Where Are the Children? Read Online Free PDF

she called. No, no! It was Michael and Missy. They were her children.
    'Michael. Missy. Come here. Come in now!' Her wail heightened to a shriek. Where were they? She hurried out to the backyard, unmindful of the cold that bit through her light sweater.
    The swing. They must have gotten off the swing. They were probably in the woods. 'Michael. Missy. Michael! Missy! Don't hide! Come here now!'
    The swing was still moving. The wind was making it sway. Then she saw the mitten. Missy's mitten, caught in the metal loops of the swing.
    From far off she heard a sound. What sound? The children.
    The lake! They must be at the lake. They weren't
    supposed to go there, but maybe they had. They'd be found. Like the others. In the water. Their faces wet and swollen and still.
    She grabbed Missy's mitten, the mitten with the smile face, and staggered towards the lake. She called their names over and over again. She pushed her way through the woods and out on to the sandy beach.
    In the lake, a little way out, something was glistening below the surface. Was it something red . . . another mitten . . .Missy's hand? She plunged into the icy water as far as her shoulders and reached down. But there wasn't anything there. Frantically Nancy clutched her fingers together so that they formed a strainer, but there was nothing - only the terrible numbing cold water. She looked down, trying to see to the bottom; leaned over and fell. The water gushed into her nostrils and mouth and burned her face and neck.
    Somehow she staggered up and back before her wet clothes pulled her down again. She fell on to the ice-crusted sand. Through the roar in her ears and the mist that was closing in front of her eyes, she looked into the woods and saw him - his face . . . Whose face?
    The mist closed over her eyes completely. Sounds died away: the mournful cackle of the sea gull ... the lapping of the water . . . Silence.
    It was there that Ray and Dorothy found her. Shivering uncontrollably, lying on the sand, her hair and clothes plastered to her head and body, her eyes blank and uncomprehending, angry blisters raised on the hand that clutched a small red mitten to her cheek.
     
    CHAPTER SIX
    Jonathan carefully washed and rinsed his breakfast dishes, scoured the omelet pan and swept the kitchen floor. Emily had been naturally, effortlessly neat, and years of living with her had made him appreciate the intrinsic comfort of tidiness. He always hung his clothes in the closets, put his laundry in the bathroom hamper and cleared up immediately after his solitary meals. He even had an eye for the kind of detail that his cleaning woman missed and after she left on Wednesdays would do small jobs like washing canisters and bric-a-brac and polishing surfaces that she'd left cloudy with wax.
    In New York he and Emily had lived on Sutton Place on the south-east corner of Fifty-fifth Street. Their apartment building had extended over the F.D.R. Drive to the edge of the East River. Sometimes they had sat on their seventeenth-floor balcony and watched the lights of the bridges that spanned the river and talked about the time when they'd be retired at the Cape and looking out over Maushop Lake.
    'You won't have Bertha in every day to keep the wheels spinning,' he'd teased her.
    'By the time we get up there, Bertha will be ready to retire and I'll break you in as my assistant. All we'll really need is a weekly cleaning woman. How about you? Will you miss having a car pick you up at the door any time you want it?'
    Jonathan had answered that he'd decided to buy a bicycle. 'I'd do it now,' he'd told Emily, 'but I'm afraid some of our clients might get upset if the word was around that I arrived at work on a ten-speeder.'
    'And you'll try your hand at writing,' Emily had prodded. 'I sometimes wish you'd just taken a chance and done it years ago.'
    'Never could afford to, married to you,' he'd said. 'The one-woman war against recession. All Fifth Avenue stays in the black when Mrs