The Fugitive Factor

  The man shook his head in disgust. “What were your parents thinking, letting you ride off on that newfangled buzz bomb?”

  The Falconers exchanged a look. What was probably going through their parents’ minds at this moment was a combination of How did this happen to us? and How are we going to survive it? What else was there to think about in prison?

  “Don’t worry about us,” Meg said airily. “We can walk home from here.”

  “Walk, nothing,” the old man said stubbornly. “I’m taking you to the hospital.”

  “But we’re okay,” Aiden protested, alarmed. “Just a few bumps — ”

  “Then the doctor can send you home. Get in the truck.” He opened the driver’s door and climbed inside.

  They hesitated. “Should we run?” whispered Meg.

  Aiden shook his head imperceptibly. “Then he might call the cops.”

  “But what if someone at the hospital recognizes us?”

  “Take it easy. We walk inside, he drives away, we walk back out again.”

  They piled in and the truck backfired to life. Their chauffeur proceeded down the road at eight miles an hour, staring through his cracked windshield with dogged concentration.

  The silence was so uncomfortable that Aiden felt he had to say something. “I hope we’re not taking you out of your way.”

  It opened up the floodgates. “I had to go into town anyway. The Andersons need a new ball cock for their toilet. I’m the handyman hereabouts. The only one, as a matter of fact — Lester Mercure’s the name. That’s like Mercury, but with an ‘e’ instead of a ‘y’ — French, you know….”

  By the time they’d pulled up in front of the small medical center in the town of St. Johnsbury, the Falconers knew much of Lester Mercure’s life story, plus much of the private business of the “city slickers” who owned the ski condos in the area.

  Aiden opened the passenger door. “Well, thanks for the ride. Uh — we owe you one.”

  The handyman got out of the truck himself and began shepherding them toward Emergency. “I’m coming in there with you.”

  “But what about the Andersons’ toilet?” blurted Meg.

  “I saw what happened,” the old man said stubbornly. “The doctor might need to talk to me.”

  Aiden and Meg had no choice but to allow themselves to be escorted inside to the check-in desk. Aiden gave his name as Gary Donovan — one of his fellow inmates at Sunnydale Farm, the juvenile detention facility he and his sister had escaped from. Meg used another Sunnydale identity, Belinda Gustafson, the toughest, meanest girl in the dormitory. It made sense to pretend they were unrelated. The police would be looking for a brother and sister.

  And then Lester put his two cents in. “I saw the whole thing,” he told the admitting nurse. “They were riding on this mechanized whatchamacallit, when it tipped over and threw them off the ridge. Darned near scared me to death. I thought I’d be cleaning up the bodies.”

  They took seats in the waiting room among a few other patients. To their dismay, Lester came with them. Meg cast Aiden an agonized look. How would they ever get out of this place under the watchful eye of this well-meaning old bore?

  They waited until Aiden thought he would go insane. Somewhere in this town, buses were departing for Boston, home of Jane Macintosh, who might know where to find Frank Lindenauer. A bus might be leaving at that very moment….

  And what are we doing?

  Sitting in a hospital with Lester Mercure, with an “e,” not a “y.”

  A police officer came into Emergency, and Aiden nearly jumped out of his skin.

  Calm down. He’s just filing a report on some car accident. He isn’t looking for fugitives.

  At long last, a nurse called for Donovan and Gustafson. Lester accompanied them to the open door.

  “Are you family?” the nurse asked him.

  “No, but I witnessed the incident firsthand. Darnedest thing I ever saw. They were riding up a mountain on some kind of cockamamie dune buggy — ”

  “Why don’t you wait in the lounge where you’ll be comfortable?” she suggested, her tone polite but firm.

  Aiden and Meg were pathetically grateful. The nurse escorted them to two separate exam rooms and told them the doctor would be right in.

  Aiden waited a few seconds for her to walk away before running next door. Meg had the same idea, and the two collided in the hall.

  “Let’s blow this Popsicle stand,” urged Meg.

  “Right.”

