“There it is,” said the sister.
As they approached the cruiser, Roni made out two words in script on the back of the boat:
Cap’n Arnold.
“That’s the one,” Roni said. It was obviously Arnold Thorn’s craft. What a story this would make.
Sister Louise asked, “How long do you think you’ll be? I have afternoon prayers in about twenty minutes.”
“I might be a while,” Roni said. She liked Sister Louise, but she didn’t want her looking over her shoulder as she investigated. “I’ll be okay on my own.”
“Are you sure? How about if I come back for you in an hour or so?”
“That would be great,” Roni said. “Thank you.”
She grabbed the small ladder attached to the back of the boat and climbed on board, then watched as Sister Louise rowed back toward shore. Standing alone on the swaying, creaking old boat, Roni suddenly felt very vulnerable.
Brian, ankle deep in bilgewater, looked around the cramped sleeping quarters. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for, but he quickly figured out where the weird smell was coming from—a big bunch of flowers rotting in a tipped-over vase. Faint voices drifted in from outside. He heard a thump, and the back of the boat sank a few inches. His heart began to pound. Someone had climbed aboard. But who? Arnold Thorn?
He tried to think. Worst-case scenario—it was the culprit returning to the scene of the crime. Worse-than-worst-case scenario—it was his mother.
He looked frantically around the small cabin. No place to hide. He flattened himself against the bulkhead. Maybe whoever it was would just glance into the cabin and not notice him.
The door to the cabin opened. Brian held his breath.
“Yoo-hoo!”
He knew that voice. He let his breath out quietly and grinned. Some crazy girl with a notebook and a phony nose ring was about to get the scare of her life.
“Any ghosts down there? Any dead bodies?”
It was all Brian could do not to laugh.
“Any rats? Any snakes? You better hide, ’cause here I come!”
He heard her footsteps, then saw her black sneakers and blue tights and suddenly realized that the oddly dressed girl on the pink bicycle had been Roni. Again, he had to fight down laughter.
He waited until one millisecond before she would have seen him, then shouted, “Rat snakes!”
It was better than he could have imagined.
Roni let out an eardrum-shattering squeal. Her feet flew out from under her and she skidded down the last two steps, landing on her butt in the bilgewater.
A laugh burst out of Brian, but when he saw the look on Roni’s face he clamped his hand over his mouth. He hadn’t taken two things into account.
Number one, Roni was quick to recover.
Number two, Roni was quick to anger.
Brian backed up as fast and as far as he could in the cramped cabin. Roni came after him like an angry mother cat.
“Wait! It’s just me!” But Roni already had him by the shoulders and was bouncing him off the wall.
“I”—
thud
—“know”—
thud
—“it’s”—
thud
—“you!”
Suddenly she stopped shoving him. Brian stared at her face. It was not a nice face at all. Gasping for breath, with her hair all wet and straggly and the black leather jacket and tights and the ferocious scowl, she looked like a crazy killer bimbo from some ultraviolent comic book. He hoped she wouldn’t start hitting him. In a situation like this there was only one thing to do.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
45
rotting roses
“Are you mad because you didn’t get here first?” Brian asked.
Roni gave him the meanest look she could muster. He
so
didn’t get it. She said, “No, Stink Bomb, I’m mad at you because you’re an immature jerkball.”
They were on the upper deck, sitting on opposite sides of the boat, trying to dry off. Roni had hung her leather jacket over the starboard running light. Brian took off his mud-filled shoes and rinsed them in the river.
“I said I was sorry.”
“I don’t like being scared like that.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t like getting shoved around. Especially by a girl.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing.”
Roni decided to ignore the little twerp. About thirty seconds passed. It was a long time for Roni to go without talking, but she was really, really mad.
“Anyway,” said Brian, “we found it.”
Roni shrugged. She
was
a bit miffed that Brian had beat her to it. First he beats her to Alicia, now this. Not that a few minutes’ difference mattered. They were partners. Or they used to be, before the stupid freshman pulled his “rat snakes” bit. She shuddered.
“What do we do now?” Brian asked. “Call the police? Call the FBI? Call the Army Reserve? Call waiting?”
