What Could Go Wrong?

by Willo Davis Roberts

  Two men came with a stretcher and lifted Mrs. Basker onto it and took her away. They picked up her belongings and said they’d see that she got them. Her wallet and change purse were still there, with money still in them, and her identification.

  The officer counted through the bills. “Hmm. A hundred and six dollars. Doesn’t look as if robbery was the motive. Unless you kids scared him off before he had a chance to get it. Do you know if she was carrying anything else of value? Jewelry, maybe?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think so. She spilled her purse before we left Sea-Tac, when somebody ran into her. I picked the stuff up, and didn’t see anything like that.”

  “Anything missing, that you can notice?”

  I looked at the accumulation of brush, comb, Kleenex—all the odds and ends a woman carries in her purse. “No,” I said. “Not that I can tell.”

  “Well, we’ve got your names and addresses, and the phone number where you’ll be in San Francisco,” he said finally. “Let’s get you on to your flight. Someone will probably want to talk to you later, if they have more questions.”

  “Maybe whoever did it is still hiding in one of the rooms along this corridor,” Charlie said. “Maybe you ought to search the whole third floor.”

  The officer regarded him the way people often looked at Charlie. The way my dad looks at him. “Actually, we thought of that,” he said dryly. “My guess, though, is the guy left here long before you kids found her. He stuffed her flight bag in the trash at the foot of the stairs, right? Searched through it up here after he’d knocked her out, found what he wanted in it—or gave up when he didn’t find it—and got rid of it down there. So he’s well away from here by now.”

  I guess that was supposed to make us feel safe to go back to our departure gate, but I couldn’t help looking around for someone dangerous all the way there, even with Charlie and Eddie and one of the security guards with me. The trouble was, I didn’t know what a dangerous person would look like. He could be anyone.

  Just before we reached the boarding area, which was practically empty now—everybody else was apparently already on the plane—I remembered something. “The clerk in the gift shop saw her with a man, she said. It must have been the one who hit her, don’t you think?”

  The officer’s interest quickened. “That so? The gift shop near the stairs? I’ll talk to her, see if she can give me a description of him. Though he’s probably long gone, now. Out of the airport, and beyond jurisdiction. The regular police will handle it from here on.”

  “What about Mrs. Basker? Do you think she’ll be okay?” I wondered.

  “Well, she was knocked out, but she didn’t seem to have a depressed fracture or anything like that. I’m not a doctor, but I think she’ll probably come around all right. Probably have a bad headache for a few days. Here you go, lady, these are the last of your passengers,” he said to the waiting passenger agent. He had a parting word for us. “It’d be better if you don’t talk too much about this, except to your parents. The news people have a way of blowing everything out of portion, and there’s a lot we don’t know yet.”

  “Sure,” Charlie said, and Eddie and I murmured our agreement.

  Everybody looked at us as if we were some weird species of bug under a microscope when we finally boarded the new plane. I felt very self-conscious being stared at by a whole planeload of people. I couldn’t blame them for being curious, but I sort of resented the comments from Gladys and Howard behind us. (We took the same places as we’d had on the first plane.)

  “I don’t see why we had to wait for them, just because they’re kids,” Gladys observed in a tone loud enough for us to hear. “We’ve already been delayed so much we’ll just barely make it to the wedding.”

  “Inconsiderate,” Howard said, finally finding something he and his wife could agree on. “That’s the way kids are these days. Never think of anyone but themselves.”

  My cheeks felt hot as I fastened my seat belt. It wasn’t fair to say that when he didn’t have the slightest idea what had happened to us, or to lump all kids together in the way they behaved.

  Mrs. Hall leaned forward across the empty seats beside her. “Do you know what’s happened to the lady who was here before? Mrs. Basker? She was supposed to be going on to San Francisco, wasn’t she? I mean, we weren’t even scheduled to land in Portland.”

  “She got hurt,” I said, after a moment of hesitation. “She’s been taken to a hospital.”

  Mrs. Hall drew back, shocked. “Really? Oh my, how did it happen?”

