Hunter Moran Hangs Out (5 page)

“Look out!”
Zack yells.

Conk!

Something hits me in the head.

I manage to hold on with one hand. “The kidnapper!”

Zack grabs my legs to steady me, the two of us diving backward.

“Hunter!” a voice calls. “Is that you?”

Fred begins to bark insanely.

I scramble back up and onto the platform. Steadman is crouched at one end, waving a thick branch around like a sword.

The branch that nearly knocked me unconscious.

Fred is at the other end, growling, showing his wicked-looking teeth. Steadman leans toward him, hand in the air.
“Yabaloo,”
he says fiercely.

Fred's mouth snaps shut.

Zack throws himself down on the cracker-thin edge of space that's left. “What's that about?”

“Fred doesn't know English,” Steadman says. “I'm teaching him a new language.
Yabaloo
means ‘Be quiet, for Pete's sake.' ”

Fred's eyes bulge with the effort to keep his snout closed. But you have to hand it to Steadman.
Yabaloo
works.

Zack hangs on to the inch of board that's holding him up. “What are you doing here?”

“Don't move too much,” Steadman says. “Whoever built this thing didn't do such a hot job.”

“Steadman, pay attention.” Zack has no patience left. “We've been searching all over the place for you.”

Steadman looks off into the distance. “Someone has to look out for the kidnapper.”

“How do you know about that?” Zack asks.

Foolish question. Steadman knows everything, and he's only five.

Steadman looks worried. “I think someone is ready to steal Joey.”

I don't even know who Joey is. But I'm feeling such relief over finding Steadman without a gag and blindfold that I'm willing to let Zack do the inquisition.

“All right,” Zack says. “Who's—”

Steadman doesn't let him finish. “You don't even know your new baby brother?”

Zack slaps his forehead. “What makes you think . . . ?” he begins, but Steadman isn't paying attention. He's feeding gummy bears to Fred. That's all the information we're going to get out of him.

So, holding on to a branch overhead to steady myself, I check out the whole of Newfield. I see Becca at the town round. She's racing along, heading straight for the bench donated by the town fathers.

“Go, girl!” I hear her yell to herself.

She raises one leg, and then the other . . .

She's up, but not over.

Her feet catch on the top of the bench, bending like noodles. She hangs there for a second, then disappears into the sticker bushes behind the bench.

Behind her, some kid, with a mop of dark hair and a pair of knees like cantaloupes on toothpick legs, tries the
same thing. We hear him yell as he lands headfirst in the sticker bushes with Becca.

I turn. Bradley the Bully, muscles bulging, is coming out of Vinny's Vegetables and Much More.

Wait a minute. I nudge Zack. “Someone's walking up the driveway of the used-to-be-empty house.”

“Get a look at that guy,” Steadman says. “Huge.”

I lean forward. The platform shakes. But the guy has disappeared inside the house.

Next to me, Steadman is pulling on a rope.

Where did that come from? Something's attached to it.

I lean out an inch.

It's a basket.

“Now what?” I ask.

“Simple,” Steadman replies, and yells,
“Vestibulia!”

Before our eyes, Fred clambers over us and into the basket.

“You don't think he climbed up here all by himself?” Steadman says, as if we're the five-year-olds.

Steadman lowers the basket. It's a good thing Fred weighs only four or five pounds. The basket bangs against the tree all the way down. Fred looks terrified.

“Ecobeko!”
Steadman yells down as Fred reaches the ground.

“That means two things,” Steadman says. “ ‘Good dog,' and ‘Don't move an inch until I get there.' ” With that, he climbs down out of the tower. We watch him carefully,
every step, until he and Fred reach the house and march inside.

Safe!

At that moment, there's a huge crash, almost like an explosion, that comes from the direction of the used-to-be-empty house.

“Something's going on over there,” Zack says. We climb down the swaying tree like a pair of monkeys heading for a banana festival and stop short at the end of the weedy driveway. The junk-o car is gone, which is a good sign for us.

