The Adventures of Young Elizabeth and Rollo, the Wondercat* (*Who thought he was a dog?)

by Les Cohen

Episode 6:

  That Sinking Feeling

  “Where are we going?” MR couldn’t believe Eleanor still didn’t get it. “To Harness Creek. We’ll meet at my place tomorrow, early, let’s say 10 o’clock,” which was early for MR and Bobby, although I was used to getting up, usually by no later than seven, to have breakfast with my parents. “We’ll bike downtown to where they keep the records and old maps and find this place exactly, and then go there.”

  “It’s too far to bike.” Eleanor was right. “Besides, we’ll get killed going out Forest Drive. I’ll get my sister to take us. My mother wants her driving every day for at least an hour, for practice, now that she’s got her license. She’s got Connie running errands for her all over town.”

  “Let’s just be sure to stop for fries and gravy at Murdock’s Marina.” MR tended to plan our excursions by the food we were going to eat…

  “Meooarkk!!” Food was one of the reasons Rollo put up with his roughhousing, and MR sitting on him now and then. Rollo loved table scraps.

  “Don’t tell me you think he...” Bobby looked up at me in disbelief, reaching over to scratch Rollo’s stomach, “Tell me you don’t think the furball actually understands what MR just said?”

  “Hey, I don’t always understand exactly what MR’s talking about, but I still get the point.”

  “Thank you, Eleanor.” MR appreciated the compliment, such as it was.

  “You’re welcome,” she responded, puckering up to make a fake kissing sound – for MR, but in Bobby’s direction?!

  “I can tell you one thing,” and this was something Elizabeth knew for sure, “he knows what f-r-i-e-s and g-r-a-v-y mean.”

  “Mrrrr.”

  “And what? ...He can spell?!” Ooo, there was that Bobby smile again.

  Later that afternoon at my house, we looked through the papers in the folders I took with the cash box from her father’s study, made some popcorn and talked about stuff until about seven when we all went out for dinner.

  (It was after dinner when Bobby walked me home, stopped at a gazebo in the little park near our house and kissed me goodnight. It was romantic, being there when the sun was just going down, and I don’t think Bobby wanted to run into my parents, which means he’d thought about it. We were standing when it happened. It started with a simple kiss, then another a little bit longer and then the first serious kiss of my life. His too, I think. Four years later, I still can’t get it out of my head. Neither of us said anything the next few blocks to my driveway. We’d been holding hands and he pulled my arm up and kissed the back of my hand, told me “I’ll see you tomorrow,” and stood there, watching until I was inside. I’d left Rollo home that night, and I remember him watching us from the sill on our bay window. And I could tell he was happy for me, even though cats can’t smile.)

  In one of the folders, before we left to get something to eat, we saw some old bills for hardware and garden tools. Shovels. That kind of thing. And some letters, one or two of which had been written from my grandfather to my father, but apparently never mailed. I wondered why.

  No trouble falling asleep that night. Like a rock, and it was morning before I knew it.

  Rollo slept late that morning. He wouldn’t admit it, but I suspect he was up all night at my bedroom dormer, watching out the window for anyone who might have thought about breaking into the house, worried about those two men who kidnapped us and then crashed my mother’s car, with us in it, into the river. We’d talked about it last night, about the men who kidnaped Rollo and me. The police never found them, but didn’t think they had drowned. Some witnesses thought they saw two men coming out of the river about a quarter mile down from where we went in. Anyway, we thought they might come back for the folders my father had removed from the safe. The police said they’d have a car drive by our house during the night. Big deal. Other than the two minutes the police car would be out front, what was going to protect us the rest of the time? So we just kept the doors and windows locked, and hoped for the best. Rollo’d remember what they smelled like and would know they were coming a block or more upwind if they tried anything. It was like the old days when Rollo and Sam would be worried about something and stay up all night on their version of a “stakeout.” Mostly, I think they were out looking for what was left of a perfectly grilled steak one of our neighbors might have tossed in the trash. Either way, it was good training that Rollo and I knew would come in handy one day.

