Eighteen by Jan Burke

Author:Jan Burke [Burke, Jan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: thriller

At first, his parents rejoiced in his return. They had spent several hours alarmed by the discovery that their children were not playing under the tree and could not be located anywhere on the large property. They could not know that by the time the attic and stables had been searched, Jack had already given Andrew his quarter.

They wept over Andrew when the oil field boss brought him home, and had not remonstrated against him. But quickly their alarm returned; their fears for Charlie were expressed in recriminations hurled at his older brother, who should have known better than to get into a strange conveyance, who should have known better than to leave his brother for a quarter.

“Two bits!” Papa shouted. “Even Judas held out for forty pieces of silver!”

His mother intervened then, and separated them by taking Andrew to his room. But soon there were police to be answered, and not much later the detectives from Pinkerton’s, and over time, endless others. Tough men, large men, ill-mannered men, always badgering him for descriptions and repetition of details, making unpleasant suggestions as to how it might have truly happened that Andrew was spared. Under this assault, details became confused in Andrew’s mind, memories shifted, and to his father’s fury, he could not name the town-or be certain of the roads, or how far he had traveled. Eventually the store he had visited was located, but as Andrew could have told anyone who might have listened, no one in that town had noticed Charlie and the two men.

A ransom note, postmarked from Pittsburgh, arrived three torturous days later. The letter, filled with misspellings, was eventually deciphered to be a demand for twenty thousand dollars, details of payment to be forthcoming. Papa declared himself ready to pay.

By now, newspapers were publishing stories of “Little Charlie Masters,” whose brother had abandoned him to kidnappers. This was, of course, not at all what the papers intended to convey, but it was how every story appeared to Andrew.

During this time Andrew slept and ate little, cried easily and was prone to nightmares of the worst sort. He could not help but notice that his parents no longer looked him in the eye, that the servants whispered. Had not Grandpapa arrived to protect him from his persecutors, and threatened to remove their one remaining son from their home, the Masters might not have gone on as a family through the ordeal that awaited them.

The instructions never came. The explanation for the failure of the kidnappers to continue on their course was not uncovered until an enterprising Pinkerton’s man compared descriptions of Jack and Phil with two robbers gunned down by police in Pittsburgh on the day the letter had been received. As he lay dying, one of the men-Jack, it seems-had said, “Never find Charlie now.”

Questioning of the men’s few known associates yielded nothing. The detectives advised the Masters to assume their son was dead.

Never one to give up, Papa announced to the newspapers that he

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