Blair’s Nightmare (6 page)

The first part of the trail down to the valley floor was fairly steep, but near the bottom it leveled out. Just before it turned toward the lake, there was a place where it forked. One of the branches led on down the slope toward the road that went over another rise and into Fillmore Valley. David was leading the
way. He had just turned onto the valley trail, when he circled some bushes and practically ran into someone who was coming down the path in the other direction. It was Pete Garvey.

“Hey.” Garvey grabbed David by the shoulder. “Lookee, here.”

David tried to pull away, but it was no use. Garvey was grinning, but the smile didn't make David feel any better.

“What're you doing out here?” Garvey said.

“We were hiking.” Amanda had caught up. “What are you doing?”

Garvey looked at Amanda. “Hey,” he said. “What'cha doing with this little twerp?”

David felt Amanda bump against his shoulder, but he didn't dare take his eyes off Garvey to look at her. “He's my brother,” Amanda said. “What are you going to do?”

“Well, now,” Garvey said slowly. “I been looking for this little twerp for a long time.” His grip tightened on David's shoulder, and he lifted his arm, pulling David up onto his tiptoes. “I got a bone to pick with this little twerp.”

David wished he'd get it over with—and that he'd quit saying “little twerp.” He wished it so hard he was actually clenching his fist to take a desperate and useless swing at Garvey's grinning face, when all of a sudden a fist shot out of nowhere and smashed right into the middle of it. For a weird second or two
he almost thought the fist might have been his own, but of course it wasn't.

Garvey turned loose of David and stepped back with both hands over his nose. It had been a very hard punch. David winced. He could almost feel it himself. He was still standing there staring at Garvey when Amanda grabbed him by the arm and almost jerked him off his feet. “Come on,” she said. “Let's get out of here.”

A few feet down the trail he turned around and looked back. Garvey had turned loose of his nose, but he was still just standing there, in exactly the same place he'd been when Amanda hit him, as if he were frozen to the spot. The expression on his face was even blanker than usual.

“David,” Amanda said. “Are you coming—or what?” David hurried after her. He didn't look back again, but for quite a while he kept expecting to hear Garvey charging after them; but he never did. After a while he quit worrying about it. By the time they got to the ridge, he was worrying about something else. Amanda wasn't acting like herself.

At first he couldn't exactly put his finger on it. It was a little bit as if she were mad at him—but not exactly. Several times he caught her staring at him; but when he tried to talk to her, she answered briefly, as if she were angry or else had something on her mind and didn't want to be interrupted.

Once, just trying to make conversation, David said, “That must have really hurt.”

“What?” Amanda said, and then she looked at her hand with a strange kind of surprised expression and said, “Yeah, it did. It hurt a lot.”

“Oh,” David said. He hadn't thought about her hand; but now that he did, he realized what she meant. He'd heard of people breaking the bones in their hands by punching other people. “I hope it's not broken or anything.”

Amanda stopped and stared at him for a second. She looked irritated, as if there were something about him she really resented. “Forget it,” she said.

He didn't try to talk anymore. He'd begun to figure it out. She'd probably just realized what a coward he was, and she was really disgusted. He'd known all along that Amanda wasn't too crazy about having a bunch of stepsisters and -brothers. She'd made that pretty clear from the beginning. So to find out that one of them was a coward naturally wouldn't exactly make her happy. He didn't blame her. It didn't make him very happy either.

The rest of the way home he felt really rotten, and just as they got to the house, Amanda did something that made him feel even rottener.

It happened right after they came through the back door
into the kitchen. David was taking off his backpack when he looked up and noticed that Amanda was looking at him.

“Well,” she said. “That was an interesting hike.” Then she halfway closed her eyes, nodded and said, “Very interesting.” And then she smiled at him. She'd smiled at him before, of course. Not very often, but enough so that he knew what it usually looked like, and this was different.

It didn't take him long to figure it out. What it was, was that she felt sorry for him. All of a sudden he knew that that was it. And that made him feel rottener than anything.

