“Shhh,” a familiar voice was saying. “Be quiet.” It was Stormy.
“Stormy,” Dani said, “what on earth …”
“Shhh,” he said again. “Listen.”
She hushed then and listened. A series of thumps and thuds and clatters seemed to be coming from somewhere down below.
“Ronnie?” Stormy whispered, and Dani nodded.
“Yes,” she whispered. “He was chasing me. But what’s he doing? What’s all that racket?”
“He’s in the kitchen,” Stormy said. “I think he’s looking for you in the kitchen.”
The thuds and clatters made sense then and Dani almost giggled, picturing Ronnie pawing through cupboards and closets.
But Stormy’s voice still sounded worried. “He’ll look here,” he whispered. “He’ll look here too.”
He was probably right. Dani glanced around quickly. In the dim light of a tiny window she could barely make out a room the size of a large closet with nothing in it except a stack of wooden boxes and a narrow iron cot. Suddenly Stormy was pushing her toward the cot.
“Under the bed,” he whispered urgently. “Hurry. He’s coming.”
It was stifling hot under the cot, the air thick with dust. Dani’s heart was pounding so hard that it seemed to shake the floor. Fighting the possibility of a sneeze, and the even greater possibility of suffocation, she forced herself back against the wall, while above her head the metal springs of the cot squeaked rustily and then were still. Stormy had gotten back into the bed. There were footsteps on the stairs, then closer. The door banged open and a light blazed. Feet came into Dani’s line of vision. Big feet in fancy cowboy boots.
“Hey, kid,” Ronnie was saying, “did anyone come up here just now? Did you see anyone?”
The springs squeaked again and Stormy’s voice said sleepily, “Nobody’s here. Nobody’s here ’cept me. I’m sick.”
“Yeah?” Ronnie said. “You telling the truth?” The boots came closer. “You better not be lying to me, kid.” The springs creaked noisily.
“Turn me loose,” Stormy said. “You’re choking me. You better turn me loose.”
“Oh yeah?” Ronnie laughed sarcastically. “I’d better, huh? Who’s gonna make me?”
“Yeah.” Stormy’s voice had gone high and breathless. “You’d better. I might be catching. Like polio, maybe.”
Ronnie laughed again, but the boots moved quickly back away from the bed and, a second later, went out the door. When the sound of footsteps on the stairs had died away, Stormy said, “Okay. You can come out now.”
Pushing herself through clouds of choking dust, Dani crawled out and began to brush herself off. Stormy was sitting on the edge of the bed. He was wearing a huge baggy T-shirt instead of regular pajamas, and his feet and legs were bare. And now, in the brighter light, it was easy to see that he really did look sick. His whole face looked damp and pale, and there was a greenish tinge to his skin. Even his freckles seemed to have faded.
Dani stopped dusting and stared. “What is it?” she asked. “What’s wrong with you? Do you really have …”
Stormy shook his head. “Not polio,” he said. “Shrimp. Brenda’s shrimp salad.”
“Brenda fed you some bad shrimp salad?”
“Nope. She threw it out. But I found it.”
“Food poisoning!” Dani was horrified. “You have food poisoning!”
Stormy’s grin looked almost normal. “Not anymore,” he said. “I threw it up.”
“You’re sure you’re all right now?”
Stormy nodded confidently. “Now I am,” he said.
Dani was really glad he was going to be all right, but the whole thing was getting to be slightly disgusting. Eating spoiled shrimp, and … She looked around. And the tiny, dusty room too. A bedroom that had probably been a storage closet for the old hotel. And only too obviously, the one thing it never had been was dusted. No wonder Stormy never wanted anyone to see where he lived.
“So this is your room?” Dani asked. “Yours—and your mother’s?”
“No.” Stormy looked offended. “My mother’s room’s down the hall.” He pointed. “She got a big room.” Suddenly he was looking uneasy. “You better go,” he said.
“I will,” Dani said. “But I have to tell you something first. Something very, very important.”
Stormy nodded, looking serious and solemn. “Tell me,” he said.
