Snatched

by Pete Hautman

  “I wonder if this was from Maurice,” Brian said.

  Roni knew she should go down and have a look around, but she was still too freaked out by the thought of rats and snakes. Especially the rats. She had this thing about naked-tailed rodents.

  “Did you find anything else?”

  “No. Wait, there’s something jammed under the bed. Got it!” Brian handed up a soggy green bundle. Roni dragged it out into the light. She recognized it right away. Just forty-eight hours earlier Alicia Camden had whacked her with this very same lime green designer backpack.

  “Think we should open it?” Brian asked.

  “Probably not.” Roni unzipped the pack. “Contamination of evidence and all.” She dumped the contents onto the deck.

  “Good technique,” Brian said, watching Roni paw through Alicia’s possessions. Three tubes of lipstick with names like Tawny Puce, Orange Crush, and Deadly Red. Hair accessories of every sort: clips, scrunchies, barrettes. A comb and a brush. A few schoolbooks, a Cosmopolitan magazine, and a copy of the Bloodwater Pump. Everything was soaked.

  Roni unzipped one of the side pockets and pulled out a small notebook, also wet and swollen. It looked like a kind of diary or daybook. Roni carefully peeled apart the sodden pages. Unfortunately, Alicia had used a purple felt-tip pen for most of her entries. Much of the writing was too smeared and blurry to read, but a few entries written in black ink had survived.

  “Listen to this,” Roni said. “Breakfast: One half grapefruit, three tablespoons yogurt, one cup herbal tea. Sounds like a recipe for starvation. No wonder she’s so skinny.”

  “See if you can read her last entries,” Brian suggested.

  “I’m trying.” The wet pages were hard to separate without tearing them. “Here we go . . . this looks like last Friday.” Roni looked at Brian. “That was the day she got beat up. It says, Seeing Maurice tonight. We are getting so close. He brought me roses yesterday—a whole dozen! I just wish he wasn’t so jealous. Sometimes I’m afraid. He threatened to . . .” Roni looked up. “I can’t read the rest of it.” She looked down into the cabin where the vase of rotting roses lay. “Maybe it was Maurice after all.”

  “Yeah, but Mr. Thorn attacked you,” Brian reminded her. “And this is his boat.”

  “He didn’t actually attack me,” Roni said. “He just sort of grabbed me. He wanted to see what I was writing in my notebook.”

  “He pushed you into the pool,” Brian reminded her.

  “Well . . . actually, I was sort of falling anyway, and he grabbed me, and then I kicked him and fell in.”

  “You mean . . . I almost killed him and he wasn’t doing anything wrong?”

  “I’m not sure. He might have been about to do something.”

  “Don’t forget that Driftwood Doug saw Mr. Thorn standing over Alicia that night.”

  “Yes, but he also said he saw a tall man running away through the woods. That could have been Maurice.”

  Brian nodded. “What else does it say? Turn the page.”

  Roni peeled back the next wet page. There was one more entry.

  “It says, I hate him I hate him I hate him I hate him!”

  “Is she talking about Maurice or her stepdad?”

  “Who knows? For all we know she was talking about Mickey Mouse.”

  “Nobody hates Mickey Mouse,” Brian said.

  “I do.”

  Brian gave her a shocked look.

  “He’s a rodent,” Roni said.

  46

  the three dwarfs

  Riding in a boat was much nicer than wading through muddy water, Brian decided. Sister Louise tied the boat to the dock below the convent as Roni and Brian hopped out.

  “Thanks, Sister,” said Roni.

  “Yeah, thanks a lot,” said Brian.

  “You are both welcome. I can give you a ride back to town, but not until Sister Mary brings the van back. It might be a couple of hours.”

  “That’s okay,” said Roni. “We’ll walk.”

  Brian did not like hearing that. He was exhausted and wet, his arms were covered with scratches, and his shoes made grunting sounds with every soggy step. He felt like he was carrying ten gallons of water in his clothes. Jeans could suck up several times their weight in water. That would be an interesting experiment. He’d have to try it sometime.

