“Did you see Penny?” Kim whispered. Her heart was beating fast, filled with the furious worry that they were too late to get the baby back.
“I didn’t see anyone,” Kimo said. “It’s the weekend. No one’s around.”
“Tina and Clarice have got be in here, though, right?” asked Pippa. “I mean, the cars are out front.”
Suddenly they heard a deep low laugh. Toby immediately headed toward it. When he got to the end of the hallway, he found Leon seated in front of a small television in a lunch room. He was watching the Fitzgerald-Trouts’ favorite soap opera, Island Life. On screen, Layla was standing between the twins—Kai and Jack—trying to decide which one she really loved, but before she could make her choice, Leon clicked off the set and looked up, saying in his very formal voice, “I was beginning to wonder if you might not return.”
“The door was locked.” Toby crossed his arms over his chest and glared at the driver.
“Oh, my goodness,” said Leon. “They must have come up and locked it. I’m terribly sorry, and I’m glad you found another route in. You know, I considered leaving one of the limousines for you up in the vehicular parking area on the mountain.”
“Leave me a limo?” asked Toby. “Why?”
“Ms. Clarice has three,” said Leon, in his slow, comforting baritone. “She would hardly notice, and I thought if you didn’t find your brothers and sisters, you might require it.”
Toby was about to say that he didn’t know how to drive, but Kim interrupted him. “We’re looking for our sister.”
“I believe she’s downstairs. With a lawyer, who arrived some time ago,” Leon said.
Hearing this, Kim’s heart began to hammer in her chest. She made herself ask, “Have they signed the papers yet?”
“I don’t think they have, as they haven’t got anything to sign with. Ms. Clarice came up here looking for a pen because the lawyer forgot to bring one.”
“Did she find one?”
“She did not,” said Leon. “Somehow all the pens in the building went missing.” He opened his jacket and pulled out the handful of pens that he had hidden there. He grinned. “I thought you might be coming, so I bought you as much extra time as I could.”
“Thanks,” said Toby, patting the limo driver on the back.
“Which way?” Kim asked, already charging out the door.
“Across the hall, you go through that door and you’ll find a set of stairs down to a hall that leads to the recording studio.” As the children raced from the room and started down the staircase, they heard him say, “Watch out for the bodyguards!”
Thank goodness he had warned them. If he hadn’t, they would have dashed straight down the stairs and caught the guards’ attention right away. Because of Leon’s tip-off, the children stopped at the foot of the stairs and waited. They heard the voices of the guards coming through an open doorway down the hall. One of the bodyguards was saying, “Go directly to jail, do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars.”
Wide-eyed with horror, Toby looked at the others and in a hush asked, “They’re sending somebody to jail?”
“I think,” said Kim in a whisper, “they’re playing Monopoly.”
She gestured for the others to follow her as she tiptoed to the doorway and peeked into the room. She was right. The bodyguards were huddled around a table, focused on an epic Monopoly game. One of them seemed to be on a winning streak, and the other three were agonizing over each roll of the dice, wondering just how close it would bring them to bankruptcy.
The children exchanged knowing looks. They had been involved in many such Monopoly games, and they understood just how focused the players were on the outcome of each turn. The way to get past the open door without being spotted by the guards was obvious to all of them. They gestured to each other to confirm the plan, then they listened for the next roll of the dice. As soon as they heard it—just when they knew that all of the guards would have their eyes trained on the game board—the children dropped to the ground and crawled past the open door.
Once across, they jumped to their feet and ran to the end of the hallway, where they found a heavy metal door with a sign on it (in Serif font, Pippa couldn’t help noticing) that said:
RECORDING STUDIO—DO NOT ENTER IF LIGHT IS FLASHING
The red light over the door was flashing, but that didn’t stop them. The Fitzgerald-Trout children flung it open and raced in.
They found themselves in a room with thickly padded walls, where Tina, her bouffant hairdo bobbing back and forth, was talking into a microphone that hung from the ceiling. The room was filled with instruments, including a large drum set, and on the far end of it, on the other side of all those instruments, Penny was sitting in a small open-topped cage.
