Scared Stiff

  I didn’t want to believe that. If they didn’t want Ma to talk about something, they’d have to take drastic action, and that led back to eliminating her altogether. No, not Ma. Besides, I remembered. “Nobody followed her off the bus that day. We saw her get off.”

  Connie took a different tack. “Maybe somebody just robbed her—you know, snatched her purse, and when she started to holler, they grabbed her so she couldn’t yell.”

  “Ma didn’t have enough money to make it worthwhile to rob her,” I said.

  “People been mugged for twenty-two cents,” Connie observed. “Nobody could tell by looking at her if she was carrying much cash or not. And those drug crazies are so stupid they’ll attack anybody.”

  “You’re not making me feel any better,” I said. I hoped this wasn’t scaring Kenny, too. His lower lip was sticking out.

  “I want to go with Rick,” he said.

  Julie met my eyes; she understood what we were saying. “You stay here with me, Kenny,” she said, “and after we get finished with the laundry we’ll go back to Wonderland. Okay?”

  Kenny hesitated.

  “I’ll show you the Wild West Village—we didn’t get to that last night—where they had a shoot-out every afternoon and every evening—And the Golden Nugget Mine—we’ll take a flashlight, because it’s dark in there—and then there’s something else you haven’t seen yet. The rapids in Devil’s Canyon—when the park was open you could go down there on a rubber raft. Now it’s got no water in it, but you can climb up the rocks on foot, if you’re careful.”

  Kenny looked at me, and I said, “It’s a long boring ride on the bus. Both ways.”

  “Well, okay. I’ll stay here,” he decided, which was a relief. If we did get into any kind of trouble, I didn’t want to have to worry about him. Besides, I felt strange about using up Connie’s money for one bus fare, let alone two. “Maybe you better stay outside,” I cautioned, “until it’s late enough for Uncle Henry to be up. Don’t disturb him. We’ll probably be back before then.”

  I had a strong feeling that Uncle Henry wouldn’t approve of my going back home to investigate, and what he didn’t know he wouldn’t get upset about.

  It was a fairly long bus ride. Connie kept talking, trying to analyze the situation. Everything he said scared me more. Ma had to be all right, somewhere.

  Once, when he’d mentioned a particularly gruesome possibility, I said in desperation, “Maybe we ought to just wait until Pa gets here. He’ll know what to do.”

  “But he’s not coming for a week, almost, right? A lot can happen in a week,” Connie pointed out. “If your mom’s in a dark basement somewhere, being tortured, you want to rescue her right away, don’t you?”

  “Why would she be being tortured?” I demanded, almost angry at him.

  “To find out what she knows, of course.”

  “What could she possibly know? She works in the office of a trucking firm, adding up numbers and making out paychecks and stuff like that. It’s a boring job. She wouldn’t know any classified information, like if she worked in a place that made secret weapons or something like that.”

  “That’s what we’re going to investigate,” Connie said. “We have an advantage over the police, remember: We know she didn’t just walk off on her own, right?”

  When we got off the bus, Connie said we should retrace everything that happened when Ma disappeared. We walked from where she got off the bus, and he asked me again about where she walked, and where we met her, and what the car looked like that had driven along the curb beside her before she sent us to Willie’s for groceries.

  We walked slowly, so that we could check the gutters and the sidewalk next to the buildings, though I figured if there had been any clues in those places, someone else would have already found them.

  “The car, you couldn’t identify it. You didn’t get the license number.” Connie said it thoughtfully.

  He hadn’t indicated I was stupid, but I felt that way. “If I’d known she was going to disappear, I’d have paid more attention,” I muttered. “It was just an ordinary black car. I didn’t have any reason to look at the license plate.”

  “I’ll bet it was the guy in the car who took her,” Connie said. “Maybe we should ask the people who live along here if they saw anything that day. It’s only day before yesterday, and there’s probably old people live in some of those upper apartments. Sometimes they sit and look out the windows, watching what’s going on. Let’s ask.”

