Ransom

  He had made an excuse not to go, and they all had accepted it. It would have been all right if he had not overheard the girl—his girl—saying to a friend, “Thank God Dexter isn’t going to go with us. He’s a nice guy and all that, and cute enough in a jacket, but I think I’d die if I ever had to be seen on the beach with him!”

  The bus stopped, started, stopped. More students got out. Now there were only five of them left, five and the driver.

  We’re almost there, thought Jesse. In a few moments they would turn south on the road that led into the Valley Gardens area, down behind the country club.

  Valley Gardens, she thought, keeping her eyes on her book, not really reading, but concentrating on the neat white margins in order to keep from having to make conversation with the boy across the aisle who kept staring at her so rudely. Valley Gardens. A nice name. But living there had not accomplished the magical transformation that her mother had so hopefully anticipated.

  “Valley Gardens.” It had had a ringing sound when her mother said it, like a bell pealing across rolling countryside. “It’s the nicest area in Albuquerque. A lovely place. A solid place, where people build homes and live in them for the rest of their lives.”

  Her father had shaken his head, uncomprehendingly. “I don’t see why you don’t want to live on the base the way we always do. It’s much more convenient. I’ll be near my work. You’ll be close to the commissary. There’s the officers’ club …” “But, Clark, Valley Gardens!” Mrs. French had regarded him pleadingly. “Imagine finding a house to rent there! The owners are going to Hawaii for the winter; they don’t want to leave the place unoccupied. It’s such a wonderful opportunity for Jesse!”

  “For Jesse?” Colonel French had looked surprised. “Why for Jesse?”

  “Because it will give her a chance to know people. It’s the last chance we’ll have, Clark, to live together as a family in a settled community. We’ve always flown about so, from one base to another, one country to another—”

  Colonel French had gazed at her in bewilderment. “I thought you liked it—the service life. You’ve always said you liked it!”

  “I do, dear,” Mrs. French said softly. “I always will. It’s Jesse I’m thinking of. She’s grown up with such a mixed background. Half of her schooling has been at home. In some ways she is more like an adult than a teenage girl, and in others she is more like a child. She has never had a chance at the solid, ordinary life that most youngsters take for granted. I want her to have a taste of this kind of life. I want her to make her friends among a young crowd from the good society of the town, to come out of her shell and belong somewhere.”

  “Jesse?” Her father had turned to her. “Do you want this? Do you want to live in Valley Gardens?”

  “I—I don’t care.” She really hadn’t. “If Mother wants it so much, I—I think it’s fine.”

  It would make no difference. She had known that it would not, but she could not bear to crush the glow in her mother’s eyes.

  “I’d like to live there, Dad.”

  “Women!” Her father had shaken his head helplessly. “Give them Paris in the springtime, Switzerland in the summer, and what is their prize dream? To spend a winter in Valley Gardens, New Mexico.”

  So they had moved into the rental house. “The only rented house,” Mrs. French kept remarking, “in Valley Gardens.” And Jesse had still been Jesse. It had really made no difference.

  Because her eyes were on the book, she was not the one to notice first that the bus had passed the turnoff. It was Bruce’s voice that brought it to her attention.

  “Hey, we’ve come too far! Back there is where I told you to turn, back by the sign to the country club. You can pull right through the gates into the Gardens, and we all get off there.”

  “That’s okay.” The driver hardly seemed to notice him. “I’m taking the long way ’round. I have to stop and pick up a friend of mine.”

  “Pick somebody up? With the school bus?” Bruce was surprised.

  In her own seat Marianne echoed his reaction. “That’s funny. Whom would he pick up with the bus? And why? It’s not as though it were public transportation or something.”

  “Well, we’ll see in a minute. He’s slowing down.” Glenn leaned past her to gaze out the window with curiosity. “I guess that’s the friend he’s stopping for. It sure does seem peculiar.”