  Rollo was sleeping when I got up, but he had time – It doesn’t take him long to get ready. – and would probably need the sleep for what we had planned that day. I got dressed, made myself some scrambled eggs and skillet potatoes for breakfast – Very tasty, if I do say so myself and, if I don’t who will? – and hung out until about 9:30 when I woke up Rollo. I wanted to make sure he’d have a chance to get something to eat before we left.

  “Okay, furry. Here’s the deal.” I told him, sitting down on the kitchen floor next to his bowl while he ate. I rubbed the top of his head and scratched the end of his back by his tail, and he looked up now and then, which was his way of acknowledging the more important elements of our plan. “We’re taking our bikes downtown to make sure we know exactly where we’re going. That’ll take maybe an hour. Then we’ll meet back here where Connie’s going to pick us up. You be ready.”

  “Meoorrk.”

  “Roger that.” Rollo went back to eating full-time, and I stood up and walked toward the door out to the garage to get my bike, a solid English three speed, nothing like the double geared eighteen speed model I have now. It was just then that Bobby, MR and Eleanor rang our front door bell. I’d already talked to my mother, so my parents knew what was up. And we were off, up and down a few side streets to the county records office downtown in maybe ten minutes, door to door.

  Turned out the property we were looking for wasn’t all that hard to find and was now off a newly paved street that had been put in just a few years ago when some river front houses were built further down. Just in case, on the way back to my house we stopped at O’Riley’s Service Center to pick up a county map to make sure we didn’t get lost – and for Eleanor to say “Hey.” to Jake, the new kid who was working there for the summer.

  Connie didn’t look a bit like Eleanor. Eleanor looked like her father. Same mouth and chin exactly, less the five o’clock shadow, thank goodness, coal black hair and unexpected light blue eyes. Eleanor was attractive, but Connie was more... Well, to be honest, she was prettier than her younger sister, technically prettier, but not as “good looking.” She didn’t attract boys the way Eleanor did. My father always told me that being attractive was more important than being beautiful, if you cared about such things. At first I thought he was just being nice, given that I’m no professional model. (“Not yet, anyway,” I laughed to myself.) But he was right. Beauty is a kind of perfect, rare something you stare at maybe, but not all that interesting. “Attractive,” on the other hand, is a combination of looks, smile, attitude, personality, intelligence and chemistry. “It’s the whole package,” my father told me, “that people find compelling, that makes you unique. It’s everything. The way you move, the sound of your voice and the intelligence and fire people can see in your eyes.” Connie was beautiful, but Eleanor... I saw the way the guys looked at her when we walked the hallways at school. Connie could have been a model, but Eleanor was “neat,” an expression my mother uses now and then, something from the sixties I think, which is close to being “cool,” only better.

  What was I talking about? Oh yeah... Connie, who didn’t look a bit like Eleanor, was right on time. She wasn’t as bright as Eleanor, either, but she was really nice and, driver’s license or not, always took care of her little sister. She had her mother’s new Chevy. Eleanor sat in the front with the map. Bobby, MR, Rollo and me sat in the back. Me, in the middle, with the hump in the floor because I was the smallest of the three of us, width-wise, not including Rollo w
ho was one big cat, but he sat up on my lap, stretching his neck so that he could peer over the front seat and look out the windshield. Bobby and I were smashed up against each other – even though he had some room between him and the door.

  Finding Creekside Drive, the new road off Taylor Avenue, was easy enough, but we passed the driveway to the Harness Creek property twice before realizing exactly where it was. At one time it had probably been nice, but now the gravel driveway to the creek was overgrown with weeds and bushes that hadn’t been cut back for years. We drove in only a few yards before we got worried about Eleanor’s mother’s car getting scratched by the unkempt brush on both sides. “Let’s not go any further.” Connie was right to be concerned. “Look at the thorns on these bushes. Honeysuckle maybe?”

  “They smell great, don’t they?” Bobby inhaled while he did a slow blink. He was talking about the bushes, flush with little flowers, but looking at me, a light smile beginning to break on the corners of his mouth.