  I was nervous about ringing buzzers and getting into apartment houses. Most of them were like ours: you either had to have a key to get into the lobby or ring somebody’s buzzer and hope they’d release the lock and let you in.

  In the middle of the morning like this, a lot of people weren’t home. Nobody answered when we rang their buzzers or knocked on their doors. We figured they wouldn’t have been around when Ma disappeared, anyway, because they wouldn’t have been home from work yet.

  “If they were home they wouldn’t have been sitting watching the street,” I said. “They’d have been fixing supper, the way we did.”

  At one place a guy swore at us and told us to stop bothering him, but everywhere else that anyone was home, they listened politely and replied the same way. The trouble was, none of them had seen anything, at least not until we got back to our own building.

  I nearly skipped knocking on Mrs. Fox’s door, because I knew she was almost always crabby. She complained to Ma several times about how much noise us kids made in the hallways. But she had a window that overlooked the street directly in front of our building.

  My mouth was dry when I knocked, and she stared at me after she’d opened the door as if I were a fly who had just landed on the rim of her teacup.

  I gulped. “Um . . . I’m Rick Van Huler,” I began, only to have her interrupt.

  “I know who you are. The one who always runs up and down the stairs. Never walks.”

  I’d run up them this time, too. I felt my face getting warm.

  “I’m sorry if I disturb you, Mrs. Fox. I . . . I don’t know if you’ve heard about my ma, she . . . something’s happened to her. Day before yesterday. We don’t know where she is, and we wondered if you saw anything. Out your front window, I mean. It was Thursday afternoon, and my little brother and I met her on the way home; she sent us to Willie’s for groceries, and she came on home, only she wasn’t here when we got here. She’d been in the apartment, though, because she’d left my books she was carrying. . . .”

  A frown formed between her eyebrows. Mrs. Fox was a big lady, nearly as tall as Pa, and heavier. She looked dressed up, as if she was on the way out.

  “I heard something had happened to her. Thursday afternoon, was it?”

  “Yes. If you remember seeing her . . .”

  She shook her head. “No. I didn’t see her. But shortly before I heard you boys coming up the stairs”—she paused as if to make sure I understood that we had made too much noise that day, too—“I did happen to glance out the window. I noticed someone I’d never seen before get out of a black car and come up the front steps. I noticed because that’s not a parking spot—there’s a yellow curb marked plain as anything. That means Loading or Unloading Only.”

  “A black car. When we saw her,” I said, my tongue beginning to feel numb, “she was talking to a man in a black car.”

  Connie, right behind me, spoke up then. “Did you notice what kind of car it was, ma’am?”

  “A big black car, is all. Not a Cadillac nor a Lincoln, I’m sure.” It sounded as if those were the only cars she knew about.

  “Could you describe the man who came into the building?”

  “Men,” she corrected. “Two of them. Both in dark suits. One of them wore glasses.”

  “Gold-rimmed glasses?” I asked quickly, remembering the man I’d glimpsed driving the dark car.

  Her frown grew deeper. “Ummm. I think so, metal frames.”

  “Can you describe them?” Connie persisted.
“Were they tall? Short? Fat? Skinny?”

  She gave him a look that said he wasn’t too bright. “Did you ever try to gauge someone’s height when you’re looking down at him from the third floor? All I know is they were both dark haired, and the one with the glasses was getting a bald spot.”

  “White men, though,” Connie guessed.

  “Yes. White men. Why are you asking these things? Aren’t the police investigating? None of them has been around to question me.”

  “They say it’s too soon. They think she went off on her own,” I said quietly, trying to keep my voice steady, “and that she’ll come back when she’s ready. But we think somebody kidnapped her.”

  “Kidnapped?” Now the carefully plucked eyebrows rose. “In our building? Good grief! And you think those strangers may be the ones who did it? In broad daylight?”

