Suffer the Children (7 page)

Her eyes moved across the wide lawn, and the unobstructed path that led directly to the edge of the cliff.

“The door,” George yelled. “It’s stuck!”

“Push down,” Rose snapped. “It jams at the top.” She glanced out the window again, and the van seemed to be veering a little to the left. It would miss the garage.

She heard George grunt, and spun to see him still struggling with the door. Behind her she could hear the terrified screams of the children as they realized what was happening.

“Let me do it,” she cried, pushing him aside and grasping the knob. She lunged at the door and gave a quick yank. It flew open, and George was through it and running for the front door, a few feet away. In the middle of the doorway, Mrs. Goodrich stood frozen, her hand covering her mouth as if to stifle a scream. George shoved her aside, and she would have fallen if Rose hadn’t moved quickly to catch her.

“It’s all right,” Mrs. Goodrich snapped. “Don’t worry about me. Help Mr. Diller.”

But it was obvious that there was nothing she could do. She watched as George raced after the coasting van. From where she stood it appeared that even if he caught up with it, he wouldn’t have any way of stopping it before it shot off the edge of the cliff.

The driver’s door was flapping wildly as George caught up with the van. He hurled himself into the driver’s seat, and his left hand groped for the emergency brake as his right hand pulled the wheel around. He felt the rear wheels lock, and the van pulled around to the left and began to skid. There was nothing more he could do. He held his breath and waited. Behind him, the children screamed wildly, except for Sarah, who sat placidly in the front passenger’s seat, staring out of the window.

It stopped only inches from the edge. If the door hadn’t been open, George thought—but then he realized that there were too many ifs. He sat behind the wheel and waited for his nerves to calm down. By the time he was ready to begin guiding the children out of the van, Rose was there. One by one, they got the children out of the van, and Rose led them up to the house. Mrs. Goodrich, having seen that the van didn’t go over the edge, had already disappeared into the kitchen. By the time all the children were safely in the house, she had produced a pitcher of hot cocoa. Rose left the children in her charge and went back to the van. George had climbed into the driver’s seat again, and was preparing to jockey it away from the precipice.

“Be careful,” Rose warned him.

With Rose waving him directions, he eased the van inward from the edge and, when it was far enough back, turned it around. He called to Rose to join him, and eased the vehicle back up to the driveway. When he parked it, he carefully left it in gear and checked the hand brake twice.

“What happened?” Rose asked him as they reentered the house.

George shook his head. “I don’t know. I must have forgotten to set the brake. But I was sure I had. It’s almost a reflex with me.” He thought a moment, then shook his head. “I can almost see myself setting it, but I must not have.”

An hour later, with the children calm once more, George Diller herded them all back into the van. If Rose noticed that George made sure that Sarah was in the back seat this time, she didn’t comment on it. She simply stood on the porch and watched the van make its way down the driveway. Then she returned to her office and tried to concentrate on her work. It wasn’t easy.

George Diller drove even more carefully than usual on his way back to the school, and he kept one eye on the rear-view mirror. But it wasn’t the road behind him that he was watching. It was the children. Particularly, he watched Sarah Conger.

She sat in the back seat, and as they drove along the Conger’s Point Road she seemed to be looking for something. Then George remembered. Every morning the van passed Elizabeth Conger as she walked into town to school. And every morning Elizabeth waved to Sarah as the van passed.

But this morning they were too late. There was no one to wave to Sarah.

At the end of the day Mrs. Montgomery would note in her records that Sarah Conger had been much more difficult than usual. It was one more thing she would have to talk to Sarah’s parents about.

Rose glanced at her watch as she left the house; she had just enough time to stop at Jack’s office and still not be late for her appointment. As she walked to the garage, she glanced at the scars on the lawn, and shuddered once more at the memory of the van careening toward the cliff. She wondered if she should have kept Sarah home for the day, and felt a slight twinge of guilt at the relief she had felt when George Diller had insisted that it would be better for Sarah to continue the day as if nothing unusual had happened. She made a mental note to devote a little extra time to Sarah that evening.

