The Vanished Child Page 10

  It was exactly as difficult to live with such family intimacy as Reisden thought it would be. He thought too often of Tasy. Perdita would sometimes come and sit next to Harry, snuggling up to him as close as a dog, and put her arm around him. It hurt Reisden, though that had not been one of Tasy’s gestures. He would catch himself looking too long at the two of them, and would be relieved when at last Harry took the girl back to her own home.

  He spent as much time as he could outside the house with Daugherty, planning everything that they could do to find Richard Knight. He was not good at living in a household. He was a natural insomniac, and living wholly alone for five years, he had set the day to please himself, getting up when other people were going to sleep, working through the night. In the first two weeks in the Knight house he was much worse than usual, because he dreamed of Tasy’s death whenever he slept.

  My dear Victor,

  . . . Do assure anyone who may ask that I am not Richard. But here I am nevertheless, having talked myself into finding the child, and he has been dead for eighteen years. I find, discouragingly, that in the right circumstances a skeleton will disintegrate in fourteen. So Daugherty and I may be looking for a more than usually calcified patch of soil.

  I don’t feel at all clever.

  If you have suggestions for me, please send them. In any case, please send everything you have, or can locate, about the Knights.

  Reisden