  Charlie nudged me warningly, and I resisted the impulse to tell the whole story, as far as we knew it, to let Gladys and Howard know how wrong they were about us.

  “We don’t know exactly,” I told her. “Only that she hurt her head.”

  Mrs. Hall made clucking noises, but I didn’t volunteer any more. Maybe, by some miracle, our names wouldn’t be mentioned if any of this got into the paper. I could see my dad reading it and demanding that we return home at once, even before we’d seen anything of Aunt Molly or San Francisco.

  This time I wasn’t nervous about taking off. In fact I was so busy thinking about poor Mrs. Basker, and hoping she would be all right, that I was barely aware of the plane leaving the ground. What had her assailant been after? She didn’t look like a person you’d expect to be carrying a lot of money or any other valuables. I couldn’t help wondering how much difference it would have made if we’d gone with her to the restaurant for sandwiches instead of having banana splits.

  When I mused about that aloud, Charlie, as always, had an instant reply. “We’d probably have been knocked over the head and robbed, too. Gracie, are you sure you didn’t see anything in her stuff that somebody might have wanted? Important-looking papers, something valuable? I don’t buy the idea that the guy was scared off before he could take her money; it was right in plain sight. I think he was after something else.”

  “Like microfilm,” Eddie suggested. He was already eating again, another candy bar. I wondered why his teeth didn’t rot out, and why he wasn’t fat instead of skinny. “Maybe she’s a spy.”

  “Oh, for pete’s sake,” I said. “They don’t have seventy-year-old women for spies, Eddie.”

  “Why not?” Charlie asked, just when I thought maybe he and I on were on the same wavelength. “They’d be less suspicious-looking than anyone else.”

  “She wasn’t a spy,” I said crossly. “She was just a nice old lady taking her first airplane trip. And I didn’t see anything that looked like microfilm or suspicious documents. Of course I didn’t see what she had in her flight bag, but it probably was only a change of underwear and her toothbrush.”

  “Maybe the loot from a bank robbery,” Eddie said thoughtfully, crumpling his candy wrapper. “She could have been a member of a gang, and they had her take the money because she looked the least suspicious, and then she double-crossed them.”

  Charlie laughed, but I didn’t. “You’re an idiot, Eddie,” I told him, and lapsed into silence. My cousins were too silly to talk to.

  I was very much aware of Mrs. Basker’s empty seat across the aisle. I hoped she wasn’t seriously hurt.

  Well, it was all over now, and she was being taken care of. We had nothing more to worry about, I thought.

  That was until I got up to go back to the rest room a little while later and saw something that made me start doing some serious thinking.

  Because when I stood up I saw there were a couple of people already waiting to use the rest rooms at the rear of the plane, and two of them were the unpleasant man in the Hawaiian shirt and Mr. Upton. They had been talking to each other, only when they saw me they pretended they hadn’t been.

  And it suddenly struck me that Mr. Upton fitted the description of the man the clerk in the gift shop had seen with Mrs. Basker.

  It was suspicious enough to make me suddenly very much afraid.

  Chapter Eight

  I sat down suddenly, no longer wanting to visit the r
est room, at least not while those two men were standing at the rear of the plane. My breath gushed out of me like somebody’d hit me in the stomach.

  “What’s the matter?” Charlie asked.

  I felt the way I do when I have to stand up in front of class and recite something I was supposed to have memorized—when I wasn’t sure I wouldn’t go blank in the middle of it.

  “Did somebody else disappear?” Eddie asked, trying to be funny.

  I gave him a look that told him how funny I thought he was, which was not very. “They’re both on the plane,” I said in a low voice. “The guy in the Hawaiian shirt and the one who boarded late in Seattle, Mr. Upton. They’re standing outside the rest rooms back there, talking, only when they saw me looking they pretended they weren’t.”

  “So?” Eddie asked, his forehead wrinkling up.

  I could tell by Charlie’s face that his thoughts, however, were taking the same track as mine: suspicion.

  “Mr. Upton,” I said with lips that felt sort of numb, “is wearing tan slacks and shirt. And he’s about forty, wouldn’t you say?”

