Mavis choked, “Karthey, are you
sure?”
Karthey was silent for a very long
time; Mavis could feel the dread terror growing with each heartbeat in the
silence. Finally, her voice reached his ear, “Cramwell thinks it is going to
happen within the hour of seven o’clock tonight.”
Mavis
was elated with the news; for once they had the jump on the kidnapper. “All
right,” Mavis agreed, “I will pass this on to Sheriff Zander. I love you, honey.”
“I
love you too, Dad. Goodbye!”
Mavis
hung up the phone, bolted down his sandwich, and fairly ran back to the police
station.
“Tongs!”
he called to one of the officers, “I’ve just had a break in the case!”
Officer
Tong came running over, “Whaddaya got, Mavis?” he asked. He was a lot more
amiable a man than Hammer.
Mavis
rushed back to the room where the police had all the information on the
kidnappers and victims and looked at all the profiles. Everything was just as
Karthey had said. He turned to Officer Tong.
 |
| "He was a lot more amiable man than Hammer..." |
“Every
single one of these victims usually wore something red: an umbrella, jewelry, a
jacket, and a hat. I’m going to work with Sheriff Zander to see how much we can
find on the name Beric Richmond, meanwhile, you send the word around that
everyone wearing red needs to watch out! I think that’s what the kidnapper is
going for in his locations: the ones wearing red. If we have others watching
out for them, even, we could prevent this kidnapping from happening.”
Tong,
a diminutive Asian, glanced dubiously at the enthusiastic journalist, “Unless
it already has.”
This
dark realization stopped Mavis cold, but he thought about it very fast and
shook his head, “No; none of the kidnappings have occurred before twelve
o’clock. It’s—“ he checked the clock on the wall, “one quarter till noon right
now, so we have fifteen minutes to get the word out and warn everybody. This
could be the day we catch him!”
Tong
sighed, “I’ll let people know.” He turned to walk away, but stopped and looked
back at Mavis. “Lemme get this straight,” he commented casually, “you said
anyone wearing red, right?”
Mavis
nodded, and Tong gestured to his neck with a wry smile. Mavis looked down at
his red silk tie. Quickly, he snatched it from around his neck and stuffed it in
his jacket pocket. You just couldn’t be too careful with serial kidnappers!
^^^^^^
That
evening, Mavis excused himself from the dinner table to go over the material he
and Zander had amassed on Beric Richmond.
Beric
was a direct hit on all counts. Running a search for that name brought up a
whole host of files—files that scared Mavis more and more as he read them.
He
found that Beric had indeed attended the same schools in the same years as
Cramwell Fornberg, that he was mentally unstable from the beginning, and that
every time he was carted off to the psychiatric hospital, he would behave until
he was released back home, convince his parents (until he was old enough to
enroll himself) to enroll him in school again using a different name (usually
by harassment; it seemed a large amount of Beric’s genius went to appearing
sane and compliant to those whose cooperation he needed, while making his
enemies’ lives absolutely miserable), and the cycle of mental and behavioral
digression would begin again, culminating in another stint in the psych ward,
another release, and another alias. The teachers dared not refuse him, for fear
of what the young student would do to them. One teacher in Beric’s secondary
school had dared to refuse him, to stand up to him, and within a week, he had
completely ruined her career and orchestrated her dismissal. That was the only
record Mavis ever found of anyone standing up to Beric. The rest seemed to bend
to his will. Beric Richmond would have his full education, and no one could
stand against him.
The
files on Beric, along with records from the various educational directors from
the schools in England (who were only too happy to supply the Americans with
the information they requested, if it meant having Beric locked away for good),
listed the various deeds committed by “Beric the Red” in detail, and many of
them made Mavis sick to his stomach just reading about them. With each new
file, Mavis began to get more and more worried about the victims already
kidnapped; would they really be untouched by such a twisted man? Could he
feasibly harbor any hope, knowing what he did now, that they were even still
alive, or would be if they ever found him or them?
When
he had finally left the office to be home in time for dinner, Mavis had noticed
that everything red was hidden out of sight. The only things red in town were
the traffic signals, and everyone avoided close proximity to those. Mavis was
glad that Tong had done his job. Would Beric strike? Were they wrong? If they
were wrong, would somebody disappear? Mavis caught himself wishing that
Precinct was smaller than it already was; with a smaller group, Sheriff Zander
would have only to gather the entire community in a place like, say, the
Square, and call roll to figure out if anyone else had been taken overnight.
Sheriff
Zander and his men had staked out all the locations Cramwell typically visited
during the day; these would be the likeliest locations for a kidnapping, given
the perpetrator’s modus operandi. There
were no leisurely nighttime strollers as there often were downtown that night.
That single awful night, everyone finished his or her business in town and
scurried straight home.
Mavis
sighed and closed the file, but he could not shut out thoughts of Beric
Richmond spinning in his head, lurking in the shadows of his house. His eyes
were so tired he could hardly keep them open, but his thoughts foretold a long
night of tossing and turning. Mavis thought about Karthey; if Beric didn’t find
anyone to grab in town, would he set his crazed sights on Fornberg Hill? Was
his daughter safe there anymore? Were any of them safe?
