"Lieutenant Garrison?" Casino and Goniff looked up from the table where they were playing cards. "Lieutenant Garrison?" The query came again, a little more urgently.

"Jeeze! You'd think that guy'd be able to keep better track a the Warden." Casino said in disgust as he left the table and headed for the intercom on the wall by the door. He thumbed the switch on the unit, "Yeah?"

"I'm looking for Lieutenant Garrison."

"Yeah, I got that. He ain't in here, he had a meeting with Colonel Reynolds." He didn't think he'd get anything out of their stuffy British nemesis but he gave it a try anyway. "What's up?"

"I thought he might've come back early is all." The voice had a preoccupied tone. "I've got that Mrs. Reid on the phone. And she sounds a bit desperate. Seems she's just got herself some new charges from Italy and she's wanting a little help with them. "

The safecracker's eyebrows went up and he shot a look at the pick pocket who was still sitting at the table. "Will I do?"

"You might just," was the surprising reply.

g

Casino walked back out to the car, his steps were slow and there was a puzzled look on his face. "Blimey! What's wrong with you now?" Goniff asked from where he was getting comfortable on the front seat.

In Garrison's absence Sergeant Major Rawlins took it upon himself to dispatch the two cons into the village to see if they could help Mrs. Reid. Casino was a regular at the house and had been since he'd spotted a little girl who bore a close resemblance to his younger sister. That child had ended up in the states and was in the end stages of being adopted by that same younger sister. They'd both gone in but Goniff wasn't much help with Mrs. Reid's new charges because they only spoke Italian. He wandered off to entertain the others who made their home there and was pleased to have Emory under his elbow trying to learn another one of his more difficult card tricks. The little boy who'd put so much effort in the past into appearing slow was certainly catching up now that he knew he was a permanent member of the household.

"Well, that's just weird." Casino decided out loud as he climbed behind the wheel and started the engine.

"What?!" Goniff rolled his eyes at his teammate as they pulled away from the curb. Sometimes it was just like pulling teeth to get any information.

"Those little kids back there…."

"Yeah?", the pick pocket prompted none to gently.

"They knew my name."

"Well what's p'culiar 'bout that? Mrs. Reid prob'ly tol 'em all about you."

Casino shook his head. "Said she didn't tell 'em a thing."

"It was them other kids then," the pick pocket shrugged. "They prob'ly talked up how you come over to play the clown for her parties and tell 'em stories an' such."

"Maybe." The east coast con said slowly and then he turned to the man sitting next to him. "But they knew I knew the Warden."

"Well we all been down 'ere, mate. All them kids know our names." Goniff still couldn't figure out what the problem was.

Casino shrugged and turned his attention back to the road ahead. "You'r probably right. But they said they didn't want me, they wanted Tenente Garrison… and he's the only one they wanna talk to." He gave a snort. "There was sure no mistakin' that."

g

When the Warden finally got back from his meeting Casino, after making sure they didn't have another mission, delivered the message.

"And they'll only talk to me?" Garrison asked.

"That's what they said."

"Did they tell you what it was about?"

"Jeeze!" The safecracker propped his fists on his hips and stared at his commander. "If they'd told me what it was about they wouldn't need to talk to you, now would they?"

Garrison didn't bother reprimanding Casino for his tone of voice or attitude; it was just part of his personality and he was used to it by now, and most of the time the best way to deal with it was to ignore it. "Alright," he checked his watch and found it too late to be ringing a phone in a household filled with young children. "I'll give her a call in the morning."

g

"And you say they'll only speak to me?"

"Yes, I'm afraid so Lieutenant. I tried to tell your Sergeant Major that yesterday." Mrs. Reid was silent for a moment and then continued. "I'm sorry to bother you again but…"

Garrison smiled as he spoke into the receiver. "It's no bother, Mrs. Reid. I'll be happy to help but I think I'll have to bring Actor along. My Italian may not be up to this." He eyed the stack of reports sitting in front of him. "It'll take me another hour or so to get to a spot where I can take a break. Will two o'clock be convenient?"

