by Pete Hautman
She had sat down right in the middle of the bench, about fifteen inches away from him. It was a long bench. She didn’t have to sit that close, as if she didn’t even know he was there. And she looked mad. Really mad, like her eardrums were about to pop.
Not wanting to be too close when her brain exploded, Brian scooted over a few inches.
That got her attention.
“What are you gawking at?” She looked at him as if he were a bug.
Brian looked straight back at her. One thing he had learned about older kids was that if you look right in their eyes, they respect you more. Either that or they hit you.
“Nothing,” he said.
“Good.” She turned her glare on the floor a few feet in front of her clunky black boots.
They sat without saying anything for about two minutes, which was a long time to sit on such a hard bench doing nothing. Brian decided to ask her a question.
“What are you in for?”
She didn’t lift her head to talk. Didn’t even turn her head. She kept staring at the floor.
“I’m an investigator,” she said. “I was doing my job.”
That sounded interesting. His mother was an investigator, too. Brian liked to think it ran in the family.
“What were you investigating?”
“The Camden case. Not that it’s any of your business.” She squinted at him. “Aren’t you a little young to be in high school?”
“I’m fourteen,” Brian said, adding a few months to his real age. “I got bumped up a grade.”
“Child prodigy, huh?”
“Not really. What’s the Camden case? Is that about the girl that got beat up?”
She nodded.
“My mom’s working on that one,” Brian said.
She looked at him. “Your mom?”
“Yeah. She’s a cop.”
“A real cop?”
“No. An imitation plastic cop.” He tensed up, bracing himself. After making a sarcastic comment, it was a good idea to be ready for anything.
But instead of being offended, the girl said, “I like the plastic kind. They’re very durable.” She paused, then asked, “Your mom is really working on the Camden case?”
“She’s the lead detective for the Bloodwater police.”
“Do they have any suspects?”
“I don’t know. She doesn’t talk about her work much. What sort of investigator are you, anyway?”
“I work for the Pump.”
“Wait a second . . . are you P. Q. Delicata?”
“Yeah,” she said. “But you can call me Roni.”
“I like your column,” he said.
For the first time, Brian saw her smile. She had a good one.
“Thanks,” she said. “What’s your name?”
Before Brian could answer, Spindler opened his door. “Okay, Mr. Bain. It’s your turn.” He went back to his desk, leaving the door open for Brian.
“He doesn’t seem to like you,” said Roni in a low voice. “What did you do?”
“Unauthorized use of the chem lab,” Brian said, standing up. “No big deal—except I got interrupted before I could finish my experiment.” He grimaced. “I just hope old Bismuth had the sense to turn off that Bunsen burner.”
Just then the office door flew open and Mrs. Bismuth, the chemistry teacher, staggered in, red-faced and pop-eyed. She slammed the door behind her and let out her breath in a long, ragged gasp, as if she’d been holding it for minutes. “It’s horrible,” she said, coughing.
“What? What’s wrong?” said Mrs. Washington.
“Horrible,” was all Mrs. Bismuth could say.
Brian became aware of a faint, familiar, ferociously foul odor that quickly increased in intensity. They heard people running in the hall, and sounds of gagging, and then the door burst open again and several students ran in followed by a wave of stink so unutterably dreadful that even P. Q. Delicata could not have begun to describe it. The stench rolled over them like an invisible wave of rotten eggs, ancient sewage, and dead skunk.
Just then, Mrs. Bismuth spotted Brian. She pointed a shaking finger at him and said in a choked voice, “You! This is all your fault!”
5
ride
Standing on the sidewalk outside the hospital wearing her mother’s oversize sunglasses, Alicia felt as if she were invisible. She could stand there for days and no one would notice her. Just another teenage girl.
During Alicia’s follow-up appointment in the hospital, Dr. Chao had been very kind. She had held Alicia’s face in her hands and gently touched the bruises.
“How scary it must have been,” Dr. Chao had said. “Why would someone do that?”
Alicia had felt like crying for the first time since the incident. She had wanted to tell this gentle woman with the dark-rimmed glasses all about her life, but she didn’t dare. Instead she had dropped her head and mumbled something about still not remembering what had happened.
“That isn’t unusual,” Dr. Chao had said. “Memories might come back to you. You’ll need to talk about it eventually.”
Alicia’s mom hadn’t come in with her. She had just dropped her off at the front door. She had errands to run. More important things to do. Dr. Chao hadn’t said anything, but she had seemed surprised when Alicia came in all by herself.
“Your bruises are healing nicely,” Dr. Chao had said, smiling. “I don’t think we’ll need to see you again, Alicia.”
All by herself. It didn’t used to be that way. When she had lived in Mankato—before her mother had divorced and remarried—she’d had friends. She’d had a real father. But here in Bloodwater everything was different.
And now her mom was twenty minutes late to pick her up.
Alicia looked around. Nobody cared. Two orderlies smoking cigarettes on a bus bench. An old man helping an old woman with a cane. A little kid in a wheelchair. Alicia stared down at her feet. Nobody even knew she was alive.
