Lady Afraid by Lester Dent Page B

switch and jammed a thumb against the starter button. But the engine groaned and groaned and stayed dead. She threw open the door and leaped out on the pavement. For lack of a plan, she found herself making false starts, first ahead on the street, then back to the car, and then toward one of the houses, before she drew more to composure.
    This seemed to be a residential area, middle-class, staid. The houses were all dark, no lighted windows anywhere.
    Sarah stumbled toward the nearest residence. But it came into her mind—not a bit too soon, either, because she was racing up a cement walk to a porch—that the police must not know of this. Not yet. She stopped cold. Perhaps she might still take her son away. That hope, wild and primitive, transcended all else, even the black mystery of what had happened. Sarah wheeled and ran back to the rented automobile.
    She made the engine go. She had thrown off some excitement and she could blame darkly her failure to remember how to start a flooded engine. Never one patient with her own shortcomings, forgetting how to start a flooded engine seemed particularly stupid. The way you did it was to step hard on the accelerator so that the throttle was wide open and turn the engine over a number of times with the starter, thus clearing out the too-rich gasoline mixture. Flooding was a frequent occurrence with boat engines, and she should have known.
    Puzzled now, namelessly afraid, unable to fit sense to what had happened, she drove a few blocks in a direction the other machine might have gone. She found no trace of it. She sent the car wildly toward her apartment.
    Leaving the car in front of her apartment house, she remembered she didn’t have her key. This came to her as she laid her hand against the lobby door. The key was in her purse, which she had left on the living-room table. The door resisted her, for it was locked.
    Her finger was hard and aching for an age against the call button before Mr. Cline came. Mr. Cline flapped in nightshirt and robe.
    “Gee whiz, Mrs. Lineyack!” The old janitor’s rheumy eyes blamed her for disturbing his sleep. “I heard you first time you rang.”
    “You were asleep?”
    “Course I was!” the old man said grumpily.
    “But—then no police—have been to see you?”
    “Huh?” Surprise whipped the old janitor erect, widened his eyes, tugged his jaw downward. “Cops?” he said. “What cops do you mean?”
    Wordless with the hard weight of new fears, Sarah pushed past him and to the elevator. Mr. Cline pattered along after her, carpet slippers slapping against his feet. He cried excitedly, “What’s this? What’s wrong, Mrs. Lineyack? Something wrong?”
    “I don’t know,” Sarah said in a not at all solid voice. “I think so. Will you come up, please, and let me into my apartment.”
    The old man’s moist eyes followed her into the elevator; reluctantly, timidly, he got in himself. The years had carried him past any liking for excitement, and also his life had not been successful, so that he was a man easily filled with apprehensions.
    Sarah strode out on the fourth floor, and the janitor hung back and his plaintive, “Mrs. Lineyack, what’s the matter?” was a plea that he have none of this. Sarah came back and gripped his arm. “Please open my door, Mr. Cline!”
    He unlocked the door. Sarah flew past him with arms down tight at her sides. Already she had a sick sense of what she would find. And it was so. It was as she expected. Jonnie was not in the bedroom. Jonnie was not in the apartment anywhere. Her son was gone. Jonnie was gone.
    Hardly any of Mr. Cline’s timidity left him, but, head extended turtle-fashion, he ventured into the apartment. His eyes watched Sarah as she fell in a frenzy upon the places that a two-and-a-half-year-old boy might have gotten by himself.
    On the bedroom chest of drawers the electric clock purred so gently that it could not be heard more than a few inches away, and in the kitchen the