"That would be lovely." The woman on the other end of the phone said with relief. "I'll put out some tea and biscuits, shall I?"

g

All of them ended up going. Casino liked being with the kids, so did Chief though he was shy about admitting it. Actor agreed to go to help in translating for the children… and Goniff, though Garrison couldn't figure out how, had found out about the food.

When they arrived in the house in the village where Mrs. Reid lived they were mobbed by the kids that already knew them. Three stood apart from the others; a boy, about twelve who held a squirming three year old boy in his arms, and a little girl who appeared to be seven or eight years old. The youngsters were scrubbed, their hair attended to, and they were dressed in clean, serviceable clothes that had been donated to Mrs. Reid. They didn't have the haunted, gaunt look common to newly arrived refugees. Still, they hung cautiously back and waited while the other children vied for attention, got their pats and tickles, and sticks of American chewing gum from the men that had come to visit. Mrs. Reid finally called for order and sent the crowd off to the back garden with Goniff, Chief and Casino, and escorted the others into the front parlor and left them to their private meeting.

The meeting lasted two hours… long enough that Mrs. Reid started the rest of the crowd on the tea and dainties she'd put out. When Actor and the Warden escorted the new children into the garden the kids politely declined the food in favor of joining the others who had gotten up a game of tag. The two men neglected their tea as they watched them.

"Surely it is a coincidence," the con man suggested.

The Warden watched the children as they played. "Maybe," he said slowly.

"What are you going to do?" Actor asked.

"I don't know." The Lieutenant chewed at his lower lip a moment. "I've got to report it."

"How will you explain where you obtained the information?"

Garrison shook his head. "I've got some private contacts. I guess I can always say that's where it came from." He glanced at his second. "You never told the others about…?" When Actor shook his head he said, "Good. Don't tell them about this either. Not until I check it out."

They'd come out in two cars because Garrison was expected back at headquarters at the end of the day. He told them they could stay as long as Mrs. Reid could stand all of them and took off for his meeting. It was after two in the morning before he got back to the estate where the group was housed.

g

The next afternoon Mrs. Reid called out to the mansion again. She was beside herself. Three of the children had gone missing. It was the three from Italy. The house and neighborhood had been thoroughly search and she was hoping they, like Eddie, might have found their way out to the estate somehow. A search was launched but no sign was found of the children in the house, in the cars, on the grounds, or in the surrounding area. As many of the soldiers from the base as could be spared helped in the search. All of the cons went out to scour the village and its environs, but they never turned anything. Three days into it and they had to give up; they had a mission.

g

They rolled onto the grounds well after midnight. It had been a long ten days over on the continent and, it seemed, an even longer six hours in the initial debriefing at headquarters. Outside of being exhausted they'd returned unscathed for a change. The men trooped up the stairs to go to bed, even Goniff was too tired to bother about his stomach. Garrison, as was his habit, hit his office first to take a look through the paperwork that had built up while they were away. He was still there when Actor, after a restless hour of trying to sleep, came back down looking for a book.

"Come", he responded to the quiet tap on his office door.

"I saw the light." Actor explained the intrusion.

Garrison held out a report. "Take a look at this."

The Italian con man stepped up to the Lieutenant's desk and took the papers the man offered. He settled down in the chair across from the Warden and started leafing through the report. When he looked up he had a question on his face but he couldn't seem to put it into words.

"Everything those kids told us checked out."

"But how can that be. They weren't even there, were they?"

Garrison answered him with a shrug. "I have a friend that works on a paper in New York. I sent him a telegram and asked him to try and find out about them… This is what I got back from him."

Actor's attention was drawn to the letter the Warden held in his hands. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, not sure he wanted to know what information those pages held. "What did he report to you?"

