"Our souls," Michael said. "You stole our souls."

Carl's eyes widened. The gun wavered in his hand as Michael came toward him. He tried to steady the revolver, tried to squeeze the trigger, but the boy's eyes seemed to hold him in their own paralyzing grip, and as Michael moved steadily closer, Carl felt the gun slipping from his fingers. "No," he muttered, clutching at the weapon as his heart began to race, pounding in his chest with a terrifyingly erratic rhythm that warned him of what was to come a split second before it happened.

As Michael reached out to him, and Carl's fear turned into blind panic, a violent stab of pain slashed through his chest, shooting down into his arms and legs. The gun dropped from his fingers as his right hand fell to the ground.

The baby rolled onto the thick carpet of pine needles as Carl's left arm went limp.

Pain tore through Carl's head then, a blinding, searing agony that rent his sanity into shattered pieces a moment before he died.

As his mind collapsed, Carl saw demons rising up out of the nether world, coming toward him with pitchforks and torches, intent on torturing his body for eternity.

And an eternity, it seemed, in those last seconds before his death, as the demons fell upon him, ripping his skin from his muscles, jabbing sharp slivers beneath his fingernails and into his joints, tearing his limbs from his body and laying open his belly to spill his intestines onto the ground.

He screamed, flailing at the creatures that beset him, but his struggles were nothing more than the twitchings of a dying man, and though the h.e.l.l into which he had plunged seemed to him to go on forever, his body soon lay still beneath the pine tree.

In the silence that followed Carl's death, Michael stared at the body with an odd detachment, as if it had nothing to do with him.

And then a voice spoke inside him.

Take back what is yours.

He crouched down next to Carl Anderson's body, then ripped open his shirt to expose the old man's sunken chest. Nothing was left of the robust figure that the man had been only yesterday, for today all the years he had stolen had come back to claim him.

His ribs, brittle and soft, crumpled as Michael touched his chest, and when the boy's fingers tore into his flesh, the desiccated tissue gave way as if it had been cooked.

Michael ripped through the old man's sternum, tearing open his chest cavity, reaching inside the man, finally feeling what he was searching for.

A tiny fragment of b.l.o.o.d.y tissue, resting just above the old man's lungs, close by his heart.

Michael ripped it loose, and then, his hands covered with blood, stuffed the withered vestige of Carl Anderson's thymus into his mouth.

He swallowed the bit of tissue, his stomach heaving as he choked, but then the spasm pa.s.sed.

A strange warmth he had never felt before spread out through his body, and he remained where he was, letting the aura envelop him, letting it expand into his mind, and fill him up.

The emptiness he'd felt all his life was suddenly gone, and he felt whole.

For the first time in his life Michael began to cry.

He felt the hot tears running down his cheeks, tasted the salt of them with the tip of his tongue.

He let the tears run free, washing away the pain of sixteen years.

Only when his tears were finally exhausted did he pick up the baby, cradling it in his arms.

"It's all right," he whispered. "Nothing's going to hurt you now."

The baby began to cry, but Michael held it close, kissing it gently on the forehead, and soon its sobbing began to die away. At last, the baby calm in his arms, Michael left the thicket and went to the edge of the water.

Setting the baby gently on the ground, he washed himself clean of Carl Anderson's blood.

Finally he picked the baby up again and started making his way through the swamp toward the tour headquarters.

He was whole again, and once the baby in his arms was safe, he knew what it was he had to do.

He and Kelly, together.

26.

Mary Anderson was in her bedroom, staring at the last box that still remained unopened from the move from Atlanta. She knew what was in them-old alb.u.ms, ledgers remaining from Ted's failed attempt to start a business three years ago, her own report cards from grade school and high school-all the things everyone always saved but rarely looked at. She toyed briefly with the idea of sorting through the box, but quickly realized that in the end she would simply repack it anyway. She picked it up to take it out to the garage, where it would join her father-in-law's own collection of memorabilia on the metal storage shelves that lined the south wall. But as she pa.s.sed through the living room, the doorbell chimed softly, and she set the box down next to the sofa. She opened the door to find Barbara Sheffield standing on the porch, an air of anxiety surrounding her that made Mary's welcoming smile fade quickly into a worried frown. "Barbara? What is it? What's happened?"

Barbara fleetingly wondered if she shouldn't simply turn around and go back home. But after last night and this morning, when the thoughts that had been growing in her mind ever since Jenny's funeral had coalesced into a deep-seated conviction, she'd known she had no choice.

She had to talk to Mary Anderson, had to find out the truth of Kelly's origins.

If Mary even knew.

She hadn't called first, hadn't wanted to tell Mary why she was coming. After all, how would she feel if one of her friends called her up to announce that she was Michael's real mother?

