William S. and the Great Escape (11 page)

There were pedestrians, too, and two or three of them looked vaguely familiar, like people he might have seen before, and who might recognize him as one of the missing Baggetts. But each time, the dangerous not-complete-stranger went right on by. It was the cap that saved him, he was sure of that, along with his ability to play a role. In this case, the role of a rich-kid relative of the Ogden family.

Two or three more pedestrians went by without gasping or staring, before William reached the comparative safety of Gardenia Street. Once there, walking faster and faster, he quickly arrived at the driveway that led down to the large, brown-shingled home of the well-known Ogden family. A home whose solid, respectable appearance certainly wouldn't cause anyone to suspect that a bunch of Baggetts were holed up in the basement.

But not any longer,
William told himself as he started down the steps that led to the basement.
Tomorrow we're out of here.

When he reached out for the latch, the basement door flew open and there was Jancy, looking as wild-eyed as if she'd just seen an ogre, or perhaps her fairy godmother.
“Oh, William,” she kind of gasped. “You're all right. You are all right, aren't you? Did you see anyone who knew who you were?”

“Not a soul,” William said. “And not even one policeman. Just like I told you, Clarice must have been making stuff up about all the police cars and everything, just to keep us from leaving.”

Jancy managed a shaky grin. “Just to keep
you
from leaving, anyway,” she said. He ignored her.

Rather reluctantly William got out of his rich-kid costume, and the rest of that day passed pretty much the same as before, except that William and Jancy managed to sneak in a few minutes of secret planning now and then. Secret because, if they knew what was about to happen, there was no way in the world Trixie and Buddy would be able to keep their mouths shut when Clarice showed up that afternoon. Not even if they'd been warned that they mustn't tell her. Which meant that all the real packing would have to be done after the little kids were asleep that evening.

“And then we'll have to get them up in time to leave for the bus station by a little after six,” William said.

“Will that be early enough?” Jancy asked.

William nodded uncertainly. “I think so. It's only about ten blocks to downtown, but with all the stuff we'll be lugging, including Buddy if we can't wake him up, we better have almost an hour.”

“About all our clothes and stuff—,” Jancy was beginning when William interrupted.

“I know. That's a problem. I don't think we should drag that flour sack and pillow case downtown with us. I mean, if we do, people are bound to get suspicious. I'm afraid we'll just have to shove as much clothing as we can into my knapsack and leave the rest behind.”

Jancy sighed and shook her head. “But your knapsack is pretty full already with just your stuff in it. And if we leave most of our clothes here, what about when Aunt Fiona finds out that she has to go right out and buy us all something to wear? She just might—she might decide not to …”

Jancy stammered to a stop, but she'd already said enough to make William realize that he wasn't the only one who was worried about what Fiona Hardison would do when four hungry, shabby, uninvited kids showed up on her doorstep. But a minute later when Jancy pleaded, “Couldn't you leave that big, heavy
Shakespeare
book here? Just for now, so we can take all our clothes? If you write Clarice a letter once we get to Gold Beach, maybe she'll mail it to you.” Jancy's grin was slightly teasing as she went on, “I'll bet you a hundred dollars she would if you wrote her a real nice letter and signed it, ‘Love, William.'”

William gave her a cold stare. “Where I go,
Shakespeare
goes,” he told her so firmly she didn't bother to ask again.

J
ancy made that suggestion about leaving
Shakespeare
behind in the early afternoon, while the little kids were busy playing tug-of-war with Ursa. It was nearly two o'clock and almost time for Clarice to come back from her aunt's house when Jancy came up with another crazy idea. She'd been prowling around the basement looking in some of the cabinets, and now she came over and tugged at William's arm.

“Look what I found,” she said, and pulled him toward a large cabinet in the back of the big room. Opening the tall double doors, she said, “See, suitcases. All kinds of suitcases.”

William gave her an even colder stare. “You don't mean we—,” he began, but she interrupted.

