There was no reasoning behind this knowledge; it was simply there, as though it had slipped into her consciousness while she lay sleeping. She could feel the children’s presence not too far from her. They were so real, so immediate, that she could almost see their faces. For an instant she could have sworn that she could smell warm milk and talcum powder and that the echo in her ears was the sound of Matthew Wilson’s laughter.
Then she registered that the sound had been a birdcall. Opening her eyes, she found herself confronted with a scene that was unlike anything she ever could have imagined. She was lying in the midst of a dazzling fairy-tale world composed of giant spires with sculptured bases, all glinting an impossible shade of salmon in the stinging brilliance of the glittering morning light. Behind these rocks there glowed a sky that was the same vivid, incredible blue as Rob Wilson’s eyes.
Rob himself lay sleeping soundly an arm’s length away from her. His lips were slightly parted, and he was breathing through his mouth with a soft, whistling sound. The slanted morning sunlight accentuated the clean, strong line of his jaw and the high cheekbones with the shadowy hollows beneath them. A stubble of blond beard had materialized during the night and contrasted oddly with the vulnerable boyishness of his face.
Karen rolled over onto her side to watch him sleeping. How could she ever have failed to realize that he was handsome? She tried to remember the first impression she’d had of him. All she could recall of that initial meeting at the Zenners’ was the police uniform and the well-gnawed fingernails and the feeling that he was too young to be doing what he was doing.
Now, as though in response to the intensity of her scrutiny, Rob stirred, stretched, and shifted his position. He brought his right hand up and tucked it under his cheek.
Karen wondered at what point in the night their hands had parted. Had he consciously let go to turn away from her, or had he fallen asleep, as she had, with his hand in hers?
She said, “Rob?” Speaking his name in this mystical setting at this unfamiliar hour gave her a heady feeling, as though she were sipping champagne for breakfast. “Rob, it’s morning. It’s time to wake up.”
He opened his eyes. For a moment he lay unmoving, gazing blankly up into the great, blue bowl of sky. Then, he seemed to register where he was and who it was that was with him.
“Hi,” he said softly, turning his head to look across at Karen. “How did you sleep? Did the great outdoors really make that bad a bedroom?”
“Not at all,” Karen said. “I slept hard, and it’s just like you said—I do have a feel for things now. I’ve got a sense of the children. I can’t say where they are exactly, but I feel them. I know they’re near us, and I think I can find them. No, I don’t just think it. I know it. We are going to find them.”
“That’s the news I’ve been waiting for!” Rob said excitedly.
It took only minutes to roll up the sleeping bags and load them back into the car trunk. There was no sign of life to be seen in any direction. The quiet of the campground was so all-encompassing that it was almost as though they were situated on another planet. When Rob started the car to pull out onto the highway, the roar of the engine could have been that of a spacecraft taking off from the desert surface of an alien world.
Several miles down the road they pulled into a combination service station and coffee shop to pick up take-out food for breakfast and to buy gas.
While Rob was filling the gas tank, Karen went inside to use the restroom. Once there, she gave her hands and face a much-needed scrubbing and attacked her tangled hair with a pocket comb. Her mouth still held the taste of the hamburger she had eaten the previous night, and she wished she had thought to slip a toothbrush into her purse before she had left the house.
At that point, of course, she had not known that she would be gone for more than one day. If she had, she would have brought a change of clothing with her also. Her suitcase had been partially packed in readiness for the trip to San Francisco. It would have been a simple thing to close it and bring it with her.
Abandoning the wishful thinking, she did the best job she could at smoothing the wrinkles out of her shirt and dusting the coarse red sand off her jeans. When she reentered the coffee shop, she found Rob there waiting for her with a Styrofoam cup in each of his hands and a package of cinnamon rolls tucked under one arm.
“Don’t you think you should call your parents?” he asked her.
“I should, yes,” said Karen. “I don’t know, though, if I can deal with it. By this time, my mother will be ready to kill me.”
“Probably,” Rob agreed. “When you explain to her, though, about that postcard, she’s bound to understand.”
“Explain to my mother?” Karen said incredulously. “You’ve met her, Rob. You know what she’s like. Nobody ever ‘explains’ anything to Mom. She was furious enough that I came up here in the first place. When I tell her that we haven’t even left to drive back yet, she’s going to go berserk.”
“You have to call her,” Rob said reasonably. “You told her she could expect you home this morning. If you don’t check in, she’ll think we’ve been in a car accident.”
Karen sighed and nodded.
“I know you’re right,” she agreed reluctantly. “Okay, I’ll make the call, but don’t be surprised if you hear screaming out of the phone.”
To her surprise, however, when she did make the call outside the coffee shop, the voice that answered was not her mother’s, but her father’s.
“Where are you?” he demanded. “We’ve been worried to death. We expected you home hours ago. What’s happened?”
“Everything’s fine,” Karen told him. “There’ve been some new developments, that’s all. We’ve decided to keep on driving for a little while longer.”
“Do you mean to say that you’re still in Colorado?” Her father’s voice was sharp with irritation. “You haven’t even started back yet? Where on earth did you sleep last night?”
