He leaned back on the stool, keeping an eye on the TV screen mounted above the counter. It was tuned to Fox News, and he was grateful to note that he wasn’t featured in the broadcast. Maybe his departure hadn’t been noticed at home yet. So he could operate freely — whatever that meant. He didn’t even have transportation to the rest stops mentioned in the article.
A voice from the other end of the counter reached him. “Archie called in sick again. Guess he doesn’t like delivering hay any more than I do.”
“He wouldn’t work for me,” the counterman vowed.
“Haven’t got much choice,” the farmer complained. “What I can afford to pay, they’re not exactly lining up for the job.” He slammed down his coffee mug. “I’ve got four more stops west of here. It’ll be a miracle if I get home before midnight!”
Aiden directed his gaze out the window. A tractor was parked there. Attached to it was a long trailer piled high with hay bales.
Transportation.
He paid his bill and left the restaurant. Once outside, he circled back to the hay wagon in the lot. When the two heads in the luncheonette were turned away, he climbed onto the trailer and lay down among the bales.
A few minutes later, the tractor started up, and he was on his way west on Route 119.
The roar of the diesel motor, the bumpy motion, and the sweet smell of new-mown hay reminded him of every hayride at every fall fair he had ever visited. The memory clouded. Meg had usually been beside him, teasing him as the mosquitoes ate him alive and didn’t touch her. He would gladly have sacrificed his skin to every bug on the planet to have her with him now.
Those hayrides had been brief. Aiden had never considered the result of the constant jostling motion of the wagon over endless miles. He had to consider it now, because it was making him queasy. It would be hard to stay hidden if he started throwing up.
Just as he was about to succumb to a bout of landlubber’s seasickness, he spied a gas station coming up on the right. The sign advertised a mechanic. He pulled the folded papers out of his pocket. The Internet story included an interview with a mechanic — supposedly the only one on this stretch of road. This had to be one of the four places!
Keeping low, he slithered between hay bales until he reached the edge of the flatbed. He paused, watching the pavement rushing by below him. The tractor wasn’t as fast as a car, but they had to be doing at least twenty-five or thirty. A guy could get pretty messed up throwing himself off a vehicle moving at that speed.
The garage was directly beside them. The time to jump was now! Aiden aimed for some tall grass and hurled himself off the flatbed. He landed face-first on the gravel of the shoulder before rolling down into the softness of the ditch.
He did a brief check of his bones and lay there, relieved, catching his breath.
“Hey, buddy,” called a disgusted voice from the tractor. “If you’d asked, I’d have given you a lift.”
So much for staying hidden. He had just risked life and limb for nothing.
Stop complaining, he told himself. You’re here. And with any luck, they’ll remember Meg.
“They” turned out to be the mechanic who operated the snack bar, pumped gas, and sold lottery tickets when he wasn’t fixing cars. He seemed absolutely astonished when Aiden brought up the subject of the blocked toilet from two days before.
“Who are you? The Undersecretary of Toilets? What do you care about our plumbing problems?”
“I’m not interested in your toilet,” Aiden explained patiently. “I just need to know about the people who blocked it.”
“They came in with a blowout,” the mechanic recalled. “I sold them a new tire, and they left — after using the bathroom, obviously.”
“But do you remember what they looked like?” Aiden persisted. “Did they have a young girl with them?”
“Yeah, about ten or eleven,” the man nodded. “My money’s on her. She and her mom were the only ones who went back there. A grown woman wouldn’t jam a whole roll of paper down a toilet. That’s some kid’s idea of a joke.”
“What about their car?” Aiden urged. “Make? Model? Color? License plate?”
The mechanic shrugged. “It might have been green, but don’t hold me to that. They seemed to be in a hurry. Gave me cash. I’m pretty sure they were heading west. I wish I had more for you. I was barely paying attention until Niagara Falls came out the back door.”
