Kristy and the Missing Child

  “It does,” he said. “It’s been over twenty-four hours now, though. I can’t believe all that time has gone by since we last saw him.”

  We were both quiet for a minute, and I was sure Bart was thinking the same thing I was, how Jake had waved good-bye and trotted toward home, and how we had turned our backs and set off in the opposite direction.

  “Do — do you feel guilty at all?” I asked Bart. “I mean, not that you should or anything. It’s just that I do, a little.”

  “I do, too,” he said quietly. “I keep thinking that if only we had insisted on walking him home —”

  “He’d be there now!” I cried. “Safe in his bed.”

  The tape came to an end, and the room was suddenly very quiet. For a second (maybe a nanosecond) I wondered if Bart and I had run out of things to say to each other. I never thought that would happen. But then I realized that we were just having a hard time talking, because there wasn’t anything to say about the situation. Jake was missing. We hadn’t found him yet. We both felt upset and guilty. What was there to discuss?

  I flipped the tape over, then sat down again and grabbed a pretzel. “You know —” I started.

  “I keep —” said Bart at the same time.

  We both laughed. “Go on,” I said.

  “No, you.”

  “Oh, nothing. I was just trying to figure out if there was anything else we could do. What do people do when someone’s missing?”

  Bart shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “They search for the person, but we’ve already done that.” He sat quietly for a moment.

  “What were you going to say before?” I asked.

  “Oh, just that I keep thinking about how I would feel if it were one of the kids on my team who was missing,” he said. “I feel so responsible for all of them, you know?” He looked at me. “What am I asking you for? Of course you know.”

  I sighed. “You know, whatever happened to Jake, whether he’s lost or whether his dad took him, this experience must be really hard on him. I mean, imagine being kidnapped by your own father! What a mess.” I thought of Jake, and about how scared or confused — or both — he must be. And before I knew it, my eyes had filled up with tears and one of them had spilled over. I could have died! I never cry in front of anyone. That’s Mary Anne’s thing, crying. But I’m different. I’m Kristy. I’m tough.

  I reached up to wipe the tear away, but Bart got there first. His touch was gentle as he dried the tear. Then he kept his hand on my cheek as he looked into my eyes. “Kristy,” he said. “It’s going to be okay.” He leaned toward me. I closed my eyes.

  “Hey, you guys!” yelled Karen as she slammed the door open and ran into the den. “Jake’s on TV!”

  My eyes popped open. “Jake!” I cried. “Jake’s on TV? You mean they found him?” I sat up straight.

  “No,” said Karen. “Just his picture is on TV. They’re talking about how he’s missing.” She leaned down and turned on the TV in the den. “See?”

  Jake’s face filled the screen. I felt my stomach tighten when I saw his brown eyes. I recognized the picture that was being shown. It was Jake’s school picture, which I’d last seen hanging on the wall in the Kuhns’ front hall. The TV people had superimposed the word MISSING, in red, over his chest.

  As we watched, the picture of Jake was replaced by a shot of Mrs. Kuhn, who was being interviewed by a local newswoman.

  “Have there been any new developments in your son’s case?” she asked. She was dressed in a trench coat. She held the mike up to Mrs. Kuhn’s mouth.

  “Not really,” said Mrs. Kuhn. “We are still trying to locate my ex-husband in hopes that he may know where Jake is.”

  Obviously, she didn’t want to say on the air that she suspected Mr. Kuhn might have taken Jake. The newscaster thanked her and was about to turn away, when Mrs. Kuhn stepped forward and started to speak quickly.

  “I just want to ask anyone who has any information about my son to please call me,” she said. “And Jake, if you can see me, wherever you are, I love you and I miss you, and I know I’ll see you soon.” Mrs. Kuhn looked so unhappy and so worried. I felt my eyes fill with tears again, but this time I held them back.

  “She sounds kind of hopeful about seeing Jake soon,” said Bart when the interview ended and a commercial came on.

  “She does, doesn’t she?” I answered. “I wonder if she knows something she doesn’t want to tell the public yet.”

  Just then, the phone rang. I grabbed the extension. “Hello?” I said.

