Sammy Keyes and the Kiss Goodbye
Page 1
Other Favorites by Wendelin Van Draanen
Sammy Keyes and the Hotel Thief
Sammy Keyes and the Skeleton Man
Sammy Keyes and the Sisters of Mercy
Sammy Keyes and the Runaway Elf
Sammy Keyes and the Curse of Moustache Mary
Sammy Keyes and the Hollywood Mummy
Sammy Keyes and the Search for Snake Eyes
Sammy Keyes and the Art of Deception
Sammy Keyes and the Psycho Kitty Queen
Sammy Keyes and the Dead Giveaway
Sammy Keyes and the Wild Things
Sammy Keyes and the Cold Hard Cash
Sammy Keyes and the Wedding Crasher
Sammy Keyes and the Night of Skulls
Sammy Keyes and the Power of Justice Jack
Sammy Keyes and the Showdown in Sin City
Sammy Keyes and the Killer Cruise
How I Survived Being a Girl
Flipped
Swear to Howdy
Runaway
Confessions of a Serial Kisser
The Running Dream
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2014 by Wendelin Van Draanen
Jacket art and illustrations copyright © 2014 by Dan Yaccarino
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.
Visit us on the Web! randomhouse.com/kids
Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: Alfred Publishing: Excerpt from “The Teddy Bears’ Picnic,” words by Jimmy Kennedy, music by John W. Bratton, copyright © 1947 (Renewed) by WB Music Corp. and EMI Music Publishing LTD. All rights administered by WB Music Corp. Reprinted by permission of Alfred Publishing.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Van Draanen, Wendelin.
Sammy Keyes and the kiss goodbye / Wendelin Van Draanen.
p. cm.
Summary: Sammy Keyes has spent the last few years solving other people’s mysteries; now her friends (and some foes) come together to unmask the fiend who has put Sammy in a coma.
ISBN 978-0-375-87055-2 (trade) — ISBN 978-0-375-97055-9 (lib. bdg.)
ISBN 978-0-307-97410-5 (ebook) — ISBN 978-0-307-93063-7 (pbk.)
[1. Mystery and detective stories. 2. Friendship—Fiction. 3. Coma—Fiction.
4. Conduct of life—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.V2857Safq 2014
[Fic]—dc23
2013039890
Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.
v3.1
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
A Warning from Wendelin
1—Wednesday Night
2—The Swinging Door of (Maybe) Death
3—Night Shift
4—Tracing Footsteps
5—Prayers
6—Ditchers
7—Visitors
8—Rankled
9—Odd Ducks
10—A Menagerie
11—Teddy Bears
12—Dirty Laundry
13—Ribbons
14—The Decision
15—Billy
16—Blackmail
17—Lana
18—The Rotation
19—Ohio?
20—The Plea
21—Dusty Mike
22—The Acostas (And the Pig)
23—Fairy-Tale Fantasy
24—Banished
25—Annihilating Innocence
26—The Chase
Goodbye
A WARNING FROM WENDELIN
Let me start by saying I’m sorry.
I know you were expecting Sammy.
I know you were looking forward to her telling you all about some madcap escapade that had her braving shortcuts or snooping through basements or ditching bad guys.
Or cops.
I know you’re here to laugh and race along with her as she gets into scrapes and trouble and finally finds her way back home.
She would be here if she could, but … she can’t. And since everyone else is either too busy trying to help or having too much trouble dealing to let you know what’s going on, you’re stuck with me.
I’m having a lot of trouble, too, believe me. But I thought you should know. As hard as it is to hear, as much as it hurts to tell, you deserve to know what’s happened to Sammy Keyes.
1—WEDNESDAY NIGHT
Holly is the one who found her.
There was a lot of screaming.
And crying.
And as we all know, Holly is not a screamer. Or a crier. But afterward people said that her wails surely woke the dead.
Unfortunately, they did not wake Sammy Keyes.
Holly saw the whole thing—or, at least, parts of the whole thing—and when Sergeant Borsch found that out, he became relentless. (Or, as Sammy would have said, like a dog with a bone.)
“From the beginning,” he commanded Holly as he pulled her into a chair in the emergency room. “Every detail.”
Despite his tough-cop exterior, Sergeant Gilbert Borsch was, at the moment, a gun-slinging puddle of misery, his face etched deep with a single burning question:
Who did this?
(Well, there were other questions forming lines among those already present from years on the force—questions like Why? and When? and Where? and How? But the deepest, most painful crease was caused by the fiery rage of Who?)
Holly wasn’t focused on Sergeant Borsch or his topographic face. She stared instead at the door through which Sammy’s stretcher had been wheeled, and whimpered, “Is she going to be all right?”
Sergeant Borsch sucked on a tooth (an infamous habit cultivated before his doctor had suggested he quit with the pastrami and take up with turkey). Then he gruffed, “I’m not a doctor,” which was cop code for No, or Probably not, or Don’t get your hopes up—the latter being something Sergeant Borsch had learned was safer for his heart than optimism.
