“Do you know where the kidnappers are?”
“They were going to run the truck into the river, with us in it,” I told him. “But we let the air out of a tire, and they didn’t think they could get it that far. So they left in an old black sedan. Maybe ten years old; a Chevy, I think. It looked like it had been used hard. We didn’t get the license number on that when we saw it; it was too dirty, and that was before they kidnapped us, anyway, so I wasn’t looking.”
“That’s good, Kaci. Now I’m going to turn you back over to the dispatcher. I want you to stay on the line. Tell the operator when you hear the chopper, okay?”
“Okay,” I said, sounding shaky.
“I’m standing by,” the 911 operator said then. “Let me know when you hear anything, okay?”
“Okay,” I agreed. The receiver was slippery in my hand, I was sweating so much.
“Just hang on, Kaci,” the operator said, and then I didn’t hear anything more.
Except for Mrs. Banducci’s chewing—she was now working on the apple—I couldn’t hear anything at all.
I drew a deep breath. “We might not hear a helicopter,” I said uneasily. “I think this truck is insulated or something. We couldn’t hear their voices or the sound of the car when they left.”
“I think you’ll hear the chopper, especially when it drops low over you,” the operator told me. “Don’t worry, our officers will find you.”
I thanked him, and then reached out to touch Mrs. Banducci in the darkness. “They are sending patrol cars and a helicopter. We just have to wait now.”
Her hand patted my knee. “I told you it would all work out, didn’t I?”
“I think you said at your age you didn’t spend much time worrying about dying. I couldn’t be as calm as you were. I’ve been praying almost steady.”
“So have I,” she said. “Only sensible thing to do, under the circumstances. But I’m a firm believer that God helps those who help themselves, so we had to try everything we could, like letting the air out of their tires. Is it all right with you if I eat one of these cookies?”
“Go ahead,” I said.
“You want the other one?”
“No, thanks. When we get out of here”—I very carefully didn’t say “if” we got out—“I’ll probably be starving, but right now the thought of food makes me queasy.”
“So. What were you doing home in the middle of a school day?” she wanted to know.
“I was having an allergy attack and I went home to get my nasal spray.” I’d forgotten my running nose, and I was breathing all right now. “My mom must have come home on her lunch hour and found the license number of the truck where I’d written it on the wall. And your friend called 9-1-1 when she saw your note.”
“I knew she would. Sarah’s a sensible woman. She’s been my friend since we were your age. So many years ago! I met her when I fell through the ice when we were skating, and she helped rescue me. She fell in, too, before her brother got there with a two-by-four from a nearby construction site, and we both wound up with hypothermia. I got pneumonia, too. You don’t forget friends like that.”
“No, I don’t suppose you do. Do you hear anything yet?”
“Nope,” Mrs. Banducci said. “If you’re sure you don’t want this last cookie, I think I’ll eat it.”
And, then, suddenly, we did hear it. Faintly at first, and then coming closer.
I spoke into the receiver excitedly. “I think I hear the helicopter!”
“Good,” the operator said. “Stay on the line.” I could hear him relaying my information to someone else.
The sound grew quickly louder, until we could tell it was right over our heads. And then something entirely unexpected happened.
The double doors at the rear of the truck were thrown open, leaving us blinking in the sudden sunlight.
Mrs. Banducci’s excited exclamation of “They found us!” died in midbreath.
Because it wasn’t the police. It was Cal and Buddy and Bo.
I know what the word “consternation” means. I had never felt it before, at least not like this.
They were mad. And they were scared. A dangerous combination, Dad would have said.
The helicopter was directly overhead, its noise thunderous, and its blades were stirring up dust and the leaves on a nearby tree even though the thing was still high overhead.
It only took a few seconds for my eyes to adjust to the sunlight after the blackness inside the truck. I couldn’t hear sirens over the racket of the chopper, but I saw the first of the State Patrol cars turn off the main road a short distance away, and then another one, churning up dust on the long driveway, red and blue lights flashing.
