Girl Squad

by Kim Hoover

  “Oh, my goodness,” Grandma said, her hands at her heart. “This is very unfortunate. What can the girls do to make this up to you?”

  “Please,” I said. “We really were just trying to help, in what now seems like an obviously stupid way. I wanted to find my mom. That’s all. Isn’t it possible that the photos we got that night could help you build your case against the gang?”

  “Yeah!” Rachel chimed in. “We found one that shows Cal’s mother driving the RV.”

  “Okay. That’s interesting,” Bev said, softening a bit. “What else did you get?”

  We went into the kitchen and emptied a box full of photos onto the dining table. Bev went through them carefully.

  “These are some excellent shots of the tankers and the RV. I can even see the connection between them. You seem to have had a better vantage point than our cameras did that night.”

  “So, we did help, after all,” Jane said.

  Bev nodded. She then examined the picture of Joyce through the magnifying glass.

  “Does it mean she’s part of the gang?” Grandma asked.

  “It’s impossible to know for sure at this point,” Bev said. “She may be going along with things for now because she’s in over her head. Or maybe they’ve promised her something that makes it worth the risk.”

  “Maybe she’s got Stockholm Syndrome,” Rachel said.

  “What? Where do you come up with these things?” I said.

  “It’s where a hostage starts to identify with her captors,” Bev said. “It happened this summer in a high-profile case in Sweden.”

  Rachel smirked at me.

  “Well, anyway,” I said, “I’m sorry, real sorry, we messed up your chance to get Hart the other night. What do you think they will do next?”

  Bev sat back in her chair, obviously thinking about the question carefully before responding. “I know your motive is pure. You want to find your mom. But you need to stay out of this, Cal. I mean it. I’m taking these photos with me to Ft. Worth. Just get back to school where you belong.”

  “No, please! That’s not fair. The pictures are our property,” I said as I ran to gather them up into my arms.

  “You’re wrong. They’re evidence in a criminal investigation. Now put them down.”

  I was furious and started crying I was so mad. “I wish we had never met you.”

  “Calm down,” Grandma said. “Everything’s going to be okay, Cal. They’re going to find your mother.”

  “Right,” I said, sneering. “I’ll believe it when I see it.”

  Jane and Rachel stood on either side of me, each taking an arm, trying to comfort me. I was shaking with rage. I wanted to tackle her, but all we could do was watch helplessly while Bev packed up all the photos and loaded them into her brand-new Wagoneer.

  “Nice truck.” Rachel whistled at the Jeep with wooden side panels and a chrome grille. I glared at her like she was sympathizing with the enemy. “Well, it is,” she said.

  Bev drove off as the four of us watched the Jeep disappear, the red dust swirling in its trail. I felt someone had punched me and knocked the wind out of me.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Rachel, Jane, and I stood staring at each other, helpless, mute, while Grandma looked on from the porch.

  “Why don’t you girls get back inside. I’ll make us an apple pie and some homemade ice cream. Let the Rangers do their job and I’m sure this will all be okay in the end.”

  Dejected, having no idea what to do next, I signaled to the other two that we might as well go inside. Grandma went to work in the kitchen, and realizing how crushed we were, didn’t even make us help. We went up to the room Jane and I shared so we could talk in private.

  “This is the worst,” I said. “We’re totally cut out.”

  “I guess we should have known she wasn’t going to let us in on their investigation. It was really dumb to think she could,” Jane said.

  “There’s nothing stopping us from going to Ft. Worth on our own,” Rachel said, her eyes wide, as though she’d come up with a brilliant idea.

  “Nothing?” I said. “Nothing except Grandma, the Texas Rangers, our parents, the school. Other than that, it’s easy peasy.”

  “Wait a minute,” Jane said as Rachel looked glumly at the floor. “Your grandmother and the Rangers aren’t going to expect us to keep going on this. And the school, well, it’s still closed for now since there’s no water or electricity. So it looks like we won’t be back in there for at least a week.”

  “But what about my dad? Your parents? Rachel’s?”

  “Here’s the idea. We have to make your grandmother believe we’re going back home, and at the same time, we make our parents believe we’re hanging out here until the school reopens,” Jane said.

  “I don’t know. I guess it could work. But what are we going to do in Ft. Worth?” I just couldn’t shake my negative thoughts. I was so down in the dumps about what Bev had done. I had really believed she would help us and I felt like a fool for that now.

  “First things first. Let’s all call our folks and let them know we’re going to hang out in Sweetwater for the week. They’re not gonna care. My dad hates to spend money on long distance calls, so he won’t call to check up on us in the meantime,” Rachel said.

  “We’ll tell your grandmother we’re headed back home in the morning. We can make a big deal out of how defeated we are and all that, so she won’t suspect that we would do anything else,” Jane said.

  “You two sure are confident,” I said, standing and pacing the room. “But this feels like a wild goose chase to me.”

  “Maybe,” Jane said. “But one thing leads to another. Look how far we’ve gotten already?”

  “I’m starting to feel like a Texas Ranger myself,” Rachel said, jumping up on a side table and holding her arms up like she was aiming a gun.

