her face crumpled as if the air was being let out of a balloon. She began to cry, quietly at first, big silent tears rolling down her face. The silence was but the still before the storm. She built quickly to a crescendo. She uttered a heartbreaking wail.
The four other waifs watched her anxiously, and her breakdown was a lesson in leadership. All four of them instantly followed her example. Even the baby. They screwed up their faces in expressions of identical distress and began to caterwaul. Awkwardly gripping the baby, which seemed unaccountably slippery, Cole escorted the four other howling children into his living room and planted them on the couch.
The older girl held out her arms, and he carefully placed the screaming baby back in her care. All the children huddled together in a messy pile of tangled limbs and wept until their skinny shoulders heaved and their sobs were interspersed with hiccups.
Cole did not know very much about children, but he hoped hiccup-crying did not induce vomiting.
Quickly, he checked the phone—which naturally was out—stoked the fire and lit his two coal-oil lamps.
He turned back and studied the children in the flickering yellow light. He realized he was in trouble. The crying continued unabated—in fact it seemed to be rising in tempo and intensity. He had no doubt the children were going to make themselves sick if they continued. There was also the possibility that grandma—wherever she was—might not be dead and might urgently require his assistance.
He held up a hand. “Hey,” he said, in his best commander voice, “that’s enough.”
There was momentary silence while they all gazed wide-eyed at his raised hand, and then one of them whimpered and the rest of them dissolved all over again.
He clapped his hands. He stamped his foot. He roared.
And nothing worked, until something divine whispered in his ear what was required to stop the noise and squeeze the story out of the little mites.
Surrender.
The soldier in him resisted. Surrender? It was not in his vocabulary. But he resisted only momentarily. The noise and emotion in the room were going to send him on a one-way trip into the lake if it didn’t stop.
So, summoning all his courage, he took the baby back, discovered why she seemed unaccountably slippery and did his best to ignore it. He wedged himself a spot on the couch between the children. Blessed and stunned silence followed while the little troop evaluated this latest development. And then, before Cole could really prepare himself properly, the two boys and the toddler in the ridiculous dress were all vying for a place on his lap—and found it. The older girl snuggled in so tight under his arm it felt as if she was crushing his heart.
The combined weight of the children and the baby was startlingly small. It was their warmth that surprised him, the seeming bonelessness of them as they melted into him, like kittens who had found a mother.
For an old soldier, a terrifying thing happened.
Soaked in tears and whatever horrible warm liquid that was seeping out of the baby’s diaper, he felt a terrible weakness, a softening around his heart.
“Okay,” he said, putting his voice into the blessed silence with extreme caution, “tell me what happened to Grandma.” Out of the sudden chorus of overlapping voices, he began to pick out a story.
“The lights went out.”
“She fell down the steps.”
“Blood everywhere.”
“Lots of blood. Maybe bwains, too.”
In bits and pieces, like putting together a verbal jigsaw puzzle, Cole figured out who the children were, where they were from and what needed to be done.
They were the movie star’s children. When the power had gone out, their grandma, who looked after them when their mother was away, had fallen down the steps in the darkness. The children had presumed, erroneously, Cole hoped, that she was dead.
“I knew I had to get help,” the oldest girl told him solemnly, “but they—” she stabbed an accusing finger at the two boys “—said they had to come, too. And we couldn’t leave Kolina—”
“That me,” the toddler in the dress told him, then relaxed into his chest, her cheek warm and soft and wet, and inserted her thumb in her mouth.
“—or the baby, so we all came. And here we are, Mr. Herman.”
Mr. Herman? They obviously had him confused with a different neighbor, possibly one who was friendly.
He considered telling them he was not Mr. Herman, but they had a shell-shocked look about them that told him to save his breath.
He saw immediately the order of things that needed to be done. He had to get to the grandma and fast. Possibly, she was not dead, but hovering on the brink, where seconds could count.
“Your name?” he demanded of the oldest one.
“Saffron,” she told him, and the rest of them piped up with the most bewildering and ridiculous assortment of names he’d ever heard. The older of the boys was Darrance, and the other one was Calypso. Calypso!
The smallest girl batted thick eyelashes and reiterated that her name was Kolina. And the baby, he was informed, was Lexandra.
The impossible names swam in his head, and were then pushed aside by more important tasks that needed to be dealt with.
“Okay,” he said, pointing at the oldest girl, “You are not Saffron anymore. You are Number One. And you are Number Two…”
He went on quickly, numbering them largest to smallest, and he could see that rather than being indignant about the name changes, it was exactly what they needed. Someone of authority to relinquish the responsibility to. Having established himself as boss, he confidently gave his first order.
“Now, Number One, I have to go see to your grand-mother, and I am placing you in charge here. That makes you second in command.”
Adding another number had been a mistake, because the child’s brow furrowed. He hurried on. “Number One, you are to make sure each of these children sits quietly on this couch while I go to your house and check on your grandmother. Nobody moves a muscle, right?”
He was already calculating. What were the chances his road was open? Slim. If he had to hike cross-country, he could probably be at the big house on the point in ten minutes, going flat out.
It pierced his awareness that Number One was not the least impressed with military protocol or her new title of second in command. In fact, she was frowning, her expression vaguely mutinous.
“No,” she said with flat finality.
“No?” Cole said, dumbfounded. Apparently the child had no idea that he outranked her and was not to be challenged. In fact, her cute little face screwed up, and she let loose a new wail that threatened to peel the paint off his ceiling. Fresh tears squirted out of her eyes at an alarming rate.
He felt himself tensing as four other faces screwed up in unison, but they held off making noise as their sister spoke.
“Mr. Herman, we’re not staying here by ourselves,” she told him. “This house is spooky. I’m scared. I don’t want to be in charge anymore. I want to go with you.”
He only briefly wrestled with his astonishment that this snippet of a child was refusing an order. Obviously the other kids were going to follow her cue, and he did not have the time—nor the patience—to cajole them into seeing things his way.
As much as it went against his nature, he surrendered again. Twice in the space of a few minutes. He could only hope it wasn’t an omen.
He hurriedly packed a knapsack with emergency supplies, and then he turned his attention back to the children.
For a man who could move a regiment in minutes, getting those five children back through the door, arranged in his SUV and safely