Baby-Sitting Is a Dangerous Job (10 page)

The door was locked, of course. I'd known it would be, yet disappointment almost made me sick to my stomach. A window, then?

There were two windows, one on each side of the door, that opened onto the veranda. I tried
each of them, but they'd been painted shut years ago. I might have broken the glass if I'd had anything heavy to hit it with, but the men in the back of the house would have heard that and caught up with me before I got down the porch steps. Even if they couldn't see me, those dogs would find me before I ran down to the gate, and probably that had been relocked by now, anyway.

No way out here, I thought. I could have gone back up to that almost-empty bedroom upstairs, but instead I began to move slowly and cautiously toward the source of light at the rear of the house.

I turned a corner and saw a slice of brightly lighted kitchen. It was old-fashioned looking, with worn linoleum on the floor and wooden chairs at a big table with a green and white plastic tablecloth over it.

When a door opened and closed, I froze against the wall, not daring to go either forward or backward. Henry's voice sounded so near that the hair stood up on the back of my neck.

“Did I hear the phone?”

“Yeah, it was Pa. He said there was nothing
on the evening news. I bet the Fosters called the cops, though.” Dan sounded nervous.

“It doesn't matter if they did.” Henry didn't sound nervous at all. “The housekeeper doesn't know what happened to her car. They probably haven't even found it yet, where you left it in the gravel pit. You wiped all the prints off the steering wheel and the door handles, didn't you?”

“Sure. I still think the gravel pit's too close to here, though. They might get wise that I walked away from it and wouldn't have gone too far.”

“Why should they?” I heard another door closing and figured out that it was a cupboard door. Henry crossed the band of light and poured himself coffee from a pot on the stove. “They won't be able to tell you walked away instead of changed cars.”

He took his cup to the table and sat down, where I could see a little bit of his back. It made me feel somewhat safer not to have him moving around, though Dan was out of sight and could have come through the doorway any minute. Where, I wondered, was the telephone?

“I don't know,” Dan replied. “It's just so
close here, I feel like they might guess where we are, when they find the old lady's car.”

“No reason they should come here,” Henry told him. “Everybody in the neighborhood knows old Okie is the caretaker, and he lets the dogs run free on the grounds. Even the kids don't try anything since he got the dogs. The place is a mile and a half from the nearest neighbor, anyway, and nobody can tell if there's traffic in and out or more lights than usual. Okie didn't tell anybody but us that he was going to the hospital for a week or two, and nobody'd suspect
him
of kidnapping.”

“He's going to be pretty mad when he finds out we used this house for a hideout,” Dan observed. I heard the clatter of a cup against something and guessed he was drinking coffee, too.

“Why should he ever know? We'll be gone before he comes back. I doubt if he goes upstairs once a year, and even if he does, what will there be for him to see? An old mattress. He probably won't remember if it was there before or not.”

Dan didn't seem any happier. “I just wish
this was all over. Even if we get the ransom money—”

“What do you mean,
if
we get it? Foster'll pay, all right, as soon as we tell him how much and where to deliver it,” Hank interrupted.

“—we can't just go on about our business, here in Marysville, like we planned at first. Not since that babysitter knows who we are.”

“Don't worry about the sitter,” Hank told him, and it made me so cold I clamped my jaws to keep my teeth from chattering.

“Listen, I'm not going to hurt any kids,” Dan said, and he sounded as if he'd said it before. “Holding 'em for ransom is one thing, but hurting 'em is something else. You know, if Ma ever finds out about this, she's going to kill us all.”

Henry snorted. “Ma's scared of the old man; she wouldn't do anything even if she found out, which she's not going to do. Not unless you're stupid enough to tell her, and then it'll be
Pa
who'll kill you. This is rotten coffee; is it some Okie left, or did you make it?”

They talked about the coffee, and the food, and then about how long they had to wait until
they could call Mr. Foster and ask for the money. Dan wanted to call sooner, but Henry said they had to wait until two a.m., the way Pa Hazen had instructed.

