I got to the window in time to see the police cruiser sail right on by us. Nobody saw our signs calling for help.
Alison bit her lip. Harry said the kind of word my mom would chew me out for using.
“I keep looking at that two-way radio up front,” Harry said in frustration, “but I don’t know how to use it.”
“I know how to use it,” I told him, “but there’s no way they’re going to let us get close enough to do it. But I thought of something else. It may not be as effective as a gun against these guys, but it might help slow them down enough so at least one of us can get away to call for help when we stop.”
Right that minute we felt the coach slowing down, and within seconds we were turning off the highway. We made enough space between the slats of the blinds to see that we were pulling into a service station, which meant we only had seconds to get ready. I explained quickly.
Our ammunition wasn’t great, but it was the best we could manage. While Harry struggled to get one of the big side windows open—there was no window in the back because it was covered with a closet—I jerked the tops off the cans I found in the medicine cabinet.
“Who’s going out the window?” Harry asked, jerking on the cord to make sure the shade stayed up. “You want me to do it?”
“Lewis is a fast runner,” Alison said. “Let him go. Don’t sprain an ankle when you land, Lewis.”
“I’ll try not to.” My heart was pounding as we rolled slowly into the lighted area. There was only one other car at the pumps, an old pickup with two big shaggy dogs in the back of it. “Anybody see a phone?”
We had the shades on both sides out of the way now, but we couldn’t get the second window open. It was stuck. So I knew which one I had to get out of, and it was on the same side as the door up front, so when one of our captors got out he’d see me immediately.
The station building itself was lit up, and there had to be a telephone in there, I thought. So if I didn’t spot one anywhere else, I’d make a dash for that open door. As far as I could tell, there was only one man on duty, talking to the driver from the old pickup alongside of us. Like the building, they were on the far side of the lot from us.
From the front of the coach Syd yelled, “You kids stay put and keep quiet and you won’t get hurt!”
“Yeah, sure,” Harry muttered. And then to me, “Go for it, Lewis!”
A yell from up front told me I’d been spotted bailing out. I landed on the balls of my feet, no sprained ankle, and headed for the back of the motor home.
I heard Ernie come out the front door, feet pounding on the pavement behind me, and I felt as if his hot breath was on the back of my neck.
I didn’t see what happened then, just heard about it later. At the moment I expected a big hand to grab the neck of my shirt and jerk me off my feet, Harry leaned out the window with a full can of shaving cream and sprayed it directly into Ernie’s eyes.
I didn’t know why Ernie was yelling and swearing, but the dogs in the old pickup started barking ferociously at this activity only a few yards from them. I was running for the station, where the two men in the lighted area turned to see what all the commotion was.
Inside the coach, Syd headed for the bedroom to see what was going on. Alison hit him in the face with hair spray, and while he was practically blinded and bent over, she clobbered him on the head with the heavy-duty flashlight Mr. Rupe had kept beside the bed. It didn’t do any serious damage, but by the time he’d recovered enough to lift his head, she’d shaken up the hair spray again for another burst.
I heard the ruckus behind me and ran for all I was worth, hoping none of the kids was getting hurt. Ariadne was screaming as if she was being killed, but Ariadne could screech that way just in excitement.
“What the heck’s going on?” the service man asked, coming toward me wiping his hands on a rag. The pickup driver was right after him, alarmed about his dogs.
“Don’t nobody hurt my dogs!” he yelled. “Rags! Jumper! Come ’ere!”
“The cops!” I gasped, nearly going to my knees in front of them. “Call the cops!”
They were close enough now to read our signs. The pickup man, whose dogs (according to Harry, later) had literally run over Ernie and knocked him flat as they leaped out of the truck bed, gaped at the signs. “Kidnapped?” he said. “This ain’t a joke? That rig’s been stolen?” His dogs were leaping up on him and only subsided when he commanded them to sit.
“Call the cops before they drive away!” I begged. “There are four more kids in there!”
I didn’t know yet that Ernie and Syd were in no shape to drive away. Between the shaving cream and the hair spray, neither of them could see very well for a few minutes.
And then I spotted the greatest sight of my life. A police cruiser pulled onto the lot and cut across in front of the motor home.
A very tall, very sturdy-looking police officer got out and sauntered over to look closely at the signs in our rear windows. Then he turned toward the three of us standing there in the open.
