Hostage (6 page)

The nasal spray was clearing up my allergy problems, and my head was beginning to clear out as well.

Something strange was going on, and I couldn't imagine what it was.

I stepped to the door of Mom and Dad's bathroom and saw that the medicine cabinet door was open, and a couple of prescription bottles had fallen into one of the twin sinks. We didn't use much in the way of pills or remedies for small illnesses, so the rest of the stuff was still there: shaving cream, deodorant, shampoo, mousse.

I think it was right about then that the hairs started to stand up on the back of my neck. Somebody—not the family—had been in our house since we'd left that morning.

I turned back into my parents' bedroom,
looking for the phone. I'd call Mom. She was more likely to be where I could reach her immediately than Dad was. He had to be out and moving around the high school most of the time.

But there was no phone. It had been unplugged from the wall and taken away.

My heart began to beat more loudly, so I could hear it in my ears, and there was a strange, frightened feeling creeping over me like bugs on a dead squirrel.

Downstairs, I heard a door close. For a few seconds I didn't think I could breathe or move. I forgot I'd just had an allergy attack and that now I was supposed to go back to school. I forgot everything except that I was alone in the house with someone who had no right to be there.

I felt as if I couldn't catch my breath, and my chest hurt.

I listened, hearing nothing more in the house. There shouldn't have been any noises, because except for me the place was supposed to be empty. But I was sure I'd heard a door close downstairs. And the front door had been unlocked! How had that happened? An accident?

Maybe Mom had remembered leaving the door unlocked, or maybe she'd finished whatever she'd been in the middle of at the clinic and had come home to check on me, just in case. Maybe she had opened and closed a door.

But Mom would have called out for me immediately when she came in.

I stood there, frozen, beginning to ache with the effort of holding myself so still. And as my
gaze drifted around my parents' bedroom, I remembered the things that were missing: my lamp, Jeff's radio, Mom's jewelry box, and Dad's gold cufflinks.

I remembered the Andersons' house, where three men had stolen a whole lot of stuff and vanished with it before the police could get there. I remembered that one of them had hit Jeff over the head and knocked him out.

The hairs prickled on the top of my head.

I couldn't call the police. The telephone had been unplugged and carried away.

I finally sucked in a great gulp of air and made myself move, slowly and cautiously, toward a window looking out over Mrs. Banducci's house. For once she wasn't out there spraying water on the street as an excuse to see what the neighbors were doing.

Actually, there probably weren't any neighbors around this time of day. This was a new subdivision, with expensive houses that probably took two people working in every family to pay for them. Like ours. If I could have seen anyone, I'd have opened the window and yelled.

I felt cold, although it was ordinary early
fall weather, no hint of chill when I'd walked home from school.

What should I do?

There were two other phones in the house, one in the living room and one in the kitchen. Unless, of course, someone had unplugged those, too. They were my best chance to get help.

Maybe, since the thieves had obviously already been up here and taken the things that looked the most interesting, it would be safe just to wait here until they'd cleaned out what they wanted and left the house.

My aunt Jane had brought us all wristbands the last time she came to visit. They were different colors of leather—brown for Wally (appropriately dirt colored, Jeff had pointed out), black for Jeff, blue for me, and pink, of course, for Jodie. They had gold letters stamped on each of them—WWJD? The letters stood for “What Would Jesus Do?” and wearing them was supposed to remind you to reflect on your choices before it was too late.

It was easy enough to figure out what Jesus would do in most situations. The right thing, the kind thing, the loving thing.

But those choices didn't apply here.

The question was, what would Dad advise me to do? Call the police, if it were possible. But since it wasn't, unless I went downstairs and found a working phone, would he want me to hide up here until the housebreakers were gone?

The Andersons had lost a whole lot of stuff—a computer, TVs, the family silver—and so far they hadn't retrieved any of it. I didn't even know if all of our things were insured, except for Jeff's piano. I knew nobody had carried off the piano, at least not yet. I had noticed it when I looked at those mysterious boxes downstairs.

