Scared Stiff

  “Why?” I asked anxiously. “Did something else happen?”

  “He came in here to use the phone.” She put the pan on the stove and turned on the burner. “He called the dispatcher from that trucking company where your folks work, and talked to him at home. He was upset when he got through, and he talked to me about it.”

  “Nothing’s happened to Pa, has it?” That awful tightness was in my chest again.

  “No. That’s one of the things Mr. Svoboda wanted him to do, to get in touch with your pa when he picks up his load in Ogallala. I guess the man didn’t sound very cooperative. Just annoyed that your ma hadn’t showed up or called or anything. So Mr. Svoboda said he was going to talk to the police again, see if they wouldn’t try to run down your pa, wherever he is. Said it was too much for him to deal with by himself.”

  Mrs. Biggers wiped her hands and sat down at the table, facing us. “I don’t blame him. I hope he can make the police believe your ma didn’t just run off and abandon you. He says she’s not the kind of person to do that, and somehow he has to convince the police they need to look for her.”

  She sighed. “I don’t know, I’m sure. Since they told me we have to move, I can hardly think straight, so I’m no help to anybody. Anyway, your uncle said he was taking a footprint or something to the police, today instead of waiting until tomorrow. How can he take a footprint anywhere?”

  I was puzzled and anxious and excited, all at the same time. “He meant the one on my notebook. Maybe this time they’ll listen.”

  “Come on,” Connie said, pushing himself away from the door frame where he’d been leaning. “I’ll wait with you until your uncle comes home.” Julie followed us out into the tiny front yard, and we stood around awkwardly until Connie spoke.

  “You know, I’ll bet your uncle had the same idea I’ve got about all this.”

  “What?” Julie asked.

  “Well, why would the people at E & F Trucking be uncooperative? Why were they so disagreeable when Rick called them? I mean, it’s more likely that something happened to Rick’s mom than that she just walked off the job and left her kids without telling anybody, isn’t it? I mean, if she wanted to quit the job, all she had to do was say so. Nobody could stop her. And if they want her to do the paperwork for getting out paychecks, wouldn’t she have one of her own coming? Why would she leave without getting it? Besides that, Rick, those papers you found in your notebook, they’re some kind of clue your mom found to something that’s going on there where she worked.”

  “Something crooked,” I said slowly. It was a scary idea, that E & F was mixed up in something like they put on TV shows, where people get kidnapped . . . or shot.

  “Could that be it?” I asked slowly, as a cold fear crept through me. “Remember, I told you my dad had a load of TV sets hijacked. Ma asked him . . .” I swallowed, because it was hard to say and I didn’t want it to be true. “She said did he have anything to do with it, like leaving his truck long enough so somebody could unhook it from his cab, and he got really mad and they had a big fight. And then he walked out and didn’t come home again.”

  “Did he—” Julie began, but Connie, who was facing the street entrance to the park, suddenly clamped a hand on her shoulder to silence her.

  I turned to see what had caught his notice, and the air froze in my lungs so they hurt.

  “Run!” Connie barked, and without conscious thought, everybody except Kenny spun and dashed toward the shelter of the laundry room.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The blood pounded in my ears so hard that Connie’s voice, calling to my little brother, sounded faint and far away.

  “Kenny! Come here and just act natural, like you’re playing,” Connie said.

  Kenny looked uncertainly after us, in through the door of the laundry room. “What’s going on?” he asked, which for him was acting natural, I guess.

  “Kenny,” I finally managed to get out in a fairly firm tone, “this is important, so come right now. And don’t look around.”

  Immediately his head swiveled, from the back of the park to where the purple bus ought to be parked and wasn’t, to the front of the park. His face was blank; whatever he saw, it had no meaning for him.

  I spoke through gritted teeth. “Now, Kenny!”

  He walked toward us, kicking a pop can somebody had dropped, then picking it up to deposit it in the garbage can near the door, the way he’d been taught. Ma had a real thing about dropping trash around.

