“How do you know about that?” Zack asks.
Foolish question. Steadman knows everything, and he’s only five.
Steadman looks worried. “I think someone is ready to steal Joey.”
I don’t even know who Joey is. But I’m feeling such relief over finding Steadman without a gag and blindfold that I’m willing to let Zack do the inquisition.
“All right,” Zack says. “Who’s—”
Steadman doesn’t let him finish. “You don’t even know your new baby brother?”
Zack slaps his forehead. “What makes you think . . . ?” he begins, but Steadman isn’t paying attention. He’s feeding gummy bears to Fred. That’s all the information we’re going to get out of him.
So, holding on to a branch overhead to steady myself, I check out the whole of Newfield. I see Becca at the town round. She’s racing along, heading straight for the bench donated by the town fathers.
“Go, girl!” I hear her yell to herself.
She raises one leg, and then the other . . .
She’s up, but not over.
Her feet catch on the top of the bench, bending like noodles. She hangs there for a second, then disappears into the sticker bushes behind the bench.
Behind her, some kid, with a mop of dark hair and a pair of knees like cantaloupes on toothpick legs, tries the same thing. We hear him yell as he lands headfirst in the sticker bushes with Becca.
I turn. Bradley the Bully, muscles bulging, is coming out of Vinny’s Vegetables and Much More.
Wait a minute. I nudge Zack. “Someone’s walking up the driveway of the used-to-be-empty house.”
“Get a look at that guy,” Steadman says. “Huge.”
I lean forward. The platform shakes. But the guy has disappeared inside the house.
Next to me, Steadman is pulling on a rope.
Where did that come from? Something’s attached to it.
I lean out an inch.
It’s a basket.
“Now what?” I ask.
“Simple,” Steadman replies, and yells, “Vestibulia!”
Before our eyes, Fred clambers over us and into the basket.
“You don’t think he climbed up here all by himself?” Steadman says, as if we’re the five-year-olds.
Steadman lowers the basket. It’s a good thing Fred weighs only four or five pounds. The basket bangs against the tree all the way down. Fred looks terrified.
“Ecobeko!” Steadman yells down as Fred reaches the ground.
“That means two things,” Steadman says. “ ‘Good dog,’ and ‘Don’t move an inch until I get there.’ ” With that, he climbs down out of the tower. We watch him carefully, every step, until he and Fred reach the house and march inside.
Safe!
At that moment, there’s a huge crash, almost like an explosion, that comes from the direction of the used-to-be-empty house.
Chapter 11
“Something’s going on over there,” Zack says. We climb down the swaying tree like a pair of monkeys heading for a banana festival and stop short at the end of the weedy driveway. The junk-o car is gone, which is a good sign for us.
Still, we try for an invisible look. We scrunch our heads into our necks, bending over to minimize ourselves as targets. Then we sidle up to the house. The shades are down to the sills; not a slit of light shows through.
We trot around the entire house; it’s closed tight as a clam. Here’s a criminal who doesn’t want the world to know what he’s doing. What is he doing, anyway? Blowing up his victims?
We spot the cellar stairs. That’s probably where the action is.
We start down the worst steps anyone could imagine. Old leaves are gunked up in piles.
And is that . . .
“A mouse,” Zack says. “Dead as a doornail.”
We jump over the step, just missing the poor guy’s tail.
There’s no shade on the cellar window. We give each other a high five . . .
. . . and peer in.
It’s dark as a tomb.
“That’s where he keeps his victims,” Zack says. “No doubt about it.” He reaches out to try the doorknob.
“Don’t even think about it,” I begin, but I never get to finish.
Yeow!
The kidnapper crouches over a table near the window. He has a saw in his hand, but we can’t see what he’s amputating.
His hair hangs down over his eyes, but you can still get a look at them. Blazing eyes like the ax killer in He’s After You, Tuesday night, midnight, which we’re not allowed to watch.
The napper looks up. “Hey!” he yells.
We don’t answer. I’m paralyzed, my tongue glued to the top of my mouth.
