Scared Stiff

by Willo Davis Roberts

  “They haven’t been into Wonderland yet. You want to stick around and go with them?” I asked Connie. “We can have something to eat first. I can make some sandwiches,” I suggested.

  “Okay,” Connie agreed as he followed me into the purple bus.

  It didn’t look as if Uncle Henry was up yet, and he hadn’t been to a store, either, so we had peanut butter and jelly again.

  I was pretty depressed. I’d thought sure the cops would look into what we’d learned, but I didn’t know if they really would or not. The officer had had an answer for everything we told him that made our clues sound insignificant.

  Kenny came back with Julie about the time we were finishing our second sandwiches. I warned them to be quiet, that Uncle Henry was asleep, so we sat and talked in whispers.

  Kenny had had lunch with Julie. He was anxious to return to Wonderland, but Julie said we couldn’t go yet.

  “Not until Mr. Alvinhorst is out of the laundry room, and he was just putting his stuff in the washers a minute ago. And we’d better go over there one or two at a time. We don’t want anyone to get suspicious of what four of us are doing in there, or why we stay so long.”

  Kenny shifted restlessly, unwilling to be bored while we waited. “I want to draw,” he said. “I need some paper, Rick.”

  I glanced around, but Uncle Henry wasn’t either an artist or a writer, I guessed. He didn’t even have a desk where I could look for paper. I kept my voice low so it wouldn’t disturb him in the bedroom. “There’s blank paper in my notebook. I know I brought it along, because I intended to draw some more, and that’s the only paper I had. Where did we put it?”

  We finally found it under the edge of the couch. Kenny settled down in the driver’s seat up front, then turned to ask, “Is it okay if I draw on the back of this?”

  He held up a sheaf of papers I didn’t recognize. I reached for them to see what they were, and I still didn’t know.

  “What the heck is this? It’s not my stuff.”

  There were several pages of Xerox copies of some kind of forms, or ledger sheets. There were columns of figures on the right side, with a list of names down the left side.

  I studied them, frowning. “I don’t know how this got in my notebook.”

  Connie suddenly sat up straight, his face alert. “Your mom was the one who took your notebook home, right?”

  I turned slowly to look at him. “Yeah. Yeah! Maybe Ma stuck these papers inside the cover. Sure, that could be it. They’re something she was bringing home, maybe some of her work. That’s what she does, bookkeeping for E & F Trucking. She uses a calculator and adds up a lot of numbers and figures out payroll deductions, that kind of thing.”

  Connie stretched out a hand for the papers and I gave them to him to look at. He pursed his lips.

  “These don’t look like work she’s doing. I mean, there are totals at the bottom; she’s not still adding them up.”

  “She might be looking for a mistake. A column that didn’t balance,” I speculated.

  Julie peered over my shoulder. “What are all the names for?”

  I studied them thoughtfully. “Hmm. Names of companies, I think. Sure, they’re people who had E & F haul stuff for them. That one, there, is the company that shipped the TV sets in the load that got highjacked. And I remember this name, McCallam Electronics. Pa hauls stuff from them all the time, and from Alvarez Plumbing Supply too.”

  “So the figures must be what each one was charged for what was hauled.”

  “Right. Just routine stuff.” Then a thought struck me, so hard I actually had to sit down beside Connie on the couch. “Or maybe they’re something important, something she stuck inside my notebook to keep safe. Maybe . . .” I hesitated, feeling melodramatic and half-scared. “Maybe these papers are what someone was looking for in our apartment, though I can’t see what would be important about them.”

  I could tell that Connie was getting excited. “Maybe she stuck them in your notebook to hide them from those guys in the car. Maybe they really are important, Rick!”

  “But if they were important, would she have been careless enough to drop them on the steps?” Julie asked. She’d heard the whole story in detail, too.

