Wanted!

by Caroline B. Cooney

The best disguise is weight. Richard Rellen was heavy. If he had an elegant jaw, it was now obscured by a beard.

  Could Alice’s mother actually be in love with the killer of Alice’s father? What a last laugh for Dick Arren—ending the life and taking the wife of his pursuer.

  Alice’s mind sealed over at the idea of having eaten pizza and sat on the couch with that human being. “You killed my father,” she whispered. “You killed his brother, too! Where is my mother? Have you killed her?”

  He said nothing but kept walking toward the house, and Alice had no hope of freeing herself. She stopped walking and let herself drop, a deadweight, the way strikers did when police tried to arrest them, but it did not work for Alice; Richard Rellen just picked her up.

  I’m just like Dad, thought Alice, stunned. I knew there was a bad guy. Why hadn’t I been ready?…

  “Is that the same Porsche?” said Alice. “Is that the car you drove when Rob drove his Triumph?”

  “What can you be talking about, Alice?” asked Richard Rellen, smiling again.

  “That’s why you didn’t yell and run after me and call the police when you caught me on campus. You had my backpack, and you knew Dad’s disks had to be in it.”

  They were almost at the door. She could not let him take her inside. Inside, because nobody knew she was here, would be just as remote as a reservoir. She could see no point in screaming: people never looked up for annoyances like that—car alarms rang till they died and nobody went over to see why. If Alice screamed, he would put his hand over her mouth and suffocate her.

  “It won’t work,” she said. “I have an E-mail master list on my laptop. I sent everybody the wanted poster with the updated photograph of you. So you can kill me, but you can’t do it in secret. I’ve notified the world.”

  Rellen’s smile vanished.

  Without a smile, the face seemed to belong to different people. Several of them.

  Then he laughed. “There is no updated photograph, Alice. Because if there were, you’d have recognized me. You wouldn’t have come here, would you?” He reached for the door. The house had a decorative screen door and a heavy wooden storm door behind it. Both were closed. He was going to need a hand free to open them. Alice did not bother trying to free herself. She tried to keep his other hand occupied instead. She grabbed it and bit it and braced her flimsy torn sneakers against the door jamb.

  He enjoyed it. Was that the last thing poor Uncle Rob had seen before his death? And Dad? Had he seen? At the last minute, facing the man his wife meant to marry, had he realized the terrible awful coincidence of this? Had Dad heard this sick chuckle, looked into this sick smile?

  Maybe it was not a coincidence. Maybe Mr. Rellen purposely found Mom and got a laugh out of being Mr. Perfect to the woman whose husband was trying to hunt him down.

  Alice heard a siren. Then two. Was there a car accident? Was there a fire? Or was this the sound of rescue?

  Alice scratched him with the long hard false fingernails, making bloody tracks on his ugly fat hairy arm. He shoved her against the house wall and held her with his chest while he opened the screen door and the storm door.

  A car drove into Rellen’s driveway.

  Two cars. Three. Four.

  Police.

  Horns honked. Doors slammed. Feet pounded.

  Richard Rellen released her and Alice slipped to the ground. So many people! Police in uniform, men and women not in uniform, people with guns in their hands. The guns were out, were drawn.

  “Be very careful,” said Richard Rellen calmly. “She’s truly violent.” He held up his bleeding arm. “She may be on crack. Or some hallucinogenic drug. There’s more here than just an emotional teenage girl.”

  One officer said, “If you’d step away from Alice, sir…”

  “Of course. Please think of Alice’s mother first. She’s a fragile woman who has suffered many shocks. For her sake, be gentle with Alice.”

  “We’ll do that, sir,” said the officer. He put his gun away.

  Alice pressed her back against the house, terrified of them all.

  Mr. Rellen said, “She was crazed when she got here. She drove her father’s car right through the garage, screaming things about her mother.” He pointed. The Blazer’s engine was still running, trying to drive on through the building. It was an eerie sight. “Very sad,” said Mr. Rellen. “Poor Chrissie. She hasn’t done anything to deserve this.”

  He’s used to bluffing, thought Alice. After all, he’s been doing it successfully for a quarter of a century. And now I know how easy a bluff is, how well it works. You walk into the dorm, you steal a car, you use an elementary school, you fib in the bagel line—all you have to do is stay calmer than the people around you and they don’t question you any longer.

  He’ll win, she thought dizzily. I’ve had two days of practice and he’s had twenty-five years, and he’ll win.

  An officer stood on each side of her, lifted Alice, and walked her toward a police car. She could not speak to defend herself. She was completely overwhelmed with the numbers against her.

