The Famous Stanley Kidnapping Case

by Zilpha Keatley Snyder

  The man leaned on the table breathing heavily, and then suddenly feinted to the left. David ran too, saw the ruse, and again managed to change direction in time to keep from being caught. They were running again, to the right, when David became aware of a high-pitched squealing noise and something shot out of the bushes directly into his path. He swerved to miss it, stumbled, and the hooded man caught up with him, ran into him, and they both fell.

  The man came down on top of David, pinning him to the ground, just as the small squealing thing came back into David’s line of vision. It was Janie, and she was swinging a big stick. There was a swish and a thud and the man on David’s back made a yelping noise and lunged at Janie. Scrambling to his feet, David yelled, “Run, Janie. Run for help.”

  She backed away swinging the stick with both hands, but then as she turned to run, the hooded man grabbed her from behind, lifting her off her feet. But she went right on screaming and flailing away with the heavy stick, and kicking now, too, with both feet. Trying to get to her to pull her free, David was suddenly aware of another person, jumping around beside him. Another hooded man was trying to get to Janie—lunging and ducking and grabbing at her stick. But then he noticed David and grabbed him instead. David struggled, but the other guy was a lot stronger. Very quickly he had David pinned, holding him from behind with his arm across his throat. They’d gotten the stick away from Janie, and the man who was holding her had his hand across her mouth. Suddenly everything was very quiet except for a mumbling, smothered sound from Janie.

  There were three of them now. The third man, hooded too, looked enormous. He gestured toward the path to the road and whispered in Italian. He sounded angry and urgent, and immediately they started across the terrace, pushing David and carrying Janie with them. They were starting down the steep path that led to the quarry road when one of the men spoke sharply, and they all stopped and listened.

  Something was moving in the underbrush on the other side of the circle. There was a sound like footsteps and rustling leaves. The third man started back stealthily like a stalking cat, creeping toward the sounds in the underbrush. He was near the table when the man who was holding Janie gasped and jerked his hand away from her mouth and shook it.

  Janie yelled, “Run, twins. Run for help.” And the next moment everything went crazy. The clearing around the picnic table seemed to be full of people running in every direction—stumbling, falling, and getting up and running again. The man who was holding David made a grab at someone who was running past, and David jerked away and ran too, until something tripped him and he fell and his head hit something very hard. Lights flared up around him, and then everything went black.

  eleven

  He didn’t stay unconscious for very long. They were still carrying him, slipping and jolting on the steep hill, when he began to be aware of what was happening. His head was hurting like crazy, and at first he couldn’t remember anything except that he knew something was very wrong and he was frightened. Then the jolting stopped, and he felt himself being lifted up and put down on a cold, hard surface. There was a loud metallic clang, followed by darkness and what sounded like a lot of people crying softly. A moment later a motor started, and the hard surface under his back began to vibrate. He tried to push himself to a sitting position and moaned as a pain shot through his head.

  “David,” Amanda’s voice came out of the pitch darkness. “David, are you all right?” Amanda’s voice sounded tense and shaky, but she didn’t seem to be crying.

  “I don’t know,” he said, but it came out sounding like a groan. The crying got louder and more frantic, and he added quickly, “I’m okay, I think. I must have been knocked out, but I’m okay now.”

  The metal floor lurched and jolted, and David was tipped back against a wall. He moaned again, and Amanda said, “Where does it hurt?” He felt her hand on his arm and he took it and guided it to the place where his head felt as if it were about to come apart.

  “Be careful,” he said. He had wanted to touch it himself and had been afraid to. “Not so hard. It hurts.”

  He winced at Amanda’s exploring fingers, but when she said, “I don’t think it’s bleeding. There’s a lump but I don’t feel any blood,” he started feeling a little better, because what he’d been imagining was a big bloody hole. He steadied himself against the wall behind him and started feeling around him for the kids. They were all there, a jumble of arms and legs and tear-wet faces. “Janie?” he said. “Blair? Tesser?” and they answered by grabbing hold of him and crying louder than ever.