That didn't mean the strangers wouldn't come back and get it, even if it was hard to move, because it was very valuable. And thinking of valuable, I tried to recall if the new big-screen TV had still been in the corner of the living room.

I hadn't noticed. We hadn't had it very long. Would it be included on our old home owners' insurance, or would Dad have had to especially put it on the policy?

In spite of what Mom had said about how
economically feasible this new house was, I knew the family budget had been strained by our move. The money from the sale of the old place had provided the down payment and paid for the new living room set after they decided to put the old one in the family room. But they'd stretched things to cover the big TV and a few other things. Losing anything we owned would be a serious matter. I knew we didn't have the money to replace any of it.

So, what would Dad want me to do?

Suddenly, downstairs, there were voices. Men's voices.

I jumped away from the window, which offered me nothing in the way of help, and tried to think. My parents always told all of us that we were intelligent and capable. If that was the case, why had my brain gone numb? I eased out into the hallway so I could hear better.

“They sure got a million books in this place,” somebody muttered. “They're in just about every room. We gonna take any of those?”

“Nah. Books aren't worth anything. Get that set of candlesticks off the mantle. I think maybe they're silver.”

“We
gonna take that picture of the mountain?” one of the men asked clearly.

I knew the picture they were talking about. It was of Mount Baker, in northern Washington, where Mom and Dad had met years ago on a hiking trip. It had been Mom's first climb, and Dad had rescued her when she'd fallen into a snow-filled gully.

“It was love at first sight,” Dad had told us. “There she was, floundering around helplessly in a snowbank, with only a bright red knitted cap sticking out.”

“And he had enough muscle to pull me out, one-handed, and he shared a Thermos of hot coffee,” Mom always added when they told the story.

Mom had bought him the picture as a birthday present, and I knew he really liked it.

I felt a sudden rush of rage at the way these strangers had invaded our home and were helping themselves to our belongings.

How could I stop them, without access to a telephone?

Was there a way to get out of the house without being detected? I could run to a neighbor's
house to call the police before they got away. Well, Mrs. Banducci's house was undoubtedly the only one where there was anyone home, but she'd call in a minute, I was sure.

The trouble was, I was on the second floor, and the only stairway down would take me to where the thieves were. Dad had talked about getting one of those emergency ladders to hang out a window—in fact, he'd even ordered one, but it hadn't come yet. I was way too high up to risk jumping; I'd break bones for sure.

There was no roof to crawl out on, and the idea made me queasy, anyway. Jodie, with her dance training, wasn't afraid to balance on anything a couple of inches wide. Me, I was the family klutz. I could fall off a sidewalk.

I moved as silently as I could around to all the rooms on the top floor, checking to make sure I wasn't overlooking any means of escape. There was nothing, and in the meantime I was hearing voices from downstairs and the scrape of something heavy across a bare wood floor.

In the end I had to give up on getting out of the house from the second floor. I hesitated in
the upper hallway, out of sight of anyone from below, listening.

“Hey, look! In this cabinet here. You think this would be worth anything?”

“A chess set? I dunno. It's just wood, isn't it?”

“Yeah. But I think it's hand carved, and old. Maybe an antique.”

Grandpa's chess set, I thought, the outrage flooding through me anew. The one Dad's grandfather had made from some kind of rare wood, many years ago. It was one of my father's prized possessions. I remembered how upset he'd gotten when he'd come home one day and found Wally and one of his friends playing with it on the floor. It would be a lot worse if these thieves took it.

“It's probably one of a kind. Might be too easy to trace,” the deeper of the two voices answered. “Maybe we'd better forget that. What do you think about that piano, though?”

For a few seconds I didn't hear what they said next. I saw red as my vision blurred.

Not Jeff's piano! He'd be heartbroken if he lost his piano, even if it was insured! It would be like losing his child. No amount of money
could compensate for losing this one, no matter what replaced it.