  I threw a pillow at her and she fell backward off the table, hitting her head against the wall.

  “Ouch!”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, running to help her up. “Let’s pack up. I’ll let Grandma know we’re headed back home first thing in the morning.

  Grandma watched as we drove off toward home. Once we were on the highway, we circled back and headed in the direction of Ft. Worth. Four hours later, as we rolled into town, we spotted a phone booth and pulled over to look up the address of Arlington Heights High School. In one of Rachel’s side chats with Bev, she had learned that she lived across the street from there. Rachel’s habit of being nosy sometimes came in handy.

  “We need a map,” Jane said.

  We stopped at a gas station nearby and bought a street map of Ft. Worth. The high school was easy to find, right off the interstate and closer to downtown.

  “We’ll need to hang around there after five, when she should be coming home from work,” I said.

  “I’m a little nervous,” Rachel said. “What if we run into her?”

  “We have to be smarter than that,” I said. “Maybe there’s a spot in the school parking lot where we can watch and wait.”

  The front of the high school faced the interstate. The parking lot was in the back and faced a row of modest single-story houses. We had to hope one of them was Bev’s. As the clock ticked closer to six, I was feeling anxious, like this was yet another harebrained idea. But just then, we saw her car.

  “There she is!” Rachel said as Bev’s Jeep pulled into one of the houses across the street.

  I looked at Rachel and Jane and realized they were thinking the same thing I was thinking.

  “Okay, so now we know where she lives,” I said.

  “But what are we going to do?” Jane said.

  “Sleep out overnight? Break in when she goes to work in the morning?” Rachel asked sheepishly.

  We had been pouting for several minutes when Jane grabbed my arm. “She’s leaving!”

  We looked over to see Bev getting into the Jeep and driving away.

  “Let’s go!” I said.

&nbs
p; We parked on the street that shared an alley with Bev’s and walked as nonchalantly as we could to the back of her house. There was a fence with an unlocked gate, so we walked in like we owned the place. The backyard was neat, the grass freshly cut and trimmed, with a deck near the back fence next to the two-car garage. An outdoor table and chairs sat on the deck.

  With no signs of life, we boldly approached the house. There was no back door and all the blinds were closed on the windows that faced the backyard. We rounded the side along the driveway and saw a slightly ajar screen door. I tried the door behind it, and of course, it was locked, but there was nothing covering the glass so we could see right inside.

  The view was into the kitchen, which was spotless, the linoleum floor shining.

  “Look!” Rachel said, pointing. “It’s a kitty.”

  A tubby calico cat strolled toward the door, looking us over with curiosity. She sat primly and meowed loudly.

  “She has a full bowl of food,” Rachel said. “I bet Bev came home just to feed her.”

  “At least there’s no dog. That would spoil our plan,” Jane said.

  “What is our plan, exactly?” I said.

  “We should check around for a hidden key,” Jane said. “People do that all the time. In case they lock themselves out.”

  “But she’s a Texas Ranger. Do you really think she’s going to leave a key laying around?”

  “No, not laying around. Hidden. We have to think like her. Where would she put it?”

  “Hmm,” Rachel said. “What about the garage?”

  She ran to check, but both garage doors were locked.

  “No dice.”

  I stepped back and examined the house. I noticed a metal downspout on the far side, away from the driveway and walked over to take a look. Sure enough, at the bottom, underneath the part that turned away from the house, was a key keeper with a magnet holding it in place. I opened it.

  I held the key up, smiling. “We’re in.”

  As we stood at the side door, I looked at the two of them, took a deep breath and turned the lock carefully. I could tell they had as many doubts as I did about what we were doing. Were we going too far? Was it worth it? How much trouble could we get into if we got caught?

  The lock clicked and the door was open. We stepped inside and Rachel picked up the cat.

  “No time for that,” I said. “Let’s be quick about this. If there’s nothing here that helps us, we need to get out, pronto.”

  The house was small, only two bedrooms. The smaller bedroom was set up as an office with a desk and filing cabinets.

  “If there’s anything, you would think it’s in here,” Jane said.

  I nodded. “Be careful. We don’t want her to know we were here. Whatever you touch, put it back the way you found it.”

  We checked drawers and filing cabinets but found nothing interesting. Then Rachel opened the closet door.

  “Look,” she said. “Here’s some boxes labeled Brazos River Gang.”

  “Wow,” Jane said. “The mother lode.”

  “This has to be what we’re looking for,” I said, helping them drag the boxes out into the room.

  “This is going to take a while,” Jane said.

  “We can’t take a while. We have to move fast.”

  We divided up the boxes and went to work. We pored over the reports, reading logs and examining maps, trying to piece together the history of the Brazos River Gang. After a couple of hours, we sat back, discouraged, our eyes red from the effort.

  “Come on, girls,” Rachel said. “We can’t give up. We have to live up to the Texas Ranger standard.”

  Jane and I sighed and we all got back to work. A few minutes later, Jane gasped.

  “There’s a pattern here,” she said, pointing to a logbook of where the gang had been known to have various activities over the previous six months.

  I looked over her shoulder at the logbook and Rachel jumped up, looking over her other shoulder.

