The Maypop Kidnapping

by C. M. Surrisi

  I escape to my table, open my laptop to work on my missing persons report, and watch from behind it. So much is happening, I can’t wait for Ben to get back to Maiden Rock after school. I send him a text message that says: Ms. Stillford missing. MR invaded by tattooed rockers.

  5

  The rockers from the Escalade order a ridiculous amount of food, which has Dad smiling from ear to ear. Mom must have been convinced that all was well, because she’s taken off for who knows where—probably to deliver the mail. Dad’s been running back and forth to the rocker table with second bowls of chowder and taking orders from some regulars who’ve come in for lunch. The regulars give the rockers hard looks.

  I take in reactions around the café, which are mostly a lot of eyebrow talk. I look from table to table until something on the floor in the corner catches my eye. When I move my head, it sparkles in the light. I get up and walk over to it.

  Ms. Stillford’s lobster pin! The one she wore yesterday. The one with ruby eyes and gold-tipped claws. I touch my cheek where it had pressed against me.

  She must have lost it yesterday at lunchtime, when I saw her, because she wasn’t here last night for dinner. At dinnertime, she was at home, cutting an apple and planning to eat a peanut butter sandwich.

  I set the pin on the table next to my computer, open a blank document, and make a list of everything I can remember: I saw her here at Gusty’s yesterday at noon. She was wearing her lobster pin. This morning, she missed the first day of school. There’s a cut brown apple on her counter, which must have been from last night’s dinner. Her mail from yesterday is still in her mailbox. Her bed is made like she didn’t sleep in it. The cat smells of tuna fish, like he’s been fed recently. Her phone is on the dining room table. The plants in the shed have been watered. Her car is in the garage.

  I know I’m “obsessing,” as Mom calls it—going over something again and again—but it calms me to write down everything I can remember. If Ms. Stillford doesn’t show up by dinnertime, I’ll print it out and give it to Mom as part of my official missing persons report. If Ms. Stillford shows up, I’ll let her read it. I imagine her laughing and saying, “Oh, my stars. I had no idea I caused such a stir. I’m so sorry. I got so busy thinking about cinnamon from Zanzibar that I went to the spice shop and forgot about school completely. So, so sorry.”

  I keep looking at my phone, hoping it will play Patsy Cline’s “Crazy.” That’s the ringtone Ms. Stillford uses on her phone, so I programmed it in my phone for when she calls me. Ben says it makes his ears bleed to listen to country—even ringtones. I’ve told him ten times that not everyone wants to listen to hip-hop.

  I can’t wait for him to show up. My phone vibrates with Ben’s thoughtful response to my horrific news: Shut up!

  * * *

  He doesn’t get to the café until 5:30 p.m. By that time, I’ve been back and forth between home and the café three times, and the rockers have come back for another Gusty’s Down East meal.

  “Did she say you couldn’t go in the house, near the house, or to the house?” Ben asks. He’s thrown his schoolbooks next to mine on the table.

  “I can’t remember exactly.” I think back to when I had my hand on the doorknob and Mom was warning me. “I think she said to the house, which really means in the house, right?”

  Ben looks at the rockers, who are sitting at the same table as before.

  “They’re goofy for Gusty’s,” I say. “They were here for lunch and now they’re here for dinner. They ate all the chowder, so I hope you want a BLT.”

  This time, the rockers are gorging on a lobster fries platter and Gusty burgers. They lick their fingers, smack their lips, and ooh and ahh over every lemony, buttery bite. They already ate one whole blueberry pie at lunch and told Dad to save them another one for dinner. Dad’s hovering over them with coffee refills like they might be restaurant critics in disguise.

  “I’d kinda go for that blue-haired girl,” Ben says and gives me a ya know nod.

  “Forget them. Pay attention. I’m telling you about Ms. Stillford.”

  Ben licks his thumb and wipes a smudge of dirt off the top of his running shoe. His wet hair curls at the nape of his neck. Cross country. He runs every day after school until the snow’s too thick to slog through. After his post-practice shower, he comes straight here, and I worry that he’s going to catch pneumonia.

  But not as much as I am worrying about Blythe Stillford right now.

