Abduction!

by Peg Kehret

  A DOOMED FERRY RIDE. . .

  Denny withdrew a short black gun, not much bigger than Matt’s water pistol, and pointed it at Bonnie.

  Bonnie stared at the gun. She didn’t know what kind it was, only that it was aimed at her heart. A small gun could be just as deadly as a large one. Fear crashed against her like ocean waves.

  Denny wouldn’t get away with it; Bonnie was positive of that. As soon as Denny shot her, Matt would scream and run upstairs for help—and what would Denny do then? Shoot Matt, too?

  OTHER BOOKS BY PEG KEHRET

  Cages

  Don’t Tell Anyone

  Earthquake Terror

  The Ghost’s Grave

  I’m Not Who You Think I Am

  Nightmare Mountain

  Runaway Twin

  Searching for Candlestick Park

  Stolen Children

  Terror at the Zoo

  The Pete the Cat Series

  Spy Cat

  The Stranger Next Door

  Trapped

  Abduction

  PEG KEHRET

  PUFFIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Young Readers Group, 345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

  Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand

  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue,

  Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Registered Offices: Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in the United States of America by Dutton Children’s Books,

  a division of Penguin Young Readers Group, 2004

  Published by Puffin Books, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group, 2006, 2011

  Copyright © Peg Kehret, 2004

  All rights reserved

  THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE DUTTON EDITION AS FOLLOWS:

  Kehret, Peg.

  Abduction! / by Peg Kehret.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Thirteen-year-old Bonnie has a feeling of foreboding on the very day that her

  six-year-old brother, Matt, and their dog, Pookie, are abducted, and she becomes

  involved in a major search effort as well as a frightening adventure.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-66166-6

  [1. Kidnapping—Fiction. 2. Brothers and sisters—Fiction. 3. Fathers and sons—Fiction.

  4. Seattle (Wash.)—Fiction.]

  I. Title

  PZ7.K2518Ab 2004

  [Fic]—dc21 2003063531

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  For my daughter, Anne Konen,

  love always

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  Author Q&A

  Discussion Guide

  Denny Thurman stuck the black wig on his head, pulling it snug above his ears. He put on the brown shirt with the fake UPS logo, buttoned it over his T-shirt, and tucked it into his brown pants. Last he pressed a false mustache on his upper lip, pushing hard to make it stick.

  He smiled at himself in the mirror. His own mother wouldn’t recognize him.

  The temporary rose tattoo on his left biceps showed below his sleeve, but the slight bulge of the handgun in his shoulder holster was barely noticeable under his shirt.

  Denny hurried downstairs to his car, feeling nearly as excited as he did when he placed a bet. An hour later, he stopped the car in the alley behind his ex-wife’s house and put on thin plastic gloves. He got out but left the engine running, in case he needed to drive away quickly. He looked both ways, saw no one, and walked to the gate that connected the garage to the fence.

  He reached over the top of the gate, feeling for a latch. Good. No lock. He opened the gate and stepped into the yard. One hand rested in his pants pocket, the fingers wrapped around a small plastic bag containing a piece of broiled steak. With luck, the dog would come to him without the bribe. If that happened, Denny would have a steak sandwich for dinner tonight.

  He wished he could remember the dog’s name, but Denny had never paid attention to the dog—he didn’t care for animals—and six years was a long time. By now it might be a different dog.

  Denny’s eyes swept across the small yard: neatly mowed grass, a swing set, sunbursts of yellow tulips in full bloom, a bird feeder and birdbath. No dog, though. Surely Anita would have a dog; she had been crazy about dogs, and so had Bonnie. They both petted every mutt they met, acting as if each was the grand champion of all time. Anita even kept dog biscuits and a leash in the car, in case she saw a stray in need of help.

  The dog must be inside. Denny would have to pry open a door or window. He hoped the house wasn’t wired with an alarm system.

  Denny walked toward the house but stopped before he reached the screen door. His eyes swung to the corner of the house, to a metal flap at ground level. A dog door! If he could coax the dog out the door, he wouldn’t have to break in, after all, and wouldn’t risk setting off an alarm.

  Denny stood outside the dog door and whistled. “Here, dog,” he called. “Come get your steak.” He whistled again.

  When no dog appeared, Denny pulled off a piece of the steak, pushed the door flap inward, and tossed the meat inside.

  Soon the flap pushed outward, and an elderly black-and-white terrier waddled out. The once-dark muzzle was gray, and the dog walked stiff-legged, as if his knees didn’t bend well anymore. It’s the same dog, Denny thought. He must be over one hundred in dog years by now. Denny wondered if the dog would remember him.

  “Hey, dog,” Denny said.