  “If you draw out these movements on the map, you see these first five entries make a star starting and ending on Palo Duro Canyon.”

  “Spooky,” Rachel said.

  “And then, if you look at the next three, which is where it stops for now, you have three points of the star.”

  “What does it mean?” Rachel asked.

  “It looks like a kind of code,” I said. “Maybe those points of the star are where they’re picking up the gasoline.”

  “Right! So, look at this. It looks like the next place they would be is over here in Tyler,” Jane said, drawing the line to the next logical point.

  “Tyler—my uncle lives there. He used to work at an oil refinery there. That makes sense,” said Rachel.

  “What’s the timing on those log entries?” I asked.

  “Four days apart,” Jane said. “The last entry is two days ago.”

  “So they could be planning a strike on that refinery in Tyler in two days.”

  We sat quiet for a moment, just staring at the map.

  “What do we do?” Rachel asked.

  “How do we know the Rangers haven’t already figured this out? This is their job after all,” I said.

  “You would think they’ve looked into it, but maybe they didn’t notice what I noticed. You would have to be thinking about star patterns. They’re a bunch of old guys for the most part, so they don’t think that way,” Jane said, folding her arms with finality.

  “We have to tell Bev about it,” Rachel said. “No matter how mad she gets that we broke into her place.”

  “I agree we should tell her, on the chance they haven’t figured it out, but I’m worried about surprising her when she gets home. She might go nuts and arrest us or something,” I said.

  We decided it was best to put everything away, back where we found it, except we left the log and the map with Jane’s pencil drawing of the star on top of one box. As we skedaddled out the back gate, I caught a glimpse of Bev arriving back home. We had just made it.

  We drove several blocks away and located a phone booth where we could call her. I dialed her number and waited. After the fifth ring, I was ready to put the receiver back in the cradle when I heard her voice.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi, Officer,” I said. “It’s Cal and Jane and Rachel.”

  “Oh, hello, girls. Is everything okay? Are you in trouble?”

  “Everything’s fine,” I said. “We just, we, well, we have an idea for you. About the Brazos River Gang.”

  “Hmm,” Bev said. “That’s interesting. What is it?”

  “I’ll get to that, but, uh, there’s something I have to tell you first.”

  I was nervous and too afraid to say it, and I could see that Rachel was itching to take the phone, so when she grabbed it, I didn’t resist.

  “Ma’am,” Rachel said with confidence, “we were in your home tonight, going through those boxes in your closet.”

  “You what?” Bev cried.

  “I know it wasn’t right for us to go in without your permission, but, well, we did. And the important thing is, we found something. Something you need to know about, if you don’t already.”

  “Where are you girls?” she spat.

  “Don’t worry about that. Just go look in your closet and get the map and the log that we left out.”

  I took the phone back as Rachel sneered at me, “You should let me handle this from here.”

  I listened for Bev to come back on the line.

  “Okay, I’ve got it. Now what is it you think you’ve found?”

  “See the star pattern on the map?”

  I could hear the rustling of crisp paper as she opened the map.

  “Yes.”

  “That shows the order of hits on refineries. The final point of the star, if you take it that far, is Tyler.”

  She was so quiet I couldn’t tell if she was still on the line. “Hello?”

  “I see it,” she said.

  “And if you look at the timing on t
he log, you see they should be in Tyler two days from now.”

  She let out a long sigh as the three of us looked at each other helplessly, waiting for some reaction.

  “This looks…like something we should investigate,” she said at last. “But, listen to me, like I said before, the three of you need to stay out of this. Go back home. Right now. Or I’ll send a passel of squad cars to look for you.” She paused. “And if you ever break into my house again, I’ll personally arrest you!”

  Chapter Nineteen

  I felt my resolve slipping away, but I didn’t want the other two to know it, so as we stood silent in the phone booth, I decided to just take control and come up with a plan, any plan.

  “I’ve read about youth hostels,” I said. “I wonder if they have one here.”

  “You mean where we could stay the night?” Rachel asked.

  “Yeah. It’s getting late. And I’m not sure what we should do next. We need time to think. Regroup. Figure it out.”

  We looked through the Yellow Pages. Under hostels there was a listing for the YWCA in downtown Ft. Worth.

  “Look, it says minimum age fifteen, females only,” Jane said.

  “Perfect. I hope they have room.”

  We called to confirm they had beds for us and drove in that direction. A parking lot on the side of the building had plenty of space, so we pulled in, parked, and unloaded our bags.

  “This is fun,” Rachel almost squealed. “Like camp.”

  “I don’t know,” Jane said. “Do you think it’s safe? It looks kinda like skid row. What if someone steals the car?”

  “It’s a little dodgy, I guess, but what choice do we have?”

  She couldn’t argue with that, so we went inside. A woman wearing cat’s eyeglasses, her hair in a bun tacked up by pickup sticks, sat at an imposing elevated reception counter, looking down on us suspiciously, smoke from her cigarette swirling above her head.

  Her thick drawl seemed to pour out of her mouth like molasses. “How kin I help ye?”

  “We’d like to stay the night,” Rachel said, perky like she was checking into the Holiday Inn.