She was a child too much a part of her environment, too eager to grow and learn and experience.
Once, they were at Easthampton for the summer (again, Fritzie said, a good place, even though they were being robbed).
One soft evening -- that marvelous sea-blessed time when the sun's departing warmth lingers and a smell of spume and wrack haunts everything -- Amy had picked herself off the floor and begun to walk.
Fritzie was on the couch reading;
Laura was sitting in an easy chair about eight feet away.
The infant, in white terry-cloth bathrobe, her face intense and purposeful, had essayed a few wobbly steps toward her father.
"Y'all wanna walk -- walk", he said.
Then, gently, he shoved her behind toward Laura.
Amy walked -- making it halfway across the cottage floor.
She lost not a second, picking herself up and continuing her pilgrimage to Laura.
Then Laura took her gently and shoved her off again, toward Fritzie: Amy did not laugh -- this was work, concentration, achievement.
In a few minutes she was making the ten-foot hike unaided;
soon she was parading around the house, flaunting her new skill.

Some liar's logic, a wisp of optimism as fragile as the scent of tropical blossoms that came through the window (a euphoria perhaps engendered by the pill Fritzie had given her), consoled her for a moment.
Amy had to be safe, had to come back to them -- if only to reap that share of life's experiences that were her due, if only to give her parents another chance to do better by her.
Through the swathings of terror, she jabbed deceit's sharp point -- Amy would be reborn, a new child, with new parents, living under new circumstances.
The comfort was short-lived, yet she found herself returning to the assurance whenever her imagination forced images on her too awful to contemplate without the prop of illusion.
Gazing at her husband's drugged body, his chest rising and falling in mindless rhythms, she saw the grandeur of his fictional world, that lush garden from which he plucked flowers and herbs.
She envied him.
She admired him.

In the darkness, she saw him stirring.
He seemed to be muttering, his voice surprisingly clear.
"Y'all should have let me take that money out", Andrus said.
"'nother minute I'd have been fine.
H'all should have let me do it".

Laura touched his hand.
"Yes, I know, Fritzie.
I should have".

Tuesday

The heat intensified on Tuesday.
Southern California gasped and blinked under an autumn hot spell, drier, more enervating, more laden with man's contrived impurities than the worst days of the summer past.
It could continue this way, hitting 106 and more in the Valley, Joe McFeeley knew, into October.
He and Irvin Moll were sipping coffee at the breakfast bar.
Both had been up since 7:00 -- Irv on the early-morning watch, McFeeley unable to sleep during his four-hour relief.
The night before, they had telephoned the Andrus maid, Selena Masters, and she had arrived early, bursting her vigorous presence into the silent house with an assurance that amused McFeeley and confounded Moll.
The latter, thanking her for the coffee, had winked and muttered, "Sure 'nuff, honey".
Selena was the wrong woman for these crudities.
With a hard eye, she informed Moll: "Don't sure 'nuff me, officer.
I'm honey only to my husband, understand"?
Sergeant Moll understood.
The maid was very black and very energetic, trim in a yellow pique uniform.
Her speech was barren of southernisms;
she was one of Eliot Sparling's neutralized minorities, adopting the rolling R's and constricted vowels of Los Angeles.
Not seeing her dark intelligent face, one would have gauged the voice as that of a Westwood Village matron, ten years out of Iowa.
After she had served the detectives coffee and toast (they politely declined eggs, uncomfortable about their tenancy), she settled down with a morning newspaper and began reading the stock market quotations.
While she was thus engaged, McFeeley questioned her about her whereabouts the previous day, any recollections she had of people hanging around, of overcurious delivery boys or repairmen, of strange cars cruising the neighborhood.
She answered him precisely, missing not a beat in her scrutiny of the financial reports.
Selena Masters, Joe realized, was her own woman.
She was the only kind of Negro Laura Andrus would want around: independent, unservile, probably charging double what ordinary maids did for housework -- and doubly efficient.

When the parents emerged from the bedroom a few minutes later, the maid greeted them quietly.
"I'm awful sorry about what's happened", Selena said.
"Maybe today'll be a good-news day".
She charged off to the bedrooms.

Moll took his coffee into the nursery.
During the night, a phone company technician had deadened the bells and installed red blinkers on the phones.
Someone would have to remain in the office continually.
McFeeley greeted the parents, then studied his notebook.
He wanted to take the mother to headquarters at once and start her on the mug file.

"Sleep well"?
He asked.

Andrus did not answer him.
His face was bloated with drugging, redder than normal.
The woman had the glassy look of an invalid, as if she had not slept at all.
"Oh -- we managed", she said.
"I'm a little groggy.
Did anything happen during the night"?

"Few crank calls", McFeeley said.
"A couple of tips we're running down -- nothing promising.
We can expect more of the same.
Too bad your number is in the directory".

"Didn't occur to me my child would be kidnaped when I had it listed", Andrus muttered.
He settled on the sofa with his coffee, warming his hands on the cup, although the room was heavy with heat.

