The Mystery of the Third Lucretia

by Susan Runholt

  By this time I was across the lobby. “Just send the police!” I yelled over my shoulder. Then I pushed through the doors and ran the five blocks to the taxi stand.

  I jumped into the first taxi in line. “Corner of Oudezijds Achterburgwal and Achterburgwalsteeg, fast as you can go,” I said, trying to use Mom’s pronunciation. “I’ll give you an extra fifty euros if you can do it in less than ten minutes.” It was something I’d seen on TV, but I wasn’t sure it would work in real life.

  It didn’t. The guy just sat there, looking back at me over his shoulder. For a second I thought I hadn’t pronounced the words right and he didn’t understand. Then he said, “You shouldn’t go to a place like that.”

  I reached in my pocket and held up the fifty-euro bill, worth more than fifty bucks in American money. “My mom’s been kidnapped and that’s where she is. Now drive.”

  He drove. Whether it was because he believed what I said or because he wanted to earn the money, I’ll never know for sure. We pulled out and around the corner, tires squealing.

  For the first five minutes of the trip there wasn’t much traffic, and the lights stayed green. Then we hit a red light. It seemed to last forever. I started out drumming my fingers on the armrest, and ended up pounding it with my fist before the light changed. When I saw a second light turn red two blocks ahead I wailed, “Oh, no!” and the taxi careened around the next corner with a right turn that sent the back of the car skidding.

  We were on a narrow, cobblestone street. The car shook so badly going fast over the small, rounded stones that I wondered if it might actually break apart.

  We were in the Quarter now. The driver put his hand to his horn again and drove, dangerously fast, through the tourists who scattered in front of us. “If I go to prison for this, will you pay the money to get me out?” he asked. I think he was feeling like the star in a movie car chase. But I was way too worried and too busy thinking to answer him.

  Suddenly we slowed down, and the driver started looking up at the sides of the buildings to check the street signs. Then we stopped with a jerk, and I recognized Jacob’s corner. The ride had taken twelve minutes—two more minutes than I’d bargained for—but when I saw that the meter said twenty euros, I just threw fifty euros into the front seat, said “Thanks a lot,” and jumped out. I closed the taxi’s door softly behind me so that Jacob wouldn’t hear me.

  There was light in Jacob’s windows. Thank God. I’d been sure this was where he’d take Mom and Lucas, and I’d been right.

  By this time I had it all planned in my mind. If I got there before the police showed up, I’d get Sister Anneke and Sister Katje to call and make sure the cops were coming, and the nuns and I would go up to Jacob’s place together.

  I ran to the mission door, turned the handle—and it was locked. The sign on the door said, Return at 7:30 in Dutch and English. It was just after seven o’clock.

  I felt desperate. I wanted to cry, but I didn’t have time. I looked up and down the street—no police yet. Then I looked at Jacob’s building and took a big breath. If somebody was going to rescue Mom and Lucas, it would have to be me.

  Three bounds and I was at the bottom of his stairway. I had no idea what I’d do when I got to the top, but I figured I’d think of something. I took another breath and started up.

  My tennies didn’t make a sound, but it turned out even a little movement made the metal steps grind and clang. I had to creep up to keep them from banging. I knew that as long as he didn’t know I was around, Mom and Lucas had a chance. But if he caught me, we’d all be killed.

  Jacob’s place was five whole stories up, and going slowly enough to be quiet made it seem like my trip up the stairs was taking forever. With every step I wondered if I’d be in time, if Mom and Lucas were still alive. Would it all turn out okay, or would one of them be dead? I prayed as hard as I’ve ever prayed in my life that they were okay and that I’d think of some way to make sure they stayed that way.

  Every landing was right outside a big set of European windows that opened like doors, just like in our hotel room, but they were all padlocked and the panes were painted over on the inside. When I stepped on the third-floor landing, the stairs let out a huge clang. I held my breath, backed up, and stood absolutely still. Then I looked up to see if Jacob would open his windows and look out to see what had made the noise. Nothing happened, and in a few more seconds I went up again, this time leaning most of my weight on the railing at the bad spot.