  As soon as he got close enough, Connie and I both reached out and jerked him inside.

  “What’s going on?” he protested.

  “Did you see the car turning in?” I asked, wanting to shake him for being so slow when we’d tried so hard to make him move quickly.

  “What car?”

  I sighed and pushed him behind me, then maneuvered so I could try to see back down the road to the entrance of the RV park. I couldn’t see anything up front, though, without showing myself. And I didn’t really have to. I remembered what I’d seen when Connie had shouted for us all to run.

  A black sedan had turned in from the street, and it had a crumpled front license plate. Just like the one on the car Mrs. Fox had seen out front the day Ma disappeared.

  “Is it them, do you think?” Julie asked huskily. “The men who maybe kidnapped your mom?”

  Connie didn’t waste time discussing that. “Julie, there’s no reason they’d be interested in you. Go back to your grandma’s and see if you can find out what they want, who they are. If we can, we’ll wait here for you to come back and tell us. If we can’t wait . . . well, you know where we’ll be.”

  “I’ll go out the back door, then, so they don’t see me coming and realize I was with you a minute ago,” Julie said, getting the drift even if Kenny didn’t.

  He was looking sort of scared now. “What’s happening, Rick? Are we going to be kidnapped, too?”

  “No,” Connie and I said together, though my heart was beating its way through my rib cage again. I wished Uncle Henry hadn’t chosen right now to go to the police; who knew when he’d be back?

  I wanted desperately to see what was going on, but I didn’t dare stick my head out the door. Connie, though, decided to do just that.

  I started to stop him, but he gave me a look that proved he was calmer than I was.

  “He doesn’t know me, Rick. If he’s the guy who did something to your mom, and now he wants you and Kenny, he’s looking for white kids, not a black one. I’m going to pretend I live here and walk over to Mrs. Giuliani’s trailer and ask if she’s got change for a dollar. I’ll see what I can see.”

  He strode briskly across the road, not looking toward the car, while I waited. Kenny tugged at my shirt, and I spoke without taking my eyes off Connie.

  “It could be the guys who kidnapped Ma. Be quiet and do whatever I tell you. This could be dangerous, and if we have to run we’ll go back into Wonderland and hide. It’s important they don’t see us, understand?”

  His mouth was open, but he nodded slowly.

  Out in the open, Connie paused as if to tie his shoe, then straightened and glanced casually in the direction of the office. Then he went on across the road and knocked on Mrs. Giuliani’s trailer, setting her little mutt to yapping until she came to the door. She took his dollar bill and a moment later handed him change.

  He came back, sauntering along as if he had no thought in the world except to put his quarters in the Coke machine just outside the door. He shifted so that he could look unobtrusively toward the front of the park and spoke out of the corner of his mouth.

  “The car’s there, and it’s got a bent-up license plate all right. There’s one guy standing on the steps talking to Mrs. Biggers, and another one standing beside the car.”

  The quarters jangled their way down through the machine, and he pretended to be making a leisurely selection before he pushed the button and got out a red and white can. Then he stood openly staring toward the car while he sipped at it
.

  “What do the guys look like?” I whispered, though the men couldn’t possibly hear us from this distance.

  “Just about the way Mrs. Fox described them. My dad’s age, maybe. Forty, forty-five. Medium height. Dark hair. Yeah, and the one beside the car is going bald on top. They’re not wearing suits this time, though. Slacks. The one by the car has a striped shirt, the other one has a white short-sleeved shirt and a tie. He’s handing Mrs. Biggers a paper of some kind, and she’s shaking her head. Like ‘no.’ ”

  “Can you see Julie?”

  “Nope. Umm. Everybody’s looking back this way. Guess I’ll keep on pretending I live here and I’m curious. The same as everybody else. People are looking out their windows.”

  Kenny slid his hand into mine, and I squeezed it.

  “I think they’re arguing about something,” Connie said, and threw his head back to take a long swallow.

  It seemed a long time before Connie finally reported, “They’re getting back in the car. I think they’re leaving.”