  They couldn’t leave through the waiting room — Lester would be sitting right there. They walked briskly down the brightly lit corridor, slaloming around medical center employees and rolling equipment carts. Luckily, the place was busy, and the doctors and nurses who rushed to and fro had little time to think about a couple of kids.

  All at once, Meg let out a little gasp and stopped short. Aiden followed the twitch of her gesturing elbow. In the center of a bulletin board plastered with hospital announcements was tacked a blotchy fax with two small photographs.

  Aiden recognized the murky images immediately.

  Our mug shots from Sunnydale!

  They were being hunted — even here, on the opposite end of the state.

  They had to get out of Vermont. But that was putting the cart before the horse. First they had to get out of the hospital.

  They increased their pace, turning left and left again, following the path of the corridor. Although the medical center wasn’t huge, the endless halls were like a maze, with no windows to the outside. Heavy glass doors led to different wards and departments. Aiden’s eyes darted from sign to sign: RADIOLOGY, MATERNITY, INTENSIVE CARE, AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY — where was EXIT?

  “How do you get out of this dump?” Meg hissed.

  Aiden shrugged helplessly. Was that Emergency coming up again?

  Oh, no! We’ve been walking in circles!

  All at once, their nurse stepped out of one of the empty exam rooms, looking around in concern for her young patients.

  Not knowing what else to do, Aiden grabbed Meg by the arm and yanked her through a pair of steel security doors. They felt the heat of the afternoon — they were outside the building. But this was no exit. They were in a narrow loading bay. Two white-coated med techs were climbing into the front of a waiting ambulance, its motor running.

  One of them activated the siren. It resounded like a bomb blast in the confines of the loading bay. The earsplitting sound seemed to jump-start Meg. She ran up, unlatched the rear doors, and leaped aboard.

  Aiden tried to follow her just as the ambulance lurched forward. His hand closed on the metal handle, and he found himself hanging off the back of the accelerating vehicle, floundering on the open door.

  “Meg, help me!”

  She waited for him to swing around and grabbed two fistfuls of his T-shirt. “Let go!” she ordered, and wrestled him inside. They collapsed in a heap on the metal floor.

  The hospital’s access road whipped by as they picked up speed.

  From a kneeling position, Aiden managed to reach out and pull the door shut. “I hope you have a plan.”

  The ambulance swerved around a corner, flinging the two of them against a rack of oxygen tanks. Meg steadied herself against a wall-mounted stretcher. “We’re out, bro!”

  “We’re in a moving ambulance!” Aiden exclaimed.

  She shrugged. “It has to stop eventually.”

  “Yeah, but what if that happens forty miles out in the woods? Then how do we get to a bus station?” Aiden peered out the rear window. The short downtown strip of St. Johnsbury flashed by in the scratched glass.

  All at once, the wail of the siren was replaced by a series of staccato blurps as the ambulance slowed in a cluster of traffic.

  Aiden made a split-second decision. “Jump.”

  He yanked on the hatch and was just about to push it open when he saw the police car. It turned in from the intersection and fell into line right behind them.

  The effo
rt to keep the doors from flying wide open nearly tore his shoulder in two. The cruiser pulled even with them and then passed on the left.

  Aiden knew this might be their last chance. “Now!” He unlatched the doors, and he and Meg bailed out. With another blurp of the siren, the ambulance sprung away, its open hatch rattling. The Falconers hopped up on the sidewalk and looked around furtively. No one was pointing and yelling at them. Their escape had gone unnoticed.

  “Bus station,” murmured Aiden.

  “Right.”

  The walk was nerve-racking. Every glance from a passerby set Aiden’s mind racing. Was that recognition? And what kind of recognition? Did you hear about the two kids who jumped out of an ambulance? Did you hear about the two kids who ran away from the hospital?

  Worst of all, what if somebody connected the two kids from those stories with the two kids who were wanted by police on the other side of the state?

  His imagination conjured up a crowded bus terminal filled with patrolling policemen, prying eyes, and suspicious questions. But the “station” turned out to be a Plexiglas shelter on the far end of town. A disintegrating hand-scrawled cardboard sign declared BUY TICKETS AT OWEN’S.