  The bus door opened, and a swarthy man in a leather jacket climbed aboard. The door closed quickly behind him, and the bus started up again. The man glanced about the interior of the bus and said to the driver, “Is this all of them?”

  “These are the kids from the Gardens area.” The driver spoke over his shoulder, his eyes on the road ahead.

  “But there are only five. I thought we figured on at least eight.” The new passenger spoke with a marked Mexican accent, not unusual in this part of the country. “Only five. Geez, Buck, it’s hardly worth the risk of it.”

  “We’ll make it worth it,” the driver told him.

  The bus turned now and started north, directly away from Valley Gardens. Dexter, who had been staring in bewilderment, came to with a start.

  “Hey, you can’t do this! Who are you anyway? Where do you think you’re taking us?”

  The man in the leather jacket was still standing with his back against the door. Now he took a step forward.

  “I think you had better move,” he said, “behind those other two up there. And you, girl”—he nodded to Jesse—“you move up with him. I want you all together where I can keep tabs on you, and I want each one of you to dump your cellphones on the floor.”

  “What the hell …” Dexter began. And then he saw the pistol.

  The bus turned again now, off the highway onto one of the dirt roads that led along the river.

  “Where are we going?” Jesse asked numbly.

  “Move forward,” the man with the jacket told her, and she did so, closing her book carefully first, automatically slipping a bit of paper in to mark her place, too stunned even to attempt to grasp the significance of what was happening.

  “You, too,” the man said, and Dexter followed her, growling defiance beneath his breath, but moving.

  Perched at the front of the bus, Bruce stared back at them all like a small, startled owl.

  “What—what’s happening?” he asked shakily, “Glenn, do you understand?”

  His brother’s handsome face was incredulous. He drew a long breath.

  “It looks,” he said in a strange, flat voice, “as though we are being kidnapped.”

  Chapter Two

  MARIANNE PAGET WAS OFTEN misjudged because of her appearance. Because she was a small girl and brought out protective instincts, because she was cuddly and big-eyed and appealing, it was easy for people to assume that the softness and helplessness which appeared on the surface went all the way through.

  In reality, this was not the case. Beneath the soft hair and pert face, Marianne had a hard core of self-sufficiency. It was like a thin strand of steel wire running through the center of her being—a hidden, unbreakable resistance which kept her calm in emergencies and unbendably stubborn in the face of adversity.

  It was Marianne, sitting quietly in her seat by the window, who was first able to accept the incredible situation for what it was.

  They are going to hold us, she thought, for ransom. They have selected the five of us because we live in Valley Gardens, and the people who live there are supposed to have money. They can’t know how it is with Mother, that she got the house when she divorced Daddy, but aside from that great, big, sprawling white elephant, she doesn’t have anything.

  She could imagine her mother receiving the ransom note, standing there, white-faced and shaken, and then undoubtedly bursting into hysterics. Her mother, so gentle and blond and pretty, looking exactly the way Marianne herself would look twenty years from now, lacked the element of strength that ran through her daughter. Whenever pressures got too great, she broke into pieces.
r />   Poor Mother, Marianne thought worriedly, it is going to be terrible for her. She won’t know what to do. How much money will they ask her for? A lot, I’m sure—thousands and thousands of dollars.

  She recalled the words the bus driver—the other man had addressed him as “Buck”—had spoken a few moments earlier.

  “It’s hardly worth the risk of it,” the man with the Mexican accent had said, and Buck had answered, “We’ll make it worth it. ”

  Yes, they will ask her for a fortune, Marianne thought, and she won’t have it, and Rod certainly won’t, not from working for a newspaper like the Journal. There isn’t even anybody they can borrow it from. They don’t have rich friends the way Daddy did.

  She paused, letting the words repeat themselves in her head. “The way Daddy did.” And then, suddenly, it came. It was like a great burst of light switching itself on inside her, the wonderful, illuminating knowledge of what the final recourse would have to be. It was inevitable. There was simply no way out of it. The money would have to come from her father.

