Best Kept Secret

  When the morning ended at last and the fourth graders filed through the halls to the lunchroom, Francie and Kaycee claimed seats at the end of a long table.

  “We carved pumpkins last night,” Francie said as she pulled an apple from her bag. “Matthew’s pumpkin is a monster, Dana’s is a cat, and mine is a regular jack-o’-lantern. Like from Charlie Brown, with triangle eyes and a grin with missing teeth. Then we roasted the pumpkin seeds and Dana’s going to use them the next time she makes granola.”

  “I love Halloween,” said Kaycee with a sigh. “How are we ever going to wait until it’s time for trick-or-treating?”

  Francie shook her head. “It’s like waiting for your birthday. Or the last day of school.”

  “Maybe I’ll win an award in the Halloween parade tomorrow. I mean, a real award, not one that says, Best Witch, when you’re the only witch in the parade, or even worse, Nice Try! I want a blue ribbon for Overall Best Costume.”

  “You could win Best Monster!” called Jed from down the table. “But only if you go as Francie.”

  Francie rolled her eyes at Kaycee, and Kaycee called, “What’s your brilliant costume, Jedediah?”

  “I’m going as Frankenstein.”

  Kaycee’s mouth dropped open. “Seriously? Again? Isn’t it time to try something new? Or do you just like dressing up as someone smarter than you?”

  Jed took a large bite of his sandwich, chewed it, and turned to Kaycee and Francie, his mouth open wide. “Lookie!”

  “Ew! Oh, disgusting!” cried Francie.

  “Ignore, ignore,” said Kaycee under her breath. “Let’s go outside.”

  The girls ran for the swings, where they sat side by side, trailing back and forth, their minds on pumpkins and candy bars and parades.

  “So here’s the plan,” said Francie. “You come over to my house at six o’clock tomorrow. It’ll be dark by then. We’ll go next door and get Amy and trick-or-treat in our neighborhood first. Then we’ll get one of our parents to drive us over to your neighborhood and we’ll keep going.”

  “Hey, where is Amy?” Kaycee asked suddenly. “I haven’t seen her today.”

  “She’s home with a cold. But her mother promised she could go with us tomorrow.”

  Francie sat on the swing and planned the rationing of her Halloween candy. With any luck, she could make it last until after Thanksgiving. She would separate all the candy bars first and put them in a bag. Then she would —

  “Francie, Francie, Francie! Not wearing underpantsies!”

  Francie glanced at the monkey bars, where Jed and Antoine were hanging upside down, chanting in unison. “You know,” she said to Kaycee, “that used to bother me, but now I hardly hear it. They just sound like two annoying insects.”

  “Insects you’d want to swat,” added Kaycee. She clapped her hands together and pantomimed wiping them off on her jeans. “Nice try, boys,” she called over her shoulder as she and Francie slid off the swings.

  When school finally dragged to an end that day, Francie shot up from her seat, grabbed her books and jacket, and ran out of school. For a moment, she stood uncertainly on the front lawn. She wasn’t used to walking home without Amy. Not that she didn’t know the way. Of course she knew the way. She’d been walking to school since kindergarten. She just wasn’t used to walking alone.

  She buttoned her jacket, hefted her book bag into her arms, and set out for Vandeventer Avenue. At first, she walked between other groups of kids on their way home. Then, one by one, the groups veered off onto side streets. Francie was vaguely aware that Jed was somewhere behind her, but she refused to turn around and look at him. She didn’t want to give him the satisfaction.

  She reached a corner and realized that she was now nearly alone on the street. But she had only one more corner to turn, then three more blocks, and she’d be on Vandeventer.

  Francie envisioned her costume again. She thought of her wig and the sparkly white belt she and Matthew had worked on. As she was picturing the very tight pants she planned to wear, she became aware that a car, a black station wagon, was driving along beside her, moving very slowly.

  She turned to look at the car. A man was at the wheel. He pulled the car to a stop, leaned across the passenger seat, rolled down the window, and said, “Hey, there!”

