There was one other thing that happened that evening that might have given David some warning if he’d been a little more alert. Just as the little kids were getting into bed, Janie asked David if he thought Red Mask was still the one who stayed at the hideout at night.
“I don’t know,” David said. “I suppose so. Why?”
“Oh, I just wondered,” Janie said, and that was all.
It was probably an hour or two later—David had been asleep for quite a while—when he suddenly woke up. He lay there for a minute wondering what had awakened him. Either it had been a dream, or he had heard the motorcycle noise again. He wondered sleepily about who was coming and going so late at night and then, just as he was about to go back to sleep, he heard something else. A soft scraping noise that came from not far away. His eyes flew open.
At first he didn’t see anything, but then something under the table moved and caught his eye—and there was Janie. She seemed to be crouching down below the table, hanging onto the table leg with both hands.
Sitting up in bed he whispered, “Janie. What are you doing?”
“Nothing.” She got up quickly and tiptoed toward him. “I couldn’t sleep, so I decided to play a little game by myself. I was just playing a game about—being a bear and under the table was my cave. I was just playing it was winter, and I was getting ready to hibernate and—”
“Janie,” David said wearily, “shut up and go to bed.”
“Okay,” Janie said agreeably—much too agreeably, he realized afterwards. “Okay. I’ll hibernate in bed.”
David sighed and turned over and went back to sleep. It must have been a very sound sleep because the next thing he knew he was sitting straight up in bed, wondering frantically if the world were coming to an end. The cellar was full of sound, an incredible thumping, crashing, screaming noise, loud enough to wake the dead. The first thing he thought was that there’d been an earthquake and the hideout had fallen in on them, so the first place he looked was up—but the ceiling was still there, and so was the cellar—but in the midst of it Janie and Esther and Blair were pounding on a water bucket with sticks and screaming at the top of their lungs.
Oh, he thought, it’s only Janie and Esther and Blair pounding on a bucket and screaming. And then, a second later—what on earth are they doing that for? He was just jumping out of bed to make them stop when the cellar door crashed open and Red Mask appeared at the top of the stairs in just his undershorts and red mask. For one awful moment he stared down at Janie and the twins, and then he started to shout and run down the stairs. An instant later he lurched forward and launched himself into space. Shooting down the rest of the way headfirst, Red Mask landed at the bottom of the stairs with a terrible thud.
What happened next must not have taken more than a few seconds, but it seemed, somehow, that everything shifted into a weird kind of slow motion, so that there was time to see what was about to happen and to think, Oh no, this can’t be happening, before it actually did. It seemed as if Red Mask was lying stretched out on the floor moaning for a long time before David noticed what Esther and Janie and Blair were doing—before he saw they had stopped pounding on the water bucket and were getting ready to start pounding on Red Mask.
Janie was yelling, “Tie his feet, Blair. Hit him hard, Esther.”
When he realized what they meant to do, all David could think about was what Red Mask would do to them for hitting him—and he lunged forward in time to grab Janie’s table leg just before it crashed down on Red Mask’s head. As he jerked it away from her and pulled her away from Red Mask, there was a weird everlasting instant during which he watched Blair wrapping a bathrobe belt around one of Red Mask’s ankles, and Esther whacking him on the back with a piece of wood.
“Hit him, David. Knock him out!” Janie yelled, and David raised the table leg and looked down at Red Mask’s head, but somehow he couldn’t do it. He went on standing there while the kidnapper shook his hooded head and then pushed himself to a sitting position. Then he looked around, and making a kind of growling noise, he staggered to his feet, his swinging arms toppling Blair and Esther like rag dolls. David retreated backwards across the room, and Red Mask came after him.
Towering over David like a huge half-naked giant, Red Mask kept coming, and every step was, for David, a long, distinct and vivid eternity. And then Red Mask reached out and grabbed the club, and David hung onto it desperately and was jerked and tossed as Red Mask tried to shake him loose. David’s grip was weakening, the club was being torn from his fingers, when something hit Red Mask from behind so violently that he crashed into David, and David crashed into the wall behind him; and for a little while there was nothing at all except the struggle to get some air back into his lungs.
As David’s eyes and lungs started working again, he was aware first of all of Janie, jumping up and down and making a noise like a cheerleader at a football game—and then of two extra people who were sitting on top of Red Mask tying his wrists and ankles with bathrobe belts. The two people looked like teen-aged boys, and although they weren’t wearing masks, they were wearing boots and black leather jackets. When they ran out of belts, they got up off Red Mask and the tallest one said something to Janie.
“Pietro says we’d better get out of here fast,” Janie said—and they did.
twenty
For almost half an hour David had been sitting on the terrace wall enjoying the view and thinking. What he had been thinking about was how there could be times in a person’s life when, for a little while, everything seemed to be just about perfect. It was that kind of a day. That kind of a week, actually. And two days ago it had even turned amazingly warm for November, as if Nature was trying to do something special for the occasion, too.
Besides thinking, he’d been noticing how the clear blue of the sky lightened to turquoise near the tops of the hills and how the vines on the walls of the villa were turning to gold and brilliant red, and how the Swedish students who lived across the courtyard were taking advantage of the unexpected weather to get a last minute layer of suntan. It was especially interesting to notice that Swedish people sometimes sunbathed with less clothing on than you might expect.