  Charlie put it together at once. “The man the clerk in the gift shop described,” he said.

  Understanding finally washed over Eddie’s face. “The man with Mrs. Basker, before she disappeared?” He shoved his glasses higher on his nose. “You think he’s the one who did it? Attacked her and robbed her?”

  “You’re slow, Eddie, but you get there,” Charlie told him kindly. “I guess it’s time to do some detective work.”

  “Let’s tell the stewardess, so they can arrest Mr. Upton when we get to San Francisco,” Eddie said eagerly.

  Charlie’s gaze was withering, and even I knew better than that. “And tell her what?” I asked. “What’s our evidence? Our proof? The police aren’t going to arrest anybody on our say-so, without proof!”

  “But the clerk described that Upton guy! That’s enough to take him in for questioning, isn’t it?”

  “What good will that do?” Charlie said. “Unless there’s some real evidence? All he has to do is say he doesn’t know what we’re talking about. Or that he spoke to Mrs. Basker about something perfectly innocent, like she dropped a coin and he picked it up and handed it to her. It would be his word against ours, and figure out who they’re going to believe. As long as she’s unconscious, Mrs. Basker isn’t going to accuse him of attacking her. We didn’t see him do anything to Mrs. Basker or even speak to her.”

  “The guy in the Hawaiian shirt followed her when she left her stuff with us,” I said, finally remembering. “She walked away and when I turned around to look at her, he was heading in the same direction.”

  “But it was Upton—if that’s really his name—she was seen with in the gift shop,” Charlie mused. “And now they’re both on this plane, talking together and pretending they weren’t when you saw them, which means they’re probably in cahoots, right?”

  “Right,” Eddie and I said in a chorus.

  “We talked about it before,” I added, “only then it didn’t seem particularly important, and now it does. The Hawaiian-shirt guy didn’t fly with us from Sea-Tac, but he showed up in Portland only a little while after we landed there. He sat around in Seattle for at least half an hour before our flight left. If he was coming here, why didn’t he get on that plane?”

  “Maybe he was only going as far as Portland,” Eddie said, “and Flight 211 wasn’t scheduled to land there, remember?”

  Before I had decided that Eddie had, for once, said something sensible, Charlie asked, “Then why is he now on the plane to San Francisco? This gets fishier and fishier. There wasn’t another plane to Portland or San Francisco on that TV screen schedule, not on our airline or our gate. I read it several times to see if anything had changed while we were sitting there waiting.”

  “Then how did he get here?” I demanded in a fierce half-whisper. “Why would he take another airline after he’d sat there as if he were waiting for our flight?”

  “He could have gone on an errand and missed the flight,” Charlie said, thinking it out as he went, “or he could have changed his mind about going until it was too late. And then he decided he had to go, after all, and—and chartered a plane, I suppose. Those small planes don’t fly as fast as the jets, but we were on the ground in Portland for quite a while before he showed up, weren’t we? Time enough for even a small plane to have made it.”

  I was dubious. “Doesn’t it cost an awful lot to charter a plane?”

  “Not necessarily. Sometimes it doesn’t cost any more than regular airline tickets. Besides, if it was really important, the cost might not matter to him.”

  “Like,” Eddie ventured, “if they were gang members who robbed a bank, and Mrs. Basker double-crossed them and took off with the loot, and they had to chase her.”

  “Oh, Eddie,” I said in exasperation, “this is serious! Try to think of something logical, will you? She sat right there in front of Hawaiian shirt, and he didn’t do anything, did he? Do you think she’d have sat talking to us—or he would have ignored her—if she’d been stealing their stolen money?”

  Eddie didn’t give up. “Probably he didn’t want to knock her over the head while there were people watching. He had to get her alone, like luring her up onto the third floor in the Portland airport, where nobody could see what he did.”

  “Well, he knew she was getting on Flight 211—that was obvious—so why didn’t he get a ticket and come on that plane, then? Why charter another plane after she’d left the ground? He had plenty of time in Sea-Tac to do that. Besides, Mrs. Basker wouldn’t have stolen anything from anyone. She’s a perfectly nice woman. She wouldn’t be mixed up with bank robbers or spies or any such types.”