  “Kristy? This is Caroline Kuhn.” It was strange to hear her voice over the phone, when I’d just been watching her on TV. “I just wanted to let you know that things are looking up. We searched Jake’s room about an hour ago, and I found some letters from Harry. In them, he talks about this woman — a friend of his that Jake apparently has met.”

  She didn’t sound at all jealous about the woman. I wondered why she wasn’t bothered that Mr. Kuhn had a “friend” already.

  “Anyway,” she went on, “the police seem to think she’s a great lead. They’re trying to call her right now, because she may know where Harry is.”

  “Great!” I said. Mrs. Kuhn sounded so optimistic. Her hopefulness was catching. She said she’d call as soon as she heard anything, and we hung up.

  “What’s happening?” asked Bart.

  I filled him in. “Oh, Bart,” I said after I’d told him about the new lead. “Something tells me Jake is going to be found really, really soon, and that he’s safe and sound. I just know it.”

  “I hope you’re right, Kristy,” said Bart, smiling. “That would make a lot of people happy.”

  But an hour later, while Bart and I were watching a rerun of The Brady Bunch, Mrs. Kuhn called back. In a tired voice, she told me that the Dallas police had located the woman and questioned her, and that the woman had no idea where Mr. Kuhn was.

  Bart left soon after, and I went to bed feeling as if I’d been riding a roller coaster all day, up and down, up and down. But the ride was no fun; all I wanted was to be back on solid ground. And that meant finding Jake.

  Mary Anne was almost ready to give up on home ec and resign herself to a failing grade. For some reason, maybe because she was so nervous, she couldn’t do anything right in that class. She lost her notes. She left the stove burners on. She spilled things. When she was sewing her skirt, she accidentally attached it to the dress she was wearing that day, and didn’t realize it until the bell rang. (She had to get a late pass to go to her next class.)

  Mary Anne was not a happy homemaker.

  “I know I can do it,” she had said to me at lunch that day at school. “I just have to relax and have fun with home ec. But Mrs. Ploof makes me so nervous. She wants everything to be just so. When we had our table-setting test? She actually whipped out a tape measure to check that each plate was exactly one inch from the edge of the table. I mean, really!”

  I sympathized with Mary Anne, honest I did. I’ve never been any good at that home-ec stuff, myself. And any other time I would have been glad to help her figure out ways to pull up her grade. But my mind was on only one thing lately: finding Jake.

  Mary Anne was worried about Jake, too. She said she’d had trouble sleeping. She lay awake at night thinking of all the places he could be, all the things that could have happened to him. This was one time when having a good imagination was not helpful.

  Anyway, I hate to admit it, but Mary Anne’s home-ec problem was really kind of funny. It made me smile to think about her class having to drink the raspberry Jell-O she’d made because it never set. And I almost laughed when I thought about how one of the boys in her class, Pete Black, had said that another Jell-O mold she’d made would make a great weapon, since it was so hard. During study hall, he’d shown me a drawing he’d made of an AJL: an Automated Jell-O Launcher. It looked very high-tech.

  Home ec was a nice distraction from worrying about Jake. Nice for me, that is. For Mary Anne, it was a pra
ctically a nightmare.

  On the evening of the “Jell-O breakthrough,” she’d put aside her worries (about her class and about Jake) in order to sit for the Barrett kids. Mrs. Barrett was going over to the Kuhns’ house to keep Mrs. Kuhn company while the search for Jake continued. She was ready to leave when Mary Anne arrived. And even though she was only going over to a neighbor’s house for the evening, she looked, as Mary Anne told me later, “as glamorous as always.” Mrs. Barrett is really gorgeous. She could be a model: she has long, curly, chestnut hair, and a great figure, and she’s always wearing these very elegant-looking outfits. She’s one of those people who never runs her stockings or spills tomato sauce on her blouse.

  Before she left, she told Mary Anne that the kids were “a little upset” about Jake. She said Buddy and Suzi were old enough to understand what was going on, and that it was affecting them. And Marnie, the baby, was picking up on their feelings and was just generally cranky.