  When I got to the fourth floor, I could hear a man’s voice shouting up above. That was a good sign, I thought, because if Jacob was shouting, that meant there was still somebody alive to be shouting at. But by the time I got to the landing between the fourth and fifth floors, I could hear that the shouting was in Dutch, and there weren’t any voices shouting back. That’s when I started to shake and I could feel the tears sting in my eyes. I told myself I couldn’t cry, I had things to do, even if I didn’t know yet what they were. It worked. The tears went away.

  Only nine steps left. I thought I’d never get to the top. I knew I couldn’t make a sound this close to Jacob’s windows, so I went super slowly, testing every step for the noise it might make before actually stepping on it. Once I made the mistake of looking down and I got so dizzy at the height that I almost lost my balance and had to lean against the wall.

  I got to the last step, then very, very slowly I moved my head until I could just see into the room.

  There was Mom, tied to a chair. Her back was to me, and there was a dirty gray cloth tied around her mouth and knotted at the back of her head. The room was like an attic with the ceiling sloping down here and there, big and brightly lit, with easels standing all over it.

  Jacob was pacing back and forth on one side, yelling into a cell phone and making big, angry gestures with his free hand. His face was so red he looked ready to explode.

  Lucas wasn’t anywhere.

  I pulled my head back. My heart was pounding so hard it felt like it might slam right out of my chest. This was when I should have come up with an idea, but I couldn’t think. My mind, which had been working so well, screeched to a sudden stop. I stood there a minute, my eyes closed. It was all I could do to take a breath.

  I said to myself, very firmly, “Don’t panic,” and that stupid little phrase actually helped. At last I could breathe, but I had no idea what to do next. The one thing I’d thought of was to sneak in when Jacob’s back was turned and hit him over the head with something, but the windows were tightly closed. Even if I broke one of them and got in, what could I do?

  Lucas was gone, but I’d found Mom, and now I couldn’t think of any way to save her. I prayed again that God would give me an idea of how to help Mom, and I prayed for Lucas.

  I’m not sure how long I stood there, but no idea came. Not one. The nuns weren’t around, the police hadn’t come, and now God had let me down. I was all alone way up farther than I’d ever wanted to climb, and there was nothing I could do. My eyes filled with tears. I wiped them away and started back down.

  Going down was even worse than going up. I had to look at the drop to see where I was going. I made it by leaning on the wall and the railing. My fear of heights added to my terror that something horrible had happened to Lucas already, and something just as bad was about to happen to Mom. I had the feeling there was something simple and logical I should do, but all I could think of was finding another way to get the police to help.

  Once down, I went over to the mission. The sign was still there, but I tried the door anyway. Locked. My trip up and down the stairs had seemed to take such a long time, but my watch said it was just 7:10. I looked down the street. There were no pedestrians this far up the Oudezijds Achterburgwal. And this wasn’t the kind of neighborhood where there were stores or restaurants where I could find somebody. I ran to the other end of the tiny Achterburgwalsteeg to have a look. No luck there—it was just as empty. No drunken men. No girls. Should I take the time to run down into the busier nei
ghborhood? What if something happened to Mom while I was away?

  I ran back to the staircase. I decided go up again, kick in the window to Jacob’s room, jump inside, grab an easel, and hit Jacob with it.

  My foot was on the first stair when I stopped. I remembered how it had felt looking down from the top and I was totally afraid of being that far away from the ground again. Then I started thinking about Mom and Jacob alone in that room, and my fear of heights didn’t matter. I was going to go up again even if my feelings about doing it and my panic about Mom were crushing my chest with fear.

  And just when I was, like, being squeezed in the middle between two terrors, I heard a footstep on the street behind me.

  It’s Jacob, I thought. He heard me, and now he’s come to get me.

  You can only get just so scared before you stop feeling anything anymore, and this was what did it for me. In that split second I went numb. I thought, if Jacob wants to kill me, he can just go ahead and do it. I turned around calmly, my head up, expecting to find a gun in my face.