A stranger calling with such an announcement would be one thing-indeed, ever since she and Craig had adopted Michael, she'd always been prepared for the possibility that at some point her son's natural mother might appear. She would have been able to deal with that, for at least she would know that Michael had no relationship with such a person.

But this was different, for Barbara had a relationship to Kelly. What if Mary thought she was planning to lay claim to her daughter?

Still, Barbara felt she simply had had to know, had to lay all the doubts in her mind to rest. to know, had to lay all the doubts in her mind to rest.

"I need to talk to you, Mary," she said at last. "I know it's going to sound crazy, but I've been having the most awful thoughts. I can't seem to shake the idea that Kelly might be my daughter, that maybe Sharon didn't die when she was born." Speaking the thoughts out loud for the first time, she realized how bizarre they sounded. "I know it sounds crazy," she went on, stumbling on her own words now. "It's just-well, there's so many little things-the way she looks...And Amelie Coulton...you know what she said at the funeral-" Her eyes flooded with tears and her voice turned into a choking sob. "Oh, Mary, I don't know. It's all just so awful for me. I feel like I'm coming apart, and I don't know what to do...."

Mary drew Barbara into the house and closed the door, then led her into the kitchen. "It's all right, Barbara. I know how you must be feeling. It has to be horrible for you right now." She poured a cup of coffee from the pot on the stove and sat down across from Barbara. "Now tell me what I can do."

Barbara took a deep breath, struggling to control her roiling emotions, finally speaking only when she was certain her voice wouldn't fail her. "I-I thought maybe if you could tell me where Kelly came from-"

"It was an adoption agency in Atlanta," Mary told her. "Ted and I had been waiting for almost a year."

"Atlanta?" Barbara echoed hollowly.

An image of the box on the living room floor popped into Mary's mind, and she stood up. "I'll be right back." A moment later she came back into the kitchen, the box in her arms. Opening it, she began piling its contents on the table, and finally lifted out a photo alb.u.m. "Look through this," she said, handing the alb.u.m to Barbara. "It's full of pictures of Kelly, from the day we picked her up at the agency right up until a year or so ago." Her voice took on a wistful quality. "The last couple of years I'm afraid we didn't take many pictures. Ted's business wasn't doing well, and..." Her voice trailed off. "I guess the last couple of years there just wasn't much we wanted to remember."

Barbara opened the alb.u.m and began flipping through the pages. The early pictures, when Kelly was an infant, meant nothing. But as Kelly grew, and her features began to develop, Barbara felt the same familiarity as she had when comparing Kelly to her niece Tisha. From the age of four on the resemblance was there. The two children, apparently unrelated, looked enough alike to have been sisters.

"I found it," Mary said a few minutes later, interrupting Barbara's reverie as she sat gazing at a picture of Kelly when she was about the same age as Jenny.

Again, she looked nothing like Jenny, who took after her father, but her resemblance to Tisha, and even more so to Barbara's own sister, was eerie. At last Barbara looked up from the page. Mary, her expression almost sorrowful, was holding out a folded sheet of heavy paper. "It's Kelly's birth certificate," she said softly. "I-well, I think it tells you what you want to know."

Barbara took the certificate, her fingers trembling, but for some reason she couldn't bring herself to look at it for a moment. Finally she unfolded it, her eyes misting over as she studied it.

It was from a hospital in Orlando that she'd never heard of.

It recorded the birth of a baby girl, born a week after Sharon had been born.

The baby had been given no first name, its identification stated impersonally as "Infant Richardson," the daughter of Irene Richardson.

Father unknown.

Barbara felt her heart sink, but as she studied the signature of the attending physician, something stirred inside her.

Philip Waring.

She'd never heard the name before.

Yet there was something familiar about the signature, something flicking around the edges of her mind.

Then it came to her, and she reached into her purse, digging through it until she found the prescription Warren Phillips had given her the morning Jenny had died.

The prescription she'd never filled.

She flattened the form out and laid it next to the birth certificate.

The scrawl of the attending obstetrician's first name matched the last name of her own doctor.

The first three letters of the obstetrician's last name matched the corresponding scribble of the first syllable of Warren Phillips's own signature.

She stared at the two signatures for a long time, telling herself it wasn't possible, that it was merely a strange coincidence, that neither of the signatures was actually even legible.

They were nothing more than doctors' scribblings.

The denials still tumbling in her mind, she spoke to Mary Anderson. "There's something wrong," she said quietly. "Mary. I think this birth certificate is a fake."

Mary Anderson's eyes clouded. "Barbara, it's the certificate we were given by the agency. Why would they-"

"Let's call the hospital, Mary," Barbara broke in. "Please?"

