Scared Stiff

by Willo Davis Roberts

  I drew in a shaky breath. “No, I didn’t. I’m just shook up. Wait a minute, I’ll see if the window will come open and if I can find something to stand on to get out. . . .”

  I finally looked around. There was only one window, and it wasn’t very big, I thought uneasily. Kenny could get through it okay, but I wasn’t sure I could.

  It was a storage shed, as Connie had guessed; there were racks with tools hanging in them, rakes and hoses and stuff like that. I was still dazed, and for a minute I didn’t realize what I had seen as I went to the window and struggled with the catch.

  Connie’s face showed up there as soon as I pulled the window open. “You find anything to stand on yet?” he asked, relieved that I was moving around.

  “Yeah, there’s a bench I can drag over here.” I got one knee up onto it and then stopped moving. “Connie,” I said slowly. “You know what I’m looking at? There’s a big panel here on the wall.”

  He tried to look inside, but he needed something to stand on, too. “What?” he asked.

  “It’s an electrical-control panel. Circuit breakers, dozens of them.”

  “Circuit breakers? You mean, like fuses?”

  “Well, if they go out you don’t have to replace fuses, like the old-fashioned ones. If you overload these”—I tried to remember how Pa had explained it once when I went into the basement with him after a power outage—“the juice goes off and the switch cuts off the power. When you turn something off, so the power drain is less, you can flick the switch and it’s the same as putting in a new fuse—the power comes back on. Gosh, Connie, it looks like the breakers for the entire park must be right here.”

  Julie was too short to look in the window, but I heard her voice. “Can’t you get out, Rick?”

  For the moment I’d forgotten the problem of getting out, and so had Connie. A look of eager anticipation brightened his eyes, which were about all I could see of him.

  “Turn ’em on, Rick. Throw some of those breakers, see what happens!”

  “No!” Julie sounded alarmed. “You don’t want to mess with anything electrical, it might be dangerous!”

  “It’s not dangerous. They just turn the electricity off and then on again,” Connie said reasonably. “There must be a main breaker that turns off everything, but that can’t be off because those outside security lights still come on. But everything else must be off. Try it. Rick. See if you can make anything come on. Are they labeled? Can you tell what each switch controls? Like the one to the Pirate’s Cave? Or the mine?”

  I was shaking, but I knew that though this was a much bigger control panel, with many more breakers than the one I’d seen in the basement of our apartment house, it was no more dangerous than that one had been. Pa said it was safer to throw a switch to reset a breaker than it was to change a fuse, and everybody ought to know how to cut the main power in their own house.

  “Rick?” Connie pressed.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, they’re labeled. But we can’t see into the Pirate’s Cave from here. What’s closest? What could we see if I threw a switch?”

  “No, don’t,” Julie was saying, at the same time as Connie said, “Try the carousel. I can see that from here.”

  I read down the list of typed stickers beside the first row of breakers, took a deep breath, and threw the switch.

  There was a silence, and then Kenny said disappointedly, “Nothing happened. There’s no lights.”

  For a few seconds I was disappointed, too, until I realized what would make the difference. “The only lights that would come on when I hit the breaker would be the ones that were left on when the breaker was turned off. They probably turned all the lights off. What’s closest, so you could maybe flick the switch right there where the lights are?”

  “Most of them are probably inside, behind locked doors,” Connie said. And then, “Wait a minute. I think I might be able to get at the light switches at the starting point for the mine ride, because that’s all open, not behind bars or doors. Throw the switch for that, Rick, and I’ll run over and see if it works.”

  A minute later I heard him yell, and Kenny give a crow of delight. Julie’s eyes appeared again at the window.

  “Hey, you did it!” Even Julie wasn’t protesting anymore.

  I threw the rest of the breakers on, one after the other, and scrambled through the window, so excited I hardly paid any attention when my sore places scraped once more on the window frame.

  We had power in Wonderland.

  Chapter Eleven

  It was fantastic.

