Hostage

Nancy and I couldn’t walk to school together since I’d moved, but we met a block from school. “My grandma’s coming to live with us,” she greeted me glumly.

  “What’s so bad about that? I wouldn’t mind if Grandma Beth came to our house,” I said. “She’s really neat, and she takes my side in arguments and cooks terrific lasagna and cookies.”

  “My grandma criticizes everything we do. Not just me, all of us. Mom can take it all right, but Dad gets pretty irritated with her. It’s a good thing he won’t be the one who’s home with her all day, or he’d explode. He doesn’t think Mom will last for long, either, but Mom says nobody can afford one of those retirement complexes. Grandma isn’t sick, but she just can’t take care of herself very well anymore.”

  “At least you have a bedroom for her. You won’t have to share.”

  Nancy shuddered. “Can I come live with you if it comes to that? You’re lucky to have such a great family, Kaci. Everybody in your family is normal.”

  “Whatever normal is. Did you read all of chapter three today for that test?”

  She made a face. “I hate tests.”

  “So do I.”

  “But you always get good grades. Unless my paper has an A, I won’t dare display it at home. Grandma thinks everybody should be perfect.”

  We were in a mob of kids by the time we got to the school grounds. It was a beautiful fall day, cool and sunny, and we trooped into the building with everybody else, regretting the end of summer and long, empty days to fill any way we liked.

  We were halfway down the long corridor to Room 106 when Mrs. Janacek came out of our homeroom. She smiled and greeted us. “Ready for the first test of the year?” she asked. “I’ll bet you both worked all weekend studying for it.”

  “I’ll bet we didn’t,” Nancy said, and our teacher laughed. We were both glad we’d gotten Mrs. Janacek for our teacher this year. The other half of the sixth grade got Miss Mills, who was a lot older, about a hundred pounds heavier, and who had five o’clock shadow every afternoon even if she did shave her chin. We had all our classes except for music, art, and physical education in our homerooms, so it was important to get a teacher we really liked.

  Three boys came tearing down the hall, yelling and running into people, and Mrs. Janacek put out a hand to stop the first one, grabbing him by the arm and swinging him around so that the second boy ran into him.

  “Boys, you know better than this! We don’t allow running in the halls.”

  One of them said something rude, and her grip on his arm tightened. I could tell by his face that it was uncomfortable. “That’s enough, Stuart. All of you, it’s time you were in your classrooms.”

  Behind her, Miss Mills stepped into the hallway. “What’s going on?” she demanded.

  “It’s under control,” Mrs. Janacek said firmly, and turned the boy around, heading him toward his own room. The others sort of melted away.

  I dumped my backpack on the floor under my chair and got a pencil out of the outside pocket of it as the test papers were passed out. I got through the test all right, but before I handed in my paper my nose was running and my eyes were watery and itchy. Mrs. Janacek looked up at me and said, “You need a Kleenex, Kaci?”

  I helped myself to a handful from the box on her desk. “Allergies, I guess. I think it’s all those leaves the maintenance men are burning, and having the windows open so the smoke comes in.”

  We closed the windows in our room, but I got worse and Nancy looked at me in alarm. “I thought you were having allergy shots.”

  “I didn’t have one yet this week. I’m due on Tuesday,” I said. “I wonder if it would help to wash my eyes out with a wet paper towel?”

  Usually my allergy shots took care of such problems, so I didn’t carry the nasal spray with me, but today my eyes continued to stream and itch until I thought I’d go crazy. Finally I decided I’d have to do something.

  “Um . . . Mrs. Janacek? I have some medicine at home that can really help this. Do you think I could go home to get it? I could be back before lunchtime is over.”

  She looked at my reddened face and eyes. “You do look pretty miserable. Why don’t you check in with Mrs. Burton to see what she thinks?”

  Mrs. Burton is the school nurse. She seemed like a no-nonsense sort of person. She had me sit down, gave me some more tissues, and brought me a wet washcloth to bathe my face. It felt better while I was doing it, but I could see myself in the mirror across the room: I was still a mess.

