“Maybe we could talk to a ranger,” Alison said, almost whispering. “They’re the closest thing there is to cops here in the park.”
“Not too bad an idea,” I agreed, “except how do we catch one of them? There haven’t been many around, except in cars that don’t stop unless you’re doing something stupid or you jump in the middle of the road and flag them down. I can imagine trying to talk to that one this morning with Mr. Rupe listening. He’d want to know why we hadn’t told him first, and I still think he probably wouldn’t take us seriously.”
“And if he acted like we were nuts, the ranger would think so too.”
“But what if somebody gets hurt if we don’t tell?”
Alison bit her lip. “It could happen, couldn’t it? If Syd and Ernie are desperate enough, they could be nasty.” She sighed. “Maybe we should just get away from the motor home, make sure it’s unlocked, and let them get what they want, and forget it. Except if there’s something illegal going on, Dad would say we have a responsibility to see that they don’t get away with it.”
“He might,” I began, and then forgot what I was going to say when William the cat exploded, yowling and snarling as he spilled off Billy’s lap.
It sounded like he was being killed, and for a few seconds I was too chicken to dive after him when he spurted between us and tried frantically to hide under one of the seats.
Then it registered what I’d seen, and I turned and glared at Billy. He was staring after William, half-excited, half-scared, and I knew what had happened to Alison’s Scotch tape.
Chapter 9
“I can’t believe this cat slept through being wrapped in almost a whole roll of Scotch tape,” Alison declared, snipping again with the scissors. “And I’m ashamed of you, Billy. That was a cruel thing to do to William. When he woke up all tied up, it scared him half to death.”
“Not to mention what it did to the rest of us,” I added. We’d decided we couldn’t pull the tape off; it was hard enough just to hold the cat and trim his hair off under each section of tape we cut loose. “I’ve got scratches all over my hands from trying to pull him out from under your mom’s seat.”
“It didn’t hurt him,” Billy protested. “I tried some on myself, and it didn’t hurt.”
“It would hurt if we pulled it loose. It’s caught in all his hair. And it wasn’t your Scotch tape to play with. It was mine.”
“Buy some more,” Billy suggested. He obviously wasn’t understanding any of our objections.
“I don’t have the money to buy any more,” Alison told him, and snipped again. William struggled and nearly got away from me, and I got another scratch across my arm. “I spent all my money on souvenirs, so I can’t buy anything now.”
Watching Billy think made me feel like I could actually see the little wheels going around in his head.
“I’ve got some money,” he said. And he reached into his pants pocket and handed her a hundred-dollar bill.
Alison forgot to keep cutting Scotch tape out of the cat’s fur, and I almost let go of him.
“Billy,” I said carefully, “didn’t you spend some of that hundred dollars on ice cream?”
“I don’t know,” Billy said.
“He did,” Alison remembered. “This has to be a different hundred-dollar bill. Billy, where are you getting this money?”
“I found it,” Billy said.
“Where?” Alison demanded, and I asked, “Here? Since we’ve been at Yellowstone?”
“Lewis, we’ve got to tell Mr. Rupe.”
“No! Daddy can’t have it! It’s mine! Harry said finders keepers, and I found it!”
“That’s okay if it was a quarter, or maybe even a dollar bill,” I said, getting a firmer grip on the cat. “But this is too much money. Show us where you found it, Billy.”
Well, we tried. We couldn’t believe he really didn’t remember where he found it, but he wouldn’t admit to anything. He was into everything, all the time, when the rest of us weren’t paying much attention. He poked into purses and cupboards and compartments until someone—usually Alison—made him stop. The money could have been hidden anywhere inside the coach that he could reach or climb up to.
About the time we got the last of the tape off William, and he’d retired under the chair to lick at his damaged fur, Harry showed up, and we told him what had happened.
He thought the bit with the Scotch tape was funny and that the hundred-dollar bills were exciting.
“Bring us some more, Billy,” he urged, ripping open a new bag of corn chips. He dug into them without offering them around, but I didn’t even care.
“No,” Billy said flatly.
“Your folks will have to be told about this,” I said.
Harry chewed and swallowed. “What do you think Dad’s going to do about it? He’ll make him tell where they came from, maybe. Is there a lot more, Billy?”
“You don’t think your folks will let him keep it, do you?” Alison asked.
“Harry,” I said, “I think it’s time we told you what’s going on.” So I did.
Harry forgot to eat for a few minutes. “No kidding. If they had money hid in here, no wonder they wanted to trade coaches. Except why did they let us have this one in the first place?”
“Maybe they told the truth about that much. A new employee made a mistake and brought us the wrong coach.”
“I wonder why they’d have hidden money in a rental motor home? They must have planned to take it somewhere. Out of state, maybe, or even over the border into Canada. Or maybe across the Mexican border.”
“It just about has to be something illegal, don’t you think?” Alison asked.
Harry grinned. “Cripes. Just like in a movie. And you think these guys have been following us, huh? Trying to get in here and get their money back?”
“If it was legitimate,” I mused, “all they’d have to do is tell us they’d made a mistake and come and get the money. We all know it doesn’t belong to us.”
