Snatched (2 page)

“Because.”

“Because why?”

“Because they don’t want anybody to mess up their investigation, that’s why.”

“Did you see who hit you?”

“No. It was dark. Look, I told you, I’m not supposed to talk to reporters.”

“Do the police have any suspects at all?”

Alicia stopped and turned on Roni. “You’re kind of pushy, aren’t you?”

“I’m a reporter,” said Roni. “It’s what I do.”

“Well, why don’t you do it someplace else. I gotta go. My mom’s here.” She pointed at the SUV parked at the curb. The woman behind the wheel looked like an older version of Alicia—thin, blond, stylish, and snooty. Even their hairstyles were the same.

Alicia’s mom leaned on her horn. Alicia turned away from Roni and started for the car.

“Wait . . .” Roni reached out and grabbed Alicia’s elbow.

“I said leave me ALONE!” Alicia whirled, swinging her backpack. Roni saw it coming, but not in time. The heavy pack hit her in the chest and knocked her backward. She landed hard on her butt.

“Hey!” Roni scrambled to her feet, her heart pounding. She felt herself losing control. Even as a little voice inside her said, Count to ten, girl, she was charging at Alicia, who was walking away as if nothing had happened.

Roni grabbed Alicia’s backpack, saying, “Wait a minute!”

Alicia turned and pushed Roni, but Roni didn’t let go of her backpack. They both toppled and fell to the ground. Alicia let out a shriek and kicked at Roni’s head, but this time Roni was ready for her—she ducked the kick and rolled on top of Alicia, pinning her arms to the sidewalk.

“I just wanted to ask you a couple of questions!” she shouted.

That was when Alicia really started yelling.

“Do you know what ‘zero tolerance’ means?” asked Mr. Spindler.

“I was just . . . ,” Roni said.

Spindler cut her off. “Wrong answer. Zero tolerance means that this school will not abide violence of any sort. It means that
any
fighting will be dealt with harshly.”

“Then you should deal with Alicia—she attacked me.”

“We will talk with Alicia—but don’t you think that poor girl has gone through enough in the past few days?”

“That’s why I had to talk to her. I was just asking her a few questions and all of a sudden she hits me with her backpack.”

“Roni, Roni, Roni,” said Mr. Spindler, shaking his head. “What are we going to do with you? Last time we had this problem you said it was because some boy called you names.”

“Justin Riverwood called me Thunderthighs. And I didn’t hit him, I just poured a Coke over his head.”

“And the time before that?”

“You mean the time Krista Rose stole my Walkman?”

“I mean the time you broke into Krista Rose’s locker with a crowbar.”

Roni shrugged. That was all ancient history. “The point is,” she said, “I was working on an official news story for the
Pump,
and I asked Alicia a couple of legitimate questions, and she hit me with her backpack. It’s a clear case of self-defense.”

“That is not what Alicia’s mother said, Roni.”

“Look, all I did was grab her backpack. Then she tries to kick me and starts hollering like some psycho killer’s got her. My ears are still ringing.”

“Yes, well, in any case, you were fighting on school property, and that’s a mandatory four-day suspension. We’ve called your mother to pick you up. Until then, you will wait outside in the office.”

“That’s not fair.”

“I didn’t say it was.”

“What about Alicia? Is she suspended, too?” Roni asked as she left the office.

Spindler didn’t bother to answer.

Brian Bain hated The Bench.

Spindler had left him sitting on that incredibly hard wooden bench outside his office for nearly half an hour. There wasn’t a lot to do on The Bench. Except listen to Mrs. Washington type on her computer. Or read the school newspaper, the
Bloodwater Pump.
It was all part of the punishment, Brian figured, which was completely not fair, on account of nothing had actually happened yet.

He flipped through the paper—all four pages of it. Football . . . boring. Debate Club . . . borrrring. Fund-raiser for girls’ hockey . . . BORRRRRRing. He turned to the back page to read the “Crime Corner,” a column by P. Q. Delicata. Sometimes that was pretty interesting. You never knew what sort of strange criminal activity P.Q. was going to report on next. Even when nothing much bad had happened, P.Q. knew how to make it sound interesting.

Brian liked the way P. Q. Delicata wrote. He was still reading when Spindler’s door opened and a girl came out and sat down next to him.

Spindler stuck his head out of his office, looked at Brian, and sighed. “Not you again, Bain!”

Brian smiled and shrugged.

Spindler put on his holy martyr face. Looking back and forth from Brian to the girl, he said, “What did I ever do to deserve you two?” When neither of them answered, he sighed and said, “I’ll deal with you in a few minutes, Mr. Bain. In the meantime, try not to blow anything up, okay?” He closed his door.

Oh well. Brian was in no hurry to get reamed out by Spindler. He looked at the girl sitting next to him. She was wearing a big, thick sweater and baggy jeans. Her hair was long and straight, and she sat kind of hunched over at the shoulders. She was older than Brian, probably in eleventh grade. A small silver ring decorated her left nostril. Her other nostril sported a medium-size zit, which she had tried to cover up with makeup. Except for the zit and the way she dressed, she wasn’t bad looking. He decided that she rated a seven on a scale of one to ten.

She had sat down right in the middle of the bench, about fifteen inches away from him. It was a long bench. She didn’t have to sit that close, as if she didn’t even know he was there. And she looked mad.
Really
mad, like her eardrums were about to pop.

Not wanting to be too close when her brain exploded, Brian scooted over a few inches.

That got her attention.

“What are you gawking at?” She looked at him as if he were a bug.

Brian looked straight back at her. One thing he had learned about older kids was that if you look right in their eyes, they respect you more. Either that or they hit you.

