Scared Stiff (7 page)

“Under the Big Sombrero,” Connie explained unnecessarily. “When it's turned off, it's not that high off the platform, but it's good shelter from the rain or the sun, either one. I brought over an old sleeping bag and a pillow, and I keep a box of crackers and a bucket of peanut butter there, too. Just in case I can't go home for a while.”

Kenny had to climb up and look at the place close up. “I wish I could come here when everything's running,” he said wistfully. I thought it was probably a good thing it
wasn't
running. It would have made Kenny throw up.

“I wish I could find the keys to the lights and the operating buttons,” Connie said when
Kenny rejoined us. “The main power's still on. The security lights come on automatically, but everything else is off. Old Wonderland is really something when the lights are blazing and the music's playing and the rides are buzzing and whirring and whipping around.”

I wished I could see it that way, too. “Even if you could turn things on, somebody'd hear the music, wouldn't they?”

“I don't know. Most of the people who live in the RV park are deaf.”

“Not that deaf,” Julie protested. “My grandma's not deaf. Mrs. Giuliani isn't, either, at least not very much. Still, it might be worth it, to see it going again. Even if we got caught and sent to Juvie afterward.”

“Could we do it?” Kenny asked eagerly. “Make everything run?”

“Not without knowing how to turn on the rest of the power,” Connie said. “And you need keys to control each of the rides. It takes two people pushing buttons that aren't even close to each other to make a ride start. Safety factor, so some dumb kid can't set it off when people are getting off or on, or don't have their
safety belts fastened. There's lots of stuff you can monkey around on, though, even if you can't make the motors run.”

“We'd better go home,” Julie said reluctantly, “before Grandma wonders where I am. She thinks I'm over at Mr. Svoboda's bus, watching TV or something with Rick and Kenny. Once her own TV programs are over, she might come looking for me.”

We started back to where we'd entered the park through the fence. “It almost makes me wish I was going to stay here awhile,” I said. “This would be a fun place to come.”

“How long you going to be here?” Connie asked.

“Only until my ma comes back,” I told him, and the remembering took all the fun out of everything.

“Where is she? In the hospital? On a trip?”

The lump in my throat was painful. “No. She disappeared.”

Connie stopped walking. He had the flashlight aimed toward the ground, but we could faintly see each other's faces above it. “Like, abracadabra, poof, she vanished in a cloud of smoke?”

“Almost,” I said, and told him what had happened. “And,” I finished, “the police say she probably just went away on her own, and will come back when she's ready. Only if she
could
come back on her own, she'd have done it by now. I know she would have.”

“What're you going to do, then, if the cops won't look for her?”

“I wrote a letter to Pa, in care of the E & F Trucking, where he works. He's off on a trip, though, and won't be back until next Thursday.”

“And you're just going to wait until then to do anything?” Connie sounded incredulous.

Julie had stopped walking, too, and turned to face us. “What else can they do?”

“Was me, I'd go looking for her myself. Do a little detective work.”

He sounded so positive he made me feel awkward and kind of stupid. “I'm no detective. Where would I look?” I asked defensively.

“I'd start the last place anybody saw her.”

“The last place we saw her was on the street near the deli, but we know she was at the apartment after that. She left my notebooks and
stuff there. I don't even have a way to get back to the apartment.”

“On the bus,” Connie said promptly.

“I don't have bus fare,” I had to admit.

“I do.” Connie started to walk again, and the rest of us moved with him. “When my old man's in a good mood, he'll peel off a twenty-dollar bill for me to run an errand for him. It helps a little to make up for the times when he slams me into the wall. Tell you what: first thing in the morning I'll be over, and we'll go see if we can find any clues. Okay?”

My hopes had begun to rise, even though I didn't really believe anything would come of this. Connie wasn't more than a year older than I was, and what could a couple of kids do? “The police officer already looked around, and so did Uncle Henry.”

“Well, the cop was the only trained observer, wasn't he? and he was convinced your mom just walked away because she wanted to go. So maybe he wasn't looking as hard as we'd look.”

“I
know
she didn't abandon us,” I said earnestly.

“Right. You know your mom better than the
cop, so chances are you're the one that's right. First thing in the morning, then?”

We'd reached the place under the roller coaster where we'd come in, and Julie shifted the boards to let us squeeze through. I'd never have found it by myself.

“Okay,” I said. “First thing in the morning.”

I followed Kenny and Julie through the opening, and the last thing I saw when I glanced back, before the boards fell into place again, was Connie's grinning face above the glow of his flashlight.

“We'll look for your mom ourselves,” he said, “if the cops won't do it.”

I don't know why, but right that minute it never occurred to me that looking for Ma on our own might be dangerous.

Julie couldn't go with us because she had to help her grandma with the laundry for several of the old people who lived in the RV park: they didn't get around easily enough to do it themselves. She did Uncle Henry's, too, because he didn't have time.

Kenny wanted to go with us back to the apartment, but Connie shook his head. “No, you're too little. This might get risky, kid. You'd be better off here, with Julie. You can help her fold up towels and stuff.”

Kenny stared at him. “Risky?”

“Well, sure. If you're right that your mom was kidnapped, and we find any clues, don't you think the kidnappers are going to do anything they can to stop us from telling the cops about them?”

I cleared my throat uneasily. “Like what, do you think?”

In daylight I noticed that Connie wore jeans and a bright plaid shirt, and he walked with a kind of swagger, like Pa.

“Who knows? Depends why they took your mom. If it was for ransom—”

“We don't have any money,” I blurted, feeling my eyes sting in the way I was getting used to whenever I thought about Ma. “Pa doesn't, I mean. It was one of the things they . . . argued about. Not enough money. Or how to spend what there was.”