Besides thinking and watching the interesting view, the other thing David was doing was waiting for Amanda to come back from Florence. For the last two days Amanda had been staying with her father in Florence, but today he was to catch a plane back to California, and Dad and Molly had driven into the city to bring Amanda back to the villa.
“Hey, David.” It was Janie’s voice, and he looked up to see her leaning out of her window on the second floor.
“What do you want?” he called before he realized that she didn’t really want anything, except perhaps attention.
“Hi!” she called again, even louder. “Hi, David.”
The Swedish girls looked up and waved at Janie, and she waved back. “David,” she yelled, “I’m coming down.” She disappeared for a minute, and then she was back leaning out the window again, but this time without her tee shirt. “I’ll be right down,” she called. “Here I come.”
David sighed and went back to admiring the view, and a few seconds later Janie came out of the front door wearing nothing but a pair of shorts—not that it made much difference in Janie’s case. She skipped across the courtyard, waving at David, and on over to where the Swedish girls were sunbathing. After she’d stood around talking to them for a while, one of them spread out a towel for her, and she lay down beside them and went on talking. They were too far away for David to be sure, but he supposed they were talking English, since the Swedish girls all spoke some English, and as far as he knew Janie didn’t speak any Swedish—not yet anyway. He could hear enough, though, to tell that Janie was doing most of the talking. Now and then one of the girls seemed to be asking her a question, and every once in a while they would all laugh. David stayed where he was, watching the view and the beautiful day, and the road that went down to the village, and a while later Janie got up and cam
e over to the terrace wall.
“What are you doing, David?” she asked. “I’ve been sunbathing.”
“I’m just waiting,” he said, “for Dad and Molly and Amanda to come back from Florence. What were you saying to the Swedish girls? What were you telling them about? You remember what Dad said about talking so much about the kidnapping.”
“I wasn’t talking so much,” Janie said. “They were asking me questions.”
“What kind of questions?”
“Well,” Janie rolled her eyes thoughtfully, “mostly about my plan. They wanted to know about my plan.”
David sighed again. Everyone had heard a great deal about Janie’s plan. Everyone who’d gotten within earshot had heard over and over again about how she had taught the twins their part of the plan, and how she had swiped David’s belt when he wasn’t looking, and how after everyone was asleep she had tied the belt to the bannisters near the top of the stairs so that anyone coming down would trip over it, and how she woke up the twins and when they were all ready she said, “ready-set-go,” and they began to beat on the bucket and scream. And then Esther was going to help her knock Red Mask out while Blair tied him up. Only David had interfered and spoiled it all, and everything would have turned out very badly, except that Gino and Pietro were still there, which she hadn’t expected, but which turned out to be very lucky.
They’d been very lucky, all right. Now and then during the last week, David had given himself cold chills by thinking about just how terribly lucky they’d been. In between all the great times, being back with Dad and Molly, having their names and pictures in the papers, being on TV, and starting back to school where everyone made such a fuss that it almost got to be embarrassing, David had sometimes thought about how easily it might all have turned out very differently. How Gino and Pietro wouldn’t have been there that late at night except that Red Mask had just returned from delivering the ransom note, so that instead of being home in bed as they usually were at that hour, they were just getting on their motorcycles when Janie and the twins started banging on the bucket.
But nobody talked much about what might have happened. What the papers told, and what everybody talked about, was how it all actually turned out. Everyone knew now about how the Lino boys had met Red Mask, who’s real name was Alberto Scalione, who was a lot older and who had been in trouble with the law several times before; and how they had told him about the rich American girl who was a friend of their sister’s. It looked now as if it had been Scalione who planned the kidnapping from the beginning—who’d found the deserted farmhouse and prepared the note that lured Amanda out of the house, and who planned the roundabout route that had made it seem that the hideout was a great distance from Valle, when in reality it hadn’t been far away at all.
Everything had been in the papers. As a matter of fact, there’d been a lot of stuff in the papers that, in David’s opinion, hadn’t been all that necessary. Dad had said that in the beginning, when the children were still missing, the newspaper people had been very helpful and sympathetic; but since the rescue, they’d started printing some rather humorous articles, some of which David could have done without.
There’d been one about the kidnapping itself, about how the kidnappers had set out to capture one victim and had wound up with a lot more than they’d bargained for, that he could see real humor in. But there were others that dwelt on the fact that after the captives had been released, they’d managed to get themselves so thoroughly lost in the woods, they’d gone on being missing for several more hours. The articles had told about how, after the release, the Lino boys had turned themselves in, and led the police back to the hideout where Scalione was still lying on the floor tied up with bathrobe belts—and the whole mystery had been solved, with the minor exception of the fact that no one could locate the kidnap victims. Where they had actually been was in a rather small patch of woods near the hideout, and what they had been doing was going around in circles because of trying to plot a course by looking for moss on the sides of tree trunks.