“At the Garden of the Gods,” Karen told him. “We’re in a state park. Rob had brought along sleeping bags, and we slept out in the open on the ground.”
“Well, I want you to get yourself back here, and I mean pronto!” Mr. Connors said. “If Officer Wilson refuses to drive you, then take a bus or hire a car. Do you have money? If you don’t, you can charge it on our card. We want you home, Karen. We’re very worried.”
“I can’t come home just yet, Dad,” Karen tried to explain to him. “I was starting to tell you, I think I can find the children. I have this feeling they’re somewhere right up ahead of us. If we drive just a little way farther—”
“Karen, I’ve had it with this sort of thing!” her father exploded. “This whole business is getting more and more ridiculous! I don’t want to hear any more about these crazy premonitions. Running off the way you did was cruel and irresponsible. Your mother has been worried sick about you. You know she can’t take pressure like this. She’s in bed right now with a migraine.”
“Please tell her to stop worrying,” Karen said. “There’s nothing for either one of you to be upset about. Rob and I are together, and he’s looking out for me. He’s a police officer! He’s trained to take care of people. Everything here is fine, and we are going to find those kids. You can believe it or not, your choice.” Before her father could respond, she said hastily, “I’ll call you tonight. Well, I will if I’m not home by then, which I might be. Good-bye, and please, stop worrying about me.”
She turned off the phone.
Rob was sitting in his car, munching on a roll and washing it down with coffee. Karen hurriedly crossed the parking lot and climbed in beside him.
“Well, that’s done,” she said with relief. She picked up the coffee cup that he had set out for her on the dashboard and took a grateful gulp of the hot black liquid. “I could have used this reinforcement before making that call.”
“I didn’t see any sparks fly,” Rob said, extending the package of rolls so she could take one. “Was it as b
ad as you expected?”
“Not quite,” Karen told him. “Luckily, it was Dad who answered and not my mother. He’s mad enough, but Mom must be even worse. Dad says she’s collapsed with a migraine.”
“You don’t sound too sympathetic,” Rob commented.
“I would be, except that she always does that. Mom gets headaches when things don’t go her way.”
She took a roll from the package, bit into it, and chewed on it thoughtfully. “You know, of course, that Mom and I don’t get along very well. Despite that, though, my mother’s the one who believes me. I’ve never understood that—why my mother should accept the fact that I’m psychic, when my father doesn’t.”
Rob turned the key in the ignition and started the engine.
“Maybe your dad doesn’t want to believe it and your mother does.”
“No, that’s the weird thing about it. Mom hates my being ‘different.’ She wants me to hide it and not tell anyone. She’s always wished that she had a ‘normal’ daughter, as well-adjusted and popular as she was when she was a teenager. To hear Mom talk, she was a cheerleader, homecoming queen, a sorority girl—Miss Popularity.”
“That doesn’t sound like the kind of person who gets migraines. I thought they were stress-related.”
“I don’t know what causes them, really. I just know she gets them.” Karen leaned back in her seat. “Are we ready to get started?”
“I guess we’re as ready as we’ll ever be. Where to?”
“Just keep driving north, the way we’ve been going,” Karen told him. “I’m pretty sure that I’ll know when we come to the turnoff.”
They drove for over an hour without much talking, watching the lush mountain scenery roll past the car windows on either side of them. Karen finished her cinnamon roll and then ate a second. She kept her mind directed toward the children. Every so often she closed her eyes and attempted to call up a vision of what they were doing. On one occasion, she found that she could see light and movement, but the scene that leapt and wavered upon her mind’s dark screen would not come into focus.
As time passed, however, she began to experience a steadily growing sense of physical nearness to the house by the river that Anne had described to them. With every mile they traveled, she felt them drawing closer. When Rob broke the silence to say, “We’re on the outskirts of Denver,” she immediately responded, “That’s not where we want to go. There should be a side road coming up soon on the left. We want to take that.”
Rob nodded, accepting the statement. When, after they had driven another mile or so, the side road did appear, he slowed the car without comment and turned off the smooth asphalt highway onto a narrow pitted lane that ran off to the west.
Now the driving became more difficult and their pace much slower. The road curved and wandered as though uncertain of its own destination, meandering first along the fringes of a pine forest, then jutting back and forth in a series of wild S-turns to avoid a family of boulders, then twisting to take a sudden, startling plunge into a gorge to cross a bridge above a narrow river.
At the sight of the surging water, Karen’s feeling of well-being abruptly vanished. The memory of that other river, of Carla’s terrible river, came rushing back to her, and she saw once again the images from her dream—tiny bodies in diapers and nightgowns being tossed about like foam. Her stomach lurched, and the acid taste of the coffee she had consumed several hours earlier rose in her throat until it threatened to gag her.
Glancing sideways at Rob, she saw that he, too, was reacting to the similarity of the circumstances. His jaw was set, and his face showed pale beneath the shadow of morning beard.
“This is different,” he said without attempting to elaborate. Silently, Karen nodded. The situation was different, and so was the road they were traveling. This road did not dead-end at the river as the other had done; instead, it turned to run parallel, turning itself to the curves and twists of the bank to form a border for the singing green water.
