Scared Stiff (11 page)

It was so late that I thought Uncle Henry might have gone to work already, and Julie wondered if her grandma would be mad at her for being gone so long. Only Connie shrugged at the time. “Nobody cooks a meal on time at our house, anyway,” he said. “I'll heat up a frozen pizza. Come back tonight?” he asked, pausing after he'd turned off the last of the lights at the Big Sombrero.

“Sure,” I said, but Julie hesitated. “Grandma may not let me get out again tonight. I'll have to see.”

As it turned out, none of us went back that evening.

Uncle Henry had already gone to work, and Connie stood talking to me after Julie went home. He was still there when she came running back to us with an expression on her face that made me stiffen with apprehension.

“Rick!” she called. “There was a phone call while we were gone! A woman asked if you and Kenny were here with Mr. Svoboda!”

My heart began to pound. “Ma?” I asked, hardly daring to hope.

“She didn't say, but when Grandma told her all us kids were off somewhere playing, but she could call your uncle, the woman said okay but to hurry. Only when Mr. Svoboda got there, there was nobody on the line.”

Disappointment was a heavy pain in my chest. Could it have been Ma? Who else would have guessed we'd be here with Uncle Henry?

“That's all?” I asked. “She didn't call back?”

Julie shook her head. “No. But maybe she tried and couldn't get through because right after that Grandma got another call, and it upset her a lot.”

We sort of hung there, waiting, expecting the worst because Julie looked so stricken, but
for me the worst was wondering if it had been Ma on the phone, if she'd hung up because she was in danger, if somebody had hurt her before she could talk to us.

“Who was your grandma's call from?” Connie asked, looking sober too.

“Mr. Mixon's lawyer. He said she'd be reading about it in tomorrow's paper, and he thought she deserved to hear it officially first.” Julie gulped and looked near tears. “The court case ended late yesterday. The lawsuits the Mixons were having among themselves, about what to do with Wonderland. They're going to sell the property—he said they'd probably be in as early as the end of the next week with bulldozers and start knocking everything down—they're not even going to try to sell the rides or anything, just let some junkman haul away what he wants, and destroy the rest! And they want the land the RV park is on, too. They have to give us thirty days' notice to vacate, and then everybody has to be out of here!”

Tears spilled over and ran down her cheeks. “We only have a month and everybody has to
move, and nobody knows anywhere to move to! Not that's cheap enough so we can afford it! Just the cost of moving anything but the little travel trailers is more than most of the people can afford.”

I knew it was real trouble for the people who lived in the Wonderland RV Park. They were old and most of them were poor. Uncle Henry could probably find another place to park his bus, but it would be very hard for most of the rest of them.

I felt sorry for everybody, especially Julie and her grandmother, and I hated the idea that Wonderland Amusement Park would be destroyed. It seemed a terrible thing to do.

Yet what overwhelmed me was that telephone call. It had to have been Ma, I thought, to tell us she was safe—or that she needed help, and where to find her—and then something had happened that kept her from waiting for Uncle Henry to get to the phone. It scared me something awful, worrying about what it could have been.

I felt selfish, thinking about my own problems when Julie's and Mrs. Biggers's were bad,
too. But I had to ask. “Would it be okay if I talked to your grandma about the phone call?”

Julie took a deep breath and wiped the back of one hand across her eyes. “Sure,” she said, sounding so subdued that I could barely hear her. “Come on.”

Mrs. Biggers wasn't crying, but she was clearly upset. She didn't tell me not to bother her, though, but sat down at the kitchen table with us kids. Connie remained standing near the door.

Mrs. Biggers didn't have much to tell me. Only that the caller had been a woman, she'd asked if two boys were staying with Mr. Svoboda and seemed relieved to be told we were playing somewhere, and then had agreed to wait until Uncle Henry could be called to the phone, though she'd urged that he come quickly.

“Only when Uncle Henry got there, she'd hung up,” I said dully.

“No, actually she hadn't. There was no dial tone,” Mrs. Biggers said, trying to concentrate on my problem for a minute instead of on her own. “She must have just dropped
the phone and let it hang there, because Mr. Svoboda said he heard sounds but nobody was on the line.”

