What Could Go Wrong? (12 page)

“Oh, come on,” Charlie began, but I waved him into silence.

“He'd done part of the puzzle,” I said. “Only he didn't put in the right letters for the words it called for. I didn't notice what he'd filled in until I tried to do some of the other spaces and they didn't match up with what he'd written. Some of his fill-ins weren't even letters; they were mostly numbers.”

There was noise and movement around us, but it was as if we were in a cocoon of our own,
a bubble that shut out everything but the three of us.

“He left the paper on his seat on purpose,” Charlie said slowly, “for somebody else to pick up. Because there was a message in it. In the crossword puzzle.”

And then we all three spoke together; even Eddie figured it out.

“In code,” we said. “A message in code!”

Eddie repeated the words, sounding dazed. “A message in code. Geez! What did it say, Gracie?”

I remembered how he'd sat there reading his stupid old comic book instead of watching what was happening to me. It made my tone sarcastic. “It was
in code,
Eddie. That means it wasn't written in plain English. I
don't
know what it said
!”

“No, I mean, what were the letters written out? Maybe we can decipher the code. Can you remember what the letters were?”

“He's right,” Charlie said. “If you remember them, write them down right away before you forget what they were.”

“You guys are still getting secret messages out of cereal boxes. This one isn't going to say the treasure is hidden behind the couch, or whatever. This is something serious.”

“Sure. We know that. Here.” Charlie reached over and took the scrap of newspaper out of my hand, turning it over so he didn't write on top of the phone number Aunt Molly had given me. “You talk, and I'll write. Let's get it down. You
do
remember it, don't you? It wasn't very long, was it?”

“No, but I'm not sure I can remember it all. I didn't realize it was important,” I said, but I recited what I thought the letters and numbers had been, and Charlie carefully wrote them out and looked at them.

“
X's.
And more numbers than letters. Hmmm.”

I had an unpleasant thought. “I was trying to fit in
my
words, and I erased a couple of his letters. They may be mad when they find out it's not all still there.” And come looking for me? I wondered, to ask what I'd erased? I'd thought it was all over when The Enemy walked away with the newspaper, and now it occurred to me that it might
not
be over, that they might shoot me if I didn't tell them what I'd erased. I swallowed audibly.

“The newspaper belonged to the guy in the
loud shirt,” Eddie pointed out. “He must know what he wrote there.”

“Then why is he here? Why did he come up and take it away from me?”

“Yeah,” Charlie said, not making me feel any better. “If he wrote it there himself, and—say—left it on his seat for someone else to pick up—like Mr. Upton—only Mr. Upton saw
Gracie
take the paper. And the Upton guy knew he'd lost it so he quick went and called Hawaiian shirt, wherever he'd gone, so he'd know. That's why he was late getting on the plane. Told them at the desk it was an emergency or something.” He paused to think, working it out in his head. “Let's see. Upton knew somehow that Gracie gave the paper to Mrs. Basker. He saw her stick it in her flight bag—the old lady, I mean—and after he got on the plane he tried to get the bag away from her long enough to get the paper back. He apparently
didn't
see her give the paper to Gracie, and when his attempts to steal the bag didn't work—remember how he tried to get the seat next to Mrs. Basker? And how grouchy he was when the flight attendant said he had to sit
where he'd been assigned?—he used some ruse to get her off where he could hit her over the head and search her stuff.”

“He probably pulled a gun on her,” Eddie said, nodding. “Told her he'd shoot her if she didn't go with him.”

“Sure. And when he didn't find the paper, he figured she must have passed it along to Gracie, who kept talking to her, so they started watching
us.
And when they realized Gracie actually had the paper, the guy in the loud shirt just walked up to her and took it.”

It sounded horribly logical, but there were a lot of gaps. “But if the guy in the Hawaiian shirt
wrote
the message, why would he need the paper back? Why would he fly all the way to Portland to get it, when he apparently hadn't intended to get on our plane in the first place?”