Lowering her voice, Dani said, “I’m leaving tomorrow. On the afternoon bus to Reno. I’m leaving tomorrow for Sea Grove.”
Stormy stared at her for a long time without asking or arguing. He seemed to know she really meant it. After a long time he swallowed hard and said, “All right. Me too. I’m going too.”
“Stormy,” Dani said. “You can’t. There isn’t enough money. There’s just barely enough for one person.”
Stormy grabbed her arm. “But Pixie’s going to get some more. For her birthday. She said so.”
Dani sighed. “I know. She thinks she is. But her birthday isn’t until next week. And she doesn’t know when the money will come. I can’t wait.”
Stormy was still clutching her arm. “I’ll come too,” he said. “I’ll get some money. You can’t go without me. I won’t …” He hushed then, saying, “Shhh. Listen.”
Dani heard it then too. There were footsteps on the stairs again, but not the same kind of footsteps. Instead of a heavy thudding noise it was now a series of hard, sharp clicks. Sounds that might be made by someone in very high heels.
Pushing her back away from the door, Stormy put his finger to his lips and whispered, “Shhh. Stay here.” Then he turned out the light and went out into the hall.
Standing there against the wall in the dimly lit room, Dani could hear voices, a woman’s voice asking questions, and Stormy’s answering. Hearing the voices, but not quite what they were saying, she suddenly felt frightened without knowing why. It was only Gloria out there, she was pretty sure of that. Only Stormy’s mother, old Gorgeous Gloria.
What she should do, she told herself, was to open the door and walk out there and say, “Hi.” Just say hello and tell Gloria the truth, that Ronnie had chased her and she’d run up there to get away from him. Anybody who knew Ronnie Grabler would understand that. That was what she ought to do, and she would have too, except for a mysterious feeling that tightened her throat, froze the muscles in her arms and legs and forced her to go on standing there in the dark, motionless and silent. Made her stay right where she was in the tiny, stifling hot room until the voices stopped and, at last, Stormy came back into the room.
Closing the door behind him, Stormy held his finger to his lips and kept it there while the click of high heels was followed by the sound of another door opening and then closing. It wasn’t until several minutes later, when the clicks had returned to pass Stormy’s door again and continue down the stairs, that Stormy took his finger away from his lips. And it was then that, staring into his wide eyes, Dani began to understand where her own mysterious attack of fear had come from. She’d caught it from Stormy.
Chapter 24
IT WASN’T UNTIL SHE was home again, back in the cabin with the front door locked and a chair pushed up against the broken lock on the back door, that Dani had time to start thinking. She thought first, of course, about Ronnie and whether he’d come looking for her at the cabin. She didn’t think he would, but the locked door and the chair under the doorknob were just in case. With that taken care of there were many other things to consider, some of which she’d have preferred not to think about if she’d had the choice.
The part she really tried not to think about was what Ronnie had said about raising Linda’s rent if she refused to sell her property, because that brought up a lot of other questions. Questions like what Linda would do if she had to pay more rent right now when she was about to lose her job at the bookstore. Dani tried her best to put the whole subject out of her mind by telling herself that what Linda would do was her business and nobody else’s. She
was the one who had chosen to stay in Rattler Springs and so how she was going to manage it was her own business. Dani had her own problems to think about. Problems like how she was going to manage the long, complicated bus trip to Sea Grove. Especially now that she knew for almost certain that no one would be going with her.
But her mind wouldn’t cooperate. When she reminded herself of the big fight she and her mother had just had about selling the ranch to the Grablers, and how the whole thing had been Linda’s fault from the very beginning for not doing enough to get them out of Rattler Springs long ago, her mind just kept coming back to the same questions. Questions about what would happen to Linda when she had no job and no place to live.