  “Maybe she was abducted,” he says.

  “I think so too!” I squeal. “But by who?”

  “I don’t know. Aliens. They kidnap humans and subject them to complex physical and psychological testing.”

  “Puh-leez! Be serious.”

  “I am serious. This guy, Antonio Boas, was abducted in the 1950s, and nobody’s been able to prove he wasn’t, and scientists studied the snot out of him.”

  I slap his arm. “So, do you want to walk to her house with me?” I ask.

  “Sure.”

  “We won’t go in. We’ll just walk by it.” I convince myself that this is in compliance with whatever Mom said.

  “Let’s go. I’m ready.” He stands up, all long legs and arms, and digs his hands into his hoodie pockets.

  “Quinnie?” Dad calls from the kitchen. “Where’re you guys going?” I know immediately by his tone that Mom’s told him about her order.

  “We’re just going to walk around Circle Lane. Just to check. That’s all.” I feel a little like I am daring him to stop me.

  He hesitates for a second and then his shoulders relax. “Oh, that’s fine. Don’t go in the house—or in the yard. Okay, Quinnie?”

  I zip up my fleece so hard I catch the bandage on my palm. Ouch. “Okay.” He’s still looking at me. “Okay!” I say.

  “And don’t be gone long.” He looks at the rocker gang, then over to my and Ben’s computers and schoolbooks, and mouths, “I’ll watch your table.”

  The rockers look older than they did this afternoon, like maybe in their thirties or even older. And they look richer, maybe like real rock stars. The big guy raises his inked arm to us as we pass their table. He points his finger at Ben, and I notice he’s wearing a chunky ring on his pointer finger. A skull ring. Now I have a name for him: Skullfinger.

  “Yo, man,” Skullfinger says to Ben. “We’re headed for Rook River. You know it?”

  “It’s the next town up the coast,” Ben says. “On the other side of the channel, and on the other side of the river.”

  The whole rocker table thinks this is interesting. The blue-haired girl is combing her hair with her black fingernails.

  “So how do you get there from here?” Skullfinger says and licks butter off the side of his hand.

  “You’ve got to go back out to the main road,” Ben says.

  “Can’t drive up this way?” Skullfinger asks, jerking his thumb up Mile Stretch Road.

  “Nope,” I say. “It’s a peninsula.”

  Skullfinger pulls out his phone, taps Google Maps about ten times and squints. “That’s stupid. I figured there’d be, like, bridges or something.”

  I decide that I do not like these people even though they may be rock stars and even though they bought a ton of food.

  “You got, like, a lobster store in this town?” Skullfinger asks. His eyes are like black glass.

  “Lobster pound,” I say. I want to look at Ben like sheesh, but I’m a little afraid to.

  The blue-haired girl bumps Skullfinger with her elbow. “Hey, what are you gonna do with lobsters?”

  His eyes flash, and he turns snarly. He pokes his finger in her face. “Shut up, Bin. Nobody asked you. Maybe I’ll bring ’em back here and have this Gusty guy cook ’em up. You like the cooking all right, don’t ya? You can’t stop stuffing your face.”

  Tension sparks all over the room, and Ben and I are out the door in a nanosecond. The next thing I know, we’re in the parking lot, looking back in through the window.

  “Those guys
are drunk,” Ben says.

  “Or something,” I say. “You think we should leave Dad alone with them?”

  But before we can worry about that too much, Ben’s Uncle John drives up and gets out of his pickup. “Where’re you two going? Have you had dinner, Ben?” he asks.

  We look at each other. Why does everyone want to know where we’re going all the time?

  Ben’s Uncle John is so strict that he’s kind of mean to Ben, making rules and giving him limits all the time. Ben’s parents died in a car accident when he was two. Dad says Ben popped out of the crash strapped in his car seat, without a scratch on him. Ever since then, his uncle has been his guardian. Mom says John doesn’t know how to be a parent but he does the best he can.

  “We’re walking out to the point and back,” Ben says. “I have to work out my hamstrings a little more.” He shakes his leg like it has a cramp. “I’ll eat when I get back. Is that okay?”

  His uncle looks at his watch. “No more than thirty minutes.”

