Blair’s Nightmare (7 page)

David opened his mouth and then closed it. If anyone questioned Pete Garvey about being out in the hills near Golanski's place, he would know immediately who had told. Dad looked at David questioningly, and he was still opening and closing his mouth when Amanda said, “Well, we did see some dirt bikers, in a big valley not far from Golanski's place. But I don't think they'd steal his stuff. Not milk and pigs, anyway.”

“Yeah,” David said, gratefully. “If he was missing stuff like tools and gasoline it would be different, but I don't think those guys are interested in food.”

Dad grinned. “Well, I certainly don't understand people who go out and destroy virgin land with those contraptions, but I imagine they're human. I suspect they get hungry, just like anyone else.”

“Yeah. I guess so,” David said, “but I just don't think . . .”

“Couldn't it have been an animal?” Amanda asked.

“I asked Mr. Golanski about that,” Dad said. “It seemed quite possible to me, particularly since the thieves apparently strike at night. But he said the spring house door was latched, and the milk and cream disappeared from pans on a high shelf. The ham and the pig carcass were cut down from where they were hanging from rafters. He's sure no animal could have done it.”

“Well,” Janie said cheerfully, “if it wasn't an animal or the
dirt bikers, it must have been those escaped convicts. I'll bet it was escaped convicts. I'll bet they're hiding in the woods, and when they get hungry, they just go to someone's house and steal food. They're probably going to try to steal our food, too.”

Molly rolled her eyes and said, “Bless you, child. You're such a comfort.” And Dad said, “Okay, Janie, cool it.”

The discussion ended at that point, but David went on thinking about it, trying to make up his mind whether animals, Garvey and his friends, or escaped convicts were the most likely suspects.

He was still thinking about the spring house mystery that afternoon while he worked at the carpenters' bench in the garage. It was a neat place to work. The bench itself, with its shelves and drawers and tool pegs, had been built by Mr. Golanski's father a long time ago, and when the Stanleys bought the house a lot of old tools were still there. David had done quite a bit of building since they'd moved in. Small things mostly, like bird houses and benches, but the tree house was going to be his masterpiece. At the moment he was working on some eight-sided windows for it. He'd sketched out a pattern, measured the boards, mitered the corners, clamped the first piece in the vise and was starting to saw. The saw was old and needed sharpening, so the sawing took a long time. As he worked, David found himself going over
the whole thing about the spring house robbers for about the dozenth time.

After considering all the possibilities again, he was beginning to lean toward Garvey and the dirt bikers. He'd really meant it when he told Dad he didn't think they'd be interested in stealing food, but on second thought he could see how it could have happened. They could have stayed late in the valley riding their bikes, until it got dark and they got hungry. And then, instead of going on home, they could have decided to stay and have a barbecue—with Mr. Golanski providing the pork chops. He wouldn't put it past them. And it certainly wouldn't have been very difficult.

David had been to Mr. Golanski's farm several times, and he remembered the spring house. Dad had asked Mr. Golanski to show it to David and the other kids because it was, Dad said, a relic of the past. Instead of having a refrigerator for his cream and cheese and butter, Mr. Golanski had this little stone house built into the side of a hill where a spring of cold water came out of the ground. Inside, it was always very cool and smelled faintly of milk. As David recalled, the thick heavy door was only fastened by an old-fashioned wooden latch. It would have been a cinch for Pete and his dirt biking friends.

As the saw bit slowly through the hard wood, David was picturing it all in his mind—evening shadows, crouching figures
creeping silently across the barnyard, the raspy squeak of the spring house door, the narrow beam of a flashlight playing on Pete Garvey's wide flat face . . .

“Hey,” somebody said. David looked up, right into the same face, staring in at him from the garage door. For just a fraction of a second he wasn't sure it was real—as if, by thinking about him, he'd somehow conjured up an imaginary Garvey. But then the face opened its mouth and a familiar voice said, “Hi-ya, Stanley.” It was Pete Garvey in the flesh.

