Baby-Sitting Is a Dangerous Job

  And at last the time came. It was just barely dark, and Shana had fallen asleep on the mattress; Melissa was nearly asleep, too. I was amazed at Jeremy’s patience, standing looking downward into the side yard; and then he turned, speaking again in that loud whisper that could possibly have been understood out in the hallway.

  “The car’s driving away!”

  “Could you see who got into it?”

  “Two men,” Jeremy said readily. “I think it’s Dan still here. Now can we escape?”

  My breathing was suddenly very fast. “Now we see if I can get past the dogs. You stay here and look after the girls, okay?”

  His lower lip came out in a pout, the way Shana’s sometimes did. “I want to go, too. They’re asleep, so we’ll have to come back after them if we find a way out, won’t we? So why can’t I come, too? I’ll be real quiet, honest I will.”

  I looked at him, afraid and uncertain, knowing that if I did the wrong thing this time, it was possible that none of us would ever get home again.

  “Well, let me see first if the dogs will let me past. Give me a little bit of the dog food.”

  He handed it over, and feeling as if my heart was in my mouth, I took a few cautious steps toward the two huge dogs at the top of the stairs.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The dogs didn’t move, and they didn’t growl as I approached. I spoke softly to them, while they kept their ears pricked up and waited.

  I hoped I wasn’t making a mistake, putting out a hand very slowly with the dog food on it, because if I was, it would be a big mistake. I had to try it, though. If the dogs wouldn’t allow me down those stairs, I didn’t see what I could possibly do to get us out of this mess.

  The nearest dog turned his head slightly toward me as I moved my hand within a couple of inches of his nose—and those sharp teeth—and held it there. “You want some?” I asked, almost in a whisper.

  For a few seconds nothing happened, and then the dog stretched his neck and sniffed my hand.

  “Go ahead,” I told him, “take it.”

  It was a very peculiar feeling when his tongue touched my palm, and then the dog food was gone. I still had my fingers, I thought, elated, and tried the same thing with the other dog.

  “I’m going to go downstairs,” I told them in that same quiet voice. “And you’re going to stay here and guard Melissa and Shana. All right? Guard?”

  They seemed to know that word. Their tails twitched ever so slightly.

  “I’m going, too,” Jeremy said. He, too, spoke very softly. He offered more bits of food; and then, when they’d accepted it, he put out a hand and stroked first one dark head, then the other. The dogs twitched their tails again.

  And they let us walk between them, turning their heads to watch us.

  “Stay,” I said. “Guard,” and Jeremy echoed my words.

  We crept down the stairway, lighted only from above; when we reached the bottom and the front entryway, it was pretty dark, though there was a light in the kitchen at the rear of the house, as before.

  I tried the front door again, found it locked as expected, and put a finger on my lips to warn Jeremy to silence. Then we edged toward that lighted doorway.

  The TV was on, and Dan sat at the table, absorbed in what sounded like a cops and robbers show. The telephone was out of sight to our left; the door to the bedroom was out of sight to our right.

  “What are we going to do?” Jeremy whispered.

  I swallowed hard. “There’s a window in Okie’s bedroom that opens. We need to get in there. Maybe, when the show’s in an exciting part, we could crawl on our hands and knees, and he wouldn’t see us. His back’s this direction, anyway, and if we don’t bump into anything, or make any noise, he might not notice us.”

  “Okay,” Jeremy said, moving forward, and I caught his shoulder.

  “No, wait until there’s a chase or a gun fight, or something that really holds his attention.” I had to decide which way to do it. “I’ll tell you when, and you get into the bedroom and wait for me, out of sight. I’ll follow as soon as I can.”

  We dropped to hands and knees and crept closer to where the light spilled out into the hallway. Dan was eating a sandwich and had a can of pop before him, his eyes were practically glued to the screen.

  Suddenly sirens went off and he leaned forward, forgetting to chew.

  “Now!” I whispered, and Jeremy scuttled forward.

