Darkness

26

Mary Anderson was in her bedroom, staring at the last box that still remained unopened from the move from Atlanta. She knew what was in them — old albums, ledgers remaining from Ted’s failed attempt to start a business three years ago, her own report cards from grade school and high school — all the things everyone always saved but rarely looked at. She toyed briefly with the idea of sorting through the box, but quickly realized that in the end she would simply repack it anyway. She picked it up to take it out to the garage, where it would join her father-in-law’s own collection of memorabilia on the metal storage shelves that lined the south wall. But as she passed through the living room, the doorbell chimed softly, and she set the box down next to the sofa. She opened the door to find Barbara Sheffield standing on the porch, an air of anxiety surrounding her that made Mary’s welcoming smile fade quickly into a worried frown. “Barbara? What is it? What’s happened?”

Barbara fleetingly wondered if she shouldn’t simply turn around and go back home. But after last night and this morning, when the thoughts that had been growing in her mind ever since Jenny’s funeral had coalesced into a deep-seated conviction, she’d known she had no choice.

She had to talk to Mary Anderson, had to find out the truth of Kelly’s origins.

If Mary even knew.

She hadn’t called first, hadn’t wanted to tell Mary why she was coming. After all, how would she feel if one of her friends called her up to announce that she was Michael’s real mother?

A stranger calling with such an announcement would be one thing — indeed, ever since she and Craig had adopted Michael, she’d always been prepared for the possibility that at some point her son’s natural mother might appear. She would have been able to deal with that, for at least she would know that Michael had no relationship with such a person.

But this was different, for Barbara had a relationship to Kelly. What if Mary thought she was planning to lay claim to her daughter?

Still, Barbara felt she simply had to know, had to lay all the doubts in her mind to rest.

“I need to talk to you, Mary,” she said at last. “I know it’s going to sound crazy, but I’ve been having the most awful thoughts. I can’t seem to shake the idea that Kelly might be my daughter, that maybe Sharon didn’t die when she was born.” Speaking the thoughts out loud for the first time, she realized how bizarre they sounded. “I know it sounds crazy,” she went on, stumbling on her own words now. “It’s just — well, there’s so many little things — the way she looks … And Amelie Coulton … you know what she said at the funeral—” Her eyes flooded with tears and her voice turned into a choking sob. “Oh, Mary, I don’t know. It’s all just so awful for me. I feel like I’m coming apart, and I don’t know what to do.…”

Mary drew Barbara into the house and closed the door, then led her into the kitchen. “It’s all right, Barbara. I know how you must be feeling. It has to be horrible for you right now.” She poured a cup of coffee from the pot on the stove and sat down across from Barbara. “Now tell me what I can do.”

Barbara took a deep breath, struggling to control her roiling emotions, finally speaking only when she was certain her voice wouldn’t fail her. “I–I thought maybe if you could tell me where Kelly came from—”

“It was an adoption agency in Atlanta,” Mary told her. “Ted and I had been waiting for almost a year.”

“Atlanta?” Barbara echoed hollowly.

An image of the box on the living room floor popped into Mary’s mind, and she stood up. “I’ll be right back.” A moment later she came back into the kitchen, the box in her arms. Opening it, she began piling its contents on the table, and finally lifted out a photo album. “Look through this,” she said, handing the album to Barbara. “It’s full of pictures of Kelly, from the day we picked her up at the agency right up until a year or so ago.” Her voice took on a wistful quality. “The last couple of years I’m afraid we didn’t take many pictures. Ted’s business wasn’t doing well, and …” Her voice trailed off. “I guess the last couple of years there just wasn’t much we wanted to remember.”

Barbara opened the album and began flipping through the pages. The early pictures, when Kelly was an infant, meant nothing. But as Kelly grew, and her features began to develop, Barbara felt the same familiarity as she had when comparing Kelly to her niece Tisha. From the age of four on the resemblance was there. The two children, apparently unrelated, looked enough alike to have been sisters.

“I found it,” Mary said a few minutes later, interrupting Barbara’s reverie as she sat gazing at a picture of Kelly when she was about the same age as Jenny.

Again, she looked nothing like Jenny, who took after her father, but her resemblance to Tisha, and even more so to Barbara’s own sister, was eerie. At last Barbara looked up from the page. Mary, her expression almost sorrowful, was holding out a folded sheet of heavy paper. “It’s Kelly’s birth certificate,” she said softly. “I — well, I think it tells you what you want to know.”