As soon as the baby saw her siblings, she pulled herself up to her feet and began rocking the cage, which the children could now see was actually a playpen. Kim started toward the baby, but Clarice—wearing her pointy high heels—came out of nowhere and stepped on Kim’s bare foot.
“Ow!” Kim yelped, grabbing her foot and in the process knocking a guitar off its stand. It fell with a crash. When the guitar noise had faded away, they heard what Tina was saying into the microphone: “…I allow custody of Penny Fitzgerald-Trout to transfer to Baby Loves…”
But they didn’t hear the rest because Kim lunged for the microphone and batted it away from Tina even as Pippa began to holler, “Give a loud shout…” Pippa had realized that if Tina wasn’t able to be heard, then the recording she was making wouldn’t matter. “’Cause we’re Fitzgerald-Trouts. We don’t give up and we don’t give in. We eat chocolate radishes and chicken skin!”
Kimo and Kim joined in on the next round of chanting, and so did Toby, who was so relieved to see Penny that he also jumped onto the drum set and grabbed the sticks. He began to bang on the drums with abandon as the siblings all screamed in unison, “We don’t give up and we don’t give in. We eat chocolate radishes and chicken skin!”
The baby rocked her playpen back and forth in time to the ruckus. “What the heck do you think you’re doing?” Tina hollered.
“We’re stopping you from what you’re doing,” Kim shouted back. “You’re trying to give Penny away. You’re recording some kind of legal thing.” The lawyer, Mr. Lawman, was sitting at one of the keyboards with his papers spread out in front of him. “A voice recording is a binding document,” he said, adjusting the lapels of his suit jacket. He seemed utterly unfazed by the chaos.
“Doesn’t matter!” Kim yelled at him. As if in agreement, Penny knocked her playpen onto its side so that she was free to crawl out of it. Kim, Kimo, and Pippa couldn’t get to her because Clarice—and her dangerous footwear—were blocking the way, but they saw that if Penny could crawl through the tangle of instruments, then one of them would be able to reach down and scoop her up.
But of course Penny didn’t know how to crawl. The baby just sat there on the floor. Toby had stopped drumming and was surreptitiously gesturing to her while mouthing the words, “Crawl, Penny. Come on. Crawl.” The baby only blinked. She didn’t move.
Kimo, meanwhile, had spotted the red RECORD button on the microphone and switched it into the OFF position. Kim had her hands on her hips and was shouting at Tina, Clarice, and the lawyer, “You can’t give our baby away to Baby Loves because Baby Loves doesn’t love our baby.”
“Hey.” Clarice smiled her tight smile. “That’s a catchy jingle. Too bad I don’t like what you’re selling.” This made Tina laugh. And that irritated Kim.
“We’re not selling anything,” Kim said in a voice like cement—hard, uniform, dependable, and completely unafraid. Now that the machine wasn’t recording she didn’t need to yell.
“Baby Loves is the finest baby product line on the whole island,” Clarice said. “Good food. Good clothes. Good accessories. I’ve seen where you live and believe me, y
our sister will be better off with us. Baby Loves can offer her so much more than you can.”
“No,” said Kim, once again speaking clearly and solemnly. “It can’t. Because we’re not selling anything. That’s the difference between us and you. You like Penny’s smile and her laugh and that cute look she gets when she’s about to drool, because you want to use them to make money. But we don’t. We just love her smile and her laugh and, yes, we love the way she drools. Maybe we don’t have fancy baby food from jars and maybe we don’t have fancy toys or clothes, but we have more. We have the four of us, who love playing with her and singing to her and cooking for her and who don’t even mind changing her dirty diapers. Babies deserve to be with the people who cherish them and love them and who want to be loved by them. You might be called Baby Loves, but you don’t know anything about loving babies.”
Mr. Lawman stood up from his keyboard and adjusted his cuffs. “Nice speech,” he said. “You should be a lawyer when you grow up.”
