Muffin glared at Ed. “You’re going to be in a whole lot of trouble. My brother Rowen is driving to the store to use the phone. He’s calling the police. So there.” Muffin made a hug of herself, with Sam tucked inside her crossed arms. She could feel his tiny heart beat against her ribs.
“Give me that camera,” said Ed, a demand that startled her completely. Muffin had forgotten the camera. So that was the annoying, hard rectangle pressed against her belly button, getting in the way of holding Sam. “You can have it,” she said. “But I have to keep holding Sam.”
“You do that.” Ed’s fat hand, its fingernails split and stained, reached down to her tummy as he took the camera out of her kangaroo pouch. “Don’t drop the baby, Muffin,” he said, “no matter what happens.” He curled his fingers through her hair and raised his strong arm high, so she was held vertically upward by her very own hair.
Rowen appeared in the door.
“I told you!” Muffin said to Ed. “I told you so. I told you Rowen went to get the police. So there!”
Ed laughed. He twisted her hair until she had to stand right next to him, and he twisted again, forcing her face into the pattern of his shirt.
“Walk outside,” said Ed to Rowen.
Muffin said into the shirt, “Row, where are the police?”
“There are no police,” said Ed.
At first the hair yanking was just scary, just a weird new pressure, but now it was hurting, and then it was hurting a lot, and it was harder to think about Sam, and harder to keep her balance, and hardest to remember that holding Sam counted the most.
Her big brother said, “Muff and I will take care of Sam for you, Ed. We won’t tell anybody anything. Really, Ed. Muff and I are on the same team as you are. We want Dusty’s baby to have those great parents. We want the adoption to go through. It’s very late and we’re all tired and the baby probably needs a bottle, and —”
Ed said, “Get out of the house, kid. Go get your car keys.” He began walking Muffin forward. Her feet tangled when he turned her so she was facing forward. Her scalp was higher off her head than it was supposed to be, as if Ed might jerk and peel her scalp away from her skull.
Rowen said, “You don’t need this, Ed. A baby and a nine-year-old? They’re real pains in the neck. What you need is the money that Cinda and Burt are paying you, and we have to sit down and talk about how we’re going to get that.”
“Get your keys,” said Ed, “or I’ll hurt your sister and the baby both.”
Then he did jerk hard on her hair, and the thought of her hair coming right off, of Ed standing there with her whole hair in his fist, was so horrific Muffin screamed, which was stupid and wrong, because it frightened her brother. He obeyed Ed. He left the kitchen, which was the last thing Muffin wanted him to do; she felt they must stay with the house until the police got here; and now they were going out into the dark.
Ed marched Muffin over the grass to his car, opened the driver’s door, and kneed Muffin into the opening. Ed did not let go of her hair. She didn’t see how she could do anything because she had to keep holding Sam.
Rowen raced back, gasping for breath, holding the key chain on one extended finger for Ed to take. Muffin knew what would happen now. Her brother — who liked wrestling and soccer and ice hockey and baseball and tennis — her brother would tackle Ed while Muffin would throw herself sideways into Ed’s car with the baby, and scrabble out the other door while they were tussling, and —
“Throw the keys in the woods, Rowen,” said Ed. “Your best throw.” He changed his grip on her hair, forcing Muffin’s head backward until her throat was white and exposed.
“Okay,” said Rowen, “okay. Just don’t hurt them. Listen to me.”
Ed yanked Muffin’s head back so far that Muffin screamed with pain as her neck cracked, but there was no scream, because the tilt had flattened her throat out and she could make no sound.
“Throw the keys.”
Rowen threw the keys into the woods. It was his best throw. Muffin could hear leaves parting as if for a bullet and she knew they would never find the keys.
“Start backing away from me,” said Ed.
Rowen did not move. He said, “Ed, come on, she’s only nine.”
“I could break her neck,” said Ed conversationally.
Rowen backed up.
Muffin hung on to Sam with everything she had. Her brother was getting farther and farther away now. She couldn’t see anything but stars, and she was no longer sure whether they were stars in the sky or stars in her brain. She didn’t know time, either, and how long Row had been backing.
