The Secret of Rover

by Rachel Wildavsky

  But David was strangely calm. It had been five against two. Whether it was fair or right hadn’t mattered. He sank to the floor, picked up his sandwich, and unwrapped it. In the faint light he pulled apart the pieces of bread and sniffed tentatively at the slightly acrid contents. Some sort of foreign paste was smeared inside.

  But undoubtedly it was food. He was very hungry, and who could say when they would receive their next meal? He slapped his sandwich back together and took a bite. He didn’t like it, but he could eat it. And after he ate it he could sleep. The floor was very hard, but he was very tired.

  It was terribly noisy in the basement. Clearly the Katkajanians would be awake for a long time. But after a while David did lie down, and sometime later he was dimly aware that Katie had done the same.

  “We have to get away, David,” she whispered softly.

  He did not answer.

  “We have to escape from them,” she insisted.

  He wanted only to sleep, and again he made no reply.

  “In the morning,” she continued, aware now that she was speaking to herself, “in the morning we’ll run away.” And then—despite the noise and the slatted light and the concrete, despite her sorrow and her fear—she fell asleep.

  But in the morning they were taken away.

  At the crack of dawn—before it was fully light, before there were cars on the streets, before they had even woken up—Trixie and the crooked-nosed Katkajanian roughly and unceremoniously dragged open the door to their closet.

  The basement was still dark. The house was silent and—but for them—asleep. Trixie carried a flashlight that she shone in their faces.

  “Get up,” she whispered.

  The children, fogged by sleep, simply stared.

  “Up,” she repeated, now jerking the flashlight toward the stairs, as if to beckon them forward. “We’re going for a little ride in the car.”

  They asked no questions. And fleetingly—through her sleepy confusion and her terrible fear—Katie noticed that neither did Trixie. At some point, Trixie had abandoned the irritating upward tilt that used to end her every sentence. There was no need to sugarcoat anything now.

  The children stumbled to their feet and prepared to follow her. But Trixie, indignant, pointed back toward the floor where they had lain.

  “Get that!” she barked, gesturing toward the plastic from their sandwiches, which had been flattened beneath their bodies. “You don’t leave your trash for others to pick up!”

  Clutching the wads of plastic and the empty water bottle, and stumbling with fear and fatigue, the children followed Trixie across the basement and up the stairs, with the other Katkajanian silently following them. Lighting a path with her flashlight Trixie led them across the kitchen and out the back door.

  Their fear was intense but still, the fresh dark air was good after their night in the stuffy closet. At the first touch of it on their faces they were fully alert.

  They were led through the side yard and across the dewy grass to the front of the house. There a car idled in the driveway, with its headlights off despite the still-starry sky. The colorless, lank-haired American was behind the wheel. Trixie slipped into the front seat beside her while the crooked-nosed Katkajanian opened the back door and pointed the children in. They slid across the cold seat, the man slid in after them, and the door was slammed shut. The American woman put the car into gear and they rolled down the driveway with the lights still off.

  “Where are we going?” David’s voice trembled audibly. Any attempt to pretend he was not petrified was hopeless.

  But there was no reply.

  They rolled through the familiar streets, away from their home, past the pool, and out of their new neighborhood. They rolled past their school.

  The driver switched on the headlights at last as they slipped onto the freeway. They continued to cruise in total silence. And soon after that—too soon—Trixie was gesturing and pointing and they were exiting on a familiar ramp.

  The ramp took them beneath a lonely overpass, and as they glided under it the lights once again went off. They emerged onto a bleak and well-known road.

  Gone were the leafy branches that spread like a canopy over the streets in their new neighborhood. Gone were the neat lawns and the well-tended houses. On either side of them were wrecks and hovels, rubble and dirt.

  Katie closed her eyes. It was their old neighborhood.

  The children could have made the rest of the trip on their own, and with their eyes closed. They knew it that well. And their hearts, which they had thought could sink no further, dropped down, down, down with every turn of the wheel.