  “No sweat.” MR didn’t like riding in the back seat anyway and was the first to get out, although there wasn’t much room on either side of the car. None of us could open our doors the whole way, so we squeezed out. I put Rollo in my backpack, with the top open, of course. It kept him tight up against me, without getting in my way, with just enough wiggle room for him to look over my shoulder to see where we were going. Sure, I was worried about him going off on his own into the woods around the house we found in the clearing. But then I had my own selfish reason, too. Sometimes he would warn me about something coming from behind, like having eyes in the back of my head.

  The “house,” and I’m using the term loosely, was a single story shack, the kind with the cheap wood siding with wavy bottoms that nobody’s used forever, not since they invented aluminum. The house was on our left, a clearing to our right where there was what was left of an old cinderblock barbeque and a picnic table made out of two by fours. In front of us, past the house, were some steps that led down a short hill to the water. The narrow dirt road that brought us there sort of became part of the clearing, turning left around the front of the house, running along the other side and then back out the way we came.

  When I called the place a “shack” before, I was being kind. It might have been someone’s weekend house ages ago, but now.. Now it was bulldozer food waiting to be eaten by the next housing development or condo some developer would build – a reality I’d learned listening to my parents talk around the dinner table. There wasn’t a piece of the place or the property that didn’t need serious work. There was a back door near the corner, not far from where we were standing, in a section of the house that, for some reason, wasn’t quite as wide as the rest of the place. Farther up, toward the water, there were two windows on this side of the house, one of them over a shed that had its own little roof for a lid, with a bucket, an old cork life preserver and other boat stuff inside, so we found out later.

  The front of the house was a used-to-be completely screened in porch that faced the water. Nobody had worked on it for years, and some of the staples that held the screens to their two-by-fours had rusted away to nothing, leaving plenty of room for an occasional bird, and who knows what else, to come and go through openings where the screen was no longer attached. Some pieces of slate, cracked and overgrown with weeds, led down the hill in front of the house to a flat, sandy area to the left of which was a rickety pier, its uneven boards extending maybe thirty feet into the creek where it became T-shaped, with an old wooden fishing boat tied up across the end.

  That boat was what they call a “Chesapeake Bay deadrise,” like the ones, mostly larger, that brought fish and crabs into the dock downtown to sell through the market and to the local restaurants. I think the term, “deadrise” had to do with the flat angle of the hull across the stern. (Aren’t you impressed that I know this stuff? It’s just that I grew up near the water and paid attention. “If I write murder mysteries someday,” I remember thinking to myself, “‘Deadrise’” would make a great title.” Little did I know at the time how prophetic that title might be.) The flat hull helped the fishermen work shallow waters, the characteristically low stern making it easier to work their crab pots and other fishing gear. In its day, it might have been a working boat – mostly open, with a small uncomfortable cabin. Too small to be a commercial vessel by today’s standards, and too slow to be fun, it was probably just a boat someone used to troll for Rockfish out in the bay around the lighthouse at Thomas Point.

  I don’t remember it all that well, but my grandfather and his friends, with my father sometimes, would go out for the day in a boat a lot like this one, talk about stuff between beers and bring back some fish we’d clean and grill that night. It was good, especially the watermelon we’d always have for dessert. Smashing our mouths into the sweet red mush, not caring about the juice running down our faces onto our shirts and then spitting out the seeds into the yard only to wonder for a whole year if we’d have water melon plants growing there the next summer, but that almost never happened. I remember laughter, and how, when the sun had gone down, I would lie there in the hammock between the trees, falling asleep while I watched the fireflies and listened to the adults sitting around the table and in the lawn chairs nearby.

  Both the house and the boat had been white with dark green trim, as if someone had painted them to match, or maybe just had some paint leftover, but the white had turned light gray, and the green was chipping off, sometimes down to the wood. I couldn’t help myself and picked one of the loose pieces of green paint off a shutter next to the window we looked through to see if there was anybody home.