A quarter of a mile toward town, Rose smiled to herself as she passed the old Barnes place. She had a feeling that today, as she drove home, she would be able to take down the FOR SALE sign that had been hanging on the fence for months. And it’s a good thing, she thought. It’s been on the market too long. Another couple of months and it would take on that awful deserted look and be impossible to sell at any price. But she had a feeling that she finally had the right customers for the house. Unconsciously, she pressed the accelerator, and as the car leaped forward some of the feeling of depression that had been hanging over her all morning dissipated.

She slipped the car into her space behind Port Arbello Realty Company, and dropped her purse on her desk as she walked through to the front door.

“You have an appointment in fifteen minutes,” the receptionist reminded her. Rose smiled at the girl.

“Plenty of time. I’m just going to run across the square for a minute and say hello to Jack.” She knew she could as easily have telephoned, but she liked to keep up the charade of devoted wife. In Port Arbello, solid marriages counted for a lot in the business community.

On her way across the square she glanced quickly at the old armory, standing forbiddingly on the corner just south of the courthouse. Another year, she thought, and I’ll find a way to buy it. Then it would be a simple matter of a zoning variance, and she could go ahead with her plan to turn it into a shopping center—not one that would compete with the businesses already surrounding the square, nothing with a major department store. Rather, she envisioned a group of small shops—boutiques, really, though she hated the word—with a good restaurant and a bar. That way, she could increase the value of the property without taking any business from the rest of tie merchants. In her mind’s eye she saw the armory as she would remodel it: sandblasted, its century-old brick cleaned of the years of grime, with white trim, and a few changes in the façade to give it an inviting look instead of the grim air with which it had always looked down on the town around it.

She jaywalked across the street to the
Courier
office and went in.

“Hi, Sylvia.” She smiled. “Is my husband in?”

Jack’s secretary returned her smile. “He’s in, but he’s a bear today. What did you do to him this morning?”

“Just the usual,” Rose said. “Tied him up and thrashed him. He squalls, but he loves it.” Without knocking, Rose let herself into her husband’s office, closing the door behind her, and crossed to his desk, leaned over, and kissed him warmly.

“Hello, darling,” she said, her eye not missing the fact that the intercom was open. “I hear you’re having a bad day.” As Jack looked at her in puzzlement, she pointed to the intercom unit on his desk. He nodded and switched it off.

“You seem cheerful enough,” he said sourly.

“I am, now. But we almost had a disaster this morning.” She recounted what had happened with the van.

“George is sure he set the brake?” Jack said when she had finished.

Rose nodded. “But he must not have. If he did, then there’s only one explanation for what happened. Sarah.” Jack seemed to lose a little of his color.

“So the school wants to talk to us about her on Thursday afternoon?” He made a note on his calendar.

“Not about what happened this morning,” Rose said quickly. “Although I should imagine that will come up too. My God, Jack, they all would have been killed. Not one of them would have had a chance.”

“And you really think Sarah might have released the brake?”

“I don’t know what to think,” Rose said uncertainly. “I suppose I’m trying not to think at all until we talk to the school.”

“I could take the rest of the day off,” Jack offered. “We could play a round of golf.”

Rose smiled, but shook her head. “If you want to, go ahead. But not me. I have an appointment that I’m almost late for, and I think it’s going to be a good one. I’m going to try to sell the Barnes place. If I can pull that off, it will do a lot more for me than a game of golf.” She stood up. “For some reason, work seems to relax me.”

“I wish it did the same for me,” Jack replied. He didn’t get up, and Rose felt a surge of anger that he wouldn’t play the game with her. “Send Sylvia in as you leave, will you?”

Rose started to make a reply, then changed her mind. Silently, she left the office, forcing her face into a cheerful expression for Sylvia Bannister’s benefit.

“He is a bear,” she said to Sylvia. “And he wants you in his den. Got to run.” Without waiting for the secretary to speak, Rose left the building and hurried across the square. By the time she had reached her own office, she had put her personal life back into its compartment, and was ready to greet her clients.