“It wouldn't be stealing. We could leave a note telling the Ogdens that we borrowed one of their suitcases, and when we get to Aunt Fiona's we'll send it back to them. And look, maybe we could take just that old-looking
one way down there at the bottom. They probably don't use that one anymore, anyway. “

At first William was against the whole idea, and he told Jancy so. Told her how one of the first
Shakespeare
quotes Miss Scott had taught her class was, “
Neither a borrower nor a lender be
.” But when he'd had time to think about it, he realized that what Jancy was saying really did make sense. If they left a note, it wouldn't actually be stealing. And it
would
be a lot safer to appear in the bus station looking like part of a normal tourist-type family, instead of a bunch of tramps. Or runaways?

But there was another possibility. “Wait a minute,” William said. “Maybe it would be all right to just go ahead and tell Clarice that we have to leave. You know, because tomorrow will be Saturday. She must know that there's no way we could stay here on a weekend with her folks home all day.” He grinned. “We could mention how lawyer-type people like her parents aren't likely to take kindly to having a bunch of people the police are looking for right here in their own house. If we put it to her that way—make her see what might happen—I bet she'd say, ‘Okay, go. Get out.'”

He acted that last part out, stamping his foot and pointing dramatically as he said, “Okay, go! Get out!” But before he even finished the act, Jancy started shaking her curly head, and went on shaking it for a long time after he finished his dramatic scene.

At last she said, “William. You are
so
wrong. If we tell Clarice we're going to leave, she'll find some way to stop us. Believe me.”

He didn't. Not really. But then again, maybe he just didn't understand women. So maybe he'd better listen to what Jancy was saying. He sighed. “Yeah, well, I guess you might be right. Looks like we better not tell her.”

It was only a few minutes after they'd finally settled the suitcase argument, when Clarice showed up carrying a big grocery bag. She said hi to everyone and told the kids that dinner was almost ready. But then she motioned for William and Jancy to come sit on the steps with her. “We have to talk,” she said. And as soon as they were seated she began. “It's about weekends.”

Weekends
, William noticed. Not this weekend, but
weekends
. As if she were planning on a lot of them. Jancy got it too. She caught William's eye and lifted an eyebrow before she ducked her head and hid her face.

“Yeah. We were wondering about the weekend,” William said. “Aren't your folks home all day on Saturdays and Sundays?”

“Well, sometimes,” Clarice said. “Except tomorrow they're both going to a Chamber of Commerce lunch that starts around eleven and always lasts most of the afternoon, so there'll be plenty of time for you to come up and have a noon meal. A big one, so there'll be enough leftovers to bring down here for supper. But I
was
thinking that breakfasts on weekends might be a problem, until … But look what I thought up.” She opened the paper bag and showed them a dozen big glazed doughnuts, and beneath that a whole bunch of oranges.

As soon as Clarice opened the bag, Ursa dropped the rag he'd been playing with and came over to sit at the foot of the stairs, sniffing eagerly. Trixie and Buddy were right behind him. On his way to the stairs, Buddy was sniffing too. “What's in the bag, Clice?” he said.

“Breakfast.” Clarice closed the bag, ran down the stairs to one of the tall cupboards, and put the bag way up on a high shelf. Buddy was right behind her, staring up at the bag. “Not right now,” she told him. “It's for breakfast.”

“Oh, breakfuss.” Buddy sounded disappointed. “But it smells good right now.”

Clarice laughed. “It will smell even better in the morning.” To William and Jancy she added, “In the morning, just be sure to keep them quiet until you hear the car leave. That probably won't be until about ten thirty.”

On the way up the stairs, headed for the kitchen and dinner, Jancy gave William a significant look. All he could do was shrug and nod. She was right. It was probably better that Clarice didn't know.

Dinner was tuna and noodles again. Apparently Clarice's lessons with her aunt's cook hadn't gotten
much farther than roast chicken and tuna and noodles. After that there was the kitchen to clean up, a quick trip to the playroom to exchange toys, and then the four basement dwellers were herded back down to their hideout, just in time to hear the Ogdens' car rolling down the driveway.

Next came keeping the kids quiet until they finally got sleepy, putting them to bed, waiting for them to fall asleep, and then beginning to pack. After piling his own clothing on top of
Doubleday's Complete Works of William Shakespeare
in his knapsack, William helped Jancy pack nearly everything else into the old leather suitcase.

