She knew they couldn’t have seen her face the night before. They were trying to scare her into confessing.
Mrs. Jenness moved to a desk near Vicki and sat. She smiled and tried to sound reassuring.
“You’re just misguided,” she said. “We don’t want to punish you. We just want to find out who’s behind this.”
Right, Vicki thought. It had to be somebody else. A girl like me wouldn’t have the brains to put two sentences together.
“Just tell us who put you up to this,” Mrs. Jenness said, “and this all goes away.”
“Otherwise,” Handlesman said, “you go with these guys. Believe me, you don’t want to do that.”
Vicki turned. The guards stared at her with blank faces. She cleared her throat. Her voice came out shaky. Scared.
“I’m sorry about the alarm,” Vicki said. “I didn’t know the fire department would come. Nobody put me up to that. I’ll pay a fine or whatever.”
“We can overlook a prank like that,” Mrs. Jenness said. “But this newspaper—that’s much more serious. Why don’t you tell us about it, Vicki?”
Vicki remained silent, staring at Handlesman. The coach smiled and looked at the principal.
“She knows,” he said. “She knows we couldn’t see her face on the video from last night.” He turned back to Vicki. “But I wonder if we sent someone to your home in—he looked at a clipboard—Kings Trailer Court. Bet we’d find a mask, huh? Or maybe evidence of your part in producing the Underground?”
___
“We’ve gotta get her out of there,” Judd said.
“We don’t know what’s going on,” John said. “All I can hear is this girl whimpering and her mother.”
“How could we get her out?” Mark said. “They’ve got her. Maybe it’s time we faced the music and turned ourselves in.”
“That’s crazy,” John said.
“As crazy as letting her take the fall for all of us?” Mark said. “She saved us the other day with that fire alarm. And for that she gets punished?”
The speaker crackled. Coach Handlesman was in Jenness’s office, talking to the woman and the girl. He was asking about Vicki.
“It was her,” the woman interrupted. “It had to be.”
“She never told me that,” the girl said.
“Why do you think it was her?” Handlesman said. “Did she mention the newspaper?”
“I brought it up,” the girl said. “We talked about stuff in the paper,” the girl said. “But she never actually said she was a part of it.”
“You’ve got the guilty one,” the woman said. “Can we have the money now?”
“That doesn’t prove anything,” Handlesman said. “No proof, no reward.”
Judd said, “Mark, give me your gadget, quick.”
___
Vicki felt another vibration and reached in her pocket as if peeking at her watch. It read, “Admit nothing. No proof.”
How would anyone know that? she wondered, then remembered the bug in Jenness’s office behind her.
“You don’t need to worry about what time it is, young lady,” Mrs. Jenness said. “You’d better be thinking about your future. Things could be pretty grim.”
Coach Handlesman returned from Jenness’s office, but Vicki couldn’t turn around quickly enough to see who was in there before the door closed.
Coach Handlesman pulled up his chair again. “We know this wasn’t your idea,” he said. “You just got caught up in it. Somebody probably convinced you this would be a noble cause. We can understand that. If you cooperate now, tell us who’s involved, we’ll see things get worked out for you.”
“And if I don’t?”
Mrs. Jenness said, “You could be removed from your home and sentenced to a juvenile facility.”
“For a fire-alarm prank?” Vicki said.
Handlesman slammed his fist on the table. “We don’t care about that!” he screamed. “Tell us about the newspaper!”
“What makes you think it was me?”
Handlesman rose and stood in front of Mrs. Jenness’s office. “Here’s why,” he said.
He opened the door and let it swing wide. Vicki gasped.
Shelly. And her mother. The woman pointed at Vicki.
“That’s her,” she said. “She’s the one with all the crazy ideas. She came over to our house with that pastor of hers. Trying to brainwash my kid.”
Shelly didn’t speak. She just cried and mouthed, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
Handlesman shut the door. “This is it,” he said. “Either tell us the truth or face the consequences.”
___
“I can’t take it any more,” Mark said. “I’m going in there and tell them it was me.”
“Don’t,” John said. “Let this play out. Maybe you ought to call your pastor, Judd.”
“I don’t want to get him involved,” Judd said. “He said something like this might happen.”
“Hey, call him and tell him,” John said. “At least he can pray for her.”
“You guys really get me,” Mark said, and he was out the door and down the hall before John or Judd could stop him.
___
Vicki was startled by a sharp knock on the office door. Coach Handlesman opened it and Mrs. Waltonen said, “May I see you and Mrs. Jenness a moment? Outside?”