  We couldn’t get to things that were inside of real buildings, like the merry-go-round and the train station, because they were locked up. We talked about trying to find a way in, but Julie and I both insisted we weren’t going to break in.

  “We already broke into the park,” Connie said, “so if we get caught in here, we’re in trouble anyway.”

  “But we haven’t damaged anything,” I pointed out. “Except for the roof of the shed, and that was an accident. There are lots of things we can do to have fun that won’t damage anything. Like go through the Pirate’s Cave now that the lights will be tripped for each scene when a boat passes it. They aren’t selling tickets, so we aren’t cheating anybody.”

  “And we didn’t exactly ‘break in,’ ” Julie argued. “That section of boards was already loose. We just moved them to one side to make room to slide through.”

  I guess we all knew that wasn’t going to save our hides if we got caught. But we weren’t hurting anything. Wonderland was what my pa would have called an attractive nuisance. That meant things that would draw kids to play in them, when they might be dangerous. Like gravel pits, unfenced swimming pools, salvage yards. Like an abandoned amusement park that probably was never going to open again. Legally, Pa said, it was the responsibility of the owner to set up some kind of system to keep kids out.

  Not that Pa would take that as an excuse for our being in here, though I thought it was the kind of thing he’d have done when he was a kid. Who could resist any of this?

  We couldn’t. And it was better going through the cave with the electricity turned on; the “underwater” scenes were flooded with greenish light, and in the other scenes we could see details better than we’d been able to with the flashlight.

  We still couldn’t operate any of the rides. “You have to have the key, and on any of the dangerous rides—the parachute jump, the stuff that swings you around or drops you from high off the ground—you also have to push two buttons at once,” Connie said.

  “Far apart from each other,” Julie supplemented, “so one person can’t reach them both at the same time.”

  That still left quite a few things to explore with the lights on. And I discovered, now that we could see, that the controls for water in the canals and miniature lakes and streams were not locked up; they were simply out of sight of the paying customers. When you walked through with lights on, you could find the valves easily enough.

  Connie and I looked at each other over the first one we discovered.

  “Be a lot easier to float through than to wade in that yucky water,” Connie said tentatively.

  “If there was water in the rapids, maybe we could go down them with a canoe,” I added.

  Connie grinned. “Let’s do it,” he decided.

  It took both of us to turn the big valve, throwing everything we had into it. And then came the reward: Water gushed into the canal, and everybody let out yelps of triumph.

  While the canal was filling, we tried to get one of the rafts loose from the track it was secured to on the Devil’s Canyon ride, so we could go down through the rapids, but it wouldn’t come loose.

  “Darn,” Connie said, exasperated. “What good does it do to have the water falling over the rocks if we can’t take a rafting trip down?”

  Julie studied the artificial rapids. “I think we’d probably get killed going down with a loose raft. Look, see how the track winds around, and tilts, to keep
the rafts from hitting anything?”

  Connie had located the control at the loading platform on top of the “mountain” where the stream began, before it plunged over the rocks to the pond below. “Here’s the control button, right here, and the second one is up there. All we need is the key to turn it on. Where do you suppose they kept the keys?”

  “Maybe someone took them home,” I guessed, but Julie had a better idea.

  “I think,” she said, “they’d leave them in the office somewhere. I mean, they closed the park without any warning the day after Mr. Mixon had the heart attack and died. People came back later and shut down things like the lights and water and stuff. But why would they carry off the keys? They just closed up the place, and I think they’d have left the keys to the rides where they usually kept them.”

  The idea of having the keys that would make it possible to start the rides was irresistible. “Where’s the office?” I asked, though I knew it would be locked, as the toolshed where I’d discovered the circuit breakers had been locked.

  “The office is up front, by the gate,” Connie said. “I’ve looked in the windows. But it’s locked,” he added unnecessarily.