  Francie paused. She pointed to herself. “Me?”

  The man grinned at her. He was handsome and young, with neat brown hair that curled just a little around his ears, and green eyes that twinkled like Mr. Friedman’s did when he told Francie a joke. But something about his smile made Francie take a step away from the car. It was as if an alligator were smiling at her.

  “Of course I mean you!” the man said, widening his grin. “Your mom sent me to pick you up. She said she didn’t want you walking home from school alone.”

  Francie stepped back to the car. She and Dana and Matthew had had a conversation at breakfast that morning about this very subject. Since Amy would be absent, Matthew had planned to walk Francie to school and then run an errand before he went to work. But Francie had begged to be allowed to walk home by herself, and her parents had finally consented.

  Now she wondered if her mother had changed her mind.

  “My mom called you?” she asked.

  “Yup. So why don’t you come on and get in the car? You can meet my puppy,” the man added. He nodded toward the back, and when Francie cupped her hands and peered through the window, she could see a small black puppy — maybe a Lab? — tumbling across the seat with a rubber fireplug in its mouth.

  The man laughed. “His name is Bubbles.”

  Still, Francie hesitated. If Dana had changed her mind, she would have called the school and sent a message to Mr. Apwell, right? Francie was stepping away from the car again when the man’s hand shot through the open front window and grabbed her wrist.

  Francie gasped.

  The man was strong, stronger than Francie could have imagined, and he jerked her against the side of the car.

  Francie was struggling to pull away when, from somewhere behind her, she heard a shout. “Hey! Francie Goldberg!” This was followed by a laugh. And then she heard Jed chant, “Francie, Francie, Francie! Not wearing underpantsies!”

  “Jed!” Francie shrieked, but he was already running off, trying to catch up with Antoine. It didn’t matter. The man, startled, had loosened his grip, and Francie broke away from him.

  A car turned onto the street then. Francie sucked in air, ready to scream, but no sound came out.

  “So, your name is Francie Goldberg,” said the man softly, glancing at the car. “That’s a nice name. Francie Goldberg.” He slid back to his spot behind the wheel and offered Francie another of his grins. Then he licked his lips. “Francie — Francie Goldberg,” he sang. “Maybe you don’t tell anyone what just happened here and I won’t come find you.” He drove off, smiling.

  Francie stood on the sidewalk and watched the station wagon. This was exactly what her parents had been afraid of — that something would happen to her while she was on her own. She’d been given her independence and look what had happened.

  Francie wanted to run, but her legs wouldn’t move. She felt as if she were in the dream she sometimes had, in which she was lost in a nighttime forest and could hear something large crashing through the underbrush — but when she tried to run from whatever it was, her legs wouldn’t work. She would wake up gasping, heart pounding.

  Now, as she stood rooted to the sidewalk, her breath began to come fast until she was gulping air. The man knew her name. He could find her if he knew her name. It wouldn’t be difficult. He could figure out what school she went to as well. There was only one elementary school in the neighborhood. He could wait and watch for her. He could follow her. Or he could find her at her home.

  Just as bad, Francie had watched enough scary movies on television to know that she knew too much about the man. She could describe him. She could describe his car. Francie wanted to run after him and shout, “I w
on’t say anything! I promise!”

  But the car had disappeared from sight.

  Francie thought of the man repeating her name. She tried to shake the image and the words from her head, and she began to run. But as her feet pounded the sidewalk, she heard the man’s voice over and over again: “Francie Goldberg. That’s a nice name. Francie Goldberg. That’s a nice name.”

  Francie ran until she came to an intersection near her house, an intersection so big that a crossing guard was stationed there. She paused, out of breath, holding back tears.

  “Everything all right?” the guard asked her.

  Francie nodded. “Yup. I’m okay.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yes.” Francie stopped herself from adding, “Leave me alone.”

  The guard waved her across the street and, a block later, Francie turned down Vandeventer. She paused and looked behind her to make sure the man wasn’t following her, but saw only an aging blue Volkswagen bus and the little yellow car that belonged to the Newcomers.