  It seemed to me that he went very slowly, though he didn’t make a sound. My chest hurt from holding my breath. And then Jeremy vanished from sight, and Dan was still watching the screen. I was just about to follow after Jeremy when Dan suddenly stood up and went to the refrigerator for another can of pop. If he’d been facing the doorway, he’d have seen me for sure; but he didn’t notice a thing, sinking back into his chair and popping the top of the can.

  The sound of gunfire replaced the sirens. I closed my eyes, breathed a small prayer, and started forward.

  After the first few seconds, I didn’t look at Dan. I crawled across the corner of the kitchen and had to restrain myself from making a dive for the shadowed bedroom. I was wet with sweat and felt as if I might be shot from behind at any minute, though I hadn’t seen any of the Hazens with guns.

  “The window’s open,” Jeremy said in my ear. It was a wonder I heard him, the way the blood was pounding in my head.

  “Okay. This time I’ll go first, because it’s a ways down,” I told him. “Then I’ll catch you when you jump out.”

  It was as easy as that. I jumped, making no more than a dull thud as I hit the ground, and then Jeremy came into my arms. He was heavy enough so I staggered backward, but I didn’t fall down.

  Only then, looking back up the rectangle lighted by what illumination filtered through from the kitchen, did it occur to me that it might be harder to get back in, if we had to, than it had been to get out. I hoped Shana and Melissa wouldn’t wake up and be frightened to find us gone.

  There was no point in worrying about getting back in the house until we had to. Though it had seemed quite dark, after a few minutes our eyes adjusted, and we could see well enough to move around without bumping into the trees. I stood for a moment, getting my bearings.

  “The little gate’s over that way,” Jeremy told me, and I thought he was right. If only it would be unlocked!

  A tiny beam of light pierced the darkness, and I yelped before I realized that Jeremy had a tiny flashlight. “I found it on the table by the bed in Okie’s room,” he said.

  “Keep it turned away from the house,” I told him. “It’ll sure make this easier.” We set off in the direction of the small gate we’d seen from the cupola.

  It was so well hidden that it took us a while to find it. It had been plain enough, seen from above, but from the ground, and at night, it seemed impossible to locate. I tried to recall what we’d seen, and finally remembered that there’d been a big tree just to the left of it. The yard was full of trees, but we kept looking just to the right of all those close to the wall, and at last we found the gate.

  I got scratched, pushing aside the shrubbery to reach it. It was much smaller than the one we’d driven through, made of wrought iron in a fancy pattern, and it stood ajar. Hope made me giddy, until I tried to push it further open—or pull it, whichever way it would go.

  It wouldn’t move at all. It had apparently stood open for years, and some of the shrubs had grown through it, around it, wedging it into its present position. Beyond it, the shrubs outside the wall seemed even thicker than on this side.

  “I can’t get through it,” I said helplessly, disappointment making my chest ache. “It won’t move.”

  “Maybe I can,” Jeremy suggested. He pushed forward through the branches; and sure enough, he could just barely squeeze through the opening. However, the shrubs on the other side were almost impossible to go through without scratching him pretty badly. And what would he do, alone, if he came out the other side?

  I could see his face
in the reflected light of the tiny flashlight. His eyes were big and scared.

  “Maybe I can get all the way through,” he said. “Only I don’t know where to go.” His voice quavered a little bit.

  “I don’t know, either,” I told him. “You could follow the wall around that way, to the front where the driveway comes in, and then follow that to the main road, but it’s a long way to another house. No, I don’t think this is going to work.”

  “What are we going to do, then?” Jeremy asked. I think he was more disappointed than I was; we’d counted on finding a way off the grounds once we were free of the house.

  I didn’t know for sure what time it was, probably nine o’clock or maybe even a little later. At ten Mr. Foster would leave the house with the money. The kidnappers were going to make him run around from place to place, stopping in various phone booths for instructions. I didn’t know how long that would take, but it would be nerve wracking for the Hazens as well as for Jeremy’s father. I didn’t think they’d keep it up for hours.