  It was becoming obvious that they were in the back of a small truck. The growling motor whined through a series of gear shifts and the metal floor beneath them tipped and jolted. The little kids were clutching David, hanging onto his bathrobe, pulling him this way and that as the truck bounced and lurched. His head was still throbbing, and then the top of someone’s head hit his chin as the truck tilted, making him bite his tongue. All three of the little kids were crying as steadily and monotonously as a broken record, and for quite a long time David was so close to crying himself he didn’t dare try to say anything. All he could do was clench his teeth and swallow hard and pat whichever kid seemed to be crying hardest. Most of the time it was Esther, but sometimes it was Blair, and once it was even Janie. It really scared him when it was Janie—probably because he couldn’t remember another time in Janie’s whole lifetime when she’d cried because she was frightened—angry maybe, or sad, or even just for the fun of it, but never before because she was frightened.

  So he just clenched his teeth and patted and tried to put things together in his head in a way that made some sense. His thoughts seemed to be coming in a jumble of bits and pieces, and mixed up with everything he tried to think through were a few Italian words that kept scaring him half to death. The words were “molto pericolo” and “rapito.” One minute he would be hearing the witch doctor’s voice saying, “molto pericolo,” and the next there’d be Olivia saying, “Rapito—rapito would mean a kidnapping.” And then there were other bits of things that Olivia had said—phrases like “kidnapped for ransome” and “shut up down there among the ancient bones.”

  Sometime later he noticed that the truck was running more smoothly, as if it were on a paved highway, and it occurred to him that he ought to be listening for sounds and counting turns and all the things that kidnapped people did in stories so they could tell where they were being taken. So he tried a little, but he was too jittery to keep his mind on it for very long. He did notice that the road got bumpy and then smooth again several times, and that they kept on traveling for what seemed like hours and hours. The pain in his head had faded to a dull ache and his body had begun to ache almost as much from bouncing on the metal truck bed when there was a sudden sharp turn that slid them all together in a heap. For a minute or two they seemed to be climbing steeply up a very rough road, and then the truck ground and shivered to a stop. Everybody clutched each other and waited.

  There was the sound of the cab doors opening and then slamming shut, and then footsteps and voices that came around toward the back of the truck. The kids had stopped crying, but David could hear their hearts pounding, or else, maybe, it was his own. There was a grating sound at the back of the truck, a squeak of hinges, and then someone—it could have been David himself—gave a sharp gasp.

  Moonlight flooded through the dome-shaped opening, silhouetting three terrible figures, black and blank and featureless, except where the eyeholes in the dark hoods gave the impression of enormous owl-like eyes. They just stood there, peering into the back of the truck for what seemed like a very long time, and after a while Esther began to cry again—a thin, high-pitched wailing noise. When Esther wailed, one of the black figures stepped back and turned to look at the one in the middle. The man in the middle seemed to be in charge, because as Esther went on wailing the other two guys went on looking at him, as if for instructions. After a while he said, “Venite qui,” in a deep, gruff voice.

  Ja
nie jerked David’s arm. “He said come here,” she whispered and David whispered back, “I know,” but he didn’t move and neither did anyone else. Then the tall kidnapper in the middle said something else, and the other two shook their heads. Very suddenly the big guy jumped up into the back of the truck and started groping his way toward where they were all huddled together. As he got close, one of the little kids screamed and then the groping hands touched David and pulled him to his feet.

  As the kidnapper jerked David towards the tailgate, the other two reached up and pulled him down to the ground. He had time for a brief glimpse of what seemed to be wooded hillside before a blindfold was tied over his eyes and he was led across rough, sloping ground. When the guy who was leading him barked some kind of order in Italian, he didn’t understand, but it must have meant “step up,” because right afterwards he stumbled and pitched forward, pulling the kidnapper off-balance. They kind of fell up a couple stairs and lit on a hard, smooth floor. When David struggled to his feet, he had a bumped shin and knee and an awful feeling that the soft thing he’d just stepped rather hard on must have been a bunch of fingers. Blindfolded, he couldn’t be sure, of course, but from the noise the guy made when it happened, it probably was something that belonged to him. They went on across the floor, and then the kidnapper said something that must have meant stairs again, only this time there were a lot of them and they were going down—down into something that smelled damp and musty.