Connie nodded. “Yeah. My folks, too. My mom says there would be enough, if he didn't spend so much of it drinking. Anyway, kidnappers don't usually pick anybody but rich people if they're looking for easy money. So there must be another reason they took her. If they just wanted somebody to torture—”

“Don't!” I said quickly. I couldn't bear to think about a thing like that, though I knew from the TV news that sometimes such things happened.

“Yeah, that's probably not what happened, anyway. More likely she knew something about
somebody and they didn't want her to tell.”

That wasn't much better, because in that case they might shoot her, I thought; but I couldn't put that into words. “What could she know about anybody who was a kidnapper? She was—
is
—just an ordinary mother who works as a bookkeeper for a trucking company. She rides the bus to and from work, and she minds her own business, except for listening to conversations on the bus. Sometimes she tells us what people were talking about, when she thinks it was interesting or funny.”

Connie nodded. “That's what I mean. Maybe she overheard somebody talking about something that was a secret, and they didn't want her to tell. You know, people sitting behind her on the bus, or something like that.”

“Why would they be talking about anything that was a secret?” I wanted to know. “I mean, on a bus, where anybody could hear them?”

Connie shrugged. “Who knows? People do stupid things all the time. Maybe they were planning a crime, or they'd already committed one and were talking about it. So they followed
her when she got off the bus, and took her away.”

I didn't want to believe that. If they didn't want Ma to talk about something, they'd have to take drastic action, and that led back to eliminating her altogether. No, not Ma. Besides, I remembered. “Nobody followed her off the bus that day. We saw her get off.”

Connie took a different tack. “Maybe somebody just robbed her—you know, snatched her purse, and when she started to holler, they grabbed her so she couldn't yell.”

“Ma didn't have enough money to make it worthwhile to rob her,” I said.

“People been mugged for twenty-two cents,” Connie observed. “Nobody could tell by looking at her if she was carrying much cash or not. And those drug crazies are so stupid they'll attack anybody.”

“You're not making me feel any better,” I said. I hoped this wasn't scaring Kenny, too. His lower lip was sticking out.

“I want to go with Rick,” he said.

Julie met my eyes;
she
understood what we were saying. “You stay here with me, Kenny,” she said, “and after we get finished
with the laundry we'll go back to Wonderland. Okay?”

Kenny hesitated.

“I'll show you the Wild West Village—we didn't get to that last night—where they had a shoot-out every afternoon and every evening—And the Golden Nugget Mine—we'll take a flashlight, because it's dark in there—and then there's something else you haven't seen yet. The rapids in Devil's Canyon—when the park was open you could go down there on a rubber raft. Now it's got no water in it, but you can climb up the rocks on foot, if you're careful.”

Kenny looked at me, and I said, “It's a long boring ride on the bus. Both ways.”

“Well, okay. I'll stay here,” he decided, which was a relief. If we did get into any kind of trouble, I didn't want to have to worry about him. Besides, I felt strange about using up Connie's money for one bus fare, let alone two. “Maybe you better stay outside,” I cautioned, “until it's late enough for Uncle Henry to be up. Don't disturb him. We'll probably be back before then.”

I had a strong feeling that Uncle Henry wouldn't approve of my going back home to
investigate, and what he didn't know he wouldn't get upset about.

It
was
a fairly long bus ride. Connie kept talking, trying to analyze the situation. Everything he said scared me more. Ma had to be all right, somewhere.

Once, when he'd mentioned a particularly gruesome possibility, I said in desperation, “Maybe we ought to just wait until Pa gets here. He'll know what to do.”

“But he's not coming for a week, almost, right? A lot can happen in a week,” Connie pointed out. “If your mom's in a dark basement somewhere, being tortured, you want to rescue her right away, don't you?”

“Why would she be being tortured?” I demanded, almost angry at him.

“To find out what she knows, of course.”

“What could she possibly know? She works in the office of a trucking firm, adding up numbers and making out paychecks and stuff like that. It's a boring job. She wouldn't know any classified information, like if she worked in a place that made secret weapons or something like that.”

“That's what we're going to investigate,” Connie said. “We have an advantage over the police, remember: We know she didn't just walk off on her own, right?”

When we got off the bus, Connie said we should retrace everything that happened when Ma disappeared. We walked from where she got off the bus, and he asked me again about where she walked, and where we met her, and what the car looked like that had driven along the curb beside her before she sent us to Willie's for groceries.

We walked slowly, so that we could check the gutters and the sidewalk next to the buildings, though I figured if there had been any clues in those places, someone else would have already found them.

“The car, you couldn't identify it. You didn't get the license number.” Connie said it thoughtfully.

He hadn't indicated I was stupid, but I felt that way. “If I'd known she was going to disappear, I'd have paid more attention,” I muttered. “It was just an ordinary black car. I didn't have any reason to look at the license plate.”

“I'll bet it was the guy in the car who took her,” Connie said. “Maybe we should ask the people who live along here if they saw anything that day. It's only day before yesterday, and there's probably old people live in some of those upper apartments. Sometimes they sit and look out the windows, watching what's going on. Let's ask.”

I was nervous about ringing buzzers and getting into apartment houses. Most of them were like ours: you either had to have a key to get into the lobby or ring somebody's buzzer and hope they'd release the lock and let you in.

In the middle of the morning like this, a lot of people weren't home. Nobody answered when we rang their buzzers or knocked on their doors. We figured they wouldn't have been around when Ma disappeared, anyway, because they wouldn't have been home from work yet.

“If they
were
home they wouldn't have been sitting watching the street,” I said. “They'd have been fixing supper, the way we did.”

At one place a guy swore at us and told us to stop bothering him, but everywhere else
that anyone was home, they listened politely and replied the same way. The trouble was, none of them had seen anything, at least not until we got back to our own building.