The Secret of Rover

by Rachel Wildavsky

  But Katie did not walk toward the house. Instead she lifted her chin and straightened her shoulders so that she stood very tall.

  “I want them to notice,” she said with composure. The tears had not yet dried on her face, but her voice was strong and clear. She marched across the sidewalk to the SUV, peered into the rear passenger window, and rapped smartly on the glass. Then she stepped back and waited.

  There was a brief pause. Then the door opened. Inside was Trixie. The familiar oily smile slid around on her face on its slick coat of syrup.

  To their astonishment, Trixie opened her arms toward Katie, as if to fold her into a great big hug. “Honey?” she said. “So good to see you? We were so, so worried!” She turned to loop David into the same slippery smile. “You too!”

  Katie and David let Trixie’s open arms hang empty as they stared. They’d had weeks to consider what it might be like to come face-to-face with her again. They had imagined this moment many times and many ways. They had imagined Trixie shouting, Trixie snarling, Trixie shooting.

  But this?

  Trixie dropped her arms. Then she seemed to notice the traces of tears on Katie’s face. “Oooh, you’re sad,” she said with a little pout of sympathy. She gave the seat beside her a comfortable pat. “Come. You kids just get in the car, and we’ll drive you home.”

  Uh-oh.

  Katie took a big step backward. “No thanks,” she said, shaking her head.

  The light was still red. Nose rolled down his window, stuck his head out, and glanced nervously up and down the street.

  Trixie ignored him. She continued her talk with Katie. It was all back: the black brows that arched coaxingly up her forehead; the wheedling question marks where they did not belong; the laugh like splintering glass.

  “That little house?” Trixie said. “Where we put you, to keep you safe?”

  David needed a moment to figure this one out. When he did, he was appalled. The house with the rats, that was to keep them safe? But Trixie was still talking.

  “We went back there to help you?” she said. “And you were gone. Gone! We were so scared! We thought someone would get you and hurt you. And I felt worst of all, because your mom and dad? They told me to take care of you! So!” Trixie laughed her brittle laugh. “Now we’ll take you home.”

  “That’s funny,” said Katie. “My mom and dad told me not to get in cars with child abusers.”

  “Get in now!” Nose said menacingly.

  Trixie turned her head briefly in Nose’s direction. Her broad smile did not falter. “Shut up,” she said through her gleaming teeth.

  The traffic light ahead of them turned green, but Trixie, unhurried, turned back to Katie. “Honey,” she repeated, ignoring the light. “Nobody here is mad at you? We’re just glad we found you!”

  The cars in front of the black SUV rolled forward. The cars behind it began to honk. Katie took another step backward.

  “Trixie.” Hair spoke up in her nasal voice. “Da light. Id’s chadgig.”

  Trixie continued to speak to Katie, and she continued to smile. Now, though, her voice was growing just a tiny bit tight. “We’re running out of time, sweetie,” she said very softly. “Don’t make me come out and get you.”

  “Suit yourself,” said Katie, and she stepped back again.

  Trixie’s smile vanished. “You little—” And with a grunt, she swung her short, heavy body out of the car, planted her feet on the pavement, and rose to her full, if brief, height.

  As she did so, Katie gave a strange snap to her wrist. A small silvery capsule slid out from her sleeve. As Trixie lunged, Katie raised her arm and released a blast of noxious mace straight into Trixie’s eyes.

  Trixie gave a hoarse shout and clutched at her face. She dropped to her knees and collapsed on the ground, rolling in agony.

  “That does it!” cried Nose, and he flung open his door and strode out of the car. But he did not make it to the sidewalk. Instead, he tripped headlong and landed nose-first on the pavement. There was a sickening crunch and a blood-curdling cry as this already-broken part of his body shattered yet again.

  David withdrew the ankle that he had deftly slipped under Nose’s feet and shook his head, disgusted with himself. He hated to resort to such primitive tactics, but when you aren’t armed . . .