  “Couldn’t I go home and use my spray?” I asked.

  She considered. Kids aren’t usually allowed to go home once they get to school unless they’re practically dead. Maybe I looked as if I were. “Why don’t I check with your mother to see what she thinks?” the nurse suggested.

  She let me talk to Mom on the phone. “I’d come to get you, but we’re having a major emergency here right now,” she said distractedly. “Yes, let me talk to Mrs. Burton. I think you could just run home to get your medication. You know where it is, don’t you?”

  “In the drawer in my nightstand,” I said, and sneezed four times in a row while the nurse was talking to my mother.

  So that was how I came to be at our new house in the middle of the day when nobody expected me to be there.

  Chapter Four

  We don’t have enough lockers to go around at our middle school, even if we double up on them, so only the eighth graders have them. The rest of us have to carry our junk around with us all day in backpacks. Dad’s concerned about it because he says we’re all going to need a chiropractor because we try to carry too much.

  I didn’t usually carry anything but my books, notebook, and my lunch. I almost didn’t mind the weight of my backpack because it looked so good. It was waterproof and had outside pockets for pencils and pens and my student body card and tissues and change in case I needed to use a phone or something. And it was bright red.

  My grandma got one for each of us before school started. If Mom had picked them out, each would have been different from all the others so we couldn’t get them mixed up. As it was, Jodie’s and mine were the same. And so far, it hadn’t been a problem. But as I went home, I wished I could have left it in school somewhere. It was heavy. I was glad I had it, though, when I had to dig out some tissues, because I had a couple more sneezing spells.

  Nearing home, I saw that Mrs. Banducci was putting something into her mailbox out on the curb.

  I hoped she’d go inside before I got there, but of course she didn’t. She just waited for me to get to her.

  “What are you doing home this time of day?” she wanted to know.

  I blew my nose again and stuck the soggy Kleenex in one of the outside pockets of the backpack. “I came home to get my allergy medicine.” I sneezed and groped for another tissue. “I have to hurry up and get back to school, though.”

  “I noticed you had another furniture delivery,” Mrs. Banducci said. “I couldn’t tell what it was. It was in several big boxes.”

  She was waiting for me to tell her what the delivery had been.

  “I don’t know,” I said truthfully. “I didn’t think we were getting anything else.”

  “They were really big boxes,” she said. “A big yellow truck. I couldn’t make out what it said on the side.”

  “I don’t know,” I repeated. “Excuse me. I have to hurry.”

  “Was there anyone home to accept delivery?” she asked, taking a few steps along with me when I started moving.

  “I don’t know. If Mom was expecting something, maybe she came home for a few minutes.”

  “Her car wasn’t there,” Mrs. Banducci said. Her eyes were very bright with curiosity.

  “I don’t know,” I said again, feeling another sneeze coming. “Excuse me.”

  This time I got away from her, though she hadn’t gone into her house yet. I glanced back when I went up to the front door and fished around for my key.

  To my surprise, I didn’t need it. When I touched the kno
b, it turned, letting me into the front hallway. Maybe Mom was still here. “Mom?” I yelled. Maybe someone had dropped her off and was going to pick her up in a few minutes.

  There was no answer. I glanced into the living room as I reached the doorway, and sure enough, there were several huge boxes sitting in the middle of the floor.

  I was curious, too, and I went over and opened the nearest carton.

  It was empty. Hmm. If they’d already unloaded, why had they left the boxes like this?

  The other two were also empty, and I didn’t see anything new that could have come out of them.

  I sneezed and shrugged and went on upstairs to get my nasal spray. By the time I’d walked around to the opposite side of the bed, my eyes were so red and watery, I got a washcloth and wrung it out with cold water to press against my face.

  Since I’d started the allergy shots I didn’t have problems like this very often, and usually the worst of it was in the spring, when everything was blooming and there was lots of pollen around. When I needed the spray, I was supposed to put one squirt in each nostril, and it usually worked pretty fast.