I shut my eyes. Had someone attacked her, if it was Ma? Connie wasn't the only one who watched too many cop shows on TV. I knew the kind of thing that could happen while someone was trying to make a phone call from a pay phone, too. Or any phone, for that matter.

Connie's voice was unexpectedly sharp. “What kind of sounds did he hear?”

“What?” Mrs. Biggers looked blank, as if she'd lost the thread of the conversation.

“Mr. Svoboda. What did he say he heard? Voices in the background? Music? Traffic? What?”

For a few seconds I didn't know what he was getting at. And then I remembered a movie where they tracked down the crooks because they'd called from someplace where there were plane sounds over the phone, and the cops figured out the guy was calling from near an airport. “Planes?” I asked, hope leaping inside me again.

“He didn't say. Just that nobody had hung
up the phone.” Mrs. Biggers looked at me. “He seemed to think that it was your ma, and he was upset that something made her drop the phone. But at least if it was her, you know she's all right.”

Or had been up to the time she dropped the phone, I thought sickly. Why hadn't she left a message with Mrs. Biggers, before it was too late?

My eyes met Connie's. “It's important,” I said. “It might be a very important clue. It might tell us where she was when she called.”

When the phone rang we all jumped. Then Mrs. Biggers got up to answer it. “Wonderland RV Park,” she said, sounding as if she expected more bad news.

“Oh, Mr. Svoboda. Yes, the boys came home all right. They were off playing. Yes, they're here right now. I think Rick would like to talk to you.”

She handed the receiver to me.

I took it gingerly. “Uncle Henry?”

“I guess we got to have some rules as long as you kids stay with me,” Uncle Henry said, sounding the way grown-ups do when you've
done something that scared them and then they find out you're okay and they want to kill you for scaring them. “I want you to be home before I go to work so I don't have to worry if you're all right.”

“Yes, sir,” I agreed, knowing Pa would have put it stronger than that. “Uh . . . Uncle Henry, Mrs. Biggers told us about the phone call. . . .”

“Did she call back?” he asked quickly. “Was it Sophie?”

“No, she didn't call back. Not yet.” I thought of the time the phone had been tied up when she
might
have tried to call. If somebody hadn't
prevented
her from calling. “Uncle Henry, what did you hear on the phone after . . . when you got here?”

“Nothing. She'd gone,” Uncle Henry said. “It just about had to be Sophie, though. Only female I gave this number to.”

I could hardly breathe. “Mrs. Biggers said you heard some kind of sounds.”

“No voices,” Uncle Henry said. “Just a train, whistling the way it does for a crossing, and the dogs. Dogs barking.”

“Trains whistling and dogs barking,” I echoed.

It didn't mean anything to me, but Connie moved closer to me. “Big dogs or little dogs?” he asked.

I repeated that too. Julie frowned.

“How could he tell over the phone if they were big or little?” she asked.

“Big dogs have deep voices,” Connie said. “Little dogs sort of yap.”

I guess Uncle Henry heard that. “All sizes,” he told me. “Deep voices, yappy voices. A whole bunch of them. Well, I have to go to work, but I wanted to make sure you boys came home all right. I have tomorrow and Monday off, and on Monday we'll go talk to the people over where Sophie works. There must be some way to get in touch with your pa without waiting for him to get home. I'll see you in the morning.”

He made it sound almost like a threat—he was probably going to chew us out for making him worry—but I didn't care. He wasn't going to wait any longer for the police to decide we had an emergency, and he was practically certain the caller had been Ma.

“Dogs,” Connie said thoughtfully as I hung
up the phone. “Where would there be a lot of dogs?”

“They have guard dogs at a lot of the warehouses around here,” Mrs. Biggers contributed, but Connie shook his head.

“They have Dobermans or German shepherds. Big dogs. No little ones.”

“Lots of people have little dogs,” Julie said. “In any neighborhood you'd find both big dogs and little dogs.”

It was discouraging. There could be dogs anywhere. It wasn't much of a clue.