Cal and his friends were aware of those cars, too, undoubtedly about to be here in seconds. Why had our captors come back? I wondered frantically, and then realized that the police were chasing them. They must have been spotted as soon as I talked to the detective, and they’d decided their best chance was to return to us and depend on making the authorities back off if we were held up as hostages. I was horribly afraid that it might work.
In the meantime Bo was looking into the truck at us, and he had a long-bladed knife in one hand.
The stuff I’d dumped out of Jodie’s backpack was scattered all around me. Nothing for a weapon to stall them off, nothing at all. An empty sandwich bag, an apple core, and the phone, which I was still clutching.
I dropped the phone. I couldn’t hear the 911 operator’s voice anymore, but I knew he must be able to hear the chopper, although it was pulling away now, lifting higher into the sky. I scrabbled beside me in the junk to reach anything I could that I could throw at them.
I wish I could say I reasoned it all out, but I didn’t. Dad said later I was just going on instinct in trying to protect myself. I was so scared, it was a miracle I could function at all. The police were so close—but Bo had a knife, and they’d wanted me as a hostage before to shield themselves in a situation like this. I only knew I had to try anything to hold them off until the cops could reach us, before Bo put that knife to my throat, or to Mrs. Banducci’s. If they threatened to kill us if the cops didn’t let them leave, would the police be able to stop them?
I had no doubts now that when Bo and Cal and Buddy were through with us, when we were no longer of any use to them, they wouldn’t hesitate to kill us.
The plastic bag that had felt squishy inside the backpack was beside my left hand, filled with gold sequins Jodie had been going to glue onto something at school. I felt it pop open when I squeezed it, and glittering bits sprayed out into the air. Pretty, but worthless.
My right hand closed around the little tube. Glue—that’s what my fingers were touching—glue to stick glitter onto something, a costume, maybe.
I picked up the glue—sort of like arming myself with a feather to fight off a cougar—and instinctively slid backward, away from the three menacing figures already bounding up into the truck.
The chopper had retreated enough by now so I could finally hear the approaching siren of yet a third patrol car. The first two had driven right up to us, and uniformed officers were leaping out of them, weapons in hand, yelling at the menacing trio to stop where they were.
Actually I wasn’t consciously taking all this in at the time. My heart was pounding so hard, my chest hurt, and panic was making me deaf and blind all at once. But I remembered, later, the welcome sight of uniformed police officers with drawn guns, even as I feared they wouldn’t be able to stop whatever Calvin and Bo and Buddy intended to do.
I didn’t realize that they couldn’t kill us in the next few seconds, because then we wouldn’t be hostages any longer, and the police would have no reason to hold their fire. Fear had turned my brain to Silly Putty—or so I thought at the time.
As Bo jumped up into the compartment where they’d kept us prisoner, I felt the little tube in my hand. I don’t remember twisting the cap off, but there must have been a small part of my mind that wasn’t paraly
zed by fear.
And as he lunged toward me, where I was sprawled in the middle of the junk from Jodie’s backpack, I squinted and held out my pathetic little tube and squeezed it as hard as I could. Right into that snarling face.
It was only a tiny tube. There wasn’t much in it. At first I thought it hadn’t had any effect at all, and then Bo swore and swiped at his face and went down on his knees and roared in anger. That gave me time to slide a bit farther away. Beyond him, Buddy was wrestling with Mrs. Banducci, who, for an old lady, was putting up a pretty good fight. Cal had already gone down under a swarm of blue uniforms.
I felt the knife fall against my leg and slide off onto the floor of the truck. Bo started to scream and he had both hands on his face. “What did you do to me, you—” Whatever he was going to call me was cut off when an officer hauled him backward out of the truck where the sound of the helicopter rotors drowned out his cursing.
Another officer helped me to my feet and I was lifted down onto the ground, where my legs were almost too shaky to hold me up.