“Are you sure this is right?” Rob asked at last. “Could there have been another road up ahead that we should have waited for? We haven’t seen a sign of life since we turned off the highway. We haven’t even passed a car going in the other direction.”
“This is right,” Karen said. “I know it.”
And as she spoke the words, the picture was there. It came so suddenly and with such total clarity that it blocked her view of the road ahead of them. With a gasp of surprise, she found herself staring into what appeared to be a makeshift nursery. The room was filled with cribs, in many of which there lay sleeping infants. The side was down on one of the cribs, and a woman bent over it, engaged in the process of dressing one of the children. Although the figure of the woman obscured her sight of the baby, Karen knew instinctively that the child was Matthew.
He was awake and thrashing; she could tell that by the woman’s jerky movements as she struggled to work his arms into the sleeves of a T-shirt. The other children seemed unnaturally quiet for this time of morning, lying still and placid in their beds, with only an occasional involuntary twitch of arm or leg muscles to show that they were not dolls on display in a toy store.
“They’ve been tranquilized,” Karen said.
“What did you say?” Rob asked, startled.
“The children have been tranquilized,” Karen repeated. “They haven’t been hurt, but Betty has given them something to keep them sleeping. All except Matthew. He was sleeping earlier, but whatever they gave him has been allowed to wear off now. Betty is dressing him. She’s going to take him somewhere.”
“How do you know that?” Rob asked hoarsely. “What is it you see?”
“There’s a room, a sort of office.” For an instant it was there before her, superimposed like a ghost image upon the vision of the nursery. “It’s small. There’s nothing there except some chairs and a desk with a telephone. It’s in the city, I think; I can hear the sound of traffic. They don’t keep their files there. They use it only as a meeting place.”
“Their files?”
“The files of all their business records. They’re out at the house. It’s a good-size house, though it’s only one story. There’s a long living room with windows looking out on the river. There’s a kitchen and there are several bedrooms. The children are in a big one in the back. The walls inside are natural wood. The outside’s made of raw logs, like a hunting cabin. I can see—”
She broke off her description, for it was no longer necessary. As they took the next curve in the road, they both could see the house, back at the edge of the woods, on the far side of the river.
They could also see, at the side of it, half-hidden by trees, the back end of a blue van.
CHAPTER 19
Rob’s hands tightened on the wheel until the knuckles grew white, but he did not reduce the speed at which he was driving until the house had been passed and lost to view around the next curve. Then he pressed his foot to the brake and pulled the car over to the side of the road, bringing it to an abrupt halt on a flat, grassy patch of ground next to the river.
He shut off the engine and sat without speaking. He seemed to be trying to decide what to do. It was Karen who broke the silence.
“How do you suppose they were able to get the van over to that side of the river?”
“There must be a back road,” Rob said. “Come to think of it, I think I saw a trail of some kind leading off to the left before we crossed the bridge. You didn’t tell me to turn there.”
“I missed it,” Karen admitted. “I didn’t expect it to be there.”
“Well, you didn’t miss much,” Rob said. “You got that house perfectly. It looks just like you said it would. If you tell me the kids are in there, I’ll take your word for it. And the office you were talking about, the one in the city, of course, they must have that. They need a separate place to meet with the couples.”
“What do you mean?” Karen asked. “What couples?”
“It explains why they didn’t
demand ransom money,” Rob said. “They’ve never had any intention of returning those kids. Haven’t you figured it out yet? They’re running an adoption agency. They’re selling black-market babies and probably making a fortune.”
“They’re selling babies!” Karen repeated. “Who buys them? Any couple that wants a baby and can’t have one can go to an adoption agency.”
“And be put on a mile-long waiting list,” Rob said. “From what I’ve heard, the wait can take over five years. Even then, there’s no guarantee a kid will be available. Here in the Southwest especially, there are a lot more people wanting healthy, light-skinned babies than there are kids like that to go around.”
“But I’ve seen specials on TV,” Karen protested. “They advertise to find parents for orphaned children.”
“Well, sure, but those aren’t cute little babies they’re talking about. They’re older kids and disabled kids and kids of mixed races. Most people don’t want those. They want babies like Matt.”
“Gerber babies,” Karen said softly, recalling how she had used that term less than a week before. “Perfect children.”
“Yeah, perfect children. They’re worth a bundle, especially when they’re infants. Half-grown children come equipped with problems. Why buy a problem child if you can buy unused merchandise?”
“That’s terrible!” Karen breathed. “Babies aren’t ‘merchandise’!”
“To these people they are. To them, this is a business, and Matt must be their blue-ribbon special. You said you saw Betty getting him dressed to take him out somewhere. I’d be willing to bet he’s not expected back.”
Karen nodded. What he said made sense.
“What can we do?”
“I wish I knew what to do,” Rob continued. “The way I see it, we’ve got two choices. One is to go back the way we came and contact the state police. We can’t do that by phone, we’d need to do it in person or they won’t believe us. Even so, I could try to talk them into sending armed men out here with a search warrant, but I’m worried that they wouldn’t do it.”