  “It was broad daylight when Ma disappeared,” I confirmed.

  The thought clearly made her uncomfortable. “My gracious,” she said. “That gives me chills. Of course I only saw them on the front steps. I don’t know if they actually came inside the building. They couldn’t have, could they, unless they had a key, or knew someone who released the front-door lock.”

  “Or they came in behind somebody else,” Connie speculated, “before the door could close. Like, if they were following Mrs. Van Huler, and she was in too much of a hurry to be sure the door locked behind her.”

  That idea gave me chills, and I swallowed hard.

  “Is there anything more you can tell us about the suspects?” Connie asked.

  I hoped he wasn’t overdoing the “investigating officer” routine. So far this was the best lead we’d had—the only lead. I didn’t want her to think he was being smart-alecky and clam up before we’d learned whatever she knew to tell us.

  “No,” Mrs. Fox said after a moment’s thought. “They were just men. Not real young, not real old.”

  Disappointment began to seep through me. It wasn’t enough to tell us who the men were, or why they would have kidnapped Ma.

  “Well, thank you,” I managed.

  “You’re welcome, I’m sure. I never had any problems with your mother. She seemed like a nice lady. Quiet. Never bothered anybody.”

  She was friendlier than she’d ever been before. “Thanks,” I said again, and was turning away when she spoke once more.

  “I just remembered something about the car, though,” Mrs. Fox said. “I noticed it when it drove up, because I was outraged they’d park in a no-parking zone. People are always doing that, taking up handicapped spaces when they’re not handicapped, parking where they block the rest of us from getting in or out.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Connie agreed. “No consideration for anybody else. What was it about the car that you noticed, ma’am?”

  “The license plate.”

  My heart leaped, until she added, “I didn’t get the number. It doesn’t do any good to call the police and report a number unless you can also identify the driver. You can’t arrest the car, you see, only the driver. If the owner says he wasn’t driving it, and you weren’t able to describe him, the police won’t do anything.”

  “What about the license plate?” I asked quickly, before Connie could get another one of his TV-detective questions formed.

  “Well, it was bent up so bad. A nice enough car, you know. Washed and waxed recently, I’d say. So the damaged plate looked out of place. It was folded right up, as if they’d hit something hard with it, you know.”

  It wasn’t as much as I’d hoped. But it was more than I’d actually expected.

  We thanked her again. When she’d closed her door, Connie grinned at me.

  “See? I told you we’d find clues. We’ve talked to the rest of the people on this floor, so let’s check out your apartment.”

  I knew as soon as I opened the door that someone had been there.

  Connie knew it, too, and he’d never been in the place before.

  “Wow,” he said softly. “Just like in the movies, huh? The place has been ransacked!”

  For long seconds I stood there looking at all the stuff that had been knocked off Ma’s desk, at the pile of coats and boots dragged out of the closet and left on the floor, at the cushions thrown out of the chairs in the living room.

  Even the police would have to believe now, wouldn’t they?

  I wished I didn’t feel so sick about it.

  Chapter Nine

  Somebody was sure looking for something important,” Connie said, surveying the mess. “I wonder if he found it.”

  “There wasn’t any money to find, if that was it,” I said, picking up some of the things that had been knocked off the desk. “Whoever it was has been here since we came back yesterday morning with Uncle Henry.”

  “And they didn’t break in,” Connie observed, glancing at the door I’d unlocked only a minute or so earlier. “So that’s another clue right there.”

  I guess I was in a state of shock. It was hard to think.

  “What kind of clue?”

  “Well, who had keys?”

  “I did,” I said slowly. “And Pa probably still had a key. He wouldn’t have done this, though. And Ma, of course. She had a key in her purse.”

  “And her purse disappeared when she did, right?”

  “I guess so. We didn’t find it anywhere.” Ma wouldn’t have made this mess, either, I thought, which could only mean one thing. “Somebody used Ma’s key,” I said. “Somebody . . . took it away from her. I don’t see what good it does us to know that.”