Kim suddenly realized that she had made a speech. Calmly and articulately, she had found the words that she wanted to say and she had said them.
“That’s right,” said Tina. “You should be a lawyer.”
I’m good at public speaking, Kim thought. I’m never going to worry about it again. Tina was smiling at her, and Kim thought for a second that perhaps Tina had been convinced by her words. Perhaps Tina did want what was best for Penny and perhaps Tina now understood that what was best for Penny was being with her siblings. Kim watched as Tina pulled a compact mirror out of her pocket and checked her reflection, then slid a tube of lipstick out of her purse and expertly painted her lips. When she’d finished, she pressed them together into a kiss, saying, “You should definitely be a lawyer when you grow up. But you’re not grown up yet, are you, Kimberly?”
“My name is not Kimberly,” said Kim. “It’s Kim.”
“Whatever it is,” said Tina, “you’re just a child. A minor. And minors can’t be lawyers and they can’t take care of babies.” She turned to Mr. Lawman. “Isn’t that right?”
“That’s right,” said the lawyer. “Minors have no legal claim to custody of other minors.”
Kim realized with horror that her speech hadn’t mattered. Tina was too terrible to care what was best for Penny. There’s no speech that will ever convince her to do the right thing, Kim thought. But she was not going to let Tina have the last word. She shook her fist and said, “If being a grown-up means being like the three of you, none of us ever wants to be one.”
Inspired by her older sister, Pippa charged past Clarice (and her high heels) straight into the tangle of instruments. She waded toward Penny, who was sitting on the floor near the overturned playpen. Words hadn’t worked, so Pippa had decided she would extract the baby from the room by force.
But it wasn’t meant to be. Tina swung open the door to the recording studio and shouted down the hallway, “We have a situation!” Seconds later, the four bodyguards appeared in the doorway. They each took hold of one of the four Fitzgerald-Trouts and they carried them—struggling and shouting—from the room.
CHAPTER
18
The late afternoon sun slanted low through the windshield of the car where the Fitzgerald-Trout children sat gathering themselves and watching the front doors of the recording studio. They were trying to stay out of sight while they decided what to do next. They knew that there was no way to go back into the building, since the bodyguards had taken up positions in the front hallway. And they suspected that even if Kimo could pole vault onto the roof again and sneak back down the stairs, he wouldn’t be able to get past the bodyguards and down to the basement to extract the baby. No matter how many times they mulled over the situation, they couldn’t see a way to get to Penny.
Kim was drumming her hands on the steering wheel. “We could wait until they come out of the building?”
“We’ve been through this,” said Kimo, who was watching the doors through the binoculars. “They’ll have the bodyguards with them.”
“We have to get her when no one’s paying attention.” This was Pippa, whose stomach was growling with hunger. It had been hours since any of them had eaten, but they weren’t letting themselves think about anything but their little sister. “Maybe we can get to her when she’s back at that hotel.”
“No,” said Kim. “That’ll be too late. Clarice won’t take her back there till the lawyer has finished the recording, so Baby Loves will have custody of her by then.”
“So what?” said Toby, who had pulled a large piece of foam out of the hole in the seat and was shredding it to pieces. “Who cares about that?”
“We care,” said Kim. “She’s ours, not theirs.”
“But recordings and paperwork, that’s just grown-up stuff.” Toby lifted his feet and pressed them against the back of Kim’s seat. “All that matters is Penny.”
Maybe they were light-headed with hunger or maybe they were exhausted from a long day or maybe Toby was entirely right, because all of a sudden they all felt that what Toby had said was true. Only grown-ups worried about legal documents and paperwork, and they weren’t grown-ups—as Tina herself had just pointed out to them. All they needed to worry about was getting Penny back into their arms.
“So we wait it out and let Clarice take her back to the Baby Loves office,” Kimo said. “Then when Clarice has stopped paying attention, when she thinks we’ve given up, we sneak into the office and take her back.”
