The Boys Start the War (9 page)

The boys sprinted back down the driveway, watching the house over their shoulders. Wally faced forward again to see a baseball cap coming toward them, but there was no time to prevent a collision.

Wham! Crunch!

“Going somewhere?” came Eddie’s voice.

“Yikes!” hollered Wally as a hand grabbed his shirt. He had never known that a tall, skinny girl could be so strong. She seemed to have Josh by the collar as well, dragging them both back toward the house. Wally wrestled free, but collided again, this time with Jake, and then he tripped over Peter. In
the dark it was hard to see which arm belonged to whom.

“What are you guys up to anyway?” asked Eddie, but the boys got away and ran pell-mell to the bridge.

“You got the flashlight?” Jake asked Wally breathlessly.

“Heck, no. You were carrying it.”

“I thought you grabbed it,” Josh said. “Someone did!”

But that someone was already inside the house.

C
aroline was standing in the bathroom, practicing expressions in the mirror. She had actually been studying her eyebrows to see what they did when she went from sad to frightened, from scared to angry, and it was then she heard the scream.

Thinking her sister was being strangled, Caroline rushed into the room across the hall to find Beth on the floor, her chair overturned, eyes huge.

“What
is
it?” Caroline cried.

“Oh, Caroline, the most horrible thing right outside my window!”

“Girls, what’s going on?” asked their father, hurrying in. Mother followed.

“Dad, there was something right outside my window!” Beth cried, still shaken.

“What was it?”

“A bobbing head. A floating face! It was green
with gray eyes, and … oh, it was awful! All decayed, with drool coming out of its mouth, and …”

Father reached down and picked up the book Beth had been reading:
The Creeping Dead.

“Don’t you think it’s time you read something else for a change?”

“I only had half a chapter to go, and I just had to know how it ended,” Beth said. “But what I saw wasn’t my imagination; it was real!”

Caroline and her mother went to the window.

“Well, I don’t see a thing,” said Mrs. Malloy. “Eddie went next door to take back the eggs I borrowed. I’ll bet it was her.”

“It wasn’t Eddie!” Beth declared.

“I’ll go check,” said Father.

He started down the stairs, the others behind him, just as Eddie came up.

“What’s happening?” she asked.

“You missed a floating face,” Caroline told her diyly. “Dad’s going out to check.”

“Don’t bother,” Eddie said. “Guess who I just bumped into? Crashed into, actually, they were in such a hurry to get away.”

“Them?” cried Beth.

Eddie nodded.

“Who?” said Mother. “Those Hatford boys?”

“The very same,” said Eddie. “There’s a ladder up against the house, right under Beth’s window.”

“What now!” Mother exclaimed. “Those guys must drive their mother nuts.”

Coach Malloy, however, was grinning. “That’s the kind of thing you get when you have boys, Jean. Now, don’t you go telling on them. They helped wash our windows, didn’t they?”

Caroline waited as her parents went back downstairs, then she and Eddie went inside Beth’s bedroom and shut the door.

“Those guys are terrible!” Beth said angrily.

“It could have been worse,” said Caroline. “You could have been naked.” Frankly, it had been a wonderful trick, Caroline decided, and she only wished that she had thought of it first to play on the boys.

“We’ve got to get even!” Beth declared, “We’ve just
got
to, Eddie!”

Eddie only smiled. “We already have. I’ve got their flashlight. A
good
flashlight too. I’ll bet it belongs to their dad. They won’t get it back unless they give us something in return.”

“What?” asked Caroline.

“I haven’t decided yet,” said Eddie. “But believe me, they’ll have to crawl!”

It would make such a marvelous story, Caroline thought. Sort of like Cinderella, only with the shoe on the other foot. This time
they
had the glass slipper, and whoever it belonged to had to come beg for it.

On their way to school the next day Beth and Eddie showed Caroline the ransom note they had written to the Hatfords:

To whom it may concern:

If you ever hope to see your flashlight; again, you will meet us at the swinging bridge at 7:30 this evening, and you will each say aloud, “I am, honestly and truly sorry for the trouble I have caused, and will be a faithful, obedient servant of the realm, now and forever.”

The Malloy Musketeers

“Servant of the realm?” Caroline asked. “What does that mean?”

“I don’t know,” said Beth, “but I read it in a book, and it sounded wonderful.”

“It
is
wonderful!” said Caroline. “We could go walking down the path tonight single file, dressed like Egyptian princesses or something, and make them kneel down on one knee when they said it.”

“Not me,” said Eddie. “I’m not going as any princess.”

“The boys would never do that,” said Beth. “Getting them to say they’re sorry is going to be hard enough.”

“Who gets the note?” Caroline wanted to know.

“You’re going to give it to Wally. If we gave it to
Jake or Josh, they wouldn’t even read it—probably just make a spitball out of it.” Eddie said.

Caroline could hardly wait to get to class. When the bell rang and she went in her room, however, Wally wouldn’t even look at her, which told her just how upset the boys were that they had lost their father’s flashlight.