  Now shouts of alarm rose from the honking cars behind them and doors began to slam. Adults ran to the children’s aid. In the hubbub, Katie and David almost forgot about Hair. Fortunately, she reminded them.

  “Dode shoot!” she called, putting up her hands in surrender. “Please dode shoot.”

  “Oh,” said Katie happily. “I almost didn’t remember!” And reaching down to Trixie’s writhing body, she patted her pockets and extracted the gun. As she did so, a purple flash caught her eye. She tucked the gun under her arm, grasped Trixie’s wrist, and tugged the ring off her finger.

  But by that time she and David were surrounded. A pantsuited woman who had leaped from a beige sedan folded Katie into a tight embrace. A young man with tattooed arms raced to the driver’s-side door and pulled Hair from her seat. A man clutching a cell phone yanked David away from Nose’s prone body. Planting his foot on Nose’s back, the man barked, “Don’t get any ideas, buddy!”

  All three of their pursuers now lay facedown on the pavement. Katie wriggled out of her rescuer’s grasp and made her way to David’s side. “Nice footwork,” she said.

  “Don’t start,” he retorted testily. “I totally could have used a gun.” Then he sighed. Just thinking about that gun made him remember Alex. Despite their success, David had a feeling that his uncle would not be happy.

  He turned to the man with the cell. The guy was still hovering over Nose on a personal mission to prevent him from getting up, ever in this lifetime.

  “Um, borrow your phone?” said David wearily. “I think I’d better make a call.”

  David was more right than he knew. It turned out that no one was happy. Katie and David thought this was more than a little unfair, seeing as how they had caught three dangerous armed fugitives. Thanks to them, Trixie, Nose, and Hair were all under arrest.

  But back at the safe house, no one seemed particularly interested in this good news. All they wanted to talk about was how Trixie had found them and how Katie and David had gotten out.

  “Um, by opening the door?” said David.

  All that afternoon the police and the State Department people investigated. Everybody was questioned. The Katkajanians were interrogated down at the station. Apparently—or so Katie and David were later told—Trixie and Nose wouldn’t talk, but the clueless Hair did. From her they learned that David had been right about what happened the night the kids and Uncle Alex met Alicia at the State Department. When the cops went out to search for the three thugs, the thugs themselves were dining peaceably at an Italian restaurant. After their dinner they had retrieved the black SUV, slipped back to the State Department, and followed the Bowdens to the safe house.

  The police also questioned the owners of the yellow house across the street. They turned out to be a harmless older couple. This couple was horrified to learn that the new cleaning lady who had knocked on their door—telling a hard-luck story and begging for a job—was actually a wanted international criminal.

  While all this was being discovered, Mario and his team were busy at the safe house. There they had a long, private meeting with Alex, who was furious to learn that there was no other residence to which he and Katie and David could be moved, now that this one had been compromised. Even through the closed door Katie and David could hear their uncle’s uncharacteristically raised voice.

  When that meeting ended, Mario, the laptop woman, and the guards with the tiny microphones swarmed over the place, replacing locks, tightening procedures and, of course, phoning and typing furiously. Before they left, they sent Curtis and Manny packing. A new pair, who looked much more dangerous, took their places.

  But it wasn’t just the Katkajanians and the neigh
bors and the safe house that got worked over. Katie and David did too. Late that night, when everyone had gone home and the house was quiet again, they were called to the living room for a long lecture from their uncle Alex. Alicia sat beside him, backing him up as he alternately ranted and wrung his hands.

  The point of Alex’s lecture was that the kids should never do anything like what they’d done that day—never, ever again.

  “I know you got them,” said Alex, who could tell that Katie and David were not happy. “That’s not the point.”

  “Funny, we thought it was,” said David.

  “I’m glad about that part,” said Alex, correcting himself. “Don’t get me wrong.”

  “We’re both glad,” Alicia chimed in. “It’s just that you took a terrible risk. When we think what might have happened to you, leaving the house like that . . .”

  “What if Trixie hadn’t gotten out of the car?” demanded Alex. “What if she’d pulled you in, instead?”