  Heart pounding, Francie ran down her street. She passed the Foxes’ house and saw Amy at her bedroom window, waving to her. Francie lowered her head, picked up her pace, and flew across the lawn, bursting through her front door. Kaycee’s mother and Dana were seated on the living room couch, drinking coffee.

  “Francie! My goodness, is something wrong?” asked Dana. She set down her cup.

  “No! Nothing!” Francie threw her book bag on the floor and ran up the stairs to her room. The man’s face swam in front of her eyes. She wanted to take a bath, to wash the man away — this man who knew her name.

  Behind her, she heard startled laughter and her mother’s voice: “She’s already becoming a teenager!”

  Francie slammed her door shut and threw herself on the bed. She felt tears again, but before she allowed them to flow, she leaped to her feet once more and looked out her window at Vandeventer. She checked the cars on the street below. No black station wagons.

  She lay down, pillow over her head, and tried to slow her breathing, but she eventually crept to her window again to check for black cars.

  Francie checked the street fourteen times and took two baths before Dana called her for dinner.

  Francie’s morning routine — she liked routines — had changed in the past two weeks. Now it involved peeping through a gap in her curtains and looking down at Vandeventer in the early morning quiet exactly five times between when she first woke up and when she was finally dressed and ready to go downstairs. Even though she had not seen the black station wagon, not since that horrible day two weeks earlier, she still expected it to appear at any time. How long, she wondered, might it take for the man to find out where she lived? (“Francie — Francie Goldberg.”)

  Francie had tried to celebrate Halloween — to put on her costume and march in the parade at school, to trick-or-treat with Kaycee and Amy — while pretending that nothing was wrong. But soon everyone could tell that something was very wrong.

  “You didn’t sort your candy yet?” Amy had asked on the day after Halloween, when she’d spotted Francie’s full bag of candy inside her closet, where she’d left it at the end of an uninspired night of trick-or-treating.

  “You’ve barely eaten a thing in two days,” Dana had said as she’d watched her daughter pick her way through another dinner that night. “Are you sure you’re feeling all right?”

  “Francie, how come you don’t talk to me?” Kaycee had asked, lip trembling, on Friday morning as they’d entered school. “Did I do something wrong? Are we having a fight? Please tell me what I did.”

  “Francie? Any reason you didn’t hand in your homework?” Mr. Apwell had asked her a few minutes later. “You didn’t hand in yesterday’s work either.”

  She’d shaken her head. “I don’t know,” she’d muttered.

  The truth was that, by Friday, Francie had actually been starting to feel just the teensiest bit better. There had been no sign of the car or the man or Bubbles. Not on Vandeventer and not anywhere on her route home from school.

  Then had come the Friday night news.

  Francie and her parents had settled themselves in front of the television in the living room after supper. Matthew had tuned the set to NBC, and Dana had exclaimed, “Hey, this story is from Princeton! Look — ‘Developing story in Princeton, New Jersey.’ ”

  Francie had leaned forward in her chair, breath catching in her chest. That afternoon, a girl in Princeton, Erin Mulligan, a third grader at Riverside Elementary, had been abducted on her way home from school. She’d been walking by herself when two of her classmates, lagging behind, had spotted her getting into a car that pulled up alongside her.

  “She just got right in the car!” one of the girls told a newscaster. “Like she knew the driver. We couldn’t see who was driving, but we thought it was her mother.”

  The TV camera then focused on a reporter, a young woman standing on a street corner in a Princeton neighborhood, a small home lit up brightly behind her, police cruisers jamming the driveway.

  “Now,” said the reporter, “it’s been made abundantly clear that the driver of the car was not Erin’s mother, but an abductor. Mrs. Mulligan was at her house, waiting for Erin to come home from school. When Erin was an hour late, her mother began phoning her friends, and that was when she learned about the car. The police are calling this a kidnapping. According to the witnesses, the abductor was driving a black station wagon. If anyone has —”

  Matthew had switched off the TV, glancing at Francie. “Pretty scary, huh?”

