Baby-Sitting Is a Dangerous Job

by Willo Davis Roberts

  Dan didn’t seem any happier. “I just wish this was all over. Even if we get the ransom money—”

  “What do you mean, if we get it? Foster’ll pay, all right, as soon as we tell him how much and where to deliver it,” Hank interrupted.

  “—we can’t just go on about our business, here in Marysville, like we planned at first. Not since that babysitter knows who we are.”

  “Don’t worry about the sitter,” Hank told him, and it made me so cold I clamped my jaws to keep my teeth from chattering.

  “Listen, I’m not going to hurt any kids,” Dan said, and he sounded as if he’d said it before. “Holding ’em for ransom is one thing, but hurting ’em is something else. You know, if Ma ever finds out about this, she’s going to kill us all.”

  Henry snorted. “Ma’s scared of the old man; she wouldn’t do anything even if she found out, which she’s not going to do. Not unless you’re stupid enough to tell her, and then it’ll be Pa who’ll kill you. This is rotten coffee; is it some Okie left, or did you make it?”

  They talked about the coffee, and the food, and then about how long they had to wait until they could call Mr. Foster and ask for the money. Dan wanted to call sooner, but Henry said they had to wait until two a.m., the way Pa Hazen had instructed.

  “Means we can’t even go to bed until so late,” Dan grumbled, and I wondered how they could sleep, under the circumstances.

  His brother changed the subject, getting up to dump the last of his coffee into the sink. “You have any trouble with the kids while I was gone?”

  “No. I brought the dogs inside, to guard the stairs, because they said they had to use the bathroom. They won’t get past the dogs.”

  Henry swung around from the sink. “The dogs are outside. They came up to me when I drove in.”

  “Yeah, I know. They’d been guarding for hours; I had to let ’em run before I lock up for the night. It’s a good thing they got a little bit used to us when we were here taking down those trees and sawing ’em up. They still make me nervous. Every time I turn my back, I expect one of ’em to nip my heels.”

  “So if the dogs are outdoors, who’s watching the kids?” Henry demanded.

  “They’re asleep, and besides, they can’t get out. Every outside door in the place is locked except the one you just came in, and that’s been in my sight all the time. And the windows don’t open, either, except that one in Okie’s bedroom. They can’t get at that without coming through the kitchen. So what’re you worrying about?”

  “Your stupidity, mostly,” Henry said. “If anything happens to screw this up, we’re all going to jail. You know that, don’t you?”

  “You and Pa promised that wouldn’t happen.”

  “Not if you do things right. But you let that girl run away and bring back the police, and I guarantee they’ll lock us up for a long time. You didn’t want to hang around this town forever, doing odd jobs, without any money, any more than we did. Anybody said, ‘Mexico, with plenty of cash,’ and you got as excited as the rest of us. You better check on those kids, and I’ll get the dogs back in here.”

  I started backing up, moving as quickly as I could without making any racket. I had to be up there in that room by the time Dan got there; if they found me downstairs, they might very well tie me up, and then all hope of escape would be gone.

  I reached the stairs and fled upwards as fast as I could go. I had barely stretched out on the mattress beside Melissa when I heard Dan on the stairs. I squeezed my eyes shut and hoped my breathing wouldn’t give away the fact that I’d raced up there just ahead of him.

  Chapter Eleven

  I could feel them standing there, looking at me.

  I heard the dogs, too, their toenails clicking on the wooden floor. My heart thundered in my ears.

  “You better be more careful from now on,” Henry said. “Don’t take any chances, you hear? All we have to do is keep the kids here until Foster hands over the money, and it’ll all be over. So stay cool, Dan. Just watch these kids so they don’t get away.”

  “They’re not gonna get away,” Dan said, and he sounded annoyed.

  After a minute or so, they went away.

  I opened my eyes. They’d left the hall light on, and the dogs were back on guard duty.

  I wanted to go to sleep, but I couldn’t. I lay there beside the Foster kids, and after a while it cooled off enough so I put the blanket over them.

  It was partly my fault they were here, I thought. If nobody came to rescue us, how could I get them out of this? And myself with them?