  “Hey, what are you doing?” MR grabbed me by the arm and pulled me back. “Suppose there’s someone in there, with a gun or something. You want to scare them by peeping through their window?”

  “Did it occur to either of you Einsteins to just knock on the door?” A rare comment from Connie was unexpected and got our attention.

  “Good idea.” Bobby decided to give it a shot, knocking on the back door to see what happened.

  “There’s no one here.” Eleanor was more hopeful sounding than sure of herself, looking around for any signs of life.

  “Maybe not now...” Bobby had given up knocking, but did turn the door knob a couple of times in case it was open. It wasn’t. He was just standing there now, his hands in the back pockets of his jeans, looking down at what he’d just realized, “...but someone’s been taking out the garbage.”

  “Maybe we should look through it?” MR was quick with the good idea, slow on the follow through.

  “You go through it.” Eleanor had her arms folded, keeping her hands a safe, extra few inches from the two plastic bags leaning up against the notch in the back of the house next to the small concrete slab in front of the door.

  “This is all too neat.” MR was back by the door with Bobby. “Look at this plant.” He was pointing to the small, ordinary red pot in the corner. “Those... What are those?”

  “Petunias.” Connie knew her flowers.

  “Whatever, someone’s been watering them.” He bent over, touching the soil. “It’s moist, and it hasn’t rained in a couple of days.”

  “Maybe someone’s in there and they’re just not answering the door?” Bobby wondered out loud.

  “Okay, okay.” This was getting way too tense for me. “Let’s stop playing detective and try to find out something really important. We get it. Someone’s living here. Let’s stay together...”

  Eleanor interrupted me. “You’re absolutely right. It’s always when they split up in those scary movies that someone gets stabbed to death, or worse, one at a time.”

  “Hey, dead is dead,” MR was nervous, but tried to cover it up by making a point. “What difference does it make how...”

  “I think the point is,” I don’t think I’d ever heard Connie talk this much, “there’s safety in numbers.”

  “MR...” Bobby c
ould tell we were all a bit shaky and was asking his friend, nicely, to give it a rest. “Com’on. Let’s check out the porch. Maybe the screen door’s open.”

  And it was. The front porch was half the size of the house. Nothing fancy. Quite to the contrary. Just some two-by-four studs – I help my father build stuff now and then, which is how I know these things. – supporting an extended roof with screening that was held on, where it wasn’t torn open here and there, with rusted staples, really “brads,” you know, the staples you hammer into the wood. The door had one of those old fashioned black rubber balls that would swing in a bit so that, when the spring on the door brought it back from wide open, it would hit the ball and not bang into the frame. Apparently, it hadn’t worked that well and the ball was stuck there, instead of rolling out of the way, keeping the door open. And so the four, no, make that five of us, opened it all the way and walked onto the worn and warped boards that made up the floor. There was a badly frayed cane chair and, on the other side, an indoor couch that didn’t belong outside, an unfolded army surplus blanket lying rumpled at one end.

  “It’s probably hot inside,” MR was thinking out loud. “I’m guessing someone’s been sleeping out here.”

  Bobby on the left, and me on the right holding Rollo who had climbed out of my backpack and over my shoulder, tried looking in the windows on either side of the door to the house, the door inside the screened-in porch, but there were curtains drawn on the inside and we couldn’t make out anything through them.

  “What’s wrong with him?” Connie had come onto the porch just in time to hear Rollo start to go nuts. He’d been pretty quiet up until now. Thinking. Sniffing around. But as soon as we got near the door, the one inside the porch into the house, it was all I could do to hold on to him.

  “Mrrrrr. MrrrrRRR!!” He was growling, and squirming like crazy.

  “I’m taking him out of here.” And I headed back out the screen door onto the crest of the hill where the path led down to the water.

  “What was that?!” Connie was the first to hear it.

  “Someone’s going out the back door!” MR was shouting, pushing Eleanor out of the way, running with Bobby – and Connie running a step ahead of him? Now that was a surprise. I had no idea where they thought they were going. I mean what were they going to do if they actually caught someone? Those guys who kidnapped me were BIG!