Roni tried and failed to control the smirk that jumped to her lips, but she quickly squelched it and continued to ignore him. After a few seconds Brian got up and went back down to the sleeping cabin.
“I think we might have contaminated a crime scene,” he shouted up from the doorway.
Roni couldn’t resist. “And whose fault was that?”
Brian was looking carefully at the door. “The door’s been kicked open.”
“Well, duh!”
“Did you notice that smell? It’s coming from a bunch of rotten flowers in a vase.”
“Flowers?” Roni was still mad at him, but this was business. She went to the top of the steps and looked down. Brian picked something up and held it up to her. The blossom was a soggy mess, but the thorny stem was enough to identify it as a rose.
“I wonder if this was from Maurice,” Brian said.
Roni knew she should go down and have a look around, but she was still too freaked out by the thought of rats and snakes. Especially the rats. She had this thing about naked-tailed rodents.
“Did you find anything else?”
“No. Wait, there’s something jammed under the bed. Got it!” Brian handed up a soggy green bundle. Roni dragged it out into the light. She recognized it right away. Just forty-eight hours earlier Alicia Camden had whacked her with this very same lime green designer backpack.
“Think we should open it?” Brian asked.
“Probably not.” Roni unzipped the pack. “Contamination of evidence and all.” She dumped the contents onto the deck.
“Good technique,” Brian said, watching Roni paw through Alicia’s possessions. Three tubes of lipstick with names like Tawny Puce, Orange Crush, and Deadly Red. Hair accessories of every sort: clips, scrunchies, barrettes. A comb and a brush. A few schoolbooks, a
Cosmopolitan
magazine, and a copy of the
Bloodwater Pump.
Everything was soaked.
Roni unzipped one of the side pockets and pulled out a small notebook, also wet and swollen. It looked like a kind of diary or daybook. Roni carefully peeled apart the sodden pages. Unfortunately, Alicia had used a purple felt-tip pen for most of her entries. Much of the writing was too smeared and blurry to read, but a few entries written in black ink had survived.
“Listen to this,” Roni said.
“Breakfast: One half grapefruit, three tablespoons yogurt, one cup herbal tea.
Sounds like a recipe for starvation. No wonder she’s so skinny.”
“See if you can read her last entries,” Brian suggested.
“I’m trying.” The wet pages were hard to separate without tearing them. “Here we go . . . this looks like last Friday.” Roni looked at Brian. “That was the day she got beat up. It says,
Seeing Maurice tonight. We are getting so close. He brought me roses yesterday—a whole dozen! I just wish he wasn’t so jealous. Sometimes I’m afraid. He threatened to . . .”
Roni looked up. “I can’t read the rest of it.” She looked down into the cabin where the vase of rotting roses lay. “Maybe it was Maurice after all.”
“Yeah, but Mr. Thorn attacked you,” Brian reminded her. “And this is his boat.”
“He didn’t actually
attack
me,” Roni said. “He just sort of grabbed me. He wanted to see what I was writing in my notebook.”
“He pushed you into the pool,” Brian reminded her.
“Well . . . actually, I was sort of falling anyway, and he grabbed me, and then I kicked him and fell in.”
“You mean . . . I almost killed him and he wasn’t doing anything wrong?”
“I’m not sure. He might have been about to do something.”
“Don’t forget that Driftwood Doug saw Mr. Thorn standing over Alicia that night.”
“Yes, but he also said he saw a tall man running away through the woods. That could have been Maurice.”
Brian nodded. “What else does it say? Turn the page.”
Roni peeled back the next wet page. There was one more entry.
“It says,
I hate him I hate him I hate him I hate him!
”
“Is she talking about Maurice or her stepdad?”
“Who knows? For all we know she was talking about Mickey Mouse.”
“Nobody hates Mickey Mouse,” Brian said.
“I do.”
Brian gave her a shocked look.
“He’s a
rodent,
” Roni said.
46
the three dwarfs
Riding in a boat was much nicer than wading through muddy water, Brian decided. Sister Louise tied the boat to the dock below the convent as Roni and Brian hopped out.