  I guess I did sleep for a while, only I kept waking up. Each time I knew at once where I was, and what was happening. I wondered if Henry had called Mr. Foster yet, and how long it would take to get the ransom money together and deliver it.

  And what they’d do with me, when they were ready to take their money and run to Mexico.

  Finally I woke up and there were birds twittering in the trees outside. The kids began to wake up then, too, and we all trooped to the bathroom. We couldn’t brush our teeth or comb our hair, but we washed our faces. The dogs kept their heads up and watched us as we went back to the bedroom; they weren’t growling the way they had done last night, though.

  It was still pretty early, and we didn’t hear any sounds from downstairs. Jeremy stood looking out the window. “Maybe I could crawl out on the roof and drop down and go for help,” he suggested.

  “It’s not as easy as in the movies,” I told him, trying not to sound as depressed as I felt. “It’s an awful long way down, and you might break a leg or something. I thought of trying to make a rope out of the blanket, but I can’t tear it. I don’t see anything to tie it to, anyway.” I stood beside him, wishing the house wasn’t so high off the ground, wishing for a miracle.

  Melissa said, “I want to go home.”

  I knew just how she felt. “They probably called your daddy last night. Maybe it won’t be long before they let us go,” I told her.

  Shana said, “I’m hungry.”

  “I’m bored,” Jeremy added. “Darcy, let’s go exploring again.”

  “We already explored, yesterday, remember? All we found was some old magazines.”

  “We didn’t explore upstairs. Maybe there’s something up there. A gun that we could shoot them with.”

  That wasn’t likely, but I didn’t have any better suggestion. “Okay,” I said, “if the dogs will let us open the door to the attic stairs.”

  Though the Dobermans watched us warily, they didn’t growl when we crept quietly along the hallway toward the door to the stairs. It wasn’t very light in the stairway, but a faint illumination came from above, enough so we could climb without falling.

  Jeremy went first, then Melissa, then Shana and me. We emerged into a great dusty room with all kinds of junk in it, mostly old trunks and broken furniture. Again, though, none of it looked like anything we could use. Even the windows were dirty, so dirty we couldn’t see much through them.

  I was trying to open a window so I could see more clearly when Jeremy found some kind of old fur lap robe and draped it over his head and down his back. “I’m a monster, and I’m going to eat you for my breakfast!” he cried, and dove toward his sisters.

  Both of them shrieked as if he really were a great animal about to devour them. Shana grabbed my leg, and I put an arm around her, but Melissa ran, crashing into a bird cage and several boxes that teetered and fell, spilling old clothes and papers over the attic floor.

  “Jeremy, cut it out! We don’t want to make enough racket so they’ll hear us on the ground floor,” I told him, and to my relief he stopped chasing Melissa.

  She didn’t realize he’d come to a halt, though, and she careened into an old mattress that stood on end against one wall. It toppled with a cloud of dust that made us all sneeze.

  “Boy, I’m glad they didn’t bring this one down for us to sleep on,” I said, and shoved it off Melissa, who had been knocked down by it. “It’s all right, don’t ye
ll, Melissa!”

  “Hey, look!” Jeremy said, letting the furry thing slide off his shoulders. “There’s a funny little door!”

  There was. It was small enough that I would have to duck to go through it. “It’s probably just a storage area.” I said, and would have turned around to go back downstairs.

  Jeremy, however, wanted to know what was behind it. He tugged at it, then turned to me. “Help me, Darcy. Let’s see what’s inside. Maybe they hid a treasure in there!”

  “There’ll only be more junk,” I predicted, only it wasn’t trash that was revealed when I jerked open the door, but another set of stairs.

  They were so steep and narrow they were almost a ladder, and they curled around like the stairs I’d once seen inside a lighthouse we visited on Lake Huron.

  “Let’s see what’s up there,” Jeremy suggested, sounding excited, and I wished I could forget that we were prisoners in this big old house and just enjoy myself.

  Well, having the kids interested in exploring seemed better than having them crying in terror. I followed them up the stairs, helping Shana because she couldn’t make it on her own.