“Thanks for your help,” Aiden said, and meant it sincerely. Just the thought that Meg had actually been here — that the trail wasn’t totally cold — made his heart soar.
Where to next? The kidnappers were heading west, but that wasn’t exactly an address. Besides, he was stranded here. The farmer with the hay wagon was long gone. What should he do? Hitchhike? It was already getting dark. Who knew when the next car would come by?
The thought had barely crossed his mind when a shiny new pickup truck squealed to a halt alongside the fuel pumps. Two teenagers hopped out. One began to fill the tank; the second ran around the back of the building to the bathroom.
Should I ask for a lift? Aiden wondered. The farmer would have taken him. Maybe these kids would, too.
But his gut instinct was to remain invisible. No one was looking for a runaway yet, but that could change at any minute.
Staying in the shadows of a few scrub bushes, Aiden worked his way around to the back of the vehicle. Perfect. The payload was covered by a tarp.
If I play my cards right, they’ll never know I’m back there.
So focused was he on his stealthy approach to the pickup that he completely missed it when something under the tarp moved.
Meg jammed the blade of the hoe into the crack where she’d seen the intrepid beetle disappear. The mortar crumbled, raining dust and pebbles down on her. She began to worry the point of the hoe in the opening, digging it deeper into the gap between fieldstones. More debris showered her. Soon she was white with dust. But that was only a fraction as dirty as she hoped to be pretty soon. If she could break through these stones, she could tunnel out of this prison. It would only be a matter of a few feet to the surface.
It had been at least an hour since Spidey had brought her dinner — a stale submarine sandwich in a plastic wrap. She would have loved to throw it at him. But a night of digging required energy. And food equaled fuel.
“When you’re ready to sleep, blow out the candle,” he’d grunted. She hoped that meant her kidnappers wouldn’t check on her again until morning — at which time they would find her long gone.
At last, the hoe was in deep enough for her to finesse the blade behind the stone. She leaned on the handle, throwing her full eighty pounds into the effort of levering the first piece out of the wall.
The rock wouldn’t budge. As she grunted and pushed, sweat began to trickle from her brow, tracking through the dust and dirt on her face. For the first time, she faced the possibility that she might not be strong enough to pull this off. That thought amped up her power level, and she gave a mighty heave. With a snap, the wooden handle broke at the blade, sending Meg sprawling. Enraged, she speared the broken pole into the crack. To her surprise, it stuck there. And when she attempted to free it, she felt the stone move.
Encouraged, she leaned into it. There was a crunching, and the rock came away from the wall. Behind it was hard-packed earth. Few sights had ever looked so beautiful to Meg Falconer.
She grabbed a small spade and began to excavate the opening. The dirt was dense and solid, but still much easier to deal with than stone. In no time, she had hollowed out the beginning of her passage. Now all she had to do was widen the entrance.
She filled the hole with as many gardening tools as she could cram inside. Then she wrapped her arms around the bouquet of wooden handles and pulled with all her might.
The result was astonishing, and not a little scary. The weakened wall disintegrated, crumbling to pieces at her feet. Two more fieldstones came loose and toppled out, missing her toes by inches. The can
dle flickered dangerously in the flying dust, but did not go out.
A good omen, she decided.
One escape tunnel, coming up.
She began to dig, loosening the soil with the point of the spade. It was a thousand times filthier than she’d expected. Since she was tunneling at a sharp angle up, every shovelful rained straight down onto her head. The effort to keep from coughing and spitting loud enough to alert her captors was almost as difficult as the actual work. Her eyes stung, and she could barely breathe. But she did not slow down.
Soon she was so deep inside that she could no longer work from the floor. She had to hoist herself into the passageway, bracing her feet against the backside of the fieldstone wall. She tried to shovel the mess around her left shoulder and behind her body. She was sure it was piling up in the basement, but that was fine with Meg. She never intended to go back there — not in this life.
Up she burrowed, pushing through the earth like a mole. The darkness was near total. The air was stale, and almost nonexistent. She was aware of a horrid gritty taste in her mouth. She spat. Mud.