The article had made it all sound rather amusing, and David could see now that it was, but it hadn’t seemed particularly funny at the time. Not with Esther whining and Blair losing his clothes because Janie’s plan had used up not only his bathrobe belt and shoe strings, but also the drawstring out of his pajama pants, and Janie and Amanda arguing about moss and tree trunks and which way they ought to be going. But then, they’d eventually stumbled on a farmhouse and been recognized and kissed and cried over by the farm woman, and soon afterwards they were back at the villa—with Dad and Molly and the Thatchers and everybody being hysterical with joy.
There was just one part of the whole thing that no one talked about very much, and that was Blair’s dream. David and Amanda had talked it over, right after they got home, and decided they weren’t going to bring it up, and after they explained it to Janie, she agreed not to bring it up, either. There were a lot of reasons. The main one was the effect the story might have on the Lino family. Gino and Pietro had tackled Red Mask and let the Stanleys loose and maybe even saved their lives; and if David and Amanda started going around saying that it had only turned out that way because they’d tricked Gino and Pietro into believing that Blair had seen a vision—it wouldn’t do anyone any good.
It certainly wouldn’t do Gino and Pietro any good, or Ghita, their mother—or Marzia, who just as David had suspected hadn’t had anything to do with the kidnapping at all.
And then, too, as Amanda pointed out, if everyone did start believing that Blair had been part of a miracle, it might turn out a lot like the movie she’d seen on TV, and that obviously wouldn’t be good for Blair. Besides, David wasn’t at all sure about what he, himself, believed about what Blair had seen in the corner of the cellar. Not long after they’d gotten back home, he’d tried to question Blair about it. He and Blair had been coming down the front stairs at the time, and they’d stopped at the landing with the statue of the Virgin.
“Blair,” David had said, “did you really see the Blue Lady on the box in the cellar? I mean really, Blair.”
Blair looked at the statue and then back at David. He pointed at the statue and said, “Don’t you see that? Don’t you see that Blue Lady, David?”
“Well, of course, I see that,” David said.
“Is that really? Is that really the Blue Lady?”
“Well, it’s really a statue,” David said, feeling a little confused.
Blair nodded happily, looking as if he thought everything was all solved. “A dream is really,” he said. “A dream is really a dream.”
David sighed. “Look,” he said, “we’d better hurry up. I think it’s time for dinner.” And that had been the end of the investigation.
* * *
“Hey look. Here they come,” Janie said, and David came out of the past to the terrace wall in the warm sunshine, and to Janie walking up and down the wall with her arms held out as if she were walking a tightrope. “Here comes Dad and Molly and Amanda.” She jumped down off the wall and ran toward the gate that led into the courtyard. The car came through the gate, and Janie ran behind it, waving and yelling, all the way to the parking place on the lower terrace. David got off the wall and followed more slowly.
Amanda was getting out of the car wearing a new skirt and blouse that were very stylish and Italian-looking. She was hugging Janie when David came up, and then she turned loose of Janie and grabbed David and hugged him, too. She went off toward the house with one arm around Molly and the other around Janie.
“Wow!” David said. He’d never thought of Amanda as the hugging type, particularly not where he was concerned.
Dad laughed. “I know just what you mean,” he said. “Some people seem to have done a bit of changing lately.” He opened the trunk and began getting out groceries and other packages. “Here, David. Could you give me a hand with these?” he said.
“Well, in Amanda’s case,” David said, “I think part of it has to do with how she was fe
eling about her father.” It was something David hadn’t gotten around to discussing with his father, so while they carried in the groceries, he began to go into some of the things Amanda had told him about her father while they were in the cellar. About how she felt her father didn’t love her—and what a difference it had made when she’d heard that he had come to Italy to try to save her, even though he couldn’t get all the money the kidnappers wanted.
In the kitchen, Dad put water on the stove for coffee and sat down at the kitchen table, and David sat down, too. Dad was looking very thoughtful. “A good observation,” he said at last, “and a reminder that I’ve needed from time to time in the past year. With her own father apparently indifferent, and Molly occupied with a new family, it’s not surprising that Amanda has felt like getting even with the world, now and then.”
Dad got up and made his coffee and got some cookies out of one of the sacks of groceries. Then he sat down and passed the cookies to David and said, “Yes, I think the whole Stanley family has learned some very important things. Molly and I were talking last night about how much we’d learned, not just about our own family, but about other people as well.”
David knew what Dad was talking about. He’d already heard Dad and Molly telling about how much help and support other people had been during the terrible time when the children were missing. Not only the renters at the villa, but also lots of people from the village and farms, had tried to help in any way they could. Molly said the Italian people had been marvelous, and she didn’t know how she and Dad could have lived through that awful time if it hadn’t been for all the people who helped and sympathized.
“Speaking of learning,” Dad said, “according to Ghita, Gino and Pietro have done a lot of learning, too. We stopped by to see her on our way into Florence this morning. You know how terrible it was for her when she heard her boys were involved in the kidnapping; but today she seemed to be almost her old cheerful self. She’d just heard that the court will probably be quite lenient with the boys, because of their ages and the testimony you and Amanda gave about their behavior at the end when the chips were down.
The Famous Stanley Kidnapping Case Page 15