  Above me, I heard Jeremy’s delighted cry. “It’s a little room! Boy, I wish we had one like this in our house!”

  A cupola, I realized, gaining the top of the stairs, a round room at the top of the house. It had been used as a children’s playroom, for there were still toys there.

  “A shicken,” Shana announced, and headed for the other side of the room. There was a table and four chairs, small-child size, and a miniature stove and sink and ice box. They weren’t modern like the ones the kids had at home, but they were toys, coated with dust. At the table sat a doll with its hair mostly worn away, a teddy bear with one eye, and a clown doll made out of a sock that sagged limply over a tiny china plate.

  “We can play house, Melissa said, lifting a teapot and pretending to pour into a blue and white cup.

  “There’s a train,” Jeremy said, and dropped to his knees on the dusty floor. “Only there’s no place to plug it in!”

  “It’s not electric,” I told him, and moved toward one of the windows that opened on all sides.

  He gave me a puzzled look. “How does it work, then?”

  “I guess you just have to push it around the track by hand,” I told him, but I wasn’t thinking about the train. I was thinking how isolated this place was.

  It felt as if we were a mile above the ground. We could see way off over the unmowed lawns, through the trees, to the stone wall that surrounded the place; there were no houses within sight beyond the wall, only more trees, though there was one thing that might be worth investigating if I could get outside the house.

  It probably wouldn’t even show from the ground, but from above we could make out a break in the stone wall, with a gate set into it. I wondered if that gate, too, was locked. Or if, because it was hidden in shrubbery on both sides of the wall, it might be possible to open it and escape that way.

  For some reason the windows up there weren’t painted shut, the way they were in the rest of the house, though I had to shove hard to get one open. We needed the fresh air, because it was hot up at the top of the house. The roofs spread out all around us, and we could have walked on these for they were almost flat; only there was nowhere to go.

  I opened a couple more windows. I didn’t think it was a good idea to stay up here for long, because I didn’t know how the Hazens would feel about it and I didn’t want to antagonize them, not while there was a chance I might be able to outwit them if they weren’t expecting me to do it. Yet the kids were being entertained for a little while, and I hated to chase them out of the special room immediately. I’d have liked it myself if I hadn’t been a prisoner.

  Jeremy was entertaining himself in a way that nearly gave me a heart attack when I saw him.

  I turned around from looking out over the grounds and saw him at one of the open windows, a toy arrow in one hand, stretching out to poke at something up under the eaves.

  At first all I thought about was that he’d fall out and roll over the edge of the roof below. But then I saw what he was trying to poke with the arrow.

  “Jeremy! Stop it!” I cried, and made a grab for him.

  He turned to me with a smile of pure, innocent delight. “It’s a bee’s nest, Darcy. Isn’t it?”

  “Wasps, I think. Get away from there. They sting, and it hurts something awful. I remember, because my brother knocked a nest off the corner of our garage once, and we all got stung.”

  His smile faded, “I never saw a bee’s nest. I just wanted to poke a little hole in it and see what happened.”

  I took the arrow out of his hand and dropped it near the bow, which couldn’t have been used to shoot because it was broken. “What happens when you poke a hole in the nest is that the wasps all come swarming out and sting everybody in sight. Come on, we’d better get back before they discover we’re missing. We don’t want to make them mad so they get nasty.”

  The only thing I let them take downstairs was a box of old children’s books. I carried them back down to the second floor, and we started looking through them, to take our minds off being hungry.

  “I want Greg’ry Gray and the Brave Beast,” Shana said, and we tried to explain to her that that book wasn’t among the ones we had. Instead, we read about a goat named Billy Whiskers and some kittens named Buzz, Fuzz, Suzz, and Agamemnon.

  Shana picked up some of the words and sang them softly under her breath. “Happy birthday, mew mew.” She giggled to herself.

  After a while Dan came upstairs, carrying more paper bags. “Breakfast,” he announced.

  I was hungry enough to eat just about anything, but Shana stuck out her lower lip at the sight of the hamburgers. “No,” she said when I offered her one. “Go shicken.”