  But instead of Jacob, there stood Sister Anneke and Sister Katje and a tall woman with dyed blond hair and lots of makeup.

  “You’re back again, little girl,” Sister Anneke said. “Where is your friend?”

  “I don’t know!” I said in a whisper. Then suddenly, out of the blue, I was flooded with relief that they were there. I started to get tears in my eyes again.

  “Why are you crying?”

  “Because my mother and my best friend have been kidnapped,” I said, my voice kind of half sobbing on the words, “and now Mom is upstairs in this building, tied to a chair, and my friend is gone and I don’t know where she is, and I’m afraid she might be dead.”

  I could tell I sounded hysterical and I wasn’t surprised that the three women all looked at me funny.

  “You don’t believe me,” I said. “Nobody ever believes you when you’re just fourteen.”

  The woman who was with the nuns stepped closer and put her arms around me. “I know,” she said quietly. Her English was slow, but she pronounced it well. “When I was fourteen, I tried to tell people something. Something important. But no one ever believed me. What is your name?”

  “Kari.”

  “I believe you, Kari.”

  39

  Rescue, Part 2

  If you’re dying to know what happened next, don’t worry, I’ll get back to that part. But first I want to catch you up on what was happening to Mom and Lucas all this time, beginning when I was still in our hotel room reading the Time magazine article.

  They’d just sat down at their table in the restaurant when the waiter came over and said, “Someone would like to speak to both of you outside.”

  “Bill?” Mom said, looking at Lucas with her eyebrows raised. Then, to the waiter, “Would you watch our things for a minute?”

  “Certainly, madam.”

  When they stepped outside, no one was there. A big black Mercedes was pulled up right in front of the restaurant’s main entrance, parked with one whole side up on the sidewalk, but they do that a lot in Europe, so Mom and Lucas didn’t think anything of it.

  The restaurant and hotel were on a quiet street, and just then it was deserted. Mom stepped over to look around the corner for whoever had wanted to talk to them, when suddenly Lucas, who was watching her, felt her wrist grabbed from behind, and her arm jerked around behind her and shoved up high. She yelled, partly because it hurt really bad and partly because she’d just had the meep scared out of her.

  Mom spun around to see Lucas with one shoulder shoved up high and her mouth still open with pain. Jacob was standing behind and holding on to her.

  “Ms. Sundgren,” he said, “I find you with your daughter.”

  Then, with a little jerk on Lucas’s arm that turned her sideways enough to look at him, he said, “I studied your face when you and your mother were standing in line to see the Third Lucretia. It took me a moment to place you, then I remembered that we had met before under, shall we say, less than pleasant circumstances. Now I learn from my friend Heri that you and some little friend have been spying on one of my friends. I believe, between the two of you”—he looked at Mom, then at Lucas—“you know far too much about my situation. I should have run over you in London, when I had the chance.”

  So it had been him driving the Jaguar after all.

  He turned to the Mercedes, opened the driver’s door, and shoved Lucas into the front seat toward the passenger side, as if she were a big bag of potatoes. When he turned around he was holding a gun, pointed straight at Mom.

  “You try anything, little girl, and I’ll shoot your mother now.” Then he pulled Mom over to the door and shoved her in.

  “I was hoping my . . . business partner would drive, but alas, I must do it alone. So don’t try anything or you’ll regret it.” Still holding the gun, he started the car and pulled out into the street.

  Mom, wedged between Lucas and Jacob, took Lucas’s hand and gave it a squeeze.

  “Where are you taking us?” Mom asked.

  “To a place where we can be alone and I can make some decisions.”

  This gave Mom a little bit of hope. First, he wasn’t just going to take them someplace and shoot them right away. Second, there was a good chance he was going to his studio. And third, Jacob thought Lucas was her daughter. He didn’t know I existed, and he sure didn’t know I’d be looking for them in all the right places. She squeezed Lucas’s hand again.