Or, regrettably, pastrami.
But suddenly Holly’s adoptive mother, Meg Talbrook, was blasting through the door, wrapping Holly in her arms as she panted out incoherent phrases and fragmented clauses and hopelessly dangling modifiers.
And since Meg was a dog groomer, which was just thiiiis far away from being a veterinarian, which (as everyone suspects but won’t actually say) is just thiiiis far away from being a doctor, and since there were, at that time, no doctors in attendance, Holly looked at her mother with desperate puppy-dog eyes and begged, “Tell me she’s going to be all right.”
The fragmented clauses suddenly ceased, Meg’s shoulders squared back, and her solid frame jelled into a protective barrier between her daughter and reality. Then she held her daughter’s face in her hands and lied with the unwavering conviction only a parent in crisis can muster. “She’s going to be fine.”
“It’s bad, Mom. There was a lot of blood. She wouldn’t wake up. She wouldn’t … she was just …”
“Who are we dealing with here, hmm?”
Meg asked, sitting beside her. “Have you ever known anyone to get the better of Sammy?” She lifted Holly’s chin. “She was breathing, right? Her heart was beating, right?”
“I don’t know! They put a mask on her and stuck tubes in her and told me to stay back.”
Meg cast a wary eye on Sergeant Borsch, silently asking what he might know of the situation, but the best the Borschman could seem to do was, “She wasn’t under a white sheet. That’s all I know.”
“Don’t you have connections?” Meg whispered. “Can’t you find out?”
“They’ll come out when they know something,” the lawman stated. “That’s how this works. Me demanding information is gonna get us nothin’ but stonewalled. What I need to find out, ma’am, is who did this. That’s my job, and I really need your daughter’s cooperation.”
Meg turned to Holly, who looked down to collect her thoughts, but instead got caught up thinking about her shoes.
They were high-tops, just like Sammy’s.
It used to be just Sammy who wore high-tops, but now a lot of kids at William Rose Junior High did. Even (to the administration’s chagrin) some of the teachers. It was just one of those things. Something Sammy had started, not by trying, but by just standing up and being.
“Holly?” Sergeant Borsch rasped. “Holly, please.”
But instead of coming out with who, what, where, when, or why, what Holly said was, “She saved my life, you know. That time at the riverbed? When that creep was coming after me? She took him down with her umbrella.”
“That big black thing?” Meg asked. “You never told me that!”
“Please,” Sergeant Borsch said again, desperate for them to discuss the past in the future, not now, when he was trying to deal with the present.
Holly took a deep, choppy breath, held it for a moment, then said, “She was on her way home—”
“Home?” Sergeant Borsch asked. “But that makes no sense! This happened at the Highrise!”
As you’re probably aware, Sergeant Borsch is not known for his tact or his patience. And although he is a more tactful and patient man now than he was as a streetbeat officer when Sammy first met him, these characteristics would need major work should he ever aspire to reach the rank of lieutenant. Or captain. Or (pray for the City of Santa Martina) chief.
So it came as no surprise to Holly that after just one short sentence Sergeant Borsch had already interrupted her, but Meg was not so accustomed to the lawman’s brusque ways. “The girls had been studying for exams,” she began.
“At the Pup Parlor?” Sergeant Borsch interjected, again interrupting after a single sentence.
“At our apartment above the business,” Meg said. “It was after nine and dark outside. I was heading off to take a shower before bed and told Sammy she should get home before her grandmother began to worry.”
“But her grandmother no longer lives in the Highrise!”
Sergeant Borsch’s confusion was understandable. Not so long ago Sammy had lived illegally with her grandmother on the fifth floor of Santa Martina’s only government-subsidized housing for seniors—the Senior Highrise (clearly named in a moment of unrivaled creative genius).
And although the secret of Sammy’s residence had never been openly discussed, the Borschman had figured it out and immediately wished he hadn’t. How could he let this girl continue to sneak up and down the fire escape and sleep on her grandmother’s couch when doing so was against the law?
It was the first time in his career that Officer Borsch had consciously looked the other way, convincing himself that there were bigger wrongs in this world than a kid sleeping on an old lady’s couch.
Still, no one was more relieved than Gil Borsch when Sammy’s grandmother married the straight-shooting Hudson Graham, and the lawbreakers and their cat took up legal residence with the septuagenarian on Cypress Street.
But that move had occurred months earlier, which is why (despite his abrasive demeanor and propensity for interruption) it was legitimate for an investigating officer to ask, “What was Sammy doing at the Highrise?”
And ask it he did.
Holly’s head quivered side to side. “She said something about the Nightie-Napper.”
The creases in Sergeant Borsch’s face deepened. Especially the ones above and between his eyebrows. Entire rivers could have coursed through them without hazarding overflow. “The Nightie-Napper?”
Holly nodded. “It bugged her that she never figured out who the Nightie-Napper was.”
“So this … this Nightie-Napper did this to her?”
“No!” Holly’s head quivering resumed. “At least I don’t think so!”