  “Now what?” he asked as they reached the highway. He looked at Roni. She wasn’t looking her best. He had to laugh.

  “What’s so funny?” she asked.

  “You look like the three dwarfs.”

  She gave him that look—the one she had given him on the bench outside of Spindler’s office, like she couldn’t decide whether to laugh or punch him in the nose. “Okay, I’ll bite. What are you talking about?”

  “The three dwarfs,” Brian said. “Soggy, Muddy, and Droopy.”

  “Very funny.”

  “I do my best.”

  “Okay, smart guy, where do you think we go from here?”

  “Home. Get into some dry clothes.”

  Roni was giving him the look again.

  “What?” he said.

  “Don’t you want to know what really happened to Alicia?”

  “Sure, but, I mean . . . look at us! Soggy, Muddy, Droopy, and Soaked. Not to mention Hungry.”

  “That’s not important. We have to talk to Maurice. He should be home from school by now.”

  “Why Maurice?”

  “He’s the one who gave her the roses.”

  Brian frowned. “I think we should try to see Alicia. She’s the one with the answers.”

  “We’d never get past her mother.”

  “We could send a note in with Ted. Tell her we found her backpack. That might get her to talk to us.”

  “That’s a good idea . . .” Roni started walking, trailing her jacket and Alicia’s backpack. “But my idea’s better. I say we start with Maurice. You coming or not?”

  “Okay, but how do we get there?”

  Roni stuck out her thumb.

  The pickup truck was an old, faded-red Ford. The doors were painted with the words KATO SIGN CO. and a phone number. A man with tousled reddish hair rolled down the window and looked them over.

  “Need a lift?” he asked.

  “We’re going into Bloodwater,” Roni said.

  “You willing to get in a truck with a stranger?”

  “My mom’s a cop,” Brian said. He figured it couldn’t hurt to let the guy know.

  The man laughed. “Hop in then.”

  Roni and Brian climbed into the back of the truck.

  “You can sit up front,” the guy said, sticking his head out the window and looking back at them.

  “No, we’re too grungy.”

  “Don’t matter to this old mule.”

  “That’s okay,” Roni said. “We like riding in back.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  He put the truck in gear and pulled back onto the highway. Wind whistled through their clothes. They were wet and cold. Empty paint cans rattled around the truckbed.

  “I’m freezing,” Brian said through clenched teeth.

  “Yeah,” Roni said.

  “I promised my mom I would never, ever hitchhike.”

  “Me, too,” Roni said.

  “I wrecked my shoes.”

  Roni looked down at his shoes. They did indeed look wrecked.

  “Whose idea was this anyway?” Brian asked.

  Roni didn’t say anything. She looked down at her clothes. They were drying out a bit, but she was not exactly presentable. She didn’t really want to see Maurice like this. A girl’s got her pride, even in front of a possible kidnapper. But she didn’t want to wait, either. They were so close to solving the mystery she could taste it.

  The pickup truck driver dropped them off in downtown Bloodwater.

  “I’ve got two kids about your age,” he told them. “If I ever caught them hitchhiking, I’d have something to say about it. Well, you be good now.” The guy waved as he pulle
d away.

  Roni walked up to the windows of the Hallmark store and tried to get a glimpse of herself. Her hair was mostly dry, her jacket covered most of her wet clothes, and, after she pulled up her bagging tights, she didn’t look so bad.

  “You’re a doll,” Brian told her, standing next to her, looking like a twit. “A rag doll.” He laughed.

  “Hey,” he said as she walked away. Roni resolved to not talk to him all the way to Maurice’s house.

  “There was something I noticed in the boat—” he said, but she kept walking. “Don’t you want to know what I figured out?” he asked.

  “No. Just shut up for a while.” Roni was sick of listening to his juvenile jokes. She kept walking.

  He fell into step beside her and they walked the five blocks to Maurice’s with only the sound of Brian’s wet shoes grunting.

  47

  floating islands

  A little voice in Alicia’s head kept asking questions. Questions like water pounding against the hull of a boat. Pounding and pounding. She felt as if she were drowning all over again, only this time in her own lies.