  “It’s over, Alice,” said the officer. “Let’s go sit in my car.”

  They slid into the front seat: one officer behind the wheel, Alice in the middle, the other policeman at the door. She was surprised in an exhausted blurry way: Didn’t prisoners sit in the back behind the grill?

  “You’re okay, Alice,” said the officer gently. “You were a brave girl. Dumb, but brave. Your father’s colleagues got in touch with us the minute they realized he’d been murdered. It can’t be the daughter, they said, it’s got to be the killer he’s been hunting. We let it stay on the news that we suspected you because we didn’t want the killer to vanish. We didn’t know about Richard Rellen. When your mother mentioned him, we put him on our list to talk to, but we had a bunch of names ahead of his. We figured with your mother dating him, your father would have met him and recognized him right away, no matter what amount of weight or hair or beard had changed. But in fact, your father never laid eyes on Richard Rellen.”

  “You don’t think it’s me?” said Alice. “You know he sent the E-mail confession? My mother isn’t afraid of me?”

  “Your mother is afraid for you, Alice. She hasn’t slept or moved from the telephone since this began.”

  Fears ran off Alice like water from the shower. She felt cleaner and clearer. Mom still loved her.

  “How did you find me?”

  “Your high school friends. They couldn’t believe you had hurt your father. They believed you were a hostage, and somebody hidden in the backseat of all those cars was forcing you to drive away.” He grinned. “Though when you ran away from the boys in the Jeep, that theory got shaken up.”

  “It was awful,” said Alice. “They stalked me. They wanted to throw me to the ground.”

  “I don’t think so. I think they wanted to help. We tried to stop them and make them go to school, but you actually had a lot of admirers who weren’t going to listen to any crap about how you hurt anybody. So they were out there in the roads, trying to find you and help. A girlfriend of yours was up at dawn. Kelsey was sure you’d go home. She said your whole life was home. She saw you drive away from your mother’s house and she followed you here. Kelsey called in from her car phone.”

  Alice was so tired she could not even picture her best friend. She could think only of being with her mother again. “Are you arresting Mr. Rellen?”

  “We’re reading him his rights and asking him to come down to headquarters to talk. You just sit here between us and don’t look. It isn’t pretty.”

  “I’m not pretty. I’m filthy and disgusting.”

  “Yeah, but you’re alive. That’s pretty cool. You know, Alice, if you had just trusted one grown-up, if you’d called just one friend, we would have reached you and explained what we knew and you wouldn’t have had to go through this.”

  “I did call!” she said. “I called home. The policewoman sure didn’t make it sound like she believed in
me.”

  “Nobody handled this real well,” he admitted. “We don’t have many murders like this. We were all a little crazed the first day. Just like you. And it was a heck of a confession, Alice. Everybody fell for it at first.” He paused. “Where did you spend the nights?”

  “A girl at State University let me stay in her room. She didn’t call you?”

  “Nobody called us.”

  So Ginger just thought Alice was an incredibly rude houseguest who fled in the morning without saying thank you. And perhaps Amanda, with her large wardrobe, had not noticed anything missing. And maybe Paul, with exams on his mind, had not thought of her again.

  Alice said, “I want my mother.” Alice whimpered softly.

  He nodded. “Hop in the backseat; I can’t drive around with you up front. We’ll go over to your house. Your mom and your grandparents should be back from the airport. You just hang on another ten minutes.”

  “Does she know yet about Richard Rellen?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe she’ll be on his side.”

  “She’ll be on your side. You’re her world, Alice. And we’ve known for twenty-four hours that your father was not killed in the condo, but brought there dead, so you couldn’t have done it.”

  “Where was he killed?”

  “We don’t know yet. Maybe Mr. Rellen will tell us. Maybe a quick look at his home and office will tell us.”

  Alice got in the back. Like Bethany’s van, it had old and unpleasant smells. Like Bethany’s van, it was a rest from running.

  I’m safe. Mom loves me. I still have a home. I had friends all along. But I don’t have Daddy.

  She said to her father: I did my best. I’m sorry I didn’t do better. I was pretty dumb most of the time. But so were you! Oh, Daddy, why weren’t you ready? Why didn’t you win?

  “Here we are,” said the officer, “and there’s your mom.”

  They had to let her out of the car. The doors didn’t open from the inside. By the time Alice was out, her mother was on top of her, and they were sobbing and hugging, and her grandmother was saying, “That girl needs a bath!” and her grandfather was saying, “Alice, Alice.”