G
ARVEY WAS SMILING.
E
VEN STANDING
as he was with his back to the light, it was clear that the expression on his face was definitely a smile. The chipped tooth gleamed in the front of the mouth, and the lips were curved way up at the corners. Not that it mattered. Garvey always smiled while he was punching people out. “Hi,” David said warily.

“I got a flat tire,” Garvey said.

David hadn't even noticed the bicycle until then. It looked old and rusty and a lot too little for a guy as huge as Garvey. As he pushed it forward, it made a clunking noise. As Garvey came toward him, David tried to make up his mind whether to run for it or not.

“What are you doing here, Garvey?” Amanda was standing in the entrance to the garage.

Garvey whirled around, swinging the bicycle as if it were light as a feather. “Hi-ya,” he said. “I got a flat tire.”

Amanda walked around Garvey and the bicycle in a wide circle. When she was standing beside David, she said, “Yeah? So what?”

“I was riding to town only my tire went flat. Right out in front of your place. I just came in to borrow a pump. You got a pump?” Garvey's grin was wider than ever, but something about the way he was talking sounded phony, as if he were reciting lines from a play.

“Not me,” Amanda said. She was giving Garvey the look David called her “Medusa special.” Guaranteed to turn its victim into stone, or at least into a stuttering klutz. An icy voice went with the stare. “Have you got a pump, David?”

“I'll get it.” Still keeping his eyes on Garvey, David sidled along the bench to where he kept his bicycle stuff. He had started back when Amanda grapped the pump out of his hand and headed toward Garvey. Suddenly David was angry. She was treating him as if he were a helpless baby who had to be protected.

“Hey,” he said, trying to take the pump back. Amanda held the pump up high with one hand and pushed him so hard with the other that he stumbled and almost fell down. She went on, holding the pump over her head.

“Take it easy,” Garvey said. He turned loose of the bike with
one hand and tried to move around to the other side, so it would be between him and Amanda. The front wheel began to swivel, and the bike slid sideways. Garvey hopped and stumbled and stepped into the spokes of the front wheel. When he lifted his foot and shook it, the whole bicycle came, too. Then the other wheel swung around and hit him on the back of the leg, and he stumbled backwards and sat down on the bicycle.

Amanda laughed first. David had been trying not to, but when Amanda started, he couldn't help himself. But even while he was laughing he was thinking, This is it—now he's going to murder me, for sure.

Garvey got up slowly and pulled his foot out of the spokes. Then he lifted the bike by the handle bars and held it out in front of him. The spokes in the front wheel looked like a bunch of spaghetti and the rim of the back wheel was obviously crooked. After a while he began to grin.

When Amanda finally stopped laughing, she said she guessed he wouldn't be needing the pump, and Garvey said no he guessed he wouldn't, and then he stood around awhile more, still smiling in a strange way and not saying much. After several more very weird moments, he said he guessed he'd better go, and started off down the drive pushing what was left of the bicycle. But a minute later he turned around and came back.

“Hey, Davey,” he said. “Guess I'll just leave this old wreck here till tomorrow. Maybe I'll come by after school and try to fix it up. Looks like you got lots of tools and stuff. I'll come by tomorrow. Okay?”

“Well, okay,” David said uncertainly.

Pete Garvey trudged off down the road. David and Amanda stood at the garage entrance and watched him go.

“I don't believe it,” Amanda said.

“That's exactly what I was thinking,” David said. There was something very phony about the whole thing. The strange stiffness of Garvey's smile, for instance, and the way he'd talked, like a bad actor reciting lines. And the whole thing about the bicycle. Garvey just wasn't the bicycle type. A dirt bike or motorcycle, sure, but not a spindly little old rusty one-speed. David went over to where Garvey had left the bike, leaning against the wall. The front tire was flat all right—he hadn't been lying about that. But then David made a discovery. The back tire was flat, too. Obviously, Garvey was lying when he said he was riding by on his way to town when he just happened to get a flat tire. Unless he'd gotten two at the same time—if you could believe that. David didn't.

