Baby-Sitting Is a Dangerous Job (7 page)

I wondered how Diana was doing, up there in the tree house with only that old tattered book about child abuse to occupy her time. Maybe when I got home I'd go and talk to her, try to persuade her to confide in my folks. Kids can't do much about that kind of situation, but surely adults could. I didn't know if it was even legal for her to go and live with her brother or her aunt, but there must be some way to keep her from going back home where she was mistreated. My mom is usually pretty good about finding solutions to problems, even serious ones, and if Diana would talk to her . . .

I had walked back to the front hall, where I could see down the bedroom corridor and into the big living room. The house was so quiet now that I stopped, listening. Mom always said that the time she got most concerned was when she couldn't hear the kids making any noise, and I hoped the Fosters weren't into anything horrible or destructive.

Had Mrs. Murphy returned, or not? I didn't think I'd have noticed the neighbors operating a garage door opener, but maybe I'd
mistaken the source of the sounds I'd heard. A new and alarming idea formed. What if it had been Jeremy doing something, not Mrs. Murphy at all?

Was there a control where he could get at it? I had a horrible vision of him opening the garage door and then closing it on Shana, though if anything like that happened, I'd surely have heard genuine screams instead of playful shrieks. Right now I wasn't hearing anything at all, and it made me uneasy.

“Jeremy? Melissa?” I called.

There was no response. Were they hiding, holding their hands over their mouths to restrain the giggles, waiting for me to walk by so they could jump out and pounce on me?

If I screamed when they did it, it could start another noisy game. If I didn't, they'd be disappointed. I walked back toward the kitchen, expecting to be startled any minute, trying to decide how to react.

Nothing sounded in the house except the grandfather clock in the corner of the dining room, which played a twelve-note tune and then chimed the hour. Three o'clock. At least
an hour earlier than the housekeeper usually came home. I must have been mistaken about the noises.

I walked into the kitchen and stood in the middle of it, listening again. I could see through sliding glass doors out into the backyard, and there was no sign of the kids there.

And then I heard Shana's cry of distress, and perhaps anger. “I told you, I hafta go
potty
!”

Maybe that was it. Sometimes the older kids did look out for Shana, and they were probably all in the back bathroom. I started in that direction, about to call out again just as Shana cried, “I don't like you!”

Nobody'd given me permission to touch any of these kids for disciplinary purposes. Surely, though, if the older ones were tormenting Shana I'd be allowed to separate them, forcibly if I had to.

After the bright sunshine of the kitchen, the hallway seemed dim and shadowy. Shana was crying now, sobbing, and I quickened my steps. If they were hurting her, I was going to be tempted to—

I didn't see anybody in the short hallway
that ran off to the side of the main one, leading to Melissa's room. That door was closed, and it was almost dark in there; I didn't even glance that way in the urgency of reaching Shana and stopping whatever was being done to her. I'd forgotten I expected the kids to jump out and scare me.

When the hand closed over my mouth, from someone standing behind me, I made a smothered protest and tried to say, “Jeremy, cut it out!”

And then I realized it couldn't be Jeremy. The hand was too large, too strong, and there was an odor of tobacco that certainly didn't come from a six-year-old boy. And whoever held me against him was tall, a lot taller than I was.

Fear exploded in me. I tried to yelp and I struggled, until a harsh male voice said, “Knock it off, unless you want to get hurt!”

The burglar, I thought, he had gotten inside after all, and somehow the police didn't find him!

“Hurry up, what's going on?” another man's voice demanded, and I was trying to cope with
the idea that there were two strange men here who had broken in when I heard the third voice.

“She had to go to the bathroom, so I thought I'd better take her. I didn't want to drag a kid around in wet pants,” it said, and then the speaker appeared in front of me, in the bathroom door.

He was tall and skinny, with frizzled reddish brown hair and light blue eyes, and he was carrying Shana, whose small face was streaked with tears.