  She will call him, Marianne told herself, and he will come. He will have to come because after all, I am his daughter! They will see each other again, and they both will be worried. Daddy will walk into the living room, and Mother will be there, crying.

  She pictured the scene the way it would be, with her mother seated, weeping, on the sofa, small and frightened and desperately alone. Her father would pause in the doorway, his big frame almost filling it, his own face ashen with strain.

  “Marian,” he would say, and her mother would raise her head.

  “Jack! Oh, Jack, I knew you’d come!”

  “Of course, I’ve come. The moment I got your message. Did you think it possible that I wouldn’t come when something has happened to our daughter, our Marianne!”

  “Oh, Jack.” And her mother would rise to her feet, holding out her hands beseechingly. “I’ve been so frightened! I haven’t known what to do!”

  “It’s all right,” big Jack Paget would say. “I’m here now. I’ll take care of things. Now I’m home again, everything is going to be all right.”

  Somewhere, of course, Marianne had to admit to herself ruefully, Rod Donavan would have to fit into the picture. He did live in the house now, and he was her mother’s husband. It wasn’t probable that he would be out of town at the crucial moment when her father returned. Rod never went out of town anyway, and even if for some reason he should be called away, he would never leave her mother in a moment of crisis.

  No, he would be there, but luck could put him somewhere in the background—in the den, perhaps, watching television, or downstairs in the basement rumpus room, which he had fixed over for himself into a workshop. With Mother crying in the living room? the practical side of Marianne asked reasonably—oh, come now!

  Well, anyway, he couldn’t, he simply couldn’t intrude on the scene of reconciliation. Not when it was going to come about so dramatically.

  The bus, which had been lurching along at much too fast a speed for the unpaved road, slowed now and pulled to the side, where, Marianne could see from the window, a car and a van were parked in the shadow of a cottonwood. Beyond the tree was the river, shallow and sluggish, more mud than water in its winter lassitude. It was empty country, this part of the valley, a stretch of flatness leading off in all directions without a trace of civilization, not even a trickle of chimney smoke against the clear, unbroken arch of the sky.

  There was a woman in the driver’s seat of the van. When the bus pulled to a stop, she opened the door and got out and stood there, huddled in her heavy coat, while the man named Buck pressed the handle that opened the bus door.

  “Okay, kids,” he said, “climb out and get into the van.”

  There was a moment’s silence during which no one moved or answered.

  Then Glenn asked, “Why?”

  “Why?” The driver regarded him with surprise. Evidently he had expected no resistance. “Because I say so, that’s why. Come on, now. Get a move on.”

  “The joke’s gone far enough,” Glenn said casually. He did not sound at all worried. “I can’t be late getting home today. I’ve got a car to pick up before the garage closes.”

  “This is not a joke,” the man with the accent said quietly. He had moved until he was standing in the aisle only a few feet behind them, and Marianne, although she did not turn to look at him, was as conscious of the pistol that he held as though the cold end of the barrel had actually touched her neck. She shuddered, and the man said, “Guns do not make jokes. You all are to get out of the bus.”

  “You wouldn’t dare shoot us,” Glenn told him. “You are using the gun to scare us. If you let us go now, we’ll know you have only been kidding, that this was a … a … kind of initiation for a club or something. We’ll just go home and not say anything to anybody and forget all about it.”

  He turned then and smiled, the easy, confident smile which had always won him any situation. Marianne, who knew that he must be gazing directly into the gun barrel, was filled with admiration.

  He is giving them a chance to change their minds, she thought. He is telling them that they can still get out of this, that they have not yet passed the point of no return. If they are convinced that the risk is not worth it, perhaps they’ll take this opportunity to let us go!

  Straightening her shoulders, she forced herself to speak. “Even if—if … this was a real kidnapping, it wouldn’t work. I mean, you couldn’t get any money from my family. They simply don’t have any.”

