What Could Go Wrong?

by Willo Davis Roberts

  When the FASTEN SEAT BELT sign came on, and the plane banked and circled around to make its approach to San Francisco International Airport from the south, we had a marvelous view of the Bay Area. Passengers around us exclaimed over glimpses of the Pacific Ocean, and Golden Gate Bridge, and the bay, looking bright blue and sparkling in the late afternoon sunshine. Even the city itself looked golden and magical.

  Excitement stirred again as I thought about the two weeks ahead of us with Aunt Molly. I knew it was going to be wonderful, and I’d have all kinds of things to relate to my friends when I got home.

  It wasn’t until we were off the plane that things started to get frightening again, when we found out that it wasn’t over yet, the series of events that had begun in Sea-Tac when I helped Mrs. Basker pick up the spilled contents of her purse.

  It was in San Francisco Airport that we finally figured out what those men wanted, though we still didn’t know why.

  Chapter Nine

  I didn’t mean to look toward the rear of the plane when we were gathering up our things to leave. It was almost as if I felt an unfriendly gaze on my back and just had to turn to see.

  Sure enough, they were both looking at me, though Mr. Upton immediately pretended he wasn’t, and Hawaiian shirt bent over to pick up something so our eyes only met for a few seconds.

  That was long enough to scare me. “Charlie, come on, hurry,” I said. “Let’s get out of here ahead of those men. I don’t want them to catch up to us.”

  Eddie cast a startled glance toward the men, then jerked his flight bag out from where it was wedged under the forward seat. “There’s no reason why we should be afraid of them, is there?”

  “If they didn’t find what they wanted in Mrs. Basker’s purse or her bag, maybe they think we have it,” I worried. “I mean, she talked to us, and left things with us. The box of candy and her sweater. Even if we don’t still have them, they may think we have whatever it is.”

  “They’ve got to be spies or crooks of some kind,” Eddie said, looking as if he didn’t know whether to be thrilled or terrified at the idea.

  “Let’s go,” I said, not daring to look back along the crowded aisle, hoping the other passengers would keep the two men from moving quickly toward us. “At the time I thought it was an accident when that Upton guy kept snagging on Mrs. Basker’s bag, but now I don’t think so. I think he was trying to get it away from her in such a way that she wouldn’t think he was stealing it, and when that didn’t work, he did something more direct.”

  Charlie was standing waiting for us, obstructing the other passengers so that one of them said, “Excuse me, please. May I get past?”

  Obediently Charlie moved to the side, speaking softly just above my ear. “They’re trying to move toward us, fast. Come on.”

  I felt a little as if a demon were at my heels as we hurried off the plane. I didn’t know what the demon could do if he caught up to us, and I didn’t want to find out.

  “I sure wish Aunt Molly were going to be right here,” Eddie said, hitching up his shoulder strap and trotting to keep up with Charlie’s long strides.

  I did, too, but of course she wasn’t. She was waiting for our call. “Tell me when you see a phone,” I said, wondering if the men were really interested in us, really following us, and not daring to turn around to find out.

  “There’s one,” Eddie said almost at once as we emerged into the main building and were practically swept along by the rest of the passengers.

  I swung toward him, then heard Charlie say, “We can’t use that one, Eddie. That’s one of the white courtesy phones they have, so you can answer if they page you. We need regular pay phones. I think there may be some down that way. Come on.”

  It should have made me feel safer to have so many people around, but somehow it didn’t. There had been crowds in the other airport, too, but that hadn’t prevented Mrs. Basker from being enticed or forced into a deserted area where she could be attacked. Having three of us didn’t guarantee anything, either. Two grown men could probably handle three kids without too much trouble.

  “I wonder if they’ve got guns,” Eddie said, sounding a bit breathless. I didn’t know if that was from fright or from hurrying the way we were doing.

  “Thanks a lot for sharing your thoughts, Eddie,” I told him. “As if I didn’t have enough to worry about on my own.”