Harry got a can of pop out of the refrigerator and popped the top. “I wonder if they’d give us a reward?”
“I don’t believe you,” Alison said after she’d given a ladylike snort. Ariadne spilled her crayons on the floor, and my sister went to help pick them up, turning her back on Harry.
I stared at him. “What do you think we should do?”
He took a long swallow of root beer. “The next time they show up alongside of us, walk over and ask them what the heck they want and if they know where it’s hidden. They’ll just about have to give us a reward if we help them, won’t they?”
Alison dropped the last crayon into the box. “It doesn’t matter to you that it’s probably stolen money?”
“Why do you think it has to be illegal?” Harry pressed, flopping down on the couch.
“Because of the way Syd and Ernie are acting. Anybody carrying a lot of money—legitimately—would use better sense than to pack it into a crack somewhere in a rental motor home. They’d have it in travelers checks or a certified check, not cash.”
Harry’s brain workings were almost as transparent as Billy’s. “Okay,” he said, nodding. “Let’s go talk to them the next time we see them.”
“That might be dangerous,” I said mildly, but the idea was kind of exciting, too. I felt a little cowardly that I hadn’t done it on my own.
“In the middle of the crowds that are always around? Nah,” Harry said confidently.
“And if they say there’s money that belongs to them, and we let them come and get it, we just let them walk away with it even if it’s stolen?” Alison asked.
Harry showed his teeth in a wicked grin. “After they pay us the reward, of course.”
“You know, Harry”—I said what I was thinking before thinking, if you know what I mean—“your sense of ethics is lousy. My dad believes that if you
let somebody get away with something that’s wrong, that makes you guilty too.”
It wouldn’t have surprised me if he’d been really irritated with that statement. He wasn’t, though. And why that should have been a surprise after what we’d seen of the whole Rupe family, I don’t know.
Harry laughed. “I didn’t steal anything. And hey, if the guy says it’s his money, what do I know?”
“Don’t you think we should tell your dad what we know and what we suspect then?” Alison asked.
“I only got to be twelve years old,” Harry said, “by telling my dad as little as possible. He doesn’t have much sense of humor, so if you guess wrong about what you tell him, you suffer for it. What he doesn’t know doesn’t hurt you, right?”
We gave up. But I kept thinking about walking right up to the guys who were following us and asking them why, and it made my heart beat faster and my mouth get dry.
Harry sure wasn’t going to worry about it. He was a real clown the rest of the day. He could be very funny, and we all laughed a lot. Mr. and Mrs. Rupe and the Nabs were going into town to dinner, so we were allowed to buy chicken and broasted potatoes and cole slaw from the store for our supper.
While Alison was giving Ariadne a bath, she asked us to watch Billy, and I suggested to Harry that we walk over to the back of the campground, past the blue car and its little trailer.
“What’s the matter, scared to go look by yourself?” he taunted, but he came along. I told myself I wasn’t being scared of anything, I just thought he might like to come, but I wasn’t sure if that was true or not.
When we passed the final stand of trees, the Crown Victoria was there, unhooked from the little trailer. There was no sign of the two men who’d been traveling in it. We stopped and stared. From this point, no other rig was in sight; we were hidden in the little grove of trees.
“They must’ve gone up to the store or the showers,” Harry said. “Let’s check it out.”
“It’s a rental trailer,” I pointed out, looking at the license plate and the holder for it. “They rented it in Montana, not back in Washington. If they knew they were coming all the way up here, why didn’t they bring a trailer from home? You’d think they would have. They work for an RV rental place.”
“They didn’t know it would take them this long to get their money back,” Harry said readily, approaching close to the trailer and peeking in a window. “And they didn’t like sleeping in their car that first night. When we didn’t all get diverted away from the motor home by the fire they set, if they did that, they rented the trailer at the place where they needed it. Boy, I’m glad we’re not traveling in this thing! Crummy, isn’t it?”
“I want to see too,” Billy insisted, so I held him up to look through the window.
It wasn’t exactly crummy, just small and ordinary. No queen-size bed, just a couple of narrow bunks. And no microwave, no full-size refrigerator/freezer, no ice maker. Hardly enough room for two people to get into it at the same time.
“They didn’t get this one for comfort,” I said, drawing back from the window and setting Billy on the ground. “It’s only a place to sleep until they get what they want.”
“So tomorrow,” Harry said cheerfully, “let’s put an end to it. Come on, Billy, get out of their car. They might catch us poking into their stuff and be mad about it.” He slammed the car door after he’d dragged his little brother out of the front seat. “Yep, we can probably clear this all up tomorrow just by talking to them.”
It sounded good. I hoped it worked out, even if Harry didn’t agree with Alison and me about letting them take the money if they knew where it was hidden. I wondered if Dad would make us go to the police later, after we told him the story. I wished none of it was happening, except seeing Yellowstone.
The next morning started off with Mr. Rupe in a tight-lipped rage because he couldn’t find his glasses.
“I put them right there on the console,” he said furiously. “I told you to put them in an overhead compartment,” Mrs. Rupe said, lighting her first cigarette of the day.