  Across the aisle the stocky black-haired boy with the sullen face gave a short sound which might have been meant for a laugh.

  “You’re sure not going to get any cash out of my uncle. He’ll be glad to be rid of me. He’s a bachelor, and the last thing he needs is a nephew living right on top of him.”

  “That’s why it is a good thing this is just a joke,” Glenn continued hopefully. “If it were for real, it wouldn’t get anybody anything. So why don’t we just laugh the whole thing off and—and …”

  His voice faltered and petered out before the look on the man’s face.

  Marianne had turned to see it, and now shut her eyes. Oh, Lord, she thought. Oh, dear Lord, he is really going to shoot him.

  In his seat at the front of the bus, Bruce thought the same thing. His face was dead white; his voice, a squeak of terror. “Glenn, don’t—don’t say anything else! He will shoot!”

  “Yes, he will.” The bus driver’s tone left no room for doubt. “Juan has used that gun before. He will not hesitate to use it again. Now, for the last time, I will tell you to rise and leave the bus. Walk directly over to the van and get into the back. The girls will sit on the seat. The boys will kneel on the floor facing toward the back. There will be no further discussion.”

  Bruce got to his feet, throwing his brother a look of panic.

  Marianne reached over and touched Glenn’s arm. “It’s not going to work,” she said softly. “I know what you were trying to do, and it won’t work. They are not going to change their minds. We had better do what they tell us.”

  It could not be argued. Both the dark-haired boy across the aisle and the girl, whom Marianne could remember having seen on the bus on other days but whose name she did not recall, had risen and were moving forward to follow Bruce. With a shrug of defeat Glenn rose, too, and he and Marianne fell into step behind the others. They moved down the three steps to the ground and crossed to the van.

  “All right, get in.” The driver had followed close behind them.

  The woman in the coat moved up beside him and asked, “Is it going all right? I expected you before this.”

  “It took longer than I thought it would. I didn’t know the stops for those other kids.” His voice was brisk and businesslike. “Okay, get into the car. Girls first.”

  Because the other girl was hesitating, Marianne stepped past her and climbed in. As she did so, she thought, this is probably going to be our last chance to break aw
ay and run. But all reason told her that such a move would be fatal. Where was there to go in country that offered not a single rise for protection? Back along the road? Into the shallow river?

  Glenn might try it, she thought, hoping desperately that he would not be so foolhardy.

  But Glenn was climbing into the car.

  He hesitated, and the driver said “Kneel,” and he got to his knees, cramming his big frame into a cramped position on the narrow strip of floor. Marianne moved her legs over as far as possible to give him room.

  To her surprise, she found that she was shaking.

  Stop it, she told herself firmly. There is no sense in going to pieces. Everything is going to work out all right. It has to.

  Beside her the other girl was crying. She was not being noisy about it; she was just sitting there, white-faced and silent, with tears streaming down her face.

  Marianne reached over and took her hand. “Don’t be scared,” she whispered, thinking, as she said it, what an idiotic command it was.

  They all were in the car now, crammed in like sardines. The boys particularly were in such cramped positions that Marianne could not see how they were able to breathe. The driver closed the door and paused to secure it, in some way, from the outside. Then he and the woman got into the front, the woman in the driver’s seat, and the man named Juan came around to the front of the car and handed the pistol in through the window.

  “Let’s get the names,” he said, and Buck nodded.

  “Okay, kids, give me your names. You, blondie, what’s yours?”

  He was looking at Marianne. She said, “Marianne Paget.”

  “Paget?” Buck was doing mental inventory. “Look, I don’t want any funny stuff. I know who is supposed to be on that bus and who isn’t. There isn’t any Paget listed in Valley Gardens.”

  “My mother’s name is Donavan,” Marianne said shakily. “Mrs. Rodney Donavan. This is her second marriage. I still have my father’s name.”