  Francie nodded.

  “You know better than to get in a car with a stranger, don’t you? We’ve talked about this.”

  Another nod. Then Francie had gotten to her feet and crept upstairs to her room. She’d sat down very, very carefully on her bed, for some reason not wanting to wrinkle the spread. She’d stared at the closed curtains in front of her windows. If, she thought, she had told her parents what had happened to her on Tuesday — about the man and the car and Bubbles — maybe Erin would be at home with her own parents this very moment. But Francie had been afraid to tell. The man had made her feel scared. He had threatened her. He knew her name. He said he might come after her. Besides, if Francie told now, her parents would be angry that she hadn’t told earlier. Very angry. And what about Erin Mulligan’s parents? How angry would they be?

  Francie had lain down on her bed and fallen asleep, and hadn’t wakened until the morning, when she’d changed her clothes groggily and made her way downstairs to the kitchen. There, she had found Dana and Matthew at the breakfast table, listening to the news on WHWH, the local radio station.

  “What —” Francie had started to ask, but Dana had held her finger to her lips.

  “We’re asking for volunteers,” the newscaster was saying, “to help with search efforts. The police plan to comb the woods and streets of Princeton and surrounding areas for any sign of Erin Mulligan.”

  Dana had switched off the radio then.

  “They haven’t found her?” Francie whispered.

  Dana shook her head.

  “This doesn’t look good,” Matthew added.

  “Don’t say that!” Dana had exclaimed. “There’s always hope. She hasn’t even been missing for twenty-four hours yet.”

  * * *

  The search for Erin — hundreds of volunteers walking through woods and fields, police officers searching houses — had lasted for days. At the end of each day, people would ask one another, “Is there any news? Did anyone find anything?”

  The answer was always no.

  For days, the answer was no.

  Then came the morning of November 12th. Francie got dressed for school. When she was ready to face the day, she parted her curtains, checked the street one final time, satisfied herself that Vandeventer was clear of black station wagons, and made her way downstairs. She entered the kitchen just as her mother was switching off the radio.

  “Well,” said Dana grimly, “it’s ov
er.”

  “What is?” asked Francie. “What’s over?”

  “The search for Erin. They’ve called it off.”

  Francie slid into her place at the table and sat very still, her hands folded in her lap. “Did they find her?” she asked after a moment.

  She saw her mother glance at her father.

  Matthew, who was sitting across from Francie, his hair messy — his eyebrows messy, too, she noticed — said, “No. They called off the search because they don’t think they’re going to find her now. Not alive anyway.”

  “Matthew!” said Dana.

  “Well, it’s the truth. People are going to be talking about it today, and I’d rather Francie hear it from us.” He looked across the table at her. “Do you have any questions about this?”

  Francie couldn’t speak.

  There had been so many moments during the last two weeks when she had almost — almost — told her parents about the man. But she hadn’t been able to bring herself to say a word. The man was a monster. He was a killer, maybe, and he knew Francie’s name. “Maybe you don’t tell anyone what just happened here and I won’t come find you,” he’d said.

  She couldn’t tell on him.

  This morning, the search had ended and Erin hadn’t been found. Francie certainly couldn’t say anything now. It was way, way too late. She would be the girl who could have saved Erin, if only she’d spoken up. She would be almost as horrible as the man.

  Francie straightened her back. She was aware that her parents were waiting for her to answer Matthew’s question. “We have two quizzes today,” she announced. “I studied really hard for them.”

  “I’m sure you did, sweetie,” said Dana, frowning. But then she smiled. “Ready for breakfast?”

  She filled Francie’s plate and Francie cleaned it.

  “You have your appetite back,” Matthew commented.

  “Yes,” said Francie, who hadn’t been hungry at all.

  * * *

  Francie walked to school that morning with Amy, who dawdled and wanted to show her some outfits she’d been designing. But Francie hurried her along. “We don’t want to be late,” she said.