  We went over there anyway, to a little building that looked like a miniature castle, behind the ticket booths and entrance gates. “The parking’s all outside,” Connie said, pressing his face against the first window he came to. “You have to walk about a block, which is one reason some of the relatives said they shouldn’t reopen the park. People expect parking right on the premises these days, and if Wonderland were new they’d never let it open without parking space right by the gate.”

  The rest of us looked in the windows, too. It was disappointing, because it was just an ordinary office, with desks and chairs and telephones and filing cabinets. As if she were reading my mind, Julie said, “I always feel as if I should see Cinderella at the ball in here, or the king and queen sitting on their thrones.”

  Kenny was stretched up on his tiptoes to see, too. “I don’t see any keys,” he observed.

  “Probably in a drawer somewhere,” Connie said. “Or hanging on a hook or something.”

  “Is there a different key for each ride?” I wondered aloud, pushing harder against the window to try to see more of the interior.

  “There have to be a lot of keys,” Julie said, “so they can operate or lock up each ride. I think maybe they’re all alike. I mean, there’s a master key that would work on any of them. If not, they’d be labeled. But there’s no way to get in.”

  There didn’t seem to be. We checked all the doors and windows, which were locked. Connie jokingly picked up a big rock, painted pink, from along the walkway, and made a motion as if to throw it through one of the windows, but then he dropped it back in place.

  “Let’s go see what it’s like walking through the tunnel along the train tracks with the lights on.”

  We were so busy that we almost didn’t notice the afternoon was gone, that it was suppertime, except that Kenny finally complained that he was hungry.

  It was so late that I thought Uncle Henry might have gone to work already, and Julie wondered if her grandma would be mad at her for being gone so long. Only Connie shrugged at the time. “Nobody cooks a meal on time at our house, anyway,” he said. “I’ll heat up a frozen pizza. Come back tonight?” he asked, pausing after he’d turned off the last of the lights at the Big Sombrero.

  “Sure,” I said, but Julie hesitated. “Grandma may not let me get out again tonight. I’ll have to see.”

  As it turned out, none of us went back that evening.

  Uncle Henry had already gone to work, and Connie stood talking to me after Julie went home. He was still there when she came running back to us with an expression on her face that made me stiffen with apprehension.

  “Rick!” she called. “There was a phone call while we were gone! A woman asked if you and Kenny were here with Mr. Svoboda!”

  My heart began to pound. “Ma?” I asked, hardly daring to hope.

  “She didn’t say, but when Grandma told her all us kids were off somewhere playing, but she could call your uncle, the woman said okay but to hurry. Only when Mr. Svoboda got there, there was nobody on the line.”

  Disappointment was a heavy pain in my chest. Could it have been Ma? Who else would have guessed we’d be here with Uncle Henry?

  “That’s all?” I asked. “She didn’t call back?”

  Julie shook her head. “No. But maybe she tried and couldn’t get through because right after that Grandma got another call, and it upset her a lot.”

  We sort of hung there, waiting, expecting the worst because Julie looked so stricken, but for me the worst was wondering if it had been Ma on the phone, if she’d hung up because she was in danger, if somebody had hurt her before she could talk to us.

  “Who was your grandma’s call from?” Connie asked, looking sober too.

  “Mr. Mixon’s lawyer. He said she’d be reading about it in tomorrow’s paper, and he thought she deserved to hear it officially first.” Julie gulped and looked near tears. “The court case ended late yesterday. The lawsuits the Mixons were having among themselves, about what to do with Wonderland. They’re going to sell the property—he said they’d probably be in as early as the end of the next week with bulldozers and start knocking everything down—they’re not even going to try to sell the rides or anything, just let some junkman haul away what he wants, and destroy the rest! And they want the land the RV park is on, too. They have to give us thirty days’ notice to vacate, and then everybody has to be out of here!”

  Tears spilled over and ran down her cheeks. “We only have a month and everybody has to move, and nobody knows anywhere to move to! Not that’s cheap enough so we can afford it! Just the cost of moving anything but the little travel trailers is more than most of the people can afford.”

