The men who’d been following us didn’t see us immediately. Because of a radio playing in the trailer next door, they hadn’t heard us either.
“It’s about time they left the rig unguarded,” Ernie said as he came through the doorway, and it was clear he thought the coach was empty. “Let’s move it. We gotta get this stash out of the country before the cops catch up to us.”
We all froze. Harry and Billy and I were on the couch, Alison and Ariadne were in the copilot’s seat, and nobody moved.
“They didn’t leave the blinds closed,” Syd said, pulling the door shut behind them. “We better do that before we turn on a light.”
“Yeah. No sense attracting attention. With any luck these Rupes won’t even know we were ever here. Open up that vent and grab the stuff, and we’ll hightail it out of this place.”
Ernie took a step toward the front of the coach and tripped over Harry’s feet. He went sprawling forward and landed across Billy and me and the cat, who was on Billy’s lap.
For a few seconds our visitors seemed almost as scared as we were. William shot away from Billy, clawing and spitting. Judging by the swearing and the fact that the guy fell onto the floor, I figured the cat landed somewhere around his face.
Syd had fallen over Ernie before he realized anything was wrong, and Ariadne started screaming. It made the hair stand up on the back of my neck even though I knew she wasn’t being murdered. Yet.
Syd recovered before his partner did. He scrambled to his feet. “Shut this kid up or she’s in trouble!” he snapped. “Get those shades closed and a light on in here!”
A moment later we were blinking as he reached one of the wall lights. We all looked at each other as if we’d just seen ghosts, but Ariadne stopped screeching.
“Who are you?” she demanded, sitting up in Alison’s lap.
There was some more swearing. Ernie was still breathing heavily as he surveyed us in disgust.
“I thought you said they were all gone; the rig was empty.”
Syd gave us no more than a glance. “They’re only kids. Let’s get our stuff and get out of here.”
“What do we do with them? Once they report to the cops, they’ll have an APB out on us before we get out of the park.”
I felt the cold run all the way through me. Even Harry wasn’t wisecracking now. My tongue had gone dry and stuck to the roof of my mouth.
Syd grunted a nonanswer and bent over toward the front of the coach. He lifted the grating off the furnace vent in the floor, reaching down inside with one arm. Seconds later he straightened and said disbelievingly, “The stuff’s not there.”
“It’s gotta be there,” his partner said, equally incredulous. “Maybe it slid down deeper.”
“No way it could have fallen any deeper. The pipe bends there.” Syd straightened and looked straight at Harry. “Where is it?”
“What?” Harry asked, looking as much stupid as he did terrified.
“The bag that was in the vent. What did you do with it?”
Harry ran his tongue over pale lips. “I never saw any bag. I never touched anything.”
Syd reached out and grabbed Harry’s arm, jerking him to his feet. “Don’t mess with me, kid. We want that bag.”
Harry looked petrified. And innocent. Maybe Billy knew where the bag was, if that was where he’d found the hundred-dollar bills, but the rest of us didn’t know.
Billy had slid off the couch and worked his way past the open furnace vent to dig under the chair for William. He dragged him out and cuddled the indignant cat against him, crooning soothingly.
Ernie turned and grabbed me by the shoulder. I could tell he wasn’t kidding; it hurt. “Where’s the bag? Come on, don’t play dumb! We want that money!”
“We don’t have any money,” I managed. “Honest. How would we know where you hid something?”
I didn’t know how Billy found it, though I was sure he had. Maybe, even as nearsighted as he was, he’d been sitting on the floor and seen something through the grille. Anyway, he’d found it and then rehid it, I guessed. At that point I thought even Dad might have said to just hand over what they wanted and call the cops later, but there was no way we could. I was afraid of what they’d do if they knew Billy had hidden it and wouldn’t tell where.
Syd snarled an oath. “You kids sit down and stay put,” he said, “while we look for it.”
They didn’t find it. They looked in the cupboards, and under the couch and the chairs, and in all the little nooks and crannies. Nothing.
“Maybe you got the wrong motor home,” Harry suggested as the man dumped papers and a package of cookies out of an overhead compartment.
“We don’t have the wrong motor home,” Ernie contradicted brusquely. “And you better hope we find it, wherever one of you hid it.”
Billy looked up, the cat draped across his shoulder and against his face. “Are you going to shoot us?” he asked.
Ernie swore. Syd said, “Yeah, what are we going to do with them? They’ve seen us now. They can identify us.”
Syd was the boss, the one who had tried to exchange coaches before we left home. I sure wished Mr. Rupe had let him do it.
Syd’s face hardened. “We’re getting out of here before the parents come back.”
“Without the money?” Ernie asked in dismay.
“No, stupid, not without the money. It’s got to be here somewhere. We’ll just take the whole coach.”
“Yeah,” Harry said eagerly, sitting forward. “Take the whole coach! We’ll just wait here for my folks!”
“And call the cops the minute we’re gone? Not likely.”
Five minutes later, as the motor home eased out onto the highway heading north with Syd at the wheel, we knew the impossible was happening. We were being kidnapped.
“You kids get in the back and stay there,” Ernie said, and we were glad to move as far away from the two of them as we could get.