“Nothing,” he said.

“Good.” She turned her glare on the floor a few feet in front of her clunky black boots.

They sat without saying anything for about two minutes, which was a long time to sit on such a hard bench doing nothing. Brian decided to ask her a question.

“What are you in for?”

She didn’t lift her head to talk. Didn’t even turn her head. She kept staring at the floor.

“I’m an investigator,” she said. “I was doing my job.”

That sounded interesting. His mother was an investigator, too. Brian liked to think it ran in the family.

“What were you investigating?”

“The Camden case. Not that it’s any of your business.” She squinted at him. “Aren’t you a little young to be in high school?”

“I’m fourteen,” Brian said, adding a few months to his real age. “I got bumped up a grade.”

“Child prodigy, huh?”

“Not really. What’s the Camden case? Is that about the girl that got beat up?”

She nodded.

“My mom’s working on that one,” Brian said.

She looked at him. “Your mom?”

“Yeah. She’s a cop.”

“A real cop?”

“No. An imitation plastic cop.” He tensed up, bracing himself. After making a sarcastic comment, it was a good idea to be ready for anything.

But instead of being offended, the girl said, “I like the plastic kind. They’re very durable.” She paused, then asked, “Your mom is really working on the Camden case?”

“She’s the lead detective for the Bloodwater police.”

“Do they have any suspects?”

“I don’t know. She doesn’t talk about her work much. What sort of investigator are you, anyway?”

“I work for the
Pump.
”

“Wait a second . . . are
you
P. Q. Delicata?”

“Yeah,” she said. “But you can call me Roni.”

“I like your column,” he said.

For the first time, Brian saw her smile. She had a good one.

“Thanks,” she said. “What’s your name?”

Before Brian could answer, Spindler opened his door. “Okay, Mr. Bain. It’s your turn.” He went back to his desk, leaving the door open for Brian.

“He doesn’t seem to like you,” said Roni in a low voice. “What did you do?”

“Unauthorized use of the chem lab,” Brian said, standing up. “No big deal—except I got interrupted before I could finish my experiment.” He grimaced. “I just hope old Bismuth had the sense to turn off that Bunsen burner.”

Just then the office door flew open and Mrs. Bismuth, the chemistry teacher, staggered in, red-faced and pop-eyed. She slammed the door behind her and let out her breath in a long, ragged gasp, as if she’d been holding it for minutes. “It’s
horrible,
” she said, coughing.

“What? What’s wrong?” said Mrs. Washington.

“Horrible,”
was all Mrs. Bismuth could say.

Brian became aware of a faint, familiar, ferociously foul odor that quickly increased in intensity. They heard people running in the hall, and sounds of gagging, and then the door burst open again and several students ran in followed by a wave of stink so unutterably dreadful that even P. Q. Delicata could not have begun to describe it. The stench rolled over them like an invisible wave of rotten eggs, ancient sewage, and dead skunk.

Just then, Mrs. Bismuth spotted Brian. She pointed a shaking finger at him and said in a choked voice, “You! This is all your fault!”

Standing on the sidewalk outside the hospital wearing her mother’s oversize sunglasses, Alicia felt as if she were invisible. She could stand there for days and no one would notice her. Just another teenage girl.

During Alicia’s follow-up appointment in the hospital, Dr. Chao had been very kind. She had held Alicia’s face in her hands and gently touched the bruises.

“How scary it must have been,” Dr. Chao had said. “Why would someone do that?”

Alicia had felt like crying for the first time since the incident. She had wanted to tell this gentle woman with the dark-rimmed glasses all about her life, but she didn’t dare. Instead she had dropped her head and mumbled something about still not remembering what had happened.

“That isn’t unusual,” Dr. Chao had said. “Memories might come back to you. You’ll need to talk about it eventually.”

Alicia’s mom hadn’t come in with her. She had just dropped her off at the front door. She had errands to run. More important things to do. Dr. Chao hadn’t said anything, but she had seemed surprised when Alicia came in all by herself.

“Your bruises are healing nicely,” Dr. Chao had said, smiling. “I don’t think we’ll need to see you again, Alicia.”

All by herself. It didn’t used to be that way. When she had lived in Mankato—before her mother had divorced and remarried—she’d had friends. She’d had a real father. But here in Bloodwater everything was different.

And now her mom was twenty minutes late to pick her up.

Alicia looked around. Nobody cared. Two orderlies smoking cigarettes on a bus bench. An old man helping an old woman with a cane. A little kid in a wheelchair. Alicia stared down at her feet. Nobody even knew she was alive.

An SUV pulled over to the curb in front of her.

“Need a lift?”

Alicia raised her eyes and looked in at the driver.

Brian stood in the doorway of his father’s study. The room looked as if a tornado had hit it. That was normal. Books covered the floor, the chairs, the desk. The shiny top of his father’s balding head could be seen above the waves of books, but only because his father was very tall.

Bruce Bain was a not-famous author. He wrote strange, intelligent books that got great reviews, but that only a few strange, intelligent people read. His books had titles like
Bivalves of the Upper Mississippi,
and
Narcissistic Behavior in Flat-worms.
Recently, he had been working on something called
The Entomology of Bovine Pustules.

Brian had tried to read his father’s books. They made him feel as if his brain were crumbling.

But then, his father couldn’t even balance his own checkbook. Neither could his mother. Brian had been doing it for them since he was ten.

“Hey, Dad,” Brian said in a quiet voice. His father had been known to jump straight up out of his chair when startled.

This time he levitated only a few inches.

“Huh? What?” He peered over the mountain of books. “Ah! Brian. Home so soon? How are you, son?”