  “There’s no chowder left,” I say. “And I think Dad could use some company.”

  John Denby looks through the window at the rockers, then at the Escalade.

  “Got it,” he says, walks into Gusty’s, and calls to Dad, “Hey, Gus. I hope you got some chowder left.”

  I look at the Escalade and its dark tinted windows, and I have a crazy thought. What if Ms. Stillford is tied up in the back of that car?

  6

  “I’d stay away from that thing if I were you,” Ben says as I walk toward the black monstrosity. “It probably has an alarm.”

  “What if Ms. Stillford is in there?” I ask.

  “What possible reason could those guys have for kidnapping Ms. Stillford?”

  I know a criminal has to have a motive. I know that from being a sheriff’s daughter. A criminal needs motive, means, and opportunity. I look back through the window at the rockers. Trinka is fixing her lipstick. Bin is picking her teeth with her fingernail. The guy with Stevie tattooed on his arm is draining a cup of coffee. Skullfinger is staring blankly and chewing. Ben’s right. These goofballs have less reason to kidnap Ms. Stillford than an alien would.

  We walk toward the point. It’s not even six o’clock, and the sun is fading.

  Maiden Rock is at its worst in the week right after Labor Day. The beach houses look tired. From the road, you only see the backs of them. Back doors. Garage doors. Garbage bins overflowing with the summer people’s last loads of trash. Only the Woodsons’ place has fresh white paint. The rest of the houses are peeling like pale skin after a sunburn.

  I check my phone. No calls.

  I reach into my pocket and touch my rock.

  I open my mouth, but the words don’t come out right away.

  “I’m scared, Ben.”

  Then this boy I have known my whole life, who treats me like a cousin, but who I think I might want to marry when I grow up, does the sweetest thing. He grabs me around the neck like he’s applying a wrestling hold and says, “Aw, Q. It’ll be okay.”

  I feel a flush of heat on my face and I have a little hope that he’s right.

  “Where do you think she is?” I ask him.

  “It’s only, like, since this morning, right?”

  “Yeah, but it’s the first day of school.” I stop and grab his arm. “If you didn’t talk to your uncle all day, and he didn’t show up to pick you up at school, you’d worry, right?”

  He pauses for a second. “Yeah, I guess so.”

  We walk on in silence.

  “Look along the side of the road,” I say.

  “Why?”

  “Because she may have tripped and hit her head or something and, I don’t know, rolled in the bushes.”

  He looks at me like I’m dumb, which I hate. “If she fell on Mile Stretch Road or Circle Lane, she’d have to roll twenty feet to be out of sight.”

  Fine. The Ben I heart is gone, and Mr. Know-It-All is back. I say heart because I am not ready to say the L-word. Maybe Zoe is right. She says maybe I only heart him because he’s the only boy in town my age. But I don’t think so. There are boys around all summer long, every summer. There are city boys, rich boys, nice boys, fun boys, boys who any girl would call cute. Yet I heart Ben, even though he is clueless . . . and even though sometimes he really makes me mad. Like right at this very moment, when he treats me like I’m dumb and takes off jogging.

  “Where are you going?” I call after him.

  “To look around.”

  “We can’t go in.”

  “No. You can’t go in.”

  “Don’t touch anything!” I yell. “It could be evidence!”

  I start running after him. I run past the locked and chained Maiden Rock Yacht Club, past Loney’s Lobster Pound (“All Sales Final”), by the boarded-up Miss Wickham’s Bed & Breakfast, by the closed-for-the-winter Bradford’s Grocery, past the practically dollhouse-sized post office. I’m panting when I reach Ms. Stillford’s driveway. He’s not there.

  “Ben!”

  I listen intently but hear only gull calls and thrashing branches. It’s getting colder. I pull up my hood and scoop in hair that by now looks like a tangled ball of twine.

  “Bennnnn!” I yell into the wind.

  I pace at the entrance to Ms. Stillford’s driveway. What is he doing? What is he finding? He knows how much I hate waiting.

  Back and forth. Back and forth.

  Zzzzzt. Zzzzzt. My phone vibrates in my pocket then bursts into “Get Low,” one of Ben’s all-time favorites—a classic, according to him.