  Owen’s was the luncheonette across the street. A counterman who concealed a sumo-size potbelly under a greasy white apron presided over ticket sales and “the best chowder in New England.”

  Throughout the transaction, Aiden expected the man to burst out with, Why are you two going to Boston on your own? Where are your parents? What’s the deal here?

  But all he asked them was, “You guys want some french fries to go?”

  The bad news was, the next bus to Boston was the Moonlight Special. It didn’t leave until midnight.

  They split a take-out hamburger and a cup of chowder in the woods behind the bus stop. “One thing about life on the run,” Aiden mumbled as he wolfed down his half. “There’s never time to eat.”

  “Tell me about it,” Meg agreed, polishing off the soup. “We should start the Fugitive Diet. You know, sic the FBI on fat people and see how much weight they lose. We’ll get rich.”

  “Yeah, well, we sure aren’t rich now,” Aiden said glumly. “In Boston, we’re going to have to figure out a way to get our hands on some cash.”

  “Maybe Jane What’s-her-face will lend us some,” Meg suggested hopefully. “She’s our ‘aunt,’ after all.”

  Aiden grimaced. “I’ll be happy if she knows what happened to Frank Lindenauer.”

  “Amen to that.”

  They remained under cover of the woods until nightfall and then moved to a small park beside the bus stop. Just past midnight, they boarded an air-conditioned Greyhound to Boston. Meg sank into a padded seat near the back and closed her eyes.

  “No sleeping,” Aiden ordered.

  “Aw, come on,” she protested. “It’s the Moonlight Special. You’re supposed to sleep.”

  “If the cops stop the bus, we have to be ready to run for it.”

  “The cops think we’re still in Colchester. Nobody knows we’re here.”

  He was adamant. “No sleeping.”

  By the time the bus had left the town limits, both Falconers were dead to the world.

  Agent Emmanuel Harris of the FBI took a sip from the steaming cup and nearly gagged. Ugh! What passed for coffee in these small-town police stations tasted more like raw sewage. Hadn’t these people ever heard of Starbucks?

  Chief Bumgartner of the Colchester PD hooked his thumbs in his pants pockets. “What do you say, Harris? Time to take down the roadblocks?”

  Harris barely had the strength to shake his head. It was nearly three in the morning. Except for a ninety-minute catnap on a too-short cot in one of the holding cells, he’d been going nonstop for forty-eight hours. “It’s too soon.”

  “Can’t be too soon for me,” the chief informed him. “A department our size hasn’t got the manpower for this kind of operation. Unless,” he added, “you bureau hotshots want to send us some extra bodies to work the checkpoints.”

  Harris did his best to fold his six-foot-seven frame into a chair designed for someone half his size. “I wish I could. This case isn’t under FBI jurisdiction. It belongs to Juvenile Corrections.”

  “So what’s the big deal about a couple of kids? Even if their names happen to be Falconer” — Bumgartner’s face turned suddenly urgent — “you don’t think they’re working for their folks, do you? Finishing what their parents started?”

  “No, nothing like that,” Harris said with a sigh.

  How could he ever explain it? That Emmanuel Harris, the hero who had brought to justice the most notorious traitors of the past half century, lay awake nights wondering if the right people were in prison.

  The FBI was certain that John and Louise Falconer were guilty. Harris wished he shared their confidence. And that wasn’t the only thing weighing on his mind.

  If John and Louise Falconer turned out to be innocent, that meant their son and daughter were on the run, risking their lives, thanks to the Bureau’s mistake.

  Thanks to Harris’s mistake.

  “How about twelve more hours?” he bargained. “We’ve got them. I can feel it. How could they get past those roadblocks?”

  One of the younger officers hung up the phone. “Chief, that was Tom Vickers out on Route 3. Says his quad bike is missing.”

  * * *

  The next thing Aiden knew, a hand was shaking him out of a deep sleep.

  “Kid, wake up.”

  With effort, he raised a single heavy eyelid. The driver of the Moonlight Special stood over him. “Boston. Last stop.”

  “Five more minutes,” pleaded a slumbering Meg beside him.