Barbara took the certificate, her fingers trembling, but for some reason she couldn’t bring herself to look at it for a moment. Finally she unfolded it, her eyes misting over as she studied it.

It was from a hospital in Orlando that she’d never heard of.

It recorded the birth of a baby girl, born a week after Sharon had been born.

The baby had been given no first name, its identification stated impersonally as “Infant Richardson,” the daughter of Irene Richardson.

Father unknown.

Barbara felt her heart sink, but as she studied the signature of the attending physician, something stirred inside her.

Philip Waring.

She’d never heard the name before.

Yet there was something familiar about the signature, something flicking around the edges of her mind.

Then it came to her, and she reached into her purse, digging through it until she found the prescription Warren Phillips had given her the morning Jenny had died.

The prescription she’d never filled.

She flattened the form out and laid it next to the birth certificate.

The scrawl of the attending obstetrician’s first name matched the last name of her own doctor.

The first three letters of the obstetrician’s last name matched the corresponding scribble of the first syllable of Warren Phillips’s own signature.

She stared at the two signatures for a long time, telling herself it wasn’t possible, that it was merely a strange coincidence, that neither of the signatures was actually even legible.

They were nothing more than doctors’ scribblings.

The denials still tumbling in her mind, she spoke to Mary Anderson. “There’s something wrong,” she said quietly. “Mary. I think this birth certificate is a fake.”

Mary Anderson’s eyes clouded. “Barbara, it’s the certificate we were given by the agency. Why would they—”

“Let’s call the hospital, Mary,” Barbara broke in. “Please?”

Ten minutes later Barbara felt a cold numbness spreading through her body.

The hospital in Orlando was real.

The birth certificate was not.

There was no record of an Irene Richardson giving birth to a child in the hospital.

No record of an Infant Richardson at all.

No Dr. Philip Waring had ever been connected with the hospital in any way.

When the phone call was over, the two women looked at each other, Mary Anderson now feeling as numbed as Barbara Sheffield. “What are we going to do?” Mary asked, suddenly fully understanding — and sharing — Barbara’s obsession to find the truth of Kelly’s origins.

Barbara barely heard the question, for she already knew what had to be done.

She wondered if she would be able to bear to stand in the cemetery one more time, gazing at the crypt in which her first child lay.

She wondered if she would be able to watch them open it.

But most of all, she wondered if she would be able to stand the awful reality of finding it empty.

• • •

Tim Kitteridge sighed heavily, his large hands spreading across his desk in a gesture of helplessness as he faced Ted Anderson. “I still don’t see what it is you expect me to do. If your father’s sick—”

“He’s worse than sick,” Ted exploded. “He’s dying. He’s dying, and he’s gone off into the swamp somewhere!”

“Now, you don’t know that,” Kitteridge replied. “All you know is that he wasn’t in his office. That’s a big development out there—”

“I searched it,” Ted repeated for what seemed like the fifth time. He felt his temper rising, but struggled to control it. After he’d left his father early that morning, he’d gone to Warren Phillips’s house and then to the hospital.

Phillips had been in neither place, nor did anyone know where he might be. “I’ll page him,” Jolene Mayhew had told him, but after five minutes with no reply to the page, he’d demanded an ambulance, and gone back out to the construction site.

To find that his father was gone.

Taking the paramedics with him, he’d searched every house on the site, every possible place where his father could have been hiding. When the crew had arrived for work, he’d sent them out, too, certain that somewhere on the hundred acres of Villejeune Links Estates his father would be found.

But there had been nothing.

Nothing, until one of the men had found tracks at the edge of the canal. That was when he’d come to the police station and tried to enlist Tim Kitteridge’s help. He’d told him the whole story, but even as he talked, he’d seen the skepticism in the police chief’s eyes.

“Now come on, Anderson,” Kitteridge had told him after he’d described how his father had looked early that morning. “Nobody ages like that overnight. And I know your father — he’s strong as an ox, and works harder than most men half his age.”

“And he looks half his age, too,” Ted had shot back. “Phillips has been giving him some kind of shots. I don’t know what they are, but I saw what happened to him a week ago. It was like watching the fountain of youth or something. He was feeling really bad, and looking terrible, and an hour later he was fine! But this morning he looked like he was dying!”