While the two of them were packing, William was also doing some important planning. “I've been thinking,” he said. “Once we get to Main Street we better go two by two. Like, Buddy with me, and Trixie with you. Pretending like we don't even know each other.”

Jancy started to frown, but then she sighed and nodded. “Yeah, I get it,” she said. “If there were posters about us, like Clarice said, and maybe something in the paper, too, it would have said there were four of us. Like …” She pretended to write a headline in the air. “‘Four Baggett Kids Missing.' Right?”

“Right,” William agreed. Jancy was nobody's fool. He got four dollars and twenty-five cents out of the bag that held his Getaway Fund and gave it to her. “Four dollars for two under-twelve-year-old tickets, and a little change,
just in case,” he said. “You can buy your own ticket and the one for Trixie. Okay?”

Jancy smoothed the dollars out on her knee and stared at them wide-eyed for a minute before she folded them carefully and put them in the little bag she used for a purse. She was looking excited and kind of proud. Probably it was the most money she'd ever held in her own hands, all at one time. “Okay,” she said firmly. “I can do that.”

So that much seemed to be decided, but there still was the problem of being sure to wake up early enough. But then Jancy came through again. Maybe? It seemed she'd been operating on the old alarm clock, and she thought she might have fixed it. “This morning, while you were gone, I opened up the back and connected a kind of lever thing that had come loose,” she told William. “And then I set it for an hour later, and sure enough, it went off. Just like it used to. So now all we have to do is set it for six o'clock.”

“And hope for the best,” William said, secretly thinking they'd better not count on it. He'd simply do what he'd done before and force himself to stay awake all night. So he got into bed and started forcing himself, but without having had an afternoon nap, he wasn't too successful. The next thing he knew the alarm was going off, just like Jancy said it would, and it was six o'clock in the morning.

B
efore they got Trixie and Buddy up and dressed, they'd put the luggage outside the basement door, and Jancy had written the note explaining about the borrowed, not stolen, suitcase. Then at the last minute before waking Trixie and trying to wake Buddy, the oranges were peeled and the doughnut box invitingly opened. The doughnuts worked miracles. One sniff and old “dead-to-the-world” Buddy was wide awake, and then too busy eating doughnuts to even ask why. But when the doughnuts were all gone, the questions began.

“Why are we eating breakfuss down here?” That was Buddy, and then from Trixie, “Why can't we eat upstairs in the kitchen like before?” and then from the two of them, both at once and one at a time: “Where's Clarice?” from Trixie. “Where's Clice?” from Buddy. “Where's Ursa?” from both of them.

William decided it was time to try to explain, at least partly. To say, “This time we really are going to the Greyhound station, and then we'll go on a big bus to
Gold Beach. But we're going to have to leave very quietly like we did before.”

Trixie looked anxious. “Like we did before? In the dark? I don't want to. I like it here. Why do we have to go?” she whimpered.

“It won't be in the dark because it's not as early as it was when we did it before,” Jancy told her, but she only went on whimpering.

“Do I ride in the wagon like before?” Buddy wanted to know, and then before anyone could even try to answer, “Why not? Why can't I? Why are we going away, Willum?”

“Because I said so.” William's growl sounded so Baggetty that it surprised everyone into sudden silence. Even William himself. He had to swallow hard and take a deep breath before he could add, “So come on now. We're leaving right this minute.”

And they did, but not easily. For one thing, it turned out that the overstuffed leather suitcase was so heavy that, without help, skinny little Jancy could barely get it off the ground. So there went the plan to split up and go two by two, at least for the long walk down Gardenia Street. With his knapsack over one shoulder, William had a hand free to help out with the suitcase, but it was slow going. All the way down Gardenia they stopped to rest every few yards while Trixie and Buddy circled around them asking excited questions. The only good news was that
there wasn't a single curious passerby around to watch and wonder, and maybe remember hearing something about four missing kids. Not a soul. People who lived on Gardenia Street, it seemed, didn't go out walking at six thirty in the morning.