"He found where the family was living." Separating a piece of newsprint from the stationary Garrison continued. "He even sent a story that ran in his paper." After a few moments of holding it out for the con man, who refused to touch it, he started to read. "A fire, thought to be the result of faulty wiring, took the lives of three people last night. The dead are; Luisa DeLuca, thirty-seven, her sons Emilio, twelve, Nicholas, three, and daughter Christina, age seven…"

"The same names. When did this happen?" Actor asked quietly.

"The fire happened two days before we talked to those kids down at Mrs. Reid's."

He thought a moment. "The same day Mrs. Reid picked them up…. Are you going to report this?"

"Report what?" The Warden tossed the papers on his desk and crossed his arms. "That I'm getting intelligence from ghosts now? What do you think?"

"But what of Mrs. Reid? Surely…"

"I know." Garrison sighed, leaned back in his chair and rubbed at the back of his neck. "I've got to tell her something or she'll spend the rest of her life looking for those kids."

"Would you like me to be with you when you talk to her?"

Garrison gave a short laugh and shook his head. "No. I think it'll be better if she only thinks one of us out here is crazy."

g

Mrs. Reid smiled and handed the synopsis of his report and the newspaper clipping back to him. She slipped her hand into the pocket of her jacket and drew out a piece of folded paper. Careful block printing wavered from edge to edge across the page, the ink bleeding through to the opposite side.

"I've a little note here to add to your mystery." She opened the paper and smoothed it over her knee before starting to read. "Grazie per la tua gentilezza a noi la signora Reid. Per favore non ti preoccupare. Ora ci troviamo con mamma e Papa. Emilio, Nicola e Christina Deluca." Holding it out she let him read it for himself and check the signature.

"You know it's very strange. As long as you all were here everyone was intent on finding those children. But once you left…. I went back to the people who first called me to come and get them. I thought they might have found out that they had relatives here, you see, and I hoped that's where they had gone. Well they looked at me as if I'd lost my senses. They said they'd never heard of them, that they'd never called me about three children from Italy. The constable in the village had forgotten all about searching for them, so had your own Sergeant Major. The other children remembered them but in a vague, misty, sort of way that made me wonder if it was only because I had said they stayed with us those two days." She read through the little note again and then folded it away into her pocket. "I must say, until you showed me that article I was afraid I'd gone quite mad."

Garrison got up and stepped around his desk to give Mrs. Reid a hand as she rose from her chair. He wasn't sure he wanted to tell her that the memory of those children had faded for his men too. That it seemed to be related to the amount of time each man had spent with them. "But you don't believe that they were actually…"

Mrs. Reid held her hand up to interrupt the question he was trying not to ask. "When I was a girl, Lieutenant, I had a habit of taking long walks by myself. I was on one of those walks when I heard someone call my name. I turned round and there was no one there. Thinking it was just a trick of the wind I continued on my way… but it happened again you see. It was out on a moorland path and I was absolutely the only one on it. I turned round at that point and went back the way I'd come," she explained. "The next day two people were found dead on the path not far from where I'd turned back. Oh, I don't believe I was meant to be harmed, but I don't believe I was meant to find those two bodies either. I always took that voice for the voice of my grandfather. He died when I was five, but he'd always been particularly protective of me."

She'd never told that story to anyone. She'd never told anyone any of the rather odd things that had happened to her in her long life and so most of the people she knew considered her a very sensible woman. She looked up into the American's eyes to see if she could find any doubt about her there and was pleased to see none. Still, she'd keep the rest to herself.

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." She smiled up at the young American officer and then patted the hand that still held hers. "The important thing is that they are back with their parents. Don't you agree?"

"Yes, ma'am." He said, wondering why she was so comfortable with all of this when he was still getting shivers up his spine. "I suppose."

He walked her out to her car and held the door as she got in. "I don't expect we'll ever see them again," she said wistfully. She smiled up at him one last time and put the car in gear and pulled away.

"I certainly hope not," he mumbled to himself as he watched the car make its way down the drive, stop at the gate and then pass through. Then, as the car turned into the lane and disappeared, the thought struck him that he hadn't met the mother yet...