Energized by this plan, Kim sat up straighter in her seat. “Toby, what’s the office like? And Pippa, listen up, because you’re the one who got us into the recording studio.”
Pippa nodded as Toby said, “There’s an elevator that goes right up to it from the lobby of the hotel.” He was remembering their ride when Penny had compared the elevator to a limo.
“Perfect,” said Pippa.
“You need a little plastic thingy to unlock it so that you can press the button for the right floor.”
“Not perfect,” said Pippa. “That’s going to be tricky to get around.”
“Maybe we should go back to the Castle,” said Kim. “Toby can draw a map of the hotel and we’ll figure out what to do next.”
“So we’re leaving Penny here?” Pippa’s voice was thin with apprehension. Even though she agreed with the plan, she could not actually imagine driving away and leaving the littlest Fitzgerald-Trout with Clarice and Tina.
“We have to.” Kimo was emphatic. “They have to think we’ve given up if we’re going to be able to sneak into the hotel.”
They all agreed but nevertheless a blue mood settled over them as Kim turned the key to start the car. The mood was made worse by the sound they heard next…not grrrg, not sputter, not even clunk, but a hollow click, click, click. The key was turning in the ignition, but the car’s engine didn’t make a sound.
After several attempts, Kim took her hand from the ignition and shook her head, saying, “That’s it, the engine’s…” She choked on the end of her sentence. She could not say the word that she was thinking.
The little green car had been almost like another member of their family. It had given them shelter, warmth, comfort. It had transported them, and now it was…well, it was…she shuddered with horror as Kimo made the pronouncement: “Dead.”
There was a long moment of sorrowful silence, broken when a fly flew through Toby’s open window and up between the front seats and began to hurl itself against the windshield. The violent buzzing brought them back to their senses.
“How about a tow truck?” Kim asked.
“We can’t afford it,” said Kimo.
“So we’re, what? Leaving the car here?” asked Pippa. “Walking back to the Castle?”
“I guess so,” said Kim.
But Toby was already opening his door and getting out of the car. “No,” he said. “That’s not what we’re doin
g.” He walked purposefully across the parking lot between the rows of parked cars.
“Where are you going?” Kim called out even as she saw exactly where Toby was headed. He was swinging open the door of Clarice’s limo. The boy disappeared inside. For a second all they could see were the soles of his feet, then he popped back out of the limo holding up the keys triumphantly. The others climbed out of the little green car and ran across the parking lot to join him.
“But we can’t just take it,” Kimo said.
“We’re borrowing it,” said Toby. “Leon told us we could. You heard him, he said Clarice has three limos.”
Kim didn’t need to be convinced. She grabbed the keys from Toby and clambered into the front seat, where she found Leon’s hat. She slipped it onto her head. “Let’s go!”
“What about our stuff?” Pippa asked.
“Right,” said Kim, and they went back to the little green car to gather their belongings.
A few minutes later they were speeding along the coastal road, heading for the Muldoon Park Parking Lot. The limo went much faster than the little green car had ever gone, and though she had to really concentrate to steer it around corners, Kim found it otherwise very easy to drive. The engine was loud and responsive; she barely had to touch the gas to feel the car surging ahead.
Kimo sat beside her, eating a bag of peanuts, drinking a guava juice, and anxiously pressing the button that raised and lowered the glass window between the front seat and the back. It was only after he’d climbed into his customary seat in the front that he realized that Pippa and Toby—in back—now had much better seats than he did. If the car weren’t already moving, he would have taken off his seat belt and climbed into the back, where his siblings had their legs stretched out and their heads reclined. They were staring up through the open sunroof at the pink clouds sliding by. On another night, they might have all been jubilantly celebrating the fun of having a new vehicle filled with food and juice, but with Penny gone the mood was somber. No one felt like listening to the radio or watching the little TV set. Toby thought about the show he had watched the first time he’d seen the limousine. About the rabbit that had lost his ears. Losing Penny felt like that, like losing a part of himself.
Shout Out for the Fitzgerald-Trouts Page 14