Scared Stiff

  “Darn it, Kenny, I told you—” I began, and then my voice trailed away.

  Because he was right about the light; I’d seen the flicker of it, too. Kenny pushed again, carrying us away from the oval of light behind us at the mouth of the tunnel. We bumped the other wall, where Kenny pushed again, sending us around a curve so that the light behind us almost vanished.

  It was pitch black ahead. I heard Julie suck in her breath, and then the hair stood right up on the back of my neck. A leering pirate with a parrot on his shoulder suddenly loomed up to our left, an evil grin on his face and a hooked hand carrying a lantern.

  It wasn’t the lantern that illuminated him, though, but a flashlight, I realized as my heart thudded in my chest.

  It wasn’t a real pirate, of course, nor a real parrot. But there was someone real in the tunnel with us; when I heard the maniacal laughter I stumbled backward and sat down without intending to.

  I wanted to shout out and ask who was there, but for just a few seconds my voice wouldn’t work, even when I heard Kenny whimper as he, too, sank onto the seat of his gondola.

  And then the light went out and we were in darkness, while the wild laughter continued to echo off the walls around us.

  Chapter Seven

  I heard Kenny’s wavering voice say “Rick?” and felt our boats bump, then drift apart. I’d let go of the one he was in when I sat down, and I felt a moment of panic that I’d lost contact with my little brother.

  He hadn’t really meant to come far enough inside the tunnel to get completely away from the light, and he’d never have done it if he hadn’t thought I was right behind him. He didn’t spook about the dark unless he was alone in it.

  I could hear the blood thundering in my ears as the crazy laughter died away, and then Julie spoke behind me.

  “Who’s there?”

  There was no response, only the faint sound of one of the boats rubbing against the tunnel wall. I tried to calm down, because there wasn’t anywhere Kenny’s boat could go except on through the tunnel; there wasn’t room to pass, and my boat was right behind his.

  I wanted to say his name, to reassure him that I was close by, but my voice wouldn’t work. Off to the side there were small scuffling sounds, and then a giggle.

  Julie’s words were sharp and didn’t sound as afraid as I was. “Who is it? Who’s there?”

  The only answer was another smothered giggle.

  “Is that you, Connie Morse?”

  The flashlight came on, glancing off the fierce pirate with his parrot and his hooked hand, then settled on Julie’s face so that she lifted a hand to shield her eyes.

  “You don’t have to blind me,” she said. “What are you doing in here?”

  “I been following you for half an hour,” a perfectly normal boy’s voice said. The beam of light swung over me, picked out Kenny crouched in the gondola ahead of us, then dropped so it didn’t shine in anybody’s eyes.

  At first I couldn’t see behind the light to whoever was holding it, but at least if it was someone Julie knew maybe I didn’t need to have a heart attack.

  “Why have you been following us? And why are you in here?”

  “You were heading this way. I figured there was a chance you’d check out the Pirate’s Cave the way you were checking out everything else, so I ducked in here. Thought I’d give you a surprise. Didn’t cost you anything, either.”

  The boy laughed again, only this time he didn’t sound crazy.

  “It was stupid,” Julie said, but she wasn’t angry. “Just like that stupid play you wrote for the sixth grade to put on at school. That’s how I knew it was you. It was the same stupid laugh.”

  The flashlight dropped a little, and I finally saw the face behind it and realized why it had been so difficult to make out. Connie Morse—what kind of name was that for a boy?—was black.

  “The play wasn’t stupid. It was a fantasy,” the boy called Connie stated. “I got an A for writing it, and another one for being the insane Dr. Murder.”

  “What are you doing in Wonderland? Nobody’s supposed to be in here.”

  Including us, I thought. Kenny was staring at the other kid and didn’t seem scared anymore.

  “Same thing you are,” Connie Morse said. “I been watching you for weeks. I followed you in here a few times.”

  “Spying on me?” Julie was mildly indignant, probably remembering how silly she might have appeared as she played she was going to the moon in the rocket ride.

