Snatched (18 page)

Brian asked, “What happened that night at the Thorns’? The night Alicia got hurt.”

“I went to see Alicia,” Maurice said. “She’d broken up with me, but I had to talk to her one more time. It turned out she broke up with me because Mrs. Thorn thought I was too low class for her daughter. Alicia was all conflicted about her mom. She wanted her mom to love her, but at the same time she wanted to get away from her. I kept telling her she couldn’t have both. We were out by the pool when Mrs. Thorn came out of the house, and then she and Alicia got into it. Alicia has a temper, too, you know.”

“I know,” said Roni, remembering getting whacked with Alicia’s backpack.

“So they were yelling at each other, and all of a sudden Mrs. Thorn goes crazy on Alicia and starts hitting her.”

“And you took off running,” Roni said.

“How’d you know that?”

“We have our sources,” Roni said.

Brian said, “What I don’t get is why you let everybody think she’d been beat up by some stranger.”

“Alicia called me later that night and made me swear to keep my mouth shut. She was worried it would make her family look bad.” Maurice shrugged. “So . . . the
Cap’n Arnold . . .
you going to tell me where it is now?”

“It washed up on Nun’s Island,” Roni said.

“How’s it looking? Is it in okay shape?”

Roni thought about the
Cap’n Arnold,
half full of bilgewater and rotting roses.

“It’s in great shape, Maurice. It’s just perfect.”

 

“Now what?” Brian said to Roni.

Maurice, who was anxious to drive out to Nun’s Island to check on his boat, had dropped them off on Main Street, a few blocks from their houses.

“Now we walk home and get dried off.”

“We’re almost dry already.”

“Yeah, but we still smell like dead fish,” Roni said, wrinkling her nose. “Time to go home, get cleaned up, then get grounded all over again.”

“I thought the idea was that we’d be heroes and everybody would love us too much to punish us.”

“Don’t get your hopes up. The idea was that we would save Alicia from some evil kidnapper. But all we did was get her to admit she kidnapped herself. Oh, by the way, Stink Bomb, I owe you something.”

“What?”

Roni made a fist and drove it into Brian’s shoulder.

“Yowch!” Brian exclaimed, backing away and grabbing his arm. “What was
that
for?”

“For keeping me in the dark. How come you didn’t tell me about the kicking-in-the-door thing?”

“ ’Cause I didn’t figure it out right away.” He rubbed his arm. “Jeez!”

“I don’t believe you. I think you knew it the whole time, ever since we were on the boat.”

“I figured it out later, when we were going to see Maurice. I tried to tell you, but that’s when you weren’t talking to me. You told me to shut up. Besides, I didn’t like when you were shoving me around on the boat.”

“That was because you
scared
me.”

“It was just a joke,” Brian said.

“It wasn’t funny.”

They glared at each other for a few seconds. Then a big smile stretched across Brian’s face.

“Yes, it was,” he said, rubbing his shoulder and grinning. “Rat snakes,” he said, then started laughing.

For about one-tenth of a second, Roni wanted to pummel the kid. But then something else rose up inside her and she was laughing, too.

It had been two weeks since Roni and Brian had cracked the Alicia Camden case, but they had not been hailed as heroes. In fact, things were much as before. Brian shifted position on The Bench. It got harder every time he sat on it. Mrs. Washington was hammering on her keyboard. A copy of last week’s
Bloodwater Pump
sat on his lap.

Brian turned to the other occupant of The Bench. “So . . . what are you in for?”

“I was doing my job,” Roni growled. “I wrote an article about Alicia snatching herself, and about how she has to do community service to make up for filing a false police report and wasting everybody’s time, and how Mrs. Thorn has checked herself into an anger management program. But Spindler wouldn’t let me run the story. He said it would be too embarrassing for Alicia and her family.”

“I heard she and Ted were moving back to Mankato with their dad.”

“They’re going to stay with Arnold Thorn till the end of the semester. The Thorns are getting divorced and selling Bloodwater House. I think maybe Driftwood Doug is right about that place. Maybe there really is a curse.”

“But how come they sent you down here?”

“I sneaked my article onto the school website. Didn’t you see it?”

Brian shook his head. “I’ve been working on a physics project.”

“Well, everybody else did. Spindler got pretty upset.” Roni glanced at Mrs. Washington, then leaned toward Brian and said in a quiet voice, “I think he’s going to have me tortured and killed.”

“Sounds unpleasant,” Brian whispered back.

“Yes, I was hoping for a simple execution. By guillotine, perhaps.”

For a few seconds Brian and Roni contemplated death by guillotine and listened to the buzz of the fluorescent lights, the hum of the computer and printer, and the rattle of Mrs. Washington’s fingers on the keyboard.

Roni said, “What about you?”

Brian shrugged. “I was making an electromagnet for physics class. Mr. Oppenheimer didn’t like that I tapped into the school’s emergency generator.”

“You really did that?” Roni said.

“It wasn’t that hard. I just hope when he disconnects it he knows enough to—”

All the lights in the school went out. For one entire second, there was silence—no buzzing lights, no humming computers, no rattling keyboard—then Mrs. Washington gasped. A muffled exclamation came from within Spindler’s office.

Brian said, “Oops.”