Two other officers had gone to the assistance of Mrs. Banducci. Overhead, the Channel 4 chopper was tilting for a better angle of what they’d show on the six o’clock news, and it wasn’t until it rose even higher and began to swing away that any of us could hear what anyone else said.
Bo was still screaming and writhing around. “My eye! She squirted something in my eye, and my hand’s stuck to my face!”
The officer who was holding on to my arm bent his head so I could make out his words. “What was it, Kaci?”
I handed over the squashed tube and read the label the same time he said it out loud. “Super Glue! Oh, boy, that’s going to require a trip to the hospital. That’s wicked stuff. He may not be able to get his eye open if it really got it. Better call an aide car for that one, Jim. That Super Glue sets in thirty seconds. They can use it to close an incision these days.”
They led him away from me, still mouthing obscenities, and they rounded up the other two and put them into the back of one of the patrol cars. Then they installed Mrs. Banducci and me in another one.
“You want this?” one of the officers asked, handing in Jodie’s backpack with all her junk packed back into it.
Everything but the phone. He kept that long enough to make contact with the 911 operator, who was apparently still on the line, to give him a report. Then he handed it over to me. “You did some pretty quick thinking there, young lady.”
“It didn’t seem like I was thinking at all,” I admitted. “We thought they were gone. I never dreamed they’d come back!”
“They panicked when they found they had a patrol car on their tail. We were looking for a car of that description, and I was about to pull them over and check them out when they swerved onto an off-ramp, turned around, and headed back here. They undoubtedly figured that having you and Mrs. Banducci as hostages was their only chance of getting away. You did a good job of holding that one off so he couldn’t put that knife to your throat. You just sit back for the ride home. Your folks are waiting for you at headquarters.”
“I suppose it’s too late for lunch with Sarah now,” Mrs. Banducci said. “She probably went home.”
• • •
By dinnertime my appetite had come back. Mom picked up Chinese takeout—she was too nervous and exhausted to cook, she said—and neither she nor Dad went back to their jobs that day.
Jodie knew about the switched backpacks of course. For one thing she’d had to eat my ham sandwich instead of her own peanut butter and jelly, and she was pretty nervous about the stuff she had taken. She wasn’t supposed to have the Super Glue, either; as Mom pointed out, it was much too potent to use to stick sequins onto a costume. Actually, none of us was supposed to use it without supervision.
And in spite of the fact that the phone had proved invaluable to me, she got bawled out for taking it and the glue. She almost always got away with whatever she did, and ordinarily it would have been sort of satisfying to see her on the spot for once. Not that I expected it to change her in the long run. But I was surprised to realize that I felt almost sorry for her as she explained while Mom and Dad were both watching her with those incredulous expressions on their faces.
“Why the telephone, Jodie?” Dad demanded.
My sister licked her lips and glanced at me as if for help. I was even more astonished to hear myself saying, “Well, it was a good thing it was in the backpack when I needed it.”
“Yes,” Dad agreed. “We’re grateful for that part of it. But we still want to know what she expected to do with it.”
Mom had a sudden flash of understanding. “You were taking it somewhere so that you could call me after school, weren’t you? You weren’t going home, you were going where there wouldn’t be a telephone.”
Jodie squirmed on one of the kitchen chairs, the only ones left in the house at the moment. She looked at me again, but I didn’t see any way to help her. In fact, I couldn’t believe that I even wanted to help her. I felt like I ought to say something, just to show that for once we were both on the same side, but nothing came to me.
“Bethany and I were going out to the lake where they’re making the movie,” she said in a small voice. “We thought maybe they’d let us be extras in the mob scenes. The paper said they’d need a couple of hundred kids, and they’d pay them twenty-five dollars apiece.” She swallowed hard. “Mrs. Wightman wouldn’t take us out there, either, and said Bethany couldn’t go. We . . . we didn’t think anybody’d ever know the difference, if we were home before suppertime.”