  Dan stared at her, exasperated. “I’ll get chicken next time. For now, this is all we got.”

  “Go shicken!” Shana insisted, looking as if she were going to cry.

  “I think she means kitchen,” Jeremy translated. “She likes cereal for breakfast.”

  “Fruit Loops,” Shana stated. “I want Fruit Loops.”

  “Me, too,” Melissa agreed. She often took her cue from one of the other kids.

  “Why can’t we go downstairs and eat?” Jeremy wanted to know. “Maybe there’s some cereal down there.”

  Dan hesitated. “I’m supposed to keep you up here.”

  “Why?” I asked. “You’re going to have to let the dogs outdoors for a few minutes, aren’t you? So they can’t guard us all the time. Shana will be a lot easier to handle if she gets what she wants to eat.”

  I was sure his brother would never have let us talk him into it, but Dan finally shrugged. “Okay, Come downstairs to eat. But don’t try anything.”

  I couldn’t think of anything to try that had any chance of working, but I kept watching for an opportunity. We sat around the kitchen table, where Jeremy and I ate hamburgers, and the girls had cereal. There weren’t any Fruit Loops, only bite-size shredded wheat, the kind my dad calls “grown-up cereal.” While we were eating, I located the telephone on the wall beside the stove. I just glanced at it, then quickly away, so Dan wouldn’t think I was plotting anything.

  “When can we go home?” Jeremy asked.

  “When your daddy gives us the money tonight,” Dan said. There were dirty dishes in the sink, so he must have already had something to eat. I wondered if they were going to leave them there for the old man called Okie, when he came home from the hospital.

  “Did you talk to Daddy?” Jeremy demanded.

  “Henry did. He’ll get the money this morning. After dark he’ll meet us and hand it over, and then you can go home. You can behave that long, can’t you?”

  I remembered what he’d said about there being a window in Okie’s bedroom that could be opened. The bedroom was beyond the kitchen; through the doorway I saw an unmade bed and guessed that Dan had slept in there last night after they’d
called Mr. Foster.

  Jeremy wasn’t looking toward the bedroom. He’d spotted the television on the counter, and a couple of game cartridges alongside it. “Can we play games? Do you have Donkey Kong?”

  “You gotta go back upstairs,” Dan said, but he didn’t sound very firm about it. He was probably as bored as we were.

  “Let’s play Donkey Kong. Or Road Racing.”

  Dan hesitated. “Well, I’ll have to bring the dogs back in. And when we hear Henry or Pa coming, you high tail it back upstairs.”

  The Dobermans came when he whistled at them, looking expectantly at the empty dishes beside the stove. While Dan was scooping dog food out of the bag that stood beside them, Shana reached over and took the crusts from Jeremy’s hamburger. She dangled them in the air, and one of the dogs reached up and took them out of her hand.

  There were still two hamburgers in the sack. Dan wasn’t looking, so I unwrapped one, then the other, and shoved them toward Shana. Without any change of expression, she dropped them under the table. They only lasted a matter of seconds.

  Dan put the scoop back into the dog food bag and stared at the dogs. “Well, what’s the matter with you? I thought you were so all-fired hungry a minute ago.”

  The dogs, however, only sniffed at the food he’d put out, then dropped flat near Shana’s chair, waiting for something else. I thought sure Dan would catch on, but he didn’t.

  Jeremy and Dan started to play a video game. I could hardly keep my eyes off the telephone; if I could get through to the police, or my folks, we’d soon be out of this place. But though Dan had part of his attention on the game, he didn’t turn his back on me. I didn’t have a chance to do anything.

  Jeremy won two games. Obviously he played a lot. Melissa slid off her chair and put the dish containing the remains of her cereal on the floor, so the dogs could finish it. Dan, who was getting beaten the third game, too, didn’t notice when Shana’s bowl was set beside Melissa’s.

  I wasn’t quite as afraid of the dogs as I had been. They watched me move around the kitchen, clearing the table, not trying to stop me. They weren’t as hostile toward the kids as they had been, either. That might come in handy if we tried to run, though I supposed I couldn’t count on it.