Scared Stiff Read online

  “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.

  Chapter Twelve

  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.

  No sign a woman has ever been here, I thought, turning away.

  And then I saw it.

  At the side of the crummy little building a leaking faucet had made a wet spot on the otherwise dry ground. And in the middle of the wet spot there was a footprint.

  Not one I could take for Ma’s, but it made me suck in my breath, anyway.

  “What’s the matter?” Connie asked at once.

  Then he saw it, too. He gulped. “It . . . it’s just like the footprint on that notebook you dropped,” he said. “Swirls on the heel.”

  “I suppose,” I said, sounding strangled, “there are lots of shoes that have that pattern on the heels.”

  But I didn’t believe it was a coincidence, and neither did Connie.

  We both were convinced that the same man who had come into our apartment house right about the time Ma disappeared had been here, too, and not very long ago.

  “I guess we better go tell Uncle Henry,” I said hollowly,
“and see if he thinks we should go to the cops again.”

  We looked around some more, but there were no more clues of any kind. No sign of Ma. When the bus returned, we got on it in silence and rode back into town.

  • • •

  I intended to wake up when Uncle Henry came home early in the morning, but after I’d lain awake until past midnight worrying, and then had bad dreams after that, I guess I slept too hard. When I did wake up Sunday morning, I could hear Uncle Henry snoring. He’d come in without disturbing us.

  Kenny was still sleeping. Nobody moved around the park except Mrs. Giuliani, who was walking her ugly little dog. I ate a bowl of cold cereal and then made up my mind. I couldn’t wait any longer. I had to tell somebody.

  I thought Uncle Henry might be cross when I woke him up, but he wasn’t. He sat on the edge of the bed in his underwear and listened while I showed him the papers we figured Ma had put into the notebook.

  He studied them for a minute. “Don’t mean anything to me,” he said finally. “But if Sophie deliberately hid them in your notebook they could be important. We’ll show them to the police; maybe they can figure out what they might mean.”

  He put them aside and examined the earring and the notebook cover with the footprint on it.

  “You’re sure it’s the same kind of print?” he asked, but he didn’t sound as if he doubted my word, only as if he were sorting things out in his mind.

  “Yes.”

  “And the earring is like some Sophie has, but you can’t be sure.”

  “Yes.”

  He made that snorting sound, though this time it didn’t seem to signify amusement. “Well,” he said, sighing, “I could have heard the train and the animals at the pound on the phone, I guess. I don’t know if this is enough to convince the police of anything, but we’ll give it a try. First maybe we better go have a look at that footprint, compare it with the one on your notebook.”

  Uncle Henry reached for his pants.

  This time we drove out to the pound in the purple bus, and it didn’t take anywhere near as long as the city bus. I showed him how Connie had thrown a rock against one of the metal posts around the dog runs, and he nodded.

  “Sounds pretty much the same,” he said, and then we checked out the phone booth again. There was nothing more there, so we parked the purple bus in the driveway at the salvage yard and got out.

  “See,” I pointed out, “there at the corner, where the faucet drips and makes a wet spot.”

  But the footprint was gone. The water had continued to drip, erasing it. There was no longer any evidence whatever.

  I felt crushed, going home, but Uncle Henry was only thoughtful. “Tomorrow morning,” he said, “we’ll get up early and go see if we can’t find a way to contact your pa. There must be a way, even if he is on the road somewhere. Get the police to watch for his truck or something. And we’ll talk to the police again, tell them about the footprint and show them the one we still have on your notebook. Maybe now they’ll listen.”

  We went back to the RV park and had breakfast. We had my favorites, pancakes and sausage, but I couldn’t help being depressed. I’d thought we had a couple of real clues, but now we didn’t have anything, it seemed. It hadn’t occurred to me to find a way to preserve that footprint, though it should have.

  I didn’t even want to go to Wonderland that afternoon while Uncle Henry finished his sleeping. Connie came over, and I told him what had happened.

  “Tough luck,” he said understandingly. “But you can’t do anything before tomorrow anyway, right? So let’s go do something fun.”

  I went along mainly to keep from going crazy sitting around waiting for Uncle Henry to wake up. I’d almost forgotten that Julie and her grandma had a crisis of their own to deal with, until I saw Julie’s face as she came out of their trailer to join us.

  “I guess we’re all going to have to move,” she said listlessly, kicking at a rock in the drive. “Only nobody knows where to. Mrs. Bogen was crying last night when Grandma told her the park’s being sold. She has no family, and nowhere to go. Mrs. Giuliani called several other parks, but they’re all too expensive for the people here.”

  Connie and I were silent, watching Kenny trying to turn cartwheels. He wasn’t very good at it.

  “Grandma called Daddy this morning. In Alaska. He said he’d try to take time off to come down and help us find another place, but Grandma doesn’t think our chances are very good of finding a place to live that won’t cost a lot more than it does here.”