  “Meoarrrkkkkk!” Rollo wasn’t kidding this time. Bolting out of my hands, he kicked off my chest, and now Eleanor and I were in motion, running to catch up. Seconds later we were all huddled together a few yards down the driveway, back to back in sort of reverse huddle. We’d stopped because none of us knew which way to go. It was all quiet now. No running sounds. No rustling of brush in the woods on either side of the drive. Each of us was looking in a different direction, but none of us saw anything. Nothing.

  “You guys,” Connie was talking to Eleanor and me, “wait here. Bobby, you and MR come with me to make sure the car’s okay.” Very impressive. Eleanor and I turned to each other, the way friends do when you’re thinking the same thing at the same time.

  “You know,” Eleanor was always the first to say something, “sometimes I don’t have any idea who she is.”

  “Com’on. Let’s make ourselves useful.” I reached behind to lift up the top of my backpack, and then bent down on one knee. “Rollo, back!” I did a quick thumb point over my shoulder and a second later he was sliding his furry butt into the pouch, his forearms on either side of my neck. “Let’s go down and check out the boat.”

  “What about Rollo?”

  “Meoarkkk!”

  “He’ll be fine, won’t you, furry?” I turned and reached over my shoulder, rubbing his huge head to reassure both of us. “You going to stay put?”

  “Merrrroook!”

  “Good. “Let’s go.”

  “Watch it.” Eleanor was in front of me and hadn’t made it more than a couple of feet down the hill when she lost her footing. “Careful. These stones...” which we could hardly see between the weeds that had grown around them, “aren’t that steady.” Hands out from our sides for balance, we made it the rest of the way down with no problem, turning left at the bottom of the hill to follow the path along the edge of the water to the pier.

  The pier itself wasn’t all that bad, considering its age and lack of care. It was close to the water, but then it was high tide. The boards were uneven, and the pilings not too straight, but it seemed sturdy enough and we weren’t worried, although we probably should have been, but you don’t grow up near the water to be afraid of old piers. A little, tubby, brown bird squatted at the top of one of the pilings to my right, staring at me, but not concerned enough to fly away. Rollo hardly noticed. A lesser feline would have been all over that bird, but not this Jedi cat. (“Furry-Wan,” like “Obi-Wan” with fur. Get it? I loved that movie.) He was way too focused on the boat to be distracted. Instead, he turned left, his powerful forearms pressing down on the back of my neck to give him the extra height he needed.

  “Mrrrrrrr,” Rollo whispered to get my attention, extending his left arm straight out and down toward the water. (I was the one who taught him to point.) Tied up on the left, below where we could see it from the house, was a dingy, like a small rowboat with two short oars.

  Eleanor was kneeling at the end of the pier, doing her best to look past the cabin door which kept flopping open and banging shut with the motion of the boat. The only window to the cabin we could see was a single porthole, its brass rim and hardware badly tarnished, almost green. There would be another one on the other side, and maybe even one in the front. Rollo and I felt a light breeze at our backs that kept both boats away from pier, at the end of their ropes – pretty much the way I felt when I was locked in the safe.

  “Somebody’s been here,” we both said in unison. “Recently,” we did it again. “How do you know?” and again, smirking back at each other.

  Eleanor, standing now, held up both hands, palms out, to stop us and take charge of the conversation. “You go.”

  “Because there’s no water in the boat.”

  “This boat?” she asked, pointing down at the cabin.

  “No,” I answered, pointing with a nod of my head. “This one.” I pointed to the dingy. “It hasn’t rained in the past couple of days, but that thunderstorm we had Wednesday would have sunk this for sure.”

  “Forget that.” Eleanor had bigger news. “I think someone’s living in this one. ...Com’on,” she waved me over the last few feet to the edge of the pier.

  “Why are you whispering?”

  “Why are you whispering?”