  “Look, we’ve been all over this,” said Katie. “We won’t do it again, OK?”

  “We can’t do it again,” said David angrily. “We’re locked in now.”

  This was perfectly true. The State Department’s new locks could be opened only with codes, even from the inside of the house, and these codes had not been shared with David and Katie.

  “We’re locked in,” he repeated. “And why? I mean, we’re not in danger anymore! Nobody’s after us now. We got ’em! In fact,” he added, warming to his topic, “why do we have to stay here at all? Why can’t we just go home, at this point?”

  Katie and David actually knew the answer to this. The idea had already been discussed, and Alex was firmly opposed to it. Bad things had happened in their house, he said—things it would scare them to remember. And the Katkajanians had trashed the place. Alex was sure the children would find it upsetting to see what had become of their home.

  “Not now,” Alex said after a pause.

  “We can clean it up!” argued David.

  “Eventually,” said Uncle Alex. “But for now we want you to stay here. Just until this is all over.”

  “You mean, just till you find our mom and dad,” said Katie.

  “Right,” said Alex.

  Ah, thought David. This got them to the main point—the big, ugly problem that lay behind this whole business. He and Katie had no parents, and nobody seemed to know what to do about that. David had been perched on the edge of the sofa, but now he threw himself back into it and fixed his gaze stonily at the ceiling.

  “Uncle Alex?” Katie’s voice was polite, but there was pleading in it too. “And Alicia? I’m not mad about the locks—really, I’m not. And it’s OK with me to live here for now. I mean, it’s OK with me,” she repeated, glancing at David. “But about Mom and Dad. When do you think you’ll find them?”

  Alex and Alicia exchanged anxious looks.

  “Soon,” said her uncle painfully. “We know you’re waiting and—and I’m sorry.”

  There was nothing that either Katie or David could say to that. So moments later, Alicia said good night, and the three residents of the safe house headed off to bed.

  “I should be happy,” said Katie gloomily as she and David climbed the stairs. “I mean, we did this huge thing today.”

  “What?” said David sarcastically. “You’re not happy?”

  She ignored the sarcasm. “I know he said ‘soon,’ David, but did you see their faces? What was that about?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Does ‘soon’ mean tomorrow, or the day after that? Does it mean, ‘Soon we’ll tell you they’re dead?’”

  “Look, I don’t know,” her brother repeated. “But I do know this: This can’t go on forever.”

  “Which means . . . ?”

  David sighed. “Which means I don’t know if it’ll be tomorrow, or the next day, or next month, for that matter. But eventually, we’re going to find out. Eventually, they have to tell us something.”

  But they did not find out the next day, or the day after that, or the day after that. Instead, the most frustrating part of living in the safe house—the information blackout—continued.

  If anything, in fact, it was worse. Before the capture of the Katkajanians it had been aggravating not to know what was happening. Now it was scary, too. David and Katie had seen too much. They could no longer assume that the adults who were managing this crisis knew what they were doing. They could no longer simply trust.

  What they saw in their uncle did not reassure them. Alex looked weary and tense. He tried to come home for dinner, and most nights he did. But he was never there on time, and he never seemed to finish his meal before rising from the table with a distracted face and returning to the War Room to resume the search.

  Then came a night when Alex did not go back to the War Room.

  For the first time since they had been at the safe house, he joined Katie and David for dinner on time. He sat down to eat with them, and tried to ask them questions about their schoolwork. But his conversation and his smile were strained. Though they tried to answer what he asked, they sensed his mood and soon a gloomy silence fell over the table. At last Alex put down his fork, pushed back his chair, and sat staring at the floor.

  Katie and David exchanged a look. “It’s not going well, is it, Uncle Alex?” asked David bluntly.

  “No,” said Alex after a moment. “No, David, it’s not.”

  Katie flushed with fear. “Are they—are they—”

  “They’re not dead,” said her uncle woodenly.

  “Then there’s still a chance!” said David.

