The Girls Take Over (5 page)

“I'm not going to wade out in the river with Dad's hip boots and fishnet,” he said boldly and firmly. “If you want Eddie's bottle, you have to get it yourself.”

Jake studied him for a moment. “Okay, okay. Don't have a spaz,” he said.

“We'd be nuts to try to fish them out on this side of Island Avenue anyway. The girls could see us from their house,” said Josh. “If we wait till the bottles go around the bend, the river's shallower on the other side of the island.”

“Yeah, but we'd still need Dad's boots,” said Jake.

“And fishnet,” said Josh. “Where are they?”

They both looked at Wally. Now was his chance to say nothing. Was it possible only he knew that they were in the attic? Why were they looking at him like that?

“Wal-ly?” said Jake, slowly advancing toward him. “Where does Dad keep his hip boots and net?”

Wally's lips were dry and stuck together as the words came out. “The attic.
But I'm not going to wade out there and get Eddie's bottle!
”

“Okay. Just crawl up in the attic for us and find
them,” said Josh. “We'll cover for you in case Mom wants to know where you are. But hurry!”

This always happened! Wally always got in trouble because of the twins. The only way to stay out of trouble in the Hatford house was to separate himself from Jake and Josh entirely. He wondered if a fourth-grade boy could just walk into the county courthouse and ask for a divorce from his older brothers. A legal paper he could carry around in his pocket that said they weren't related.

Jake and Josh went out in the hall and listened at the top of the stairs to be sure no one was coming, then motioned to Wally to open the small door to the attic and climb the narrow stairs.

It was dark and cobwebby in the attic. Above Wally's head was a trapdoor leading out to the widow's walk on top of the house—a kind of balcony where the wife of a sea captain would stand, searching the horizon for her husband's ship, hoping he wasn't lost at sea. Why anyone would build a widow's walk on top of a house in Buckman, West Virginia, Wally didn't know, because the closest a ship had ever come to their town was the Ohio River, and that was a long way off.

Wally rummaged along the wall, sorting through old hammocks, inner tubes, trunks, and garment bags, but he couldn't see any of his father's fishing gear. Maybe it was in the basement. Maybe it wasn't in the attic at all.

He went to the little window, where the light was
better. Maybe the boots were in the bags and boxes piled there. He caught sight of Eddie and Beth coming across the swinging bridge, their bodies stuck strangely together at the shoulders as though they were glued. But stranger yet, something stuck out behind them that looked as though Eddie had a tail!

Wally hurried back down the narrow stairs.

“Hey!” he said. “Eddie's got a tail.”

“What?” said Jake. “Where are the boots? What are you talking about?”

“I couldn't find the boots, but I looked out the window, and Eddie's coming across the bridge. She's got a tail!”

The three boys ran to the window in the twins' bedroom. There, coming across the swinging bridge, were Beth and Eddie, walking side by side, and sticking out behind Eddie, just as Wally had said, was a tail. A long straight tail, like a pointer.

“Didn't I
tell
you she was a devil?” Jake joked, still mystified.

“Yeah, but one of the girls has an extra pair of feet,” said Josh, leaning closer to the window and staring hard. “That's not a tail, Wally, it's a pole. Somebody's walking behind them, carrying a pole!”

“Caroline!” said Jake and Wally together.

As the boys watched, they saw the girls glance hurriedly up toward their house as they reached the edge of the bridge and then go slipping and sliding down the bank, as though trying to keep Caroline and what she was carrying hidden from view.

“What are they up to?” asked Josh.

“Guess!” said Jake. “Look again! I'll bet anything that's a butterfly net Caroline's got in her hands. Why, those double-crossing cheats! They're going to fish our bottles out of the river!”

“And those red caps we put on our bottles make it easy for them!” said Josh. “Our bottles are sitting ducks!”

“Yeah, but
we
were going to pull out
their
bottles!” said Wally, trying to make sense of the war that had suddenly heated up a notch.

The three boys started to bolt from the room, but Jake abruptly stopped and put one finger to his lips. “Where's Peter? Don't let Peter come along. He'd blab like anything.”

“He's in the kitchen with Mom; I can hear them,” said Josh.

“Where's Dad? Shouldn't he be home by now?”

“I think he's on duty this evening,” said Josh. Besides being a mail carrier, Mr. Hatford was an assistant deputy sheriff in Buckman, and three times a week he manned the telephone in the small sheriff's office.

The boys crept downstairs and put their jackets on, avoiding the second step from the bottom, which creaked if you stepped on it. They slowly opened the front door, closed it again behind them, and started to run across the road.

This time Josh stopped them. “Don't let them see us. What we want to do is catch them red-handed. If
we accuse them before they get any of our bottles, we won't be able to prove a thing.”

They crept behind a clump of serviceberry bushes and slowly, slowly raised their heads until just their eyes were showing above the tops of the branches.

What they saw made even Wally lose his faith in human honesty, for there were Beth and Eddie, running along the bank upstream, their eyes on the water, their fingers pointing toward the river, where not one, not two, but three of the boys' red-capped bottles were bobbing along on the current. And there was Caroline, teetering on a large rock that jutted out into the water. She was holding a pole with a net on the end of it.

“That's a butterfly net, all right!” said Josh. “Man oh man! They are cheats through and through.”

“Give me the pole, Caroline,” they heard Beth say.

“I'll get it! I'll get it!” Caroline kept saying, maneuvering around on the rock.

“Ouch!” said Eddie as the end of the pole hit her on the head. “Be careful, Caroline! Give the net to Beth. Her arms are longer.”

“No, I'll get it! I'll get it!” Caroline cried, leaning out as far as she could.

And then it happened so fast that Wally could hardly believe what he saw, what he heard.

A little shriek, a grunt, and just as Beth and Eddie lunged forward to grab their sister, a splash.

