A group of boys, maybe nine or ten of them, were having a frantic conversation in the glow of three sets of headlights.
Aiden experienced a strange moment of jealousy. A bunch of high school kids involved in a wild prank suddenly seemed like the greatest luxury in the world.
I wonder what it feels like to do something for fun, even stupid fun….
The Falconers always seemed to be scratching and clawing for their very lives. Fun never entered the picture anymore.
Breathing a whispered “Good luck” to Abe Jr., who was beginning to doze, Aiden dropped to the ground and began to steal away across the field.
All at once, there was a loud bloop and searchlights blazed in the darkness. Before Aiden had a chance to run, a police car was herding him into a circle with the other boys.
A booted sheriff in a cowboy hat stepped forward, his face grim.
“All right, fellas. Cough up the goat.”
Sheriff Atkin of Alberta County, Virginia, was doing his best to intimidate the goat-nappers into believing they were in real trouble with the law. That was the only way to deal with these high school mischief-makers — to scare them straight. A long uncomfortable night in lockup was enough for most teenagers. They were so terrified of facing their angry parents the next morning that the vast majority left the building law-abiding citizens.
He was having trouble, though, with that one lanky kid with the strange baseball cap. He refused to give even his name.
“Come on, son. I’ll find out sooner or later. Who are you?”
The boy was a clam.
The sheriff turned to the others. “Anyone care to supply the name of this fine, upstanding young man?”
The clam’s partners in crime jammed their hands into their pockets, and hemmed and hawed.
Teenagers! Atkin thought in disgust. They’d rather cut off their tongues than rat one another out.
The silent boy was carrying no wallet, but he had sixty-eight dollars in cash and a Baltimore County Public Library card in his jacket pocket that identified him as Richard Pembleton.
“City boy, huh? What are you doing out here, Richard? Visiting? Who and where?”
No reply.
The sheriff heaved a sigh. “You’ll all be enjoying the hospitality of the county while I get in touch with your parents.” He turned to Richard Pembleton. “And when I find yours, I’m going to make a special point of telling them how pleasant and cooperative you’ve been.”
* * *
The Alberta County sheriff’s office was a long doublewide trailer, set up on concrete blocks. It was in the whistle-stop town of Keyes, the county seat. There was no holding cell large enough for ten people, so Aiden and the other teens were locked in the staff lounge, a small coffee room with a couch, table, chairs, and an adjoining bathroom.
The questions started almost immediately after the door closed.
“How did you get here?” demanded Matt, the driver of the pickup. “Who are you?”
Aiden could still find no words. What the sheriff had taken for stubbornness was actually his pure horror at what had happened to him. Against all odds, he had picked up Meg’s trail, only to get arrested for something he hadn’t done! Yet he couldn’t even claim his innocence, because that would only point out the fact that he didn’t belong. That was far worse than being part of a conspiracy to steal a mascot. Atkin was treating this more as a prank than a crime. But when the sheriff found out his mystery prisoner was a runaway, not a visitor, he’d start to get serious. He might contact the Pembletons of Baltimore County and find out exactly who had Richie’s library card. Sooner or later, the FBI would get wind of it. Then Agent Sorenson would send someone to drag him home in disgrace. And where would that leave Meg?
“Listen,” he said finally, “I’ve got no beef with any of you guys.”
Jason, who had first sounded the warning that Abe Jr.’s disappearance had been discovered, spoke up. “Are you new around here? You don’t go to our school. Are you a spy from Lincoln?”
Matt had to laugh. “Yeah, right. With a forged library card.” He faced Aiden. “My question is what were you doing in that field with us? And why did you let Atkin arrest you for something you had nothing to do with? What are you hiding?”
“Whoa!” The shocked exclamation came from a short, stocky boy whose name was Randy. “That’s why you look familiar! You’re that kid whose sister got kidnapped! Your parents used to be in jail, right? Falconer! You’re Aiden Falconer!”