“Thanks, Sister,” said Roni.
“Yeah, thanks a lot,” said Brian.
“You are both welcome. I can give you a ride back to town, but not until Sister Mary brings the van back. It might be a couple of hours.”
“That’s okay,” said Roni. “We’ll walk.”
Brian did not like hearing that. He was exhausted and wet, his arms were covered with scratches, and his shoes made grunting sounds with every soggy step. He felt like he was carrying ten gallons of water in his clothes. Jeans could suck up several times their weight in water. That would be an interesting experiment. He’d have to try it sometime.
“Now what?” he asked as they reached the highway. He looked at Roni. She wasn’t looking her best. He had to laugh.
“What’s so funny?” she asked.
“You look like the three dwarfs.”
She gave him that look—the one she had given him on the bench outside of Spindler’s office, like she couldn’t decide whether to laugh or punch him in the nose. “Okay, I’ll bite. What are you talking about?”
“The three dwarfs,” Brian said. “Soggy, Muddy, and Droopy.”
“Very funny.”
“I do my best.”
“Okay, smart guy, where do you think we go from here?”
“Home. Get into some dry clothes.”
Roni was giving him the look again.
“What?” he said.
“Don’t you want to know what really happened to Alicia?”
“Sure, but, I mean . . . look at us! Soggy, Muddy, Droopy, and Soaked. Not to mention Hungry.”
“That’s not important. We have to talk to Maurice. He should be home from school by now.”
“Why Maurice?”
“He’s the one who gave her the roses.”
Brian frowned. “I think we should try to see Alicia. She’s the one with the answers.”
“We’d never get past her mother.”
“We could send a note in with Ted. Tell her we found her backpack. That might get her to talk to us.”
“That’s a good idea . . .” Roni started walking, trailing her jacket and Alicia’s backpack. “But my idea’s better. I say we start with Maurice. You coming or not?”
“Okay, but how do we get there?”
Roni stuck out her thumb.
The pickup truck was an old, faded-red Ford. The doors were painted with the words KATO SIGN CO. and a phone number. A man with tousled reddish hair rolled down the window and looked them over.
“Need a lift?” he asked.
“We’re going into Bloodwater,” Roni said.
“You willing to get in a truck with a stranger?”
“My mom’s a cop,” Brian said. He figured it couldn’t hurt to let the guy know.
The man laughed. “Hop in then.”
Roni and Brian climbed into the back of the truck.
“You can sit up front,” the guy said, sticking his head out the window and looking back at them.
“No, we’re too grungy.”
“Don’t matter to this old mule.”
“That’s okay,” Roni said. “We like riding in back.”
“Suit yourself.”
He put the truck in gear and pulled back onto the highway. Wind whistled through their clothes. They were wet and cold. Empty paint cans rattled around the truckbed.
“I’m freezing,” Brian said through clenched teeth.
“Yeah,” Roni said.
“I promised my mom I would never, ever hitchhike.”
“Me, too,” Roni said.
“I wrecked my shoes.”
Roni looked down at his shoes. They did indeed look wrecked.
“Whose idea was this anyway?” Brian asked.
Roni didn’t say anything. She looked down at her clothes. They were drying out a bit, but she was not exactly presentable. She didn’t really want to see Maurice like this. A girl’s got her pride, even in front of a possible kidnapper. But she didn’t want to wait, either. They were so close to solving the mystery she could taste it.
The pickup truck driver dropped them off in downtown Bloodwater.
“I’ve got two kids about your age,” he told them. “If I ever caught them hitchhiking, I’d have something to say about it. Well, you be good now.” The guy waved as he pulled away.
Roni walked up to the windows of the Hallmark store and tried to get a glimpse of herself. Her hair was mostly dry, her jacket covered most of her wet clothes, and, after she pulled up her bagging tights, she didn’t look so bad.
“You’re a doll,” Brian told her, standing next to her, looking like a twit. “A rag doll.” He laughed.
“Hey,” he said as she walked away. Roni resolved to not talk to him all the way to Maurice’s house.