Snyder, Zilpha Keatley (6 page)

Prisoners of Fear

shall! Melanie!” There was something about the tone of her voice that made Melanic’s eyes widen with fear.

“Something’s wrong,” she said.

“It’s too early,” April nodded. “She never gets home this early.”

They scrambled through the hole in the fence and, dragging Marshall to hurry him up, they dashed for the main alley behind the Casa Rosada. From there they could safely answer without giving the location of Egypt away.

Mrs. Ross met them near the back door of the apartment house. Even though they all clamored to know what was the matter, she only shook her head and said, “There’s been some trouble in the neighborhood. April, you and Elizabeth come up to our apartment until your folks get home.”

Of course they were all terribly curious, but Mrs. Ross wouldn’t say any more. “We’ll wait to discuss it until we have the facts,” she said. “What I know right now amounts only to rumors. There may not be any truth in the story at all.”

It occurred to all of them, though, that the rumors had been frightening enough to make Mrs. Ross cancel her after-school remedial reading class-which she almost never did-and come home early. And Melanie noticed a strangeness in her voice and that her hand shook as she put milk and cookies on the table. It had to be something serious.

By the next day it was common knowledge. A little girl who lived in the neighborhood had been killed. She hadn’t gone to Wilson School, so April and Melanie had barely known her, but her home was only a few blocks away from the Casa Rosada. Like all children in the neighborhood, and in all neighborhoods for that matter, she had been warned about strangers-but she must have forgotten. She had been on her way to the drugstore-the very one where April had purchased her eyelashes-in the early evening, and she had never returned. The next day her body had been found in the marshland near the bay.

It was a terrible and shocking thing. But there was something else, another circumstance, that made it even more terrifying and threatening to the parents of the neighborhood. It had happened before. Almost a year before a little boy from the same area had disappeared in almost the same way; and the police were saying that it looked as if the guilty person were a resident of the neighborhood.

As the days passed and no arrests were made, fear and suspicion grew and spread in all directions; and a great silence began to settle over Orchard Avenue and the streets and alleys on either side.

Twice a day a few children could be seen walking to and from school, but they went quickly and in larger groups than usual; and many other parents arranged car pools, even for children who had only a

few blocks to walk. Afternoons and weekends, which usually rang with a medley of shouts and laughter and pounding feet, dragged by in a strange, uneasy silence broken only, by the dull hum of traffic.

But although fear made a great silence out-of-doors, inside the homes and stores and apartments it had a different sound-it talked and it talked and it talked. For the boys and girls, talking was about all there was left to do, since nobody was being allowed to play outside. Lying across a bed, or sitting on one of the Casa Rosada’s little iron balconies, April and Melanie talked it over many times. Most of their special information, besides what they read in the papers, came from Mrs. Ross by way of Melanie. Caroline didn’t seem to know how to talk about important or shocking things, and April wouldn’t have asked her.

“I wonder why anyone would do an awful thing like that?” April asked one day while she and Melanie were sitting on the floor in Melanie’s bedroom, looking through old magazines for new people for the paper-families game. “On TV and in the movies when somebody gets killed it’s usually because of money, or else revenge. But little kids don’t have that much money and there’s all sort of ways to get revenge on kids without doing a thing like that.”

Melanie looked at April curiously. She’d noticed before that April, in spite of her sophisticated ways, really didn’t know much at all about certain kinds of

things. The kind of things parents tell their children when they’re alone together and other kids tell you if they know you really well. All April’s information seemed to be the kind of things grownups let you overhear, and of course, nearly everything she could find in the children’s part of libraries.

“They do it because they’re sick,” Melanie answered. “That’s what my mom says. It’s a sickness of the mind. They can’t help themselves so there’s no use hating them, but they just have to be caught and shut up or they’ll probably do it again.”

“But why can’t they catch him, if he’s crazy? It seems to me a crazy person wouldn’t be hard to catch.”