  Would anyone ever believe her again?

  It’s all going to come out, Alicia thought. Every crummy little detail. And then everything will fall apart. It’ll be the end.

  She could hear her mom on the phone, her voice carrying all the way up the curving marble staircase and under the door of Alicia’s bedroom. It was a huge house, but not huge enough for them to get away from each other.

  Alicia knew exactly what her mother was wearing—the new Anne Klein teal blue sweater with the too-tight Ralph Lauren jeans and Cole Haan heels. She could almost always guess which look she’d go with on any given day. It made it easier for Alicia to pick out her own outfit. Her mother liked them to look like twin sisters. Alicia knew it was weird, but she usually went along with it anyway. It was her mom’s idea of being close.

  Alicia would have preferred a hug. But hugs for kids were in short supply at Bloodwater House. Even when Alicia made it home after that awful night on the boat, her mom hadn’t really hugged her. They were like floating islands on an icy ocean, swirling around each other, colliding occasionally but never gently touching.

  Her mother would be leaving soon to pick up Arnold at the hospital. Alicia wished her mom had never met Arnold Thorn, had never moved here to Bloodwater House. They could still be living in their little two-bedroom house in Mankato with her real dad, the only home she’d known for her first fifteen years. Maybe her dad wasn’t rich, but he had loved her. He had kept her safe. Back then her brother Ted had been a cute little hellion, always dirty and full of wild grins and mischief. Now he was turning into a mini Arnold.

  Her mom had wanted money and prestige. A big house. Nice clothes. But now that she had all that, she still wasn’t happy.

  Alicia stared out her window across the pool and tennis court into the woods. Already the maples were sporting a bright gold and orange fringe. Summer was long gone. In a month or two everything would be white and frozen.

  It doesn’t matter anymore, she told herself. By the time they get back from the hospital I’ll be long gone.

  48

  dead fish

  “Let me do the talking,” Roni said.

  “Whatever,” said Brian. The ride in the pickup had almost dried him off, but his jeans remained uncomfortably wet in the crotch, and his shoes were still making weird noises.

  Maurice was in his driveway cleaning the wheels of his Ford Explorer. He looked up as Roni and Brian approached.

  “You come to blackmail me some more?” he said.

  “Just a few questions,” said Roni.

  Maurice glared at her, shook his head, and went back to cleaning a glob of tar off one of the wheel covers.

  Roni said, “You told me you were in class Monday afternoon when Alicia was abducted.”

  “So?” Maurice dipped his rag in a jar of cleaning compound and rubbed furiously at the tar.

  Roni said, “But you were late for basketball practice. Why was that?”

  Maurice stopped scrubbing and looked up at them. “What do you want from me?”

  “The truth,” said Roni.

  Maurice shook his head, stood up, and threw down the rag.

  “Look, I didn’t do anything wrong, okay?”

  “Where were you Monday afternoon?”

  “I went to see Alicia, okay? I went over to her house to try to talk to her. Nobody was home.”

  “What time was that?”

  “About one-thirty. So I went for a drive and lost track of time and got to practice late. End of story.”

  “When was the last time you gave Alicia roses?” Roni asked.

  Maurice looked startled. “Last Thursday. Why?”

  “Where were you?”

  Maurice shook his head slowly, as if reluctant to revisit the memory. “Look, Alicia’s home, okay? It’s over. Why are you being such a pain?”

  “It’s what I do,” said Roni.

  “If you want to know what happened to Alicia, ask Alicia. Now go away.” Maurice returned his attention to polishing his wheels.

  Brian, who had not spoken the entire time, said, “How about giving us a lift over to Bloodwater House?”

  “The munchkin speaks,” said Maurice, not looking up. “Why should I do you any favors?”

  “Because we know where your boat is,” Brian said.

  Maurice stared at Brian with his mouth hanging open. “Where?” he asked, standing up.

  “Not where you left it,” Brian said.

  “I know that. It blew away in the storm. Where is it?” He stepped toward Brian, towering over him.