  No Mom, thought Katie. No Dad, no Theo. No room, no house, no home.

  They were back to where they had started, with less than when they had begun.

  The car pulled to a stop in front of the old place and the driver cut the motor. The house had, if anything, sagged still further than when they had left it, hoping never to see it again. Vandals had punched holes in the front steps. They would have to pick their way to the door. Plywood had been nailed over the barred windows. Who had put that up, and when? Now there would be no light as well as no exit.

  “We’re home!” Trixie sang with a sudden trill of a laugh. Her loudness jarred them in the silent car. She shoved open her door and leaped out, all but dancing around to open theirs. “Out!” she snapped, low-voiced now in the open air.

  It was funny how even the car, which had been a detestable prison moments before, felt like a refuge now. But they had no alternative. Reluctantly they slid from their seats and huddled together on the familiar pavement. Trixie tucked her flashlight beneath her arm and, from the capacious pockets of her camouflage suit, she withdrew a key. She began picking her way up the broken steps. The man with the crooked nose and the lank-haired woman emerged from the car. The woman carried a smallish brown paper bag bundled beneath her arm. Joining them, she gave David a shove to indicate he was to follow.

  A flicker of movement to his left drew David’s startled eye. A fat gray rat was slipping beneath the stairs. David shut his eyes and squeezed them tight.

  Trixie turned the key in the lock. Katie noticed with surprise that when she did so, a new and unfamiliar deadbolt slid open on the outside of the door. The door creaked open, dislodging a clod of dust and dirt that fell onto Trixie’s head. She muttered angrily in Katkajanian and brushed the filth from her face. Impatiently pushing aside cobwebs, she led the way in.

  They followed. They had no choice.

  The front door opened straight into the small front room. Once it had been their living room and they had done their best to keep it clean. Though it had not been so very long since they had lived there, they could see in the beam of Trixie’s light that in their absence it had become filthy with spiders and dust.

  The driver dropped her paper bag onto the floor. “Thad’s sub food,” she said in her flat voice, nudging it with her foot.

  Trixie grunted in affirmation. “Water’s in the sink,” she added. “We’ll check on you later. So you’d better be good.”

  Then, incredibly, she and her two helpers turned back toward the door. They were going to leave. That was it. That was all they planned to say.

  Now Katie’s voice shook, too, but not just her voice, and not from fear. Now it was her whole body. The outrage. The utter outrage.

  “What are you doing to our mother and father?” she demanded loudly. “When are you letting them go?”

  “And what about us?” added David. “How long are you planning to leave us here, in this—in this—”

  Trixie wheeled around, hands on hips. “You think this is bad? You think this place is bad?” She stared at David, hard, as she spoke. “You haven’t seen anything. If you aren’t good, this is gonna get a lot worse.”

  Then she turned on Katie. “And do you want your mother and father? Do you want to see them again?”

  A terrible, cold fear seemed to stop Katie’s heart. She raised her claspe
d hands to her face in an involuntary appeal. “Are they alive?”

  “Oh, they’re alive,” said Trixie. Katie felt as if her heart resumed beating at these words. Trixie was watching, and now she sneered. “That’s very sweet,” she said. “But listen up, cupcake: If you want to see your parents again, you shut up. You don’t. Tell. Anybody.”

  With that dreadful warning, she and her companions stepped out the door and shut it tight. Katie and David heard the key turn in the lock. They heard the creaking deadbolt slip into position, barring them in. Then their jailers’ footsteps clomped down the front steps, the car doors slammed, the motor came to life, and their only hope of escape rolled away from the curb and was gone.

  They were alone.

  Fortunately, they were not left in total darkness. By the time Trixie and her friends drove away, the blackness outside had faded to gray. And while the windows of their ancient house were boarded over, the boards had been hastily and sloppily applied. Cracks between the panels of wood sent shafts of the rapidly brightening daylight across the floor.