  “It might be evidence the police would pay attention to.”

  I remembered how the police officer at the station had found a reason to dismiss every point we’d brought up. “Or they could decide somebody found her purse where it had been thrown away in an alley after they took what money there was left in it, and got the address from her ID and came here with the key to rob the place.”

  Connie was thoughtful as he walked around the living room. “Look at the way they took the cushions out of the chairs and the couch. They wouldn’t have looked under those for money; people keep their money in better places than that. They were looking for something that had been hidden. The doors are left open on the record cabinet, so they looked there, too. What could they have thought was hidden?”

  I didn’t know. We walked through the place trying to figure out if anything had been taken, but I couldn’t tell. Most of Pa’s stuff was gone, but nothing else was missing that should have been there, as far as I could see.

  I had to agree with Connie, though, that it hadn’t simply been an ordinary thief. The TV and the VCR were still there, and the camera that belonged to Pa. Even Ma’s best earrings were in the box on her dresser, the ones Pa gave her for Christmas a year ago. Those were all things a burglar would have taken because they’d be easy to sell.

  We gave up looking any further.

  “I suppose we’d better talk to the police again,” I said. “I don’t know if what we found out will matter to them or not.”

  We decided to go down to the police station right then to do it. I was afraid if I called they’d think I was some kid playing a joke, and ignore everything I said.

  Connie had watched lots of movies, but he’d never actually been in a police station before. I was really nervous, because they hadn’t helped when we were there before, but I led the way to the front desk and asked for the officer who had talked to Uncle Henry.

  “Sorry, Sergeant Mulligan’s off duty,” the officer said. “Can you talk to someone else, son?”

  I had to tell the new officer the whole story. He listened in the same way, asking an occasional question, making a few notes. When I told him about the men in the dark car who had come into our building, he started asking questions.

  “Did you see these men with your mother?”

  “No. Well, I mean, I don’t know. I couldn’t see whoever was in the car, talking to her. Not clearly. The driver had glasses with gold frames, though, t
he same as the man Mrs. Fox saw.”

  “Lots of people have glasses with gold frames,” he observed, making another note on the pad in front of him. “Did you get the license number on the car? Did this Mrs. Fox get the number on the one she saw?”

  I had to admit neither of us could provide the license number. We couldn’t give a good physical description of the two men, nor prove any connection with Ma.

  “We talked to just about everybody that lives in the building,” Connie told him, exaggerating only a little, because some of the people hadn’t been home. “Nobody let the men inside, of the ones who talked to us. We figure they were right behind Mrs. Van Huler and came in with her, or before she could latch the door behind her.”

  “Um-hmmm.” The officer looked at me sharply. “Are you sure the car you saw with your mother had a bent license plate, son? Sure it was the same car as this Mrs. Fox saw?”

  I had to admit I hadn’t noticed the license plate at all. So, as the officer pointed out, it could have been a different car that parked illegally in front of the apartment house. “Lots of black cars,” he said, and I felt my eyes stinging; he didn’t believe me, I thought. He wouldn’t do anything even now.

  We told him about the mess where someone had been searching the apartment. He made notes about that, too, and said when the other officer came back he’d tell him about it. “He’ll look into it,” was the last thing he said.

  Then he got busy with a couple who came in who’d been in an accident, and forgot about us. Connie gave me the high sign and we left.

  “I don’t think we did any good,” I said as we waited for the bus to take us back to Wonderland RV Park.

  Connie kicked at a beer can someone had dropped on the sidewalk. “I don’t think so, either. But that doesn’t mean we can’t keep on investigating on our own.”

  Investigating what, though? What was there left that a couple of eleven- and twelve-year-olds could do?

  It was only a little after noon when we got home, and Kenny and Julie were just finishing with the laundry. They had folded it up in baskets and were delivering it around the park to the people who couldn’t come and get it themselves.