“Who took my glasses?” Mr. Rupe’s angry gaze swept across all of us, and even though I wasn’t guilty I shrank away from him. He wasn’t a good-looking man to begin with, and when his face turned red he was positively homely. Even his bald head was red.
I knew who had most likely taken the glasses. I looked at Billy, but he was absorbed in William. The cat had forgiven him for the Scotch tape episode, or maybe he didn’t realize Billy had done it while he was sleeping.
Billy stroked the cat over the fur that had uneven chunks where Alison had cut it to get the tape loose. Billy crooned softly, and William purred loud enough to hear from six feet away.
“Listen up, gang,” Mr. Rupe said. “You better all get looking for those glasses, because we’re not going anywhere until I have them.”
With that he stomped outside and began to unhook the electrical connections.
Mrs. Rupe sighed in exasperation. “I told him not to leave them down there in plain sight for somebody to sit on.”
“Nobody sat on them, Ma,” Harry told her. “What’d you do with them, Billy?”
Billy stopped petting the cat to look up. “What?”
“Dad’s glasses. Where did you put them?”
Billy didn’t answer, but Ariadne said, “I know where they are.”
She got down from her seat at the breakfast table and picked up Alison’s supply box from the side counter. Sure enough, when my sister opened the box, there were the missing glasses. Alison inhaled deeply before she spoke. “When you tell your father where they were, tell him I didn’t put them there.”
It didn’t get the day off to a good start. And the herd of buffalo filling the road on our way into the park certainly didn’t put Mr. Rupe into a better mood.
He had decided that today we were going to drive north to the Mammoth Hot Springs. Hoping all the bad feelings had subsided, I said cautiously, “It sounds really interesting. It says the whole hillside is covered with a series of steps. The hot water comes up from the ground on the top, and then it flows down the steps, leaving mineral deposits as it comes over the edges. There are colored ponds on top of each layer, and the colors are caused by algae that depend on the temperature of the water.”
Nobody said anything. Only my sister looked interested. Harry said, “I hope we finally see a bear today.”
I liked the pools of blue and green water better than anything else we’d seen except for the animals. The pools began high up on the hillside. It was a stiff climb on the stairs and boardwalks to get to the top ones. I took pity on my sister. She couldn’t hang on to both little kids at once and still have time to look at anything herself, so I kept Billy with me.
“Hang on to him tight,” she warned, and I tried. Naturally Harry didn’t think it was any responsibility of his to keep his little brother from being boiled alive in one of the deep blue pools.
In fact, the whole family took so little responsibility for the kids, I wondered how they’d lasted this long.
Billy kept tugging on my hand to keep me moving. He wasn’t much interested in the terraces or the multicolored algae. Harry was at least taking pictures of the colored pools and not complaining about not seeing a bear yet.
From the top we could see far below us, the parking lots and the strange tall rock formation called Liberty Cap that had once had hot water flowing out from its top. From here it looked like a giant anthill. There were tourists all over the place, some far enough away to look like ants moving up and down the trails. Halfway down the steep slope I saw Mrs. Rupe lighting another cigarette, sitting down to rest on a bench. She wasn’t coming to the top. I didn’t spot Mr. Rupe’s bright yellow T-shirt anywhere.
“Hey,” Harry said right beside me, “I felt the water running down over there, and it’s hot enough to cook eggs in, I bet.”
&n
bsp; I’d read more of the book about Yellowstone than he had. “The first explorers who found this place did cook in the hot springs,” I said. “Look, are those elk tracks in between those two ponds?”
“And buffalo chips,” Harry said. “If it’s okay for the animals to walk out there, why are we restricted to the boardwalks?”
“Because it’s dangerous,” I said automatically. “And the animals can’t read the signs. Maybe some of them fall in and get scalded to death.”
I heard a splash and spun around to find Billy stretching out his arms as far as they could go, leaning over a pool with steaming water rippling over bright orange algae. “Did you throw something in the water?”
Billy tried to lean farther out over the forbidden territory, and I jerked him back. “Come on. We’ve climbed all the way to the top. It should be easier going down.”
It wasn’t, not much, but we finally did get to the bottom of the steps. Once we were away from the hot pools, Ariadne and Billy were allowed to run on ahead—on the assumption that drivers would take the responsibility for not running over them, apparently—and Alison and I fell behind the others.
“Did you notice, Lewis, when you looked down?” she asked quietly.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “The blue car doesn’t seem to be following us today. We could see it from the top if it were in any of the parking lots.”
“Maybe,” she said hopefully, “they’ve given up and gone home.”
Fat chance, I thought, though I didn’t say it.
I was more nervous about the blue car when I couldn’t see it than when it was right behind us.
Chapter 10
I ought to have been able to enjoy seeing the wonders of Yellowstone more without those two guys dogging our heels, but it didn’t work that way. Out of sight was definitely not out of mind.
I could see it was bothering Alison, too. She kept glancing behind us, checking out the parking areas, scanning the hordes of tourists that swarmed around us and biting her lip a lot.
Surviving Summer Vacation Page 8
