Danielle Steel - Vanished

“…There was a terrible crackling noise … almost like thunder …and the ice cracked …three of the children fell in …one of them was Andre … I rushed out on the ice, with the other women, and people were shouting. I was the first one to reach the hole …I got both of the little girls out … I got them,” she sobbed … “I got them …but I couldn't get him … I tried … I tried so hard … I tried everything I could … I even climbed into the water, but he had slipped under the ice, and then I found him …” Her voice was distorted by pain, and as he listened John Taylor was crying…. “He was all blue, and he lay in my arms so tiny and cold and so still. … I tried everything … I tried to breathe for him, I tried to warm him …the ambulance came and we took him to the hospital, but …” She looked up at John, seeing him again then, and they were both crying for the little boy who had died beneath the ice in Geneva. “They couldn't save him. He had died in my arms, they said, when I first pulled him out …but he wasn't even breathing then …how could they know when he died?” And what did it matter? “It was all my fault … I should have been watching him, and I wasn't. I was talking to those damn women …about him …and then he was gone …one moment of talking to them, and I killed him….”

“And Charles?” He had asked the key words, and he had barely recovered from what he'd just heard, but he could see there was more from her face, still ravaged by the story she had just told him.

“He blamed me of course. They kept me in the hospital, and I wanted to be there anyway …with Andre …they let me hold him for a long, long time. I held him so close to me, I kept thinking that if only I could get him warm again, but of course …” She sounded a little mad, as she went on with the story.

“What did Charles do when he got to the hospital?” His voice was gentle. He had asked an important question, and she looked at John Taylor without seeing him as she answered.

“He hit me …hard …again and again …afterward …they said … I thought … it didn't matter …they said that when I jumped into the ice …”

“What did he do to you, Marielle?”

“He tried to beat me … he said I'd killed Andre, that it was all my fault … he hit me …but I deserved it …and …” She gulped on a terrible sob, and made a sound that he had never heard another human make, it was a keening of pain that was almost like baying. “… I lost the baby….” She looked up at him again, and this time, he put an arm around her and pulled her close to him to let her sob against his shoulders. He held her against his chest, and stroked her hair without thinking.

“Oh my God.” He suddenly understood. “…You were pregnant …”

“Five months … a little girl …she died that night, on the same day as Andre.” She sat then for a long time, in silence, crying quietly, as John Taylor held her.

“I'm so sorry …I'm so sorry for what happened to you …and to put you through this now.” But he had had to. He had to know what she was hiding. He had seen it in her eyes, but he hadn't known it would be like this.

“I'm all right,” she said quietly, and in a way she was, but in another way, she wasn't. She had suddenly remembered that Teddy was gone …and that added to the others made it too much. That was why John Taylor had to find him. “I wasn't all right then. For a long time. I guess … I guess you'd call it a nervous breakdown, or something more. I suppose Charles went more than a little mad too. They had to tear him off me that night, and he collapsed at the funeral, I was told. I don't know …they wouldn't let me go. They put me in a private clinic in Villars, and I was there for twenty-six months. Charles paid for it, but I never saw him. They finally let him come to see me before they let me go, and he asked me to come back, but I couldn't. I knew we both thought that I had killed our child, if not both of them. Not only had I let Andre drown, but I had jumped into the icy water and killed the baby.”

“And what were you supposed to do? Let him drown?”

“No, I did what I had to do, but it took me two years to figure that out, and it's taken me another six to live with it since then. I think that,” she began to cry harder again, “I decided …when Teddy was born that God had decided to forgive me. I had a terrible time getting pregnant with him, and I always thought I was being punished.”

“That's crazy. You were punished enough. What did you ever do to deserve that?”

She smiled sadly at the man she had just shared her life with. “I've spent most of my life trying to figure that out.” He touched her hand again, and poured a small amount of brandy into the cup of tea she'd been sipping. He had helped himself to one of Malcolm's decanters, and he still had a hard time believing she'd never told her husband. What a lonely burden she'd had to live with, no wonder she suffered from migraines.

“And the meeting in the church?” But he had figured that out now.

“It was the anniversary of …the children's death. I always go to church and light candles for them, and my parents. And suddenly there was Charles, rather like a vision.” Taylor wondered if it was a welcome one. He was fascinated by her now, and all she had been through, and yet she had survived it. She was much stronger than she looked, and much deeper.

“Are you still in love with him?” He wanted to know now.

“Yes, I suppose part of me always will be.” She was so honest with him, so open, there was something about her which seemed so fair. It made his skin crawl now when he thought of the chauffeur's accusation that she had a “boyfriend.” “But that part of my life is over.” She sounded as though she meant it.

“Is that what he wanted? For you to come back to him?”

“I don't know. I only saw him at Saint Patrick's for that little while, and we were both upset. He kept telling me it wasn't my fault, but I know he always thought it was. He accused me of murdering our son, of being negligent….” She looked away from John again, and this time he forced her to take a sip of the brandy, “The truth is that I was. I was a twenty-one-year-old girl, and I made a terrible mistake. I talked to that woman for only a moment, and he was gone…. I'm surprised Charles is willing to forgive me at all, given how he felt about me then.”

“Are you sure he has?”

She looked honestly at the inspector. That was the big question. “I don't know. I thought he had when I saw him at Saint Patrick's on Friday. I told him I was married again, and I think he was surprised, and perhaps not pleased, but he seemed to accept it. But the next day, when we saw him at the park … he was furious about Teddy, furious that I have another child …and he doesn't. He said I didn't deserve it, and I felt as though he were threatening me, but I think they were just words. He said he could take the child, in order to make me come with him.” John Taylor had just heard the music he wanted to hear, and he was almost sure they had their man now. All they had to do was find him. Thank God she had confided in him. With any luck at all now they'd find the boy, and they could lock her ex-husband up and forget him. As sorry as he felt for her, with all she'd been through, Taylor felt far less sympathetic for Charles, who had beaten her up in the hospital when she was pregnant, and instead of consoling her, had accused her of murdering their children. He had left her in a hospital for two years, and had somehow let her carry the burden for the rest of her life that it was her fault their son had died. As far as John Taylor was concerned, the guy deserved to be punished.

“Do you think he was serious when he said those things?”