Ed let go of her hair and shoved her and the baby over on the seat. Then he got in, drove around Row’s car and down the drive, accelerating. She and Sam were flung forward, and she twisted hard, trying not to let Sam get bruised, and the hard long curve of the dash smashed into her arm.
She would not cry. She would not cry out, either.
She scootched herself back on the seat, bracing her sneaker bottoms against the dashboard to make herself a stiff safety net for Sam. She had never been in a car without a seat belt. She and Sam bounced and tipped and jarred.
It was an old car, and it smelled of old things, old food and old oil.
Ed picked up his car phone. He tapped in a number.
Muffin buried her face against Sam. He was even littler than she remembered, as if he had shrunk during the day, from not enough food and not enough love and not enough safety.
I am all Sam has, thought Muffin. I cannot make mistakes. This isn’t spelling. This isn’t arithmetic. This is Sam.
Cinda and Burt had both cars. Neither Cherokee had room for a passenger. They could hardly stand outside in the street shifting boxes and deciding which car to abandon, while Kit yelled for help and the neighbors came with cell phones, guns, and Dobermans.
Cinda and Burt were immobilized at the front door, terrified of leaving the soft sanctuary of the house, equally terrified that Kit’s father would have reached the local police and that any second, sirens would come screaming down the road.
Cinda still had her knife, but she had lost track of why she wanted it.
I’d be better off with Cinda, thought Kit. She’ll drive, and people driving cars cannot threaten anybody with a knife. She’ll have to set it down, maybe next to me where I can use it, or at least on the floor by her feet. She sure can’t use it. Cinda’s ready to talk. So she’s the one I want to be with. I think I can break her down. Or lie to her about Sam, and get her to drive where I want her to drive. And where would that be? What’s my master plan now? “Oh, Cinda, would you just turn into that driveway, please, the one marked Police?”
“Here,” said Kit, taking over. “The best thing to do is find Dusty and talk things through. I’ll take the boxes out of Cinda’s front seat, and once I’ve made room —”
“There’s room,” said Burt. He hauled her toward the navy Jeep as if it had been his idea. “Get on the floor,” he ordered. “You can fit.”
“Fit” was hardly the word. A tennis ball would have fit in the space on the floor. Kit had to shift boxes and wedge between reams of paper, but she did arrive on the floor of Cinda’s Cherokee and Burt did slam the door behind her, while Cinda got in the driver’s seat.
Kit found herself starting to giggle. The giggle took hold, and felt good. Down here, hunched over like a dog having kibbles, she could, like a dog, chew on Cinda’s ankle if all else failed.
Cinda and Burt were in the midst of a whispered conference when Cinda’s car phone rang. Cinda answered it, and the voice that rasped out of the phone was Ed’s.
Ed and Dusty. They were still driving around with Sam! Probably looking for Cinda and Burt so they could get the next installment of the adoption payment. So now the three cars would rendezvous — two Grand Cherokees and one ancient Caddy — and money and baby would change hands and Kit would be in the way. And what about that knife?
While Cinda was driving, Kit would just have t
o get out of the car. Though how she would manage that, scrunched down on all fours, she did not know. She pictured herself opening her door with her toes behind her back, and bumping out fanny first into New Jersey traffic.
“You come and meet me!” said Ed. He was spitting out each syllable. “I want my fifty K! You promised it to me and I want it! I already spent some of it. You give me my fifty K! You give it to me now. This situation has gotten crazy. Now I’ve got a damn little kid here, too! You come get this baby, you bring my fifty thousand!”
Kit’s giggles dried up.
Ed Bing was rabid. He was a mad dog. There would be froth around his mouth.
Cinda spit right back, “We don’t have your stupid fifty K,” she said in a hot raging whisper.
“Well, I’ve got the baby; I’ve got the camera you wanted so much; and I’ve got the little girl who took the pictures. You bring the fifty K and we’re set.”
Chapter 13
ED HAS MUFFIN, THOUGHT KIT.
That’s impossible! But where is Rowen? Where is Dusty? How could this have happened?
