“You in trouble?”
“I think so,” Katie said.
“Did Mr. Pollard turn you in for something?”
“I think it was Mr. Cooper.”
“Him? I thought he seemed like a nice guy. He paid me ahead of time for the paper. Listen, is it true? Did you do those things, make the door slam in his face and his money blow out of his wallet and all that stuff?”
“I guess so.”
“How do you do it?” Jackson Jones asked. He didn’t sound as if he didn’t believe her, and he didn’t sound afraid or hostile, either. “I wouldn’t mind a few lessons.”
“I don’t know how I do it,” Katie admitted. “I just think about it, and it happens.”
Jackson Jones sighed. “I figured it wasn’t something you could teach me. Anyway, thanks. It’s the easiest I ever got my money out of Mr. Pollard. What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know,” Katie said again. “I’d run away and hide, if I knew of any place where they wouldn’t find me.” She sounded small and forlorn.
“You want some help?”
“Where is there to go?”
“Well.” He considered that, kicking at a loose rock near the edge of the walk. “They say the best place to hide something is in with a whole bunch of other things just like it. So, a kid would be the least conspicuous in a bunch of kids, right?”
“Where would I find a bunch of kids? Especially at night?”
“At our house.” Someone came out of the door of The Cedars Apartments, and Jackson Jones pretended he was trying to find something he’d dropped; the man didn’t even glance at him. When the stranger was out in the middle of the parking lot, Jackson Jones continued. “My little sister Dorothy is having a slumber party tonight. There’ll be so many kids in our house, my mother won’t notice another one. I’ll lend you my sleeping bag.”
Katie began to breathe normally again. “Do you think that would work?”
“Why not? The way our house is, you could probably come even when we weren’t having a slumber party and she’d never notice you. Well, she’d know you were there, but she’d just think you were a friend of Dorothy’s or Carol’s. She never knows half the kids who come to our place.”
Katie could see the police car between the branches of her shelter. It gave her cold chills. “How will I get away, though? To get to your house?”
“Go back into the alley,” Jackson Jones told her. “Turn left and go until you come out on Sixth Street. I’ll meet you there, and we can get to my house through the alley. Nobody’ll notice us.”
So Katie did as he said, and twenty minutes later she was following Jackson Jones through the back door of a big white frame house that smelled of garlic and tomato sauce. Her stomach contracted painfully. She wondered if she’d dare to ask him for something to eat.
There was no one in the kitchen except a big, fluffy white cat, who lifted his head from a feeding dish.
“That’s Homer. He’s got a brother around somewhere. Henry,” Jackson Jones said. “Come on up the back stairs, and we’ll get my sleeping bag for you.”
They didn’t meet anyone, but somewhere in the distance Katie heard a TV playing, girlish voices giggling, and a male voice shouted, “Whoever took my tennis racket, bring it back!”
The stairs opened onto a second floor landing. From there Katie saw assorted bedrooms and a bathroom with a heap of towels on the floor.
“Wow,” Jackson Jones said. “If you want to use the bathroom tonight, maybe you better do it now. It isn’t very often empty.”
She hadn’t wanted to say it, but his suggestion was welcome. Katie used the bathroom while Jackson Jones got the sleeping bag, and then he hesitated. “I better get you some pajamas, too. I think Carol’s will fit you. Ma might think it’s funny if she sees you in the middle of the night in shorts when everybody else is wearing pajamas.”
He went into one of the bedrooms and brought back a pair of summer pajamas with a pink and white bunny print on them. They were pretty childish, but Katie thought they’d probably fit.
Just as they reached the head of the stairs—the front ones, this time—a tall, skinny boy came bounding up two steps at a time. He didn’t even look at Katie.
“Jackson Jones, did you snitch my tennis racket?”
“No. Where’s the rest of the slumber party? Aren’t they going to sleep in Dorothy’s room?”
“What, and keep the rest of us awake all night? No, Ma said they had to stay in the basement. Where the heck is my tennis racket?”
“Probably under your bed. If you get a shovel and clean it out, maybe you’ll find the racket.”