Again, it was Meg who came to the rescue. “Holly, sweetheart,” she said with a soothing voice, “we don’t understand what you’re talking about. Explain what a nightie-napper is.”
“The Nightie-Napper has been stealing stuff out of the dryers in the basement at the Highrise. They’ve been doing it for a long time.”
“Stuff?” Meg prompted. “Like … nightgowns?”
Holly shrugged. “And muumuus.”
“Muumuus,” Sergeant Borsch moaned. “What has this—”
Since Meg was a woman of both internal and external substance, it took a simple STOP hand signal for her to shut him down. Then she continued coaxing information from her obviously traumatized daughter. “Is the Nightie-Napper someone you think might try to kill a fourteen-year-old girl?”
Holly’s eyes pinched closed. “The Nightie-Napper doesn’t have anything to do with this!”
Sergeant Borsch’s hands flew skyward. “Then why are you—”
STOP went Meg’s hand again. And like a Rottweiler warning off an intruder, she locked eyes with him and bared her teeth ever so slightly as she growled, “She’ll get to it.”
And after a little head bobbing and recollecting and sorting and thinking, Holly did indeed get to it. “Sammy talked about the Nightie-Napper. She also wondered if her gum was still in the fire-escape doorjamb. She was trying to picture what the new neighbor was like. Her name’s Violet, and Sammy thought that was strange.”
“Why strange?” Meg asked, but then with a laugh she got it. “Oh! First Daisy, then Rose, now Violet!”
“Exactly.” Holly took a deep breath, then continued. “It seemed like she missed the place. I told her she should take me there someday, because I’d never been inside, and after all the stories she’d told, I really wanted to sneak up the fire escape and peek down the hallway and hide out in the basement and maybe catch the Nightie-Napper red-handed.”
Now, an ordinary parent might have filed this particular conversation away in her mental To Be Discussed folder, but Meg was no ordinary parent. She had taken the runaway Holly in, saving her from a life of homelessness, and no sleuthing adventure through a seniors building would (or could) come close to the dangers Holly had already faced.
Besides, this wasn’t about going places you shouldn’t.
This was about Sammy.
So Meg simply waited for Holly to continue, needing to employ only one STOP signal to quell Sergeant Borsch’s questions before Holly’s focus returned.
“After she left, I watched her through the window. She rode her skateboard up to Main Street and crossed Broadway. Only when she got to the other side, she didn’t cross again and go toward Hudson’s the way she always does. She just stood looking over at the Highrise for a little while. Then she rode down Main and disappeared into the bushes like she used to when she lived at the Highrise.”
Meg asked her daughter a question that Gil Borsch would never in a million years have thought to ask: “Did that upset you?”
Holly’s head bobbed. “Yes! I’d just talked to her about wanting to go there with her—why couldn’t she wait for sometime when I could go, too?”
“So you watched to see if she really was going up the fire escape?”
“Yes! And she did! And at first I was really mad!”
“But then?”
&nb
sp; “But then I saw someone start up the stairs after her.”
“And …?”
“And … and they were moving fast. Like they were chasing her. I called her cell phone to warn her, but her phone started ringing in our kitchen! So I opened the window and yelled for her to watch out, but that was hopeless because of the traffic. And then there was a big struggle and I saw Sammy fall off the fire escape.” Holly’s eyes welled with tears. “It was the third floor, Mom. Nobody can survive that.”
“There were bushes,” Meg assured her.
Even in that moment Holly recognized the irony of Meg’s statement. Bushes had been a big part of Sammy’s duck-and-cover routine. Bushes had concealed her from foes and cops alike. Bushes had been her primary spy spot, and once again, she had landed in them.
Only this wasn’t funny.
Not funny at all.
But pondering the irony of bushes provided a silence and, consequently, a long-awaited entry into the conversation for Sergeant Borsch. “How would you describe this person who followed Sammy up the stairs?” he asked. “Tall? Short? Thin? Hefty?”
Holly thought a moment, then shook her head. “Kind of medium.”
If there’s one answer Sergeant Borsch has been known to ridicule, it’s “kind of medium.” But this time it didn’t seem to even register on his finely calibrated annoyance meter, and he just went on. “Man? Woman?”
Holly hesitated. “I figured it was a man, but … but … I guess it could have been a woman.”
“Hair? Clothing?”
“It was dark! I don’t know!”
“Where did the assailant go? Up? Down?”
“I don’t know! I saw Sammy fall and I screamed and called 911!”
“How’d you know it was Sammy falling and not the other person?”
“Her backpack! She was wearing her backpack!”
The three of them sat there, Holly in tears, Meg trying to comfort her, and Sergeant Borsch numbed to the core.
He had nothing.
Nothing to work with.
Not a single clue.
2—THE SWINGING DOOR OF (MAYBE) DEATH
News travels fast in the digital age, and not long after Holly smacked Sergeant Borsch with the one-two punch of Don’t Know and Not Sure, teenagers started coming through the emergency-room door.