“Means we can't even go to bed until so late,” Dan grumbled, and I wondered how they could sleep, under the circumstances.

His brother changed the subject, getting up to dump the last of his coffee into the sink. “You have any trouble with the kids while I was gone?”

“No. I brought the dogs inside, to guard the stairs, because they said they had to use the bathroom. They won't get past the dogs.”

Henry swung around from the sink. “The dogs are outside. They came up to me when I drove in.”

“Yeah, I know. They'd been guarding for hours; I had to let 'em run before I lock up for the night. It's a good thing they got a little bit used to us when we were here taking down those trees and sawing 'em up. They still make me nervous. Every time I turn my back, I expect one of 'em to nip my heels.”

“So if the dogs are outdoors, who's watching the kids?” Henry demanded.

“They're asleep, and besides, they can't get out. Every outside door in the place is locked except the one you just came in, and that's been in my sight all the time. And the windows don't open, either, except that one in Okie's bedroom. They can't get at that without coming through the kitchen. So what're you worrying about?”

“Your stupidity, mostly,” Henry said. “If anything happens to screw this up, we're all going to jail. You know that, don't you?”

“You and Pa promised that wouldn't happen.”

“Not if you do things right. But you let that girl run away and bring back the police, and I guarantee they'll lock us up for a long time. You didn't want to hang around this town forever, doing odd jobs, without any money, any more than we did. Anybody said, ‘Mexico, with plenty of cash,' and you got as excited as the rest of us. You better check on those kids, and I'll get the dogs back in here.”

I started backing up, moving as quickly as I could without making any racket. I had to be up there in that room by the time Dan got there; if they found me downstairs, they might
very well tie me up, and then all hope of escape would be gone.

I reached the stairs and fled upwards as fast as I could go. I had barely stretched out on the mattress beside Melissa when I heard Dan on the stairs. I squeezed my eyes shut and hoped my breathing wouldn't give away the fact that I'd raced up there just ahead of him.

I could feel them standing there, looking at me.

I heard the dogs, too, their toenails clicking on the wooden floor. My heart thundered in my ears.

“You better be more careful from now on,” Henry said. “Don't take any chances, you hear? All we have to do is keep the kids here until Foster hands over the money, and it'll all be over. So stay cool, Dan. Just watch these kids so they don't get away.”

“They're not gonna get away,” Dan said, and he sounded annoyed.

After a minute or so, they went away.

I opened my eyes. They'd left the hall light on, and the dogs were back on guard duty.

I wanted to go to sleep, but I couldn't. I lay there beside the Foster kids, and after a while
it cooled off enough so I put the blanket over them.

It was partly my fault they were here, I thought. If nobody came to rescue us, how could I get them out of this? And myself with them?

I guess I did sleep for a while, only I kept waking up. Each time I knew at once where I was, and what was happening. I wondered if Henry had called Mr. Foster yet, and how long it would take to get the ransom money together and deliver it.

And what they'd do with me, when they were ready to take their money and run to Mexico.

Finally I woke up and there were birds twittering in the trees outside. The kids began to wake up then, too, and we all trooped to the bathroom. We couldn't brush our teeth or comb our hair, but we washed our faces. The dogs kept their heads up and watched us as we went back to the bedroom; they weren't growling the way they had done last night, though.

It was still pretty early, and we didn't hear any sounds from downstairs. Jeremy stood
looking out the window. “Maybe I could crawl out on the roof and drop down and go for help,” he suggested.

“It's not as easy as in the movies,” I told him, trying not to sound as depressed as I felt. “It's an awful long way down, and you might break a leg or something. I thought of trying to make a rope out of the blanket, but I can't tear it. I don't see anything to tie it to, anyway.” I stood beside him, wishing the house wasn't so high off the ground, wishing for a miracle.

Melissa said, “I want to go home.”

I knew just how she felt. “They probably called your daddy last night. Maybe it won't be long before they let us go,” I told her.

Shana said, “I'm hungry.”