Alison lifted the little kids onto the middle of the bed, and the rest of us sat on the edges. After about a minute Harry reached up and turned on the speaker for the intercom, putting a finger over his lips to indicate to the rest of us that we were to be quiet. I’d noticed the control there, but we hadn’t used it before. We hadn’t been interested in what Mr. and Mrs. Rupe were saying up front, and they hadn’t wanted to hear us.
Now we listened.
They didn’t know we could hear them, so they talked freely. It didn’t take us long to get the gist of the situation.
Ernie and Syd worked for the RV rental and repair business at legitimate jobs. But they had something else going on the side, evenings and on weekends.
Syd was a manager, and he had keys so he could get into the building when the rest of the staff wasn’t around. We figured out that these two had been charging big amounts of money to “fix” things on motor homes when they were brought in for regular maintenance or minor repairs.
Syd was an expert at making it look like there was a major problem, like an oil leak. Ernie would crawl under the rig and plant the oil both on the undercarriage and on the floor, so they could show it to the customer. They’d tell him if he didn’t let them fix it, he could burn up his engine before he’d gone another twenty miles. Since lots of the people who drove the big rigs didn’t know anything about them mechanically, they were conned into authorizing the repairs.
Syd’s “repairs” weren’t cheap. It sounded as if most “oil leaks” he “fixed” cost an unwary motorist anywhere from one to two thousand dollars, and it sounded as if he and Ernie did a lot of them. They also routinely charged for “new” parts they never installed.
It sounded to us, though, as if the owner of the business had begun to be a bit suspicious of them after he caught them working late at night. This made them nervous. Besides that, Syd had had an opportunity while the boss was on a business tr
ip the previous week to steal the proceeds from several recent sales of new motor homes. Since these big rigs were priced at two to three hundred thousand dollars apiece, and the buyers had written out checks in full payment, Syd as the manager was able to manipulate them into cash.
The trouble was, he knew that as soon as the boss came back, he was a dead duck. So he and Ernie had stashed their cash in the motor home they intended to steal under the pretense of “renting” it for a vacation, planning to be out of the country before anyone missed the money or caught on to their larcenous dealings with unwary tourists.
Only all their plans had gone awry when a new employee had accidentally delivered “their” motor home to the Rupes.
They’d been in a panic, controlled until now, thinking they could still pull it off. They only had another day before the boss would return, take one look at his books and deposit slips and undoubtedly call in the police. Before that happened, they needed to be across the border into Canada.
They couldn’t go without the cash they’d hidden in the motor home, and they sounded desperate to get their hands on it.
They were convinced someone, probably Mr. Rupe, had found the bag and intended to keep it rather than turn it in to the authorities.
They seemed positive that the money had been removed from their hiding place and rehidden somewhere else. And, miraculously, they seemed to believe us when we said we didn’t know where that was.
But they hadn’t expected to find kids in the motor home, didn’t realize we had known they were following and watching us, nor that we were now listening to their conversation. Ariadne put her thumb in her mouth and fell asleep, but twice Harry slapped a hand over Billy’s mouth when he started to talk. “Shhh! Be quiet so they don’t hear us!” he whispered.
They had started to argue about what to do with us.
“It’ll take us close to ten hours to reach the Canadian border and cross into Alberta. We can’t try to take those brats through the inspection; they’d give us away for sure,” Ernie said.
They seemed to be assuming that once they got into Canada, they’d be safe. The Canadians wouldn’t arrest them for crimes committed in the United States, not for theft. But they might be cooperative with the American authorities if the two were caught kidnapping a bunch of kids. That was a federal crime, one the Canadian authorities might agree to extradite them for.
They didn’t want to take us along, but they didn’t know what to do with us. They couldn’t leave us where we’d report them to the police, because the cops wouldn’t even have to chase them. They’d just call ahead to the border patrol and stop them there.
It was clear they were thinking they’d have to get rid of us before we went much farther.
We only had one little light on in the bedroom, but we could see each other’s scared faces. Billy, cuddling the cat against his face, was dozing off like Ariadne. At least they weren’t terrified. Harry and Alison and I stared at each other, petrified.
“Are they going to kill us?” my sister mouthed.
“I don’t think they’ve got any guns to shoot us with,” Harry murmured, his back to the microphone set into the wall so it wouldn’t pick up his voice.
The two up front were still talking, so I guessed it was safe to talk if we did it very softly. “There are other ways to kill somebody,” I said. “But they could be extradited from Canada for murder and kidnapping, especially of kids. I don’t think they’ll kill us.”
“Nah,” Harry agreed. “Their chances of getting away with it are too small, even if they leave the United States.”
The three of us sat there in the dim light, wishing we could believe what we’d just said.
“You can’t just move to Canada because you want to,” I muttered. “You have to have papers and everything to emigrate from the U.S. to Canada. Our uncle did it, and he had to have a physical exam and show how he’d make a living up there and fill out a whole bunch of forms. So just because they cross the border doesn’t mean they’re home free.”