It was another unbearably hot day. Ordinarily Dani would have been out on the front porch by then, but because of the Ronnie problem, the best she could do was stay in the kitchen, where a wet towel draped over an open window could bring the temperature down a degree or two. By early afternoon what she was doing was trying to keep her mind on the right track by making a list of all the things she would need to take along on the trip. Which shirts and blouses, and maybe even a keepsake or two if they weren’t too heavy. She hadn’t gotten very far with the list when someone knocked on the front door.
Dani froze. Stormy, and Linda too, usually came in the back door. It might be Pixie, of course. Dani started to the living room. Or what if it was Ronnie? She stopped and went back to the kitchen, looking for something hard and heavy. When the knock came again she was headed for the door again, carrying a small cast-iron frying pan. Just as she got there she heard an impatient voice calling, “Dani! Let me in.” It was Pixie after all.
When Dani unlocked the door Pixie kind of exploded into the room. She was wearing her khaki shorts and matching safari vest with lots of big stretchy pockets. As always, she was talking nonstop. “Dani,” she said. “Where were you? Why didn’t you let me in? My folks just have to make some phone calls in town and then they’re going back, so I can’t stay very long, but I have something to tell you. Something very important. What are you doing with that frying pan?”
“Oh, that.” Dani looked down at what she had in her hand. “I guess I was getting ready to hit Ronnie Grabler over the head.”
“Really?” Pixie looked delighted. “Could you? Could I help?” She stopped to catch her breath and added, “Why?”
“Because he chased me this morning. I made him mad so he chased me down the street and right through the store and under the lunch counter into the kitchen. I was going to run out through the service door only it was locked so I …” She paused. “I hid in … Well anyway I hid and got away from him. But I was afraid he might come here looking for me. When you knocked on the door I thought maybe he’d come.”
“Really?” Pixie ran to the window and looked out. “I don’t see him. Do you really think he’ll come? I hope he comes before my folks get back. Before …” Suddenly she put her hand over her mouth. “I forgot. I almost forgot what I came to tell you.”
Reaching into one of the big pockets in her vest, she pulled out a fat envelope. “It came early,” she said. “My birthday package from my grandmother. She always gives me a bunch of presents and a ten-dollar bill for every year, so there’s eleven of them this time. Eleven ten-dollar bills. See. She usually gives it to me on my birthday but she mailed it early because she didn’t know how long it would take to get here.”
Staring at the fat roll of money, Dani opened her mouth to say—she didn’t know what. After a moment she closed it again.
“Here.” Pixie was holding out the money, pushing it toward her. “It’s for the running-away fund.” She shrugged. “If I was still at Grandma’s I’d have to put most of it in the bank but here—well, nobody will notice what I do with it. It’s not as much as the bicycle money would have been, but it’s enough, isn’t it?”
Holding Pixie’s birthday money in her hands, Dani sat down on the edge of the daybed, and Pixie sat down beside her. Dani looked at the money, folding and unfolding it. It was more money than she’d ever before held in her own two hands.
“It’s enough, isn’t it?” Pixie was still asking. “Can we all go? All three of us?”
It was quite a while, maybe almost a minute before Dani said, “Yeah. It’s enough.”
“Then what’s wrong?” Pixie asked. “Something’s wrong, isn’t it?”
Dani nodded. “Yes, something’s wrong.” She didn’t know how to tell Pixie. In fact she didn’t even know exactly what she was going to tell her until that moment when she admitted out loud that something was wrong with her decision to run away. She took a deep breath and, reaching over, she shoved the fat wad of money back into Pixie’s lap. “What’s wrong is,” she said, “that I guess I can’t go.”
“You can’t go?” Pixie’s big eyes were electric with surprise. “But—But you said you had to. You said you were going to go no matter what.”
“I know,” Dani said. “I know.” How could she explain? How could she explain in a way that someone like Pixie would understand? Someone who had never had to worry about whether there would be enough money to buy groceries at the end of the week or pay the next month’s rent. There was no way she’d ever understand. And least of all would she ever understand about Linda. How could a kid who had parents who owned custom-built cars, not to mention a rich grandmother in San Francisco, understand about a mother who handled money problems by putting unpaid bills away out of sight and checking out another mushy novel?
