Danielle Steel - Malice

For days people left flowers and bouquets outside the Park Avenue building where she'd lived, and when Grace and Charles drove by it the next day, on their way to dinner with friends, Grace felt a sob catch in her throat as she caught sight of a big pink heart, made of tiny roses, with the little girl's name written on a pink ribbon across it.

“I can't bear it,” she cried into a handkerchief he handed her. “I know what it's like,” she whispered … why don't people understand? Why don't they see? Why can't they stop it? Why did no one suspect what went on behind closed doors when atrocities were happening there? The real tragedy was that sometimes people did know and did nothing about it. It was that indifference that she wanted to stop. She wanted to shake people to wake them.

Charles put an arm around her shoulders then. It hurt him to think of what she must have gone through, it made him want to be good to her every day, to make up for all of it, and he had been.

“I want to go back to work,” she said as they drove along in the cab, and he looked at her, startled.

“In an office?” He couldn't imagine why she would want to do that again. She was so happy at home with their children.

But she smiled at him as she shook her head and blew her nose again. “Of course not … unless you need a new secretary,” she teased, and he grinned.

“Not that I know of. So what did you have in mind?”

“I was thinking of that little girl … I'd like to go back to working with battered women and kids again.” Her death had reminded Grace again of her debt, to help those who were living the same hell that she had. She had escaped, and she had come to a better place in her life, but she could not forget them. She knew that, in some way, she would always have a need to reach a hand back to them, to offer to help them.

“Not at St. Andrew's,” he said firmly. He had never let her go back there to work again, only to visit, once they were married. And Father Tim had been transferred to Boston the year before, to start a similar shelter there. They had had a Christmas card from him. But Grace had something else in mind. Something more complicated, and far-reaching.

“What about starting some kind of organization,” she had been thinking about it for two days, trying to figure out how she could help, and really make a difference, “that would reach out to people, not only in ghettos but middle-class neighborhoods, where the abuse is more of a surprise and better hidden. What about reaching out toward education, to teach educators and parents and clergymen and day-care workers, and everyone who works with kids, what to look for and how to deal with it when they see it … and reaching out to the public, people like you and me, and our neighbors and all the people who see abused kids every day and don't know it.”

“That sounds like a big bite,” he said gendy, “but it's a great idea. Isn't there some existing program you could latch on to?”

“There might be.” But five years ago there hadn't been, there was only the occasional shelter like St. Andrew's. And the various committees set up to help victims of abuse she heard of seemed to be badly run and ineffective. “I don't really know where to start. Maybe I need to do some research.”

“Maybe you need to stop worrying so much,” he said, smiling at her in the cab, as he leaned over and kissed her. “The last time you let your big heart run away with you, you got pretty badly beaten up. Maybe it's time for you to let other people take care of it. I don't want you getting hurt again.”

“If I hadn't, you'd never have married me,” she said smugly, and he laughed.

“Don't be so sure. I'd had my eye on you for a while. I just couldn't figure out why you hated me so much.”

“I didn't hate you. I was scared of you. That's different.” They both smiled, remembering the days when they had met and fallen in love. Things hadn't changed at all since, they were more in love than ever.

And when they came back from dinner that night, Grace started talking about her idea again. She talked about it for weeks, and finally Charles couldn't stand it.

“Okay, okay … I understand. You want to help. Now where do we start? Let's do something about it.”

In the end, he talked to a few friends, and some of his partners at the law firm, some of their wives were interested, and others had useful references and suggestions. At the end of two months, Grace had a wealth of research and material, and she knew exactly what she wanted to do. She had talked to a psychologist she had met, and the head of the children's school, and she decided that she had what she needed. She even tracked down Sister Eugene from St. Andrew's, and she gave her some names of people who would be willing to work hands-on and wouldn't expect a lot of money for it. She needed volunteers, psychologists, teachers, some businessmen, women, and even victims. She was going to put together a team of people who were willing to go out into the community and tell people what they needed to know about abuse of all kinds against children.

She set up an organization and gave it a simple name. “Help Kids!” was what she called it, and at first she ran it out of her home, and after six months she rented an office on Lexington Avenue two blocks from their house. By then, she had a team of twenty-one people who were talking to schools, parents’ groups, teachers’ associations, people who ran extracurricular activities like ballet and baseball. She was amazed at how many bookings they got. And she shook like a leaf the first time she gave a talk herself. She told a group of people she had never met how she had been abused as a child, how no one had seen it, and no one had wanted to, and how everyone had thought her father was the greatest guy in town. “Maybe he was,” she said, her voice shaking as she fought back tears, “but not to me, or my mother.” She didn't tell them that she had killed him to save herself. But what she did tell them moved them deeply. All of their speakers had stories like that, some of them firsthand, and some of them about students or patients. But the people she organized to speak were all powerful in their message. It was a message that came straight from the heart. Help kids! And they meant it.

The next thing she did was set up a hot line for people who knew about abusive friends or neighbors, or parents who wanted help, or kids in bad situations. She did everything she could to raise funds to place ads and buy billboards with the hot line number on it, and she managed to keep it manned twenty-four hours a day, which was no small feat. It was almost a relief when a year and a half later Abigail went to kindergarten, because it gave her more time for “Help Kids!” although she missed having her at home at eleven-thirty. She managed to keep all her work down to a dull roar so that she could spend her afternoons with her children. But “Help Kids!” had grown to a full-scale office by then, and it was funded by five foundations. And they were currently in the process of raising money and free creative help for commercials. She wanted to organize a TV campaign to reach even deeper into the community. Again and again she tried to touch the kids who were being abused, and the people who knew it. She was less interested in reaching the abusive parents. Most of them were too sick even to want help, and it was rare that they themselves would step forward and ask for it. It was easier to get the point across to observers.

It was hard to judge what kind of results they were getting, except that their hot line was jammed night and day with desperate callers. They were usually neighbors, friends, teachers who weren't sure whether or not to come forward, and more and more lately they had been getting calls from kids telling horrifying stories. Grace and Charles answered phones themselves for two long shifts a week, and more often than not, Charles came home and ached over the things he heard. It was impossible not to care about those children. The only people who didn't were their parents.