Scared Stiff (12 page)

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 through 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.

“Why?” I asked anxiously. “Did something else happen?”

“He came in here to use the phone.” She put
the pan on the stove and turned on the burner. “He called the dispatcher from that trucking company where your folks work, and talked to him at home. He was upset when he got through, and he talked to me about it.”

“Nothing's happened to Pa, has it?” That awful tightness was in my chest again.

“No. That's one of the things Mr. Svoboda wanted him to do, to get in touch with your pa when he picks up his load in Ogallala. I guess the man didn't sound very cooperative. Just annoyed that your ma hadn't showed up or called or anything. So Mr. Svoboda said he was going to talk to the police again, see if they wouldn't try to run down your pa, wherever he is. Said it was too much for him to deal with by himself.”

Mrs. Biggers wiped her hands and sat down at the table, facing us. “I don't blame him. I hope he can make the police believe your ma didn't just run off and abandon you. He says she's not the kind of person to do that, and somehow he has to convince the police they need to look for her.”

She sighed. “I don't know, I'm sure. Since
they told me we have to move, I can hardly think straight, so I'm no help to anybody. Anyway, your uncle said he was taking a footprint or something to the police, today instead of waiting until tomorrow. How can he take a footprint anywhere?”

I was puzzled and anxious and excited, all at the same time. “He meant the one on my notebook. Maybe this time they'll listen.”

“Come on,” Connie said, pushing himself away from the door frame where he'd been leaning. “I'll wait with you until your uncle comes home.” Julie followed us out into the tiny front yard, and we stood around awkwardly until Connie spoke.

“You know, I'll bet your uncle had the same idea I've got about all this.”

“What?” Julie asked.

“Well, why would the people at E & F Trucking be uncooperative? Why were they so disagreeable when Rick called them? I mean, it's more likely that something happened to Rick's mom than that she just walked off the job and left her kids without telling anybody, isn't it? I mean, if she wanted to quit the job,
all she had to do was say so. Nobody could stop her. And if they want her to do the paperwork for getting out paychecks, wouldn't she have one of her own coming? Why would she leave without getting it? Besides that, Rick, those papers you found in your notebook, they're some kind of clue your mom found to something that's going on there where she worked.”

“Something crooked,” I said slowly. It was a scary idea, that E & F was mixed up in something like they put on TV shows, where people get kidnapped . . . or shot.

“Could that be it?” I asked slowly, as a cold fear crept through me. “Remember, I told you my dad had a load of TV sets hijacked. Ma asked him . . .” I swallowed, because it was hard to say and I didn't want it to be true. “She said did he have anything to do with it, like leaving his truck long enough so somebody could unhook it from his cab, and he got really mad and they had a big fight. And then he walked out and didn't come home again.”