“Dani?” Pixie was squirming impatiently. “Why don’t you want to go anymore?”
“Look,” Dani said. “It’s not that I don’t want to go. It’s just that …” She stopped and started over. “Look. I’ll tell you why I don’t want to go if you tell me why you do. Okay? Just the truth this time. Stormy isn’t here so you don’t have to drag in all that Frankenstein stuff. Just tell me why you really want to run away. Okay?”
Pixie stared at Dani and went on staring for a long time without moving or saying a word. For one of the longest times, in fact, that Dani had ever seen her sit with her mouth shut. And when she finally began to talk it was in a slow, uncertain voice, so that she hardly sounded like Pixie at all. “Why I want to run away?” she said slowly and thoughtfully. “Well, I guess it’s just because I want to go back to my grandmother’s.” She looked at Dani and nodded and then went on sounding a little more like her normal self. “See, I thought I wanted to come out here and live with my parents but nobody else wanted me to. They all said I’d hate it. So I had to show them I meant it.”
“How did you do that?” Dani asked.
Pixie’s lips twitched and the fiery flicker was back in her eyes, at least for a second. “Oh, lots of ways,” she said. “I stopped eating for one thing. And laughing. And talking too. I stopped talking to anyone.”
Dani couldn’t help smiling. “Wow. That must not have been easy.”
“It wasn’t,” Pixie said. “But it worked. I think it was the not talking that did it. That really worried them.”
“Yeah, I guess it would,” Dani said. “So—you won and they let you come. And then you found out they’d been right, and you really did hate it?”
“Um, not really. I liked Rattler Springs and the school all right. I liked how different it all was. I thought school was kind of exciting. And you and Stormy. You and Stormy were the best part. But the part I hated was living with my parents. Living with my parents is absolutely the worst thing in the world.”
Dani didn’t get it. “Then why did you want to do it?” she asked. “You must have known what they were like.”
Pixie shook her head. “No,” she said. “I didn’t. I guess I really didn’t know. They’ve usually been off somewhere like Arabia or Brazil or Antarctica, at least since I was old enough to remember. They usually went someplace where kids weren’t allowed. So I’ve been mostly with my grandmother. And I’d only see them at Grandma’s house when they were home visiting for a little while. But then they cam
e out here and it wasn’t so far away, and it sounded all right to me, so …”
“Yeah, but what I still don’t get,” Dani said, “is what’s so bad about them. I mean”—she grinned—“they’re not really going to try to chop you up for monster parts or anything, and you don’t get starved or—”
“Shhh. Listen.” Pixie was cocking her head. “That’s it. That’s the car.” On her knees on the daybed, she pushed back the drape. “Yes, there it …”
Dani looked too. It was the Smithsons’ big black car, all right, coming up Silver Avenue. Coming up—passing the cabin—and going right on past.
Pixie jumped to her feet. On her way to the door she said, “See. They’re forgetting about me. That’s what’s so awful. They’re always forgetting about me.”
She was gone then. Out into the middle of Silver Avenue, where she jumped up and down and waved her arms and yelled until the car came to a stop and slowly backed up. Backed up to where Pixie was waiting, with her hands on her hips.
When the huge black hulk of a car had disappeared up the avenue, Dani turned away from the window and collapsed. She lay there for a while thinking about what Pixie had told her, and also about what she’d told Pixie. And why. The why was what she thought about most.
It wasn’t until she finally got up off the daybed that she noticed a big fat wad of ten-dollar bills lying on the floor not far from where Pixie had been sitting.
Chapter 25
IT WAS SOME TIME later that Dani realized how long she’d been standing there. Just standing there in the middle of the room, staring at all that money. She glanced at the clock. Linda might show up at any minute. Dani hurried to her room then and, after counting the eleven bills once more, she tucked them away next to the running-away-fund envelope at the back of her underwear drawer. She would give it back to Pixie the next time she came, all one hundred and ten dollars of it, but in the meantime it needed to be where it wouldn’t be noticed and have to be explained.
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