The Famous Stanley Kidnapping Case

by Zilpha Keatley Snyder

  She shook Janie again, and Janie’s lip trembled harder and big tears rolled out of the corners of her eyes and down her cheeks. “I wasn’t pretending,” she said. “I was hysterical with terror.”

  David pulled Amanda away. “Leave her alone,” he said. “Come over here. I want to talk to you.”

  “Look,” he said when they were on the other side of the room. “It doesn’t do any good to yell at her. I don’t think she’ll do it again if we explain it to her—about the danger. It’s just that when she starts imagining like that, she really isn’t pretending. Dad says there’s a part of Janie that really believes all her nonsense. There was probably a part of her that really was hysterical with terror.”

  “Oh yeah,” Amanda said. “Look at her. Just look at her.” Janie was still standing against the wall. Her face was still wet and shiny with tears, but she was smiling, and the glassy gleam that always meant she was up to something was back in her eyes.

  David nodded—and sighed. “And on the other hand,” he said, “there was probably another part of her that was having a ball.” He sighed again. “I’ll talk to her,” he said.

  twelve

  The stuff that one of the kidnappers had gotten tangled up in when Janie started screaming turned out to be a couple of folding metal cots with woven wire springs. David had just started to set them up when the cellar door opened again and one of the black masks came back with an armload of blankets. Actually, he didn’t come all the way back. What he did was to come down a few steps and stop to look around. Janie was still standing against the wall at the farthest side of the cellar. The kidnapper looked at Janie for a minute; then he threw the blankets down to the foot of the stairs and went away again.

  The cots weren’t easy to put together, but finally, with Amanda’s help, David managed to get them untangled and made up with mattresses and blankets. They put Janie and Esther to bed in one of them and Blair in another. Amanda wrapped herself up in a blanket and sat down on the third one, but she said there wasn’t any use for her to try to sleep because she knew she’d never be able to sleep there, not if she stayed a million years. David didn’t think he would either, but it was cold in the cellar so he got in with Blair. It wasn’t too comfortable because the springs were so saggy that David immediately sank down into a kind of valley, and Blair rolled down on top of him. He tried pushing Blair back onto his own side several times, but the bed sloped so much he rolled back down. So at last David just decided to make the best of it. He was still telling himself that he probably wouldn’t be able to sleep anyway, when suddenly he was waking up feeling as if he’d been asleep for quite a while.

  He woke up all at once, going from deep sleep to a full realization of where he was and what had happened with a kind of mental lurch that sent a sharp pain through the lump on his forehead. Opening his eyes a little bit, he looked around. The one dim bulb was still burning inside its metal shade, sending out a pale, shadowy light. In the windowless room it was impossible to tell if morning had come, but some kind of internal clock seemed to be saying that it had. Closing his eyes again, David pictured the villa with the morning sun slanting in through the deep-silled windows—into deserted rooms where the covers were thrown back on empty beds. He imagined the front door opening, and the Thatchers coming in. The Thatchers would have worried faces because it was late and the twins hadn’t arrived to spend the day. He could see their faces become more and more worried as they looked into one empty room after the other. Then he saw Andrew’s face, round and reddish, but not smiling the way it usually was, as he talked into the telephone. He could see the expression on Andrew’s face as he asked for the hotel in Rome where Dad and Molly were staying, and then—as he talked to Dad—telling the awful news.

  A lump was starting to form in David’s throat again when suddenly Amanda sat up and threw back the covers. Her eyes looked strange, red and puffy, from sleep or perhaps from crying, although David hadn’t seen her cry. She looked over at David, and when she saw that he was awake, she did something with her face that you could tell was meant to be a smile. Immediately the lump in his throat got bigger and more painful. He wasn’t sure why, except that it really gets to a person when someone who usually isn’t very long-suffering suddenly is trying to be brave and cheerful when everything is terrible.