  Mary Anne assured Mrs. Barrett that she would do her best to keep things calm. But about two seconds after Mrs. Barrett walked out the door, all three kids exploded into action. Marnie screwed up her big blue eyes and started to wail — and like any two-year-old, she can wail loud enough to make you wish you were in another county. Then Buddy, who’s eight, came running into the living room (where Mary Anne was busily trying to distract Marnie), shouting that Suzi had “totally ruined” the diorama he was making for school. It was for a book report, he said. It was supposed to be the farm where Charlotte and Wilbur lived, from Charlotte’s Web. And Suzi kept trying to put her My Little Ponies into the barn.

  “Horses need a place to sleep,” explained Suzi, who’s five. She had run into the room behind Buddy. “If they stay out in the fields at night they might get horse-napped.”

  “Nobody’s going to horse-nap your dumb pink pony,” said Buddy. “Just keep out of my stuff, okay?”

  Mary Anne, holding Marnie on her lap, was looking from one kid to another, trying to figure out how to make peace. She told me later that she must have been feeling kind of desperate, because the only thing she could think of was a cooking project. She suggested they make Jell-O.

  “Jell-O!” said Buddy. “My favorite. Can we make lime? I like the green kind because it looks like slime.”

  “I like strawberry,” said Suzi. “It’s prettier.”

  “We’ll make both,” said Mary Anne, hoping that the Barretts’ cupboards were stocked. She led the kids into the kitchen, where she found several boxes of Jell-O. Luckily, there were a couple of boxes each of lime and strawberry. Mary Anne put on some water to boil and reached for a bowl. Several cookie cutters fell out of the cabinet and she tried to stuff them back in. Then, she suddenly had a brainstorm. What if she made the Jell-O extra strong and poured it into a long, shallow baking pan? It would probably come out hard — she knew that from her home-ec “experiments.” And then the kids could cut out shapes with the cookie cutters. It seemed like a perfect activity.

  She prepared the Jell-O, poured it out, and put the pan into the fridge. She figured it would be ready to cut in a couple of hours.

  “Suzi, while we’re waiting for the Jell-O, why don’t you bring your horses down here and we’ll make them a barn of their own,” she said. “And Buddy, why don’t you bring your diorama downstairs so I can see it? Charlotte’s Web is one of my favorite books.”

  Suzi and Buddy ran to get their stuff. Mary Anne sighed with relief. At least the older kids had stopped fighting. But Marnie had started to cry again, loudly. Mary Anne looked around for something to distract her with, and her eyes lit on a rattle shaped like a clown that had been left partway under the couch. Mary Anne scooted over to the clown and grabbed it without putting Marnie down. She waved the clown at Marnie. “See?” she said, “see the happy clown? Can you smile like that?”

  Marnie didn’t actually smile, but she did stop screaming as she held out her hands for the clown. Just as she settled down to play with it, Buddy and Suzi charged back into the room. Suzi was waving her toy horse, which was bright pink with a flowing purple mane, and Buddy was carrying his diorama, which fit inside a shoebox.

  “See?” said Buddy excitedly. “There’s the web, and there’s the place where Wilbur sleeps, and —”

  “Shhh …” said Mary Anne. “Let’s use indoor voices, okay?”

  “— and there’s the hatchet that Fern’s dad was going to use to chop Wilbur’s head off,” Buddy went on, in a slightly quieter voice.

  “Oh, ick, Buddy,” said Suzi. “Why do you have to have that in there?”

  “Because it’s part of the story,” explained Buddy patiently. “Dummy,” he added under his breath.

  “Buddy,” Mary Anne said in a warning tone.

  He looked innocently at her. “What?” he asked. “What?”

  “You know,” she said. “Don’t call your sister names.”

  “Okay,” he said. “But she is a —”

  Mary Anne held up a finger. “Don’t say it, Buddy.”

  He shut his mouth and turned to his diorama. “What could I use to make trees?” he wondered aloud.

  “How about a green sponge?” asked Mary Anne. “I have one at home that you can use, if your parents don’t have one.”

  Buddy bent to consider how sponge-trees would look.

  “What about my pony barn?” asked Suzi, who had been waiting patiently for Mary Anne’s attention.

  “Right,” said Mary Anne. “Okay. I saw an empty box in the kitchen. How about if we cut a door into it and draw windows and stuff on it with crayons?”