Kitteridge’s eyes rolled. “If he was really dying, I find it hard to believe he took off into the swamp. And I can’t start sending out search parties every time someone goes in there. Especially not for someone who’s lived here all his life. If your dad wanted to take off for a while, that’s his business, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

Ted glared angrily at the police chief. “What about Phillips? Dad saw him this morning — he told me so himself. And now he’s gone. He’s not home, and he’s not at the hospital. Where is he?”

Kitteridge felt his own temper rising now. “Look, Mr. Anderson,” he said, his voice hard. “I don’t know what you think my job is, but I can tell you it’s not to go hunting for people who are minding their own business. You told me yourself that Phillips was out of whatever medicine he was giving your father. Maybe he went to get more of it. Did that ever occur to you?”

“Jesus Christ,” Ted swore, making no attempt to check his anger any longer. “If whatever he was giving Dad was something he could just pick up in Orlando, why the hell would he run out? Dad says he makes it himself. Aren’t you even interested in what he might be giving the people around here? It’s drugs, goddamn it! And you don’t seem to give a shit!”

Kitteridge rose to his feet, but just as he was about to speak, the phone on his desk jangled loudly. He snatched it up. “Yes?” he snapped into the mouthpiece. But as he listened, the angry scowl that was directed at Ted Anderson began to fade. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll be right out there. And I’m bringing Ted Anderson with me.” He placed the receiver back on the hook. When he looked back at Ted, his impatience had turned to uncertainty. “That was Phil Stubbs,” he said. “One of the tour boats just came in. There’s been a kidnapping. He said an old man came out of the swamp and lifted a baby right out of the boat.”

Ted said nothing, but felt a cold knot of fear forming in his stomach.

“Your daughter was there,” Kitteridge went on. “She saw the whole thing, and says she knows who the man was.”

“Dad,” Ted breathed. “It was my father, wasn’t it?”

Kitteridge nodded.

Together, the two men left the police station.

• • •

Barbara Sheffield barely nodded to her husband’s secretary as she passed through the small front office of his two-room suite over the hardware store and walked into the large room where Craig worked. He was on the telephone as she came through the doorway, but when he saw the look on her face, he abruptly cut his conversation short, rising to his feet.

“Barbara? What’s happened?”

She silently crossed the room to drop a folded sheet of heavy yellowed vellum onto his desk. He picked it up, stared at it blankly for a moment, then looked curiously at his wife. “What’s this?”

When she spoke, Barbara heard the hollowness in her own voice. “Kelly Anderson’s birth certificate. Except that nothing on it is true. And I’m sure Warren Phillips forged the signature.” The emotions she’d been holding in check by the sheer force of her will suddenly boiled up inside her. She sank into the chair in front of Craig’s desk, her eyes flooding with tears. Moving around the desk, Craig dropped down to kneel next to her, putting his arm around her.

“Honey, what’s going on? What are you doing to yourself?”

Doing to myself? Barbara echoed silently. The fear she’d been feeling turned into anger, and she pulled herself free of her husband’s embrace. “I’m not doing anything!” she exclaimed, her voice rising. “All I’m trying to do is find out what’s been done to me! To me, and to our little girl. She’s not dead, Craig! Can’t you understand?”

“Barbara, honey,” Craig began as he stood up again, but Barbara cut him off.

“It’s Sharon,” Barbara told him. “Something’s wrong, Craig! Sharon’s not dead! Dr. Phillips took Sharon when she was born and did something to her. Then he arranged for her to be adopted by Mary and Ted Anderson.”

Craig stared at her in shock. What was she talking about? The whole idea of it was so bizarre …

“I know it sounds crazy, Craig,” Barbara went on as if she’d read the thoughts spinning through his mind. “But just listen to me. Just give me five minutes.”

She told him about the pictures she’d looked at, first in her own album, then in Mary Anderson’s. But it wasn’t until she told him about the phone call to the hospital in Orlando that she saw the disbelief in his eyes begin to give way to a worried frown. “You can call them yourself,” she said, handing him the birth certificate once more. “In fact, I wish you would. Maybe the woman I talked to made a mistake. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe …” She floundered for a moment, trying to sort through her conflicting emotions, but finally gave up, leaning tiredly back in the chair. “I don’t know what I think.”

