There was a long silence, then he said, “I’ll call when I know for sure it’s Jenny.”
Despite this, I could tell the bit about false hope had been a useless caveat.
THE television screens in the newsroom were full of stories about the events of the day and showing photos of the children,
Roy, and Bonnie/Victoria. A forensic artist’s sketch of Cleo showed up, too-no one seemed to have any photos of her. Speculation was laid on thick by various commentators, but that would be nothing compared to the hours of live guesswork that were bound to come. I was already thoroughly tired of seeing the clips some of them had captured out in Palmdale. My fifteen minutes of fame, and I looked as if I had stepped out of a sandblaster.
I kept hoping that all the coverage would result in solid leads, thinking that surely someone would have seen Roy and the three children. Calls did come in to the police. Frank told me that if all the sightings were accurate, Roy and the kids had been able to manifest themselves in more than six hundred places in the United States and Canada, almost simultaneously.
As the hours from the time of Roy’s disappearance lengthened, worries grew.
JUST before I left work, Edith Fletcher, a daughter of Graydon Fletcher who lived with him, called on his behalf. She said he wanted me to know that the police had been informed that Giles Fletcher had been seen leaving an SUV-registered to a corporation none of them had ever heard of-parked in front of Graydon’s house. “And apparently Roy came by very early and unloaded it.”
“What did he take out of it?”
“The security cameras didn’t catch many details, but apparently it was sports or camping equipment-duffel bags and an ice chest, things like that. The police have the vehicle and the tape. We’re hoping this might help them to locate Roy before…before anything happens.”
“How often was Roy’s family over there?”
“Oh, Roy would stop by every few weeks or so, but we rarely saw the children. Still, I’m very fond of them. I know the girls better than the boys. They like to help me in the greenhouse. Such smart girls! They were here just after Sheila died.” She paused. “I didn’t really know Sheila, but-well, I’m now wondering if I knew Giles or Victoria or Roy! I can’t believe all of this is happening. And Carrie’s father-to have worried so about her for all those years! Thank goodness you were able to save her. I’m so grateful to you for that, I can’t begin to tell you. As for Genie and Aaron and Troy, I do hope nothing bad has happened-” She wasn’t able to finish. I found myself trying to reassure her. We talked for a while, and I found myself liking her. I thanked her for calling, and passed word on to Mark about the second SUV.
Just when I wanted to write them all off, I’d meet one of the kinder family members. If Edith Fletcher wasn’t genuinely concerned about those kids, and genuinely appalled by what she was learning about certain other family members, she was the best actress I’d encountered since becoming a reporter.
John Walters stopped us on the way out of the newsroom. “Kelly, you look like hell. Take the day off tomorrow.”
“Are you sure? I already took-”
“Don’t argue with me, Kelly.”
“Don’t argue with him,” Frank chimed in, and steered me out the door.
FRANK got another call as we headed home that night, from his new lieutenant, Jake Masuda. I caught Frank’s attention and said, “I wonder if the woman Gerry Serre dated before he was murdered bore any resemblance to Cleo Fletcher?”
“We do sometimes think of these things,” he said to me, and went back to talking to Jake.
Well, if he was going to be like that…
When he hung up, he told me there was a lead on the third child, Troy Fletcher. “A preschool teacher called to say she remembered him as Troy Sherman, one of her brightest, so I’m going to go talk to her tomorrow.”
I smiled and wished him luck, and if my tone made him suspicious, he didn’t say anything.
At home, we found that Caleb and Ben had left, and Ethan had fallen asleep. I made one more phone call, to a night-owl friend down in San Diego, Tonya Pearsley. She’s a school psychologist. Apparently my misadventures had made the news down there, so she was glad I called. I was glad she already had some background on the day’s events. I asked her about IQ testing of young children, and she verified that there were intelligence tests for preschoolers.
“Yes, but it’s not foolproof. There is some question about the reliability of the results based on socioeconomic factors and the home environment. You can’t tell how bright a child is just from a test score, you have to look at the whole child. In general, if you wait until a child is in second or third grade, you’ll get more reliable information from testing.”
“But it can be done?”
“Yes. Beyond reliability, though, the controversy surrounding the testing of preschoolers is mostly over how the information from the tests is going to be used.”
“You mean questions over whether to put kids in accelerated classes early on?”
“Partly, yes. Private testing is becoming more popular with parents who want to push their kids, although the schools are more inclined to try to use the tests to identify kids with learning problems, so that we can help them as soon as possible. Is this associated with a private school in the area?”
“You saw the kids in the newscast. They weren’t all at one private school-in fact, they were home-schooled. But they seem to be exceptionally bright-I mean off-the-charts smart. It’s the one factor I know they all have in common.”
“So you wonder who identified them as being so bright at such a young age? You’re probably looking for an educational psychologist. Not that many people do testing of preschoolers, so that may help you.”
I thanked her and promised we’d try to get down that way sometime soon.
When I hung up, I realized Frank had been eavesdropping.
“Sorry I was sarcastic earlier,” he said, proving he does figure out some things on his own. He had an impish smile on his face as he apologized, though, so he hardly presented a portrait of contrition. Alas, I’m a sucker for that smile.
“You want to know what Tonya said, I suppose.”
The smile grew. “Yes. But I really am sorry.”
“Hmm. If you hadn’t driven all the way out to Antelope Valley and hung around with me in the newsroom, I’d have my doubts. But you’ve scored big points.” I explained what Tonya had said. “Roy and Bonnie took Carrie to live with them in Huntington Beach. She’s especially bright. But then, three other especially bright kids from Las Piernas came to live with them-I find it too unlikely those are chance adoptions, especially given the cloistered lifestyle these kids were leading.”
“I agree. We aren’t talking about two people who were blithely unaware that someone was handing off stolen kids to them.”
“Caleb’s sister was a relative, so even if Richard Fletcher was estranged from the extended Fletcher family, Giles or someone else could have observed her intelligence. I keep wondering who might have flagged these two boys for them-identified them as especially bright.”
“I’ll ask the preschool teacher I’m meeting tomorrow about who did Troy’s testing.”
“No AMBER Alert on these kids?” I asked.
“That was debated by the task force they’ve formed on these cases. You know an AMBER Alert only gets used if the child may be seriously injured or killed-no one wants the public to become complacent about those alerts, so they try not to overuse them. You ask me, Roy Fletcher conspired to kill his wife and represents a threat to the kids. He could be suicidal at this point. But given everything Carrie said about the family, the higher-ups in the task force decided it was parental abduction. I hope that won’t come back to bite them.”
Not wanting the children to come to harm, I hoped so, too.
We agreed to call it a night. As we got into bed Frank said he’d like it very much if I’d stay away from people with guns for a while, but I reminded him that in that case, I would have to avoid him and most of his friends. So he amended the request: I was to avoid anyone with a gun who was not officially on the list of Frank Harriman Approved Gun Owners, which was a pretty darned short one. I said that was fine with me, really.