“It’s not like that,” Melanie said. “My mom says some people who are crazy are only crazy at times, or in certain ways. Most of the time they seem just like anybody. My mom says that’s why kids have to be careful about all strangers, no matter if they seem as nice as anything.”

“Yeah,” April said. “I guess that’s right. You can usually tell about people if you watch them hard, but I guess you can’t always. Hey, look. Here’s a mother who’s just right for the haunted house family. Isn’t she weird?”

It wasn’t only the boys and girls of Orchard Avenue who talked and talked. The grownups did, too. Everybody had theories and opinions, and everybody

had heard rumors they were eager to repeat. There was one rumor that was particularly persistent and particularly troublesome to the members of . It had to do with the Professor.

Someone had seen two policemen going into the Professor’s store on the morning after the little girl had disappeared. It looked as if he must be a suspect, at least. No one knew that the Professor was guilty; but at the same time, no one knew anything about him that would make them believe he was innocent. There were other people in the neighborhood who were noted for their bad tempers or downright meanness, but their actions were predictable. For instance, you knew that Mrs. Harkness would call the police if you stepped on her lawn, and that at Schmitt’s Variety Store you’d get cheated out of small change if you weren’t careful. But how could anyone know what a person like the Professor would do. Of course, he hadn’t been arrested yet, but that might only mean that the police hadn’t found the proof.

Only the Egypt gang maintained that the Professor was innocent. April said she was sure of it because of a feeling she had. As just about the only kid in the neighborhood who’d actually talked to the Professor, she felt she was entitled to have feelings about what he might do. Melanie and Elizabeth thought the Professor was innocent because April did. And, without really admitting it even to themselves, all

three of them kept thinking he must be innocent because if lie were guilty was ruined forever. Nobody plays games in the backyard of a murderer.

But apparently there were other people who were just as firmly convinced of the old man’s guilt. Three days after the murder someone threw a brick through one of his store’s show windows, and Mr. Schmitt organized a not-so-sccrct campaign to get people to write letters and sign petitions inviting the Professor to leave the neighborhood. The fact that the Professor sold old and cheap some of the things that Mr. Schmitt sold new and expensive was worth thinking about; but it really didn’t prove anything one way or the other.

Without the days were very slow for the four Egyptians. Once or twice they tried to play the Game indoors, before the grownups were at home of course; but it wasn’t the same at all. In fact, it was such a disappointment that it was frightening. What if the magic was gone forever? But probably it was only that carpets and couches and curtains just didn’t make the right atmosphere for a game about hidden splendors and giant mysteries, in a land of mud and sand. Anyway, they decided instead to spend their time making some things they could use when they finally could return to Egypt.

Elizabeth, who was very clever and artistic with

her hands, started the costume idea by making herself a Nefertiti headdress out of a plastic bleach bottle with the top cut off. Next, Melanie got some old curtains from her mother, enough to make sheer flowing robes for everyone. The sheer robes were to be worn over short tunics made of pillowcases.

It was April who got the idea of going around the apartment house and asking all the ladies if they had any old junk jewelry that they were willing to sell. Just as she predicted, most people gave them stuff and refused to take any money, which was just as well, since they only had nineteen cents between them. Some of the jewelry they took apart and glued or sewed onto their robes for decoration; but some of the necklaces and bracelets that looked a little bit Egyptian, they used just as they were.

Their most successful creation was Marshall’s costume. One day when they were all working in the Ross’s apartment, Marshall got out his indoor bowling game. The ball and tenpins were made of a light plastic, so as not to dent up the furniture. April was watching him set up the pins and suddenly got a brilliant idea. She went upstairs, got one of her Egypt books, and showed the rest of them that the tenpins were shaped exactly like the inner part of the. double crown of Egypt. The outer part could be made of another bleach bottle. Melanie wasn’t sure they ought to use up one of Marshall’s tenpins; but April

pointed out that there was nothing wrong with the game of ninepins And, anyway, they were Marshall’s and he was all for it when he found out the crown was to be for him When it was all put together and painted, with a cardboard vulture’s head and cobra glued to the front, it looked so impressive they could hardly believe they’d made it themselves

With no place to work but their own rooms, it wasn’t long, of course, until their families knew the girls were making Egyptian costumes But fortunately

a simple and logical explanation was handy. Halloween wasn’t far away and making costumes was a perfectly natural thing to be doing.