  But Katie and David were beyond appreciating this small piece of good luck. They felt that they had sunk as low as it was possible to sink.

  And as bad as it was for both of them, David had a special and secret problem: rats. He was mortally afraid of them. When they had lived in this house—and how, he now wondered, had they ever lived here?—he had kept this shameful fact from Katie. She was his sister and they had few secrets from each other, but he had never wanted her to know this one. It was going to be hard to conceal it from her now.

  Katie sank to the dusty floor. She crossed her arms on her raised knees and buried her face in them. “Sit,” she said to her brother, her words coming muffled through her arms. “We’re going to be here for a while.”

  “It’s too dirty,” he replied. No way was he sitting on that floor, where the rats could get him.

  “They don’t come out in the daylight,” she replied. “We aren’t going to see them till tonight. You may as well rest now.”

  So she did know. Embarrassed, David dropped to a crouch.

  Katie lifted her face and gazed into his. She was very calm. “So what now?” she asked simply. “What do we do?”

  David did not reply, so she continued. “The way I figure,” she said, “there are two things. I mean, two things we have to do. For starters—”

  “Katie.”

  “What?”

  “Stop a minute—OK? I have to say something, and I only want to say it once. So you have to promise that after I do say it, we never talk about it again—all right?”

  She was silent, curious.

  “You have to promise or I won’t—”

  “OK! I promise.”

  David took a deep breath and his heart began to race. “I’m sorry,” he said, trying to control his voice. “I’m sorry I got us into this. I know you didn’t want them—you didn’t want Mom and Dad to go.”

  For a moment she simply absorbed this. “OK,” she said. “That’s OK. David? I was trying to tell you, there are two things we have to do.”

  She didn’t even seem to mind! Maybe he hadn’t needed to apologize.

  “The first thing,” she was saying, “is that we have to get out of here, and before tonight.”

  Amen to that, thought David, remembering the rats.

  “We can’t sleep here,” Katie continued, “and we don’t want to be here tomorrow either. What if they come back? I never want to see Trixie again,” she added feelingly. “So that’s one. Two is that after we get out, we have to tell.”

  “But what about Mom and Dad, Kat? If we tell, they’ll—”

  “They’ll what?” she demanded. “And what’ll they do if we don’t tell? If we don’t tell, are they going to let them go?”

  This had not occurred to him.

  “Not telling—that’s their idea. Those are their rules.”

  “Right,” he said slowly, getting it. “We have to make our own rules, for us. But who do we tell? Because whoever it is, they have to handle this just right. As soon as we tell them they have to move fast. They have to get the Katkajanians before the Katkajanians can get Mom and Dad.”

  “Exactly. And even before that they have to believe us, and that means we have to tell the right person. I mean, if we tell the police, the first thing they’ll do is go talk to Trixie. She actually is our nanny, remember? She has papers from the agency! And she’ll laugh it off and say we just ran away, and they’ll believe her. They always believe adults! And then they’ll give us back to her and when the police are gone—”

  “I get it,” said David. “No police.”

  “We can’t tell any strangers at all,” continued Katie. “In fact, the way I see it, there’s only one person we can tell.”

  “And that person is . . . ?”

  “Uncle Alex.”

  David’s jaw dropped. “Uncle Alex? Hermit Uncle Alex? Uncle Alex who we’ve never met?”

  “Think, David! What’s this all about, this kidnapping? Millions of people adopt babies—why take Mom and Dad? This is about Rover! They want Mom and Dad because of Rover! And who else in the world—besides Mom and Dad, I mean—knows about that?”

  “But isn’t there something you’re overlooking, Katie? We don’t know where Uncle Alex lives!”

  “That’s not true! We know exactly where he lives. Mom and Dad have been telling us for years.” She began reciting. “He lives on a mountain north of Melville, Vermont, just below the border with Canada. There’s only one road that crosses Melville, and you take it straight through. You go half a mile past the first bridge out of town, then turn north into the woods by the big rock that was split by lightning.”