  “Give us a ride to Alicia’s and I’ll tell you.”

  “You’ll tell me now, you little twerp.”

  Roni looked from one to the other. Maurice’s boat? How was the Cap’n Arnold Maurice’s boat? Maurice was getting red in the face, never a good sign.

  “I’ll tell you after we talk to Alicia,” Brian said.

  Maurice’s hands closed into fists and his mouth got very small and tight.

  “I paid five hundred dollars for that boat.”

  “You bought it from Arnold Thorn?” Roni asked.

  Maurice nodded. “He gave me a deal on it. After it got vandalized.”

  “Vandalized by who?” Roni asked, thinking of the way Maurice had keyed Tyrone’s car.

  Maurice shrugged, looking away.

  Roni thought: Aha! Maurice vandalizes the Thorns’ boat, then buys it for cheap, then he beats up his girlfriend, then he locks her away in his boat. Case closed?

  Something wasn’t right. Why would Alicia keep it a secret? Why would she accuse Driftwood Doug? Why had Arnold Thorn tried to grab her notebook away from her, and what was he afraid of?

  Brian said, “How about that ride, Maurice?”

  Before he would let them in his car, Maurice went inside to get something to cover the seats. “No offense, but you two look kinda soggy,” he said.

  As soon as he was out of hearing, Roni turned to Brian. “How did you know it was his boat?”

  “It was just a wild guess. Ted told us that his stepdad had sold the boat, so I thought maybe Maurice had bought it.”

  Maurice came out of the house with an armload of newspapers and spread them over the seats in his SUV.

  “Okay, soggy bottoms, hop in.”

  The papers crinkled as they sat on them, Roni in the front seat and Brian in back. No one said much during the drive to Bloodwater House. They couldn’t. Maurice had cranked the tunes up super loud to show off the subwoofers he had installed under the seats. It was like getting a butt massage. Roni looked back at Brian. He was waving his arms around like a singer in a hip-hop video. She winked at him. He stared back at her. Maybe he couldn’t wink.

  Maurice drove the same way he ran around the basketball court: fast, with lots of sharp turns. Brian was trying to be cool in the backseat, working his arm routine to the music, when he noticed Roni’
s eye twitching. Maybe she was trying to wink, but it looked too spasmodic for that. She looked a mess. It must be hard for a girl to be wet and grubby. Girls just couldn’t pull off the mud-stained look as good as a guy.

  Maurice said something.

  “What?” Brian yelled.

  “I said, ‘You guys smell like dead fish!’ ”

  Brian looked at Roni. Her eyes had narrowed to tiny slits. He hoped she wouldn’t do anything to Maurice while the SUV was moving.

  They made it to Bloodwater House without incident.

  Maurice pulled over to the curb opposite the front gate, across the street from an old pickup truck. He cut the music.

  Roni and Brian both stared at the pickup, faded red with KATO SIGN CO. painted on the side.

  “Roni said, “Hey . . . isn’t that the truck . . .”

  “It sure is,” said Brian.

  “What are you talking about?” Maurice asked.

  The front gate swung open and a man with tousled reddish hair came out carrying a bag in one hand, pulling Alicia toward the pickup truck with the other.

  Maurice jumped out of the Explorer. “Alicia!” he shouted.

  The red-haired man threw the bag in back, opened the door of the pickup, and pushed Alicia into the passenger seat.

  Roni was already out the door and running toward them. She had almost reached the truck when it suddenly lurched forward. Roni yelled, but the driver kept going, accelerating quickly.

  Alicia looked back at them, wide-eyed, through the rear window.

  49

  crash

  Brian, still sitting in the backseat, was confused. He thought he’d figured everything out, but now Alicia was being carried off by the pickup truck guy. What was going on?

  Roni ran back toward the Explorer. Maurice stood uncertainly on the sidewalk, watching the pickup racing away.

  “Follow them!” Roni shouted at Maurice.

  “Why?” Maurice asked. “If she wants to go off with some other guy, that’s her business.”