An SUV pulled over to the curb in front of her.
“Need a lift?”
Alicia raised her eyes and looked in at the driver.
6
bovine pustules
Brian stood in the doorway of his father’s study. The room looked as if a tornado had hit it. That was normal. Books covered the floor, the chairs, the desk. The shiny top of his father’s balding head could be seen above the waves of books, but only because his father was very tall.
Bruce Bain was a not-famous author. He wrote strange, intelligent books that got great reviews, but that only a few strange, intelligent people read. His books had titles like Bivalves of the Upper Mississippi, and Narcissistic Behavior in Flat-worms. Recently, he had been working on something called The Entomology of Bovine Pustules.
Brian had tried to read his father’s books. They made him feel as if his brain were crumbling.
But then, his father couldn’t even balance his own checkbook. Neither could his mother. Brian had been doing it for them since he was ten.
“Hey, Dad,” Brian said in a quiet voice. His father had been known to jump straight up out of his chair when startled.
This time he levitated only a few inches.
“Huh? What?” He peered over the mountain of books. “Ah! Brian. Home so soon? How are you, son?”
“Fine, Dad.”
“Good, good.”
“I got suspended from school.”
His father smiled hazily. “School. Yes. Good. Hmm. And how is school going?”
“Wellll . . . my hydrogen sulfide generator got left on. It wasn’t my fault.”
“Hydrogen sulfide.” He blinked. “Very smelly, yes. Major component of intestinal gases, hmm, uh-huh, yes . . . cattle create a great deal of it.”
“They had to evacuate the school.”
“Yes, well, I’m glad to hear it. Good work, son.”
Brian was sure that nothing he had said had penetrated. His father’s head was still deep in The Entomology of Bovine Pustules. That was fine with him.
“Well, I gotta go snazzledorf my finkwalter.”
“I see, well, that’s nice, son. I’m glad you had a good day at school.”
“Thanks, Dad.”
His father’s head sank beneath the ocean of books.
“When’s Mom coming home? I need to ask her about a case she’s working on.”
He was interrupted by the horrible clatter of his father’s antique rotary dial telephone.
Brian’s father hated telephones above all things on earth. He shuffled through the books and papers on his desk, searching for the source of the ringing. Brian thought about running and answering the kitchen extension, but he was curious how long it would take his father to find his phone.
It took ten rings.
“Hello? Oh, hello, dear.”
It had to be his mother. Brian listened to one end of the conversation.
“Yes. Oh. That’s awful. Oh dear. Oh my. That’s very bad. Yes, no, yes, don’t worry about us, dear. We’ll just whip something up. Okay. Bye now.”
Brian heard the click of the phone being set back in its cradle, then a sigh, then the soft clatter of typing.
“Dad?”
His father’s head popped up.
“Brian? Back so soon?”
“I never left. Was that Mom?”
“Yes. She’s going to be running late this evening.”
“So is it tuna melt sandwiches for dinner again?” Tuna melt was the only thing his father knew how to make.
“I’m afraid so. She might be quite late. Apparently, something terrible has happened to one of your classmates.”
7
meat loaf
“Nick, you’re looking at this the entirely wrong way. Think of it as a time for me to find myself.”
Roni’s mother, Nicoletta Delicata, better known as Nick, was attempting to make dinner. Roni stared at the mess her mother was mashing together in a big yellow bowl. Nick was not a great cook. They ate grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup so often that Roni was thinking of buying stock in Campbell’s. But for tonight Nick was making something she claimed was “meat loaf.”
“You’ve been suspended from school for a week. How else can I look at it?”
“It’s not a week. It’s four days.”
“That’s hardly the point. I’m very disappointed in you, Petronella.” She stopped attacking the meat loaf mixture for a moment and pointed her wooden spoon at Roni.
“You are grounded. You are cleaning the house from top to bottom. You are keeping up with your schoolwork. The television is moving to my room and your laptop will be used for homework only for the next month.”
Roni didn’t like what she was hearing.
Then her mother severed the final line of communication with the outside world. “No phone.”
Roni whined and moaned. She knew that was what her mother expected. She didn’t point out how impossible it would be for her mother to enforce these new rules while she was at work all day long. As the mayor’s secretary, Nick took her job very seriously. The mayor, Buddy Berglund, spent most of his time on the golf course, so she had to make most of his decisions for him. In effect, Nick Delicata ran the city of Bloodwater.
“Whatever were you thinking, fighting with a fellow student?”
“I was investigating,” Roni said.
“Oh, so now you resort to beating information out of people?”
“I already told you. She started it.”
“Yes, I did hear that part. And what should you have done?”
“I just wanted her to listen to me. She acted like I was some pesky fly that she could swat away.”
Roni saw a small smile land on her mother’s lips for a moment. “Well, sometimes you are pesky.”
“I know. But now I won’t get anything out of her. I don’t mind the suspension, but this is a big story.”
“Maybe you should apologize,” her mother suggested.