  And Alice was saying over and over the most important word left to her: “Mom!”

  A Biography of Caroline B. Cooney

  Caroline B. Cooney is the author of ninety books for teen readers, including the bestselling thriller The Face on the Milk Carton. Her books have won awards and nominations for more than one hundred state reading prizes. They are also on recommended-reading lists from the American Library Association, the New York Public Library, and more. Cooney is best known for her distinctive suspense novels and romances.

  Born in 1947, in Geneva, New York, Cooney grew up in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, where she was a library page at the Perrot Memorial Library and became a church organist before she could drive. Music and books have remained staples in her life.

  Cooney has attended lots of colleges, picking up classes wherever she lives. Several years ago, she went to college to relearn her high school Latin and begin ancient Greek, and went to a total of four universities for those subjects alone!

  Her sixth-grade teacher was a huge influence. Mr. Albert taught short story writing, and after his class, Cooney never stopped writing short stories. By the time she was twenty-five, she had written eight novels and countless short stories, none of which were ever published. Her ninth book, Safe as the Grave, a mystery for middle readers, became her first published book in 1979. Her real success began when her agent, Marilyn Marlow, introduced her to editors Ann Reit and Beverly Horowitz.

  Cooney’s books often depict realistic family issues, even in the midst of dramatic adventures and plot twists. Her fondness for her characters comes through in her prose: “I love writing and do not know why it is considered such a difficult, agonizing profession. I love all of it, thinking up the plots, getting to know the kids in the story, their parents, backyards, pizza toppings.” Her fast-paced, plot-driven works explore themes of good and evil, love and hatred, right and wrong, and moral ambiguity.

  Among her earliest published work is the Fog, Snow, and Fire trilogy (1989–1992), a series of young adult psychological thrillers set in a boarding school run by an evil, manipulative headmaster. In 1990, Cooney published the award-winning The Face on the Milk Carton, about a girl named Janie who recognizes herself as the missing child on the back of a milk carton. The series continued in Whatever Happened to Janie? (1993), The Voice on the Radio (1996), and What Janie Found (2000). The first two books in the Janie series were adapted for television in 1995. A fifth book, Janie Face to Face, will be released in 2013.

  Cooney has three children and four grandchildren. She lives in South Carolina, and is currently researching a book about the children on the Mayflower.

  The house in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, where Cooney grew up. She recalls: “In the 1950s, we walked home from school, changed into our play clothes, and went outside to get our required fresh air. We played yard games, like Spud, Ghost, Cops and Robbers, and Hide and Seek. We ranged far afield and no parent supervised us or even asked where we were going. We led our own lives, whether we were exploring the woods behind our houses, wading in the creek at low tide, or roller skating in somebody’s cellar, going around and around the furnace!”

  Cooney at age three.

  Cooney, age ten, reading in bed—one of her favorite activities then and now.

  Ten-year-old Cooney won a local library’s summer reading contest in 1957 by compiling book reviews. In her collection, she wrote reviews of Lois Lenski’s Indian Captive: The Story of Mary Jemison and Jean Craighead George’s Vison, the Mink. “What a treat when I met Jean George at a convention,” she recalls.

  Cooney’s report card from sixth grade in 1959. “Mr. Albert and I are still friends over fifty years later,” she says.

  Cooney in middle school: “I went through some lumpy stages!”

  In 1964, Cooney received the Flora Mai Holly Memorial Award for Excellence in the Study of American Literature from the National League of American Pen Women. “I always meant to write to them, and tell them that I kept going!” Cooney says. “I love the phrase ‘pen woman.’ I’m proud to be one.”

  Cooney at age nineteen, just after graduating from high school. (Photo courtesy of Warren Kay Vantine Studio of Boston.)

  Cooney with Ann Reit, her book editor at Scholastic. Many of the books Cooney wrote with Reit were by assignment. “Ann decided what books she wanted (for example, ‘entry-level horror, no bloodshed, three-book series,’ which became Fog, Snow, and Fire) and I wrote them. I loved writing by assignment; it was such a challenge and delight to create a book when I had never given the subject a single thought.”

  Cooney with her late agent Marilyn Marlow, who worked with her on all of the titles that are now available as ebooks from Open Road.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  copyright © 1997 by Caroline B. Cooney

  cover design by Kathleen Lynch

  978-1-4532-9536-6

  This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media

  180 Varick Street

  New York, NY 10014

  www.openroadmedia.com

  EBOOKS BY CAROLINE B. COONEY


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