“We’re in the middle of something,” Mrs. Jenness said.
“I think it will be worth your while,” Mrs. Waltonen said.
Handlesman and Jenness left the door slightly open, and Vicki saw Mark in the hall. She furrowed her brow and mouthed, “What are you doing?”
Mark shrugged. Handlesman said, “Unless you have business here, pal, get lost.”
Mark caught Vicki’s eye again and put his hand in his pocket, then scurried off. Vicki read his message: “I’ll confess.”
She quickly tapped back: “NO!”
___
“If Mark gives it up, we all have to,” John said.
“She doesn’t want him to,” Judd said, looking at John’s screen over his shoulder. “Let’s keep our heads.”
“If Vicki gets out of there without talking, the GC guys will be all over her to see who she hangs with.”
Mark came back in. “That’s one brave girl. Waltonen is talking to Jenness and Handlesman.”
“What about?”
“She said she knows where Vicki hangs out. Waltonen gave them the street you live on, but she couldn’t remember the address.”
“I knew that would come back to haunt us,” Judd said. “Handlesman will be sniffing around the neighborhood all afternoon. How did Vicki look?”
“Like she was on trial.”
___
Vicki sat up as Mrs. Jenness and Coach Handlesman returned. Neither looked at her.
“Anything you want to say?” the coach said finally.
“I’m sorry about the alarm. I won’t do it again.”
He nodded to the principal.
“We’re going to let you think about it overnight, Vicki,” she said. “Your future depends on what you tell us. Tomorrow we want you back here with your parents.”
Vicki wondered if her mom and dad would be proud of what she was doing. Could they see her? That thought overwhelmed her and she began to cry.
“It’s OK, Vicki,” Mrs. Jenness said, handing her a tissue. “You have a talk with your family. I’m sure they’ll want you to do the right thing.”
The bell rang and Coach Handlesman said, “You’d better get to your next class.”
Vicki walked out into the stream of students. At the end of the hall Judd, John, and Mark turned and walked the other way. Would they desert her? Did they think she had betrayed them the way Shelly had betrayed her?
For the first time since she had met her new friends, she felt utterly alone.
About the Authors
Jerry B. Jenkins (www.jerryjenkins.com) is the writer of the Left Behind series. He owns the Jerry B. Jenkins Christian Writers Guild
, an organization dedicated to mentoring aspiring authors. Former vice president for publishing for the Moody Bible Institute of Chicago, he also served many years as editor of Moody magazine and is now Moody’s writer-at-large.
His writing has appeared in publications as varied as Reader’s Digest, Parade, Guideposts, in-flight magazines, and dozens of other periodicals. Jenkins’s biographies include books with Billy Graham, Hank Aaron, Bill Gaither, Luis Palau, Walter Payton, Orel Hershiser, and Nolan Ryan, among many others. His books appear regularly on the New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, and Publishers Weekly best seller lists.
Jerry is also the writer of the nationally syndicated sports story comic strip Gil Thorp, distributed to newspapers across the United States by Tribune Media Services.
Jerry and his wife, Dianna, live in Colorado and have three grown sons.
Dr. Tim LaHaye (www.timlahaye.com), who conceived the idea of fictionalizing an account of the Rapture and the Tribulation, is a noted author, minister, and nationally recognized speaker on Bible prophecy. He is the founder of both Tim LaHaye Ministries and The PreTrib Research Center. He also recently cofounded the Tim LaHaye School of Prophecy at Liberty University. Presently Dr. LaHaye speaks at many of the major Bible prophecy conferences in the U.S. and Canada, where his current prophecy books are very popular.
Dr. LaHaye holds a doctor of ministry degree from Western Theological Seminary and a doctor of literature degree from Liberty University. For twenty-five years he pastored one of the nation’s outstanding churches in San Diego, which grew to three locations. It was during that time that he founded two accredited Christian high schools, a Christian school system of ten schools, and Christian Heritage College.
Dr. LaHaye has written over forty books that have been published in more than thirty languages. He has written books on a wide variety of subjects, such as family life, temperaments, and Bible prophecy. His current fiction works, the Left Behind series, written with Jerry B. Jenkins, continue to appear on the best seller lists of the Christian Booksellers Association, Publishers Weekly, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and the New York Times.
He is the father of four grown children and grandfather of nine. Snow skiing, waterskiing, motorcycling, golfing, vacationing with family, and jogging are among his leisure activities.
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