  “She might,” I said slowly, “if the men were close behind her and she didn’t want to be caught with these papers on her. It just looks like a kid’s school notebook, with some graded papers in it. If she was afraid of the men, afraid they’d try to take the papers away from her, she didn’t have much to lose by dropping the notebook. She knew we’d be along in a few minutes and find it. If the men found it first, it wouldn’t be any worse than having them take the papers away from her.”

  Julie was sitting in Uncle Henry’s one easy chair. Her mouth formed a round O before she said, “In that case, it means the papers are really important.”

  In the silence we heard a siren off in the distance. I felt prickles along my spine as I studied the papers, trying to figure out what could make them important enough so Ma might have been kidnapped to get at them. I didn’t want to think what might have happened to her when they discovered she didn’t have them on her person.

  “Maybe the cops will believe these are evidence,” Connie said softly. “Even if we don’t understand just how.”

  “No,” I heard myself saying. “No, they haven’t done anything about any of what we’ve said, so far. No, I’ll save the papers for Pa. He works there, too; he’d probably have a better idea of what they mean than the police would. He knows how things are run at E & F.”

  Kenny had been drawing something on the back of another sheet of paper, not appearing to pay any attention to the rest of us until he suddenly joined the conversation. “Pa may not work at E & F anymore if they fire him.”

  “Why would they fire him?” Connie wanted to know.

  He spoke a little bit louder than he had been, and I put a finger on my lips as I looked apprehensively toward the bedroom door at the back of the coach.

  “Because he let a load get hijacked,” Kenny said. “Didn’t he, Rick? While he was eating supper, but he couldn’t help it, could he? They unhooked his trailer and drove it away while he was eating, and they were mad at Pa for that.”

  An idea was taking form in my mind, still not clear enough so I could get a real picture. “That was what Ma and Pa were arguing about,” I said slowly. “Before he walked out and didn’t come back.”

  “I wish my old man would walk out and not come back,” Connie asserted. “It would make it easier on the whole family. Except that we’d miss what he brings home of his paycheck.”

  “Ma asked if he’d had anything to do with the hijacking.” I continued to think aloud, hardly aware of what Connie had said. “It made him really mad. I don’t think he would have cooperated with hijackers, ever. He always told us to be honest, not to do anything illegal, or take anything that didn’t belong to us. Once Kenny swiped some gum in a store, and Pa made him take it back and apologize.”

  Connie was thinking hard. “But what if he—your old man—really needed money bad? What if he decided, just once, to do something that would get him the money? Like taking a bribe to leave the truck long enough so somebody could steal his load?”

  Kenny catapulted out of the driver’s seat and threw himself on Connie before anyone could stop him. “He didn’t! He didn’t! Don’t you dare call my pa a thief!”

  I grabbed him and got a hand over his mouth, hauling him off Connie’s lap. “Shush! Don’t wake up Uncle Henry! Connie didn’t mean anything, he’s just thinking out loud, trying to figure out what’s going on, what these papers can mean.”

  Kenny had started to cry. “Pa’s not a crook,” he protested.

  “No, of course he isn’t,” I said, and hugged him. I figured that’s what Ma would have done.

  “I didn’t mean your old man’s a thief,” Connie said, sounding apologetic. “But there’s got to be some sense to somebody kidnapping your mom, and these papers make it look like it might be
because of something she found out where she works. Your dad works at the same place, so there might be a connection between his load that was hijacked and the pages she brought home. See?”

  Clearly Kenny didn’t understand any of it, except that it had sounded like Connie was saying bad things about Pa.

  Julie stood up. “Come on. Let’s go outside and mess around until we can sneak through the laundry room and go back to Wonderland. Remember, Kenny, all the things I told you we’d go and see?”

  Kenny had dropped my notebook when he stood up, and Connie bent over to pick it up. He started to put it on the little table beside Uncle Henry’s chair, then hesitated, examining it more closely.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  “Look. There’s a footprint on the cover. Not yours, it’s too big.”

  “It got dropped on the steps, either by accident or because Ma did it on purpose. Somebody walked on it.”