“He didn't remember what it was,” Eddie said promptly. “That's why people write things down, like you wrote down the telephone number for Aunt Molly's friend. It's hard to remember numbers. Especially if you're middle-aged, Mom says.”

“Or maybe he was only a messenger,” Charlie contributed. “Maybe he didn't
write
the message, he was just supposed to
deliver
it to someone at the airport—Upton—who would then carry it away to San Francisco.”

“So why did the other man follow him, then?”

“Follow
us,
I think. I'll bet Upton wasn't sure he'd recognize us, especially Mrs. Basker. So he wanted Hawaiian shirt along to be sure he got the right person. And the message is important; they couldn't take a chance on losing it.”

“Yeah,” Eddie chimed in. “I'll bet the guy in the Hawaiian shirt even chartered a plane to catch up with us in Portland, to make sure they got the code message back.”

“Only we weren't supposed to land in Portland,” I objected, “so how would he know he could—uh-oh.”

I didn't like the idea that had just struck me. It struck Charlie at just about the same time.

“Maybe,” Charlie said, almost whispering, “he
made
us land in Portland, to give him time to catch up with us. Maybe he called the
airlines and told them there was a bomb on Flight 211. They wouldn't take any chances with a planeload of passengers and crew. They'd come down as soon as they could, and call out the people who look for bombs.”

Eddie liked that idea, which was more than I did. It made me sure that none of this was a joke, none of it was harmless, and that when the men realized they didn't have the entire message they would be back—after
me.

“How could he know it would be Portland where we'd land, though?” I asked, hoping my speculations were crazy.

“We were on a 727. It's too big to land at any of the little airports anywhere else. Portland International was the only logical place, short of San Francisco,” Charlie asserted.

“There wasn't any bomb,” Eddie said, sounding awed. “They just wanted to get their newspaper back, with the message in it. Wow! It must be something really important!”

“And crooked,” Charlie added. “Very crooked.”

“And dangerous,” I croaked. “Dangerous for us.”

After a moment of silence, Charlie handed me the scrap of the edge of the newspaper we'd written on. “Here. Try calling Aunt Molly again.”

My finger was unsteady as I dialed; I held my breath, willing her to answer in person.

“Hi, this is Molly Portwood! If my caller is Gracie, hang on, kids, I'll be there as soon as I can—”

I must have looked as bleak as I sounded. “It's the same recorded message. She's not back yet.”

Eddie was less excited and more anxious than he'd been a minute ago. “Maybe we ought to call home and tell them what's going on,” he said uncertainly.

“What good would that do?” Charlie asked before I could voice my opinion. “It must be eight hundred miles or more and a couple of hours away even if they flew down here. A day and a half if they drive. They could murder all three of us before our folks could get here, if they wanted to.”

“So what are we going to do? We're sitting ducks,” I said. “Even in this great big airport,
surrounded by people, we're sitting ducks. Charlie, we'd better go to the police. Talk to the security guards and ask them to lock us up—in protective custody, sort of”—I watched TV shows, too—“until Aunt Molly shows up, or else have them call the regular police.”

“We could do that,” Charlie said, but he sounded as if he were thinking again, and I knew that going into protective custody wasn't what he wanted to do. “On the other hand—”

“I don't think I want to know what you think on the other hand,” I said, and I wasn't kidding.

As usual, he didn't pay any attention to what he didn't want to consider. “If we do that, chances are it will be hours—if ever—before we get anyone to believe us. To believe that bomb threat was to slow us down so these mysterious guys could catch up with us. To investigate this situation.”

I started to shake my head. “No, Charlie. No, it's not up to
us
to investigate it. We're just kids, and we don't know anything about—”

He interrupted me. “We know it's real. We know we're not making it up because we
watched one too many cop shows on TV. And we have the coded message—most of it, anyway, if Gracie remembered it accurately. Maybe we can figure it out. Maybe we can turn the tables—find those guys and watch
them
and see what they do. Make sure they don't get away with their crooked business, whatever it is.”