  “Maybe you can go back to Alaska with your dad,” Connie said awkwardly.

  “It costs a whole lot more to live in Alaska. They have to fly in all their supplies, groceries and stuff, so they cost more than anywhere down here in the lower forty-eight. That’s what Alaskans call the rest of the United States.”

  Connie shifted restlessly. “Well, things are crummy. For everybody, I guess. But there’s not much we can do about any of it. Kids never get to say what they want, or have any power to fix anything that goes wrong. So let’s go back to Wonderland and fool around.”

  I could tell Julie didn’t feel like it any more than I did, though we didn’t feel like sitting around being depressed, either.

  “But we can’t,” Julie said regretfully. “Mrs. Bogen is sitting there where she could see us go through the fence. And she’s going to keep on sitting there, calling around trying to find another place to live.”

  Connie got a sort of funny look on his face, but he didn’t say anything until I asked, “What?”

  Then he shrugged. “Well, shoot, they’re going to level the whole place pretty soon now anyway, right? So it doesn’t matter if you know my secret entrance. Come on, you don’t mind walking a couple of blocks, do you?”

  “You mean we don’t have to sneak in past Mrs. Bogan? There’s another way?” Julie demanded, astonished.

  “I was thinking about telling you pretty soon,” Connie said. “Before, I didn’t know you that well. Now we’re friends, so it’s different, right?”

  Kenny sort of dragged behind as we set off past the front entrance gate of Wonderland and along the street until we came to the alley behind the far side of that high gray wall. Connie looked around and saw no one but us on the street, then ducked into the alley and trotted along with the rest of us at his heels.

  We went the entire length of that wall and then turned another corner. Connie stopped after another ten yards or so.

  We were in an open space between the back wall of Wonderland and blank walls of warehouses on the next street over. Even if it had been a working day, nobody would have been likely to see us from here because there were no doors or windows in the walls.

  There was a concrete drainage ditch through the space between the buildings. This time of year it was dry except for a narrow ribbon of water that trickled out of a big pipe sticking out of the gray wall of Wonderland.

  Connie stopped and made a gesture toward the pipe. “Ta da!”

  Julie’s mouth fell open. “You’ve got to be kidding! You go in through that?”

  My mouth didn’t exactly fall open, but I was startled. It wasn’t a very big pipe.

  “We going to crawl through the pipe?” Kenny asked. “Is it dark in there?”

  “Not for very far. I mean it, it’s only a few feet. You can see the light at the other end. Look,” Connie urged, squatting down and pulling Kenny down with him.

  Kenny put his face into the opening. “There’s bars on the other end.”

  “They push out. That’s how I found it, from inside the park. The whole grille can be lifted right off. From this side, you just push it out. I left it off for a while, but I was afraid Julie would see it and wonder about it. So I replaced it and went out the other way. Go ahead, Kenny. When you get to the grille, give it a push.”

  Obediently Kenny crawled into the pipe, not caring if he got the knees of his jeans wet. Julie put her hands on her hips.

  “I’m not crawling thro
ugh a sewer!”

  “It’s not a sewer. It’s just drain water. Honest!” Connie scooped up a handful and held it under her nose. “No smell, see? Actually, when I found it there was no water in it at all. But now we’ve got water running inside again. I think this was mainly for runoff when they sprinkled the grass or anything overflowed or there were heavy rains. It just drains off into the creek.”

  Without trying any further to persuade her, Connie followed Kenny into the pipe.

  I bent to look in after them and saw that Kenny was out the far end. “It’s not small enough to get stuck in,” I told Julie, and crawled in myself.

  When I emerged on the far side, Connie was explaining that he thought the grille had been removed for cleaning after a storm when debris piled up against it. “If they were cleaning it when Mr. Mixon died, probably nobody remembered to come back and finish the job. I think the pipe’s too small for a man to get through it, but they wouldn’t have left it on purpose without fastening the grille.”

  I looked back and saw Julie’s face at the other end of the pipe. “Come on,” I said. “It’s easy.”

  So now we had two ways in and out of Wonderland. And we had another terrific afternoon, except for when we stopped to think that in only a few weeks they’d be bulldozing the whole place, dismantling the Moon Rocket and the parachute tower and the Splasher ride and all the others.

  “And I’ll never even get to ride the merry-go-round,” Kenny said sadly when we went past the carousel.

  I was trying to watch the time, because I wanted to be home when Uncle Henry got up. We went out the same way we’d come in, and Kenny was so tired we practically had to drag him the long way around.

  It was Kenny who noticed it first. He stopped and let out a yelp of surprise. “It’s gone!” he exclaimed. “Uncle Henry’s bus is gone!”

  Not knowing what else to do, we followed Julie into her grandma’s trailer to see if Mrs. Biggers knew where Uncle Henry was.

  She was peeling potatoes into a kettle, and she looked tired.

  “He went to the police,” she said, dropping in the last potato.