  “Well, if they had guns it would explain how they made Mrs. Basker go up those stairs to where nobody saw them. If they threatened to shoot her. There, there’s a bunch of telephones.”

  I had to put down the stuff I was carrying to get out the paper with the number written on it, where we could reach Aunt Molly. By that time I had a desperate need to know if the men were following us, so I looked. To my relief, I didn’t spot either a bright Hawaiian print shirt or a man in a tan one anywhere among the travelers milling around.

  “Maybe I was wrong,” I said hopefully, pulling the folded newspaper out of the side pocket of my flight bag. “Maybe they weren’t interested in us at all. They just don’t like kids, so they were giving me dirty looks.”

  Charlie leaned against the phone compartment, completely relaxed. “Nobody’s going to try anything, anyway, in this crowd. There’s a security man over there, and another pair of them down that way. If anybody scares you, yell your head off.”

  I laughed nervously, digging for change. “When I’m really scared—like when I have a nightmare—I try to scream, and I never can. Nothing comes out very loud.”

  I smoothed the paper out so I could read the number Aunt Molly had given me. The tension started to leak out of me as soon as I’d dialed it.

  Only I didn’t get Aunt Molly. It was her voice, but I knew immediately that it was a recording, one of those answering machines.

  “Hi, this is Molly Portwood! If my caller is Gracie, hang on, kids, I’ll be there as soon as I can. My friend is having a severe asthma attack and I’m going to have to take her to the emergency room for a shot. Heaven knows how long it will take, but I hope we don’t have to wait around too long. Leave a message after the beep, tell me what time you called, and I’ll be there as soon as I can, okay? If I know Charlie, he’s got a credit card, so why don’t you kids go ahead and have dinner in the terminal, and I’ll pay you back for it. Oh, and if the caller is anyone else, leave a phone number and Andrea will call you when she feels better. Bye-bye!”

  Confused, almost stunned, I looked at my watch. “Uh, it’s a quarter to six. Okay, Aunt Molly.”

  “She coming right away?” Eddie asked expectantly.

  “No.” I felt sort of hollow. “She’s taking her friend to the emergency room. She said for us to eat dinner and charge it on Charlie’s card, and she’ll pay him back. She’ll be here as soon as she gets her friend home from the hospital.”

  We stood there for a minute looking at each other. Charlie didn’t seem quite so relaxed now, though he tried to be casual about glancing down the broad corridor. “Well, looks like we were running from nothing, anyway. Nobody’s paying any attention to us. Shall we go find a place to eat, then, before we go down and claim our luggage? I don’t think there are many places to sit down there, and we don’t want to stand up for hours.”

  “Leave it to Aunt Molly,” I said, refolding the newspaper. “Dad would say she’s a real Portwood, all right. She asked me to tell her what time my call was, but she didn’t tell me what time she was leaving her message. So we don’t know if she left for the emergency room a couple of hours ago, or just a few minutes ago. I feel so strange, I don’t know if I’m hungry or not.”

  “I am,” Eddie stated positively. “Let’s get a real meal this time. My mom’s going to ask me how much junk I ate, and I’d like to be able to say truthfully that I ate salad while I was here. She doesn’t have to know it was only one salad.”

  “It’ll be more than one,” Charlie predicted, “because Aunt Molly will see to it. I’m going to have a juicy jumbo burger with fries, and if they throw a
little lettuce and tomato on the plate maybe I’ll eat that, too. Let’s go.”

  I picked up my stuff again, and although there was no sign of the men we thought had attacked Mrs. Basker, I continued to be uneasy as we went on along the concourse toward the shops. I wouldn’t really feel comfortable and safe, I thought, until Aunt Molly showed up. I hoped that message had been left hours ago, so she could arrive any minute.

  I stopped so suddenly that Eddie ran into me. “What if she does come soon and we’re not down at the baggage place yet? She’ll never find us anywhere else! This terminal is as big as Marysville, practically!”

  Charlie was unfazed. “She’ll have them page us, over that P.A. system, and they’ll tell us to use one of the white courtesy phones. Then we’ll tell her where we are, and decide where to meet. Here, how about this place? Look okay?”