And there’s the explosion again. It’s the junk-o car coming up the driveway.
We take off. We don’t even worry about stepping on the mouse corpse. We keep going at a hundred miles an hour, around the car, across the street, and sink down in Fred’s oasis, trying to catch our breath.
“That was a close one,” Zack says after a minute. “The kidnapper was two inches away from us. No wonder he wants a million bucks ransom. The first thing he needs is a new car.”
I nod absently. “Was that a kid in the basement?”
Zack makes a Jell-O face. “A dangerous accomplice.”
So now it’s two against two. I try not to think of how pathetic that is. Zack and I are like a pair of ants looking up at gigantic shoes coming down, ready to stamp us out.
We sit there thinking. “Maybe we’d better find out Yulefski’s third clue,” I say. “We’ll have to get our evidence all set before we go to the police.”
Zack nods, and we’re off looking for Yulefski. She’s not hard to find. She’s curled up on her front steps, reading a book. It must weigh a thousand pounds.
“The clue?” Zack asks, wasting no time.
Sarah closes her book. “I almost saw the kidnapper’s hand. Well, maybe a finger or two.”
“What about the rest? The face, for example?” I sound like Great Detective Mysteries, off the air now.
She waves her own hand impatiently. “I told you I was in the beef jerky aisle; the kidnapper was in cleavers.” The book slides out of her lap and lands on the step. Make the Best of Your Beauty.
Sheesh!
“The kidnapper dropped a cleaver or something,” she says. “I bent down. I could just see the edge before a hand snaked out and grabbed it.”
“That’s it?” Zack says. He’s furious.
She looks up at a squirrel darting around in a tree.
“Focus,” Zack says.
“There was something about the fingers.”
We lean forward. She leans back.
“Chopped off?” I ask.
“Giant sized?” Zack asks.
“Wearing a watch?” I add.
She holds up her book. “That’s the thing. I can’t remember.” She raises her shoulders. “I’m thinking about it. I’ll let you know as soon as I . . .”
I can’t believe it.
We don’t wait to hear the rest. It’s time to check out the ransom note.
Chapter 12
We go back into the house, stopping to scoop up a lonely worm and drop it into the farm with its buddies. We drop in a handful of dirt, too. Worms are crazy about dirt. We pass Nana, who’s stirring some kind of brownish pudding in a pot, and Steadman, who’s asleep under the kitchen table.
Nana glances over her shoulder and smiles at us. “Your father called. Things are coming along. Maizie will be born soon.”
William stands behind her, painting the tabletop a violent shade of green. Wait until Pop sees it.
William squints over at Nana. His entire face is spattered with green polka dots. “It’ll be a boy,” he says. “We’ll name him Leonardo, after that artist.”
Sheesh.
Even Nana looks dazed.
Steadman’s awake now. He follows us up the stairs and down the hall to our bedroom. “I’m teaching Fred to
walk on two legs,” he says.
“Great,” Zack says absently.
“Hey,” a voice whispers as we pass Linny’s room.
I see a long, skinny braid, almost like the mouse tail on the used-to-be-empty cellar steps. It snakes out from under her bed.
“Don’t worry,” I tell her. “We’re on the case.”
But we have no time for Linny. “Great hiding place,” Zack says, and we keep going.
As we reach the top step, there’s a huge bang. We stop dead in our tracks. This time we know where it’s coming from. We dive over to the window.
The beat-up car is pulling out of the weedy driveway, muffler dragging, sending up sparks as it zigzags down the street.
In back of us, Steadman yells something like “Lumbacomba!” Fred hauls himself up on his front two legs and takes a couple of steps. “Notobado,” Steadman says, and peels off into his bedroom.
Zack and I close our own door and sit against it. This is a moment for privacy. We can get down to business.
I turn my pockets inside out. A hundred bite-sized pieces of paper drift onto the floor. Most of them are covered with burned cheese. We’ll have to put the whole thing together like a surgeon sewing on a head or a leg.