The boy pushed past them and Jackson Jones led the way downstairs. Katie caught a glimpse of Mr. and Mrs. Jones sitting in the living room, both with their feet up, watching TV. Mrs. Jones turned her head.
“Jackson Jones, I told you I wouldn’t keep supper hot past the regular time. You’ll have to eat it cold. I’m not going to be still serving and washing up all evening.”
“It’s OK, Ma. I like cold spaghetti,” Jackson Jones assured her. “All the rest of the kids downstairs?”
“Yes, and you tell Dorothy that they can make their final raid on the kitchen at eleven. After that, it’s lights out and quiet.”
“Sure, Ma.” Jackson Jones nudged Katie, who had not been at all sure that Mrs. Jones wouldn’t question her presence, and they went on through the house, back to the kitchen, and down the stairs to the basement.
The basement was really pretty nice. A big room that took up one whole end of it had been paneled in knotty pine, and there was a rust-colored carpet on the floor and a color television. What appeared to be about twenty giggling little girls were sprawled in sleeping bags, watching TV and eating. Nobody even looked up when Katie and Jackson Jones came down the stairs.
“Here’s a good place,” Jackson Jones said, spreading out the sleeping bag in a corner a little bit away from the others. “That’s my sister Dorothy over there, the one with her front teeth missing. If she asks who you are, say you’re a friend of Carol’s. That’s Carol over there, changing the channel. If she asks you, say you’re a friend of Dorothy’s. I don’t know if you’ll get any sleep, but at least you’re in off the street. Are you hungry?”
Katie admitted that she was.
“OK. I missed supper, too, having to go back to collect from Mr. Pollard. I’ll bring you something. Oh, there’s another bathroom over there, where you can put on your pajamas.”
Katie stood there for a moment, thinking surely someone would challenge her right to be there. Nobody paid any attention to her, though; they were flipping channels on the TV.
And then, suddenly, and to her horror, Katie saw her own face on the television screen.
12
IT WAS HER SCHOOL PICTURE from last year, the one her grandma had had framed for the top of the piano and had sent copies of to both Monica and her father. Now it stared out from the television screen, a small owllike face with horn-rimmed glasses. Katie wondered if she was going to throw up.
“We interrupt this program for a special bulletin,” the voice accompanying the picture said. “Katherine Joyce Welker, age nine, is missing. Anyone seeing this child please call the city police at . . .”
Katie didn’t hear the number. She clutched the borrowed pajamas against her chest and fled to the little bathroom beneath the stairs.
What could she do now? All those kids, and probably Mr. and Mrs. Jones upstairs, had seen her picture. The house that had seemed a refuge was now a trap.
She was standing there in the darkened bathroom with the door open when Jackson Jones came back downstairs. He was carrying a tray, and seeing that Katie was not sitting on the sleeping bag, he put down the tray and turned to find her behind him.
“What’s the matter?”
Katie beckoned to him with a finger before whispering the awful news. “They just had my picture on TV. They said to call the police if anyone saw me.”
&nb
sp; Jackson Jones whistled and looked at her with one blue eye and one green one. “Wow.” He frowned uneasily. “Maybe you better tell me. What did you do?”
“I didn’t do anything. They think I killed my grandma, though. They’re going to lock me up if I can’t prove I didn’t do it.”
Jackson Jones whistled again and glanced over his shoulder to make sure none of the little girls in the family room were paying any attention. “I thought you just needed a place to hide for one night. But I guess we’ll have to make some long-range plans tomorrow. Let me sleep on it, and I’ll see what I can think up.”
“You aren’t going to turn me in?” Katie asked.
“You didn’t do anything, did you? So why should I turn you in? There must be some way to prove you’re not a criminal.”
“But everybody out there saw my picture!”
“Wearing your glasses? Did the picture show you with glasses?”
“Yes. Just like I look now.”
“Take the glasses off, then.” He reached out and did it for her. “There. That makes you look different. Was your hair the same, too? Maybe you could braid it or something, to be different. Nobody will recognize you if you do that.”