Craig picked up the phone and made the call, but as he spoke to the woman in Orlando, his eyes fixed on the signature at the bottom of the birth certificate. He’d seen Warren Phillips’s signature hundreds of times over the years, and he knew Barbara was right. Despite the fact that the name was different, it was still clearly only a variation on the doctor’s distinctive scrawl. Even so, when the phone call was finished, he tried to think of some other meaning for the anomaly. “It doesn’t mean Kelly is Sharon,” he said. “It could be some kind of coincidence—”

Barbara cut him off. “I thought of that,” she told him. “I’ve tried to think of everything. But we never saw Sharon, Craig. Neither of us. Not after she was born. Not at the funeral. We simply believed what we were told.” Her voice held a note of self-condemnation that tore at Craig’s heart.

“What do you want me to do?” he asked, and for the first time there was no challenge in his voice.

“We have to open the crypt,” Barbara told him. “We have to find out if Sharon is really dead. If we don’t, I think I’m going to go crazy. I can’t stand it anymore, Craig. Ever since I met Kelly, I’ve had the feeling that she’s Sharon. I can’t explain all of it, and I know her resemblance to Tisha could just be a coincidence, but I just can’t get over the feeling that she’s our daughter.”

Craig felt as if he was standing at the lip of a great yawning abyss, and that if he weren’t very, very careful, he might slip over the edge and be swallowed up by the emptiness below. If the baby they’d both looked forward to so much, and then lost even before they’d seen it — if that baby were still alive …

He wasn’t sure he could bring himself to finish the thought, consumed as he was by a great wave of black fury that had risen inside him and threatened to sweep all reason away from him.

“Mary,” he said, turning away from the dark thoughts. “What did Mary say?”

Barbara closed her eyes for a moment, wishing there were some way of avoiding what Kelly’s mother had told her. But she couldn’t. “She — She says she wants to know, too. She says there’s always been something about Kelly she couldn’t understand, as if something inside her is missing.” She hesitated, then went on. “She’s always thought it was her fault, that she’d failed Kelly. But if Phillips did something to her—”

Craig grasped at the straw. “What?” he demanded. “What possible motive would Phillips have? My God, he’s a doctor! Doctors don’t steal babies from their mothers.”

“There’s something else,” Barbara said, her voice sending a chill through Craig. She opened her purse and took a picture out of it, handing it to her husband. “Remember when that picture was taken? Just before Sharon was born?”

Craig gazed down at the picture, nodding. “I don’t see—”

“Look at some of the men in that picture, Craig. Warren Phillips and Carl Anderson. Orrin Hatfield and Fred Childress. Judd Duval.”

Craig’s eyes scanned the picture, quickly picking out the men Barbara had named. “They haven’t changed much, have they?” he said. When Barbara said nothing for several long seconds, he looked up and found her staring at him.

“They haven’t changed at all, Craig. Not one of them has aged a day in the last sixteen years. And I keep thinking about that. Orrin Hatfield is the county coroner. He signed the death certificates for Sharon and for Jenny. Fred Childress buried them both. Judd Duval found Jenny in the swamp. And Carl Anderson is Kelly’s grandfather.”

Craig didn’t want to look at the picture that was coming together in his own mind, didn’t want to accept what his wife was suggesting. And yet he couldn’t deny her words.

“They’re doing something,” Barbara said. “They’re doing something with our children, and it’s keeping them young. They’re taking something from them, Craig. I don’t understand it, and I can’t prove it, but I know it’s true. They stole our daughters, Craig!”

Craig felt himself slipping over into the abyss. “We don’t know that,” he said, his voice desperate.

“And what about Michael?” Barbara asked.

Craig looked at her numbly, but understood instantly what she was asking. He got up, went to the safe, and a moment later found what he was looking for. After studying it for a moment, a cold knot of fear forming in his stomach, he handed Michael’s birth certificate to Barbara.

She felt an odd dispassion as she stared at the document, as if it merely proved what she already knew.

The same hospital.

The same signature.

“Barbara, it’s all supposition—” Craig began.

“Don’t you think I know that? Don’t you think I hope I’m wrong? That I’m just refusing to adjust to Jenny’s death? But what if she’s not dead, either, Craig? What if I’m not wrong? There’s only one way we can find out.”

Craig said nothing for a long moment, but at last he took a deep breath and met her eyes. “All right,” he said. “Let’s go see what we can do.”