“Don’t be stupid!” Jason scoffed. “The guy’s name is Richard Somebody.”
“No, it’s not!” Randy insisted. “I saw his picture in the paper a million times! He and his sister had the cops running around in circles for two months! They proved their parents were innocent!” He rounded on Aiden. “What are you doing here, man?”
Aiden was halfway through a stammered denial when he noticed that all eyes were on him now. He couldn’t be sure if the others recognized him, too, but it was clear that Randy’s words made sense to them.
He had been identified.
Aiden thought fast. He could still refuse to admit it, but what would be the point? No, it was time to do something that he and Meg had never tried in all their weeks on the run. It was time to trust someone.
“Please — don’t turn me in. I’m trying to rescue my sister.”
“What — here?”
“I think they’ve taken her somewhere along Route 119. That’s why I stowed away in your truck — for a lift. I know I can find her, but I’ve got to get out of here first.”
They all looked bewildered. “How?” came from half a dozen throats.
“We’re in the police station,” added Matt. “Under arrest.”
Aiden realized that, although he was younger than these boys, he was the one with the life experience. As a fugitive, he had learned that no locked door was stronger than the need to get past it.
“There must be some way out of here,” he mused. “A window? A heating vent? A skylight? Through the basement, maybe?”
Randy looked surprised. “There’s no basement. This whole cop shop is a double trailer up on blocks.”
“A trailer?” The word triggered the memory of Death in Dixie, one of his father’s detective novels. It featured Mac Mulvey’s most ingenious escape. The hero was trapped inside a burning trailer, with the windows boarded up and the doors nailed shut. There was absolutely no way out. But with the walls on fire and the interior filling with smoke, the resourceful Mulvey found one.
“The bathroom!” Aiden exclaimed, and rushed to it, dropping to his knees at the base of the toilet.
“What are you going to do?” wisecracked someone. “Flush yourself out?”
Aiden removed the plastic knobs covering the bolts that held the toilet to the floor. “A trailer has to connect to water and drains,” he narrated absently. “That means it has trapdoors for the pipe hookups. I just need the toilet taken off.”
The teens were bug-eyed.
“Is that how you made monkeys out of the FBI for all that time?” Matt asked. “By doing stuff like this?”
“We did whatever it took to survive,” Aiden grunted, struggling to loosen the bolts with his bare hands. “Just like I’m doing now.”
“You’re never going to budge that without a wrench,” Jason observed.
They searched every drawer, every cupboard, and every surface in the small kitchen. The closest thing to a tool that they found was a bent coffee spoon.
Aiden pointed to a strange device sitting on the microwave. It looked almost like a bowlegged pair of scissors with grooved rubber where the blades should be. “What’s that?”
Matt picked it up and demonstrated. “It’s a Jar-meister. Lots of people have them around here because everybody makes their own preserves. See? It fits all sizes of jars, and you can open them even when the lids are stuck.”
Aiden took the Jar-meister and shrank the ring down to the smallest size. He fitted it over the first
bolt and gave a strong twist. The nut held firm for a moment, and then began to turn. The second bolt was tighter, but even it was no match for the Jar-meister.
Randy and Matt stepped forward and lifted the toilet straight up off the floor and out of the bathroom. Now they could see a large square opening surrounding the drainpipe.
Wasting no time, Aiden stepped down into the hole and stood on the ground below the trailer. It would be a tight squeeze to cram his upper body around the drain and under the floor, but he could make it.
Standing there, visible only from the hips up, he addressed the nine boys he was leaving behind. “Anybody coming with me?”
“What’s the point?” sighed Matt, who looked like he was dying to try it. “Our parents already know we’re here. Besides — Sheriff Atkin and my dad are second cousins.”
Randy stepped forward. “Never mind us. Is there anything we can do to help you?”
“Don’t tell the sheriff who I am,” Aiden said readily. “Put the toilet back and don’t show him how I got out. Let him think he’s chasing a ghost.”