  “Well, you helped entertain me. Mostly, I really came in here to have a place to hide when my old man is drunk,” Connie said. “He starts fights with my mom and I can’t take it; when I say anything, or sometimes if all I do is look like I might say something, he belts me. One time he did it and I took off, didn’t have anywhere to go. I came into the RV park to use the Coke machine and saw where there were loose boards in the back fence. I worked ’em open farther and I been coming here ever since. Nobody else ever shows up except you. It’s safe. I go home after I figure my old man has passed out.”

  “Well, it’s getting dark outside. Let’s get out of here,” Julie said, and I muttered agreement.

  “Who are these guys?” Connie wanted to know, swinging the beam of light across us again.

  “Rick and Kenny Van Huler. They’re staying with their uncle, Mr. Svoboda.”

  “The old guy in the purple bus?”

  Connie was crouched in a hollowed-out place where he was surrounded, I could now see dimly, by a tropical beach with a treasure chest spilling gold coins and jewels onto the sand. For a few minutes I’d forgotten this was a scary place for kids, and that it was supposed to be about pirates.

  Connie suddenly slid off the shelf into the water, which must have been barely deep enough to float the gondolas. “Come on, I’ll take you on the rest of the tour,” he offered. “I’m Conrad Morse, only everybody calls me Connie. I’ll pull the front boat, you hang on from behind, okay?”

  So we got the tour. The tunnel twisted and turned inside the artificial mountain, and around every corner was a new scene on one of the shelves of “rock” on each side.

  “When the park’s operating,” Connie told us as he waded forward through the shallow water, “there’re electric eyes that trigger the lights so each scene pops up at you when you reach it. It’s not as dramatic with a flashlight, but you can see what’s here.”

  He’d obviously been through here often, because he knew what came next each time. He’d shine the flashlight on the pirates as they buried their treasure, and on their ship as they made someone walk the plank, and then there was a pretty spooky scene where everything was supposed to be underwater—there were fish suspended around the hulk of a sunken ship, and another pirate treasure spilling out onto the bottom of the sea.

  Our guide stopped at that one, playing the flashlight over sea urchins and starfish and a corroded anchor so we could see the details. “When the regular lights are on,” he said, “they have a greenish one here, so it looks more like it’s underwater.”

  “You were through here when this place was operating, then?” I asked.

  “Sure. Lots of times. We live over the corner grocery, six blocks down, two blocks over. Our whole family came to the grand reopening, when they redecorated everything and built the new roller coaster, when I was about seven. Then the summer before it closed, my old man bought a family ticket for the season. Course he was drunk when he did it, and he didn’t remember afterwards and thought I stole the money while he was passed out. He tried to get a refund on the ticket, but they wouldn’t give his money back, and if I hadn’t run off to my grandma’s and hid out for a couple days he’d probably have beat me senseless.”

  Connie said these things offhandedly, the way I’d have talked about walking to the store for a loaf of bread, but it made me shiver. My folks had argued, but they never hit each other, or got passing-out drunk. It made me think of Ma being missing, and Pa going off without saying good-bye, and I forgot about the
scene of the sunken pirate ship.

  “Anyway,” Connie went on, “I already had the ticket. So I came over here almost every day, the whole summer. I felt bad when they shut it down when old Mr. Mixon died. Every time the old man gets to drinking so it’s not safe to be around him, I come over here. You want to see where I sleep sometimes?”

  “Sure,” Kenny said immediately. Already he’d accepted Connie as a friend.

  We went on the rest of the way through the tunnel of the pirates; when we came out into the open air, right where we’d started from, it was dark enough so we couldn’t see very far, but since Connie had the flashlight, it didn’t seem to matter so much.

  “Why didn’t you ever say anything, if you knew I was here, too?” Julie wanted to know as we trudged along past a huge tower that had an elevator to take you up high before you got dropped in parachutes. She sounded sort of resentful.

