“Yes.” Courtenay nodded seriously, then paused, remembering. “When I got off the bus, she was waiting by the walk. She said, ‘Okay, Courtie, today you come with me.’ And she pushed me into her car.”
“The battered green station wagon,” added Becker.
“Where was the car?” Mike asked Courtenay.
“Behind the bus,” she replied.
“Apparently,” said Lamberton, “Jessica had been watching your family for about a week before she kidnapped Courtenay. She knew, from one of the letters Maggie had written to her when the trip to Saint Bart’s would take place. By the time you left”—Lamberton nodded at Dad and Leigh—“she must have known your schedule pretty well, and knew how and when Courtenay would get to school each morning.”
“But Courtie,” said Mike, “why did you go with her? You knew she wasn’t one of your teachers. She was a stranger.”
Courtie looked slightly sheepish. “I thought it was okay because she knew my name. She even knew ‘Courtie’ instead of my long name.”
Leigh gave her a squeeze. “Maybe you and Maggie and I will have a talk about strangers tomorrow.”
I threw Leigh a grateful look.
“I guess Courtie should be better prepared for … ” Leigh began.
“The big, bad world?” I supplied.
“Yes.”
“Tomorrow,” I said, “Courtie and Mike and I will show you how to play the Lost Game.”
“Now!” said Courtenay suddenly.
I was surprised she wanted to play.
“Nope. Time for a nap,” Leigh told her.
“One question,” begged Courtie.
I glanced at Leigh.
“Oh, all right,” she said.
“Let’s make it the big one,” said Mike, coming to life. “This is for the championship, Courtie. Are you ready?”
She nodded.
“What’s your phone number?” Mike and I asked at the same time.
“Five-one-nine-five-five-five-two-eight-three-six. That’s my phone number, that’s my phone number,” Courtenay sang.
Mike jumped up. “Okay! What do we have for our new champion? … A self-cleaning radar range complete with fly swatter and remote TV control? All right! Give the lady a hand!”
Everyone clapped, and Leigh, smiling, led an exhausted Courtenay upstairs to bed.
19
Afterward
THINGS IN THE ELLIS household calmed down after a while, but they were never the same again. Leigh and I got along much better. After all, in a way, I had gotten Courtenay back for her. Mike and I hadn’t intended to, but that was sort of the way things had worked out.
And I told Dad I wanted to talk to a counselor.
“That’s probably a very good idea,” he said. “I guess I should have told you and Mike more—about the divorce, about Jessica and her illness, everything. I thought if I kept it from you and just tried to give you a better life, things would be okay.”
“Maybe they would have been, if we hadn’t seen Mom. But now that I have … I don’t understand how—I mean, she did something against the law. She got arrested. My own mother.”
Dad couldn’t think of anything to say. He just put his arm around me.
So we found a counselor, a friend of Mrs. Simon’s, believe it or not, and I see her two times a week. I think the talking really helps. I’m learning how to forgive Mom. Maybe someday I’ll understand her, too. Brad as well.
Mom has been committed to a psychiatric hospital indefinitely. Brad is on some kind of probation and has to put in a lot of hours of volunteer work in the community and go to what he calls a “shrink.” Things are better for Jane and Andrew. We all plan to take psychology next year.
Guess who else sees a counselor? Courtenay. The Monday after we got her back, Leigh took her to the doctor for a checkup to make sure she wasn’t malnourished or anything, and he strongly recommended that she have some professional help in getting over her trauma. So Leigh arranged for her to go to the play therapist at her school for a half hour every day. The therapist has a dollhouse and puppets and crayons and things. Through “games,” she and Courtie talk about what happened, and sort out Courtie’s fears and anxieties. Courtie doesn’t know she’s seeing a therapist. She just thinks she gets to go to a special teacher every day. She thinks it’s some kind of privilege. I talked to the play therapist once. Maybe I’ll become a child psychologist myself.
When a local toy store sponsored a child safety day, Dad and Leigh had Courtenay fingerprinted. The prints might help locate her if she ever disappears again. Then Dad insisted that Mike and I be fingerprinted as well. “You never know,” he said.