  “Shut up down there among the ancient bones”—this time the words seemed to explode in David’s mind. Too frightened to move, he stood perfectly still, picturing the dark hole under the church’s floor so vividly that even when the kidnapper pulled off the blindfold, he couldn’t believe he wasn’t there. As a matter of fact, for a moment after he saw the place, he still wasn’t positive. The stone walls had no windows and there was a dank, underground smell in the air. On the other hand it was much bigger than he’d expected a burial vault to be, and even after he’d followed the first, frantic inspection by a more careful one, he couldn’t see anything that looked like ancient bones. Instead there seemed to be a rickety table, a chair, a narrow metal cot, and against one wall a large pile of broken crates and barrels and huge pottery wine jugs. The whole thing was dimly lit by one electric bulb in a funnel-shaped metal shade that hung down from the ceiling in the middle of the room. It all looked like the kind of stuff you might find in the cellar of an Italian farmhouse, and after a minute it occurred to David that that probably was what it was—a cellar.

  “David.” It was Esther’s voice, and David turned in time to see Esther and Blair coming down the stairs. Behind them, one of the kidnappers was closing the heavy wooden door. Still feeling a bit encouraged by the fact that they were in an ordinary cellar instead of a burial vault, David managed to smile at them, which for some reason seemed to make them cry all over again. They ran across the room and threw themselves into his arms. He was just beginning to get them quieted down when the door opened again. All three of the kidnappers were coming down the stairs leading Janie and Amanda.

  After they’d taken off Janie’s and Amanda’s blindfolds, the three men went on standing near the foot of the stairs talking together in rapid Italian. It was the first time David had seen them except by moonlight. All three were dressed in black; black leathery-looking jackets, black pants and heavy black boots. The big one’s boots were high and shiny, like riding boots, and the other two were wearing heavy black workmen’s shoes with high, lace-up tops. All three of them were wearing hoods of a knitted material that fitted tightly to their heads and necks. Two of the hoods were plain black, but David saw now that the tallest man’s hood was dark red with zigzag yellow lines radiating out from around the eyeholes and the triangular opening over his mouth.

  The big man in the red mask was doing most of the talking. Gesturing violently and throwing his arms around, he looked and sounded as if he were angry or exasperated. David tried hard to understand, but the rapid speech ran together in a stream of unintelligible sound. At last Red Mask threw up his arms in a kind of “what-the-hell” gesture and stomped up the stairs and out the door, and the two other kidnappers followed him. When the door had been slammed shut and obviously locked with a loud grating noise, David turned his attention to his sisters and brother. It was the first time he had really seen them since it all began, and they all looked absolutely awful.

  The three little kids were wearing their pajamas and bathrobes. Their faces were streaked with dirt and tears, their hair was tousled and their eyes were red and puffy. Esther’s chin was quivering, and Blair’s stare looked blank and bewildered. Obviously the twins were miserable, terrified, and exhausted. It was harder to tell about Janie. Her face was expressionless, except for her enormous round eyes, which glittered with what might be mostly excitement; she wasn’t talking, however, which showed that she wasn’t altogether herself, either. And Amanda—when David looked at Amanda, she only stared back at him so blankly he wasn’t sure if she saw him at all.

  Esther was tugging at David’s arm. “Are we—are we kidnapped?” she asked.

  “I guess we are,” he said.

  Esther started to cry again, a soft, toneless wail.

  Suddenly Janie came to life. “We really are, aren’t we?” she said. “Just like that boy in Milan—and Isabella.”