So she tried it. Without her glasses, everything more than a foot away became fuzzy, as if she were peering through thick fog. It made her uneasy, not to be able to see very well, yet it was true she did look very different without the glasses. The braids she made weren’t especially neat, but they helped, too.
By the time she’d put on Carol Jones’s pajamas and come out of the bathroom, she was still nervous but she hoped that she didn’t look enough like the picture on the television so that anyone would recognize her before she could figure out what to do next.
Jackson Jones had brought her a plate with cold spaghetti, molded salad, a buttered roll, and some carrot sticks. Katie ate it sitting cross-legged on the sleeping bag, and when her stomach was full she felt better.
The little girls—there were only fifteen of them, when she took time to count—ran around and went past her, giggling, half a dozen times. No one took any particular notice of her, except that one girl passing around potato chips offered her the bowl. Katie took some and munched thoughtfully. Jackson Jones was right that none of them took her to be the girl who was wanted by the police. So probably it was safe to sleep here. But what was she going to do tomorrow, when all the giggling little girls went home?
During the evening Jackson Jones didn’t come back. He was still in the house, though, because twice Katie heard someone calling to him.
“Jackson Jones, shut that door!” and “Jackson Jones, you come out of that bathroom or I’m going to tell Ma!”
Katie wasn’t quite so lonesome, knowing he was upstairs somewhere.
Besides watching television and whispering and giggling a lot, the little girls at the slumber party ate. And although Katie’s sleeping bag was off in a dimly lighted corner, they brought her food, too. Apparently each of them thought she was part of the group, a guest of the Joneses even if none of them knew her.
They brought her soda pop and Twinkies and popcorn and, about ten o’clock, hot dogs fresh from the kitchen. Junk, her grandma would have called it, but it tasted good to Katie.
On the eleven o’clock news, her picture came on again. Somehow she hadn’t expected that, and Katie cringed, curling down inside the bag in case anyone looked at her to compare her with the girl on the screen.
No one was paying any attention, though. Dorothy Jones flicked the switch, and the picture of a fair-haired child with horn-rimmed glasses faded into blackness. “Let’s don’t watch TV any more,” she said. “Let’s tell stories. Ghost stories!”
Katie listened to the kids talk, feeling much older than they were, although most of them were no more than a year younger than she was. Ghost stories, told in whispers and dramatic voices, would have been fun, if she hadn’t been worrying so much about how she was going to elude the police forever. She’d read a story once about some kids who ran away and lived in a boxcar, all by themselves, but she didn’t know where there was a boxcar. Besides, she’d need money to buy food and things, and it was hard for a not-quite-ten-year-old to earn money.
At eleven-thirty, after a particularly loud shriek of pretended fear and then a flurry of laughter, a male voice yelled down the cellar stars. “OK, you kids, knock it off now! The rest of us gotta get some sleep!”
Gradually, the slumber party quieted down, and the kids dozed off. Katie did, too, because it had been a long, difficult day. But she continued to worry, even in her sleep.
She thought sure, in the morning, that someone would ask her who she was, but nobody did. All the girls slept late and woke to dress in summer clothes much like Katie’s, so she didn’t stand out that way. When they all trooped upstairs for breakfast, she decided to go along. She had intended to save her Twinkie for breakfast, in case she had to run again, but she’d rolled over on it during the night and it was pretty flat. Katie decided to stuff it in her pocket for an emergency, and see if Mrs. Jones would ignore her, too, in all that batch of kids.
She did. She was making pancakes for fifteen—no, sixteen—little girls, and was too busy to look at anyone’s face. Katie sat with the others around a big oval table and had sausages and pancakes with blueberry syrup and drank a tall glass of orange juice. She didn’t know what to do, though, when after breakfast the girls’ mothers began arriving to take them and their sleeping bags home.
She was, of course, the last one left. Jackson Jones hadn’t showed up, and Katie felt panic rising again within her. Mrs. Jones smiled at her. “Your mother’s not here yet? Would you like to sit on the front porch, in the swing, and wait for her? I think Dorothy and Carol are out there with Jenny Evans; you can wait there, too, if you like.”