Mike and I really did show Leigh how to play the Lost Game. She plays it with Courtie often. We’ve extended it into sort of an Emergency Game. Courtenay knows what to do in the event of just about everything from a skinned knee to a volcanic eruption. The most important thing we’ve taught her recently is that if a stranger ever takes her again, she’s to yell, “This is not my mommy (or daddy)!” at the top of her lungs. She likes to practice that because it gives her the chance to shout inside the house.
“Do you think we’re overdoing it?” Leigh asked me one day.
“I don’t know,” I replied, “but I’d sure feel safe having Courtie around in an earthquake.”
Leigh grinned. “Maybe we should back off for a while.”
The funny thing is that since the kidnapping, Leigh has been less protective of Courtenay. I was afraid she’d buy a leash so Courtie could never be more than thirty-six inches away from her. Instead, she realizes that kids today have to be prepared. She’s still fussy about dirt and candy and bedtime, but she’s pushing Courtie to be independent. And Courtie is the one rebelling at this. At first she refused to let Leigh or Dad or Mike or me out of her sight. One of us had to be with her at all times. School was a trial. And she wouldn’t ride the bus after the kidnapping—not until Birdie began to bribe her: “If you get on the bus by yourself, you can beep the horn.” Things like that. Courtie is getting better slowly.
Two things changed at Courtenay’s school. One, now the teachers meet the buses at the curb and personally escort the kids all the way into their classrooms. Two, any absent child is checked on immediately. They’ve arranged a call-back system. If parents can’t be reached, there’s a list of other people to call to find out about the child. The teachers sincerely hope that nothing like the kidnapping will happen at their school again.
“But you can’t prevent it,” I said to Leigh one day. And she agreed with me.
Getting back into a routine was hard for me after Courtie was returned to us. I couldn’t pay attention in school. I was lost in my courses anyway, because of missing so much homework, and I couldn’t even take most of my final exams. But it didn’t really matter. I was signed up for summer school.
The one good thing about the end of the school year was the Junior Prom. I went with David. Leigh and I had gone shopping, and she’d helped me find a dress pretty much like the one I’d daydreamed about. It was soft and white with spaghetti straps and a full skirt. Then we bought gold sandals, and a lacy shawl in case the evening was cool.
On the night of the prom, David came to the door bringing me a yellow corsage—and a gift. “For no special reason,” he said.
We went into the den so we could have privacy. Inside the little box was a gold necklace with a heart-shaped locket hanging from it. I snapped apart the locket—and found tiny pictures of David and me.
“Because we belong together,” said David.
He fastened the clasp behind my neck, and then we wrapped our arms around each other. Our lips met softly.
When we left the house that evening, everyone saw us off. I looked at them carefully: Dad, Leigh, Mike, and Courtenay, waving goodbye. My family. My whole family.
A Personal History by Ann M. Martin
I was born on August 12, 1955, in Princeton, New Jersey. I grew up there with my parents and my sister, J
ane, who was born two years later. My mother was a preschool teacher and my father was an artist, a cartoonist for the New Yorker and other magazines.
When I was younger, my parents created an imaginative atmosphere for my sister and me. My dad liked circuses and carnivals and magic, and as a teenager, he had been an amateur magician. My father would often work at home, and I would stand behind his chair and watch him draw. When he wasn’t working, he enjoyed making greeting cards.
My parents were very interested in my sister’s and my artistic abilities, and our house was filled with art supplies—easels, paints, pastels, crayons, and stacks of paper. Coloring books were allowed, but only truly creative pursuits were encouraged, and I took lots of art classes.
Our house was as full of pets as it was of art supplies. We always had cats, and, except for the first two years of my life, we always had more than one. We also had fish, guinea pigs, and turtles, as well as mice and hamsters.
When I think about my childhood I think of pets and magic and painting and imaginary games with my sister. But there is another activity I remember just as clearly, and that’s reading. I loved to read. I woke up early so I could read in bed before I went to school. I went to bed early so I could read before I fell asleep. And from this love of books and reading came a love of writing.