Still, we try for an invisible look. We scrunch our heads into our necks, bending over to minimize ourselves as targets. Then we sidle up to the house. The shades are down to the sills; not a slit of light shows through.

We trot around the entire house; it's closed tight as a clam. Here's a criminal who doesn't want the world to know what he's doing. What
is
he doing, anyway? Blowing up his victims?

We spot the cellar stairs. That's probably where the action is.

We start down the worst steps anyone could imagine. Old leaves are gunked up in piles.

And is that . . .

“A mouse,” Zack says. “Dead as a doornail.”

We jump over the step, just missing the poor guy's tail.

There's no shade on the cellar window. We give each other a high five . . .

. . . and peer in.

It's dark as a tomb.

“That's where he keeps his victims,” Zack says. “No doubt about it.” He reaches out to try the doorknob.

“Don't even think about it,” I begin, but I never get to finish.

Yeow!

The kidnapper crouches over a table near the window. He has a saw in his hand, but we can't see what he's amputating.

His hair hangs down over his eyes, but you can still get a look at them. Blazing eyes like the ax killer in
He's After You
, Tuesday night, midnight, which we're not allowed to watch.

The napper looks up. “Hey!” he yells.

We don't answer. I'm paralyzed, my tongue glued to the top of my mouth.

And there's the explosion again. It's the junk-o car coming up the driveway.

We take off. We don't even worry about stepping on the mouse corpse. We keep going at a hundred miles an hour, around the car, across the street, and sink down in Fred's oasis, trying to catch our breath.

“That was a close one,” Zack says after a minute. “The
kidnapper was two inches away from us. No wonder he wants a million bucks ransom. The first thing he needs is a new car.”

I nod absently. “Was that a kid in the basement?”

Zack makes a Jell-O face. “A dangerous accomplice.”

So now it's two against two. I try not to think of how pathetic that is. Zack and I are like a pair of ants looking up at gigantic shoes coming down, ready to stamp us out.

We sit there thinking. “Maybe we'd better find out Yulefski's third clue,” I say. “We'll have to get our evidence all set before we go to the police.”

Zack nods, and we're off looking for Yulefski. She's not hard to find. She's curled up on her front steps, reading a book. It must weigh a thousand pounds.

“The clue?” Zack asks, wasting no time.

Sarah closes her book. “I almost saw the kidnapper's hand. Well, maybe a finger or two.”

“What about the rest? The face, for example?” I sound like
Great Detective Mysteries
, off the air now.

She waves her own hand impatiently. “I told you I was in the beef jerky aisle; the kidnapper was in cleavers.” The book slides out of her lap and lands on the step.
Make the Best of Your Beauty
.

Sheesh!

“The kidnapper dropped a cleaver or something,” she says. “I bent down. I could just see the edge before a hand snaked out and grabbed it.”

“That's it?” Zack says. He's furious.

She looks up at a squirrel darting around in a tree.

“Focus,” Zack says.

“There was something about the fingers.”

We lean forward. She leans back.

“Chopped off?” I ask.

“Giant sized?” Zack asks.

“Wearing a watch?” I add.

She holds up her book. “That's the thing. I can't remember.” She raises her shoulders. “I'm thinking about it. I'll let you know as soon as I . . .”

I can't believe it.

We don't wait to hear the rest. It's time to check out the ransom note.

We go back into the house, stopping to scoop up a lonely worm and drop it into the farm with its buddies. We drop in a handful of dirt, too. Worms are crazy about dirt. We pass Nana, who's stirring some kind of brownish pudding in a pot, and Steadman, who's asleep under the kitchen table.

Nana glances over her shoulder and smiles at us. “Your father called. Things are coming along. Maizie will be born soon.”

William stands behind her, painting the tabletop a violent shade of green. Wait until Pop sees it.

William squints over at Nana. His entire face is spattered with green polka dots. “It'll be a boy,” he says. “We'll name him Leonardo, after that artist.”

Sheesh.

Even Nana looks dazed.