There were more than a few smiles.
“Good luck, man,” said Jason. “I hope you find your sister.”
His back scraped painfully against the edge of the opening as Aiden made himself thin and managed to slither under the floor. It was cold on the ground, and damp and rocky. He rolled onto his belly and crawled forward, his face brushing through ancient cobwebs, thick as drapery. There was garbage under there, too, including broken glass and pulpy newsprint.
Up above, the toilet was pushed back over the opening, shutting out what little light was coming down to him. In the total darkness, a pair of yellow feral eyes burned. Aiden nearly jumped out of his skin, and wriggled faster and harder in the opposite direction. The eyes backed off and disappeared.
When he broke out of the shadow of the trailer into open air, it didn’t become a whole lot brighter. Keyes may have been the county seat, but he saw no more than a few dozen lights at this hour, most of them far away and up into the hills. He got to his feet, but stayed low until he had put some distance between himself and the police station.
A horrible thought occurred to him: I just escaped from the police. I’m a fugitive again. Worse, Sheriff Atkin had his sixty-eight dollars — not to mention Richie’s jacket and his precious Greenville Cubs baseball hat.
If I can’t get that back, I’d better not try to show my face around home again!
It was a light thought, but he realized how very much it applied to him. If he couldn’t find Meg, a return home would mean nothing.
Without his sister, home wouldn’t be home anymore.
At the Falconer home, November 17th, Meg’s twelfth birthday, was impossibly sad. There had been no word of her since the failed rescue. And now even Aiden was gone.
John and Louise Falconer were at their wits’ end. They had not believed anything could be worse than serving prison time. But this tragedy that had befallen their children outstripped everything. And the two of them — brilliant, talented, educated — were powerless to change their family’s fate.
They had decided to stand aside and let Sorenson handle the case. Now they weren’t sure that had been the right decision. The man was so obsessed with rules and regulations that he was incapable of real police work. He refused to send one of his agents to search for Aiden. Going by the book, he was heading up the Margaret Falconer case, not the Aiden Falconer case. It had been Harris, the family’s enemy, who had gone after their son.
So who should they trust? Who should they rely on? Who should they put their faith in?
A Toyota Prius screeched up to the curb in front of the Falconer house. Rufus Sehorn, the Blog Hog, was so excited that he practically flew up the front walk, waving his laptop like a flag.
Louise Falconer ran out to meet him. “Rufus, please tell me you’ve got something!”
“A new picture!” Sehorn confirmed breathlessly. “She’s alive!”
Within minutes, the Falconers, Sehorn, and Agent Sorenson were gathered around the computer, examining the e-mail that had come to www.bloghog.usa.
There was Meg, her hair matted, her face streaked and dirty, holding up a copy of yesterday’s USA Today.
“My poor little girl, what have they done to you?” Louise breathed, heartbroken.
Sehorn put an arm around her shoulder. “I felt that way, too, at first. But it’s just grooming. She isn’t bruised or cut; she hasn’t lost weight; she’s being treated well enough. She’s okay.”
“Okay!” groaned Meg’s father. “She won’t be okay until we get her back!”
The message was right underneath the photo:
THE PRICE IS NOW $3 MILLION
THIS IS YOUR LAST CHANCE
HAVE THE MONEY READY
YOU WILL BE CONTACTED
“Our tech people will trace the e-mail,” said Agent Sorenson briskly.
John Falconer sighed. “I think you’ll find the message bounced all over the world before it came to Rufus. At least, that’s how it was last time.”
“One of them must be a hacker,” Sorenson concluded, “or they’re working with one.”
“It sounds like they’re giving us time to get the money together,” Louise observed, trying to be detached and professional. “The extra million won’t be a problem, will it?”
Sorenson looked haughty. “It is the policy of the U.S. government never to negotiate with or pay ransom to kidnappers.”