  David looked quickly at Janie. Her eyes were still enormous, but there was a look in them that he thought he recognized. “Look Janie,” he said urgently, “this isn’t pretend. Those guys aren’t playing games. So don’t try anything. Do you understand? Not anything.”

  Janie nodded. “I know. We have been abducted by a bloodthirsty terrorist, and we are in great danger and peril.” David looked at her uneasily, but she looked very serious—maybe just a little bit too serious, but it was hard to tell. Esther was still wailing and, David noticed now, shivering. The air in the cellar was cold and clammy, and Esther’s robe wasn’t very heavy. David led her over to the cot and put her on it. He pulled up the thick gray blanket and tucked it in around her, and she immediately put her thumb in her mouth and curled up in a ball. Amanda seemed to come out of her trance then, and she brought Blair over and got him to lie down beside Esther. There was only the one cot, so David and Amanda sat down on the edge of it beside the twins. Janie began to walk around the room.

  There wasn’t much for Janie to examine. She walked around the pile of junk, poking at it now and then with her toe. In one corner of the room there was an arrangement that was obviously meant to be a toilet, a bucket in a box with a round hole in the top. Janie looked at the toilet for a minute before she came back to the middle of the room and climbed up in the one chair by the table. When she leaned forward on the table, it started to slope, and she climbed down and straightened out one of its wooden legs, which seemed about to fall off. Back in the chair she sat quietly staring up the stairs at the heavy door that led out of the cellar.

  After David stopped thinking about what Janie might be going to do next, he began to notice other things. Now that it was quiet in the cellar, he could hear footsteps overhead, and a metallic hammering noise, and once a clattering sound as if someone had dropped something heavy. David wondered if the kidnappers lived up there, in the house above the cellar. The footsteps and the clanking noises went on for quite a while before the key grated in the lock again, and the kidnappers came back down the stairs.

  One of the black hoods came first. He was carrying an armload of something that looked like a bunch of pipes and wire. He had almost reached the bottom of the stairs when somebody screamed. It was Janie. Everybody stared at her, and she screamed again and jumped down from the chair and ran across the room yelling, “Help! Help! I’m kidnapped! Save me! Save me!” While the kidnappers just stood there staring, Janie ran behind the pile of junk, climbed over one end of it, jumped over the toilet and dashed back across the room, throwing her arms around like a crazy person the whole time and yelling. At last she sank down against the farthest
wall, with her hands clasped together, making a strange jibbering noise that sounded like a frightened monkey.

  The short kidnapper said something in a quiet voice to Janie, as if he were trying to calm her down, but she just went on jibbering. He put down the load of stuff he was carrying and started towards her, but she leaped to her feet with such a blood-curdling shriek that everyone in the cellar jumped about a foot into the air. The short kidnapper backed away from her quickly and stepped into the stuff he’d been carrying, and for a minute or two there was nothing but earsplitting confusion. Esther was wailing again, the short kidnapper was hopping and clanking around trying to get his foot loose, and at the top of the stairs the guy with the red mask was bellowing in a very angry voice. Janie went on shrieking until Red Mask ran down the stairs and grabbed her and shook her hard. “Silenzio!” he yelled, and she finally did. Then the other black mask put down the stuff he’d been carrying, and they went away. Janie watched them go with a look on her face that David had seen a lot of times before.

  Janie,” he said, starting across the room, but Amanda beat him to it. Dashing past him to where Janie was still standing against the wall, she shook her almost as hard as the kidnapper had. “Janie, you idiot. You want to get us all killed?”

  Janie trembled her lower lip and her eyes filled up with tears, which might have looked pitiful if you hadn’t seen her do it so many times before. “I couldn’t help it,” she said. “I was hysterical with terror, like Isabella in The Secret of Holby House.”

  “You were not hysterical. You were just pretending. But those guys aren’t pretending, and if you keep on acting crazy they might decide it’s too much trouble to keep us alive. You could get us all killed, you little idiot.”