  I sat down on the edge of the bed and kept bathing my face while I waited for the spray to take effect. I was sort of gloating over my new blue and white bedroom, with no ruffles and no stuffed toys except my old childhood teddy bear, Oscar, that I’d had since I was two years old. I didn’t play with him anymore, of course, but I kept him sitting on top of my dresser with an open book on his lap. Every so often I changed the book so he wouldn’t get bored. Today the book was a fascinating one titled Small Steps: The Year I Got Polio, by Peg Kehret, a true story about the author’s ordeal with a terrible disease when she was only a little bit older than I was.

  Oscar was bent slightly forward, as if to read more easily.

  After a few seconds it occurred to me to wonder how come he was tipping so far. He had been leaning a little bit against my new reading lamp.

  I pulled the washcloth away from my eyes. There was no reading lamp.

  It was a really nice one that Mom had gotten me at a thrift store to go with my new color scheme. It had, she said, been pretty expensive to begin with, and the people at the shop hadn’t realized it could have been sold as an antique, because she’d only paid five dollars for it. It had a shade big enough to let me use a decent-sized lightbulb in it, and it was positioned right alongside my bed so I could read with it. Reading after Jodie wanted to go to sleep was one of the most important benefits of having a room of my own.

  I stared at the empty spot where the lamp was supposed to be.

  There was nothing but Oscar, reading his book, his wire-rimmed glasses sliding off the end of his stubby nose.

  Anger flared, and I forgot about bathing my eyes with a cool washcloth. Had Jodie borrowed the lamp for some reason and not bothered to bring it back?

  I got up and headed for her room.

  There it was, neat and silent with all its pink-and-white-checked ruffles, stuffed animals lining the shelves, all in precise positions, just the way my sister kept everything.

  There was no sign of my lamp, only Jodie’s fussy little pink ones that didn’t provide enough light to read or take a sliver out of your finger.

  Wally’s was the next closest room, so I checked that. We hadn’t been in the house long enough for it to be looking the way his room usually looked. There was his bat leaning against one wall, his sweater thrown on the bed (unmade, at least that was normal) and two dishes with the remains of his last ice-cream feast sitting on the floor beside his bed.

  No antique reading lamp.

  Puzzled, I went on to Jeff’s room.

  He wasn’t a neatnik like Jodie, or a slob like Wally. I wasn’t yet used to the way his new room was supposed to look, so I stood in the doorway, surveying the place. There was no sign of my lamp, but something didn’t seem quite right. I decided to stand there until I figured it out.

  He had stacks of sheet music on his desk, a couple of books on music theory, and a biography of Joseph Haydn, which anchored the sheet music.

  After a few more seconds I saw that something was missing from here, too. Jeff had a nice radio-CD player, which he kept right next to his bed on a nightstand. It wasn’t there.

  What the heck was going on?

  By this time, I was really puzzled. I crossed the hall to the master bedroom, where Mom hadn’t added anything new to the furnishings. But in spite of the familiar bedspread and chest of drawers, it all seemed strange in the unfamiliar surroundings.

  Finally I realized that not everything was present here, either.

  The radio-telephone Dad kept on his side of the bed was missing. The black velvet chest that held Mom’s jewelry wasn’t on the dresser. She didn’t have any real jewelry; the only diamond she owned was in her engagement ring, and she was wearing that. But there were earrings and a few necklaces and a nice string of artificial pearls, all in the velvet box that had held them for as long as I could remember.

  And Dad had an elegant pair of gold cufflinks that he wore on special occasions in French cuffs, when he was super dressed up. He’d kept them in a little brass tray, with a tiepin and some other small items I couldn’t remember. The tray was there, but the cufflinks were gone.

  The nasal spray was clearing up my allergy problems, and my head was beginning to clear out as well.

  Something strange was going on, and I couldn’t imagine what it was.

