Baby-Sitting Is a Dangerous Job

  He struggled with the lock and opened the door as a police car pulled in at the curb, closely followed by a second patrol unit. Jeremy ran out to meet them, shouting, “It’s a burglar! It’s a burglar!”

  I had a fleeting memory of my mother saying kids sometimes did things to get attention; and then two of the officers were entering the house. One of them, I was both glad and embarrassed to see, was Tim’s friend Clancy.

  Clancy was about my father’s age and had a magnificent handlebar mustache like someone out of an old movie. He looked at me and then at Jeremy, who was jiggling up and down, hopping from one foot to the other.

  “Hello, Darcy. What happened here?”

  “I don’t know. Just all of a sudden that horrible alarm went off. I didn’t see anything,” I said.

  “You see anything, son? Any person looking in a window, anything like that?”

  Jeremy stopped jumping; his brown eyes were shining, though. “No. I didn’t see anything. But it’s a burglar, isn’t it? The alarm went off!”

  “I’ll check around the back,” one of the younger officers said, and disappeared. Another one started through the house, and a minute later the alarm stopped. The quiet was almost as unnatural, at first, as the noise had been.

  “Where were you when it went off, Jeremy?” I asked. I could usually tell by looking at my younger brothers if they were telling the truth or not, but I didn’t know Jeremy very well yet.

  “In my room, looking for my Star Wars book. All of a sudden it went off. It made my hair prick,” he said, and touched the back of his neck.

  That made me kind of inclined to believe him, because that was how it affected me, too.

  “Do you think the burglar got any of Mama’s jewelry?” Melissa asked, leaning into my side.

  Clancy squatted down so he was more on a level with her. “Where does your mama keep her jewelry? Do you know?”

  “In a box in the bedroom. It’s in the wall,” Melissa said.

  “It’s not a box, it’s a safe,” Jeremy corrected her. “There’s one in Daddy’s study, too, but it just has papers in it, or maybe money. I can show you,” he offered.

  I went with them to look at both wall safes. Clancy made a grunting sound, and I finally realized where Tim got his habit of making that sound instead of using words.

  “Nobody’s been at either of them,” Clancy said. “You hear anything, Darcy, before the alarm went off?”

  “No. I didn’t notice anything.”

  “All the kids with you when it began?”

  “No. Jeremy was in his room, looking for a book.”

  “You try to open a window or anything like that, son?”

  Jeremy shook his head. “No. Daddy says we’re not supposed to open the windows, or it will set off the alarm. Besides, the air conditioner doesn’t work right if the windows are open.”

  I was beginning to feel wobbly in the middle. What if Jeremy hadn’t done anything to set off the alarm? What if there had been a burglar? What if there hadn’t been an alarm, and someone had gotten into the house?

  About that time, as we walked back toward the entry hall, a young officer came back. “Looks like somebody tried to jimmy the lock on the side door into the garage,” he said.

  The feeling in my stomach got worse.

  “It’s a blind area, big high hedge shields that side of the house from the neighbors. They didn’t see anything, though they looked out when the alarm went off. Doug’s checking out the alley, to see if anybody went out that way.”

  Clancy grunted again. “All right. Make sure all the doors and windows are secure now. We better contact Mr. Foster, let him know it looks like an attempted break-in.”

  “Will you catch him? And put him in jail?” Jeremy wanted to know. He did a little skip of excitement.

  “Maybe,” Clancy said. “You here alone with the kids, Darcy?”

  “Yes, until the housekeeper comes home around four. She’s having root canal work done.”

  Clancy was frowning. “We’ll make sure everything’s secure before we leave. You want to stay here, or should we take you all over to your own house?”

  A part of me wanted to go home. What if a real burglar came back? He might not be scared by the alarm the next time, or he might feel he could steal whatever he was after before the police got there.

  I didn’t know how the Fosters would feel about my taking their kids somewhere else, though. And the kids weren’t scared. Jeremy thought it was entertaining, and Melissa and Shana took their cue from him.