  But Mom’s good feelings vanished in only a few minutes, because Jacob didn’t turn left toward the central part of the city. Instead, they were driving along a road she knew would take them out of town, into the Dutch countryside where Jacob might know of a lonely place where he could kill them.

  She was gripping Lucas’s hand by now, and wondering what the two of them could do to save themselves, or at least what she could do to save Lucas, when Jacob signaled for a left turn. Almost at the same second she saw a sign saying CENTRUM, with an arrow. They were heading back toward the center of town. Mom took a deep breath.

  Why had Jacob driven them the long way around? The answer was clear: it was a route where they’d been farther away from pedestrians and buildings and policemen and places where they might escape. It occurred to Mom then that Jacob had been driving on the inside lane all the way along their route so that Lucas couldn’t jump out without landing in the middle of traffic.

  Then she had her idea.

  What was going on with Lucas during this whole drive? Well, if you think she wasn’t scared, you’re wrong. Even Lucas the Lionheart, Nerves-of-Steel Stickney, was terrified.

  At first she thought it couldn’t be happening. This was the kind of thing that happened on reruns of Charlie’s Angels, not to normal, everyday people like Gillian Welles Sundgren and Lucas Stickney. Even Jacob seemed unreal, like one of those evil snakes you see in Disney movies who have the big smiles with all the teeth but you know it’s totally phony.

  When she got past that stage, she went through a couple minutes when it was like her brain wouldn’t let her think about what was happening. Instead, she thought about stupid things. Like, if Jacob was driving a Mercedes now, did that mean he’d rented the Jaguar in London? And who did he think the “little friend” was that Heri had seen her with?

  When her mind finally shifted gears and let her focus on what was going on, Lucas got busy trying to come up with a plan. She thought of jumping out of the car, but she was afraid that if she did, Jacob would shoot Mom. Besides, she’d end up right in the middle of traffic.

  In one way it was easier for her than it was for Mom because she didn’t know her way around Amsterdam, so she never thought they were going anywhere except his studio.

  She figured her chance might come when they got out of the car and Jacob was trying to get them upstairs. She remembered how I almost ran right into Jacob while he was unlocking his door, and she thought that, for just a second when he was getting them into the building, he�
�d have to take his eyes off his prisoners and get his key into the lock.

  It was at that moment, she thought, that she and Mom would have their chance.

  Her brother, the Brat Child, had been taking karate lessons for years. He was always running around the house going “Hi-ya!” and either kicking high into the air or trying to break something with the side of his hand.

  Lucas thought the kicking thing would work best. She figured she’d watch Jacob’s eyes, and at exactly the right moment, bam! the gun would be flying out of his hand and she’d pull Mom around the corner and down the street toward all the tourists and into a bar. Jacob couldn’t very well kill them in the middle of a crowd.

  By this time they’d gotten into town. They turned a couple of times then Jacob let out a long word starting with the Dutch g sound that she figured was swearing in Dutch.

  They’d taken a wrong turn, and now they were driving right past a huge outdoor marketplace. Some of the stalls were still open, and the street they were on was nothing but one big traffic jam full of people and trucks.

  Jacob lowered the window and stuck his head out as if to see how far ahead the traffic jam went.

  In that moment Mom turned to Lucas and mouthed the words, GET OUT NOW!

  Lucas shook her head no.

  GO! Mom mouthed, and as Jacob pulled his head back in, Lucas fumbled with her door, Mom gave her a push, and she shot out into the crowd.

  She ran around behind the car, looked at the license number, then dashed into the market area, elbowing her way into the middle of a crowd gathered around one of the stalls.

  For a while she listened to hear if there would be a shot. But she figured Jacob wouldn’t risk shooting Mom for fear of being caught. At last she edged out of the crowd and saw the Mercedes back up and pull around the corner.

  She looked around for a policeman. There wasn’t one in sight.

  She ran up to a group of people buying french fries at a stall and yelled out, “Does anybody have a mobile phone? It’s an emergency!”