  I didn’t have any sense of relief. If they were Ma’s kidnappers, it was just as important to know who they were and where they’d taken her as it was to protect Kenny and me from them.

  “Why would they want to kidnap us too?” Kenny wanted to know. For once he had sense enough to keep his voice down.

  Connie was still watching the activity I couldn’t see. I was the one who answered.

  “If they kidnapped her because of something she learned on the job at E & F, like about the hijacking of Pa’s truck,” I said, “maybe they want the evidence she took. It could be those papers we found in my notebook were important. And if that was her that tried to call Uncle Henry, when she dropped the phone before he got to it, maybe she got away from them and tried to get help, only she saw them coming and ran, and they figured if they took her kids, they could get her to give them the papers.”

  Kenny had his face screwed up, trying to sort it out. “What good would it do to kidnap us? Why would that make Ma give them the papers?”

  Connie and I exchanged a quick glance, silently agreeing that it might not be a good idea to explain how the bad guys sometimes used torture of innocent victims to persuade someone else to give up evidence. Kenny didn’t watch cop shows much; he’d rather see cartoons, or build things out of Legos.

  “We don’t know yet,” I said softly, watching Connie’s face.

  A little of the tension went out of it now. “They’re leaving,” he said at last, and dropped his Coke can in the trash barrel.

  “Can you see their license number?” I asked quickly. “The back plate isn’t bent, is it?”

  “No, but it’s too far away. I can’t make it out.”

  Across the way, Mrs. Giuliani came out with her ugly little dog on a leash and began to walk toward the office. Connie grinned. “Going up to find out who it was and what they wanted. In ten minutes everybody will know.”

  We didn’t have to wait that long, though, because a minute or so later Julie came in the back door. She’d gone home behind the row of trailers on this side, and then returned the same way to be as inconspicuous as possible. She was carrying a folded-over rubber mat, and her eyes were very wide.

  “They had a letter they said was from your mom,” she told me as soon as she came through the doorway. “It said you were to go with them to where she is.”

  “Yikes!” Connie exclaimed. “They came here for you, all right, Rick.”

  I felt as if it had suddenly gone colder. “Who did they say they were?”

  “The one who talked to Grandma said his name was Packard. They didn’t leave the letter. Grandma said your uncle wasn’t here now, and she wouldn’t dream of letting you go with anyone unless he agreed to it. They tried to tell her it was okay, and showed her the letter again.”

  “Was it signed?” I asked. My fingernails were digging into my palms.

  “I think so, but we don’t know what your mom’s writing looks like, so we couldn’t tell if she wrote her name or somebody else did. They wanted to know which was Mr. Svoboda’s trailer, and she told them he was gone with it, but it’s the only empty space, so they could find it easy enough if they drove back here. And look what else.”

  She spread the rubber mat open on top of a washing machine and we all looked at it. “Grandma had just washed this off with a hose and put it down, bottom-side up, to dry on the porch. The man with the letter stepped on it right after he’d been in the dirt on the path. It’s not very dark, but I could see it plain enough. Maybe this is enough to take to the police.”

  I leaned forward, breathing carefully. There on the smooth back of the rubber mat was a footprint that matched the one that had vanished from the dirt beside the shack at the junkyard. It looked exactly like the one on my notebook.

  A slow grin spread over Connie’s face.

  “Bingo!” he said.

  We were all smiling when Kenny spoke from the doorway.

  “Rick,” he said, “the black car is coming back.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Connie said a word I only ever heard Pa say once, when he stepped on a bee in his bare feet.

  “They’re not stopping at the office this time,” he reported, standing in the doorway. “They’re coming this way . . . no, they’ve stopped to talk to Mrs. Giuliani.”

  “She doesn’t know anything that’s happened,” Julie said anxiously. “And she likes to talk. She may tell them she saw Rick and Kenny here after Mr. Svoboda left.”

  “She’s waving her arms around. Telling them where the bus is usually parked, I think. They’re coming on back here.”