  The dog blinked, looking around as if unsure where the sound had come from. He’s almost blind, Denny realized.

  Denny held the steak toward the old terrier. The dog sniffed, wagged his tail, and came closer. When he tried to take the meat in his teeth, Denny pulled it away. He put the steak back in the bag and shoved it into his pocket. He had the dog; why waste the steak?

  He removed the leash from his other pocket, looped it around the dog’s neck, and tugging gently, led him out the gate. The dog followed willingly but couldn’t jump i
nto the car; Denny had to lift him into the backseat.

  Before he shut the door, he unbuckled the dog’s collar and read the ID tag. POOKIE, it said, then a phone number. That’s right; Pookie. Denny remembered now. Foolish name for a dog. The ID tag clinked against a rabies tag and a King County dog license as Denny tossed the collar into the weeds beside the alley.

  He opened the driver’s door and slid behind the wheel. He glanced at himself in the rearview mirror, to be sure the wig and mustache were still in place. Satisfied with his appearance, he drove slowly out of the alley and headed for the school, removing the gloves as he drove.

  The dog whined and pawed at the back of Denny’s seat.

  “Too late to cry,” Denny said. “You’re the bait now, Pookie, my boy. You’re the insurance to make sure Matt gets in the car without calling for help.”

  Bonnie hadn’t thought about the dream in years, which was fine with her.

  She remembered it when her best friend, Nancy, said, “Last night I dreamed I jumped out the window during math, landed in the ocean, and rode off on a sea turtle.”

  “I can never recall my dreams,” Bonnie said as she pulled on her Mountain Middle School shorts and T-shirt for PE class. “Except for one. I used to have it a lot.”

  “You had the same dream more than once? Mine are different every night.”

  “This one was a nightmare. The first time I had it was the night my dad died.”

  “What was it about?”

  Bonnie leaned down to tie her shoes, surprised by the chill she felt. “It’s hard to explain.”

  “Try me.”

  “In the dream I’m lost on a huge prairie, acres and acres of grass higher than my head. I spend the whole dream running, calling out for help that never comes.”

  “Just grass? No vicious lion chases you? You don’t fall into a pit full of poisonous snakes?”

  “I know it doesn’t sound scary, but whenever I had the dream I always woke up crying, with my heart pounding.” Each time she had felt as if a heavy black fog hung over her bed, seeping through the blankets into her skin and making it impossible ever to feel happy again. Bonnie shuddered, remembering.

  “You were four when your dad died, right?” Nancy said.

  “Right. The thing is, I didn’t know about death until it happened. I’d heard the word, but I didn’t think it had anything to do with me. I never expected it to happen to my family, to my daddy.”

  “Most four-year-olds wouldn’t.”

  “My grandma tried to help me understand, but she made me more scared than before.”

  “What did she say?” Nancy asked.

  “She told me, ‘Everyone dies, but usually not until they’re very old.’ She meant to comfort me, but I thought Daddy was old. When you’re four, twenty-six seems ancient.”

  “Small wonder you had nightmares.”

  The girls left the locker room and began jogging around the gym with their classmates.

  “Grandma talked about heaven and angels and how it was a tragic accident,” Bonnie said, “but I focused on, EVERYONE DIES. Everyone included my mother, who was the same age as Daddy. That night, I dreamed I was lost on the prairie.”

  “You were afraid you’d be an orphan.”

  Bonnie spoke softly. “I’ve never told anyone about the dream before. Mom used to come into my room when I’d wake up crying, and she’d ask what I had dreamed, but I always pretended I couldn’t remember. At first I was superstitious about it, afraid if I told the dream it would come true. Later I worried there was something wrong with me for having the same bad dream over and over. I didn’t tell Mom because I didn’t want to go to the doctor. I was scared I’d get a shot.”

  “You don’t need a master’s degree in psychology to figure out that nightmare,” Nancy said. “It’s the classic fear-of-loss dream. You lost your dad, and you were afraid your mom would die, too. Perfectly normal. They’d march you straight to a kiddie shrink if you DIDN’S have dreams like that when a parent died. Do you still have it?”

  “No. I had it a lot at first, and then it gradually came less often. It stopped when I was eight or nine.”

  “So you are now a well-adjusted thirteen-year-old who has overcome a terrible loss and gotten on with her life. No more nightmares.”

  “You, on the other hand,” Bonnie said, “are a serious mental case who secretly yearns to escape from school and ride away on a sea turtle.”

  “You got that right,” Nancy said.

  Although Bonnie smiled, the familiar cold ache settled in her stomach. It didn’t happen often anymore. To be honest, whole weeks went past when she never thought about her dad at all, but when she did think of him she felt as if she had a hole in her heart, like some vital piece of herself was missing.