The three boys shot up like rockets, their mouths hanging open, as Beth and Eddie scrambled up on the rock. But Caroline was already in the river, her puffy
nylon jacket scrunched up around her neck, her arms rigid—and she was moving steadily downstream.

“The pole! Hand us the end of the pole!” Eddie yelled. But Caroline's eyes were huge. The pole had sunk down under the surface and only the net was visible on top. The space between the net and Caroline grew wider and wider, and the boys could tell she wasn't holding on to it at all.

Beth screamed, and at once the three Hatford boys came tumbling down the bank, running alongside the river to see if they could get to the bend where the channel narrowed, to grab Caroline there. Eddie and Beth were at their heels.

“Hey, listen,” Jake yelled over his shoulder, “she could stand up if she really tried.”

“Are you sure?” cried Eddie.

“Yeah, the only deep parts are on beyond Buckman,” said Josh. “Stand up, Caroline!” he yelled.

Out in the water Caroline suddenly seemed to come alive. She began flailing her arms, trying to grab hold of something. When a small tree limb floated by, she wrapped one arm around that.

“Hold on, Caroline!” Eddie yelled. “We'll catch you going around the bend!”

“Just stand up!” Josh bellowed again. “It's not that deep! Stand up!”

Caroline, however, still holding on to the limb, simply lay back in the water and closed her eyes.

“Look at her!” Jake said. “She's not even trying!”

“Maybe the branch hit her on the head,” suggested
Wally. Surely someone would see them, he kept telling himself. There weren't a lot of cars out around dinnertime on a Wednesday evening, but
someone
in a car going over the road bridge ahead would certainly glance down and see a girl in the water and five kids racing along the bank.

But the path by the river gave way to heavy brush and brambles. Trees were closing in. Caroline was moving farther and farther away from them, and when she reached the bend, she bobbed along under the road bridge and disappeared.

“The other side!” Eddie yelled. “We've got to cross Island Avenue and get her when she comes around over there. Oh, when I get my hands on my
sister
… !”

Seven
Rescue

W
hen Caroline first hit the water, the shock made her suck in her breath. She was in the river! She was being swept away! Except for the puffy jacket, which ballooned up around her neck like a life preserver, the rest of her clothes were filling with water and dragging her down. For the first sixty seconds or so, she was utterly terrified. Then one foot scraped along the bottom and she realized she could probably walk out if she really tried.

But why try? The water was cold, but not icy, and she felt sure she could stand it for another five minutes anyway. She was fascinated to see Beth and Eddie running along the bank, screaming for her to hand them the pole. The pole? The butterfly net? She tried to turn her head, to find the pole, but only the net was visible, and even it seemed to be slowly sinking.

Now Jake and Josh and Wally were tumbling down the bank, running toward Beth and Eddie, yelling for
Caroline to stand up, but all the while she was being carried farther and farther downstream toward the road bridge, where the river turned. She would soon be out of sight. Was this the moment she had been waiting for ever since they moved to Buckman, the start of her glorious career? She summoned all her concentration on the plot that was unfolding before her and tried to adopt a look of terror and despair.

Oh, was this the end? Would she never be on Broadway? Was the name Caroline Lenore Malloy never to be in lights on a marquee? She tried to look desperate. She tried to look pitiful. No, no, she
had
to live! She managed a fake sob and began to flail her arms, just as she was bonked on the forehead by a limb floating downriver beside her.

She was able to drape one arm over the limb, and she felt her other foot scrape the bottom. Caroline was an excellent swimmer, so she had never been afraid of water. She'd just never been in water with all her clothes on.

This could be her finest hour! Her name would be in all the papers along with her picture! On the front page of the
Buckman Herald,
beneath a banner headline,
CAROLINE RESCUED!
readers would see the almost lifeless form of a young girl, one limp arm draped over a branch, her beautiful hair spread out over the surface of the water, her face pale, eyes closed. Her white skin would make readers cry, her blue lips would bring a sob to their throats ….

Her eyelids fluttered a moment. Were newspaper photos in color? Oh, they had to be! It would be so much more dramatic if she was in color!

Her teeth chattered, but as long as she had a limb to hang on to, she wasn't about to take off her jacket and swim. And she certainly wasn't going to ruin the drama by simply standing up and walking out of the river. No, she would at least let it carry her around to the other side of Island Avenue and hope that a crowd would be waiting. She could see her sisters and the Hatford boys back on the bank, trying to get beyond the tangle of brush and bushes blocking their path.

She looked around in dismay. Where was the photographer? Why weren't there people standing on the road bridge, calling down to her to have courage? Where were the sirens? The police? The fire department? Could it possibly be that for this, her best performance yet, there was to be no audience at all? No applauding when she was rescued? No encore?

Caroline waved her free hand weakly in the air

“Help! Help!” she cried as tragically as she could. “Pleeeease, won't someone save me?”

Another car went by on the bridge up ahead but didn't stop.

This is ridiculous!
thought Caroline. There was no point being in rushing water if no one was around to appreciate it. What would an actress do if she was in a play and nobody came?

Well, if she was ever in a movie and the script callede hit a rock. “Help!” she cried pitifully. “Oh, somebody save me! Pleeeease … !”

Blub, blub.
A swell of water filled her mouth and flooded her face as she was carried around the bend in the river. Maybe she
should
just try to stand up and wade out. She passed through the shadow of the road bridge and moved along the opposite side of Island Avenue. If she wasn't rescued soon, this whole scene would have been for nothing.

She was facing upstream now, the current turning her first one way, then another. And in that moment, looking back toward the bridge, she saw a car stop. She saw a woman get out and run to the bridge railing. The woman was holding a cell phone to her ear, and Caroline felt sure she was calling 911.