The second speaker appeared from behind me, so that my captor swiveled to face him. Number two was tall and thin, like the man carrying Shana, wearing worn jeans and a blue work shirt; they looked enough alike so I guessed they might be father and son, for this one was older than my dad. He scowled at me. “Who's this?”

“Baby-sitter,” said my captor. “You didn't think the old lady went off and left the kids alone, did you? I told you, we watched this one before. We didn't want to come breaking in without knowing who was here. She's just a kid.”

Inside my head all kinds of alarms were going off. I hadn't figured it out yet, but I knew it was bad. It wasn't a game, it was real, and it was scary.

I jerked hard to one side, and the hand slid off my mouth. “Who are you? What're you doing?” I demanded.

Shana pushed against the chest of the man who held her. “Put me down!” she demanded.

The man ignored her. “Come on, let's get out of here,” he said. “This place makes me nervous. The cops were here before, they could come back.”

The older man gave him a quelling look. “If you two hadn't been so stupid, they'd never have come in the first place.”

The man behind me, the one I hadn't yet seen and who still had my arms pinned so I couldn't get away, put in his own comment. “We were smart enough to figure out a way in here, and it worked better than
your
way, Pa. What are we going to do with this one?”

My mind was racing. I knew I ought to be memorizing descriptions of them; instead I was so scared I could hardly think straight.

I tried to make myself calm down, but it was impossible. The man carrying Shana came on out into the hallway, and there was something about him that was sort of familiar. Frizzy reddish brown hair and pale blue eyes . . .

All of a sudden I knew who he was, who they all were, and I blurted it out as thoughtlessly as Jeremy would have done.

“You're Diana's brother!” I said, and then went cold as the silence, unbroken except for Shana's whimpering, grew around me.

The older man swore. “All right, you smart alecks,” he said, sounding so angry I cringed away from him. “Now see what you went and done. Now we gotta get rid of the baby-sitter!”

For a minute I thought I was going to faint. On TV, when they say things like that, they mean they're going to drop someone in the lake, tied to a stone, or something else just as bad. We don't have any lake near us, but there's a river that I supposed would be just as fatal.

The one carrying Shana—I'd finally remembered his name, he was Dan—took on an
expression that made me think I was right: they intended to dispose of me permanently.

“Hey, I agreed to the rest of this, but I'm not going to be up on any murder charge—”

“Don't be a sap,” the brother behind me said. “Kidnapping's a federal offense, and you can't get any worse than that. But we don't need to do anything drastic. We'll just take her along. Might be handy, to look after the kids, save us the trouble.”

“And what're we going to do later?” Diana's father demanded. “She's not only seen us, she knows who we are.” I remembered what Mr. Hazen did to Diana, the bruises he'd left on her, and I felt cold all over. If he'd hurt his own kid, he wouldn't hesitate to hurt
us.

“We're gonna leave this part of the country anyway, aren't we? As soon as they pay the ransom? We'll leave her tied up or something so she can't notify the police until we've had time to get out of the state. Once we've got money, we shouldn't have to worry about keeping away from them. Come on, let's get out of here.”

He shoved me forward, and when I tried to
twist free (which only hurt, and didn't do any good) I got a look at him. Yes, it was Henry Hazen, Diana's older brother; he and Dan looked a lot alike, except that Henry didn't have as many freckles and he was probably five years older.

Why had I blurted out my recognition? If they hadn't known I'd recognized them, they'd have left me here. Tied up, maybe, but unharmed. Mrs. Murphy would have found me when she came home, and then I could have given the police their descriptions so they could go rescue the kids and arrest Mr. Hazen and his sons.

I was being propelled along the corridor toward the kitchen, then across the sunny room and into the garage. Behind me, I heard Dan say, “You bite me again, kid, and I'm going to smack you.”

Mr. Hazen opened the door into the garage, and for a minute I thought that rescue was at hand, or at least that a decent adult had entered the picture. For there was Mrs. Murphy's car, the brown sedan she had driven off to the dentist's for her root canal work.