He sort of rested one hand on the gun he had holstered on his hip, casual-like. “Any of you belong with the motor home?” he asked.
I was getting my breath back. “Yes, sir. The two men driving it stole it, back at the campground outside of Yellowstone. My sister and three other kids are trapped in there. These guys stole a lot of money and hid it in there, in a furnace vent. It’s gone, and they can’t find it, which is why they stole the coach. But I think Billy probably knows where the money is.”
I’d run out of breath again by that time. The officer was looking at me, evaluating what I was saying, and I suddenly got really nervous. What if he decided I was just some smart aleck trying to play a joke on him? I was afraid I’d sounded like one.
He lifted off his uniform cap and scratched his head. “Hmm.”
About then Ernie came around the front of the coach. He’d wiped off most of the shaving lotion, and his eyes were red and irritated-looking. He acted like he didn’t even see the cop or the other two men and glared at me.
“I told you not to get out of the motor home,” he said. “I got a notion to lick you good.”
He finally looked at the cop. “He done something, officer? This boy, he don’t always mind me the way he ought to.”
“He’s not my dad,” I said quickly. “Check his ID. He’s from an outfit that rents RVs, back in Marysville, Washington. He can’t prove he rented this motor home, because it was rented to Mr. Rupe. Three of the kids with us are Rupe kids; the other one’s my sister. Don’t let him drive away with us.”
The officer hardly acted like he heard me, but he said to Ernie, “Could I see your driver’s license, sir?”
“Uh, it’s in the coach. I need to fuel up,” Ernie said to the attendant. “Maybe you can do that while I get the papers the officer needs. I’ll be right back, sir.”
But the cop didn’t wait where he was; he went along and stood in the doorway while Ernie looked for papers, or pretended to. Syd was at the kitchen sink, washing his eyes out under the faucet. I’d heard hair spray could knock flies and other insects out of the air if you hit them with it, and even kill them. I hoped Syd’s eyes were stinging like crazy, so he’d have to behave.
Spray cans weren’t the ideal weapons, but they’d helped a lot. If Harry hadn’t slowed Ernie down with shaving cream, I might never have gotten away from the motor home to let anybody know we were in trouble.
Ernie came back with some papers. “To tell you the truth, officer, my eyes are bothering me so much I can’t tell for sure what I got. I think these are the rental papers, just like the boy said. Made out to Milton Rupe. I seem to have mislaid my wallet, but it’s here somewhere. Soon as my eyes quit hurting I’ll find it for you.”
The officer appraised his watering eyes, and then glanced toward the man at the sink.
“I’ll have to ask everybody to step out of the vehicle,” he said. “Including whoever’s in the rear.”
“That’s only my kids,” Ernie said. “They been put to bed. No need to wake them up, is there?”
“They’re not his kids,” I said quickly. “He kidnapped all of us.”
“Out of the coach, please,” the officer said, stepping aside to clear the doorway. “Everyone. Including the children.”
They tried to bluff long enough to get away, but the cop wasn’t buying their story. It wasn’t until a backup unit had arrived that we found out the first cop was the one who had passed us earlier. He had seen our signs, and at first he’d thought it was a hoax. When he thought about it, though, he decided he’d better check it out.
Boy, were we glad he did.
As they made our kidnappers get into the back of one of the police cars, Syd looked at me and said, “Okay, I give up. What did you do with it?”
I didn’t answer.
While we were waiting in the motor home for one of the officers to get Mr. and Mrs. Rupe, though, I went over and over in my head all the places everybody had already looked for the money without finding it. There had to be at least one place they hadn’t looked, I thought.
The little kids got hungry, and Harry got out another big bag of chips and divided them up on paper plates. “I want a candy bar,” Billy said, and he went to the refrigerator and got one out of one of the crispers at the bottom. Mrs. Rupe had stored one of them completely full of Snickers and Hershey bars and peanut butter cups. She hadn’t brought any fruit to put in that one, only a little bit of salad stuff in the second bin. She hadn’t really cooked a meal since we’d left home, so most of it had rotted, untouched.
And that’s when the idea hit me. “Billy,” I said, “is the money in the refrigerator?”
He stared at me and said, “It’s mine. Finders keepers.”