<<<>>>
Karthey awoke the next morning at
half-past eight o'clock. Sleep had not been easy for her that night. Talking
with her father had planted doubts in her mind, especially since the last note
he had given her (which she had found at the grocery store) consisted of a list
of names which Mavis thought could be connected somehow to the kidnappings. She
had asked Cramwell about these as they walked into town that afternoon to
return the rest of the books to the library which Cramwell had been keeping for
years, and actually had dinner at the diner, but Cramwell couldn't say much
about them.
"These may have motives that I
never realized," he said with a shrug. "They never bothered or
interacted with me in school very much at all. That doesn't mean they couldn't
have done this, though."
Karthey had sat awake, staring at
the list. More names! And this time the kidnapper intended to become a killer!
What if the notes had not at first been intended for Cramwell at all, but one
of these was at the cafe when he was, saw him pick up the first napkin, and
merely capitalized on the fact that they could send warnings to an old
schoolmate? Would they really be someone as twisted as Beric Richmond if they
cared enough to warn someone ahead of
time? These and countless other questions had kept Karthey awake until she
could not think for sheer exhaustion, and now she had overslept. She picked up
her cell phone and saw there was a message waiting on it.
Please join me for
breakfast in the dining room, Carthi.
Karthey quivered as she slipped on
her robe and slippers. He'd called her Karthey in text! He had actually
bothered to type out her name, (albeit spelled incorrectly) even though he had
trouble saying it out loud. Karthey smiled as she descended the stairs and
entered the dining room.
Cramwell was waiting by a second
chair he had pulled out for her. Two bowls of cereal and two glasses of juice
stood on the table.
"Good morning," he said
in his odd, terse manner as Karthey took her seat. "Did, er, did you,
um—sleep well?"
Karthey shook her head
emphatically. "Oh no," she answered, "not at all!" she
hesitated, "Did you?"
"No," Cramwell returned
immediately.
As Karthey ate her cereal, she
could not shake the feeling that there was something missing from Cramwell's
breakfast. She was almost finished when she realized what it was. She looked at
Cramwell.
"Where's the paper?" she
asked innocently.
Cramwell nearly jumped to his feet.
"Oh, blast, I knew I was forgetting something," he strode
quickly—without his cane, Karthey noticed, he walked with much longer and more
youthful strides than he'd ever used with it—out the door of the dining room.
Karthey mused how a man who had
been getting his paper every day for the last decade would suddenly forget it
one morning.
"He's probably afraid,"
she told the bust of Jelilah, "afraid that the police couldn't act in time
and the kidnapper got away, or that they caught the kidnapper but all of his
victims are maimed or dead." Such fears were not far from Karthey's
thoughts, either.
She heard Cramwell open and close
the front door, but he did not return to the dining room. Karthey waited, but
she did not hear a sound from the entryway. The grandfather clock struck nine
times, and Karthey decided to see what had happened to her host.
She
found Cramwell, sitting on the stairs in apparent shock, with a piece of paper
in his hand. His expression was one of a condemned man resigned to his fate.
“Cramwell?”
Karthey called to him.
Cramwell
jerked out of his stupor and looked up at her.
“What’s
wrong?” Karthey asked, coming closer, trying to look at the paper in his hand.
“Wasn’t there a newspaper?”
“No,”
he said, “Just this.” He showed her the small card in his hand. It was a plain
white paper, marked in the center with a wide red circle with a black cross
over it.
“What
is it?” Karthey took the paper and studied it closely, wary of some hidden
meaning, worried that it might mean that Beric had marked them both. “Is it a
message?”
“Yes,”
Cramwell confirmed, but when he saw the fear in the girl’s face, he understood
what she was asking and sought to reassure her, “but it isn’t from the
kidnapper. It’s from the…paperboy. He, um—I mean, we have a prearranged signal if… er, for some reason the
newspaper won’t fit in the chute. This is the, um, signal.”
Karthey
relaxed only slightly, “So the paper is still at the bottom of the Hill, then?”
Cramwell
looked away from her, and she caught a strange light in his eye. “Yes,” he
replied simply.
Karthey
waited, but when Cramwell did not continue, she proposed, “Do you want me to—“
“Yes,”
Cramwell accepted her offer before she even finished. “That would be great,
thank you.” He still would not look at her.
Karthey
wondered why Cramwell Fornberg would suddenly be so short with her. He had been
acting strangely all day—and it wasn’t even nine-thirty yet! She excused
herself upstairs to put on some clothes and get her shoes on, and when she
returned to the entryway, she heard the door of the library close. Cramwell had
retreated. What was going on? Karthey slipped on her coat and scarf and went to
retrieve the newspaper.
The
weather was lukewarm and grey, and a gentle breeze played with the wisps of
Karthey’s red hair around her face. She started off down the path, head tucked
against the wind, concentrating on her feet so she wouldn’t slip on the soft
ground. Once she had made it most of the way down the Hill, finally Karthey
looked up. She stopped dead in her tracks.
Someone
very familiar stood at the foot of Fornberg Hill—standing inside the gate!
“Daddy?”
Karthey shrieked.
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