  “Neat!” said Suzi. She ran to get the box. Soon both kids were busily cutting and drawing, and Mary Anne leaned back on the couch to catch her breath. Marnie had dozed off in a corner of the couch, and Mary Anne realized that she was probably cranky because she was exhausted.

  Just as Mary Anne began to relax, Suzi looked up from her pony barn. “I think I’m going to sleep with my blanky tied to my arm tonight,” she said, twirling one of her ponytails in her hand. “That way, if the kidnappers take me, I’ll still have my blanky with me.”

  Mary Anne knows how kids feel about their security blankets, but this was a bit much. She figured that Suzi must be really scared.

  “Do you think there are any kidnappers out tonight?” asked Buddy. Suddenly, he looked very vulnerable, crouched on the floor with his big knobby knees sticking out.

  “No way,” said Mary Anne. “Not around here, anyway.” She realized that the kids had a lot of questions and a lot of fears, so she talked to them and tried to reassure them. She answered their questions, and told them that their parents were watching out for them and that they would be safe. Then, since it was almost time for bed, she decided to check out the Jell-O in the fridge.

  “Hey, look!” she said to the kids, who had followed her into the kitchen. (Marnie had woken up by then.) “This worked really well.” She shook the pan and the Jell-O hardly moved. Then she got out the cookie cutters and settled the kids at the kitchen table. They got the idea right away, and went to work. Soon they had made a plateful of shiny, jiggly stars, hearts, and Christmas trees. Mary Anne couldn’t believe how well her recipe had worked.

  After she’d put the kids to bed that night, with many comforting words about how safe they’d be while they were sleeping, Mary Anne went back downstairs and wrote up a description of the Jell-O treats she’d dreamt up. She was sure she’d be able to get extra home-ec credit for the idea. Maybe, she thought, she’d finally have a chance at passing the course. And it was all due to … Jell-O!

  “Jake! Jake! Jake!” I heard his name being called over and over. I tramped through thick underbrush, parting tree branches as I hunted for any sign of him. I kept thinking that if I just looked long enough, I would find him. Maybe he’d be behind that big bush over there, or maybe he was hidden in a little cave. I knew he couldn’t be far. I knew I could find him. “Jake! Jake! Jake!”

  I woke up with a start, and realized that I’d
been dreaming. The voice calling “Jake” was my neighbor’s dog, who likes to bark loudly in the morning.

  I rolled over to look at my clock. It was eight-thirty, Saturday morning. I lay on my bed and stared at the ceiling. I did some quick figuring and realized that Jake had been missing for about forty hours. That was almost two full days. I swallowed, and felt the lump in my throat that had been there since Jake had disappeared. I still felt kind of guilty — and now I was also beginning to feel a little hopeless.

  The police had been on the case from the beginning, and they were doing everything they could. I had mobilized the kids from school plus the kids from Jake’s neighborhood, and we’d looked and looked, but we’d gotten nowhere.

  Forty hours. If Jake had been kidnapped, he and his abductor must be pretty far away by now. And if he hadn’t been kidnapped — it was almost too terrible to think about. Wherever he was, he could be hurt, or sick. And he was probably very hungry and thirsty. And definitely lonely and scared. Poor Jake.

  When I first woke up, I felt so sad that I didn’t even have the energy to get out of bed. But then I thought of Jake, hungry and afraid, and realized he needed people to help him, not to give up on him. I jumped out of bed and threw on the same clothes I’d left on my chair the night before. In the bathroom, I ran a brush through my hair and splashed water on my face. Then, for just a moment, I got distracted.

  I leaned closer to the mirror to kind of check on what I would look like to someone who was about to kiss me. Oh, no! My nose looked huge! I tried leaning in at a different angle, and closing my eyes slightly. That was better, but I still looked pretty weird, up close like that.

  “Kristy!” yelled Karen from outside the bathroom door. She tried the knob, but luckily I’d put the lock on. “It’s time for breakfast.”

  I jumped. Then I wiped the fog off the mirror, where I’d been breathing on it, and grabbed my toothbrush. “Just brushing my teeth, Karen,” I yelled. “I’ll be out in a minute.”