The Secret of Rover (9 page)

But the sofas were piled high with yet more sleeping bags and duffels. To the children's horror, Trixie led them to the farthest corner of the basement, where the furnace lurked behind a slatted door. She pulled this door open and gestured to the concrete floor within it.

There lay two thin blankets. Beside them were a bottle of water and a couple of sandwiches wrapped in plastic.

“You've got to be kidding!” The words burst from David's lips despite himself. He would not have believed he would have the nerve to object.

And Katie was livid. “There's no way we can sleep here!” she cried. She thought for an instant of her room upstairs—her pillow, her comforter, her books—and the vision of it overwhelmed her. She balled both of her hands into fists, stepped closer to Trixie, and stamped her foot. “You wouldn't—you wouldn't make a dog sleep here!” she shouted. “This is
our house
!”

But scarcely had the words escaped her lips than four glowering strangers stepped to Trixie's side. Five angry faces glared down at David and Katie. Slowly, the man nearest David folded his arms across his chest. His crossed eyes floated weirdly above a nose that canted left. No one spoke.

That was it. There was nothing they could do. David
took Katie's arm and, gently, drew her into the small concrete closet.

“We'll be fine,” he said curtly, and without looking at anyone's face he closed the door.

“It could be worse,” he said quietly when their captors had walked away. “It's not like it's wet or gross or anything. It's not even dark.” He was right about that. A dim light entered through the slats. “And we're alone. Or sort of.”

Katie scarcely heard him. She stood rooted to the spot, with her heart still pounding and her mind still racing. “It isn't fair, David. It isn't right.”

But David was strangely calm. It had been five against two. Whether it was fair or right hadn't mattered. He sank to the floor, picked up his sandwich, and unwrapped it. In the faint light he pulled apart the pieces of bread and sniffed tentatively at the slightly acrid contents. Some sort of foreign paste was smeared inside.

But undoubtedly it was food. He was very hungry, and who could say when they would receive their next meal? He slapped his sandwich back together and took a bite. He didn't like it, but he could eat it. And after he ate it he could sleep. The floor was very hard, but he was very tired.

It was terribly noisy in the basement. Clearly the Katkajanians would be awake for a long time. But after a while David did lie down, and sometime later he was dimly aware that Katie had done the same.

“We have to get away, David,” she whispered softly.

He did not answer.

“We have to escape from them,” she insisted.

He wanted only to sleep, and again he made no reply.

“In the morning,” she continued, aware now that she was speaking to herself, “in the morning we'll run away.” And then—despite the noise and the slatted light and the concrete, despite her sorrow and her fear—she fell asleep.

But in the morning they were taken away.

At the crack of dawn—before it was fully light, before there were cars on the streets, before they had even woken up—Trixie and the crooked-nosed Katkajanian roughly and unceremoniously dragged open the door to their closet.

The basement was still dark. The house was silent and—but for them—asleep. Trixie carried a flashlight that she shone in their faces.

“Get up,” she whispered.

The children, fogged by sleep, simply stared.

“Up,” she repeated, now jerking the flashlight toward the stairs, as if to beckon them forward. “We're going for a little ride in the car.”

They asked no questions. And fleetingly—through her sleepy confusion and her terrible fear—Katie noticed that neither did Trixie. At some point, Trixie had abandoned the irritating upward tilt that used to end her every sentence. There was no need to sugarcoat anything now.

The children stumbled to their feet and prepared to follow her. But Trixie, indignant, pointed back toward the floor where they had lain.

“Get that!” she barked, gesturing toward the plastic from their sandwiches, which had been flattened beneath their bodies. “You don't leave your trash for others to pick up!”

Clutching the wads of plastic and the empty water bottle, and stumbling with fear and fatigue, the children followed Trixie across the basement and up the stairs, with the other Katkajanian silently following them. Lighting a path with her flashlight Trixie led them across the kitchen and out the back door.

Their fear was intense but still, the fresh dark air was good after their night in the stuffy closet. At the first touch of it on their faces they were fully alert.

They were led through the side yard and across the dewy grass to the front of the house. There a car idled in the driveway, with its headlights off despite the still-starry sky. The colorless, lank-haired American was behind the wheel. Trixie slipped into the front seat beside her while the crooked-nosed Katkajanian opened the back door and pointed the children in. They slid across the cold seat,
the man slid in after them, and the door was slammed shut. The American woman put the car into gear and they rolled down the driveway with the lights still off.

“Where are we going?” David's voice trembled audibly. Any attempt to pretend he was not petrified was hopeless.

But there was no reply.

They rolled through the familiar streets, away from their home, past the pool, and out of their new neighborhood. They rolled past their school.

The driver switched on the headlights at last as they slipped onto the freeway. They continued to cruise in total silence. And soon after that—too soon—Trixie was gesturing and pointing and they were exiting on a familiar ramp.

The ramp took them beneath a lonely overpass, and as they glided under it the lights once again went off. They emerged onto a bleak and well-known road.

