Wheeling, he strode out of the office.
As soon as he was gone, Fred Childress picked up the phone and began searching for Warren Phillips.
• • •
Barbara stood rigidly in front of the mausoleum, not really seeing the stained limestone with its ornate facade. Indeed, as she waited while Craig searched for the right key, she barely saw the tomb at all. Suddenly she felt consumed by doubts. Did she really want to know?
If the coffin was empty, what would it mean?
Not only for her, but for Kelly, too. If Warren Phillips had taken her the moment she was born, and given her to the Andersons a week later, what would it mean?
What had been done to her during that week?
And now, sixteen years later, what could be done about it?
Though the afternoon was hot, Barbara felt herself shiver. For a moment she was almost tempted to tell Craig she’d changed her mind, to tell him to stop before it was too late. But before she could speak, she heard his voice.
“I have it,” he said softly.
Her eyes suddenly focused, and she saw the large key that he’d inserted in the bronze door of the crypt. His hand was still on it, but he was looking at her as if he understood the doubts that were suddenly assailing her. “Are you sure?” he asked one more time.
Barbara braced herself, then nodded. Craig turned the key in the lock. It stuck for a moment, then she heard the bolt slide back.
Craig pulled the heavy door open, the hinges screeching in sharp protest at the intrusion. For the first time in sixteen years, sunlight struck the small mahogany casket in which Sharon’s tiny body had been interred.
The wood had lost its luster over the years, and as Craig pulled the casket out of the tomb and set it carefully on the ground, an awful sadness came over Barbara.
There was something about the coffin, after its years in the mausoleum, that struck her as even more final than death itself.
As Craig began to lift the lid, Barbara turned away, unable to look at whatever might be inside. Only when Craig groaned softly did she finally force herself to look.
What she saw bore no resemblance to anything human.
Instead, lying on the yellowed and rotting satin with which the coffin was lined, was the desiccated body of an alley cat.
There was little left of it — a few fragments of skin, long ago hardened into leather, and the bones, laid out with a macabre naturalness. It was as if the creature had died in its sleep, one skeletal paw folded beneath its jaw, its tail curled up its side.
The empty sockets of its eyes seemed to stare reproachfully up at her.
Barbara’s stomach twisted, and she quickly looked away. “Put it back,” she whispered. “For God’s sake, put it back.”
Craig lifted the coffin back into the tomb and closed the door, relocking it as if it had never been disturbed at all.
Then, his own heart beating hard now, he began testing keys in Jenny’s crypt. A moment later he found the right one, but this time it twisted easily in the lock, and when the door swung open, there was no screech of protest from the recently oiled hinges.
He stared at the end of his youngest daughter’s coffin, putting off as long as he could the moment when he would have to slide it out.
His hands trembled as he grasped the end of the box, but he pulled it out just enough to open the section of its lid that had been closed on Jenny’s face only a few days ago.
He lifted it up and peered inside. Staring into the empty interior of the casket, his mind reeled, threatening to shatter into a thousand broken fragments.
“I was right, wasn’t I?” Barbara whispered, seeing the anguish on her husband’s face. “She’s not there, is she?”
Craig swallowed hard in a futile attempt to dislodge the lump that had risen in his throat. He shook his head, unable to speak.
“Oh, God,” Barbara moaned. “What’s happening, Craig? What did he do to our children?”
Craig dropped the lid and turned away, leaving Jenny’s coffin protruding from the open door of the tomb. Putting his arm around his wife, he led her out of the cemetery.
• • •
Warren Phillips glanced at his watch.
In a few more hours the last batch of thymus extract would be refined, and he would be ready to leave. Once he was gone, there would be no one left to answer the questions Tim Kitteridge would have.
Within a few days Judd Duval would be dead.
So would Orrin Hatfield.
And Fred Childress.
All of them, crumbling into dust as their bodies consumed the youth he had given them.
But he, along with his research and the few vials of the precious fluid he had left, would have simply disappeared, leaving behind him the laboratory in the basement, and the empty nursery.
He almost laughed out loud as he remembered the reassurances he’d given the undertaker when he’d called an hour ago: “Stop worrying, Fred — there’s nothing they can prove! Graves get robbed all the time, and there’s nothing to lead them back to us!”
Except for the birth certificates, but he hadn’t told Fred about those. Fred, or anyone else. And even if the Sheffields had discovered the forgery, it would still take some time before they’d be able to convince anyone to issue a search warrant for his house.
At least until tomorrow morning, and tomorrow morning it would be too late.
The five volumes of meticulous notes he’d accumulated over the years, detailing the research and experimentation he’d done before he’d finally succeeded in isolating the single compound within the body that held off the aging process, was already carefully packed in the trunk of his car.
Five volumes of complicated research that, in retrospect, seemed so simple.
The thymus gland, that mysterious organ that was so large in an infant and shrank so steadily through puberty and adolescence, almost disappearing in adults, should have been the most obvious place for him to look when he’d started on the project forty years ago.
And yet, even after he’d become convinced that the thymus was the key to his search, it had still taken him years before he’d finally developed a method of extracting the secretion of the gland and refining it without destroying the precious hormone it contained.
The answer to that problem, too, seemed simple now, for in retrospect it appeared obvious that it would be impossible to extract life from that which was already dead.
The glands he’d taken from corpses in the morgue had proved all but useless, and it wasn’t until he’d begun experimenting with live animals — mice at first, and then later, dogs and cats — that he’d finally begun to find success.
Only when he’d been quite sure of his methods had he begun experimenting on children, first using only the unwanted babies of the women of the swamp, the babies they’d neither planned for nor expected to survive.
But as the work had progressed and the technique had finally been perfected, he’d known he would need more babies, for as the children began to grow up, and as their thymuses shrank, they became less and less useful to him.
And he’d seen the differences in them, the differences he’d created by tapping into them long before they’d had a chance to develop normally.
They’d grown up to be strange, quiet children, children who never cried, but rarely laughed, either.
There was an ennui about them, as if something inside them — something almost spiritual — were lacking.
They seemed to care nothing for themselves, or for anything else, either.
And yet they seemed to have developed some special form of communication, some new sense to