  “You climb, always going north,” said David, taking over. Katie was right. They did know; they’d been hearing these directions all their lives.

  He continued. “There are mountains ahead, and you keep the two big peaks in front of you, as if you were heading straight between them. But before you get there—”

  “Way before you get there—”

  “You come to the creek. And you follow it upstream, to the left. You just keep following the water and following the water—”

  “And then you’re there.”

  Both children were silent.

  At length David spoke again, this time quite off topic. “If we found Uncle Alex, do you think he’d tell us what Rover is?”

  “David, we have bigger problems than that!”

  “Yeah, well, this one’s always bugged me.” And it had, too. And now that he was tired and depressed it was bugging him again. David sighed. “Just a thought,” he said, moving on. “And you’re right—we do have bigger problems. Like, how do we get ourselves nearly to Canada? Have you figured out that part, Kat? I mean, seeing as how we don’t have any money.”

  Katie overlooked his sarcasm. “No,” she admitted. “I don’t know how we do that. Maybe we’ll hitchhike or something.”

  “Great! We’d be very inconspicuous, a couple of twelve-year-olds with our thumbs out. The police would pick us up before we left the neighborhood.”

  “OK, so we won’t hitchhike. We’ll figure out something else. You can’t expect me to think of everything.”

  “Anyway, we have a bigger problem,” David continued gloomily. “We have to get out of here. And we’re locked in, Kat.”

  “Probably,” she admitted. “But I guess we should check anyway. Just in case.”

  Neither of them wanted to explore the house. Neither of them wanted to move an inch from where they had been put. Although they used to live there, the place now struck them as intensely creepy. It wasn’t just the dust and the cobwebs and the silence; it was the darkness, too. Whoever had nailed the boards over the windows had done a much better job in the rest of the house than they had in the living room. There were almost no cracks between the pieces of wood in the other rooms, so beyond where they sat the place was nearly pitch-black.

  But reluctantly
they rose to their feet and rattled every door. With their bare hands they tried fruitlessly to turn the heavy screws that fastened the bars to every window.

  It was hopeless. There was no way out.

  Despondently they returned to the living room to wait out the long, miserable day.

  They did not want to eat the Katkajanians’ food. But they both felt the importance of saving the chocolate with which their pockets were stuffed, and at length hunger drove them to open the battered brown bag. It contained a dozen more of the same acrid sandwiches they had eaten the night before.

  “Twelve of them!” Katie cried in dismay. “How long are they leaving us here?”

  She had not wanted the Katkajanians to return, but now she feared they never would.

  They each ate two sandwiches, telling themselves they’d better save the rest. Then they braced themselves for the long day and the coming night. The plan was that Katie was to sleep now, so that she could be up through the dark hours to scare away any rats that might emerge. After all, as she explained to David, she didn’t like rats, but they both knew they bothered David worse than they bothered her.

  It wasn’t a great plan, but it was the best they could come up with. And as it turned out, the plan failed.

  David had meant to stay awake. Certainly—certainly—he wanted Katie awake at night. But his body ached with weariness from his short night on the furnace room floor. And the light was very dim in this old house, and his mind and heart were heavy.

  Weighed down by tedium and sorrow and worry, both children sank to the dusty floor and fell fast asleep.

  Again David dreamed. He was in jail, in a lonely cell in a great stone prison. He wanted to get out but knew he could not.

  Trixie was in the cell next door and she had a shovel. How he knew this he could not have said, but he could hear her digging. He heard the skritch, skritch of the shovel scraping through dirt and stone. He heard the rustle of the rubble she tossed aside.

  She was digging a tunnel so that she could escape.

  David didn’t want Trixie to succeed. Through his dream confusion he felt the injustice of his being stuck while she got away. He called for the guard. The guard must stop her and take her terrible shovel.