She decided to wait until Miss Applebaum finished talking before she dropped the note over Wally’s shoulder. But Miss Applebaum wouldn’t shut up. She was talking about the invention of the telegraph or something, which did not interest Caroline in the least. Caroline rested her head on one hand and drew a picture of Miss Applebaum in her notebook.

The more the teacher droned on, the wilder the drawing became. She gave Miss Applebaum a monstrous mouth, with fire coming out of it. She gave her horns and a tail and scales like a dragon. The dragon lady even looked like Miss Applebaum—had the same kind of hair and the same kind of glasses. Clickety, clackety went the teacher’s mouth, like a telegraph of its own.

Walty raised one hand to go to the bathroom and Miss Applebaum nodded that he could go.

Now
, thought Caroline, while he was out of the room. She waited until Miss Applebaum was looking the other way, then quickly leaned forward and dropped the note onto Wally’s desk.

When Wally came back, Miss Applebaum was
still carrying on, and Caroline was busily drawing claws on the teacher’s hands and feet.

She saw Wally’s head bend down over the desk as though he were looking at something, saw his arms move slightly as though he were unfolding a piece of paper, and then she watched as his ears turned from pink to red.

A few minutes later a small piece of paper came flying over Wally’s shoulder and landed on her notebook. Caroline opened it.

Malloy Musketeers
, it said.
Drop dead.

The telegraph led to the telephone and the phonograph, and Caroline felt that she could not stand it another minute. This time
she
raised her hand to be allowed to go to the rest room, and when the teacher nodded, she tiptoed out. Once in the hallway she gave a big sigh of relief.

The girls’ rest room was on the other side of the auditorium, and Caroline did a risky thing. Instead of going around she opened one of the great doors to the darkened room, took the four steps up on stage, and walked out to the middle, staring up at the rows of seats before her. Goose bumps rose on her arms.

Someday, she was sure, she would be here, with lights shining down on her, in a gorgeous costume, and she would dazzle the people of Buckman as they’d never been dazzled before. She walked to the very edge of the stage and whispered to the audience, “A faithful and obedient servant of the
realm, now and forever.” It sounded wonderfully mysterious and romantic. That done, she crossed over, went down the steps, and out the door on the other side.

All heads were bent over desks when Caroline came back into the room, and as she went down the aisle to her seat, Miss Applebaum said, “We are all writing a paragraph about what we think is the world’s greatest invention, Caroline.”

Thank goodness the lecture was over, Caroline thought, and reached for her pencil

When she looked down at her notebook, however, she realized that the picture of Miss Applebaum was gone. There were little bits of paper around the three metal rings, as though a paper had been quickly snatched away. Her heart leapt. She stared up at the teacher, wondering if Miss Applebaum had come by and taken it.

But the teacher seemed completely undisturbed. Caroline stared at the back of Wally’s head.
He
had taken it! He
must
have. When he came back from the rest room and walked by her desk, he must have seen what she was drawing. And somehow, when she was out of the room herself, he had managed to turn around and take the drawing.

When the papers were collected fifteen minutes later, Caroline was not even sure what she had written. And on the way out the door to recess, she poked Wally in the back. “You give me my paper or else,” she said angrily.

Wally just smiled. “Meet me at the swinging bridge at seven-thirty this evening, and crawl down the path on your hands and knees,” he said, and headed for the door.

Caroline was beside herself. This was blackmail! Beth and Eddie would never forgive her for doing something so stupid.

It was a horrible day, and as soon as school was out, Caroline charged out the door like a hornet and told Eddie and Beth what had happened. The Hatford boys had already headed for home, and were looking at the girls over their shoulders, laughing and hooting as they went.

When Caroline and her sisters reached the swinging bridge, Caroline was too angry to go home. Too angry to speak, almost. She stood glaring after the Hatford boys as they went up on the porch of their house and slammed the door. And then she saw something else: clothes drying on the clothesline in back of their house.

“Wait here,” she told Beth and Eddie.

She marched right up on the Hatfords’ lawn. Without looking to the right or left she stalked around to the back, grabbed a pair of Jockey shorts off the clothesline, then ran for her life as the boys came out on the porch and stared.

Waving the Jockey shorts high in the air, she tore across the swinging bridge, Beth and Eddie behind her, and didn’t stop until they were safely in their house and up in Caroline’s room.

“Wonderful!” said Eddie.

“I’ll show them all around school!” Caroline declared. “I’ll tell everyone in my class they’re Wally’s. ‘How are your Munsingwears today?’ I’ll ask him. He and his brothers don’t get back their flashlight
or
shorts until they return my drawing of Miss Applebaum
and
get down on one knee and apologize.”

The phone rang.

“I’ll
bet they want to exchange things right now,” Beth said, giggling, as the girls dashed out in the hall. “They can’t even wait until evening.”

Caroline picked up the phone. “Malloy Musketeers, Caroline speaking.”