  I knew it was real trouble for the people who lived in the Wonderland RV Park. They were old and most of them were poor. Uncle Henry could probably find another place to park his bus, but it would be very hard for most of the rest of them.

  I felt sorry for everybody, especially Julie and her grandmother, and I hated the idea that Wonderland Amusement Park would be destroyed. It seemed a terrible thing to do.

  Yet what overwhelmed me was that telephone call. It had to have been Ma, I thought, to tell us she was safe—or that she needed help, and where to find her—and then something had happened that kept her from waiting for Uncle Henry to get to the phone. It scared me something awful, worrying about what it could have been.

  I felt selfish, thinking about my own problems when Julie’s and Mrs. Biggers’s were bad, too. But I had to ask. “Would it be okay if I talked to your grandma about the phone call?”

  Julie took a deep breath and wiped the back of one hand across her eyes. “Sure,” she said, sounding so subdued that I could barely hear her. “Come on.”

  Mrs. Biggers wasn’t crying, but she was clearly upset. She didn’t tell me not to bother her, though, but sat down at the kitchen table with us kids. Connie remained standing near the door.

  Mrs. Biggers didn’t have much to tell me. Only that the caller had been a woman, she’d asked if two boys were staying with Mr. Svoboda and seemed relieved to be told we were playing somewhere, and then had agreed to wait until Uncle Henry could be called to the phone, though she’d urged that he come quickly.

  “Only when Uncle Henry got there, she’d hung up,” I said dully.

  “No, actually she hadn’t. There was no dial tone,” Mrs. Biggers said, trying to concentrate on my problem for a minute instead of on her own. “She must have just dropped the phone and let it hang there, because Mr. Svoboda said he heard sounds but nobody was on the line.”

  I shut my eyes. Had someone attacked her, if it was Ma? Connie wasn’t the only one who watched too many cop shows on TV. I knew the kind of thing that could happen while someone was trying to make a phone call from a pay phone, too. Or any phone, for that matter.

&nbs
p; Connie’s voice was unexpectedly sharp. “What kind of sounds did he hear?”

  “What?” Mrs. Biggers looked blank, as if she’d lost the thread of the conversation.

  “Mr. Svoboda. What did he say he heard? Voices in the background? Music? Traffic? What?”

  For a few seconds I didn’t know what he was getting at. And then I remembered a movie where they tracked down the crooks because they’d called from someplace where there were plane sounds over the phone, and the cops figured out the guy was calling from near an airport. “Planes?” I asked, hope leaping inside me again.

  “He didn’t say. Just that nobody had hung up the phone.” Mrs. Biggers looked at me. “He seemed to think that it was your ma, and he was upset that something made her drop the phone. But at least if it was her, you know she’s all right.”

  Or had been up to the time she dropped the phone, I thought sickly. Why hadn’t she left a message with Mrs. Biggers, before it was too late?

  My eyes met Connie’s. “It’s important,” I said. “It might be a very important clue. It might tell us where she was when she called.”

  When the phone rang we all jumped. Then Mrs. Biggers got up to answer it. “Wonderland RV Park,” she said, sounding as if she expected more bad news.

  “Oh, Mr. Svoboda. Yes, the boys came home all right. They were off playing. Yes, they’re here right now. I think Rick would like to talk to you.”

  She handed the receiver to me.

  I took it gingerly. “Uncle Henry?”

  “I guess we got to have some rules as long as you kids stay with me,” Uncle Henry said, sounding the way grown-ups do when you’ve done something that scared them and then they find out you’re okay and they want to kill you for scaring them. “I want you to be home before I go to work so I don’t have to worry if you’re all right.”

  “Yes, sir,” I agreed, knowing Pa would have put it stronger than that. “Uh . . . Uncle Henry, Mrs. Biggers told us about the phone call. . . .”

  “Did she call back?” he asked quickly. “Was it Sophie?”