  Before long, they’d be back here with the money. They’d have made sure the police weren’t following Mr. Foster or watching them. And then—maybe they’d let the kids go. Maybe.

  I couldn’t count on them doing the same with me. And possibly they wouldn’t even leave the kids where someone would find them. If they’d paid any attention to Jeremy, they might realize that he could describe them as well as I could, and that he’d overheard their names, too. Jeremy was smart for six.

  “What’re we going to do?” Jeremy repeated.

  And it was then, out of the depths of despair, that I got the marvelous idea.

  Chapter Fourteen

  “Can’t we escape then?” Jeremy asked, and he sounded as if he were going to cry.

  “Not this way. But maybe I’ve thought of something better,” I told him, reaching for his hand. “Come on, let’s go back to the house.”

  “What’s better than escaping? I don’t want to go in the house; I don’t like them, not even Dan. He cheats.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me. Well, maybe we’ll cheat a little, too, only in a different way. It’s not really cheating if you’re trying to save your own lives,” I reasoned aloud.

  “What are we going to do?” he demanded, trotting to keep up with me.

  I stopped. “Wait. Give me the flashlight. Come on back to the little gate.”

  “I thought we couldn’t fit through it,” Jeremy protested, though he came along willingly enough.

  “We can’t,” I said, “but maybe we can make the kidnappers think we got out that way.”

  He was so astonished he forgot to walk. “What good’ll that do?”

  “It might make them scared that we’ll get somewhere and call the police. It might make them decide not to meet your father and take the ransom money, for fear they’ll get caught doing it and go to jail for a long time. It might make them run away and leave the front gate unlocked and the telephone unguarded, so we can really get rescued.”

  I had taken the little flashlight and played its beam on the shrubbery around the small gate. The first thing to do, I decided, was to make it visible, show them where we might have gone. I handed the light to him and told him where to point it, then began to break off branches and trample them down.

  “I want them to see our trail,” I explained to Jeremy. “It would help if we could break down some branches on the other side of the wall, too, only I can’t reach very many. Maybe if I tear a piece out of my shirt, so they’ll think I’ve squeezed through . . .”

  My shirt, though, was no more easily torn than the blanket I’d thought of converting to a rope. It wouldn’t tear at all, and neither would my jeans.

  “Maybe my shirt,” Jeremy suggested. He was wearing a knit pullover in bold brown, white, and bright yellow stripes.

  “Let’s try it,” I agreed. “Yellow would show up the best, if they’re looking around in the dark.” We lifted his shirt, fixed a wide yellow stripe over one of the projections on the gate, and I pulled down as hard as I could. All it did was punch a hole in a perfectly good shirt.

  “I could tear it now, I think,” Jeremy said, and stuck his finger in the hole and pulled.

  It took a couple of tries, but we got a small bit of fabric off and we stuck it on the fence, like a tiny flag.

  “Shall we leave a white stripe, too?” Jeremy asked, really getting into the spirit of things.

  “No. I think that might be overkill,” I told him, and then had to explain what that meant.

  “Have you got any dog food left?” I asked then.

  “About a handful,” Jeremy answered, showing me.

  “Okay. Put it here on the ground, in front of the gate. It might make the dogs come here so the men’ll see the scrap of your shirt. Dump out all you have left,” I said, and he did.

  When we’d done all we could to make it seem we’d escaped through the small gate, we headed for the house.

  Through the kitchen window we could see Dan, still watching television. So all we had to do was get inside, get past him and back upstairs. I looked around for something to climb on to reach the opened window, and Jeremy tugged at my arm.

  “Darcy, if we aren’t really going to escape, what are we going to do?”

  “We’re going to hide,” I said with the first satisfaction I’d felt in quite a while. “Here, if I move this garbage can over and boost you up, can you crawl through the window? Be sure to be real quiet.”