  I stepped to the door of Mom and Dad’s bathroom and saw that the medicine cabinet door was open, and a couple of prescription bottles had fallen into one of the twin sinks. We didn’t use much in the way of pills or remedies for small illnesses, so the rest of the stuff was still there: shaving cream, deodorant, shampoo, mousse.

  I think it was right about then that the hairs started to stand up on the back of my neck. Somebody—not the family—had been in our house since we’d left that morning.

  I turned back into my parents’ bedroom, looking for the phone. I’d call Mom. She was more likely to be where I could reach her immediately than Dad was. He had to be out and moving around the high school most of the time.

  But there was no phone. It had been unplugged from the wall and taken away.

  My heart began to beat more loudly, so I could hear it in my ears, and there was a strange, frightened feeling creeping over me like bugs on a dead squirrel.

  Downstairs, I heard a door close. For a few seconds I didn’t think I could breathe or move. I forgot I’d just had an allergy attack and that now I was supposed to go back to school. I forgot everything except that I was alone in the house with someone who had no right to be there.

  Chapter Five

  I felt as if I couldn’t catch my breath, and my chest hurt.

  I listened, hearing nothing more in the house. There shouldn’t have been any noises, because except for me the place was supposed to be empty. But I was sure I’d heard a door close downstairs. And the front door had been unlocked! How had that happened? An accident?

  Maybe Mom had remembered leaving the door unlocked, or maybe she’d finished whatever she’d been in the middle of at the clinic and had come home to check on me, just in case. Maybe she had opened and closed a door.

  But Mom would have called out for me immediately when she came in.

  I stood there, frozen, beginning to ache with the effort of holding myself so still. And as my gaze drifted around my parents’ bedroom, I remembered the things that were missing: my lamp, Jeff’s radio, Mom’s jewelry box, and Dad’s gold cufflinks.

  I remembered the Andersons’ house, where three men had stolen a whole lot of stuff and vanished with it before the police could get there. I remembered that one of them had hit Jeff over the head and knocked him out.

  The hairs prickled on the top of my head.

  I couldn’t call the police. The telephone had been unplugged and carried away.

  I finally sucked in a great gulp of air and made myself move, slowly and cautiously, toward a window l
ooking out over Mrs. Banducci’s house. For once she wasn’t out there spraying water on the street as an excuse to see what the neighbors were doing.

  Actually, there probably weren’t any neighbors around this time of day. This was a new subdivision, with expensive houses that probably took two people working in every family to pay for them. Like ours. If I could have seen anyone, I’d have opened the window and yelled.

  I felt cold, although it was ordinary early fall weather, no hint of chill when I’d walked home from school.

  What should I do?

  There were two other phones in the house, one in the living room and one in the kitchen. Unless, of course, someone had unplugged those, too. They were my best chance to get help.

  Maybe, since the thieves had obviously already been up here and taken the things that looked the most interesting, it would be safe just to wait here until they’d cleaned out what they wanted and left the house.

  My aunt Jane had brought us all wristbands the last time she came to visit. They were different colors of leather—brown for Wally (appropriately dirt colored, Jeff had pointed out), black for Jeff, blue for me, and pink, of course, for Jodie. They had gold letters stamped on each of them—WWJD? The letters stood for “What Would Jesus Do?” and wearing them was supposed to remind you to reflect on your choices before it was too late.

  It was easy enough to figure out what Jesus would do in most situations. The right thing, the kind thing, the loving thing.

  But those choices didn’t apply here.

  The question was, what would Dad advise me to do? Call the police, if it were possible. But since it wasn’t, unless I went downstairs and found a working phone, would he want me to hide up here until the housebreakers were gone?

  The Andersons had lost a whole lot of stuff—a computer, TVs, the family silver—and so far they hadn’t retrieved any of it. I didn’t even know if all of our things were insured, except for Jeff’s piano. I knew nobody had carried off the piano, at least not yet. I had noticed it when I looked at those mysterious boxes downstairs.