  “I guess we’d better stay here, unless Mr. Foster thinks we should leave,” I said slowly.

  Clancy called the bank from the white telephone in the living room. Mr. Foster seemed satisfied that the police had routed the intruder, and Clancy assured him that they’d have a patrol car keeping an eye on the place for the rest of the day.

  Clancy hung up the phone as the last of the officers returned to the house.

  “Neighbors at the end of the block say a car came out of the alley right after the alarm went off, but they didn’t get a good look at it. All they’re sure of is that it was dark, and probably five or six years old. Lady said she can’t tell one model from another, but she thinks it was black.”

  Black. I remembered the car I’d thought followed Tim and me away from this house, and (maybe) the same one that had parked so the occupants could watch Irene and me when we went to the store. Could it have been the same one?

  I opened my mouth to tell Clancy about the mysterious car, but he was already turning away, and Shana said firmly, “I have to go potty.”

  By the time Shana was taken care of, the police had gone. I stood looking at the phone, wondering if I should call Clancy and tell him about the car.

  I’d feel stupid if it turned out to be just somebody who liked to look at girls. I knew Tim and his friends often drove around and watched girls.

  But what if it wasn’t only girl watchers?

  I decided to call Tim. He’d know what to do.

  I dialed our number, and Jimmy answered it. He didn’t know where Tim was, he’d driven off ten minutes earlier. I swallowed and read off the Fosters’ number for him to write down. “Tell Tim to call me when he comes back,” I said, and Jimmy promised he would.

  I felt a little better, which was a mistake. I didn’t know Tim wasn’t going to call back until it was too late.

  Chapter Seven

  Jeremy was so excited over the burglar alarm and the police coming that there was no way of calming him down. At least not any way that I could think of.

  He whooped and hollered and raced around being a burglar, poking at his little sisters, instructing Melissa to be the intruder while he was the officer who pursued her. She got into the spirit of the thing, being about half really afraid, screaming as she ran to get away from him.

  Shana didn’t understand what was going on, but she ran and shrieked, too. After Melissa knocked over a lamp, I told them they’d better go out in the backyard. Luckily the lamp landed on the couch and it didn’t break, but it looked expensive, and I didn’t want to lose all my wages for the entire baby-sitting job over one lamp.

  Jeremy was just as wild outside, but there was less to damage. I let him run and yell, as long as he didn’t get too rough with his sisters.

  After half an hour or so, though, I was getting tired of burglar alarm imitations and screaming, and Melissa fell and hurt her knee.

  “Okay, that’s enough,” I said. “Come on, Melissa, we’d better wash that off and put disinfectant on it, and maybe a Band-aid.”

  Most little kids like Band-aids, and sure enough, she decided not to cry as I led her inside.

  I found the medicine cabinet and was proud of the good job I did, getting the dirt off the scraped place, putting a Snoopy patch over it.

  “Now maybe you can talk Jeremy into playing something quieter,” I suggested.

  There was an odd sound, then, and it took me a moment to identify it. The garage door
opening? I’d heard it when Mrs. Murphy left; she had one of those devices you carry to open and close the garage doors without getting out of your car.

  Was she back already? I was torn between relief that someone else could take on the job of calming Jeremy down and regret that my pay would be smaller if I went home early. The housekeeper was only scheduled for three more appointments after today, so I wasn’t going to earn a whole lot anyway, I decided.

  Just at that moment I heard a bellow of rage—or what sounded like rage—from somewhere else in the house. I sighed. Jeremy would have to be distracted by something else, I thought, and wondered what would work best. He had every game I’d ever heard of in his room, but he never seemed much interested in playing any of them except video games. I didn’t dare play them with him because I had to watch the girls, too. Maybe I could think up something that just used his imagination, like the games my little brothers played all the time.

  Melissa trotted off ahead of me with an exaggerated limp to make sure everyone knew she’d been injured. I lingered to wipe up the dirty fingermarks she’d made on the edge of the sink, then dropped the washcloth into the hamper.

