by Peg Kehret
THUNK! The ball hit Denny hard, at the base of his neck.
Denny cried out in pain. He dropped the gun, fell to his knees, and clutched his neck with both hands. The gun landed on the deck and slid toward Bonnie.
Bonnie leaped over the mesh rope, rushed forward, and grabbed the gun. She turned toward the back of the ferry and flung the gun as hard as she could. It sailed over the mesh rope, far beyond the end of the boat, and splashed into the water.
“Run!” Bonnie yelled at Matt, but he was already halfway up the stairs, screaming for help.
Bonnie jumped over the yellow rope as Denny straightened up. He lunged for her and caught her by the ankle. She fell forward, getting slivers in her palms when she landed on the wooden deck. Bonnie kicked, struggling to get away from his grasp. His fingers dug in, bruising her skin.
With his weapon gone, she wasn’t afraid of him any longer, and she fought with all her might, but he was too strong for her. He got to his feet, then grabbed her arms and yanked her upright.
“Help!” she shouted. “Help!”
Footsteps thundered down the stairs.
“That’s him!” Matt yelled. “He has a gun!”
Denny clamped his hand across Bonnie’s mouth and held her arms behind her so that it looked as if he still had the gun pressed to her back.
“Stop where you are,” Denny said, “or the girl won’t leave this boat alive.”
The ferry workers and passengers who had followed Matt down the stairs stopped. For a moment no one moved or spoke.
“Who are you?” a man asked. “What do you want?”
Bonnie heard Denny’s rapid breathing, smelled his fear, felt his fingers pressing against her lips.
“He’s going to shoot her,” Matt sobbed. “He’s going to kill my sister!”
Bonnie forced her mouth open as wide as she could, then bit down hard on Denny’s middle finger.
“Hey!” he said, and moved his hand just enough that Bonnie could speak.
“The gun’s gone!” she yelled. “I threw it overboard!”
The adults surged forward, quickly overpowered Denny, and dragged him away from Bonnie. Two ferry workers pushed him facedown on the deck, then held his arms behind his back as the others reached for Bonnie.
Several voices spoke at once.
“Are you all right?”
“Did he hurt you?”
“Do you need a doctor?”
“I’m okay,” she said, but her knees shook as she was led upstairs.
Bonnie and Matt were taken to a room marked PRIVATE. CREW ONLY. There they told the ferry captain and other workers what had happened.
The captain notified police on Bainbridge Island. “The police will board the ferry as soon as we dock,” he told the children, “and take Denny Thurman into custody.”
Next he let Bonnie call her mother.
“Hi, Mom,” Bonnie said. “I’m okay, and so is Matt. We’ll be home soon.” Her mother, of course, had a hundred questions, so the conversation took a while. Then Matt wanted a turn to talk. By the time they finished, the ferry was docking.
No passengers or vehicles were allowed to leave until the police had boarded. A few minutes later Bonnie and Matt saw Denny get led to a waiting police car, his wrists handcuffed behind him.
Tears of relief trickled down Bonnie’s cheeks as she watched. At last, the ordeal was over.
As the police car drove away, Matt said, “I always thought it would be cool if my dad showed up, but it wasn’t. I don’t like him. He’s a mean, rotten picklepuss, and I wish I didn’t have a dad.”
Bonnie put an arm around Matt’s shoulder. She’d spent years feeling cheated because her dad was gone, but she knew she was luckier than Matt. Her father was dead, but she had memories of a kind man, an honorable man who died a hero.
Matt would remember Denny.
Hard as it was to be without her dad, Bonnie still had pride in him. Matt would never have that.
“When you grow up,” she told Matt, “you’ll be a good man. You won’t be anything like Denny.”
“How do you know?”
“Because you’re a good kid now. How you act is way more important than who your parents are.”
“I’ll act like Mom,” Matt said, “and you.”
A police boat docked next to the ferry, and two officers came aboard for Bonnie and Matt. “You get a private boat ride back to Seattle,” one of them said. “It will be faster, and you can tell us what happened while we travel.”
Officer Calvin met them in Seattle and drove them home while they told their story again.
A crowd of reporters and neighbors had gathered to welcome them. When Bonnie and Matt got out of the squad car, a cheer went up. Mrs. Sholter ran to greet them, followed by their grandparents, Detective Morrison, and Pookie. Pookie yipped and ran in circles around Matt.
Officer Calvin gave a statement to the reporters. Matt was declared a hero for bonking Denny with the baseball, and Bonnie was credited with being the brains behind the scheme.
Before they all went inside, Bonnie and Matt answered questions from the press and posed for more pictures.