  Aiden squinted out the window at the dimly lit terminal. “What time is it?”

  “Quarter to five,” the driver informed him. He seemed pleased. “We’re twenty minutes early.” He examined them closely. “That’s why there’s nobody here to meet you, right?”

  “Great.” Meg opened a wary eye. “We’re early, and Dad’s always late.”

  Aiden was filled with admiration. Even half asleep, his little sister was right on the ball. “Come on, Belinda,” he told her. “Let’s get some breakfast.”

  They scrambled off the Greyhound and were gone before the driver could comment on their lack of luggage.

  Keeping their faces down, they hurried out of the terminal. A bus station was the last place fugitives should be hanging around. But that left them in a near-deserted inner city in the middle of the night. It was more than a little creepy — concrete jungle, dark streets, shady characters …

  Oh, grow up! Meg scolded herself. After everything that’s happened, getting mugged is the least of our worries!

  She pulled the crumpled paper out of her pocket. “Two-forty East University Street, apartment twenty-three C. I hope Aunt Jane likes an early wake-up call.”

  Aiden frowned. “Where can we find a city map at this hour?”

  “I’ve got a better idea.” With grim determination, Meg strode out into the middle of the road, threw up her arm, and yelled, “Taxi!”

  Almost immediately, a Shamrock cab appeared out of nowhere and pulled up beside her.

  “Where to, kid?”

  “Two-forty East University,” Meg replied. She beckoned to Aiden. “You coming?”

  Reluctantly, he got in beside her. “We’ve only got eighteen dollars!” he hissed. “What if it isn’t enough?”

  She shrugged. “We stole an ATV and drove it off a mountain. Why are you stressing over stiffing a cabdriver a couple of bucks?”

  The ride only cost them twelve. But their relief quickly turned to dismay; 240 East University Street was an enclosed mini-mall in the middle of a long block of seedy storefronts.

  “She lives here?” Meg exclaimed as the cab pulled away.

  The flyspecked glass door was unlocked, but the stores and offices inside were empty and dark. Unit 23C was on the basement level opposite the only establishment that was open
for business — a twenty-four-hour pawnshop.

  Arrow Travel was a tiny agency with a single desk surrounded by posters of Greek islands and Alaskan glaciers. Racks of brochures stood against the back wall.

  Meg was as quick to despair as she was to action. “I must have written the address down wrong! I could strangle myself! That was our only clue!”

  “No, look.” Aiden pointed through the window. On the neat desk sat a brass nameplate: JANE MACINTOSH. “She gave the hotel her work address. She’s a travel agent. This is the right place!”

  Meg had already moved on to the next disaster. Hung around the inside doorknob was a sign: CLOSED UNTIL MONDAY.

  Aiden followed her gaze. “Oh, come on!” he exclaimed in consternation. “Friday hasn’t even started yet. How could they be closed up for the weekend?”

  “It looks like she’s running a one-woman show in there,” Meg concluded. “I guess if she’s the boss and all the employees, she sets the schedule, too.”

  There was an old-fashioned phone booth outside the pawnshop. The directory was dog-eared but still intact. Jane Macintosh was not listed.

  “Why can’t anything ever be easy?” Aiden lamented. “This should be her house, and she’s happy to see us, and Frank Lindenauer is her next-door neighbor!”

  “What are you getting so worked up about?” Meg soothed. “We found her. All we have to do is hang out till Monday and she’ll be here.”

  “We have six bucks in the world, Meg, and no place to sleep. How can we live for three days on six bucks?”

  “We had zero when we ran away from Sunnydale,” his sister reminded him.

  “That was in the middle of a Nebraska cornfield. This is a crowded city. We can’t live on the street here. It’s too dangerous!”

  “You’re right about that,” she admitted. “If we’re going to make it to Monday, we’ll need some money. Okay, how do we get it?”

  “Not by stealing,” Aiden said quickly.

  “That leaves work,” his sister decided. “We’ll do odd jobs.”

  “I’ll do odd jobs,” Aiden corrected. “I can pass for older. A kid your age trying to earn money would look suspicious.”