the bottom, where she checked the long corridor that ran the length of the mansion. Satisfied, she signaled Engersol to follow her.
They repeated the procedure at the second floor, and in less than a minute had reached the main floor. Leaving the building by the back door, Hildie opened the trunk of her Acura, then stood aside as Engersol deposited Amy Carlson’s shrouded body into it.
“All right,” Hildie whispered just loudly enough for Engersol to hear her. “I can take care of the rest.”
Engersol glanced anxiously at the faintly silvering sky. “If anyone sees you—”
“They won’t,” Hildie assured him. “And if they do, it’s quite logical that I’ve been out looking for Amy all night, isn’t it? Believe me,” she added, reading the next question in Engersol’s expression, “I won’t do anything that will get the car searched.”
Before Engersol could make another objection, Hildie firmly closed the trunk, then got into the car.
A moment later she was gone, and George Engersol quickly returned to the house, moving up the four flights of stairs as silently as he had come down them a few minutes earlier.
In his room, Josh MacCallum stirred in his chair, twisted uncomfortably, then sank back into the restless sleep that had overcome him despite his intention to stay awake all night long.
He neither heard nor saw any of what had taken place as dawn began to break.
Hildie left the car’s headlights off until she passed through the Academy’s gates. Using a series of winding back roads, she headed north, twisting along the flanks of the hills until she was well out of town. Every few seconds she glanced in her rearview mirror, but no headlights followed her, nor were there any lights on in the few houses she passed. Not that it would have mattered if anyone had glanced out a window, for in this part of Barrington, the lots were large and the houses set so far back from the road that most of them could barely be seen. The car would be all but invisible, even from the houses closest to the road. Driving carefully within the speed limits, Hildie finally turned left down a road that eventually intersected the coast highway two miles north of the village. Across the highway a viewpoint had been constructed at the end of a huge finger of rock that jutted into the sea.
When she was sure there were no cars coming from either direction, Hildie drove the Acura across the highway and along the narrow U-shaped road that ran along a ledge that had been carved out of the promontory’s bedrock. At the very end of the point there was a small parking lot, totally hidden from the highway, no matter from which direction one might be coming.
She’d chosen the spot carefully, for the cliffs of the promontory plunged straight down to a rocky shoreline that was pounded by the surf twenty-four hours a day. By the time Amy was found — if she were found at all — her body would be battered into an unrecognizable pulp.
It took no more than a few seconds to take Amy’s body from the trunk of the Acura and drop it over the edge. Hildie watched as the sea swallowed it up, then carefully folded the sheet of plastic, returning it to the trunk of the car.
Then she added the final touch.
She set a folded sweater on the ground near the edge of the cliff, a red sweater with Amy Carlson’s name neatly printed in permanent ink on a label sewed into its collar.
A sweater she’d taken from Amy’s closet yesterday afternoon.
No more than three minutes after she arrived at the viewpoint, Hildie Kramer was ready to leave.
Steve Conners rose at dawn that morning and followed his unvarying routine of washing down a bowl of cereal with fresh-squeezed orange juice and a single cup of decaffeinated coffee. He was already dressed in a nearly worn-out Amherst T-shirt and a pair of green shorts that he’d had since high school and was beginning to think he’d have for the rest of his life. He left the tiny guest house he’d managed to rent for the school year — but would have to vacate as soon as the summer season began — and trotted down the driveway past his landlady’s still-dark house. A moment later he was in his old Honda, following Solano Street down to the coast highway, then turning right to head north, where he’d park the car at the viewpoint and begin his two-mile jog along the comparatively level stretch of road north of the jutting rock.
This was his favorite part of the day, when he saw no one and could enjoy the fresh air and rugged scenery with no distractions. The running always seemed to clear his mind, too. Often, a problem he’d decided to sleep on was solved not in the hours he spent in his bed, but in the forty minutes he spent jogging along the coast.
This morning he was thinking about Amy Carlson.
His sleep had been restless last night, for he’d kept waking up, an image of the little girl fresh in his mind, wondering where she might have gone. For, though he was well aware that there was plenty of room for ambiguity in the note she’d left on her computer, Steve was almost certain that Amy hadn’t killed herself.
She wasn’t the kind simply to give up, no matter how bad things got. Even that first week, before Josh MacCallum arrived, when she’d refused to leave her room, he’d been impressed by her determination: when she’d decided she didn’t want to stay at Barrington Academy, she had neither closed down nor run away. She’d just done her best to make things so difficult for Hildie and the rest of the staff that they’d finally give up and send her back to her family.
Though it hadn’t worked, Steve suspected that if Josh hadn’t arrived and made friends with Amy, she would have prevailed in the end, for even Hildie Kramer’s patience with the children had its limits.
He came to the viewpoint, turned left, and started slowly along the narrow track that led to the tiny parking lot at the end of the point.
Hildie was just about to get back into the Acura when she heard the sound of a car approaching on the coast highway. She waited, certain that in a moment it would pass by the viewpoint and continue on its way north, but when she heard it slow down, she froze.
Her mind went blank for a moment, and then she realized what she had to do. Snatching up Amy’s sweater from where it lay, she began running toward the approaching car, waving her arms and shouting for help. A second later the car came around the curve, the driver slamming on the brakes as the headlights caught Hildie in their glare.
“What the hell …?” Steve swore as the Honda lurched to a stop a few feet in front of Hildie. He recognized her and rolled down his window. “Hildie? What—”
“It’s Amy!” Hildie wailed, holding the sweater up. Before Steve could say another word, she was speaking again, words tumbling almost incoherently from her mouth. “Thank God you’re here! I’ve been up all night, looking for her. I was about to give up when I thought of this place. So I came out, and—”
Setting the brake on the Honda, Steve scrambled out of the car and took the sweater from Hildie, who looked so upset, he wondered if she was going to become hysterical. “Where was it? Where did you find it?”
“Right here!” Hildie cried. “It was just lying on the ground, all folded up. I—”
“Folded up?” Steve broke in. “You mean it wasn’t just dropped?”
Hildie shook her head. “I was going to go call the police—”
“What about Amy?” Steve demanded. “Did you see her?”
Hildie shook her head. “I looked down, right by where the sweater was, but—”
“Show me!” Steve demanded. “Show me exactly where it was.” Taking Hildie’s arm, he led her back toward the little parking area.
“Over there,” Hildie breathed, her voice cracking as she uttered the words. “Right by the wall.”
His hand still clutching Hildie’s arm, Steve strode to the low stone wall that was built along the edge of the precipice.
“Here,” Hildie told him, stopping suddenly. “It was right here.”
Steve let go of her arm, then leaned over the wall to peer down at the rocky beach far below. He only barely noticed Hildie’s hands touching his back, and for an instant thought she meant to steady him. Then, when it was already too late, he felt the push.
His arms churned in the air as he instinctively tried to find something to grasp.
Then he was falling.
He tumbled through the air, uttering only a grunt as his body struck the cliff, bounced away, then plunged down into the boiling ocean below.