  “Ben! Where are you?”

  “Jeez, you’re welcome.” I hear the wind blowing through his phone.

  “Why? What?”

  “I crawled out over the edge of the cliff to see if she fell off and cracked her head on the rocks,” Ben says.

  “What! That’s crazy unsafe!”

  “Yeah, well, no dead Ms. Stillford down there.”

  It sounds like he’s running, and then the phone goes dead. I hate this. What’s happening now? I just about decide to go after him when he jogs out of the shadows.

  His knees and shins are smudged gray-brown. He brushes dirt off his shoes.

  Anger and relief swirl inside me, but all that comes out is, “Were there any lights on in her house?”

  “Nah, it was dark,” he says. “I think. But I mostly checked the cliff.”

  Really? I want to scream that the whole purpose of him going down there was to check out the house, but I tell myself to be glad he eliminated the most unlikely possibility—that she fell. I’m thinking I should go down the driveway myself to see if there is any sign she’s at home.

  Now Ben’s jumping around like he’s cold.

  “I’m starving,” he says.

  “Can you wait two seconds?”

  “I already told you she didn’t go over the cliff.”

  “Ben!”

  Sometimes I do not understand how his mind works.

  “My uncle’s gonna wonder where we are.”

  I stare down Ms. Stillford’s driveway.

  “Uh oh.” Ben stands still and looks over my shoulder.

  I spin around. The sheriff’s cruiser crunches gravel as it approaches. It rolls up to us, flashers on, and stops. I’d like to dive into the bushes, but Mom’s obviously seen me, so I stand up straight and take a deep breath. The driver’s window powers down, and she locks eyes with me.

  Nobody says anything until I crack. “I didn’t go past the mailbox.”

  She shifts her gaze to Ben. “Get in the backseat. Both of you.”

  Riding in the back of the police cruiser, where Mom puts criminals and suspects, is humiliating even in an empty town.

  She doesn’t give me the how-disappointed-I-am lecture. But I know by the look in her eyes in the rearview mirror. From across the chain-mesh seat divider, she suspects me of pressuring Ben into going to the house. I decide this is not a good time to bring up my plan to file an official missing persons report.
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  * * *

  That night, I stare out my bedroom window. I can see whitecaps even at night, with the help of the moonlight and the lights from the convent up the beach. I wait for the whispering of the surf to offer me an explanation for what’s happening. I get nothing. When I was little and stayed overnight at Ms. Stillford’s, sleeping in the blue guest room that faced the ocean, she would put her finger to her lips and say, “Listen, Quinnie. It’s like the ocean is saying shsssssh . . . It’s telling us to go to sleep.”

  But I can’t go to sleep tonight. I open my computer and add to my list of facts: Didn’t fall off, jump off, or get pushed off the Maiden Rock cliff.

  Then I decide my report needs an opening statement. I look up “missing persons reports” on the Internet, and using one as a model, I start typing:

  Blythe Stillford, age 60, of Maiden Rock failed to appear for a breakfast meeting on Friday morning, September 12th, at Gusty’s Café. A visit to her residence showed signs of suspicious activity.

  I practice the rule that Ms. Stillford taught me of letting it rest for a couple hours or overnight, so I leave the report as a draft and plan to get up really early tomorrow. If she hasn’t called, I’ll finalize it. But before I even log out of the computer, I read through the whole thing again, and soon I am sniffing and wiping my nose on my pajama top. I try to sleep, but her face keeps pushing to the front of my mind. I keep saying over and over like a chant, “Ms. Stillford, please be safe. Ms. Stillford, please be safe. Ms. Stillford, please be safe.”

  7

  My eyes pop open at 5:35 a.m. the next morning. I have a mark on my cheek from falling asleep on my phone—which I check immediately. No messages.

  I know Dad is already rolling out cinnamon buns at the café by now, but Mom is still in bed snoring like a walrus—that’s how Dad describes it. If Ms. Stillford heard me repeat this, she’d say, “Interesting. I wonder if walruses actually snore. Quinnie?” And I’d research it on the Internet and tell her they do, and she’d say. “Fascinating. Thank you for that, my dear.”