Hunter Moran Hangs Out (2 page)

Steadman is coming out of the backyard. Clumps of
dirt cover his hands, his knees, his shirt. I don't want to think about what he's been up to.

“Yabaloo!”
Steadman shouts.

Instantly Fred's mouth snaps shut; his tail wags. He's in love with Steadman. They disappear into the house with Linny and Becca right behind them.

We're left to see the mess we've made of Pop's lawn. “It's fixable,” I say.

“How?”

“Sister Appolonia says there's a solution for everything.”

But we don't have time to think about Sister Appolonia. We have to concentrate on salvaging Pop's lawn before he gets home, and then saving Steadman from a cage, thick or otherwise.

Zack snaps his fingers. “I've got it. Follow me.”

We cross the street and walk along the weedy driveway of the empty house, until we hit the edge of Werewolf Woods. Huge trees. A muddy pond. Last year, Bradley, the neighborhood bully, with only three teeth, lisped that the pond was a bottomless pit and about forty kids had drowned in there. “Thaw a floater mythelf,” he bragged.

Zack and I keep our distance from the pond and a possible appearance by Bradley from behind one of the trees, while I wonder if the kidnapper might deposit his victims in that murky water.

“Here it is.” Zack points to a huge rock.

“What?”

“The gravestone.”

I sink down on a pile of vines as he pats the stone.

“Don't you see? We'll roll this across the street and sink it right into the footprints. We'll tell Pop—”

I hold up my hand. I can see it. We'll tell Pop a coyote dropped dead in the middle of the lawn.

Excellent.

We get behind the rock. We shove it along, circling the trees, and rumble our way across the street, our arms and legs almost caving in.

“What else could we do?” Zack says. “Steadman crying. Fred howling from grief. The coyote too big to drag . . .”

“Actually,” I put in, “the gravestone is quite . . .”

“. . . unusual,” Zack says. “It adds pizzazz to the property.”

We're totally out of breath by the time we get it in place. It looms up like a hundred-pound toad ready to spring. We're satisfied. The footprints are covered. There's only the trail the gravestone made as it wended its way over the lawn.

Unavoidable.

We head back into the house. Right now, we're on a kidnapper watch!

It's dark by the time Zack and I head upstairs. Only one room has a view of the town and maybe the kidnapper skulking around.

William's room.

We unlock the three bolts and sneak in. We sneak quietly. If William finds us, it's goodbye. William throws a mean punch.

William is weird, anyway. He's painted horrible murals of Zack and me, both of us half-devoured by saber-toothed dinosaurs. He's painted the window, too: an orange planet, wet and sticky, heads for extinction in a black hole.

You can see out the window if you line one eye up tight against the exact center of the hole. There's a bare spot the size of a nickel.

Zack leans in, then draws back. “Dark as a cave out there.” He looks like a Halloween pumpkin from the paint.

“We have to do something fast,” I say a little desperately, “before Steadman is gone forever.”

“And before Doomsday, when we're prisoners in room
213 with Sister Appolonia.” Zack squints up at the ceiling. “We could sneak across to Werewolf Woods. There's a perfect view at night.”

A voice cuts in. It's Steadman, standing in the doorway, wearing pajamas with huge holes in both knees. “You forgot. Poisonous snakes are curling themselves around the branches.”

Zack and I glance at each other. We told him that last week when he followed us in there, talking nonstop around a Snickers bar.

“Listen,” I tell him now. “It's deadly in there until the winter. You know, when it snows. The snakes hibernate like bears.”

Steadman looks suspicious. “What about the perfect view?”

“I can't stand it,” Zack says. “Didn't Mom put you to bed an hour ago?”

Steadman doesn't answer.

But wait a minute. Is that William dumping up the stairs? We dive out of there, the three of us, and head for Steadman's room, which is a minefield. Fred still isn't housebroken.

“Bedtime, guys,” Mom calls from the stairs. “Love you.”

“Love you, too,” we call down.

I try a fake yawn. “Hey, Steadman, maybe I'll just lie on your bed.” I stretch out on his quilt, away from Fred, who's
walking around the edge on two back legs like a circus dog. His breath is extra foul tonight.

“I'm so tired I can't keep my eyes open,” Zack tells Steadman. “Why don't you climb in with Hunter and get a good night's sleep? After all, kindergarten begins in a few days.”

Huge mistake.

Steadman opens his mouth so wide you can almost see his big toe, and Fred tries to take a chunk out of mine.

“I don't want to go to kindergarten!” Steadman screams.

Zack looks at me. “Remember the kindergarten prizes?” he says over Steadman's yelling and Fred's growling.

“Hmm,” I say, as if I'm trying to think. “An iPod? Someone got a motorcycle, I think.”

Zack flips up the edge of the damp rug and lies on the bare floor. “Candy, barrels of it,” he adds. “You could dive right in . . . .”

“Orange slices,” I whisper. “Hershey bars.”

“I might try it,” Steadman says. “For a couple of days.” Fred stops growling.

All is quiet.