“They looked in the refrigerator,” Alison said.
They had, but I had a hunch. I pulled out the second crisper and poked through the wilted lettuce, a cucumber that had gone soft and squishy, and a few tomatoes with yucky spots on them. All the stuff for the salads we never got to eat.
And there it was, under the rotting vegetables. The bag was wrapped in a piece of crumpled foil—how had Billy been clever enough to think of that, or was it just a fluke that he’d hidden it so it looked like leftover lunch meat or something?
Billy started to cry when I pulled it out and unwrapped it. “It’s mine,” he said, but I think he already knew it wasn’t.
We thought the Rupes were pretty casual about their kids, but when they got back to the campground and found the motor home and all of us gone, they came unglued.
Mr. Rupe might be arrogant and sometimes rude to strangers, but he was used to giving orders and having them obeyed. He had the county sheriff’s department and the state patrol in high gear within minutes. Other units were already looking for us by the time our patrolmen called in to say they’d found us, so we’d have been rescued before long even if we hadn’t stuck the signs on the windows and even if I hadn’t leaped out a window to get help. But everybody thought we’d been very brave and clever; even Mr. Rupe nodded approval of our pressurized can weapons.
Mrs. Rupe praised us while she hugged Billy and Ariadne; she was really impressed with our responsible reactions to the situation. I figured Alison had a lifetime job as a sitter if she wanted it.
Harry and I took turns explaining the scam Syd and Ernie had been involved in, and I was glad we’d found the money to back it up, because it sounded pretty wild. Billy kept insisting that he’d found the cash and it should be his, but his father gave him a long look.
“Don’t be silly, son. It’s stolen money. It has to go back to the people it belongs to . . . after the police have held it for evidence in the trial when they send the two of them to jail for a long time.”
“But you always said ‘finders keepers,’ ” Billy protested tearfully.
“Not with thousands of other people’s dollars,” Mr. Rupe said firmly, putting an end to the discussion.
Billy finally stopped fussing about it when they promised him that as soon as we got home, they’d get him some glasses like mine so he could see what was going on around him.
The less said about our trip home the better.
As Mr. Rupe turned into the driveway, Mrs. Rupe exclaimed, “Watch it, Milton, you’re going to hit the—”
The motor home clipped the garbage cans, and they fell over, clattering, and rolled into the gutter.
Mr. Rupe turned off the ignition and sighed. “I think I’ll stick to driving something smaller than this from now on. It’s made me a nervous wreck, and I didn’t think I had a raw nerve in my body,” he said.
We’d made enough noise so my folks came out and were waiting to meet us as we got out of the coach.
Billy bailed out first and ran to meet them. “I’m going to get glasses just like the ones Lewis has,” he said. “I’m sorry I broke his glasses. I didn’t mean to sit on them.”
The welcoming smile on Mom’s face flickered uncertainly. “Lewis?” she asked, stepping forward to see me more clearly. The lens hadn’t fallen out, but there was a crack in the middle of it that divided her face into two parts.
“Hi, Mom,” Alison said, reaching for a hug. “I need to hang out my sleeping bag to dry right away. It was under one of the skylights that was broken when we came through the storm near Missoula, and it got soaked. I saved one of the hailstones that fell through, in the freezer. It’s as big as an egg.”
“I spit in the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone,” Billy said proudly, struggling to control William, who was trying to escape. “It went all the way to the bottom.”
“You’re home a day earlier than we expected,” Mom said, no longer smiling but anxious. “Did you have trouble?”
Mr. Rupe was opening up the lower level bays to unload. “Oh, it worked out all right,” he said. “But after everything that happened, we decided we’d had enough of sightseeing. We just wanted to come home. The kidnappers are in jail in Montana, and Lewis found the money.”
“Billy felt sure the money would be his, since he found it first,” Mrs. Rupe said, allowing her cigarette ashes to drift all around her as she waved a hand. “But of course that was out of the question. I’m so tired, I can’t possibly cook. Let’s call out for pizza, maybe fried chicken.”
“Kidnappers?” Mom echoed faintly.
“Money?” Dad repeated, scowling.
“When Billy cried, though, the people at the campground said he could keep William,” Harry reported, as my parents looked more confused by the moment. “Some camper had left him behind there in the first place.”
“I have to go potty,” Ariadne said.