We fiddle with the papers, pushing them around on the floor, trying to make sense of them.
There’s a capital L: Linny, of course. And more than one S. Could it be Steadman?
Sure.
But here’s something else. Zack gets a whole sentence together. Almost, anyway.
WANT TO LOOK. . .
“Like the son of Frankenstein,” Zack mumbles.
“Yes. Friday night, nine o’clock. Taking a lizard and turning it into . . .”
Zack and I stare at each other, horrified. Suppose the kidnapper wants to turn Linny into a lizard?
“If we got her back,” Zack says, “she’d have to live with the worms and eat paper and lettuce leaves.”
“Ridiculous,” Sister Appolonia would say.
Sister Appolonia! That reminds me: three books in three days! Three essays!
I squint up. “Frog and Toad changed my life. I am now interested in aquatic wildlife.”
Zack glances over at me. “You’re in sixth grade, Hunter. Sixth!”
“We’ll have to pick up some books at the library,” I say. “Skinny as possible.”
“Didn’t we do that in the beginning of the summer?”
Right. Whatever happened to them? Mrs. Wu is going to have a fit; they’ll be overdue about two months’ worth. And we don’t even have enough life savings for the overdue fines.
There’s no hope for it. We’ll have to (a) find them or (b) face Mrs. Wu at the library for another pile. I’m wrung out just thinking about it.
I lean forward, looking at the rows of words Zack is arranging.
What pops up is the word KILL.
This is worse than kidnapping. Much worse.
But wait. Arrange some letters differently, and you get cell. . . And another few: others. “Others in the cellar?” I yell. A chill runs through me, even though it’s about ninety-eight degrees in the bedroom.
“We have to get down into the cellar of the used-to-be-empty house,” Zack says. “Free those victims before . . .” He runs his finger across his throat.
I shake my head. I can barely go down into our own cellar with that maybe-alligator lumbering around in the dark.
“This is the perfect opportunity,” Zack says. “We know the kidnapper isn’t there. He’s just driven off in that piece of junk.”
“Suppose he comes back,” I begin.
Zack puts on an irritable face. “You heard the sound of that car. Don’t you think we’ll know when he pulls into the driveway?”
“And what about the accomplice?”
“Two against one,” Zack says.
We pass Linny’s room again. I don’t even see her braid. Then we head across the street to the empty house and maybe the end of us.
Chapter 13
We go straight to the back of the used-to-be-empty house and peer down the cellar stairs. We know what we’re doing now. We avoid the mouse corpse and peer in the window.
Yes, there’s the table and the saw hanging next to it.
Zack turns the handle. The door swings open.
“That’s trespassing,” I say. “We can’t go all the way in.”
Zack nods. “It’s kind of a surprise, though. If we can get in, why can’t the victims get out?”
“They might be handcuffed,” I say. “Or foot-cuffed.”
I shield my eyes against the cellar darkness. What do I see? Boxes. Shelves with books and papers piled high.
I lean in a little farther. I don’t see the step in front of me until it’s too late. Oof! I’m down on the cement floor, setting off a gong that’s so loud my ears ring.
I sprawl there, frozen, trespassing. Next to me, Zack is frozen, too. The whole neighborhood probably heard that.
“A bell,” Zack whispers from the steps. “Just a bell. A huge bell. Nothing to be afraid of.”
I’m afraid. I’m definitely afraid.
We hear a creak upstairs, over our heads. And then there’s another.
“Someone’s up there,” Zack says. “Get up. We have to get out.”
I peer at the narrow stairs leading to the killer’s lair. It’s a repeat of Nest of Aliens, Wednesday afternoon, four o’clock.
The door opens and here comes the kidnapper.
I’m stuck. Why can’t I move?
My T-shirt is caught in the door, my ankle in the bell rope. I kick my leg free and grab the edge of the shirt, pulling it almost free. A huge chunk of it is still imprisoned inside.
The kidnapper clumps down the stairs.
