if her child were hard of hearing. Her frustration rose as her daughter continued to stare vacantly into her eyes. Her hand moved to her forehead and brushed back a nonexistent stray hair.
“Sarah,” she began again. “We know you were playing with Jimmy Tyler in the field yesterday. It’s all right All we need to know is if you went into the woods. Did you go into the woods?”
No response.
“For God’s sake, Sarah,” Rose pleaded. “It’s terribly important. Please, please, try to understand. He went home, didn’t he? Jimmy Tyler went home?”
Sarah continued to stare at her mother. The silence hung heavy in the room. And then, very slowly, Sarah shook her head.
The meeting in town was chaotic, and Jack was sorry he had agreed to take Carl Stevens with him. Jack was embarrassed for the town, and he knew he had not been good company. All he could see, first on the way to Ray Norton’s house and then as they drove into Port Arbello, was a vision of Sarah staring darkly into the distance and slowly shaking her head. Over and over again Jack tried to tell himself that it was a good sign, that Sarah finally had responded to something. But over and over he would remember what she had responded to, the question Rose had asked, and despair would close in on him again. Jimmy Tyler had not gone home. Sarah knew that Jimmy Tyler had not gone home. The time was getting very near when all of them—he and his wife and Elizabeth and Mrs. Goodrich—were going to have to accept the fact that Sarah would no longer be with them. But not yet.
The faces of the people of Port Arbello loomed around him, and Jack found himself unable to meet some of the eyes that he imagined were staring at him accusingly. Marilyn Burton greeted him warmly, but he was sure he heard a false note in her voice. Lenore Tyler smiled and waved, and Jack wondered why she hadn’t spoken. Had she guessed?
Although Marty Forager had claimed that there was to be no chairman at the meeting, he did his best to run it his way.
“There’s something going on in this town,” he shouted, “and it’s going on out at Conger’s Point.”
Suddenly all the eyes in the packed auditorium were turned on Jack, and he realized he would have to say something.
He stood up and faced the town. Suddenly they were no longer his old friends; suddenly he was no longer Mr. Conger of Conger’s Point Road. Suddenly Conger’s Point was something to be afraid of, not respected. And he was the man who lived there.
“I don’t know what’s going on,” he began, and a murmur ran through the crowd, a murmur that Jack was afraid could turn the crowd into a mob. He’d have to do better than that He listened to his own words and wondered where they came from.
“My daughter saw Jimmy Tyler yesterday afternoon.”
“How did she tell you that? Sign language?” a mocking voice shouted from the rear. Jack flinched and fought to contain his sudden rage.
“Elizabeth saw Jimmy Tyler,” he heard himself say. “Down by the old quarry. She talked to him. She told him to go home. She told him it was a dangerous place to play, but he didn’t pay any attention to her. She told me that when she came home, just before dark, he was still there. That’s all.”
Jack sat down, and felt the eyes of the town staring curiously at him. He wondered if they knew he was lying, and tried to convince himself that he had lied only because of the way the meeting was going, because of the feeling he had gotten of a mob on the verge of rampage. But he knew that that wasn’t true either. He had lied to protect his daughter. His baby daughter.
Then they formed a posse. They called it a search party, but Jack knew it was a posse. Ray Norton tried to stop them, but there was nothing he could do. Perhaps it Marilyn Burton hadn’t been there, or Lenore and Bill Tyler had stayed away, Norton could have controlled the situation. But the fact was that they were there, and their very presence, combined with the rantings of Martin Forager, aroused in them the desire to do something. Anything.
And so they went out to the old quarry. Ray Norton made sure that he was in the lead, and found a spot to park