  “I’m whispering b e c a u s e you’re whispering”

  “Oh, who cares who’s whispering. Just follow me.” Eleanor, sitting down on the edge of the pier, pulled on the line holding the stern, bringing the rear of the boat up against the piece of old fire hose that was nailed to the piling as a bumper. (You always wondered where old fire hoses go when they retire? Now you know.) Eleanor went first. Stepping onto the edge of the boat pushed it down almost to the water, but that didn’t stop her from following through with enough momentum to make it into the open area in the stern around the engine box. It was either go forward, or fall back into the water. A moment later, we were both on board.

  I’d say the whole boat was maybe twenty five feet long, hanging over both sides of the end of the pier. Boats like this one have “gunnels,” narrow walkways where you can walk around the boat. Bordering these gunnels in the back, around the sides and back of the open portion of the boat, there were boards, maybe six inches higher that you need to step over when you get on and off. They were there to keep water out when the waves were rough, and Eleanor had done a good job jumping over them. Instinctively, she’d gone to the other side of the boat to use her weight to offset mine when I followed her onboard.

  There was a cabin, from the looks of it, barely
tall enough for someone standing up straight. The back of the boat, where we were standing, was open, like I said, with a box in the center covering a single inboard engine. The steering wheel, the kind made of wood with handles at the end of spokes, and engine controls were to the right of the door to the cabin, covered by a short canopy to keep the sun and rain off the pilot. Someone had put a wooden bar stool there to sit on while he steered. With the door open, we could see that it was pretty dark inside, except for the light through the portholes on either side, and a small one in the front of the cabin that looked out onto the bow.

  “Bang!!” Rollo and I spun around to where Eleanor was standing by the bench at the rear of the boat.

  “Sorrrrreee,” she apologized. “I was just looking underneath the seat and the lid got away from me.”

  “What’s in there?”

  “Couple of life preservers. The gas tank. An extra can of gas, maybe half full.” She’d tried lifting it and could feel the liquid sloshing around. “A small tool box, and one of those plugs.... You know.”

  “Yeah, for sucking water out of the boat.” Unsnap the plug at the bottom of the hull, while you were underway, and the motion of the boat would suck out any rain or river water that came in over the side – as long as you remembered to put it back before you stopped. Otherwise, you’d have an open whole in the bottom of the boat, with water coming in rather than out.

  “All of it very neat. And the tools are clean. No rust.” We paused, just standing there for a moment before we looked at each other.

  “Well?” Eleanor knew exactly what I was asking.

  “What the heck.”

  I was closest to the cabin door, so Rollo and I went first, down the first and then the second of two shallow steps I could barely make out, my arms out to hold on to whatever I could find to keep me from falling. I couldn’t see the floor of the cabin and just had to assume it was there, with nothing on it I’d trip over. On the way inside, I noticed that there was a place for a padlock on the outside edge of the cabin door – a metal ring for the lock, made to go through a matching slot on another piece hinged on the outside of the frame. Even without the padlock, you could put the piece from the door through the slot in the other one, and then twist it to keep the door shut, the way latches work on some pocketbooks. It seemed new, the hardware on the door. I looked over my shoulder, and from the way Eleanor touched it on the way down, I figured she was thinking the same as me. Maybe there was something inside someone wanted to protect. So why wasn’t it locked?

  “Think maybe someone left in a hurry when we showed up?”

  I didn’t answer. “Let’s just look around and get out of here.”

  On the right, there was a simple galley. A little sink, with a pump for fresh water from the tank in the cabinet below, although I don’t think I’d want to drink any of it, and a new or at least very clean single gas burner. Some knives and a couple of forks and spoons in the one drawer. A roll of paper towels attached to the wall, next to a small pan and a single pot. There was an ice box below, but it was empty. No ice. No food, although there was a large coffee mug and a box of Earl Grey tea bags in the corner on the counter next to the sink. And a small table on the left, with a single bench seat wide enough for two people at most.

  The ceiling of the cabin was low, barely a few inches above our heads, with small beams running left and right that we felt like ducking under. Overhead, in the center between two of the beams, there was a single light bulb screwed sideways into an old brass fixture no one had polished lately, but we couldn’t figure out how to turn it on. The only switch on the wall didn’t seem to do anything, but then maybe it had to be plugged into electricity from the pier.