So the way it turned out, the hike that was supposed to take his mind off his problems only gave him another one to worry about. Now—besides the fight he might have to have with Garvey, and the fight that Dad and Molly were probably having—there was the fact that Amanda was sorry for him. It was all pretty depressing.

After Amanda left, David started unpacking his backpack. He'd about finished when he heard something in the pantry. Thinking that it must be mice again—like most old houses the Westerly House seemed to attract mice—he tiptoed over to the door. When he jerked it open, there was a squeaking noise—but it wasn't a mouse.

It was Esther who had squeaked, but Janie was there, too. Still dressed in their party dresses, both Esther and Janie were
staring at David with wide eyes and trying to hide something behind their backs.

“Okay, what are you guys up to now?” David said.

“We're not swiping anything,” Janie said. “We're just fixing some stuff from the party. See.” She brought a great big greasy-looking paper bag out from behind her. “Show him, Tesser,” she said, and Esther produced a pie pan full of a melted-looking mess with a couple of birthday cake candles sticking out of the top. “See,” Janie said. “Mrs. Calder gave everyone so much cake and ice cream that a lot of people left stuff on their plates. So we decided to keep it from going to waste.”

Esther nodded proudly and pointed to the paper bag. “See.” she said. “We made a doggy bag.”

“No,” Janie shouted. “You idiot, Tesser. I told you! It's not a doggy bag. It's for King Tut. It's a turkey bag.”

“A turkey bag?” David said, grinning.

“Well.” Janie narrowed her eyes and looked at David speculatively. “Look, David. If we tell you a very, very important secret will you promise, absolutely, positively—”

“Don't tell me,” David said, closing the door. “I can't handle it.”

L
UCKILY
D
AVID SLEPT SOUNDLY THAT
night. He'd really expected to have a nightmare or two, or at least to lie awake worrying. It must have been the hike and all the fresh air and exercise that helped him go immediately to sleep and stay that way until Rolor started rattling the door of his cage and squawking for his breakfast. David got up and fed the crow and got back in bed.

Watching Rolor eat reminded him of the huge panful of cake and melted ice cream. Had Janie and Esther really fed it to King Tut—or to what? David told himself he didn't want to know. He had enough problems without having to worry about the kids doing exactly what they'd promised not to—encouraging Blair to take his fantasies seriously. But still, he couldn't help being a little curious about why they'd brought
home all those birthday party leftovers. He kept putting it out of his mind but it kept coming back, and finally he wound up doing a little investigating.

It was right after breakfast and David was on his way to the garage when he heard King Tut gobble. Before he was even sure what was in his mind, David found himself strolling over to the turkey pen. “Hey, Tut,” he said, sticking his finger through the wire mesh. “How'd you like the birthday cake?”

The turkey blinked his round blank eyes and bobbed his head up and down on its long scraggly neck, making himself look even dumber than usual. David grinned. He was glad Molly had saved Tut from the roasting pan. The way things had been going lately, it was nice to have someone in the family who was more of a turkey than he was. He looked around the pen. There was no sign of the pie pan, but then the kids could have taken it away. Or—they might have left it somewhere else in the first place. Like on the bench by the swing tree.

Actually it was an oak, but the kids had always called it “the swing tree.” A rubber tire swing hung from one of its thick branches and a decrepit circular bench went clear around its trunk. The pie pan was on the bench, and it was empty. Empty and very clean, as if it had been washed, or maybe—licked. David was still wondering if a raccoon or maybe Rocky,
the barn cat, could have licked it that clean, when right behind him a deep gravelly voice said, “Sixty-three.” It was Mr. Golanski.

Mr. Golanski was an old farmer and handyman who lived on a little ranch about a mile up Fillmore Road. He'd lived in the same house ever since he was born; his father, who'd been a carpenter and woodcarver, had worked for the Westerlys. It was Mr. Golanski who had first told the Stanleys about the poltergeist that, it was said, haunted the Westerly House back in the eighteen nineties. That poltergeist had supposedly been stirred up by Henriette, who was a teenager and lived in the house at the time. Talking to Mr. Golanski was always like coming in on the middle of a conversation—even when he didn't sneak up behind you first.