Connie was still muttering, “Dogs, dogs,” under his breath when we left Mrs. Biggers's trailer and walked back to the purple bus.

“And a train whistling,” I reminded him. “He said the way it does at a crossing.”

Connie stopped in the middle of the road. “The pound,” he said flatly.

“The pound?” I sounded silly, repeating everything anybody else said tonight.

“Yeah.” Connie was grinning. “That's it, Rick. I'll bet your ma—if it was her—was calling from the city pound. They've got all kinds of dogs out there, big ones and little ones. They
make an awful racket. And I remember from when my old man took us out there to get my mom a kitten: there's a pay phone right in front of it. And besides that”—he paused to add to the suspense, then added—“there's a railroad crossing right behind it! There aren't any of those guard things that come down to stop traffic, and there's a train that goes by there right about the middle of the afternoon, and it has to whistle because there are no lights or bells!”

I hardly dared to hope. A lump formed in my throat. “Do you really think . . .?”

Connie's grin grew wider. “Let's go see if we can find her!” he said.

There were still several hours before dark, and we went on the bus, using Connie's money again. I felt funny about that, but Connie didn't seem to care. I made up my mind to ask Pa to replace what Connie had spent on my behalf.

I was really nervous by the time we got off the bus. Because it was a weekend, the buses weren't running very often, and we waited quite a while for one. It was farther out in the country than I expected, and there were only two other passengers. Though Connie said there was a big subdivision farther out, where the bus would turn around, there were no houses nearby when we climbed down. There were only a few more warehouses and some open fields and an auto-salvage yard with acres of junked cars rusting in unsightly heaps.

There was a railroad track marked only by signs, no bells or lights. My skin prickled and I swallowed, but the lump stayed in my throat.

The pound was a big concrete-block building with a faded sign; behind it and along one side were runs for the dogs with high fences around them, and there was a pay phone right where the bus stopped.

“There're no dogs barking,” I said as the bus rolled away and nothing moved, nothing made any sounds.

“Sometimes they get quiet when they're not excited,” Connie asserted. “Listen.” He stooped and picked up a rock—there weren't even any sidewalks—and threw it. It hit one of the metal poles around the fencing and fell inside the nearest of the dog runs.

Immediately a dog barked, and then several others took up the chorus. Several animals rushed to look at us through the wire mesh, but most of them were wagging their tails. All but a Doberman, in a cage by himself, whose deep voice went on for a minute or so after the others had ceased.

My chest felt so tight it was hard to breathe. Was this where Ma had called from? What had happened to her?

I turned back to the phone. It was one of the older ones that had a regular booth, not like the new ones that are open with only a roof over them. We stared into it, but it was just an ordinary blue booth with a ragged directory hanging from the shelf below the phone.

Despairing, I turned and looked toward the junkyard next door. “What would Ma have been doing out here?” I asked, wanting to cry and not wanting Connie to see me do it. “There's nothing she'd have come out here for.”

“She wouldn't have come by herself, I shouldn't think,” Connie said. He knelt down in front of the booth to look at something inside. “If she was kidnapped, somebody must have brought her here. Hey, Rick, look at this. Is it hers? Your mom's?”

He stood up, extending a hand with a small object he'd retrieved from the bottom of the booth. I reached out for it.

“An earring. Gosh, I don't know. Ma wears earrings, but . . . this is a plain gold hoop. I think she's got some like this, but a lot of women wear plain gold ones.”

It made me feel strange and almost dizzy, thinking that maybe only a few hours ago Ma might have been here, might have lost this. Where was she now?

Connie surveyed the open fields, the warehouses, and finally the junkyard. “Everything's closed up until Monday, I guess. Let's walk around and see if we can find any more clues.”

There was a fence around the junkyard, and the gate was closed but not locked. The hinges squealed when we pushed it open. We went inside, and I even called “Ma?” in a sort of quavery voice, but there was only silence.

In the middle of the place there was an office that was no more than a shed with a tin roof. We looked inside, where there was a table they apparently used for a desk, and a couple of chairs. Through a door at the back I could see there was a tiny bathroom with a toilet and a sink.