In 1977 I graduated from Smith College in Massachusetts. I taught elementary school for a year, which is what I had wanted to do, and used children’s literature in the classroom. I loved teaching, but by the end of the school year I had decided that what I really wanted to do was work on children’s books. So I moved to New York City, entered the publishing field, and at the same time, began writing seriously. In 1983, my first book, Bummer Summer, was published.
In 1985, after the release of my first three books—Bummer Summer, Inside Out, and Stage Fright—an editor at Scholastic asked if I’d be interested in writing a series about babysitting. She had a title in mind—the Baby-Sitters Club—and she was thinking of a miniseries consisting of four books. So I created four characters: Kristy, Claudia, Stacey, and Mary Anne, and planned to write one book featuring each girl. The series was supposed to start in 1986 and end in 1987. Instead, it ended fourteen years later in 2000, with over two hundred titles and four related series, including Dawn’s spinoff, California Diaries.
Saying good-bye to the Baby-Sitters Club was sad. It had been nice not to have to let go of the characters at the end of each book. But by 2000, I had found that I wanted more time to spend working on other kinds of stories (though I did return to the series to write a prequel, titled The Summer Before, in 2010).
I felt myself drawn to the 1960s, the most important decade of my childhood. I think this interest was due in large part to the fact that my mother’s diaries came into my possession, and I spent a good deal of time reading them, especially the ones that covered the 1960s. The next thing I knew, I had written three books set in that decade. The second, A Corner of the Universe, is the most personal of all the books I’ve written. It’s loosely based on my mother’s side of the family, and in a way, it started on a summer day in 1964 when I learned that my mother’s younger brother, Stephen, who had died shortly before my parents first met, had been mentally ill. Stephen was the basis for the character of Adam in A Corner of the Universe. The book won a Newbery Honor in 2003.
The life I lead now is not terribly different from the one I led as a child, except that I no longer live in Princeton. I moved to the Catskill Mountains in New York a number of years ago. Animals are still very important to me. Influenced by the many stray cats I’ve known, and inspired by my parents, who used to do volunteer work for Princeton’s animal shelter, I became a foster caregiver for an animal rescue group in my community. I also still have cats of my own, and only recently said good-bye to my dog, Sadie, the sweetest dog ever. She was the inspiration for my book A Dog’s Life.
Although I grew up to become a writer, my interest in art never left, except that now I’m more interested in crafts, and especially in sewing and needlework. I like to knit, but I most enjoy sewing, especially making smocked or embroidered dresses. And of course, I continue to write. In 2014, the fourth Doll People book, The Doll People Set Sail, will be published, as well as Rain Reign, a novel about a girl with Asperger’s syndrome and her beloved dog, Rain.
Here I am as a newborn in the hospital in August 1955.
Me at age two at my home in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1957.
This is the house where I grew up on Dodds Lane in Princeton.
My family always had cats—and except for when I was in college, I’ve always had at least one. This is a photo of Kiki, Sweetheart, Tigger, and Fluffy from my childhood home (Kiki is a little hard to see).
Reading at bedtime with my mother (and cats Sweetheart and Honey) when I was about seven, circa 1962.
On the left is my mother’s younger brother, Stephen, with my grandfather and my uncle Rick. Stephen was mentally ill and the basis for the character of Adam in A Corner of the Universe.
Graduating from Smith College in Massachusetts in 1977.
Here I am at home in New York City in 1989, surrounded by fan mail.
This is my house in New York, around 1993. It recently celebrated its one hundredth birthday.
Wildlife plays a larger role in my life now than when I was young. I will often find deer, wild turkeys, and garden toads in my backyard. Here is a black bear investigating my hose!
My dog, Sadie, one week after I brought her home in 1998.
At home in the country in 2000 with Peanut, one of the many kittens I’ve fostered.
This is the room where I do all of my sewing and card-making.
A few of my handmade greeting cards!
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1986 by Ann M. Martin
Cover design by Ann M. Martin
978-1-4532-9807-7
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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