Muffin with Ed, a mad dog ready to bite.
Cinda got out of the car for the rest of the conversation with Ed, and Kit could not hear what they said to each other, only that Cinda was crying with rage. Then she and Burt had another short conference, Burt kissed the tip of his wife’s nose, and they got into their separate cars.
Cinda drove away first, followed by her husband. They drove neatly and carefully, so as not to attract attention. A shiny new sports utility vehicle driven by a woman like Cinda was just right for this neighborhood, though; she belonged. Nobody would notice them.
Ed doesn’t want a nine-year-old, thought Kit. He wants cash. He’s put himself in a position where he has to have that money. But he’s not going to get it. And Muffin and Sam are in his hands.
She remembered those hands. Fat-fingered, swollen, with those heavy, yellow split nails.
Cinda had driven out of Seven Hills. Kit had not seen the knife. If Cinda had it, she’d set it down when Kit was giggling doggy-style. Kit could not base her decisions on a knife that might not be there, that Cinda might not be able to reach.
“Cinda. If you’re worried about jail now, what kind of jail is it going to be if Ed has snatched a nine-year-old?”
“He wouldn’t do that,” said Cinda. Cinda was shaking. Her hands on the wheel, her chin around her mouth … her entire body was jittering.
“He has done that. We just heard him say so. He has Muffin.” Kit lifted boxes off herself, balancing them on the wide deep dashboard, gripped the armrest, and eased an inch of herself onto the seat. “She’s a little girl, Cinda, you met her. She’s no wider than a bookmark. And she’s somebody else’s kid! This is kidnapping, Cinda! Sam — you could maybe talk your way out of that, because some of the time you did have the mother’s permission. But you don’t have Muffin’s mother’s permission.”
“She’ll be fine,” said Cinda. The Jeep seemed to drive without her, steadying itself against her unsteady hands.
“We have to call the police, Cinda, so they can go and get Muffin and Sam safely back. You heard Ed’s voice. He wants his fifty thousand so much that he is not sane.”
Cinda threw her car phone out the window.
Okay, thought Kit, so we won’t call the police. She said, “Cinda, how about we go where Ed is waiting and pay him the rest of his money?”
“We don’t have the fifty thousand,” Cinda screamed in fear and fury. “Besides, we paid him the first ten. He’s lying. It’s forty thousand.”
They drove on. Kit wondered where they were going. Did Cinda have a plan? Had she and Burt thought of a place to go, an intelligent thing to do? Were they meeting Ed, with or without the forty or fifty K? Or were they on the run now, shrugging about the fates of Muffin and Sam? “Where is Ed?” asked Kit.
“Forget it. I’m not telling you anything.”
Kit located her confessional voice. Her voice that blamed herself. Kit did not often use this voice, but of course she heard it all the time on talk shows. “I’ve been so stupid today,” she said sorrowfully. “It started with Dusty. Dusty never changes. She’s stupid all the way through, and even though I know that, today I believed she was different. So I did stupid things. I did a hundred stupid things. And I don’t know how come Muffin’s older brother isn’t with Muffin, but whatever happened makes Rowen stupid, too. Now we have a chance to get smart, Cinda, and we have to take it.”
“I am smart!” wailed Cinda. “Don’t you bracket me with Dusty! I’m brilliant. Burt and I are smarter than anybody. Out in Silicon Valley, in all those new software companies, people are becoming millionaires every day just because they showed up at the right time! And Burt and I are smarter than they are, and yet we couldn’t get ahead. So we came up with the most brilliant plan.” She actually turned toward Kit with a smile. “You see,” said Cinda. “Burt and I created a masterpiece. I wrote the programs. Very, very sophisticated programming.” Cinda nodded with genuine pride. “The way it worked was, and of course I’m simplifying this for you, the stupid customer would stand there getting mad at technology for not giving him his hundred dollars in twenties, and meanwhile, we lift all his bank card information.” She was driving easily now, enjoying the tasks of the road: the signaling, lane changing, mirror checking. “We put fake ATMs in six states!” she bragged. “Then Dusty and I would go to real ATMs and take cash out of the accounts.”