“So that’s about it,” Rose said a couple of hours later. “As far as I can tell, these are the only three houses in Port Arbello that come anywhere close to what you’re looking for. I could show you more, but I’d only be wasting your time. Why don’t we start with these two, and save this one for last.” She picked up the listing for the Barnes property, tucked it beneath the other two, and stood up.

“Can we all fit in your car, or shall we follow you?” Carl Stevens asked.

“Let’s take mine. That way I can give you a running commentary on the town. If you want all the dirt, you’ll have to talk to my husband. I’ve only been here twenty years, and the people don’t really trust me yet.”

Barbara Stevens grinned at her. “That’s why I love towns like this. If you weren’t born here, people leave you alone. And you can’t paint if people won’t leave you alone.”

They left the office, and Rose followed through on her promise. It wasn’t true that she didn’t have the dirt; every time she sold a house, its owners gave her a complete history of the house in question and the immediate vicinity. Rose knew who had slept with whom, who had gone crazy, and who had done “odd things” in every part of Port Arbello for the past fifty years. But she never passed the information on to clients. Instead, she stuck to her business. Where other real-estate people pointed out the house where they’d found
old Mr. Crockett hanging in the attic, Rose pointed out the fact that the school was only two blocks from the property she was showing. Consequently, she got the sales.

She ushered the Stevenses quickly through the first two houses on her list. They were noncommittal, and she didn’t push the properties. Then she turned onto the Conger’s Point Road.

“Any relation?” Carl Stevens asked as he read the sign.

“We are the last of the Congers,” Rose said, doing her best not to sound pretentious, and succeeding. “Unless I manage to produce a son, there soon won’t be any Congers at all on Conger’s Point Road.”

“I think it would be wonderful to live on a road that was named after you,” Barbara said.

Rose nodded. “I have to say I sort of get a kick out of it. From what I can gather, this road used to be practically the family driveway. My husband’s family used to own practically everything between the town and the Point. But that was a hundred years ago. It’s been built up for years. We still live on the Point, but the road passes us now. Sort of symbolic: The road used to end at our doorstep, but now it passes us by.”

“You’re a philosopher,” Carl said. “Which side of the Point is the property that we’re going to?”

“This side, but barely. As a matter of fact, if I can sell it to you, well be neighbors. The Barnes place adjoins ours. But don’t worry, the houses are a quarter of a mile apart, and there’s a strip of woods, a field, and some water between them. The Barnes place is on the mainland; we’re out at the end of the Point Here we are,” she finished. She braked the car and turned in to the long drive that led to the old house. She heard Barbara suck in her breath, and wondered how long an escrow they’d want.

“My Lord,” Carl said. “How big is it?”

“Not as big as it looks,” Rose said. “It’s an odd
house, but I think you’ll like it. Besides, if you don’t, you can always change it. The first time I saw it, it struck me that an architect should have it. No one else could make it livable.”

“What’s wrong with it?” Barbara asked.

“Nothing, really,” Rose said. She was parking the car in front of the building now, and she pointed to what appeared to be a pair of long, enclosed galleries, one above the other, that ran the length of the house. “See those?”

“Don’t tell me,” Carl said. “Let me guess. You go in the front door, and there’s an entry hall that goes straight through the house. On each side of the entry hall there’s a staircase, and the two staircases meet above the front door. From there, a hall extends the length of the house in both directions.”

Rose nodded. “That’s it exactly. With another hall on the bottom floor. It gives the place the feeling of an immense railroad parlor car. Every room has one door onto the hall. There’s an incredible view of the ocean, but only from the far side of the house. And I don’t have any idea at all of what to do about it. That’s one of the reasons I brought you out here. Even if you don’t buy it, I can get some ideas on what to do with it in case somebody else does.”

They went into the house and explored it room by room, first the lower floor, then the upper. Rose, following her instincts, did little more than identify the use to which the Barneses had put each room. Finally they were back in the entry hall.