“I'm bored,” Jeremy added. “Darcy, let's go exploring again.”

“We already explored, yesterday, remember? All we found was some old magazines.”

“We didn't explore upstairs. Maybe there's something up there. A gun that we could shoot them with.”

That wasn't likely, but I didn't have any
better suggestion. “Okay,” I said, “if the dogs will let us open the door to the attic stairs.”

Though the Dobermans watched us warily, they didn't growl when we crept quietly along the hallway toward the door to the stairs. It wasn't very light in the stairway, but a faint illumination came from above, enough so we could climb without falling.

Jeremy went first, then Melissa, then Shana and me. We emerged into a great dusty room with all kinds of junk in it, mostly old trunks and broken furniture. Again, though, none of it looked like anything we could use. Even the windows were dirty, so dirty we couldn't see much through them.

I was trying to open a window so I could see more clearly when Jeremy found some kind of old fur lap robe and draped it over his head and down his back. “I'm a monster, and I'm going to eat you for my breakfast!” he cried, and dove toward his sisters.

Both of them shrieked as if he really were a great animal about to devour them. Shana grabbed my leg, and I put an arm around her, but Melissa ran, crashing into a bird cage and
several boxes that teetered and fell, spilling old clothes and papers over the attic floor.

“Jeremy, cut it out! We don't want to make enough racket so they'll hear us on the ground floor,” I told him, and to my relief he stopped chasing Melissa.

She didn't realize he'd come to a halt, though, and she careened into an old mattress that stood on end against one wall. It toppled with a cloud of dust that made us all sneeze.

“Boy, I'm glad they didn't bring this one down for us to sleep on,” I said, and shoved it off Melissa, who had been knocked down by it. “It's all right, don't
yell
, Melissa!”

“Hey, look!” Jeremy said, letting the furry thing slide off his shoulders. “There's a funny little door!”

There was. It was small enough that I would have to duck to go through it. “It's probably just a storage area.” I said, and would have turned around to go back downstairs.

Jeremy, however, wanted to know what was behind it. He tugged at it, then turned to me. “Help me, Darcy. Let's see what's inside. Maybe they hid a treasure in there!”

“There'll only be more junk,” I predicted, only it wasn't trash that was revealed when I jerked open the door, but another set of stairs.

They were so steep and narrow they were almost a ladder, and they curled around like the stairs I'd once seen inside a lighthouse we visited on Lake Huron.

“Let's see what's up there,” Jeremy suggested, sounding excited, and I wished I could forget that we were prisoners in this big old house and just enjoy myself.

Well, having the kids interested in exploring seemed better than having them crying in terror. I followed them up the stairs, helping Shana because she couldn't make it on her own.

Above me, I heard Jeremy's delighted cry. “It's a little room! Boy, I wish we had one like this in our house!”

A cupola, I realized, gaining the top of the stairs, a round room at the top of the house. It had been used as a children's playroom, for there were still toys there.

“A shicken,” Shana announced, and headed for the other side of the room. There was a table and four chairs, small-child size, and a
miniature stove and sink and ice box. They weren't modern like the ones the kids had at home, but they were toys, coated with dust. At the table sat a doll with its hair mostly worn away, a teddy bear with one eye, and a clown doll made out of a sock that sagged limply over a tiny china plate.

“We can play house, Melissa said, lifting a teapot and pretending to pour into a blue and white cup.

“There's a train,” Jeremy said, and dropped to his knees on the dusty floor. “Only there's no place to plug it in!”

“It's not electric,” I told him, and moved toward one of the windows that opened on all sides.

He gave me a puzzled look. “How does it work, then?”

“I guess you just have to push it around the track by hand,” I told him, but I wasn't thinking about the train. I was thinking how isolated this place was.

It felt as if we were a mile above the ground. We could see way off over the unmowed lawns, through the trees, to the stone wall
that surrounded the place; there were no houses within sight beyond the wall, only more trees, though there was one thing that might be worth investigating if I could get outside the house.