me, but I’ll bet it would hold you. You can climb down and find out if she’s all right. If she is, she can climb back up with you.”
Jimmy considered it for a moment He had never climbed a rope ladder before, but, on the other hand, he was the best climber he knew. And he thought of how neat it would be if he got the credit for saving Kathy Burton after the whole town hadn’t been able to find her.
“It’s all right,” he called down the shaft. “I’m coming down.”
And suddenly, in the pit, Kathy realized with terrible clarity what was about to happen. She tried to call out to him, but her voice wouldn’t carry through her fear. She watched in horror as the rope ladder appeared in the shaft. She tried to get up, to move to the ladder and grasp the end, but she was too weak. She watched in silence as Jimmy Tyler started climbing slowly down the ladder.
It happened when he was a little more than halfway down: Above him, Elizabeth gathered all her strength, and clutched at the rope ladder with both hands. And then she yanked.
If he’d been expecting it, Jimmy would have been all right. But he wasn’t expecting it, and he felt first one hand and then the other come loose from the slippery ropes. He was falling. He tried to break the fall, but it was too late. He landed on his head beside Kathy Burton, and lay still.
The shock of it forced a scream from Kathy’s ragged throat, and she found enough strength to make a single lunge at the rope ladder. Helplessly she watched it disappear up the shaft once again. And then she heard the ugly, rasping voice that she had come to associate with Elizabeth.
“Take care of him,” Elizabeth said. “Take care of your little brother. He needs you.”
The light clicked off, and Kathy listened as the scuffling sounds faded away once more. She began groping in the dark for Jimmy Tyler.
It was almost dusk as Elizabeth and Sarah made their way through the woods, and as they crossed the field night fell darkly over Port Arbello.
18
The next day there was no school in Port Arbello. The school had opened as usual, but by nine o’clock it had become obvious that the teachers would be sitting in all but empty classrooms. The few children who showed up were dismissed. But they refused to go. All had explicit instructions from their parents not to leave the school. They would be picked up, even the ones who lived only a block or two away.
The panic had built all through the night, from the moment Jimmy Tyler’s mother had called Ray Norton to advise him that her son had not come home that afternoon. Well, actually, he had come home, she admitted under questioning, but he had gone right out again to play. And then he had not come home.
No, she did not know where he had gone.
Yes, she supposed she should have found out, but she had assumed that he was going to stay near their house; after all, there weren’t any children his own age to play with. In fact, the only children close enough to be convenient were the Conger children.
Ray Norton’s forehead creased into a frown when Lenore Tyler mentioned the Conger children. That made three cases in the area, though he was still inclined to doubt Anne Forager’s strange story. He wondered what time Marty Forager would show up to begin abusing him about his handling of things in general and the case of his daughter in particular.
When he finished talking to Lenore Tyler, Norton started to call Jack Conger, then thought better of it. He decided to wait awhile and see what developed. He turned his attention instead to another problem, a problem that he thought could be potentially worse than the one of the missing children. The children’s disappearance was a fact. There was nothing he could do about it for the moment, except try to find out where they had gone.
The reaction of Port Arbello to the disappearances was something else again. This, Ray Norton thought, was predictable, and he didn’t like what he saw coming.
Port Arbello was not used to dealing with crime. Port Arbellans, in fact, were part