  “Hurry!” Julie said, folding over the rubber mat with the footprint on it, carefully so as not to destroy evidence. “Go through the fence, Rick, before they get back here!”

  She looked around for a place to hide the mat, opened a dryer and stuck it in there, and put an Out of Order sign over the dryer’s round window.

  “It’s too late,” Connie guessed. “If they pull into your uncle’s space they’ll see you before you can both get out of sight. Duck out the back door for just a minute, stay close to the building, and then when they turn in come back inside as soon as I say!”

  It didn’t work out quite that way, though, because the black car stopped at the door of the laundry room and one of the men got out—pressed against the outside wall I couldn’t tell which one it was—and then the car rolled past.

  I couldn’t see anything except the blank wall surrounding Wonderland, but I could hear.

  “We’re looking for the Van Huler kids,” the man who came into the laundry said, and his voice sent chills through me. “Two boys.”

  “Oh, yeah. New kids,” Connie said, sounding perfectly normal. I wondered if his heart was hammering like mine, so hard he could hear it.

  “You seen them?”

  “Yeah, they were around a while ago,” Connie said. “I don’t know where they are now, though. Their uncle’s gone right now. Maybe they’re with him.”

  “No. The lady back there said she’d seen them after Mr. Svoboda left. It’s important we find them quickly; their mother sent us. We’re going to take them to her.”

  Oh, no, they weren’t, I thought. Not if we could help it. I didn’t for a minute believe Ma wanted us to go with them.

  “If I see them, I’ll tell them,” Connie offered.

  “Be worth a fiver if you could find them right away,” the man said.

  “Wow!” Connie sounded as if five dollars was a fortune. “Sure, I’ll see if I can find them!”

  “Good. We’ll be waiting right here in our car.”

  “Oh, who shall I say is looking for them?”

  The man hesitated, then said, “They don’t know my name. Tell ’em a friend of their mother’s.”

  “Okay. I’ll see if I can find them.”

  “You live here, too, little girl?”

  Julie’s reply was so soft I hardly heard it. “Yes.”

  “Same goe
s for you. I mean, you find the Van Huler kids and bring them back to me, I’ll give you the five-dollar bill.”

  If she made any response to that, it was inaudible. I heard the motor die as the car pulled into the space beside the laundry room. I waited, but Connie didn’t give me a signal. Nothing happened except I heard the man on foot get into the car and slam the door, and then I smelled the cigarette smoke as one of the men lit up.

  “I got that black kid looking for them,” the first man said.

  The other voice was different. Softer, better educated. “Money gets to everybody, Zimmer, if you offer enough.”

  Was that his name? Zimmer? I’d remember that, I thought, trying to breathe as quietly as possible. I eased closer, pressed against the wall, straining to hear.

  “Everybody but the Van Hulers,” Zimmer said sourly, and I quit breathing altogether.

  “Van Huler will come around.”

  “The way his wife did?” Zimmer asked, sounding sarcastic.

  “She’ll come around, too,” Packard predicted. “Once we pick up these kids we’ll have more leverage. Relax. Think about all that money you’ll have to spend.”

  “In Mexico, though. No way we’re gonna be able to stay around here after this next job goes down. We’d never be able to trust Sophie Van Huler even if we paid her off and she took it.”

  “Think about the money. Everybody likes money,” Packard said with exaggerated patience.

  I’d had to start breathing again, and my chest hurt.

  Zimmer laughed. “Even you, Packard, huh? Me, I been on the streets all my life, never learned a trade or nothing except jockeying a truck. Lived by my wits.”

  I made a bet with myself that he didn’t have enough wit to live on very well, but I was still scared of him. I kept a hand on Kenny’s shoulder, hoping he wouldn’t say or do anything to give us away.

  “But you,” Zimmer went on, “you got a good legitimate job. Insurance adjusters get to dress up nice, drive a good car, live in a nice house. I live in the cab of a truck. Me and my sleeper, that’s it. Anybody can see I need money, but you can’t be hurting that bad for cash.”