  Remembering how suddenly she had lost him always made her feel vulnerable. If tragedy could knock on her door without warning once, it could arrive again.

  She wished she hadn’t told Nancy about the dream. Now she felt anxious and edgy, as if some unexpected disaster were about to strike her family.

  You’re being paranoid, Bonnie told herself. Mom’s at work; Matt’s in kindergarten; Pookie’s probably asleep in a patch of sunshine on the rug. It’s an ordinary morning, and everybody’s safe. Still, the vague feeling of dread stayed with her.

  It had been simple for Denny to learn Matt’s room number. After he found Anita’s address in the telephone directory, he called the school district office and asked which school kids in that area would attend. Next he had called the school and said he was Matthew Sholter’s uncle.

  “I want to send balloons to his classroom on his birthday,” Denny had said, “but I don’t know which room he’s in.”

  The student who had answered the phone looked up Matthew Sholter and then told Denny everything he needed to know, including what time all-day kindergarten started and let out, and where Room 27 was located. She called the boy Matt, rather than Matthew. Useful information.

  Jefferson School sat on the corner of Milton Street and Seventh, a sprawling one-story structure that had overflowed its quota of children years ago and now depended on portable buildings to house the extra students.

  For the last three days, Denny had parked in front of the school every afternoon, in the line of cars that arrived to pick up children who spilled out the doors like popcorn from a popper promptly at two thirty-six.

  Until now Denny had left the school by himself. Today he would have a passenger.

  Denny glanced at the car’s clock. Two twenty-three. He was right on schedule.

  The first day Denny had wondered how he would know which one was Matt. It seemed impossible that he wouldn’t know his own son, but one kid looked pretty much like the next to Denny, and he’d never actually met Matt or even seen any pictures of him. He hadn’t wanted to, until recently.

  Maybe the kid resembled him. Tim and Thomas, Denny’s nephews, looked a lot like Denny’s brother-in-law, Winston, so Matt would probably look like Denny. The boy might be a real chip off the old block, Denny had thought, and I’ll know him the second I see him.

  He had watched the children rush outside, but none of them seemed even slightly familiar. Maybe Matt was absent. As Denny watched the children line up for the school buses, or head to the waiting cars, he saw Bonnie join a small blond boy in the second bus line.

  Denny hadn’t seen Bonnie since the divorce, but she had been six or seven during his brief marriage to her mother, so he recognized her instantly. She was taller, of course, and more slender, but she still had thick, curly brown hair and a lopsided smile. The boy showed Bonnie a drawing, and she gave him a thumbs-up.

  Denny stared at the boy with Bonnie. He wore a Donald Duck T-shirt and jeans. That must be him, Denny thought. That’s Matt. My son.

  The same scene repeated the next day, and the next, as Denny parked near the school, watched for Matt, and made his plans.

  After the second day, Denny knew which boy was Matt, even before Bonnie
came.

  Matt always arrived first and got in line. Then Bonnie dashed across the playground and rode home with him. The trick would be to coax Matt into the car quickly, without alarming the bus driver or the other kids, and drive away before Bonnie got there. He planned to wait outside Room 27 and intercept Matt the second he emerged.

  Denny had come back to the school one night and walked around, deciding where to park so that he wouldn’t be seen by the other parents or the bus drivers. That’s when he saw the notice on the front door: ALL SCHOOL VISITORS MUST SIGN IN AT THE OFFICE AND GET A VISITOR’S BADGE.

  He couldn’t take a chance on being stopped for not wearing a badge, but he didn’t want to sign in, either.

  Denny had soon figured out what to do.

  Now he was finally putting his plan into motion. He had rehearsed the whole thing in his mind so many times that when he began to do it for real, he felt as if he were merely repeating actions he had already taken.

  Instead of parking where the parents lined up, he stopped on the side street, close to the door Matt always came out. He opened the trunk of his car, then took out a clipboard and a cardboard box addressed to the school library. Carrying the box under one arm, he walked around to the front entrance, past the flagpole, and into the school office.

  “UPS,” he said to the woman behind the counter. “I have a delivery for the library.”

  The woman glanced at his brown uniform. “You need to sign in, please,” she said, “and wear a visitor’s badge. The library is down the hall, on your left.”

  Denny scrawled UPS on the sign-in ledger, thanked the woman, hung a badge around his neck, and walked out of the office. Instead of heading for the library, he went straight for the door at the end of the hall, the one next to Room 27.

  Then something happened that Denny had not planned for—a lucky break he had never imagined as he mentally rehearsed this day’s activity.

  The door of Room 27 opened, and Matt stepped into the hallway. He closed the door behind him and headed straight toward Denny.

  “Matt,” Denny said.