Her excitement level kept back the exhaustion. Where was the surface? This was only a basement! She wasn’t coming up from China!
She felt a growing dread. She’d once read about scuba divers losing track of which way was up. Could that happen underground? And then she felt her spade break through a hard, crusty surface.
This is it! You’re almost out!
She shoveled madly, desperate to experience cool, clean air. Abandoning the spade, she clawed at the ground above her, hoisting herself up. To her dismay, all she encountered was more earth, softer, moister, smellier.
What’s going on? Where’s the outside? Why does it stink like rotten garbage?
She had held it together until that moment. But when the panic gripped her, it was unreasoning and total. She was suffocating in black filth. She flailed her arms and legs wildly, which only served to stir up the soft marshy stuff that imprisoned her.
Her entire being was awash with horror. Had she escaped from the cellar only to disappear off the face of the earth, buried alive?
* * *
The cabin was tiny and badly in need of a paint job. There was only one bedroom, but that was okay. No one was planning to get much sleep here. For Meg’s captors, this was a hideout, pure and simple. A place to lie low and regroup after they’d been forced to flee the warehouse in Alexandria.
Spidey walked in the door, puffing and cursing, holding up a copy of USA Today. “Two hours to get a lousy paper!” he spat. “Plus, you’ve still got to climb a mountain after you park the car!”
“When you’re holding a front-page hostage, you don’t set up shop in Times Square,” Tiger explained, not very patiently. She took the newspaper and headed back outside. “Come on. The sooner we can send a new ransom demand, the sooner we can get paid and disappear.”
That was the purpose of the newspaper. A photograph of Meg Falconer holding up today’s paper showed not only that she was alive and unhurt, but also proved that the picture was up-to-date.
“How much are we asking for now?” asked Mickey.
“Three million,” Tiger said grimly. “The extra million is a penalty for double-crossing us last time.”
The kidnappers went outside and removed the wooden stake that was wedged under the handles of the cellar doors to prevent Meg from opening them.
“Come on up, Margaret,” Spidey ordered. No answer. “I said come up!”
“We’re not going to hurt you,” Mickey promised. “We just want to take another picture.”
Silence.
The three clattered down the stairs. And gawked.
A mountain of earth and stones sat on the basement floor underneath the entrance to Meg’s tunnel. Of Meg herself, there was no sign.
Spidey bounded across the floor and virtually flew into the opening. When he came down, he was pulling Meg by one ankle.
She collapsed into the dirt, spitting and gasping. Her face was pale, her lips blue.
Spidey was enraged. “That’ll teach you to try running on us! You almost got yourself killed! Stupid kid!”
Almost smothering had only boosted Meg’s frustration and bewilderment. “I was out!” she wheezed. “Why wasn’t I out?”
Tiger sniffed the rotting scent in the tunnel and went upstairs to check. When she returned, she was smiling with satisfaction. “You dug yourself into the composter. All you had to do was open the lid, and you would have been home free.”
Meg was devastated. She had escaped — if only she could have recognized it!
Tiger was relentless. “If you had gotten out and tried to find your way through these woods on your own, you wouldn’t have lasted a day. So cheer up, Margaret. That composter just saved your life.”
Spidey thrust the copy of USA Today into her hands and hefted his camera. “Say cheese.”
“Don’t be ridiculous!” Tiger snapped. “We have to clean her up first.” She grinned. “Her own mother wouldn’t recognize her like this.” She snatched the paper away.
Meg sat up, peering at the date above the headline. “Wait a minute! Is it really November sixteenth?”
“What do you care?” snarled Spidey. “You’re not going anywhere.”
“Tomorrow’s my birthday,” she replied, and burst into tears.
It took only a few breathless seconds for Aiden to realize he was not alone under the tarp in the back of the pickup. Something — something warm — was sniffing at his face. A tongue tasted the skin of his cheek, and he jumped back as if he’d been burned.