“This is a pretty big and classy looking motor home,” Harry contributed. “It must be four or five hundred miles to the border, and this rig draws a lot of attention. There aren’t very many like it on the highways. You think when my dad finds out we’re all gone he isn’t going to describe it to the cops? That nobody’s going to spot it before they get anywhere near Alberta?”
“Surely,” Alison said tensely, “nobody’s crazy enough to kill five kids for money.”
There was a moment’s silence as the big motor home thrummed through the night. It was as if it knew there was someone other than Mr. Rupe driving. It had never sounded so powerful and so fast.
How long would the Rupes and the Nabs stay in town? How fast could they organize police pursuit when they got back to camp and found we and the motor home were missing?
Up front Syd swore.
We froze, listening.
“What’s the matter now?” Ernie asked.
“We’re practically out of fuel. Wouldn’t you think that idiot of a Rupe would refuel before he stopped for the night? Look at that!”
Harry squirmed around on the edge of the bed. “They’ll have to stop before long. Dad was going to fill up in West Yellowstone first thing in the morning. Maybe we’ll have a chance to get help.”
I wondered if his heart was hammering as hard as mine was.
Syd’s voice crackled a little, coming through the intercom. “Ernie, start tearing this place apart. Find that bag. Once we have it, we don’t have to stick with this outfit. And there’s nothing that says we have to leave these brats where anybody can find them right away. Once we cross into Alberta, it won’t matter what they tell anybody.”
I saw Alison swallow. Sure, that was probably their best bet. To dump us and the motor home in some place where we couldn’t walk out in less than a few days and wouldn’t be spotted in the meantime.
There were plenty of such places in Montana. Not to mention some spots where they could send us over a cliff or into a river where we might never be found.
“I guess they wouldn’t hang up at stealing another car or two once they dump this,” Harry muttered, leaning close to me. “What we gonna do, Lewis?”
I could see the same question on my sister’s face. “Maybe they’ll find their money and just leave us somewhere,” I muttered.
But they didn’t find the bag of cash. Ernie dumped things out of cupboards, pulled out drawers, looked among the frozen foods in the freezer, and emptied the ice maker into the sink. We could watch him in the small mirror over the credenza at the side of the aisle.
Then he came back and pawed around in the medicine cabinet and through the towels in the cabinet under the sink. When he finally turned toward the bedroom, we all sort of shrank out of his way while he pulled the drawers out of the nightstands and moved things around in the closet. Then he told us to get off the bed so he could look under the pillows and the mattress.
“The little kids are asleep,” Alison protested, but when Ernie growled deep in his throat, she picked up Ariadne without waking her, and Harry did the same with Billy, backing into the bathroom to get out of the way.
There was nothing under the bedding. There was nothing in the laundry hamper. There was nowhere else to look.
Ernie stalked back up front, fury in every line of his body. “It’s not here, Syd. They must have moved it out of the coach.”
“Why would they do that?” Syd snapped. I was glad he hadn’t talked while Ernie was back with us or they’d have realized there was an intercom on and that we could hear them talking. “It’s too big to stick in the guy’s pocket and carry to town with him. It’s gotta be here somewhere.”
Alison eased Ariadne back onto the bed, then got out of Harry’s way so he could do the same with Billy. The cat slid out of Billy’s limp arms and dropped to the floor.
&nb
sp; I raised a blind to look out at the night, where it was full dark now.
“I don’t know where we are, but it doesn’t look as if they’re going into West Yellowstone to refuel,” I said. Only a few lights showed as we passed scattered houses.
“If they don’t refuel, they won’t get very far. This rig only gets six miles to the gallon, and the tank was practically on empty,” Harry said, peering over my shoulder.
I thought the way Mr. Rupe drove it would have been a miracle if we’d got four miles to the gallon, but I didn’t say it. Right that minute I’d have been happy to have him running over small trees and nudging other vehicles.
Behind us, Ariadne stirred and sat up. “I’m hungry,” she said.
“Oh, honey, I can’t get you anything to eat now,” Alison told her. “How would you like to . . . to color some pictures?”
Ariadne scowled. “I don’t want to color. I want a sandwich.”
“There are some nasty men up front, so we can’t get at the food,” Alison said earnestly. “And we must speak very softly, so they don’t hear us. Look, my supply box is here. That man knocked it on the floor and I picked it up. Here, would you like the blue crayon?”
To my surprise, Ariadne accepted the crayon and a magazine to put under her sheet of paper. “I’ll draw a bear,” she offered.
“What’ll we do when we stop at a service station?” Harry asked, still looking out into blackness. “Yell for help?”
I hardly heard him. I was watching my sister. She had laid out four sheets of paper together and was printing on them with a black marker. I read the printing upside down. “Help, we’re being kidnapped,” I read aloud. “How’s anybody going to see them in the dark, doing sixty miles an hour?”
“We’ll have to stop pretty soon,” Alison said, “and this might be safer than trying to call for help when those men will certainly try to stop us. What am I going to use to stick them on the windows? Billy used up all the Scotch tape.”
“Band-Aids,”I said, and got some from the medicine cabinet. What the heck, it couldn’t hurt anything to stick the signs on the windows on both sides of the coach, but I didn’t really think they were going to save us.