  “No bathroom.” Eleanor needed to get out on the water more.

  “It’s called a ‘head.’”

  “Sorry. I don’t speak ‘boat.’”

  On the left there was a counter, sticking out from the wall under the porthole on that side, with a double door mostly empty cabinet underneath it. The rest of the cabin was hard to see. The flashlight I kept in my backpack was all the extra light we had, but it was enough. Along the left side, from the cabinet forward, there was a bunk, just a plywood shelf with a cushion on it, half of it under the deck from where the cabin ended to the bow, barely wide or long enough for someone to sleep. What was left of the hull on the right was open except for a couple of open cardboard boxes that had boat and fishing stuff. Nothing personal. Nothing that would tell us who’d been using the boat, because someone obviously had been, or why.

  “What’s under here?” Eleanor lifted up a separate piece of cushion to the right of where the counter stopped.

  “Ah, ha!” As I suspected, it was the missing toilet. Nothing impressive. Stainless steel, maybe, and a pump on the side for when you were done. “Gotta go?”

  “Thanks, but I’ll wait.”

  “I don’t know, it looks pretty cl...

  “Shhh!” We’d been standing next to each other in the center of the cabin, under the light that wouldn’t work, facing the galley side. (In fact, except for a couple of feet back to the door or forward the bow, it was pretty much the only place you could stand.) Hearing something outside, Eleanor raised her hand to put a finger over her lips, the international symbol for no talking when, just then, we where both thrown forward by the sudden movement of the boat, rocked by someone jumping onto the back. Pretty much frozen in place, we turned our heads slowly to look through the partially open door toward the stern, but couldn’t see anyone.

  “Mm..!” I raised my right hand, palm facing back over my shoulder to signal Rollo to be quiet, and then turned to make sure he was paying attention. I looked at him, and he squirmed in my backpack to look up at me, those huge eyes as wide open as I’d ever seen them.

  “Boom!” The door to the cabin, which had been moving with the motion of the boat, slammed shut, taking away most of our light. Then the screeching sound of metal against metal as someone turned the latch, and we knew what that meant. Locked in.

  “No way whoever did that didn’t know we were in here.” For some reason, I was whispering, and that made sense, but talking much faster than usual. “The door was wide open. He had to have seen us!”

  “Now where are MR and Bobby, not to mention Connie, when you need them?” Eleanor sounded awfully calm for someone with both hands leaving squeeze marks in my arm.

  “For sure,” I mocked her, whispering the best Valley Girl imitation I could muster under the circumstances, although I have absolutely no idea why I said that. I don’t normally do Valley Girl imitations. “You can let go of my arm now. …How about it?” But why was I so cool? (I think sometimes you sort of go into denial in situations like these, when something first starts to go very wrong. It’s probably nature’s way of delaying the onset of panic, but I think being calm is way overrated. I much prefer doing something dramatic that I’m likely to regret later than meaningless babbling like I’m doing now.)

  Then there were sounds of people running along the path, and then on the pier, coming in our direction! Too much noise and creaking for just one person. “Bobby!!!” I shouted as loud as I could, in my head. But the voices I was hearing had Russian accents, so we both thought it best to keep quiet.

  “It’s them!” I whispered way too loud. “The two guys that kidnapped Rollo and me.”

  “Keep quiet. Maybe they don’t know we’re in here.

  “Are you kidding, dead fish in Georgia know we’re in here! ...And just who do you think locked us in?”

  “Alright,” Eleanor tilted her head and gave me that you’ve-got-to-be-kidding look. “Exactly how many ‘dead fish in Georgia’ do you actually know?”