Then it spoke, identifying itself in a single syllable: “Ma-a-a-a!”
A goat?
He lifted a corner of the tarp to let in a little more light. A groggy-looking billy goat lay on its side just a few inches away, watching him with little interest. A royal purple blanket proclaimed it to be “Abe Jr.”
What was it doing back there, obviously hidden? And why was it so sleepy? Was it sick, and they were taking it to a vet?
Should I get out of here?
Who knew if he’d find another ride? And the animal seemed docile enough —
The two teenagers made his mind up for him. While he was trying to decide what to do, they got into the truck’s cab and roared off.
The motion of the truck seemed to lull Abe Jr. In truth, Aiden felt pretty lulled himself. It was getting darker by the minute, and he hadn’t had a proper night’s rest since Meg had been kidnapped nearly a week ago. He kept himself awake by making up excuses and apologies to use on whatever goat doctor might throw back the tarpaulin and find him stowed away there with the patient.
But the next stop was no vet’s surgery. It was a small farmhouse. There they picked up another teen.
This one was in a state of high excitement. “Please — tell me you don’t have Abe Jr. back there!”
“Chill out,” advised the driver. “We gave him half a sleeping pill. He’s mellow.”
The newcomer was not soothed. “Dude, the coach at Lincoln High went to school and saw the empty cage! They know it’s us, man! The whole football team’s out looking for us! We’ve got to find a place to stash the goat before we’re caught with it!”
As Aiden listened, it all came clear to him. This wasn’t a sick goat; this was a hot goat! He remembered the local cops’ reply to Agent Sorenson’s inquiries about the bathroom vandals — “It’s football season.”
Isn’t it just my luck to end up in the middle of a feud between rival high schools over a stolen mascot?
His stomach tightened. Being trapped in a pickup with a goat had its funny side. But what Aiden was trying to do here was deadly serious. If he was beaten senseless by an enraged football team out for revenge, where would that leave his sister? He was the only one looking for her where she actually was! A trip to the emergency room could lead to him being identified as a runaway. If he got shipped home, he’d be leaving Meg high and dry.
“Get in the truck!” the
driver ordered.
Their new accomplice scrambled aboard, and the pickup peeled away. They must have decided on a hiding place for Abe Jr. Wherever it was, they were headed there at ninety miles an hour.
Aiden held on for dear life as the pitching of the truck rolled him and Abe Jr. around the payload. He had already decided that the next time they stopped, he was gone. No way was he going to bet his sister’s life on some silly high school caper. Sure, he’d be seen making his exit, but that wouldn’t matter. These kids were too engrossed in their own problems to worry about a total stranger who came from nowhere and then disappeared into the same place.
They sped around for a while, and Aiden could hear snippets of urgent shouted cell phone conversations coming from the cab. That, and a juicy munching sound, almost like —
He stared in horror. Somewhere amid the twists and turns, the maps had worked their way out of his pocket, and Abe Jr. was eating them!
“Hey — cut it out!” he hissed, snatching the mangled papers from the goat’s mouth. Panic rose in Aiden’s gorge. A few shreds of moist white pulp were all that remained.
Calm down, he told himself. You’ve already come as far as the directions could take you. From here, finding Meg would depend on his own ingenuity and pure luck.
After a few minutes, the truck left the road and began to jounce across a stubbly field. Aiden risked a peek out of the tarpaulin. He could see two more sets of headlights in the gloom. Obviously, this was the powwow of the conspiracy against Abe Jr. and Lincoln High.
Aiden made his decision then and there. As soon as the meeting started, he would slip away into the darkness. He would find a barn or shed to shelter in for tonight, and resume his search in the morning. The only sure thing was that he had to get away from this craziness before he got caught up in it.
He felt the truck stop, and heard the slamming of many doors. He thrust aside the tarp and raised himself to a crouch, still under cover of the cab of the truck.