tried to avoid their thoughts as they lay in bed, side by side, separated by their fears. Jack kept repeating the story be had told to the town meeting, over and over, until even he began to believe it. Before the blackness of night began fading into a gray dawn, he had almost convinced himself that Sarah had not been playing in the field with Jimmy Tyler, that instead Elizabeth had seen Jimmy at the quarry and instructed him to go home. But with the dawn the truth came back at him, and reality reentered his life along with the sun.
As if by mutual consent, they began talking about it at breakfast They had risen early, since neither of them had slept, and they sat in the silent house, sipping coffee and trying to figure out what they should do.
“I suppose we should call Dr. Belter,” Rose said.
“No. Not yet” Jack knew she was right, but somehow calling Dr. Belter symbolized defeat for him, and he wasn’t ready for that yet “I mean, what could we tell him?” he went on, and he knew he was rationalizing as much for himself as for his wife. “Because Elizabeth saw Sarah and Jimmy playing together is no reason for us to jump to conclusions.”
“No,” Rose agreed. “It isn’t But it seems to me we have a duty that goes beyond our own family. If Sarah has anything to do with this, even if she only has something to do with Jimmy Tyler, I think we have to tell somebody. And Dr. Belter seems the logical person to tell. And, of course, there’s Sarah to be considered.”
“Sarah?”
Rose wore a pained expression, and Jack knew it was difficult for her to say the things she was saying. He wondered if it was as difficult for her to speak as it was for him to listen.
“What about her?” Rose said. “If she is doing something, and I’m not saying she is, she isn’t responsible. She needs help. How can she get the help she needs if we aren’t even willing to talk about what she’s doing?” She stopped talking for a moment and stirred her coffee fitfully. “Maybe we ought to search the woods,” she said. “If something did happen, it must have happened there. Unless they got as far as the embankment.” She smiled, but there was no warmth in it “At least we know there’s no cave, so we don’t have to look for that.”
“I don’t know whether there’s a cave or not,” Jack said quietly. Rose looked at him sharply.
“What do you mean? Didn’t you tell Ray Norton last night that you’d spent most of your boyhood looking for it and it doesn’t exist?”
“Yes,” Jack said uncomfortably. “That’s what I told him. But it wasn’t any truer than anything else I told anybody last night.”
Rose set her cup down and stared at him. “You mean you lied about the cave, too?” she said incredulously.
He nodded miserably, and it struck Rose that he looked very much like a small child caught with his hand in the cookie jar. For some reason it made her want to laugh, though she felt anything but mirthful.
“Why on earth did you lie about that?” she asked him when her laughter died. Her voice was mocking, and it made Jack flush.
“Because I didn’t want them poking around the woods and the embankment, that’s why”, he said vehemently.
“But they’ll poke around the woods anyway,” Rose said, taking on the voice of a teacher with a recalcitrant pupil. “Besides, they’ve already searched the woods. They did that when they were looking for Kathy Burton.”
Then a thought came to her, and she searched Jack’s face carefully, looking for the answer to the question that had come into her mind. It was there, in his hangdog expression, in the defensive light that glimmered in his eye.
“You believe it, don’t you?” she said. “You believe in the legend. Is there a cave there?”
“I don’t know,” Jack said softly. “I never looked.”
“Why not?” Rose demanded. “Are you going to sit there and tell me that, with a wonderful legend like that, you never once, you and your friends, never once went looking for that cave?” Her eyes widened in astonishment as he shook his head. “Well, for heaven’s sake. That legend actually worked.” Now her laughter came in gales, partly at the idea of her husband putting enough faith in the legend never to investigate it, but mostly as a simple release. A release