One of the ferry workers had retrieved the Mariners ball for Matt, and he clutched it happily, demonstrating to the reporters exactly how he’d held it and how he wound up to throw his “zinger.”
Matt and Bonnie’s safe return topped the news on every local channel Saturday night. Throughout the Northwest, television sets showed the missing boy and his sister reunited with their mother.
Bonnie, Matt, their mom, and their grandparents watched the reports together while they ate the macaroni-and-cheese that Stanley’s dad had brought a week earlier. Mrs. Sholter had taken it out of the freezer as soon as she learned Matt and Bonnie were safe.
Pookie snoozed through the broadcast, even the part about him.
In a downtown apartment, Miss Clueless took off her banner, her red evening gown, and her high heels. Wearing her comfy flannel bathrobe, she munched on salted peanuts as she turned on the TV.
Her jaw dropped in disbelief when she saw Denny in handcuffs being led from a squad car to the police station. That was the cranky man with the kids who had used the bathroom at the restaurant!
She stared at the TV screen, remembering how restless and angry the man had been, and how he’d rushed out of the restaurant when he learned his kids weren’t in the bathroom.
A chill went up her arms as she recalled the red-haired woman who had reported the writing on the mirror. She had shrugged the woman off, positive the message was written by someone trying to send the other guests down the wrong path.
She tried to think exactly what the message had said. At the time she had only paid attention to removing it, not to the words themselves.
There had been names: Bonnie and Matt and Denny—the same names now being mentioned on the news.
Guilt spoiled Miss Clueless’s appetite as she remembered her actions. She set down the dish of peanuts. Those poor children! They might have been killed because of her.
Across Lake Washington, a woman in Bellevue saw the news, grabbed the phone, and dialed her friend. “Shelly!” she said, when the friend answered. “That girl in the bathroom who asked us to help her wasn’t an actress!”
“What?” the friend said. “How do you know?”
“Turn on your TV,” the woman said. “The girl had been abducted at gunpoint! Her brother, too!”
“You’re kidding,” said Shelly.
“I wish I were.”
South of Seattle, in Kent, Eddie Gilden, the teenage driver who had stopped to talk to Bonnie and Matt, was eating lemon pie with his parents when he saw the reports.
Those kids in the street were telling the truth, Eddie realized. I could have saved them, but I drove off and left them with their kidnapper.
Eddie put down his fork, remembering how the girl had begged him to help. He and his pals had debated whether to look for a police officer and tell what had happened. “I
don’t think we should get involved,” Eddie had said.
“Neither do I,” the boy in back said. “That guy looked mean. He might remember your license plate and track you down.”
“If he’s mean,” the third boy said, “maybe the girl gave us the straight story. We should tell the cops about those kids and let them decide what to do.”
In the end, the three boys drove home without disclosing the incident to anyone.
As he watched the news report, Eddie said nothing to his parents. He couldn’t bring himself to call the other boys who had been in his car, to see if they’d seen the news. If he avoided them for a few days, maybe nobody would mention the two children who had pleaded for a ride.
The ticket seller at the ferry terminal was driving home from work when she heard the news on the radio. She gasped when she heard Bonnie’s voice describing what had happened on the ferry. The girl said she’d tried to alert the ticket person, but the woman didn’t understand.
That isn’t true, the woman thought. I knew exactly what the girl meant, making her fingers into a pretend gun and all, but I didn’t think it was for real.
She had watched the man and the two kids walk away; nothing in their manner seemed out of the ordinary. The man even put his arm around the girl’s shoulder, like a loving father. She considered dialing 911, but then other customers came to buy tickets, and by the time she had a free moment again, she had convinced herself that the girl had merely been playing a joke. She never made the call.
With a lump in her throat, she listened to the rest of the radio report. Those children needed my help, she thought, and I turned away.
In their tidy home near Pine Lake, Ruth and Fred Faulkner cheered when they heard Matt and Bonnie were both safely home. They cheered again when the news coverage showed Matt running to his mother’s arms. They cheered even louder when the camera zoomed in on Matt hugging Pookie.
“There’s Monty!” Fred said.
“Oh, he looks so happy,” Ruth said. “See how his tail is wagging? He’s glad to see that boy again.” She wiped tears from her cheeks.
Detective Morrison went off duty and got home in time to watch the ten o’clock news with her husband. She missed part of what Bonnie said because Spike, who was also off duty, kept playing with his loudest squeaky toy. Detective Morrison didn’t mind. She’d heard it all in person and she figured Spike deserved some playtime.
One reporter interviewed the kidnapper’s sister. Detective Morrison held Spike’s toy so she could hear that part.
“I didn’t know Denny had a child,” Celia said. “He never told me. He’s mentally unstable and blames others for all his troubles. I’ve tried to get him into treatment, but he would never go. I apologize to the Sholter family for my brother’s behavior.”