Poor Mom. Zack and I will be gone forever. And there’re still Steadman and Linny to worry about.
Zack pulls me, yanks me by the hair, the neck, wherever he can reach.
I’m scrambling backward. I see the dangerous accomplice looking down.
He yells. I yell. And then I’m free. Zack and I race down the weedy driveway as I hold what’s left of my T-shirt together. We don’t stop until we’ve gone all the way to the end of the street.
We sink down in the alleyway between the library and Vinny’s Vegetables and Much More. Next door, Yulefski is bent over backward, heading up the library steps. She’s holding a pile of books that go from under her chin to her knees. No wonder Sister Appolonia thinks she’s a star.
“Wasn’t there a book we read a long time ago?” I snap my fingers. “Maybe we could use that for a report. You know, it was about three animals who got lost. One was a dog, one was a tiger, maybe. Or was it an antelope? Something like that.”
“A cat,” Zack says. “And we saw it in a play. The whole school saw it. Sister Appolonia loved it.”
I raise my shoulders in the air. We’ll really have to read.
“No more than seventy pages,” Zack says.
“Fifty,” I say, and we haul ourselves up the stone steps and into the library.
Mrs. Wu is at the desk, talking to someone about old cars. A huge someone with hair the color of Nana’s pudding.
From the back, he looks familiar. He turns, but I don’t have time for more than a quick look. Zack is dragging me away, down the aisle, around the corner, into the biography section.
He leans against the bookshelves. “Did you see?” He sounds as if he’s strangling.
And then it comes to me. Talking to Mrs. Wu, standing right out in the open, is the kidnapper. I look around. No, the accomplice isn’t there. He’s still in the used-to-be-empty house guarding victims.
“Oh, the brazenness,” Zack says. That’s Sister Appolonia’s favorite word.
We hear those footsteps, clunk, clunk. He’s in the next aisle.
Zack leans forward into the shelf. About twenty books crash through to the other side, probably landing on the kidnapper’s foot.
It doesn’t bother the kidnapper. He’s talking to
someone. “Are you here all by yourself?” he asks.
That’s the most dangerous thing I can imagine a kidnapper asking.
I peer forward, but I can only see feet: the kidnapper’s, probably size 100 workman type, and the other, a little kid’s sneakers. They look familiar, almost like my old ones.
Zack is clutching me, but I’m trying to see. Yes, they’re really my sneakers. I recognize the hole in the toe. They’re the ones . . .
The ones . . .
“I’m looking for my brothers,” the little kid says. “We’re on the trail of a kidnapper.”
Steadman! He’s crossed Murdock Avenue by himself, the busiest street in town, and now he’s having a conversation with the most dangerous man on the East Coast.
“My dog’s outside,” Steadman goes on. “He’s not allowed in the library.”
“What kind of a dog?” the man says.
“Pretty vicious. He gave my sister’s friend, Becca, a bite she’ll never forget. I’m the only one who knows how to handle him.”
Zack and I stare at each other, making motions. What to do?
We have to be brave. We have to act fast. We take a deep breath; then we march around the side of the book stacks to confront the kidnapper and pull Steadman away before it’s too late.
And that’s almost what we do. We don’t confront the kidnapper, we don’t even look at him. We grab Steadman, pick up a couple of books that are lying on the floor, and head out.
“See you,” Steadman says to the kidnapper.
And then somehow I feel courage welling up in my chest. “I know what you’re up to,” I call back over my shoulder. “But we’re watching you.”
We don’t wait to hear what the guy says. It’s only two steps to the door.
But Mrs. Wu is tapping her fingers on her desk. “The books,” she says.
I look down at the pile in my arms. I don’t even know what I’m doing with them.
Mrs. Wu is frowning. As Sister Appolonia would say, she’s a no-nonsense person. She looks at us over her glasses. “You have to sign them out.”
Sheesh. As if we’d steal these babies. They weigh as much as I do.
I put the pile on her desk. I look over my shoulder to see if the kidnapper is coming, but he’s nowhere in sight.