The first time I ever went swimming in the ocean and got knocked down by a big wave, I felt sort of like I felt then. Cold and numb and terrified.

That time in the ocean my dad had been there to grab my hand and pull me out.

Now there were only Charlie and Eddie, and I was beginning to think maybe Dad was right about Charlie: Maybe he did attract disasters the way movie stars drew photographers. He didn't usually get hurt—not too much, anyway—but what if this time he wasn't so lucky? What if none of us were lucky?

In the middle of those hundreds of people traveling—maybe there were thousands of them right there in that one airport—I felt as alone as I'd ever been in my whole life. Dad
was at least four hours away from me. Even if he could get an immediate flight it would take him almost that long to actually get here, by the time he arranged for reservations and drove to Sea-Tac from where we lived in Marysville.

I couldn't depend on my dad to save me this time.

Charlie was watching my face, reading my emotions. “Eddie and I could keep on investigating, and let you go into protective custody, I guess,” he said.

He sounded neutral, as if it didn't matter whether I stayed with the boys or not, but I had a sudden picture of going back home and having everyone know I'd been a baby, that I'd chickened out before they did. (At least you'd be a
live
chicken, a tiny voice said in the back of my brain.)

My voice shook a little. “I don't suppose they could actually do anything to us in such a public place, if we stick together. At least, they wouldn't actually shoot where people would see them.”

“They wouldn't shoot you, anyhow,” Eddie
volunteered, “not until you told them what they want to know, about what you erased from their message.”

“If that's supposed to be comforting,” I told him, my heart thudding, “you might as well know it isn't working.”

I had been standing there with the receiver to my ear, hearing all of Aunt Molly's recorded message, and when it came to an end I'd hung up. I didn't know what else to do. It seemed pointless to try to explain to the answering machine what was happening to us. She might panic and try to get to us so fast she'd wreck her car or something.

“Eddie's right. They didn't kill Mrs. Basker. There's no reason to think they'd murder us, either. What good would that do them?” Charlie and his logic again.

“She's an old lady, and she really didn't know what they were talking about. They knocked her out. That
could
have killed her.”

Charlie straightened up, throwing his shoulders back, and I knew he'd made up his mind what
he
was going to do.

“You want us to take you to the security
guards and leave you to explain what's going on, see what they do?”

I met his gaze bleakly. I was pretty sure I knew what they'd do. They wouldn't listen, not seriously, and if they locked me up, it wouldn't necessarily be in protective custody. I wondered if they had mental wards at Juvenile Hall.

“Or do you want to stay with Eddie and me?” Charlie asked.

My throat hurt so it was hard to speak. “I guess I'll stay with you. Only don't do anything really stupid and get us hurt, okay?”

Charlie grinned. “Trust me,” he said.

“What we need,” Eddie proposed when we huddled together to plan our strategy, “is disguises. I mean, it's going to be hard to stalk those guys—if we can find them again—without being noticed. Since they obviously followed us and know what we look like.”

“Great idea,” Charlie told him. “Let's go back to the gift shop and get some inconspicuous stuff, T-shirts, something different from what they've seen us in. Everybody's wearing jeans, so those won't matter.”

“Not inconspicuous,” Eddie contradicted. “We'll still be three middle-sized kids, and we're not particularly conspicuous now. What we need is to look so different that they won't pay any attention unless they get a good look at our faces. I mean
real
different.
Come on, I'll show you what I had in mind.”

We picked out a fluorescent lime green shirt for me with a picture of cable cars on it, and sunglasses with multicolor striped frames, and a bright yellow straw hat with a purple ribbon and a floppy brim. I'd look different, all right.

Eddie chose a San Francisco Giants T-shirt and a baseball cap, and Charlie selected a shirt with purple and white flowers all over it. Then he studied a pair of plaid walking shorts. “I wonder if my dad will have a fit over what I'm charging? These would sure look different from what I have on.”