“Hi,” David said, when he'd finished almost jumping out of his shoes. “Sixty-three what?”

“Sixty-three years old.”

Mr. Golanski was carrying a gun. A huge heavy-looking gun with two barrels. David stared at it. “Oh,” he said, nodding. It took him a minute to get his mind off the gun, but when he did it occurred to him that maybe Golanski meant it was his birthday. He was starting to say “congratulations,” when he noticed that Golanski was pointing. “Ohhh. You mean the tree?”

Mr. Golanski drew his bushy eyebrows together into a
white hedge that ran clear across his face. “The tree,” he said sternly, “is much older than sixty-three. The bench is sixty-three years old. I watched my father build it when I was very young. Where is your father?”

David went to the back door and called, and in a minute Dad came out, followed by the whole family. Golanski was such a weird old character that people tended to be curious, and Janie, David suspected, had some kind of tall tale going about him, because she and the twins never lost an opportunity to stare at him.

Mr. Golanski wouldn't come inside even though Molly invited him in to have breakfast. “Breakfast?” he said, frowning and looking up at the sun. He didn't say it was too late to be eating breakfast, but he might as well have. “I want only a moment of your time,” he said to Dad. “There is something you should be told.”

But when Dad asked him what it was, Golanski only frowned his famous bushy frown and jerked his head toward the kids. “In private,” he said. So Dad asked them all to go back in the house, which obviously bugged Molly and made everybody extremely curious—particularly Janie, who left very slowly with her head turned so far around backwards that she looked like an owl. As soon as she got into the kitchen, she ran to the sink, and climbed up on it and stared out the window, as
if she thought she could read Mr. Golanski's lips. The minute Dad came back into the house, everybody pounced.

“Hey, wait a minute,” Dad said. “Stand back. Give me air. I'll tell—every word—I promise. Mr. Golanski seemed to feel that what he had to say was too frightening for the tender ears of women and children, but he obviously lives in the far distant past. Ears in general have toughened since his heyday, and in this particular family—”

At that point nearly everybody interrupted at once. “Jeff,” Molly began—and then everybody was saying things like, “Okay, okay,” and “Ears—schmears.” And louder than anybody else Janie was yelling, “What did he say? Why did he have a gun? What did he say?”

“All right,” Dad said. “All right. Quiet! That's better. It seems that Mr. Golanski has been having trouble with thieves. He's lost a few chickens, and things have been disappearing from his spring house. Milk and cream and ham and once an entire pig carcass. He's convinced that the culprits are escaped prisoners. It seems some prisoners escaped from a conservation camp somewhere up in the Fillmore Hills, and there was some reason to think they headed this way.”

“Oh yes,” Molly said. “I think I heard something about it on the radio just this morning.”

“Yeah,” Amanda said. “Some of the kids were talking about
it at school. They said a police helicopter had been flying around looking for them.”

“For goodness' sake,” Molly said. “So that's what they were doing. A helicopter flew over here several times, while you were all at school. Friday morning, I think it was. It kept going back and forth right over the house, or at least that's what it sounded like.” Molly looked a little worried.

“Escaped prisoners!” Janie's eyes had their high-frequency gleam and her tone of voice was the one a normal kid would use to say “a free trip to Disneyland” or something. Dad shook his head.

“Now look here, Janie. This not a game. I don't think for a minute that Mr. Golanski is right about the prisoners hiding out near here, but if they were, it would be a serious and possibly dangerous thing. And just to be on the safe side we're going to take some precautions. It might be best if there were no more hikes in the hills until this thing is settled. And we'll all have to be extra careful about keeping everything locked up.”

Esther began to whimper and say she was scared.

“There's no need to be frightened,” Dad said. “Those prisoners could be clear across the country by now, and they probably are. David, you and Amanda were up in the hills yesterday. You didn't see any signs of campfires or anything like that, did you? Any signs of someone hanging around?”