“Apologies aren’t going to be enough,” Detective Morrison said. “The prosecutor will throw the book at Denny Thurman.”
“Woof!” said Spike, and got his toy back.
The next afternoon, Mrs. Sholter baked three loaves of her special banana bread and took them to the police station where Detective Morrison and Officer Calvin worked.
“Here’s a treat for all the officers who helped me get my children back safely,” she said. She also took a large rawhide bone for Spike.
At two o’clock, the teachers from Jefferson School joyfully hit the streets, taking down the MATT IS MISSING posters.
Fred and Ruth Faulkner drove to the humane society Sunday afternoon. Faces aglow, they announced, “We’re here to adopt a dog.”
They didn’t get one, though. They got two. When they found two older dogs who had lived together since they were puppies, Ruth and Fred couldn’t bear to split them up.
“Old dogs are harder to place,” a humane society worker told them. “Everyone wants a cute little puppy.”
“Nothing wrong with getting old,” Fred said.
“We’ll each have a dog to walk,” Ruth said. “It’ll be good for our arthritis.”
“That’s right,” Fred agreed, “and we’ll never sit around getting bored with ourselves.”
Matt and Bonnie spent Sunday afternoon playing cards with their grandparents and talking about their adventure to the many friends who called or stopped over.
“I shouldn’t have believed Denny,” Matt told Stanley. “Even after I saw Pookie in his car, I should have run back to class and told Mrs. Jules what Denny said.”
“Bad guys lie,” Stanley said.
“I should have screamed my head off,” Matt said.
After the visitors left, Grandma and Grandpa decided to pack for their flight home the next day.
When Bonnie asked Matt if he wanted to practice his pitching, his smile would have lit up Safeco Field.
Bonnie crouched next to the garage and caught the balls Matt threw to her. After a few warm-up tosses, she called, “Give me a zinger!”
The two children grinned at each other. They both knew that for the rest of their lives, the word ZINGER would be a special bond between them.
How could I ever have wished for a sister instead of Matt? Bonnie wondered as the fastball streaked into her glove. She decided to buy him a “welcome home” present—a whole quart of strawberry ice cream, all for Matt.
On Monday in PE, Nancy said, “Last night I dreamed I jumped on a magical trampoline and bounced through a hole in the clouds. I think it means my life is dull and I’m searching for excitement.”
“I think it means you should write fiction,” Bonnie said. “Nobody has dreams like yours.”
This time, talk of dreams didn’t bother Bonnie. With her brother safe, she had slept soundly Saturday night and again Sunday night.
“Do you want to go to the mall with me and Sharon after school?” Nancy asked.
“I can’t,” Bonnie said. “Mom went back to work today, so I have to go home.”
“Lucky you.”
Yes, Bonnie thought. Lucky me. I get to ride the bus home with my brother, and pet Pookie, and catch the baseball while Matt practices his pitching.
She could hardly wait for two thirty-six.
Author Q&A
1. What inspired the novel?
One of my neighbors is a police officer. Before the Amber Alert system went into effect, I talked to him about it and he mentioned that many abducted children have been correctly taught what to do or not to do, but they get tricked into doing the wrong thing. I decided to write about this in the hope that kids would think twice when approached by someone they weren’t expecting and asked to go somewhere with that person.
2. What interesting facts did you learn while writing this book?
I was chagrined to learn how many missing children there are and surprised to find out what a high percentage of abducted children are taken by a relative. Soon after I finished the book, the Amber Alert system was adopted, which made me very happy.
As part of my research, I rode a Washington State ferry from Seattle to Bremerton. I pretended to be Bonnie. My husband took pictures of me standing next to the rope that Bonnie steps over.
3. Was it difficult to write about such a bad person?
I seem to be good at creating bad guys! Sometimes I scare myself when I’m writing.
In my first draft, the abductor’s name was Perry, but while I was revising the book I made a new friend—a librarian named Perry—so I changed my villain’s name to Denny.
Discussion Guide
• Why does Denny want to take Matt? Does he really want to be a parent? Why or why not?
• What are some interesting facts you learned while reading this book? What would you do if a kid went missing in your neighborhood?
• What does Bonnie do to try to help? What clues does she find? How would you feel if you were in her situation?
• Several strangers had the opportunity to help the kids but they didn’t. Why do people sometimes ignore the pleas of others? Would you have reacted differently? Will this book change your actions in the future? How?
&
nbsp; • Predict what Matt would do if someone tried to take him again. How do you think he’s been changed by this experience?
• What was your favorite scene in the book? Why? What do you like best about the author’s style of writing?
• Which character is your favorite in the book? Why?