“But I didn’t do anything wrong!”
“Saying you’re sorry never hurts.”
At first Roni thought her mother’s suggestion was ridiculous. But then she thought about it more. A reason to go over to Alicia’s house. Her mother couldn’t object—she had suggested it.
“She lives at the old Bloodwater place, all the way over by the park,” Roni said. “Can I use the car?”
“I was thinking you could simply use the phone.”
“I thought the phone was off limits.”
“In this case, I would make an exception.”
“I think it would be better if I apologized in person. I could drive over there right now.”
Nick frowned at her daughter, then shrugged. “All right, but I don’t want you gallivanting off on any of your auxiliary adventures, dear. This is a onetime exception—you are still grounded.”
Things were looking up. Roni told Nick about the other thing that had happened that day. “Some kid had a chemistry experiment go stink bomb today. They evacuated the school. So actually I’m suspended only for three days, since everybody got out early today anyway.”
“That sounds dangerous,” Nick said. “Were there toxic gases?”
“You could say that. I met the kid who did it. He’s Chinese or Hmong or Tibetan or something. Maybe I’ll write a piece on him, too—the mad scientist of Bloodwater High.”
Her mother’s eyes lit up. “He sounds interesting. A Tibetan chemist!”
Roni laughed. “I just meant he’s Asian, Mom. Besides, he’s a freshman, a geek, and he only comes up to my navel. Don’t get your hopes up.” She added, “Anyway, you wouldn’t approve of him. He got suspended, too.”
8
snatched
Brian felt as if a giant electromagnet were pulling him toward Bloodwater House.
He hadn’t really planned on going there, but once he started walking, his feet just naturally pointed in that direction. It wasn’t every day that somebody got abducted in Bloodwater. He had to know more, and the answers would be at the home of Alicia Camden and her younger brother, Ted Thorn.
If anybody could tell him more about the abduction, it would be Ted.
Brian knew Ted from science class. Ted was a year older than Brian, but he never lorded it over him. They had collaborated on a science fair project building a solar-powered potato gun. Brian had designed the gun. Ted had supplied the potatoes. The potato gun had worked great, but it had been confiscated when a slight miscalculation caused a large dent to appear on the fender of Principal Spindler’s Buick.
Brian was about six blocks from Bloodwater House when a car pulled over to the curb next to him. It was Roni Delicata.
“Hey, Stink Bomb, where you headed?”
“Bloodwater House,” said Brian.
“That’s where I’m going. Hop in!”
Brian got into the car and Roni took off, wheels spinning.
“How come you’re running around loose, Stink Bomb?” she asked. “Didn’t your parents put you under house arrest?”
“My name’s not Stink Bomb. It’s Brian.”
“Really? You don’t look like a Brian.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Brian didn’t like it when people made assumptions. She probably thought his name should be Chin, or Hop-Sing.
“I mean, you look like a Quincy. Or maybe a Hector, or a Zigmund. I expected you to have a really weird name, like a mad scientist. You being a mad stink bomber and all.”
Oh. That was okay, then. The girl wasn’t prejudiced—she was simply deranged.
Brian said, “I’ll probably be grounded when my mom gets home, but my dad’s clueless. How about you?”
“I’m going over to Alicia’s to make the big apology. One way to get out of the house. Maybe she’ll be cool and talk to me about what happened.”
“I doubt it,” Brian said.
“You don’t have to be so negative.”
“Well, I’m pretty sure about this. Alicia just got snatched.”
9
alone
The boat cabin was smaller than the smallest closet in Bloodwater House. The only light came from two filthy portholes. Paint flaked from the walls and floor, and there were spiders everywhere. Alicia sat on the edge of a thin, rippled foam mattress. The cabin wasn’t quite tall enough to stand up in, and it smelled of mold.
How long would it be before her mother knew she was missing?
Not long, Alicia thought. She would miss having someone she could order around. She would miss having someone to drag around on her stupid shopping safaris. She would miss having someone to show off to her friends: “Isn’t she adorable? Why, she looks just like I did when I was her age, but she’s so much more athletic! Alicia, dear, show Mrs. Wentworth your calves. Look at that. Aren’t they so muscular? Can you imagine?”
Was there anybody in the entire universe as egocentric as her mother? She would probably assume that Alicia had walked home from the hospital, or gotten a ride from a friend.
She’d gotten a ride all right. And ended up stuck on this boat.
With a shudder, Alicia brushed a spider off her leg, hugged her knees to her chest, and stared at the heavy wooden door.
She heard something scurry across the deck. A river rat, or something worse. Waves lapped against the sides of the boat, rocking it gently. Every now and then it would bump up against the dock and she would jump, thinking that she was hearing the thump of his heavy foot stepping onto the boat. She imagined the door opening . . .
What would happen to her?
10
the power of the press
“Snatched?” Roni said. “You mean abducted? When?”
“This afternoon, I suppose. I mean, you got in a fight with her at lunchtime, so it must’ve been after that.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know.”
“How? Who? Why?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know,” Brian said.