  Swallowing hard so that his voice would come out right, David said, “Wait a minute, Amanda.” She was headed across the room toward the toilet in a box arrangement that the kidnappers had rigged up. Most of the Stanley family wasn’t very strong on modesty, but Amanda definitely was. David had seen her go into a tizzy when even one of the twins barged in on her when she was in the bathroom. David quickly rolled Blair up the slope, crawled out of the sag in the cot, and started arranging some of the old crates and barrels from the pile of junk into a kind of little room for the toilet. As soon as Amanda saw what he was up to, she began to help, and it didn’t take them long to get it finished.

  When Amanda came back from the bathroom, David was sitting on her cot because Blair was still asleep in his. She sat down beside him and said, “That was a good idea.”

  “Thanks,” David said. But he didn’t say anything more because he was trying to decide whether to ask Amanda something. He finally did decide that it was better to ask her now, if he was ever going to, while she was in an unusually friendly frame of mind. “Oh, Amanda,” he said at last, “why did you go out alone last night—to the picnic place?”

  She looked at him for such a long time without saying anything that he was about to say, “All right, forget it,” when suddenly she stood up and unbuttoned her jacket and got something out of her shirt pocket. She sat back down and smoothed out a wrinkled piece of paper on her knees. On the paper, in stiff, roundish handwriting with little pointy flourishes, it said,

  Dear Amanda,

  Please come to the table of stone for picnics at 10:00 o’clock tonight. I love you.

  Sincerely,

  Hilary

  David looked at the note for quite a while before he said, “Hilary didn’t write it.”

  “Look,” Amanda said in a normally sarcastic tone of voice, “I don’t need you or anybody to tell me that. I know Hilary didn’t write it.”

  “But you thought he did—last night?” It was a question, and he hoped it sounded like one. He had tried hard to keep it from sounding like, “How could you possibly have thought he wrote it?”

  He must not have been entirely successful, because Amanda’s lip curled even more, and she said, “No, of course not. I knew all the time that a bunch of lousy kidnappers wrote it. That’s why I went out there all by myself in the middle of the night.”

  David sighed. “Well,” he said, “it’s just that it’s not the way an English-speaking person would arrange the words. An English person would say ‘the stone picnic table’ instead of ‘the table of stone for picnics.’ And besides, the handwriting looks so—Italian. You know, kind of round and spiky looking, like the notes that Janie’s teacher writes.”

  Amanda stared at David. “You’re crazy,” she said. “Do you mean you think Janie’s teacher is a kidnapper?”

  “No. I didn’t mean she wrote it. I just meant her handwriting looks a little like that. It’s the way a lot of Italian people write.”

  Somewhere in the distance there was the sound of a motor. It got louder very rapidly, and then someplace quite near by, it sputtered into silence. Almost immediately afterwards, the footsteps started overhead again. Amanda became very quiet. She sat stiffly still with her shoulders hunched up and followed the sound of heavy boots stomping back and forth with her eyes.

  “They’re up there again,” she whispered.

  “Again?” David said. “Do you think they all went away?”

  “I don’t know, but it’s been quiet up there until just now, and it sounded as if someone just arrived.”

  “Yeah. I guess some of them must have gone away, at least. But I’ll bet someone stayed here. I doubt if they’d a
ll go away at once.”

  Amanda’s hunched shoulders twitched. “What do you think they want us for, David? Why did they kidnap us?”

  “I don’t think they meant to,” David said. “At least, not all of us.”

  She stared at him. “You mean they only meant to kidnap—me?” When she said “me” she winced, as if from a sudden pain.

  David hesitated. He didn’t want to make her feel worse, but surely she’d already thought about it herself. “Well, the note was just to you. And they only had one cot ready. They didn’t know that I was going to follow you and Janie and the twins were going to follow me. But when we all showed up, they just had to take us too, to keep us from spreading the alarm before they had a chance to get away.”