I had to find a way to stop them.

“It's gonna be the devil to load,” the higher voice grumbled. “I don't care if it is worth thousands. And we'd have to be careful. Nobody's gonna pay big money for a piano if it's scratched, so we'd have to wrap it in blankets or something. . . .”

“Plenty of bedding upstairs. Let's take it. It could bring more than all the rest of it put together.”

“Let's quit yapping and get moving. We ain't got all day. Buddy'll be back with the truck in a few minutes, and who knows how long that nosy old biddy will be busy with her flooded garage? Let's go.”

Not with Jeff's piano, I thought. I'd have to sneak past them, somehow, and out the back door, maybe. I couldn't just hide up here until they went away. Not if they were stealing Dad's mountain picture and the piano. No amount of insurance would make up for their loss, not to Dad or Jeff.

There hadn't been a truck in sight to haul
things in when I'd entered the house. I was confused and frantic; I had to calm down enough to be logical, somehow.

They couldn't haul away anything like the piano unless they had a good-sized vehicle. I tried to remember what I'd heard them saying to each other. There had been a truck. Hadn't Mrs. Banducci said there was a delivery truck earlier? Yes, she'd wanted to know what we were having delivered, and I'd said I didn't know.

Of course they hadn't been delivering anything, except maybe those empty cardboard boxes. And then, for some reason, one of them had left with the truck. And . . . I dredged it up through my frightened memory. One of them had said, “Buddy'll be back with the truck in a few minutes.”

How long did I have? They'd mentioned Mrs. Banducci, too, I supposed. They'd called her a “nosy old biddy,” and who else could that be? Somehow they'd managed to flood her garage, and she was presumably next door cleaning up a mess, a project to keep her and her curiosity out of the way while they did what they'd come to do.

There was no time to waste. I had to get out of the house, run next door, and call 911, and then my dad, before it was too late. There was only one main street coming into Lofty Cedars Estates. If the police could get to the entrance to this subdivision, they could cut them off; there was no other way to escape.

Sometimes when I get overexcited, Dad will tell me, “Calm down, Kaci. Stand still and take a couple of deep breaths. It'll make your brain work better.”

I tried it. It felt like drawing in deep breaths was making a terrible cramp in my chest, but after a moment I had settled down to just mild tremors.

I edged closer to the top of the stairs. I could hear their voices—two of them, I decided, and hoped I was right—somewhere in the back of the house. Well, then, I'd run out the front door if I could get to it.

I started to creep down the stairs, glad they were carpeted, so I didn't make any noise. I was halfway down when I heard the engine as a truck pulled into the driveway.

For a few seconds I regressed into total panic.
Should I run back upstairs? Hide again? What?

“Hey, I think I hear Buddy.” The voice was almost below me, and I swallowed hard and dropped to my hands and knees so they wouldn't see me through the railing if they looked up. I had no choice but to retrace my steps, crawling as fast as I could.

“What took you so long?” the deeper voice said as the front door opened.

If the truck driver had looked up instead of straight ahead, he'd have seen me for sure. I reached the landing and went flat, praying hard that they wouldn't notice me. I remembered I was still wearing that bright red backpack and I squirmed forward on my stomach, working my way around the corner. I was sweating and I felt the trickle of moisture working its way down my face.

“I'm only ten minutes later than I said I'd be,” Buddy stated. “You guys get those boxes filled up so we can start moving them out of here. We ought to get out of this place before anybody comes home and catches us.”

“Except for the old witch next door, the whole neighborhood is empty.” That was the
one who thought the piano was too heavy to move. “I hope she didn't have sense enough to call a plumber.”

“I told you, I cut her phone wire. She can't call anybody. It's not likely she's got a cell phone, old broad like her.”

Cell phone. I swallowed hard. Dad and Mom had a cell phone they carried when they were out late at night, or other times when they thought they might need it. When it wasn't in use, it was left on the desk in the study.