  “I didn’t want anybody to know I was coming here,” Connie said cheerfully. “And I figured you wanted privacy, too. Only tonight I couldn’t resist the chance to spook you in the pirate’s cave.”

  “Thanks a lot,” I said, but I wasn’t really resentful. Not now, anyway. “Where do you sleep?”

  “Got me a good place,” Connie said with satisfaction. “Not if it’s too cold, but in the summer it’s great.”

  He swung the light up and illuminated one of those Mexican hats that stood maybe twenty feet high; it had seats around the brim and gave you a wild ride when they turned the machine on and made it tilt and dip while it was going up and down and around in circles all at the same time.

  “Under the Big Sombrero,” Connie explained unnecessarily. “When it’s turned off, it’s not that high off the platform, but it’s good shelter from the rain or the sun, either one. I brought over an old sleeping bag and a pillow, and I keep a box of crackers and a bucket of peanut butter there, too. Just in case I can’t go home for a while.”

  Kenny had to climb up and look at the place close up. “I wish I could come here when everything’s running,” he said wistfully. I thought it was probably a good thing it wasn’t running. It would have made Kenny throw up.

  “I wish I could find the keys to the lights and the operating buttons,” Connie said when Kenny rejoined us. “The main power’s still on. The security lights come on automatically, but everything else is off. Old Wonderland is really something when the lights are blazing and the music’s playing and the rides are buzzing and whirring and whipping around.”

  I wished I could see it that way, too. “Even if you could turn things on, somebody’d hear the music, wouldn’t they?”

  “I don’t know. Most of the people who live in the RV park are deaf.”

  “Not that deaf,” Julie protested. “My grandma’s not deaf. Mrs. Giuliani isn’t, either, at least not very much. Still, it might be worth it, to see it going again. Even if we got caught and sent to Juvie afterward.”

  “Could we do it?” Kenny asked eagerly. “Make everything run?”

  “Not without knowing how to turn on the rest of the power,” Connie said. “And you need keys to control each of the rides. It takes two people pushing buttons that aren’t even close to each other to make a ride start. Safety factor, so some dumb kid can’t set it off when people are getting off or on, or don’t have their safety belts fastened. There’s lots of stuff you can monkey around on, though, even if you can’t make the motors run.”

  “We’d better go home,” Julie said reluctantly, “before Grandma wonders where I am. She thinks I’m over at Mr. Svoboda’s bus, watching TV or something with Rick and Kenny. Once her own TV programs are over, she might come looking for me.”

  We started back to where we’d entered the park through the fence. “It almost makes me wish I was going to stay here awhile,” I said. “This would be a fun place to come.”

  “How long you going to be here?” Connie asked.

  “Only until my ma comes back,” I told him, and the remembering took all the fun out of everything.

  “Where is she? In the hospital? On a trip?”

  The lump in my throat was painful. “No. She disappeared.”

  Connie stopped walking. He had the flashlight aimed toward the ground, but we could faintly see each other’s faces above it. “Like, abracadabra, poof, she vanished in a cloud of smoke?”

  “Almost,” I said, and told him what had happened. “And,” I finished, “the police say she probably just went away on her own, and will come back when she’s ready. Only if she could come back on her own, she’d have done it by now. I know she would have.”

  “What’re you going to do, then, if the cops won’t look for her?”

  “I wrote a letter to Pa, in care of the E & F Trucking, where he works. He’s off on a trip, though, and won’t be back until next Thursday.”

  “And you’re just going to wait until then to do anything?” Connie sounded incredulous.

  Julie had stopped walking, too, and turned to face us. “What else can they do?”

  “Was me, I’d go looking for her myself. Do a little detective work.”

  He sounded so positive he made me feel awkward and kind of stupid. “I’m no detective. Where would I look?” I asked defensively.

  “I’d start the last place anybody saw her.”

  “The last place we saw her was on the street near the deli, but we know she was at the apartment after that. She left my notebooks and stuff there. I don’t even have a way to get back to the apartment.”