Mom’s voice was quiet. “And how were you going to get out there if nobody took you?”
Jodie licked her lips again. “On the bus. There was one, right after school got out.”
“You knew it was wrong, didn’t you?” Dad asked. “Both to take the phone and to deliberately disobey your mother?”
Jodie chewed on her lower lip. “Yes,” she admitted.
Dad’s a school principal and is good at handling kids who get sent to the office for misbehavior. He didn’t bawl her out anymore. He just sighed and said, “Think about this the next time you decide to do something you know we don’t want you to do, Jodie.”
He and Mom stood up, then, and went to take care of something or other, leaving me and my sister sitting at the kitchen table. I was even sitting on the chair where I’d been tied up and scared to death.
Jodie was close to tears as she looked at me across the table.
I cleared my throat. “I’m going to watch a new video tonight. I mean, it’s an old movie, a Hitchcock one. It’s supposed to be pretty scary, but you can watch with me if you want to.”
She brightened a little, swiping at a stray tear that had escaped onto her cheek. “Okay,” she said, even though I knew that getting scared wasn’t her usual idea of fun.
Afterward, she said she was nervous and wondered if I’d let her sleep with me that night instead of in her own room. And she actually said that blue and white were restful colors for a bedroom.
We eventually got our furniture and silver and pictures and all the other things back. The broken glass was replaced in the kitchen window. The number I’d written on the wall washed off. There was a tiny scratch on Jeff’s baby grand, but Dad got it touched up so it hardly showed. The bedspread they had wrapped around the piano got torn, so Mom and Dad had to get a new one. As long as they were doing that, Mom ordered new draperies for their bedroom, as well.
We heard that the doctors got the glue off Bo’s face and hands, though I guess it was an uncomfortable process. We learned later that he was related to another new family in Lofty Cedars, the Burgers. He’d visited them with his folks and then mentioned to his friend Cal that there were a lot of TVs and computers and sound equipment going into those new houses. And Cal had suggested that he and Bo and Buddy might manage to steal some of it while the families were all out working. They had done a number of jobs together before they came to Lofty Cedars Estates and hadn�
�t been caught. No one suspected them until they came to our house.
There was a story in the paper, of course. Everybody in town read all the details. That didn’t stop the kids at school from asking me to repeat them. By the second day, I was totally tired of the entire subject; I just wanted to forget what had happened. I prayed I’d never have that kind of adventure again as long as I lived.
Luckily, it didn’t spoil my love for adventures in books. I just got a new one from the library today. It’s by an author I haven’t read before, Edward Bloor, and it’s called Tangerine. That doesn’t sound like a mystery, but the blurb on the cover sounds intriguing.
But I won’t read it when I’m alone in the house. There are limits to everything. I’ll have a big bowl of popcorn, all to myself, and I’ll choose a time when Mom and Dad are downstairs, right close by.
I might even ask Jodie if she wants to come to my room and listen while I read the new book aloud to her. I might make a mystery fan of her yet, who knows?
WILLO DAVIS ROBERTS wrote many mystery and suspense novels for children during her long and illustrious career, including The Girl with the Silver Eyes, The View from the Cherry Tree, Twisted Summer, Megan’s Island, Baby-Sitting Is a Dangerous Job, Hostage, Scared Stiff, and The Kidnappers. Three of her children’s books won Edgar® Awards, while others received great reviews and accolades, including the Sunshine State Young Reader Award, the California Young Reader Medal, and the Georgia Children’s Book
Aladdin
Simon & Schuster, New York
authors.simonandschuster.com/Willo-Davis-Roberts
DON’T MISS THESE OTHER WILLO DAVIS ROBERTS MYSTERIES:
Surviving Summer Vacation
The View from the Cherry Tree
Scared Stiff
Megan’s Island
Baby-Sitting Is a Dangerous Job
The Kidnappers
The Old House
The Pet-Sitting Peril
What Could Go Wrong?
Hostage Page 9