  Amanda nodded, looking so frightened and miserable that David wished he’d never mentioned it. “Yeah,” she said. “I thought of that, but I guess I just didn’t want to believe it.” She put her face down into her hands. Then she took it out and said, “But why? Why me?”

  He shook his head, but after a minute he said, “Amanda, you know you’re always—I mean, how you sometimes mention that your father has a lot of money?”

  Amanda stopped looking like a whipped puppy and glared at David, and it was a relief to see her looking more like herself. “I don’t mention it very often,” she said. “And besides, it just so happens to be the truth.”

  “Well, how many people have you mentioned it to since we came to the villa?”

  “Hardly anyone. Except for some of the people at the villa and maybe one or two people at school. But I obviously haven’t told anyone Italian, since I don’t speak the language. And those guys”—she rolled her eyes upward—“are definitely Italian.”

  “But someone you told could have told—” David was starting when someone interrupted.

  “I might have mentioned it to some Italian people.” Janie was sitting up in bed.

  “I didn’t know she was listening,” Amanda said.

  “She probably hasn’t been for very long,” David whispered. “She never lies still after she’s awake. I doubt if she could.” Dad always said that it exhausted him to even think about the way Janie woke up in the morning, unconscious one second, and all systems go the next. Climbing over Esther, Janie came to where David and Amanda were sitting on Amanda’s cot.

  “I think I told some people at my school,” she said. “Italian kids are very interested in Hollywood and movie stars and things like that, so I just told them a little bit about how your father lives near all the movie stars’ houses and about his car and boat and how much money he has.”

  “Can you remember who it was you told?” David asked.

  “Well, I just told this special friend of mine called Anna and her brother, Geppe, but then they wanted me to tell some of their friends and—well, probably most of the kids at the school know about it now.”

  David groaned. “And hundreds of their friends and relatives,” he said.

  “Wait a minute,” Amanda said. “Whoever the kidnappers are, they had to have known a lot of other stuff besides just about my dad’s money. They must have known about Mom and Jeff going away to Rome and—”

  “Yeah,” David said, suddenly excited, “and about how you—” He stopped and regarded Amanda warily. “—you know—about Hilary. They had to know that you would go out to see Hilary, if you thought he’d written a note asking you to.” While he was still talking, David was almost wishing Amanda would get mad again, because if she didn’t it would mean she was really not herself at all. But she only nodded, looking worried and scared.

  “I know,” she said. “It’s as if someone who lives at the villa must have helped them.”

  David nodded.

  “Like maybe—Marzia,” Amanda said.

  “Marzia,” David said, amazed. “That’s crazy. Marzia wouldn’t do anything like that.”

  “How do you know? She tried to make me think I ought to go back to California.”

  “Well, if she did, it was only because you both like Hilary. But that doesn’t mean she’d try to get you kidnapped.”

  “Well, maybe she wouldn’t on purpose,” Amanda said. “But she could have helped the kidnappers by accident. Like maybe they got information from her without her knowing what they were planning.”

  “But how could that have happened? Italian girls aren’t allowed to talk to strange men.”

  “Well, what if these guys work on the fattoria sometimes for her uncle, or something like that. The thing is, someone must have told the kidnappers about me and Hilary, and not too many people know, unless—”she stopped suddenly and looked at Janie.

  Janie looked quickly away, hiding her eyes behind her long eyelashes.

  “Janie?” David said.

  Janie didn’t say anything. She was wrapping and unwrapping her thumb with the belt of her bathrobe. “Jane Victoria Stanley. Have you been talking about that, too, at your school? Have you been talking about Amanda—uh—liking Hilary?”

  “Well,” Janie said. “Only a little. Because Anna was telling me about how her big sister has a boyfriend who lives in Siena, so I just told her that my sister’s boyfriend comes all the way from London, and then, when she didn’t believe me, I had to tell her a few other things.”

  “What things?”

  “Well, most of it was true—like how they go to school in Florence together every day.”