  I wondered how Diana was doing, up there in the tree house with only that old tattered book about child abuse to occupy her time. Maybe when I got home I’d go and talk to her, try to persuade her to confide in my folks. Kids can’t do much about that kind of situation, but surely adults could. I didn’t know if it was even legal for her to go and live with her brother or her aunt, but there must be some way to keep her from going back home where she was mistreated. My mom is usually pretty good about finding solutions to problems, even serious ones, and if Diana would talk to her . . .

  I had walked back to the front hall, where I could see down the bedroom corridor and into the big living room. The house was so quiet now that I stopped, listening. Mom always said that the time she got most concerned was when she couldn’t hear the kids making any noise, and I hoped the Fosters weren’t into anything horrible or destructive.

  Had Mrs. Murphy returned, or not? I didn’t think I’d have noticed the neighbors operating a garage door opener, but maybe I’d mistaken the source of the sounds I’d heard. A new and alarming idea formed. What if it had been Jeremy doing something, not Mrs. Murphy at all?

  Was there a control where he could get at it? I had a horrible vision of him opening the garage door and then closing it on Shana, though if anything like that happened, I’d surely have heard genuine screams instead of playful shrieks. Right now I wasn’t hearing anything at all, and it made me uneasy.

  “Jeremy? Melissa?” I called.

  There was no response. Were they hiding, holding their hands over their mouths to restrain the giggles, waiting for me to walk by so they could jump out and pounce on me?

  If I screamed when they did it, it could start another noisy game. If I didn’t, they’d be disappointed. I walked back toward the kitchen, expecting to be startled any minute, trying to decide how to react.

  Nothing sounded in the house except the grandfather clock in the corner of the dining room, which played a twelve-note tune and then chimed the hour. Three o’clock. At least an hour earlier than the housekeeper usually came home. I must have been mistaken about the noises.

  I walked into the kitchen and stood in the middle of it, listening again. I could see through sliding glass doors out into the backyard, and there was no sign of the kids there.

  And then I heard Shana’s cry of distress, and perhaps anger. “I told you, I hafta go potty!”

  Maybe that was it. Sometimes the older kids did look out for Shana, and they were probably all in the back bathroom. I started in that direction, about to call out again just as Shana cried, “I don’t like you!”

  Nobody’d given me permission to touch any of these kids for disciplinary purposes. Surely, though, if the older ones were tormenting Shana I’d be allowed to separate them, forcibly if I had to.

  After the bright sunshine of the kitchen, the hallway seemed dim and shadowy. Shana was crying now, sobbing, and I quickened my steps. If they were hurting her, I was going to be tempted to—

  I didn’t see anybody in the short hallway that ran off to the side of the main one, leading to Melissa’s room. That door was closed, and it was almost dark in there; I didn’t even glance that way in the urgency of reaching Shana and stopping whatever was being done to her. I’d forgotten I expected the kids to jump out and scare me.

  When the hand closed over my mouth, from someone standing behind me, I made a smothered protest and tried to say, “Jeremy, cut it out!”

  And then I realized it couldn’t be Jeremy. The hand was too large, too strong, and there was an odor of tobacco that certainly didn’t come from a six-year-old boy. And whoever held me against him was tall, a lot taller than I was.

  Fear exploded in me. I tried to yelp and I struggled, until a harsh male voice said, “Knock it off, unless you want to get hurt!”

  The burglar, I thought, he had gotten inside after all, and somehow the police didn’t find him!

  “Hurry up, what’s going on?” another man’s voice demanded, and I was trying to cope with the idea that there were two strange men here who had broken in when I heard the third voice.

  “She had to go to the bathroom, so I thought I’d better take her. I didn’t want to drag a kid around in wet pants,” it said, and then the speaker appeared in front of me, in the bathroom door.

  He was tall and skinny, with frizzled reddish brown hair and light blue eyes, and he was carrying Shana, whose small face was streaked with tears.

  The second speaker appeared from behind me, so that my captor swiveled to face him. Number two was tall and thin, like the man carrying Shana, wearing worn jeans and a blue work shirt; they looked enough alike so I guessed they might be father and son, for this one was older than my dad. He scowled at me. “Who’s this?”

