7191 by Unknown Read Free Book Online

wouldn’t cooperate. They kissed without passion and separated.
    Bill put on his robe. Janice went upstairs to shower.
    *
    He was standing in the far corner of the room, next to the ample autumnal spray. The telephone was at his ear, but he wasn’t speaking. A slant of sunlight heightened the stricken expression on his face.
    ‘What is it?’ Janice murmured in a small, quavering voice as she took the last step down into the living-room and came to a dead stop.
    ‘There’s no answer at Bettina’s.’ Bill spoke the sentence almost dully - a stark statement of simple fact.
    ‘What?’ Janice could not quite take in the meaning of what he had said.
    ‘I thought it might have been Ivy calling before. But there’s no answer.’
    ‘That’s impossible. They’ve got to be there.’ Janice felt her scalp tightening - the prelude to panic.
    ‘Twelve rings, no answer.’
    ‘Dial again.’
    ‘I did. Get your coat.’
    Bill hung up the phone and propelled himself into action, while Janice remained rooted, dazedly watching Bill in rumpled Levis and a black turtleneck pullover thread his tennis sneakers onto his feet. She was unable to move or think.
    Bill glanced at her and crisply commanded, ‘Move, Janice!’
    The words seemed to work. Somehow Janice found herself going through sensible motions in spite of her pounding heart and the floating watery sensation in her limbs. She was even surprised to find her purse in her hand as they charged down the dimly lit hallway to the elevators.
    A sad, retiring widow, Mrs Carew had resisted all offers of friendship, preferring a life of quiet isolation for herself and her daughter. Standing in the hallway, enveloped by the sound of a slowly ascending elevator, Janice recalled the image of Mrs Carew’s sweet, gentle face. Now there was a distinct malevolence behind the patient, kindly smile.
    ‘Did you take Ivy down, Dominick?’ asked Bill while the door was still in motion.
    ‘Yes, sir,’ Dominick replied in his halting English. ‘Half hour ago. She went out with Mrs Carew and her daughter.’
    Bill gripped Janice’s arm and ushered her into the car.
    A bright, warm sun had drawn the autumn chill from the air, bestowing a clear, springlike day on the city. Leaving the building, Bill and Janice hurried towards Central Park West, having agreed on a specific course of action while descending in the elevator. They reasoned that Mrs Carew would have taken the children to either the park or perhaps the supermarket on Amsterdam Avenue, the only market in the neighbourhood open on Sunday. Since the day was so perfect and the park the closest, they decided to look there first.
    Waiting for the light to change, Bill began to feel a vague, fluttering vibration emanating from Janice’s arm which he was lightly holding. She was trembling. Guardedly, he glanced at her face in a casual manner. Her eyes were pinpricks of intensity; a light film of sweat accented the pallor of her skin. She was truly terrified. Why? he wondered.
    Crossing into the park, they all but ran up the narrow dirt path that led to the children’s playground. The awkward surrealist play forms which had, in a spurt of unthinking generosity from the Estee Lauder company, replaced the swings, seesaws and jungle gyms, were literally dripping with children of all ages and races, gamely attempting to wrest a modicum of fun out of the odd, demented shapes.
    Janice and Bill separated at the gate, striking off in different directions in order to increase efficiency. Janice covered the eastern perimeter of the playground while Bill took on the western side. They would eventually join forces somewhere on the northern end unless one lucked in on the objective, at which point he or she would communicate to the other by shouting.
    Janice moved through a maze of children-ridden monoliths, her eyes darting swiftly about, focusing, refocusing on, past, around galaxies of screaming, laughing, upright, sideways, upside-down faces,