Gone were the leafy branches that spread like a canopy over the streets in their new neighborhood. Gone were the neat lawns and the well-tended houses. On either side of them were wrecks and hovels, rubble and dirt.

Katie closed her eyes. It was their old neighborhood.

The children could have made the rest of the trip on their own, and with their eyes closed. They knew it that well. And their hearts, which they had thought could sink no further, dropped down, down, down with every turn of the wheel.

No Mom, thought Katie. No Dad, no Theo. No room, no house, no home.

They were back to where they had started, with less than when they had begun.

The car pulled to a stop in front of the old place and the driver cut the motor. The house had, if anything, sagged still further than when they had left it, hoping never to see it again. Vandals had punched holes in the front steps. They would have to pick their way to the door. Plywood had been nailed over the barred windows. Who had put that up, and when? Now there would be no light as well as no exit.

“We're home!” Trixie sang with a sudden trill of a laugh. Her loudness jarred them in the silent car. She shoved open her door and leaped out, all but dancing around to open theirs. “Out!” she snapped, low-voiced now in the open air.

It was funny how even the car, which had been a detestable prison moments before, felt like a refuge now. But they had no alternative. Reluctantly they slid from their seats and huddled together on the familiar pavement. Trixie tucked her flashlight beneath her arm and, from the capacious pockets of her camouflage suit, she withdrew a key. She began picking her way up the broken steps. The man with the crooked nose and the lank-haired woman emerged from the car. The woman carried a smallish brown paper bag bundled beneath her
arm. Joining them, she gave David a shove to indicate he was to follow.

A flicker of movement to his left drew David's startled eye. A fat gray rat was slipping beneath the stairs. David shut his eyes and squeezed them tight.

Trixie turned the key in the lock. Katie noticed with surprise that when she did so, a new and unfamiliar deadbolt slid open on the outside of the door. The door creaked open, dislodging a clod of dust and dirt that fell onto Trixie's head. She muttered angrily in Katkajanian and brushed the filth from her face. Impatiently pushing aside cobwebs, she led the way in.

They followed. They had no choice.

The front door opened straight into the small front room. Once it had been their living room and they had done their best to keep it clean. Though it had not been so very long since they had lived there, they could see in the beam of Trixie's light that in their absence it had become filthy with spiders and dust.

The driver dropped her paper bag onto the floor. “Thad's sub food,” she said in her flat voice, nudging it with her foot.

Trixie grunted in affirmation. “Water's in the sink,” she added. “We'll check on you later. So you'd better be good.”

Then, incredibly, she and her two helpers turned back toward the door. They were going to leave. That was it. That was all they planned to say.

Now Katie's voice shook, too, but not just her voice, and not from fear. Now it was her whole body. The outrage. The utter outrage.

“What are you doing to our mother and father?” she demanded loudly. “When are you letting them go?”

“And what about us?” added David. “How long are you planning to leave us here, in this—in this—”

Trixie wheeled around, hands on hips. “You think this is bad? You think this place is bad?” She stared at David, hard, as she spoke. “You haven't seen anything. If you aren't good, this is gonna get a lot worse.”

Then she turned on Katie. “And do you want your mother and father? Do you want to see them again?”

A terrible, cold fear seemed to stop Katie's heart. She raised her clasped hands to her face in an involuntary appeal. “Are they alive?”

“Oh, they're alive,” said Trixie. Katie felt as if her heart resumed beating at these words. Trixie was watching, and now she sneered. “That's very sweet,” she said. “But listen up, cupcake: If you want to see your parents again, you
shut up
. You
don't
.
Tell. Anybody
.”

With that dreadful warning, she and her companions stepped out the door and shut it tight. Katie and David heard the key turn in the lock. They heard the creaking deadbolt slip into position, barring them in. Then their jailers' footsteps clomped down the front steps, the car
doors slammed, the motor came to life, and their only hope of escape rolled away from the curb and was gone.

They were alone.

Fortunately, they were not left in total darkness. By the time Trixie and her friends drove away, the blackness outside had faded to gray. And while the windows of their ancient house were boarded over, the boards had been hastily and sloppily applied. Cracks between the panels of wood sent shafts of the rapidly brightening daylight across the floor.

But Katie and David were beyond appreciating this small piece of good luck. They felt that they had sunk as low as it was possible to sink.

And as bad as it was for both of them, David had a special and secret problem: rats. He was mortally afraid of them. When they had lived in this house—and how, he now wondered, had they ever lived here?—he had kept this shameful fact from Katie. She was his sister and they had few secrets from each other, but he had never wanted her to know this one. It was going to be hard to conceal it from her now.

Katie sank to the dusty floor. She crossed her arms on her raised knees and buried her face in them. “Sit,” she said to her brother, her words coming muffled through her arms. “We're going to be here for a while.”

“It's too dirty,” he replied. No way was he sitting on that floor, where the rats could get him.

“They don't come out in the daylight,” she replied. “We aren't going to see them till tonight. You may as well rest now.”

So she did know. Embarrassed, David dropped to a crouch.