  Any place that got us out of the stream of people, with my back to the wall and a view of whoever was going past, sounded good to me. We had to wait a few minutes for a table, because it was pretty crowded. There were windows along the whole side of the restaurant, so we could see everybody moving along the corridor. We had a booth on one side of a divider that ran almost the whole length of the room.

  The man who waited on us was very polite. “Hi, kids. You decided what you want?”

  We ordered, and by the time the food came I decided I was hungry, after all. That didn’t stop me from keeping watch on the passersby, though. If Mr. Upton and Hawaiian shirt were still around, I wanted to know it.

  Sometimes I thought Charlie could read minds, because he said, “They’re probably gone by this time. Went down and got their luggage and grabbed an Airporter or a cab.”

  “They didn’t have any luggage,” I told him. “They didn’t carry any on, anyway. Mr. Upton was about the only one I saw on the whole plane who didn’t have anything to carry, not even a jacket or a briefcase.”

  Eddie’s eyes suddenly grew large and he forgot to bite into the french fry he’d just dipped in ketchup; he was staring through the window.

  My heart leaped painfully, and I realized I’d forgotten to watch. “What? Is it them?”

  “It’s sure interesting to watch people,” he said. “Look at the color of that lady’s hair, will you? And the jewelry and the fur coat! Why’s she need a fur coat this time of year? She’ll die when she gets away from the air conditioning in this place.”

  The lavender hair was unusual. I figured she had too many rings and necklaces for them to be real unless she was a movie star, and the fur coat was gorgeous, but I concentrated on getting my heart back in my chest.

  “Maybe she just came from Iceland, or the Scandinavian countries,” Charlie guessed. “Where it’s cold. Either that or she’s a movie star and wants to be noticed and doesn’t care if she melts inside the coat as long as somebody knows she has it. We going to have dessert?”

  We all decided on strawberry shortcake and ice cream. It wasn’t quite as good as what we were used to at home, but not bad. I began to relax, the way Charlie seemed to do so easily.

  “Have you guys noticed the decor in these airports?” I asked.

  “Decor?” Eddie repeated, as if he didn’t know what the word meant.

  “In Portland, the carpeting was a hideous mixture of red and blue, and the upholstery on the chairs was enough to make you want to close your eyes. And look at the carpet here—green and brown and orange! Who do they hire to do their decorating?”

  “It’s practical,” Charlie said. “Doesn’t show the dirt of all the thousands of feet that walk on it. Besides, don’t you know the psychology of colors in restaurants and public places?”

  Eddie wiped ketchup off his chin with a paper napkin. “What’s psychology got to do with decorating?”

  “Everything. Pale green is soothing, which is why they use it in so many hospital rooms. Certain shades of pink calm down mental patients or disturbed people who’ve been arrested. And colors like these”—he gestured at the floor—“are not restful and they make people want to hurry up and eat and leave. That way they don’t linger over the tables when there are more customers waiting.”

  “I think it’s ugly,” I said. “And why do they have mirrors on the ceiling? What’s the psychology of that?”

  “I don’t think it’s psychology,” Charlie decided, “but to help the waiters see what’s going on behind this long divider and in the booths.” He grinned. “They can spy on us.”

  Inadvertently, I glanced up into the mirrors. I’d only noticed them, not really looked up before.

  And went cold. I mean, icy, icy cold.

  There was no mistaking that shirt with the bright blue and green and scarlet print.

  When my eyes got past being paralyzed, I saw something else. The top of a head going slightly bald, and I didn’t recognize that, but there was also a tan shirt.

  They’d pretended they didn’t know each other, but they were eating together just on the other side of a thin wooden partition between our booths.

  If they looked up, as I was doing now, they could see us. In fact, they might even be able to hear us, though we certainly hadn’t heard them.

  I must have looked the way I felt, because slowly Charlie and Eddie raised their faces and stared into the overhead mirrors.

  Eddie gulped and started to say something, but Charlie put a finger to his lips and shook his head.

