Silent Night by Mary Higgins Clark

soon.”
    Like father, like son, Catherine thought. Brian looks like Tom. Michael thinks like him. She closed her eyesagainst the waves of near panic that washed through her. Tom. Brian. Why?
    She felt Michael fishing in her shoulder bag. He pulled out the cellular phone. “I’ll dial Gran,” he told her.

9

    I n her apartment on Eighty-seventh Street, Barbara Cavanaugh clutched the phone, not wanting to believe what her daughter was telling her. But there was no disputing the dreadful news that Catherine’s quiet, almost emotionless voice had conveyed. Brian was missing, and had been missing for over two hours now.
    Barbara managed to keep her voice calm. “Where are you, dear?”
    â€œMichael and I are in a police car at Forty-ninth and Fifth. That’s where we were standing when Brian . . . just suddenly wasn’t next to me.”
    â€œI’ll be right there.”
    â€œMom, be sure to bring the most recent pictures youhave of Brian. The police want to give them out to all the news media. And the news radio station is going to have me on in a few minutes to make an appeal. And Mom, call the nurses’ station on the fifth floor of the hospital. Tell them to make absolutely sure that Tom isn’t allowed to turn on the TV in his room. He doesn’t have a radio. If he ever found out that Brian was missing . . .” Her voice trailed off.
    â€œI’ll call right away but, Catherine, I don’t have any recent pictures here,” Barbara cried. “All the ones we took last summer are in the Nantucket house.” Then she wanted to bite her lip. She’d been asking for new pictures of the boys and hadn’t received any. Only yesterday Catherine had told her that her Christmas present, framed portraits of them, had been forgotten in the rush to get Tom to New York for the operation.
    â€œI’ll bring what I can find,” she said hurriedly. “I’m on my way.”
    For an instant after she finished delivering the message to the hospital, Barbara Cavanaugh sank into a chair and rested her forehead in her palm. Too much, she thought, too much.
    Had there always been a feeling haunting her that everything was too good to be true? Catherine’s father had died when she was ten, and there had always been a lingering touch of sadness in her eyes, until at twenty-two she met Tom. They were so happy together, soperfect together. The way Gene and I were from day one, Barbara thought.
    For an instant her mind rushed back to that moment in 1943, when at age nineteen and a sophomore in college, she’d been introduced to a handsome young Army officer, Lieutenant Eugene Cavanaugh. In that first moment they’d both known that they were perfect for each other. They were married two months later, but it was eighteen years before their only child was born.
    With Tom, my daughter has found the same kind of relationship with which I was blessed, Barbara thought, but now . . . She jumped up. She had to get to Catherine. Brian must have just wandered away. They just got separated, she told herself. Catherine was strong, but she must be close to the breaking point by now. Oh, dear God, let someone find him, she prayed.
    She rushed through the apartment, yanking framed photographs from mantels and tabletops. She’d moved here from Beekman Place ten years ago. It was still more space than she needed, with a formal dining room, library, and guest suite. But now it meant that when Tom and Catherine and the boys came to visit from their home in Omaha, there was plenty of room for them.
    Barbara tossed the pictures into the handsome leather carryall Tom and Catherine had given her for her birthday, grabbed a coat from the foyer closet, and, withoutbothering to double lock the door, rushed outside in time to press the button for the elevator as it began to descend from the penthouse.
    Sam, the elevator operator, was a longtime employee. When he opened the door for