  “She’s mixed up with something, though,” Charlie said thoughtfully. “We’ve got to figure out what it is. Then maybe we’ll have the evidence to take to the cops so they can arrest those guys. What do we know about Mrs. Basker, besides the fact that she was flying to San Francisco?”

  “She drove up to Seattle to visit her sister,” I provided promptly, “with her son. He had to go on to Vancouver, B.C., on business, so she’s flying back alone. That’s it.”

  “I wonder what her son’s business is? Maybe she’s carrying something for him. Not stolen money,” Charlie added quickly, as Eddie’s face lit up with a new looney-tunes idea, “but maybe he’s in some high-tech industry and he gave her specifications for computer chips or the like. Foreigners are always anxious to steal American technology, see how it works, and make it without paying for the ideas, then sell it cheaper than Americans can sell it.”

  “You sound as crazy as Eddie,” I scoffed. I really needed to go back and use that rest room; I wondered if those two men were still back there.

  “Well, there had to be some reason why the guy hit her over the head, searched her purse, didn’t find what he was after, grabbed the flight bag to search later, and threw it away after he’d gone through it. Either he found what he wanted or he didn’t, but it’s a pretty sure bet the guy was looking for something specific, and it wasn’t money, or he’d have taken that out of her wallet.” Charlie screwed up his face, thinking about it.

  “She’s just an ordinary old lady,” I said weakly, but there was no denying that what had happened to her had been extraordinary. “Listen, Charlie, come back to the rest rooms with me. I don’t want to get near those guys by myself.”

  “They’re not going to knock you over the head here, in front of a planeload of people,” Charlie said, but he was already unbuckling his seat belt. “We’ve got from here to San Francisco, gang, to figure this thing out. If we don’t, those jerks are going to get away with whatever it was.”

  “I wonder if even Mrs. Basker knew what they wanted,” I said, sliding out of my seat again. “I can’t figure why she’d have gone into that restricted area with one of those men.”

  Eddie never gave up. “Maybe they dragged her there. Or drugged her coffee when she had lunch, so she passed ou
t, and they pretended they were taking care of her.”

  I expected Charlie to explode that one, but he didn’t. He paused in the aisle behind me to reply. “Maybe you’re right. She didn’t seem foolish enough to go with them voluntarily.”

  Eddie pried open his seat belt and scrambled after us. “I’ll go with you, too. I don’t want to have to go back there by myself later. Just in case those guys are dangerous.”

  As we walked past Gladys and Howard, I heard the woman sniff. “Kids! Always making up crazy stories, thinking they’re spies or private detectives or something!”

  “It’s all that TV they watch,” Howard agreed.

  For a minute I wished we were making it all up, that it wasn’t real. But when I walked past Hawaiian shirt and Mr. Upton—who weren’t sitting anywhere near each other—I knew it was real, all right.

  I could practically feel the danger oozing out of them, toward us.

  Mr. Upton never glanced up from the paper he was reading, but Hawaiian shirt gave me a look that sent prickles of apprehension up my spine. If the boys hadn’t been with me, I don’t know if I’d have had nerve enough to walk past him. He was seated on the aisle, and I almost brushed against his arm as I went past.

  Nothing happened, though, for the rest of the flight. The attendants served us another snack in place of the dinner we were supposed to have had. I tried to read my book and couldn’t concentrate on it. The boys didn’t even play chess or talk much. I guess we were all trying to figure out the mystery.

  One thing was no mystery. Once we landed, those men were going to get away with it, whatever they had done. There was nothing definite we could report to the police, only our suspicions.

  And the whole time, thinking about Mr. Upton and Hawaiian shirt behind us, I kept feeling the short hairs on the back of my neck rising up, just the way they do in horror stories. Only this wasn’t imagination, I thought. And it wasn’t fun, because I couldn’t put the book away, or turn off the TV, and go find Max or Mom and Dad to talk to until I forgot the scary parts.