  We each had a few bites of dessert left, but nobody was hungry anymore. Charlie looked around in a calculating fashion.

  To leave the restaurant, we’d have to walk past that divider, which would put us in plain view of the men I’d definitely come to consider The Enemy.

  “What are we going to do?” I asked in a whisper.

  Not even Charlie had an immediate answer.

  Chapter Ten

  I didn’t know if the awful carpeting had psychological effects on us or not, but I knew I wanted to get out of that place as fast as I could. I hadn’t seen The Enemy come in—the entrance door was the one place I couldn’t watch because that divider screened it from our view—but I was positive they’d come here because we were here already.

  That meant they’d been following us, watching us, even though we hadn’t seen them. And that meant we really had something to worry about.

  Eddie spoke in a whisper. “I feel like a great big bird—a hawk or an eagle—is stuck in my chest, trying to get out. It . . . hurts.”

  “Mine, too,” I whispered back.

  Charlie didn’t pay any attention to us. He was looking around, and then he said in a slightly louder than normal voice, “We’ll have a long ride to Aunt Molly’s. Maybe we better make a pit stop before she shows up, okay? We’ll get the check on the way out.”

  I started to remind him I’d used the rest room just before the plane landed, and then I realized that what he’d said hadn’t been intended for us. It had been intended to carry to the men on the other side of that flimsy divider.

  I swiveled my head around so fast it hurt. What was he talking about? What did he intend to do?

  “The rest rooms are back there,” he said. “Right next to the kitchen. Meet you at the cash register in a few minutes.”

  The rest rooms wouldn’t have any outside windows to escape through, I thought. But I slid out of my chair and went with the boys, hoping Charlie had a genuine idea to get us out of here without The Enemy right on our heels. I couldn’t tell to look at Charlie how he felt, but it was obvious Eddie was just as scared as I was.

  We entered the narrow corridor opening beneath the sign for the rest rooms, Charlie leading the way, and then I saw it.

  There was a doorway opening into the kitchen from that hallway, too.

  A fat man in a white apron and a little hat looked up, startled, when Charlie led the way into the kitchen.

  “No admittance back here,” he said. He had a big cast-iron frying pan in his hand, and it looked to me like a good way to enforce his rules if he wanted to.

  “There a back
door out of here? Into a different corridor than the one in from the restaurant?” Charlie asked urgently. He was carrying the bill the waiter had left with our desserts, and there were two twenty-dollar bills on top of it, all the cash he had. “Somebody’s after us—not the cops or anything like that, some pretty bad dudes—and we don’t want them to see us leave. You can keep the change, whatever’s over the amount of the bill.”

  I saw suspicion in the man’s face, and then he looked at the money and checked the total on the bill. It only took him a second or two to make up his mind.

  “Employees entrance back there,” he said, gesturing with a thumb. “All the way back, and to your left.”

  Charlie grinned. “Thanks. And don’t tell them we came through here, okay?”

  “Not unless they’re security officers,” the man agreed, waving us through.

  I ran after Charlie, hearing Eddie behind me, past a long table where startled employees stopped making their salads and fancy-looking dishes, past a redheaded boy assembling hamburgers, letting the smells of grilling meat and onions out after us into a narrow hallway. Charlie hesitated only a moment, chose the left, and we listened to our own running feet slapping the tiled floor, heard our own gasping breaths.

  When we reached a blank door at the end of the hall, Charlie shoved through it, looked in both directions, and led the way out into one of the broader passageways where a few uniformed airline employees were coming and going, paying no attention to us.

  “Where are we going?” Eddie panted.

  “I don’t know yet,” Charlie admitted. “I’m not sure if those guys followed us into that restaurant or if it was just a coincidence, but until we do know, I’d rather we had a chance to work out a plan.”

  “A plan, yes, we need a plan,” Eddie puffed. He didn’t sound as if he ran as much as Charlie and I did, though we were breathing kind of heavily, too, after pelting away from those men in the restaurant. “Where do we go to do this planning?”