Where Are the Children by Mary Higgins Clark.

Title: Where Are the Children?
Author: Mary Higgins Clark.
Genre: Fiction, mystery, thriller.
Country: U.S.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 1975.
Summary: Nancy Harmon had fled the evil of her first marriage, the macabre deaths of her two little children, the hideous charges against her. She changed her name, dyed her hair, moved from California to New England. Now she was married again, with two lovely new children, and a happiness-filled life, until the morning when she looked for her children and found only one tattered red mitten and knew that the nightmare was beginning again.

My rating: 7/10
My review:


♥ The bedroom of the top-floor apartment was large. The whole house was large. It was a bastardized evolution of an old captain's house. Begun in the seventeenth century on a rocky crest that commanded a view of the whole bay, it was a pretentious monument to man's need to be forever on guard.

Life wasn't like that. It was bits and pieces. Icebergs that showed in tips. He knew.

♥ Seven years, Nancy thought. Life was a series of seven-year cycles. Carl used to say that your whole body changed in that time. Every cell renewed itself. It was time for her to really look ahead... to forget.

♥ Audacity—that was all it took. Any fool could try to come up with a foolproof plan. But to have a plan so simple that it was unbelievable even to call it a plan—a schedule timed to the split second—that was real genius. To willingly leave yourself open to failure—to tightrope-walk across a dozen pits so that when the act was accomplished no one even glanced in your direction—that was the way.

♥ ..Chief Coffin looked again at the three people around the table. Ray got up, walked behind his wife's chair and put his hands on her shoulders.

Twenty years disappeared for Jed Coffin. He remembered the night he'd gotten a call at the precinct house when he was a rookie cop in Boston that Delia's folks had been in an accident and it wasn't likely they'd make it.

He'd gone home. She'd been sitting in the kitchen in her nightgown and robe, sipping a cup of her favorite instant hot chocolate, reading the paper. She'd turned, surprised to see him early but smiling, and before he said one word, he'd done just what Ray Eldredge was doing now—pressed his hands on her shoulders, holding her.

Hell, wasn't that the guts of the departure speech stewardesses used to rattle off on airplanes? "In the event of an emergency landing, sit straight, grip the arms of your seats, plant your feet solidly on the floor." What they were saying was "Let the shock pass through you."

♥ "Eventually Mr. Hunt bought the house and grounds—nine acres in all, including one thousand feet of warefront property and one of the finest views on the Cape."

"The Lookout was originally a captain's house, was it not?"

Dorothy realized that John Kragopolous had done some homework on the place—a sure sign of real interest. "Yes, it was," she agreed. "It was built by a whaling captain in the sixteen-nineties as a gift for his bride. The most recent renovation, forty years ago, added two floors, but the original roof was put back on, including one of those charming little balconies near the peak of the chimney—widow's walks they're called, because so many of the captains' wives used to watch in vain for their men to come back from a voyage."

♥ The tension in the small foyer relaxed tangibly. He realized that most of it was emanating from Dorothy anyway. Why not? He'd seen her countless times in these past years, in and out of the Eldredge house, pushing the children on the swing, taking them in her car. He had her number: one of those dreary middle-aged widows trying to be important to someone; a parasite. Husband dead. No children. A miracle she didn't have a sick old mother. Most of them did. That helped them to be martyrs to their friends. So nice to Mother. Why? Because they needed to be nice to someone. They had to be important. And if they had children, they concentrated on them. The way Nancy's mother had.

♥ "How could I kill them? They are me. I died with them..."

"We all die a little death when we lose the people we love, Nancy.

♥ Jonathan was standing by the mantel, staring into the fire. He had lighted his pipe, and the warm smell of the good tobacco he used had begun to penetrate the room. Dorothy breathed it in deeply as she set the coffee tray on the round pine table by the fireplace. A wave of pure nostalgia washed over her. Kenneth had smoked a pipe, and that had been his brand of tobacco. She and Kenneth used to love stormy winter afternoons like this. They would make a roaring fire and get out wine and cheese and books and sit contently together. Regret swept over her. Regret because you really can't control your life. Most of the time you don't act; you react.

♥ He realized that the only way to get her attention was through the kids and started talking to them. It was always easy for Rob to turn on the charm. He likes gals older than himself, too. Not that this one was older by much. But he'd learned from the time he was sixteen and screwing his next-door neighbor's wife that if you're nice to a woman's kids, she thinks you're A-okay and all the guilt goes down the drain. Boy, Rob could write a book on the whole mother-complex rationalization.

♥ Jonathan realized that he inadvertently looked for Dorothy first. Her hands were dug into her pockets. He suspected they were gripped into fists. She had always struck him as a remarkably efficient, self-sufficient person—traits that he admired without finding them necessarily endearing in a woman.

When Jonathan was honest with himself, he realized that an essential part of his relationship with Emily had been his constant awareness of her need for him. She never could unscrew the cap from a jar of find her car keys or balance her checking account. He had basked in his role as the indulgent, able, constant fixer, doer, solver. It had taken the past two years to make him begin to realize that he'd never understood the steel shaft of strength at the core of Emily's femininity: the way she'd accepted the doctor's verdict with only a sympathetic glance at him; the way she'd never once admitted to pain. Now, seeing Dorothy with her mute anguish so tangible, he ached somehow to comfort her.