  I took it to stick it back under the couch—there wasn’t much spare storage space in the purple bus—and then looked at it more closely.

  “Whoever it was had just walked in oil, it looks like. It made a really clear print, didn’t it? You can even see the pattern on the heel, all swirls.” I bent to slide the notebook into its hiding place and we all went outside before I added the thought that had come to me.

  “What if the guy who stepped on it was one of those men Mrs. Fox saw? The ones who might have had something to do with Ma’s disappearance.”

  “Could have been,” Connie reflected as we started walking toward the Coke machine outside the laundry room. “There probably weren’t very many men going up those steps between the time your mom got there and when you kids showed up. I’ll bet it was them. All we need to do now is find a guy whose heel makes a print like that, and he has a car with a bent front license plate.”

  “Sure,” I said bleakly. “And how do we do that?”

  Nobody answered, and Connie started dropping coins into the Coke machine while we all stood there trying to figure it out.

  If only Pa would come home, I thought longingly. I knew he’d take charge when he came.

  Only what was happening to Ma in the meantime?

  Chapter Ten

  If it hadn’t been for the nagging worry that hung in the back of my mind, it would have been a great afternoon.

  I almost forgot the things I was worrying about. I didn’t want to stay with Uncle Henry any longer than we had to, but I had to admit that playing in Wonderland was the most fun I’d had in a long time.

  Julie had shown us a lot of things, but Connie was the one who had spent the most time inside the park, and he’d also been the most adventurous.

  He lived in a part of town where very few other people lived because it was mostly warehouses and businesses like electrical and plumbing supplies, and various wholesale houses. The people who did live in apartments over little shops, the way Connie’s family did, were older people, like the ones in the Wonderland RV Park. Connie’s best friends were kids he went to school with, but they lived a long way off—too far to walk very often, and too expensive to visit regularly on the bus.

  Anyway, I was glad he was with us, because he knew all kinds of things Julie didn’t know about Wonderland.

  He had been inside all the scary places that Julie had barely investigated from the outside. In the mine, for instance, we squeezed past the cars that needed electricity to operate and went down into the darkness of the underground tunnel.

  We’d brought Uncle Henry’s flashlight, Julie had one, and so did Connie; we flashed them around to see as much as we could of the inside of the mine. It was interesting, and we could stop when we wanted to look more closely at the exhibits of miners working with their picks and shovels.

  Connie and I climbed up the bobsled track, which was solid rather than having a lot of open work under it the way the roller coaster did, so we didn’t feel as if we’d fall through. The whole trough, which went up and down in steep slopes and tilted from one side to the other, was supposed to look as if it were covered with ice. It was really only pale blue paint.

  Julie wouldn’t go, and after the first incline, Kenny decided he wouldn’t either. It was scary, because we had to crawl uphill on our hands and knees, and when I looked down from the top Julie and Kenny weren’t much bigger than ants. It was easy to pretend we were mountain climbers in the Himalayas; I imagined an icy wind howling around my ears as I was poised there on the top of the world.

  “Watch your step going down,” Connie called. “It’s trickier, so don’t slip.”

  Going down meant hanging onto the crossties of the track even more carefully than when we were going up, or we’d have just rolled down over tracks and all and probably scraped off a lot of skin. It was fun, though.

  And then I had the accident that made everything suddenly get downright exciting.

  We were in a sort of dip, before the final hill at the end, and I stopped to lean over the edge and look down. The view from the top had been incredible, out over the whole park, and from up there nothing looked neglected or faded at all.

  Even from down in the dip the view was pretty good, though I couldn’t see as far. “When we get down,” I said to Connie, “let’s go climb the rapids, too. With no water in them, it should be a cinch.”

  “It is,” Connie agreed. “I’ve done it a couple of times.”

  I hung a little farther over the edge of the bobsled-track wall. “What’s that down there? I don’t remember noticing it before.”