Steadman's awake now. He follows us up the stairs and down the hall to our bedroom. “I'm teaching Fred to walk on two legs,” he says.

“Great,” Zack says absently.

“Hey,” a voice whispers as we pass Linny's room.

I see a long, skinny braid, almost like the mouse tail on the used-to-be-empty cellar steps. It snakes out from under her bed.

“Don't worry,” I tell her. “We're on the case.”

But we have no time for Linny. “Great hiding place,” Zack says, and we keep going.

As we reach the top step, there's a huge bang. We stop dead in our tracks. This time we know where it's coming from. We dive over to the window.

The beat-up car is pulling out of the weedy driveway, muffler dragging, sending up sparks as it zigzags down the street.

In back of us, Steadman yells something like
“Lumbacomba!”
Fred hauls himself up on his front two legs and takes a couple of steps.
“Notobado,”
Steadman says, and peels off into his bedroom.

Zack and I close our own door and sit against it. This is a moment for privacy. We can get down to business.

I turn my pockets inside out. A hundred bite-sized pieces of paper drift onto the floor. Most of them are covered with burned cheese. We'll have to put the whole thing together like a surgeon sewing on a head or a leg.

We fiddle with the papers, pushing them around on the floor, trying to make sense of them.

There's a capital
L: Linny
, of course. And more than one
S
. Could it be
Steadman
?

Sure.

But here's something else. Zack gets a whole sentence together. Almost, anyway.

WANT TO LOOK
. . .

“Like the son of Frankenstein,” Zack mumbles.

“Yes. Friday night, nine o'clock. Taking a lizard and turning it into . . .”

Zack and I stare at each other, horrified. Suppose the kidnapper wants to turn Linny into a lizard?

“If we got her back,” Zack says, “she'd have to live with the worms and eat paper and lettuce leaves.”

“Ridiculous,” Sister Appolonia would say.

Sister Appolonia! That reminds me: three books in three days! Three essays!

I squint up. “
Frog and Toad
changed my life. I am now interested in aquatic wildlife.”

Zack glances over at me. “You're in sixth grade, Hunter. Sixth!”

“We'll have to pick up some books at the library,” I say. “Skinny as possible.”

“Didn't we do that in the beginning of the summer?”

Right. Whatever happened to them? Mrs. Wu is going to have a fit; they'll be overdue about two months' worth.
And we don't even have enough life savings for the overdue fines.

There's no hope for it. We'll have to (a) find them or (b) face Mrs. Wu at the library for another pile. I'm wrung out just thinking about it.

I lean forward, looking at the rows of words Zack is arranging.

What pops up is the word
KILL
.

This is worse than kidnapping. Much worse.

But wait. Arrange some letters differently, and you get
cell
. . . And another few:
others
. “Others in the cellar?” I yell. A chill runs through me, even though it's about ninety-eight degrees in the bedroom.

“We have to get down into the cellar of the used-to-be-empty house,” Zack says. “Free those victims before . . .” He runs his finger across his throat.

I shake my head. I can barely go down into our own cellar with that maybe-alligator lumbering around in the dark.

“This is the perfect opportunity,” Zack says. “We know the kidnapper isn't there. He's just driven off in that piece of junk.”

“Suppose he comes back,” I begin.

Zack puts on an irritable face. “You heard the sound of that car. Don't you think we'll know when he pulls into the driveway?”

“And what about the accomplice?”

“Two against one,” Zack says.

We pass Linny's room again. I don't even see her braid. Then we head across the street to the empty house and maybe the end of us.

We go straight to the back of the used-to-be-empty house and peer down the cellar stairs. We know what we're doing now. We avoid the mouse corpse and peer in the window.

Yes, there's the table and the saw hanging next to it.

Zack turns the handle. The door swings open.

“That's trespassing,” I say. “We can't go all the way in.”

Zack nods. “It's kind of a surprise, though. If we can get in, why can't the victims get out?”

“They might be handcuffed,” I say. “Or foot-cuffed.”