Katie didn’t like, but she didn’t know how to refuse without calling further attention to herself. She was greatly relieved when she opened the front screen door to see Jackson Jones coming up the steps with his empty paper bag slung over his shoulder.
“Morning delivery on weekends,” he told her, easing the bag onto the porch. “Did you get some breakfast?”
Katie nodded. She wished she dared to put on her glasses; she had to squint to see without them. Carol and Dorothy and their last guest were out on the sidewalk, playing hopscotch, waiting for the final mother to arrive, so Katie and Jackson Jones could talk without being overheard.
He lowered his voice, anyway. “There’s a real ruckus at your place,” he said.
Katie’s heartbeat began to pick up speed.
“Your mother asked me if I’d seen you. She looked terrible, Katie. She’d been crying. Maybe you ought to let her know you’re all right.”
Katie’s throat felt tight. “If I let her know I’m all right, she’ll want me to come home. And then they’ll arrest me.”
“Mr. Cooper asked me if I’d seen you, too.”
“What did you tell him?”
“Said I’d seen you yesterday, and that I didn’t remember what time it was. That’s the truth. I don’t have a watch, and I didn’t look at a clock after we got home. And Mrs. Michaelmas asked about you, too.”
“I guess she must have told Mr. C. what I could do,” Katie said, and then belatedly remembered that Jackson Jones wasn’t aware of all those things.
“Boy, I wish I could do some magic,” Jackson Jones said. “Maybe Mr. Pollard would get so he’d pay the first time and save me all those times going back. What else can you do?”
“Not much,” Katie said sadly. “Not enough to get myself out of trouble. In fact, that’s what got me into trouble in the first place. I didn’t hurt anybody, but I guess it scares people when I move things without touching them, and some of them decided I was dangerous. They think I pushed Grandma Welker down the stairs, but I didn’t.”
“Anybody who’d think a thing like that would have to be pretty stupid,” Jackson Jones said. “Could you move that beer can somebody dropped in the
street?”
Katie turned and saw the silvery can lying in the gutter. She flipped it along, rolling, until it jumped the curb and landed beside a can that had been set out for the garbage collector.
“Hey, that’s neat.”
“Yeah. But it makes me different, and people don’t like kids who are different.”
Jackson Jones nodded. “I know. They make fun of my eyes. I don’t see what difference it makes, if one’s blue and one’s green. I can see out of both of them, and that’s what counts.”
“They make fun of you, but they aren’t afraid of you,” Katie said. “Mrs. M. says that’s why people are cruel, because they’re afraid of anybody who’s different.”
Jackson Jones sank down onto the top step. “I’m afraid I didn’t come up with any very good ideas overnight,” he confessed. “Even in this house, I couldn’t keep people from noticing you forever. Maybe you should at least talk to your mom on the phone. Maybe she can think of some way to keep them from arresting you. She can probably get a lawyer for you. They don’t put people in jail without a chance to talk to a lawyer.”
“What good would that do, unless the lawyer could convince them I didn’t hurt my grandma? And he wasn’t there—nobody was there—so how can I prove anything?” Katie sat down beside him, watching the other girls playing out in front. One of them had spotted the silvery beer can, and they were kicking it back and forth as if it were a ball. “Besides, I think they don’t have to let kids have lawyers, only grownups. There was a boy at our school who kept running away and setting fires, and they put him in juvenile detention center. He didn’t have a lawyer.”
“Well, at least your mom would feel better, knowing you aren’t hurt or anything. And Mrs. Michaelmas said to tell you she wants to talk to you, too, if I see you. The way she looked, I think maybe she knows I wasn’t telling quite all of the truth.”
Katie considered. “Maybe I could talk to her. If I talk to Monica, and she cries, she’ll make me feel worse than I do already, and it won’t do any good. I’m not going home if they’re going to arrest me and put me in jail.” She was so depressed she almost wished she would cry.
The Girl with the Silver Eyes Page 12