  “On a first name basis?!” Why was I getting mad at Eleanor? (Frivolous argument is no doubt one of the more basic psychological mechanisms for distracting you from your real problems but, in retrospect, it wasn’t working for either of us.)
>
  The boat was unsteady, rolling erratically, particularly now that we were pretty sure the other two had jumped onto the back from the pier. Eleanor fell over onto the floor, “Oooo!” hitting her head on the door to the cabinet under the sink, but she was okay. Reaching to help her up, I turned to look through one of the portholes. Something had caught my eye and, for the first time, if only for a second, I saw the face of the man with one bad leg. You could hear him dragging it as he hobbled around the side of the cabin toward the bow, pausing just long enough to make eye contact. He was old, with uncombed wavy white hair and a few days stubble. He looked into my eyes – His were light brown, almost golden. – pausing for just a moment, and then he was gone, leaving us with only the loud splash of a bad dive.

  One down, two to go. “Bobby. MR. Where are you guys?” I whispered to myself. Rollo was out now, pushing off my chest, flying across the cabin onto the counter, sneaking up to take a look out the other porthole.

  “You understand any of that?” Eleanor was right up against my ear, both of us listening to the voices of the two men.

  “Of course not,” I whispered back, “but you’re right, I don’t think they know we’re here.”

  Good news? Bad news. Whatever they were saying to each other in Russian, it would only be a few moments before I would know exactly what they had been talking about.

  “What was that?” The “that” Eleanor was asking about sounded familiar.

  “The lid to the bench in the back of the boat.” And then the boat moved again as the two men climbed back onto the pier, did something – They untied the boat, that’s what. – and pushed us on our way out into the creek while they ran off.

  “Ploit.”

  “And that?” Eleanor asked, knowing full well it was the sound of something hitting the water. Maybe just a fish jumping out the way they do sometimes, but it didn’t sound right.

  “Okay, okay.” It was me talking. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Eleanor tried to open the cabin door. No luck, so she started pounding on it. It was rattling, but stayed in place. I was standing now, looking out through the porthole by Rollo, wondering...

  “No way.” Eleanor was less than encouraging. “I read somewhere that you need your head and one shoulder to fit through, or you’re not going to make it.”

  I could see that we were already a good ten or fifteen yards away from the pier, into the creek.

  “MEEEEEOOOOOORRRRKKK!!!”

  “What is it now?!! Rollo, I need to concentrate. I need to think.” But he was pointing, pointing down... and that’s when I figured out what the two Russian guys had been saying. “Pull the plug. Sink the boat.” Words to that effect.

  Eleanor and I both looked down and saw it together. Water. Lots of it, coming up over the cabin floor boards.

  “They pulled the plug.” And that was what they threw into the creek. Had to be.

  “But why?”

  “I don’t know. I think they’re just scuttling the boat, maybe to prevent the old guy from using it.”

  “Who cares?” Eleanor was right. “What are we going to do?! This boat was already low enough in the water when it was floating.

  “You’re right. When the back goes under, we’ve had it. You work on the door. I’ll try opening one of these portholes so maybe someone can hear us... and start shouting!”

  “BOBBBBBEEEEEE!!!!” And that wasn’t just in my head, not this time.

  To be continued...

  “Well, here we go again, Rollo.” Did we drown? Will this be the end of Young Elizabeth and Rollo the Wondercat?! ..Uhhhh, I don’t think so.

  “Mchh.” Rollo made a little sound, planting his nose into the side of my face, sitting parrot-like, on the top edge of my chair and shoulder.

  I puckered up and returned the gesture. “Back at you, furry babe. And you’re right. These thugs have absolutely no idea who they’re dealing with. .. Let’s go.” I closed the top of my computer, just as Rollo landed there. Time to make something to eat, study, e-mail... maybe take a call from somebody special.”

  “Meoarrkkch!” That’s Rollo-speak for “Give me a break.”

  “You know, Rollo,” I explained carefully, so as not to hurt his feelings, playing with the hair on both sides of his face. “You can’t be the only man in my life, but you’ll always be the furriest.... Wellll, let’s hope so. Furry guys tend to creep me out. …Wwwuh.” I shuddered, only half kidding, got up and left for the kitchen.

  * * *

  Episode 7:

  Next Cruise I Take, I'm Paying For A Better Cabin With A Larger Porthole