  “On the bus,” Connie said promptly.

  “I don’t have bus fare,” I had to admit.

  “I do.” Connie started to walk again, and the rest of us moved with him. “When my old man’s in a good mood, he’ll peel off a twenty-dollar bill for me to run an errand for him. It helps a little to make up for the times when he slams me into the wall. Tell you what: first thing in the morning I’ll be over, and we’ll go see if we can find any clues. Okay?”

  My hopes had begun to rise, even though I didn’t really believe anything would come of this. Connie wasn’t more than a year older than I was, and what could a couple of kids do? “The police officer already looked around, and so did Uncle Henry.”

  “Well, the cop was the only trained observer, wasn’t he? and he was convinced your mom just walked away because she wanted to go. So maybe he wasn’t looking as hard as we’d look.”

  “I know she didn’t abandon us,” I said earnestly.

  “Right. You know your mom better than the cop, so chances are you’re the one that’s right. First thing in the morning, then?”

  We’d reached the place under the roller coaster where we’d come in, and Julie shifted the boards to let us squeeze through. I’d never have found it by myself.

  “Okay,” I said. “First thing in the morning.”

  I followed Kenny and Julie through the opening, and the last thing I saw when I glanced back, before the boards fell into place again, was Connie’s grinning face above the glow of his flashlight.

  “We’ll look for your mom ourselves,” he said, “if the cops won’t do it.”

  I don’t know why, but right that minute it never occurred to me that looking for Ma on our own might be dangerous.

  Chapter Eight

  Julie couldn’t go with us because she had to help her grandma with the laundry for several of the old people who lived in the RV park: they didn’t get around easily enough to do it themselves. She did Uncle Henry’s, too, because he didn’t have time.

  Kenny wanted to go with us back to the apartment, but Connie shook his head. “No, you’re too little. This might get risky, kid. You’d be better off here, with Julie. You can help her fold up towels and stuff.”

  Kenny stared at him. “Risky?”

  “Well, sure. If you’re right that your mom was kidnapped, and we find any clues, don’t you think the kidnappers are going to do anything they can to stop us from telling the cops about them?”

  I cleared my throat uneasily. “Like wha
t, do you think?”

  In daylight I noticed that Connie wore jeans and a bright plaid shirt, and he walked with a kind of swagger, like Pa.

  “Who knows? Depends why they took your mom. If it was for ransom—”

  “We don’t have any money,” I blurted, feeling my eyes sting in the way I was getting used to whenever I thought about Ma. “Pa doesn’t, I mean. It was one of the things they . . . argued about. Not enough money. Or how to spend what there was.”

  Connie nodded. “Yeah. My folks, too. My mom says there would be enough, if he didn’t spend so much of it drinking. Anyway, kidnappers don’t usually pick anybody but rich people if they’re looking for easy money. So there must be another reason they took her. If they just wanted somebody to torture—”

  “Don’t!” I said quickly. I couldn’t bear to think about a thing like that, though I knew from the TV news that sometimes such things happened.

  “Yeah, that’s probably not what happened, anyway. More likely she knew something about somebody and they didn’t want her to tell.”

  That wasn’t much better, because in that case they might shoot her, I thought; but I couldn’t put that into words. “What could she know about anybody who was a kidnapper? She was—is—just an ordinary mother who works as a bookkeeper for a trucking company. She rides the bus to and from work, and she minds her own business, except for listening to conversations on the bus. Sometimes she tells us what people were talking about, when she thinks it was interesting or funny.”

  Connie nodded. “That’s what I mean. Maybe she overheard somebody talking about something that was a secret, and they didn’t want her to tell. You know, people sitting behind her on the bus, or something like that.”

  “Why would they be talking about anything that was a secret?” I wanted to know. “I mean, on a bus, where anybody could hear them?”

  Connie shrugged. “Who knows? People do stupid things all the time. Maybe they were planning a crime, or they’d already committed one and were talking about it. So they followed her when she got off the bus, and took her away.”