There was no doubt about it. The whole thing was some kind of phony set-up. Garvey was up to something, and you didn't have to think very hard to figure out what it was. Since
he hadn't had any luck catching David at school, he'd decided to get him at home. He'd probably dug up some old wreck of a bicycle that hadn't been ridden in years and pushed it all the way to the Westerly House, to use as an excuse to come in the yard. He'd probably planned to ask David to help him, and then wait for a chance to get him alone. And his plan would have worked perfectly if Amanda hadn't happened to show up.

Earlier that very day David had been considering riding the bus to school again. It had been almost a week since the fiasco in Mrs. Baldwin's class. It seemed as if that should be time enough for someone with an attention span as short as Garvey's to have lost interest in wasting any one particular person. Especially if that person had managed to be as inconspicuous as David had been. But now it seemed that Garvey was not only still after him, but was determined enough to go to a lot of trouble. Not only the trouble to think up the bicycle scheme, which must have put a lot of strain on his mental ability, but also to walk—pushing a wreck of a bike—all the way from his parents' chicken ranch to the Westerly House. It was pretty depressing. After dinner David went out and oiled his bicycle.

The next day was warm and sunny, and David got a specially early start on the ride to school. He got in and out of Mrs. Baldwin's class without any trouble, except that Garvey
seemed to be trying to catch his eye all the time. Whenever he did, he gave David a big, wide, leering smile. He was obviously trying to get something across, and it didn't take much imagination to figure out what it was. David didn't like to think about it.

At noon that day in the cafeteria everybody at the table was talking about the escaped convicts. Jerry Murphy's father was a sheriff's deputy, and Jerry had listened in on some of his father's phone conversations and gotten a lot of new information. It seemed that there had been a work crew from the prison who were building a firebreak on Curry Mountain, and one night two of the prisoners had overpowered a guard, stolen his gun and escaped. The sheriff's bloodhound had followed their trail down to the Fillmore foothills. The bloodhound had even located a campsite where it looked as if they'd stayed for a while. But that had been a couple of days ago, and since that time the sheriff and his men hadn't had any luck.

“Something went wrong with the sheriff's dog,” Jerry said. “Right after he found the campfire, he was circling around, hit a scent and went tearing off through the woods baying like crazy. My dad and the other guys started running after him, and all at once he came barrelling back ki-yiing like a scared puppy. After that he just wouldn't try anymore. Whenever they take him out there to the woods, he just sits down and shivers.”

“Hey,” David said. “I'll bet he found the prisoners and they did something to him. Like beat him or kicked him, so now he's afraid to find them again. Did he have any wounds or anything?”

“No,” Jerry said. “But my dad thinks something like that happened. He thinks they must have done something to him to scare him so bad.”

“Hey, Stanley,” a guy named Bob Alquist said. “You guys live in that old house out on Westerly Road, don't you? That old house way out there by itself near the Fillmore Hills? Boy, I wouldn't want to live out there right now.”

“Yeah,” David said in an unconcerned tone of voice. “We've been taking precautions. Since we heard about it we've been locking everything up at night.”

Everybody at the table looked at David as if they were really impressed that he was so cool about the whole thing.

“Actually,” David said, “on Saturday I went out scouting around in the hills behind our place. You know, just to be sure. I didn't see any sign of them though.”

“Sure you did,” Jerry said.

“It's the truth,” David said, “believe it or not.” It was, too. He had been out in the hills on Saturday. He didn't see the need to mention that Amanda had been with him, or that he hadn't really heard about the escaped prisoners until afterwards.

That afternoon when David pedaled, tired and sweaty, into the driveway, Janie was sitting on the front steps. Janie had always been small for her age, and sitting there alone on the broad veranda steps with her back very straight and her hands folded in her lap, she looked like an underdeveloped Barbie doll. The minute he saw her, an automatic Janie alarm went off like a silent siren. The thing was, he'd learned from long experience that when Janie looked particularly cute and harmless, it paid to be on your toes. The minute she saw him she jumped up and came running down the driveway.

“Hi, David,” she yelled as he climbed off his bike. “I've been waiting for you.”