  “Baby-sitter,” said my captor. “You didn’t think the old lady went off and left the kids alone, did you? I told you, we watched this one before. We didn’t want to come breaking in without knowing who was here. She’s just a kid.”

  Inside my head all kinds of alarms were going off. I hadn’t figured it out yet, but I knew it was bad. It wasn’t a game, it was real, and it was scary.

  I jerked hard to one side, and the hand slid off my mouth. “Who are you? What’re you doing?” I demanded.

  Shana pushed against the chest of the man who held her. “Put me down!” she demanded.

  The man ignored her. “Come on, let’s get out of here,” he said. “This place makes me nervous. The cops were here before, they could come back.”

  The older man gave him a quelling look. “If you two hadn’t been so stupid, they’d never have come in the first place.”

  The man behind me, the one I hadn’t yet seen and who still had my arms pinned so I couldn’t get away, put in his own comment. “We were smart enough to figure out a way in here, and it worked better than your way, Pa. What are we going to do with this one?”

  My mind was racing. I knew I ought to be memorizing descriptions of them; instead I was so scared I could hardly think straight.

  I tried to make myself calm down, but it was impossible. The man carrying Shana came on out into the hallway, and there was something about him that was sort of familiar. Frizzy reddish brown hair and pale blue eyes . . .

  All of a sudden I knew who he was, who they all were, and I blurted it out as thoughtlessly as Jeremy would have done.

  “You’re Diana’s brother!” I said, and then went cold as the silence, unbroken except for Shana’s whimpering, grew around me.

  The older man swore. “All right, you smart alecks,” he said, sounding so angry I cringed away from him. “Now see what you went and done. Now we gotta get rid of the baby-sitter!”

  For a minute I thought I was going to faint. On TV, when they say things like that, they mean they’re going to drop someone in the lake, tied to a stone, or something else just as ba
d. We don’t have any lake near us, but there’s a river that I supposed would be just as fatal.

  The one carrying Shana—I’d finally remembered his name, he was Dan—took on an expression that made me think I was right: they intended to dispose of me permanently.

  “Hey, I agreed to the rest of this, but I’m not going to be up on any murder charge—”

  “Don’t be a sap,” the brother behind me said. “Kidnapping’s a federal offense, and you can’t get any worse than that. But we don’t need to do anything drastic. We’ll just take her along. Might be handy, to look after the kids, save us the trouble.”

  “And what’re we going to do later?” Diana’s father demanded. “She’s not only seen us, she knows who we are.” I remembered what Mr. Hazen did to Diana, the bruises he’d left on her, and I felt cold all over. If he’d hurt his own kid, he wouldn’t hesitate to hurt us.

  “We’re gonna leave this part of the country anyway, aren’t we? As soon as they pay the ransom? We’ll leave her tied up or something so she can’t notify the police until we’ve had time to get out of the state. Once we’ve got money, we shouldn’t have to worry about keeping away from them. Come on, let’s get out of here.”

  He shoved me forward, and when I tried to twist free (which only hurt, and didn’t do any good) I got a look at him. Yes, it was Henry Hazen, Diana’s older brother; he and Dan looked a lot alike, except that Henry didn’t have as many freckles and he was probably five years older.

  Why had I blurted out my recognition? If they hadn’t known I’d recognized them, they’d have left me here. Tied up, maybe, but unharmed. Mrs. Murphy would have found me when she came home, and then I could have given the police their descriptions so they could go rescue the kids and arrest Mr. Hazen and his sons.

  I was being propelled along the corridor toward the kitchen, then across the sunny room and into the garage. Behind me, I heard Dan say, “You bite me again, kid, and I’m going to smack you.”

  Mr. Hazen opened the door into the garage, and for a minute I thought that rescue was at hand, or at least that a decent adult had entered the picture. For there was Mrs. Murphy’s car, the brown sedan she had driven off to the dentist’s for her root canal work.