As the days went by, the headlines about the terrible thing that had happened near Orchard Avenue, got smaller and smaller. The paper said the police were “following up leads” and “investigating clues”, but no arrests were made and gradually people stopped talking about it so much. The Professor still stubbornly opened his store every day, but now he had almost no local trade. The few people who had gone in now and then to look over his used merchandise department were staying away, and only an occasional out-of-town antique buyer was seen entering his store. People wondered how he managed to stay in business, and they wondered if he were really guilty, and they wondered … But wondering takes time, and most of the people of the neighborhood were hard-working people, and so they gradually began to forget. And very gradually the children began to play out-of-doors again. But the Rosses and Mrs. Chung were frustratingly careful parents, and it looked as if they were going to be the very last ones to stop worrying. Of course, Caroline Hall hadn’t given April permission to play outside either; but she didn’t get home until 5: 30, and April just might have been willing to do a little private forgetting on

her own if she’d had anyone to keep her company. But since Elizabeth and Melanie were stuck inside, April figured she might as well be, too.

The waiting was particularly hard on April because, without to think about, it was more difficult to keep from thinking about other things. At first it was the empty mailbox to try not to think about-not a single letter from Dorothea for over a month. And then at last there was a letter-and even more to worry about. Dorothea was back in Hollywood. She must have gotten all of April’s letters, but she didn’t even mention the question that April asked in every one. Dorothea wrote about her tour, and about her new job in a night club, and about Nick; but she said nothing at all about April’s coming home.

As the days dragged by, the Egypt gang grew more and more impatient. They knew that Egypt was waiting for them just as they had left it because several times they had been able to stop by on their way to school. They had had time to notice things-important things-like the fact that the Crocodile Stone seemed to have moved a tiny bit, a sure sign of its sinister power, and that the flowers on the altar of Nefertiti stayed fresh much longer than you’d expect, as if in tribute to her beauty. But there was no time for a real game because Mrs. Ross had

arranged for a neighbor lady who didn’t work to make sure they arrived home safely and on time.

So the days passed and the Egyptian clothing grew fancier and all sorts of new plans were made for the time when they could return to Egypt.

Summoned by the Mighty Ones

RIGHT UP UNTIL A FEW DAYS BEFORE THE END OF the month it really looked as if Halloween was going to be completely wasted. Of course, there was going to be a program at school and kids who wanted to could wear their costumes to afternoon classes, but only little primary kids got very excited about that. The real fun of Halloween, Trick-or-Treating and being allowed to tear around out-of-doors late at night, was absolutely out. At least that was what all the parents in the neighborhood were saying all month long. Unless, of course, the murderer had been caught by then. But as day after day went by with nothing new in the papers, there seemed little hope of that. And then, with only three more days to go, suddenly there was good news.

At a P.T.A. meeting at Wilson school, a couple of

really red-blooded mothers stood up and volunteered their husbands to take large groups of Trick-or-Treaters around the neighborhood. Before long some other fathers got shamed or nagged into doing the same thing, and by the day before Halloween nearly all the kids at Wilson were signed up to go around Trick-or-Treating with some large, chaperoned group.

Mr. Barkley and Mr. Kamata were going to be the chaperones for all the kids who lived in the Casa Rosada and the rest of the eight hundred block of Orchard Avenue. Mr. Barkley was the father of some six-year-old twins who lived on the first floor of the Casa Rosada, and Mr. Kamata was from Kamata’s Realty, just across the street and the father of Ken Kamata who was in April’s and Melanie’s class at Wilson. April had it figured out that there were at least twenty-five kids who would be going with Mr. Barkley and Mr. Kamata, and that was a lot of kids to keep track of, particularly in the dark. Which opened the way for a fascinating and frightening scheme.