  “They’re not dead,” Alex repeated, and his voice was terrible. “But Katie, David: I’m afraid we’re running out of time.”

  “Uncle Alex,” said David fiercely, “what is it? What is—”

  “They’re our parents!” cried Katie. “We need to know—”

  “You’re right,” said Alex, interrupting her. “You’re both right. You do need to know. Kids, it’s time we talked about Rover.”

  None of them could eat, so they retreated to the living room for this all-important and long-delayed conversation. Outside the window the autumn sky was just beginning to darken. Alex sat tensely on the edge of the sofa, and Katie and David pulled their chairs up close, trembling with anticipation.

  Their uncle spread his fingers wide and ran both palms through his hair. Then he sighed, lowered his hands to his knees, and plunged in.

  “I’d better start from the beginning—the beginning of this search,” he said. “Which means the night you met Alicia.”

  “Weeks ago,” Katie broke in.

  “Correct,” said Alex gloomily. “Kids,” he continued, “when we first told our story to Alicia, you warned her that she had to hurry. You remembered what the kidnappers told you on the phone the day you discovered your parents were taken. You remembered that they threatened to kill their captives if you told anybody what they’d done.”

  “Right.” We know this part, thought David.

  “You said to Alicia, Find them fast, because now we’ve told.”

  “And Alicia said they would,” said Katie. “She said they’d hurry.”

  Alex nodded slowly. “She did hurry,” he said. “That very night, our government spoke to friends of the kidnappers in Katkajan.”

  “We know their friends?” Katie was aghast. “We know who they are?”

  “It turns out we had a pretty good idea,” said Alex grimly. “We knew there was political trouble in Katkajan, we knew who was behind it, and we’d been watching ’em for a while. So we asked some people on the fringes of that group to pass a message to the guys who have your parents. The message—well, it hinted that we’d negotiate. We sort of implied that we’d cut a deal. You know”—he searched for words—“we let them think America would do what they wanted, politically, if they’d give back your mom and your dad and your sister.”

  David was both relieved and confused. He wanted his pare
nts and Theo back, of course. But could this be right? “Great,” he said uncertainly.

  “We won’t really do what they want,” added his uncle hastily, seeing David’s confusion. “We never do, with kidnappings. You can’t. You encourage these people, and then there’s no end to it. They kidnap again and again and again—”

  “We get it,” said Katie miserably.

  “But if they think you might negotiate, then you’ve bought some time. That’s the idea, anyway. You pretend to negotiate. You do it slowly. And while you’re going back and forth, you’re quietly searching for them. You figure out where they are, and then you pounce.”

  “How do you search?” said Katie, beginning to see.

  “Rover,” said David eagerly. “Uncle Alex, I bet you use Rover.”

  “You’re right,” said Alex. “You’re absolutely right. David, Katie, Rover is in the War Room, and we’ve been working with it to find your parents.”

  “Working how?”

  “I’m getting to that. Kids, do you know how they used to find missing people in the old days? How they still do, in some places?”

  David and Katie were silent.

  “They used dogs,” their uncle said. “They used a special kind of hound that was trained to sniff people out. The reason hounds can do this is that no two people are alike. Each of us has our own unique smell, and the dogs perceive that. So you give the hound something that belonged to the missing person—a shirt, for instance, or a jacket. The dog sniffs the thing, registers the smell, and follows the scent to wherever the person—”

  “Rover!” cried Katie. “That’s why it’s called Rover!”

  “Exactly,” said her uncle. “Our invention is called Rover because it’s like a hound dog—a very high-tech one.”

  “It smells?” Despite himself, David was impressed.

  “Yes, actually,” said Alex with modest pride. “As far as we know, it’s the only thing like it that does smell. But it’s better than that. A dog can only smell what’s in front of its nose. Our Rover, though, can smell what’s miles and miles away. You just have to load in the scent you want it to find—from an old sock or whatever you have—and then it sends out its sensors and matches that smell to the real person, wherever that person may be.”