Kit imagined Cinda’s mind exploring once again the programming that had made this scam possible. But Cinda would not refer to it as a scam. Cinda would not admit she was nothing but a purse snatcher, a wallet lifter. Cinda would not picture some poor exhausted woman in her sixties who’d worked all day on her feet at a tough job, and went to the ATM to get cash for groceries — and her account was empty.
You are a common thief, thought Kit.
This was the woman who would have brought up Sam!
Careful not to use the police word, Kit said, “But the authorities caught on?”
“Yes! We were so close. Everything was running perfectly. But the other day, we got to our best mall, with the highest traffic, and the police had our ATM staked out.” She shook her head. “We spotted them, of course. They’re not very smart.”
“And the house where we brought the baby — you were leaving it?”
“We looked for that house for so long! It was such a nice house.” Cinda seemed pleased by house-hunting memories, like an ordinary woman who’d been comparing kitchens. “It’s close to several states. We can hit Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts in only a two-hour drive. I even checked the schools in that district, they’re excellent, and then Dusty and Ed panicked because we weren’t recovering as much cash as we expected to. You should never work with stupid people. They just don’t understand that when a business is beginning, there are glitches. We would have paid them eventually.”
Kit made noises of sympathy. Cinda and Burt would have had to pay Dusty and Ed eventually, or eventually Dusty and Ed would have turned them in.
Or maybe not!
What was Dusty’s role in this?
Kit heard her father’s description again: Dusty’s a manipulative woman, extraordinarily selfish.
If Dusty had been going with Cinda to use the victim’s bank cards, Dusty was a common thief, too. Kit thought Dusty would have found it rather entertaining, like shopping; and would have regarded the card owners as no more important than the dolls on her shelf. What mattered was Dusty’s space, and Dusty’s self.
Dusty had probably treated this as her own delightful Wheel of Fortune, without considering that one of these spins, she might lose a turn. Well, they had lost. Big-time.
And Muffin and Sam?
Had they also lost?
How was she going to save them?
Cinda maneuvered through traffic, passing fast and efficiently, darting from lane to lane. Wherever she was going, she was going to get the
re fast.
Kit felt her way through the arithmetic of Cinda’s sophisticated programming. In elementary school Kit had loved word problems, and their little arithmetic people who were real to Kit, and whose lives she used to worry about. (If Josh and Suzette are going to Grandmother’s house, and it’s 75 miles away, and Josh drives 25 miles an hour and Suzette drives 50 miles an hour, and they both leave at 1:30, when will each child arrive at Grandmother’s?) Clearly, Josh was weird. No teenage boy under any circumstance drove 25 miles an hour. No teenage boy would permit his sister Suzette to get there first. Poor Grandmother would have to stand in the door wringing her hands, wondering if Josh had had an accident.
She had to get Cinda bragging again. Had to get Cinda talking again. Every word of information she could glean might help her find out where Ed had Sam and Muffin.
“But Cinda,” said Kit, multiplying in her head, “it must have cost a fortune to manufacture a fake ATM so perfect in appearance that nobody questioned it! You had to pay to have it designed and machined and shipped. It must have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to get the scheme up and going. You must have spent months on it when you weren’t earning a salary. And phone lines and I don’t even know enough to know what else. Say you already spent two hundred thousand dollars, and you get a hundred each time you steal; you’d have to hit real ATMs with your fake cards two thousand times just to get back the money you already spent! If you did ten a day, it would take you two hundred days. And every single time you faked it, you’d be committing a crime and somebody might spot you. Your luck isn’t going to hold two thousand times in a row!”
Cinda gave her a junior high school glare; as if Cinda were not thirty, but fourteen. It was eerie to see a kid’s sneer on a face twice Kit’s age.
I’m telling her she’s stupid, thought Kit, when the thing that matters most to Cinda is being smart. “However,” said Kit quickly, “I’m sure that once the glitches worked out you would make a fortune. And then you decided you wanted a baby. So you’d have this sweet little family —”