  Connie crawled over beside me to look. “Just a shed, looks like. I never paid any attention to it, either. It’s not painted a bright color, so it sort of fades into the background, same as the fence. Where they keep tools or something, probably. I guess from the ground it must be shielded by the train station.”

  “Hey, Rick! Hurry up, we’re going to go—”

  I never heard the end of whatever Kenny was going to say. I turned my head to look at him approaching below, and I lost my balance and my grip on the edge of the bobsled run.

  I didn’t have more than a few seconds to get scared, falling over, and then I hit the roof of the shed beneath me.

  I felt the shock of the impact more than pain; there was a racket of splintering wood, and then I was through the roof. At least part of me was.

  Dazed, I sort of hung there on my elbows for a minute or two. Julie and Kenny had disappeared from view as soon as I fell, and I could hear them yelling, as well as Connie’s voice from above.

  “Rick! You all right?”

  I didn’t know yet. I twisted my head to look up and saw Connie hanging dangerously over the side of the run.

  “Don’t . . . don’t fall,” I managed finally.

  “Are you hurt?” Connie’s face was anxious.

  “Uh . . . I guess I scraped a few places. I’m . . . sort of stuck.”

  I had a moment of feeling guilty—we were, after all, trespassing, and the possibility of an accident where someone got hurt was one reason the owners wouldn’t want kids playing around in here. And then as some of the shock wore off and the stinging began in the places where I’d been scraped, I decided I wasn’t really stuck too bad.

  I tried to lift with my arms and raise the lower half of my body out of the hole I’d made in the roof.

  Immediately I stopped. One of the splintered boards under the torn roofing gouged into my hip enough to make me reconsider how to get loose without making a real hole in myself.

  “What’s the matter?” Connie was still hanging over me, looking worried.

  “If I pull up, I get stabbed. If I let go to try to break off the sharp edge that’s poking me, or bend it back farther, I’m afraid I’ll fall all the way through.”

  “Can you see what’s underneath of you? Maybe it would be easier to just go through, and then come out through the door.”

  “The door’s got to be locked,” I pointed out. It was getting very tiring, hanging by my elbows, and besides, they both hur
t.

  “A window, then. Windows can usually be opened from the inside; they have a catch that can be unlocked.”

  “What if they don’t?” I speculated. “I’d be worse off locked inside than I am now.”

  “See if you can tell what’s beneath you,” Connie urged. “Then if it doesn’t look like you’d get hurt on it, drop through. If you can’t get a window open, we’ll think of something else. Don’t worry; we won’t leave you stuck in there, Rick. I’m going on down to the bottom of the bobsled run; I’ll be with you in a few minutes, okay?”

  He was gone before I could work up a reply.

  “Rick, what’s happening?” Julie called worriedly.

  I blinked sweat out of my eyes and tried to see downward through the opening I’d made in the roof. It must have been rotten, I thought, or I wouldn’t have gone through it.

  The important thing, though, was to get out of there.

  I shifted my body as far to one side as I could, wincing at the renewed evidence that I’d removed some of my hide. At first I couldn’t see anything inside the shed, and then gradually I could make out the splintered board that was poking me, keeping me from being able to get out.

  I said a bad word I’d heard Pa say once when he blew a tire on his rig. Ma was right; swearing didn’t help much. I was still stuck in the hole.

  I gritted my teeth and shifted again, trying to see past the plank end that had me trapped.

  With no warning, my problem was solved. Something broke under my right elbow, and I simply dropped through the hole I’d made, down into the shed.

  I hit hard and for a moment lay stunned, thinking surely I’d broken a bone in my leg when I landed.

  Outside, Julie and Kenny were yelling, but I couldn’t get enough air to answer right away. It wasn’t until Connie got there, too, that I finally managed to sit up and feel my leg. It hurt, but when I got up I could stand on it all right, so I figured it wasn’t broken.

  “Rick! Jeez!” I heard Connie exclaim. “I think he must have knocked himself out!”