  “Wow,” David said. “It could be practically the whole town of Valle. What I mean is, nearly everyone in town must know enough stuff to have written the note and everything. Janie, if you’d just keep your mouth shut . . . ”

  Janie’s chin was beginning to wobble, and this time it looked as if she was going to cry for real. David was one of the few people who could tell the difference. But then Amanda said, “Look. It really doesn’t matter.” Both David and Janie looked at her in surprise. “What I mean is, now that it’s happened, it’s probably better that a lot of people knew enough to have arranged the kidnapping, because if it could only be a few people, we might guess who they are.” She rolled her eyes up toward where the boots were still tromping around. “Because if we guessed and those guys found out, or even if they thought we might be able to guess . . . ”

  Right away David saw what she meant. If kidnappers think that you know who they are, they aren’t ever going to turn you loose, not even if they get the money or whatever it is they want—because they know you’ll tell on them. “That’s right,” he said. “So we mustn’t try to see their faces or anything like that, or let them think we know anything about them at all.” He looked hard at Janie to be sure she understood.

  Janie nodded, looking excited. “Like I shouldn’t let them know that I know what their names are?”

  “Janie! Do you?”

  “Well, not all of their names. I don’t know the name of that big one in the red mask, but the middle-sized one is Pietro, and the little one who got his foot tangled up in the bed is named Gino.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I heard them say each other’s names when they were talking over there by the stairs.”

  “What else did they say?” Amanda asked.

  “I didn’t hear all of it,” Janie said. “They weren’t talking very loud. Except the big one was angry—about us all being here. I think he was saying that we weren’t any good to them—except for Amanda.”

  David felt the cold prickle again at the back of his neck. A question had come into his mind about what kidnappers did with people who weren’t any good to them. He didn’t want to think about what the answer might be.

  “David, I’m hungry.” Esther was awake and sitting up in bed. She looked around the room and began to whimper. David went over to the cot and sat down beside her, and she leaned against him whimpering and asking questions like, “Can we go home now, David? Will they let us go home today? When are we going to have breakfast?”

  In between answering Esther with, “I don’t know. I don’t know,” David wa
s thinking hard. He had to decide how much to tell Janie and the twins about their situation. Since he and the kids weren’t of any use to the kidnappers because they didn’t have any rich parents who could pay a lot of money to get them back alive, they were only going to be a whole lot of extra trouble. And what most people do about extra trouble is try to get rid of it as quickly as possible. So the kidnappers would probably want to get rid of him and the kids, and as far as he could see, there were only two ways they could do that. One way was to turn them loose; but there wasn’t much chance they’d do that, at least not until they got their money for Amanda and she could be turned loose, too. The other way, David didn’t even want to think about. As far as he could see, the only thing he and the kids could do was to be as little extra trouble as possible so that the kidnappers wouldn’t decide that they had to be gotten rid of right away.

  That much was easy to figure out. It was easy to see that he had to make sure the kids understood about not being any trouble. What he couldn’t decide was whether to tell them why. If he didn’t explain it to them, they might not take his warning seriously; on the other hand, if he told them what he was afraid of, they might take it too seriously. Another crying and screaming fit might be just what it took to make the kidnappers decide to get rid of them all—in the quickest way possible.

  He was still trying to make up his mind how much to tell the kids when the key grated in the lock. The kidnappers were coming back.

  thirteen

  David noticed that Esther had stopped whimpering and when he turned he saw why—the kidnapper on the stairs, the one Janie had said was called Gino, was carrying a tray with bowls and dishes on it. He came down a few steps and stopped and waited while the other black masked guy came in and locked the door behind them. David felt relieved that Red Mask wasn’t with them. Before the two kidnappers had even reached the foot of the stairs, Esther was at the table. Climbing up on the chair, she dusted off the table with her hands and then arranged herself neatly in front of it as if she were waiting for a waiter at a restaurant.