“Uh, I have dinner on the stove,” Mom said, looking as if she’d been hit by a hurricane. “Come on inside, kids. We’ll talk about all this later. Thank you so much for taking Alison and Lewis with you, Mrs. Rupe. I’m sure they had a . . . wonderful time.”
“If you have any questions after Lewis tells you the story, I’ll be glad to fill in the details,” Mr. Rupe told Dad as he emptied the first compartment.
When we got in the house, Mom checked the stuff on the stove and said, “You obviously have a lot to tell us.” She glanced sideways at Alison who was putting another two place settings on the table. “Did the Rupes offer you money for caring for the children?”
“No,” Alison said cheerfully, “but I survived the trip, and I sure learned a lot about baby-sitting. I should qualify as an expert from now on.”
“I had fried chicken and all the fixings planned for your homecoming dinner,” Mom said. “I didn’t expect you tonight, so I don’t have any of your favorites.”
“Meat loaf is good, Mom. Smells great,” I said as we took our places. I took a big helping of salad and then another big one of green beans, loading up my plate.
“Tell us,” Dad commanded, unwilling to wait any longer. “Start with the kidnappers.”
Mom was still trying not to be upset, trying to make things seem ordinary. “And your glasses, Lewis. How did Billy manage to sit on them? Why weren’t you wearing them?”
“We were sharing them, and we’d come past the last of the buffalo so Billy wanted to see them. He’s as blind as I am without glasses.”
“Who was kidnapped?” Dad asked in a tone that meant he wasn’t going to be sidetracked another moment.
So between us, Alison and I told them the whole story. Well, almost. Neither of us mentioned Mr. Rupe’s terrible driving. It didn’t matter because we never intended to get into a car with him again. We’d figured out that a person could be intelligent and responsible in other ways and still not be a very competent driver.
Mom looked at me kind of funny when I took a second helping of green beans (when I was little I used to feed them to the dog under the table when nobody was looking) while Alison told them about the hail. It had not only broken our skylights but had made the freeway so icy that all traffic had stopped for nearly half an hour, and then when we got to the campground it had cooled off the heated pool enough so Ariadne complained about how cold it was. “It was so loud on the roof that we had to yell to hear each other,” Alison concluded.
Dad had a look on his face that made me think he suspected he hadn’t yet heard the whole story. “But Yellowstone was terrific,” I said. “I hope our whole family can go back together someday. You’d like the animals, and the paint pots, and the geysers, and the mud volcanoes, Mom.”
She was looking at me strangely too. Not only surprised that we were home early, and I was eating salad and green beans, but as if I’d changed in some way she couldn’t quite pin down. “I didn’t make any dessert for tonight,” she said. “I was planning on brownies for tomorrow.”
“That’s okay. We don’t need any dessert.” I didn’t tell her that instead of stopping to eat lunch on the way home we’d finished off the junk food we were carrying, including two or three candy bars apiece. The thought of any more sugar at the moment made me a little bit queasy. “I’ll rest up for brownies tomorrow. It was a great trip, but I’m sure glad to be home.”
“Me too,” Alison said.
When the phone rang, she got up to answer it, and I listened to her saying, “Oh, hello, yes, this is Alison. Oh, she did? How nice of her. Yes, I’ve had considerable experience baby-sitting for young children. Certainly, Mrs. Potter, I’d be glad to stay with your children tomorrow night. Yes, thank you. See you then.”
I’d thought she was all burned out by Ariadne and Billy, but she hung up with a grin. “That new neighbor of the Mahoneys has two little girls. She’s asked me to sit, and if the kids like me, it’ll be every Thursday night while they go bowling and then other times once in a while.”
“I thought you’d be tired of baby-sitting after this trip,” Mom said. “How were the Rupe kids?”
I thought of Ariadne at the top of the cedar tree, and wetting the bed, and with ice cream dripping off both elbows. I remembered Billy Scotch-taping the cat, and hiding my glasses, and tying Alison’s shoelaces together.
“Okay,” Alison said, and I echoed, “Okay.”
As always, the first paper I had to write when school started was on how I spent my vacation. I told the truth, every word, and there was a big red A at the top of the paper when Mrs. Garvey handed it back to me.
She was smiling. “My, Lewis, you certainly have a wonderful imagination,” she said.