The three had little to say to each other.
The previous night's horror -- the absolute failure, overcast with the intrusions of the press, had left them all with a wan sense of uselessness, of play-acting.
Sipping their coffee, discussing the weather, the day's shopping, Fritzie's commitments at the network (all of which he would cancel), they avoided the radio, the morning TV news show, even the front page of the Santa Luisa Register, resting on the kitchen bar.
Kidnaper spurns ransom;
Amy still missing.
Once, Andrus walked by it, hastily scanned the bold black headline and the five-column lead of the article (by Duane Bosch, staff correspondent -- age not given), and muttered: "We a buncha national celebrities".

McFeeley told the parents he would escort them to police headquarters in a half hour.
Before that, he wanted to talk to the neighbors.
He did not want to bring the Andruses to the station house too early -- Rheinholdt had summoned a press conference, and he didn't want them subjected to the reporters again.
He could think of nothing else to tell them: no assurances, no hopeful hints at great discoveries that day.
When the detective left, Andrus phoned his secretary to cancel his work and to advise the network to get a substitute director for his current project.
Mrs. Andrus was talking to the maid, arranging for her to come in every day, instead of the four days she now worked.

Outside, only a handful of reporters remained.
The bulk of the press corps was covering Rheinholdt's conference.
In contrast to the caravan of the previous night, there were only four cars parked across the street.
Two men he did not recognize were sipping coffee and munching sweet rolls.
He did not see Sparling, or DeGroot, or Ringel, or any of the feverish crew that had so harassed him twelve hours ago.
However, the litter remained, augmented by several dozen lunchroom suppers.
The street cleaner had not yet been around.

One of the reporters called to him: "Anything new, Lieutenant"?
And he ignored him, skirting the parked cars and walking up the path to the Skopas house.
When McFeeley was halfway to the door, the proprietor emerged -- a mountainous, dark man, his head thick with resiny black hair, his eyes like two of the black olives he imported in boatloads.
McFeeley identified himself.
The master of the house, his nourished face unrevealing, consented to postpone his departure a few minutes to talk to the detective.

Inside, as soon as Mr. Skopas had disclosed -- in a hoarse whisper -- the detective's errand, his family gathered in a huddle, forming a mass of dark flesh on and around a brocaded sofa which stood at one side of a baroque fireplace.
Flanked by marble urns and alabaster lamps, they seemed to be posing for a tribal portrait.

It was amazing how they had herded together for protection: an enormous matriarch in a quilted silk wrapper, rising from the breakfast table;
a gross boy in his teens, shuffling in from the kitchen with a sandwich in his hands;
a girl in her twenties, fat and sullen, descending the marble staircase;
then all four gathering on the sofa to face the inquisitor.

They answered him in monosyllables, nods, occasionally muttering in Greek to one another, awaiting the word from Papa, who restlessly cracked his knuckles, anxious to stuff himself into his white Cadillac and burst off to the freeway.
No, they hadn't seen anyone around;
no, they didn't know the Andrus family;
yes, they had read about the case;
yes, they had let some reporters use their phone, but they would no longer.
They offered no opinions, volunteered nothing, betrayed no emotions.
Studying them, McFeeley could not help make comparison with the Andrus couple.
The Skopas people seemed to him of that breed of human beings whose insularity frees them from tragedy.
He imagined they were the kind whose tax returns were never examined (if they were, they were never penalized), whose children had no unhappy romances, whose names never knew scandal.
The equation was simple: wealth brought them happiness, and their united front to the world was their warning that they meant to keep everything they had, let no one in on the secrets.
By comparison, Fritzie and Laura Andrus were quivering fledglings.
They possessed no outer fortifications, no hard shells of confidence;
they had enough difficulty getting from day to day, let alone having an awful crime thrust upon them.
Skopas expressed no curiosity over the case, offered no expression of sympathy, made no move to escort McFeely to the door.
All four remained impacted on the sofa until he had left.

He had spoken to Mrs.
Emerson the previous day.
There remained a family named Kahler, owners of a two-story Tudor-style house on the south side of the Andrus home.
Their names had not come up in any discussions with Laura, and he had no idea what they would be like.
McFeeley noted the immaculate lawn and gardens: each blade of grass cropped, bright and firm;
each shrub glazed with good health.

The door was answered by a slender man in his sixties -- straight-backed, somewhat clerical in manner, wearing rimless glasses.
When Joe identified himself, he nodded, unsmiling, and ushered him into a sedate living room.
Mrs. Kahler joined them.
She had a dried-out quality -- a gray, lean woman, not unattractive.
Both were dressed rather formally.
The man wore a vest and a tie, the woman had on a dark green dress and three strands of pearls.

"Funny thing", Mr. Kahler said, when they were seated, "when I heard you ringing, I figured it was that guy down the block, Hausman".
McFeeley looked puzzled.
Kahler continued: "I fixed his dog the other day and I guess he's sore, so I expected him to come barging in".
Mr. Kahler went on to explain how Hausman's fox terrier had been "making" in his flower beds.
The dog refused to be scared off, so Kahler had purchased some small firecrackers.
He would lay in wait in the garage, and when the terrier came scratching around, he'd let fly with a cherry bomb.
"Scared the hell out of him", Kahler grinned.
"I hit him in the ass once".
Both grinned at the detective.
"Finally, all I needed was to throw a little piece of red wood that looked like a firecracker and that dumb dog would run ki-yi-ing for his life".