Sehorn was confused. “Nobody’s suggesting the money should actually be paid — just used to bait a trap.”
“That was Harris’s strategy,” said Sorenson with stinging sarcasm. “And you see how well it worked out.”
“Wait a minute,” said John Falconer. “You mean we’re not even going to pretend to cooperate with them?”
“Absolutely not,” Sorenson confirmed.
“But” — Louise was horrified — “that’s the only way to draw them out of hiding, and maybe Meg with them! Otherwise we’re just sitting around hoping they’ll get tired of waiting, and let her go!”
Agent Sorenson did not even bother to contradict her.
The Falconers exchanged a look of sheer despair. In that instant, they understood the desperation that had led their son to abandon the safety and comfort of home to pursue shadows.
Sometimes even a wild-goose chase made more sense than doing nothing at all.
The ropes hurt — that’s how tight they were. But Meg’s kidnappers had decided she could not be trusted to be loose in the house. So she sat stiffly upright in a wooden chair, wrists bound behind her, ankles tied to the legs of her seat. It added a whole new dimension to her captivity. If a gaping portal to another universe opened three inches in front of her, she would be powerless to take advantage of it. She could barely move a muscle.
You’re twelve today, she reminded herself. How do you like it so far?
Not much at all, actually. Before, there had always been an escape to plan, a next move to contemplate. Now she was reduced to waiting and praying.
Her current cell was the tiny bedroom at the back of the cabin. It was probably a cinch to escape from here — if a person could move. As things were, it may as well have been Devil’s Island.
She heard the lock release, and the door swung open. There stood Mickey with a paper sack in his hand. He was beaming from ear to ear.
“I’m glad one of us is having a good day,” Meg said sourly.
Undaunted, he tore open the bag to reveal a large chocolate cupcake. Then he struck a long, wooden kitchen match and planted it in the center of the icing. He picked it up and held it in front of her face.
“Make a wish.”
Meg could have cheerfully bitten his hand off. “You know what I wish for.”
“Well, besides that.”
She choked back her anger. Unbelievable! This idiot honestly thought he could make things better — that he could make amends for what he had helped do to her, with a birthday
cupcake!
Then — she would have done almost anything to prevent it — this kidnapper, this criminal, began humming “Happy Birthday.”
“Come on,” she mumbled uncomfortably. “Cut it out.”
He just kept on humming, grinning his goofy grin. And Meg was his captive audience.
At last, the song was over. “Blow,” he invited her.
“No.”
“Come on, blow out the candle.”
“It’s not a candle,” she seethed, “and this isn’t a party!”
He looked so crestfallen, so disappointed, that the atom of humor in this awful situation found her funny bone.
“Fine,” she said, and blew out the match. “I wished for a pony.”
He gazed at her earnestly. “I hope you get one someday.”
She scorched him with a burning look. “Don’t go serious on me. Let’s enjoy our cake.” She watched him break the treat in two. “How am I supposed to eat it? Out of a dog dish?”
In answer, he untied her arms. The comfort of having her hands free was so exhilarating that this really was beginning to feel like a party. And the stale hockey puck of a cupcake tasted like heaven. There was something about chocolate icing — especially that big dollop of it on the end of Mickey’s nose —
She was pointing at it and laughing when the door was flung open, and Spidey stormed in.
“What’s going on here? Why is she untied?”
“Have a heart,” Mickey pleaded. “It’s her birthday.”
“What’s the matter with you?” Spidey roared. “Haven’t you seen enough examples of what a little Houdini she is? When I say she has to be tied up, that means all the time — including birthdays, Christmas, and the Fourth of July!”
“It’s just her hands,” Mickey protested.
“Her hands? She can use her hands to untie the rest of her, you nitwit! Where did we find you — on the bus out of Stupid-town? Do you think we planned to end up in some mountain rat-hole? She should be long gone, and we should be counting our money! The last thing we need is another mess-up from the likes of you!”