And then it dawned on me that the housekeeper was not there, for the doors of the car were opened, and there were Jeremy and Melissa inside. They each had a wide strip of tape over their mouths, and their eyes were wide with fear. Their hands had been tied together and secured to the door handles, so they couldn't escape.

Dan thrust Shana in beside them and climbed in back with the kids, slamming the door. “Let's go!” he said.

I was shoved into the front seat so roughly that I cracked my head; for a moment or two the pain of it blotted out everything else. And then I was aware that Henry had slid under the wheel, his father was pressed against me on the other side, and Henry was activating the garage door behind us with the control device.

We backed out onto the driveway, turning in the street, and headed toward the edge of town.

As the pain in my head receded, I knew the horrible truth: we were being kidnapped.

They hadn't put tape over my mouth, or Shana's, and from the back seat I heard her saying, “I want to go home.”

I twisted around and saw her little face, lower lip stubbornly sticking out, as she glared at the man who held her. I saw, too, Jeremy and Melissa, whose eyes were oozing tears of fright, and I wanted to hug them, all three, and tell them it would be all right.

The trouble was, I didn't know if it would be all right or not. I wasn't crying, but it wasn't because I didn't feel like it.

Why hadn't I called to Clancy to wait, when he was leaving? When I couldn't get Tim at home, why hadn't I called the police then?

I tried to pull away from the men on either side of me, but there was nowhere to go.
Behind me, Dan told Shana, “Now, don't do that. It hurts, little girl, and I can't let you keep kicking me.”

“My name's Shana,” she informed him, and judging by the sounds she kicked him again, because he said, “All right, I'll have to hold your legs down, then.”

Diana's father spoke suddenly in my ear. “You going to keep your mouth shut when we change cars, or do we have to tape your mouth, too?”

My mouth was so dry I could hardly speak. “What are you going to do with us?”

“Just keep you until Mr. Foster pays the ransom.” It was Henry, who was driving, who answered. “No reason for you kids to get hurt; you just can't cause any trouble, understand?”

“You going to keep quiet?” Mr. Hazen asked, and I nodded. I didn't really think a promise made to a kidnapper was binding, anyway. If I got the chance to run or scream for help, I wouldn't hesitate for a second.

It didn't matter what I'd promised, or intended to do. When Mrs. Murphy's brown sedan turned into a narrow lane and stopped
beside the black car we'd seen earlier, there was no one around to call to for help. There were only some poplar trees whispering in the breeze.

Far away, across a field, I saw a barn roof, but there were no people in sight. Screaming wouldn't gain me anything.

I'd been afraid of looking foolish if the driver of that black car had turned out to be innocent, so I'd kept still, and now look at me. Kidnapped, along with three little kids who suddenly didn't seem monstrous at all.

How long would it be before anyone discovered we were gone? Mrs. Murphy would probably come home in another hour or so—except that this was her car we were in, it was her door opener that had allowed these men into her garage.

Did that mean that Mrs. Murphy's car had been stolen while she was at the dentist, or was she somehow part of the plot? Could she have conspired with these three men to kidnap the Foster kids for ransom? Was one of them the man who'd come to the door, pretending to be a gas man? He'd been tall, too, and thin.

•  •  •

My head was aching and the blood pounded in my ears and made my heart feel as if it might beat its way out of my chest, too. No, I couldn't imagine the housekeeper plotting with these men. They'd been hanging around, had been watching the Foster house the day I'd come for an interview about the baby-sitting job, and then watching me, too. No doubt they'd figured out that Mrs. Murphy was going regularly for dental appointments, and that I'd be the only one in the house with three small kids. They'd failed to get in by passing as a gas man. Then they'd tried to break in earlier and been scared off by the burglar alarm; so they thought of stealing the housekeeper's car with the garage door opener in it.

They got out and dragged us with them. I looked at Jeremy and Melissa and couldn't help asking, “Couldn't you take the tape off their mouths?”

There was a moment's hesitation, and then Henry reached over and ripped off the tape, on first Jeremy and then Melissa. It pulled, and they both put up their hands to the places where the tape had stuck.