Caraliza by Joel Blaine Kirkpatrick

help; those police, were gentle as lambs, with the mother who cried for her lost son. The Kogens were helped to their home; they could not remain in the midst of the crime’s ruins.
     
    The store would not open, Papa’s eldest son brought his mother, Papa’s wife and they helped the old man calm enough to tell the police the tale. Such a thing they never heard escape his lips, he had told his family nothing. But Papa was able to tell, his clerk and the girl were hidden, from the brute from under the stoop. The police stormed that hole at the stair, and produced no person to question. But who was the girl? Where was her home? Who were her parents? And Papa was senseless in his replies.
    “ Gone, the bundles are gone, the keys are gone!” and he would fall in faint. His family was unable to prevent his grief overcoming him, and they laid him to his divan in the studio, while the police searched every corner they could.
     
    “ What of this mess back here?” asked the beat officer of his Sergeant. “What’s in this dirt?” He was kicking in the ruined garden.
    “ Not likely the kids. The old man pulled them roses all up in his panicked search for them. The boy just planted them. His own papa just told us.”
    “ Well, there is scuffle up the stairs and blood at the bottom. Too bad the old man keeps a clean shop, we can’t tell if they were dragged out the front, or the back here, ‘cause he leaves no dust.”
    “ Poor old man. Just stand ‘em back up and kick some dirt back, they might be okay if it rains,” the Sergeant said, nodding at the roses. “Then get some lads to the sump over there, see if anything has been stuffed.” And he pointed through the shop and across the street.
    The beat officer understood; they searched that way before, when a street urchin left his friends and never returned. At least the old drunk who occupied the foul space was not home, but he was seen at the pub for his dinner, and caused trouble, so he might be about. As the beat officer stepped cross the street, dirt from the garden fresh upon his boots, it began to rain. It was not a shower, but poured.
     
    The next two days were sad with rain on the offended neighborhood. The roses would revive, but nothing else there ever would. The Reisman Portraits would close until the children were found, or given as lost. The reports would say murder. The broken room, the blood on the floor at the foot of the stair. Someone suffered terrible blows, and the brute across the street had been suspect before.
    Yet, he was vanished; it was supposed because he had done now too much harm in Papa’s store, and did not want to swing for it upon any gallows. People were gathering outside the shop as the days moved quietly by the store, constantly watching the police, as they patrolled the morning street. Reisman’s closed for a week, rumors were horrid, and the neighborhood would shout questions when police would walk by.
    “ Where are the murdered children?”
    “ Help us find our young.”
    “ What suspect has been taken? Who is blamed?”
    No answers were given. There was nothing to say.
     
    Wanting some word, and not silence, the public began to cry out to the neighborhood, and to the community, then the city. The papers asked the same questions; there had been murders - what of the criminal? The policed were hard pressed to keep their good name, as a week passed, then two, then a month and not a word of who committed the crime. But the worst shame of it came in four little words the police could never answer, and neither could any who shouted it into the street as the police might walk by.
    “ Who is the girl?”
    She was claimed missing with the boy, Papa and the boy’s parents each swore she once had breath, and they loved her; but no neighbor could prove it, by saying they beheld her too. She was nearly a ghost, but yet lost with the boy… and the whole tale made no sense to the police.
     
    When the shop opened again, Papa could not