Ten minutes later Barbara felt a cold numbness spreading through her body.

The hospital in Orlando was real.

The birth certificate was not.

There was no record of an Irene Richardson giving birth to a child in the hospital.

No record of an Infant Richardson at all.

No Dr. Philip Waring had ever been connected with the hospital in any way.

When the phone call was over, the two women looked at each other, Mary Anderson now feeling as numbed as Barbara Sheffield. "What are we going to do?" Mary asked, suddenly fully understanding-and sharing-Barbara's obsession to find the truth of Kelly's origins.

Barbara barely heard the question, for she already knew what had to be done.

She wondered if she would be able to bear to stand in the cemetery one more time, gazing at the crypt in which her first child lay.

She wondered if she would be able to watch them open it.

But most of all, she wondered if she would be able to stand the awful reality of finding it empty.

Tim Kitteridge sighed heavily, his large hands spreading across his desk in a gesture of helplessness as he faced Ted Anderson. "I still don't see what it is you expect me to do. If your father's sick-"

"He's worse than sick," Ted exploded. "He's dying. He's dying, and he's gone off into the swamp somewhere!"

"Now, you don't know that," Kitteridge replied. "All you know is that he wasn't in his office. That's a big development out there-"

"I searched it," Ted repeated for what seemed like the fifth time. He felt his temper rising, but struggled to control it. After he'd left his father early that morning, he'd gone to Warren Phillips's house and then to the hospital.

Phillips had been in neither place, nor did anyone know where he might be. "I'll page him," Jolene Mayhew had told him, but after five minutes with no reply to the page, he'd demanded an ambulance, and gone back out to the construction site.

To find that his father was gone.

Taking the paramedics with him, he'd searched every house on the site, every possible place where his father could have been hiding. When the crew had arrived for work, he'd sent them out, too, certain that somewhere on the hundred acres of Villejeune Links Estates his father would be found.

But there had been nothing.

Nothing, until one of the men had found tracks at the edge of the ca.n.a.l. That was when he'd come to the police station and tried to enlist Tim Kitteridge's help. He'd told him the whole story, but even as he talked, he'd seen the skepticism in the police chief's eyes.

"Now come on, Anderson," Kitteridge had told him after he'd described how his father had looked early that morning. "n.o.body ages like that overnight. And I know your father-he's strong as an ox, and works harder than most men half his age."

"And he looks half his age, too," Ted had shot back. "Phillips has been giving him some kind of shots. I don't know what they are, but I saw what happened to him a week ago. It was like watching the fountain of youth or something. He was feeling really bad, and looking terrible, and an hour later he was fine! But this morning he looked like he was dying!"

Kitteridge's eyes rolled. "If he was really dying, I find it hard to believe he took off into the swamp. And I can't start sending out search parties every time someone goes in there. Especially not for someone who's lived here all his life. If your dad wanted to take off for a while, that's his business, and there's nothing I can do about it."

Ted glared angrily at the police chief. "What about Phillips? Dad saw him this morning-he told me so himself. And now he's gone. He's not home, and he's not at the hospital. Where is he?"

Kitteridge felt his own temper rising now. "Look, Mr. Anderson," he said, his voice hard. "I don't know what you think my job is, but I can tell you it's not to go hunting for people who are minding their own business. You told me yourself that Phillips was out of whatever medicine he was giving your father. Maybe he went to get more of it. Did that ever occur to you?"

"Jesus Christ," Ted swore, making no attempt to check his anger any longer. "If whatever he was giving Dad was something he could just pick up in Orlando, why the h.e.l.l would he run out? Dad says he makes it himself. Aren't you even interested in what he might be giving the people around here? It's drugs, G.o.dd.a.m.n it! And you don't seem to give a s.h.i.t!"

Kitteridge rose to his feet, but just as he was about to speak, the phone on his desk jangled loudly. He s.n.a.t.c.hed it up. "Yes?" he snapped into the mouthpiece. But as he listened, the angry scowl that was directed at Ted Anderson began to fade. "Okay," he said. "I'll be right out there. And I'm bringing Ted Anderson with me." He placed the receiver back on the hook. When he looked back at Ted, his impatience had turned to uncertainty. "That was Phil Stubbs," he said. "One of the tour boats just came in. There's been a kidnapping. He said an old man came out of the swamp and lifted a baby right out of the boat."

Ted said nothing, but felt a cold knot of fear forming in his stomach.

"Your daughter was there," Kitteridge went on. "She saw the whole thing, and says she knows who the man was."

"Dad," Ted breathed. "It was my father, wasn't it?"