  The first try we tipped over the can and the lid came off. My heart was in my throat for fear it had made enough noise to attract Dan’s attention; but when I checked, he was still glued to the TV. I wondered how he stayed so thin when he ate so much; now he was eating a Hershey Big Block bar.

  We set the garbage can back up, and this time we both made it into Okie’s bedroom. I could hardly believe that Dan would sit there, so engrossed in violence and action on the screen that he wouldn’t know we were creeping around behind him, but he did.

  We were scared, though. Again Jeremy went first and I followed. Just as I was right behind him, Dan suddenly pushed back his chair from the table; and for the second time in just a little while, I thought my heart would stop.

  Dan didn’t get up, though. He only leaned back and put his feet up on another chair; after a few seconds I started to crawl and got out of sight. I would have simply collapsed there in the dim hallway until my breathing was normal again if I’d dared, only I didn’t.

  We got up and moved quickly through the dark hall. At the foot of the stairs I paused, heard the TV going full blast in the kitchen, and called softly to the dogs.

  “We’re coming up, and don’t bark, okay? Stay.”

  The Dobermans regarded us with no more than friendly interest as we climbed the stairs. This time I was brave enough to pat each of them on the head, and even to scratch behind their ears. “Good dogs,” I said to them, and was rewarded by two wagging rear ends.

  I stepped to the doorway of the bedroom, where the light made a yellow rectangle on the floor. The little girls were sleeping soundly, Shana on her stomach with her long hair hanging over the edge of the mattress onto the floor, Melissa spreadeagled on her back.

  “Darcy,” Jeremy said, and I turned around to look at him. “Where are we going to hide?”

  “In the cupola,” I told him. “I don’t think the Hazens even know it’s there, and that mattress practically covers up the door when it leans against the wall. I think we could stand it up so we could crawl in behind it, and nobody’d notice a thing.” If we’re lucky, I added silently, but at least we were trying to do something. I didn’t see how my plan could make things any worse than they already were.

  Jeremy’s eyes were bright. “Are we going up there now?”

  “As soon as we can. We’ll have to have something to sleep on. We can’t take the mattress—in fact, I don’t think we could get a mattress through that little door and up those narrow stairs; but we’ll take the blanket, and
maybe some of the clothes out of those trunks. Come on. The sooner we get settled, the better.”

  It took a while. Jeremy was very helpful; he rummaged through the trunks in the attic and came up with a rug, two ragged old sleeping bags, and a couple more blankets. They smelled funny, but I figured that was the least of our problems.

  We made beds on the floor of the cupola room, then decided what else we needed. We took the box of books up, because we didn’t know how long we’d be there. And water. We’d need water. We had trouble finding something to carry it in, and finally rinsed out some old canning jars and filled them. Then we looked around for something to use when Shana had to go to the bathroom. It was Jeremy who located that item, too, bringing it to me from a far corner of the attic with a self-satisfied grin. “Look! A potty chair!” he said, and carried it up to our hiding place, smearing dust all over his front as he went.

  The dogs watched us with apparent interest, making no objection to our running around, or to my carrying the sleeping girls up to the attic when everything was ready. Shana slept all the way to the top; but I had to wake Melissa up so she could walk the final flight, because there wasn’t room enough for me to carry her on those narrow, twisting steps.

  I’d have liked to lurk downstairs and listen for the phone to ring—hoping I’d be able to interpret one end of the conversation when Dan answered—or for someone to come with news. Only when I suggested leaving the kids alone, Jeremy turned uncooperative.

  “I don’t want you to go,” he said, and the quaver was back in his voice.

  “Okay,” I agreed. “Come on, we’ll try to get some rest so we’ll be ready for action when it’s time, all right?”

  He fell asleep almost as soon as he stretched out on the sleeping bag beside Shana. At least I thought he had. It was a warm night, and I left the windows open. I could hear crickets somewhere, and bullfrogs. Was there a pond nearby? Even if I got to use the phone, I didn’t know how to tell them where we were. Maybe if I gave them the phone number, the police could trace that. Yes, that was the thing to do, I decided.