Zack and I lie there for about seventeen hours, and finally Steadman doses his eyes. We count to one thousand to be sure he's asleep. Then we sneak out of his room and tiptoe along the hall, passing Mary's room. She's singing to herself
in her crib. Mary makes a lot of noise, too. But she's safe from kidnappers. Mom watches her like a hawk.

We hop over the open paint cans in front of William's room, also a minefield, and we go downstairs, hardly breathing.

At the living room door, Zack and I give each other a silent high five. Pop is in his big chair, snoring like a rhino. He hasn't seen the coyote gravestone, or we would have heard about it.

What a surprise he'll have in the morning, I think uneasily.

Zack gives me a nudge. Inching its way across Pop's shoe is one of the wandering worms.

Zack dives across the room and grabs the worm just before it disappears into Pop's sock. Pop never moves. That's one great thing about him. When he sleeps, he really sleeps.

We deposit the worm in its home in the kitchen, sweep Mary's half-eaten toast crumbs off her high chair for a welcome-home dinner, and imagine the reunion the worms must be having as we slide out the front door.

Pop has forgotten to lock up again, very careless, especially when there's a kidnapper lurking around. We lock the door behind us even though it wouldn't keep a flea out.

Outside, we skitter across the street, circling around the light pole, and dart down the driveway of the empty house.
Strange, it almost sounds as if there are voices inside. But no time for that. We dive into the woods.

Way into the woods.

We just have to hope the kidnapper is staked out somewhere at the other end of town.

The trees are huge, higher than houses. Dive off one of those babies, and you'd be buried right there under piles of old leaves, muck, and maybe even snakes, poisonous or otherwise.

“This isn't going to work,” Zack says.

“I know it. All you can see are tree trunks.”

Zack looks up. His head is tilted so far it's almost leaning against his back.

I look up, too. I see the tallest tree in the forest, higher than St. Ursula's Church, but skinny as a stick.

“You know what we have to do,” Zack says.

I have a sinking feeling. But he's right.

“We'll have to build a lookout tower,” Zack says. “Up on top.”

I can hardly see the top, but we can't worry about small details. Pop has rusty nails and pieces of boards all over the place.

I flex my muscles. We're ready to take action.

We grab boards from Pop's shed and drag them behind us, leaving a dusty path in the street. Who knew they'd make so much noise?

We drop them under a tree, then go back to roll a barrel of nails into the woods. The nails are leftovers from Pop's plan to build a workroom before we were born. Now he's thrilled with his lawn seeding project. He'll never miss all this stuff.

In the woods, dark leaves and branches crisscross high over our heads. “Just like
Jungle Terror
, Saturday afternoon, four o'clock,” Zack says.

There's nothing left to do but climb.

“Sheesh,” Zack says. “Climb what?”

I see what he means. The lowest limb is almost out of sight. Even Pop couldn't reach it.

Zack throws his legs around the trunk to shinny up. He gets about two feet off the ground and falls back into an ooze of mud.

I'm not going to try that. Instead, we lean Pop's barrel
against the trunk and throw ourselves on top of the barrel. The cover sinks in.

Not only have I stabbed myself in a dozen places right through my sneakers, but we're still not high enough.

“Well,” Zack says, yawning.

I hope he's going to say we'll forget about it for tonight. But no. He leans a board against the tree, backs up about ten paces, and takes off  . . .

. . . through the ooze, onto the board, and he's right there, reaching, holding on to the lowest branch, swinging like a trapeze artist.

“Good effort,” I say in a Sister Appolonia voice as he lands on a branch, legs dangling.

“Hand up another board,” he calls down. “A good one for the floor.”

I grab one that probably weighs as much as Nana and zigzag underneath, holding it high.

Zack leans over, a little too far. “Yeow!” He just avoids a major fall as he latches on to a branch. The board swings back and I manage to duck before I'm conked in the head.

We start over. This time he grabs the board. I put a couple of nails in my mouth and take off running, yelling, “Timber!” to man myself up.

Too bad about the nails. Once I open my mouth, all but one has disappeared into the undergrowth.

“Timber!
” someone whispers back at me.

“Keep going,” Zack calls down. “It's only an echo.”

“I don't think that was an echo,” I say. Halfway up, I hang on to the tree trunk. Back and forth, forth and back, until I'm dizzy. One way, I catch sight of trees with gigantic spider legs. I swing the other way. A killer snake reaches out to circle my ankle. “Poisonous!” I scream.

“A vine,” Zack says.

I close my eyes. Insects buzz. The echo keeps ringing in my ears.
Timber
.

“Let's go, Hunter,” Zack calls.

I lean my head against the trunk and open my eyes. Everything is still moving. “Onward to the next branch,” I whisper.

Toward the top, the trunk is even skinnier. It bends, it sways. And we bend and sway with it.

“High enough,” Zack says at last. “I can see St. Ursula's roof and the town round.”

He's right. I spot the railroad station and Gussie's Gym. And there's the enormous Suicide Hill, which only the bravest skateboarders in the world would dare try.

Not me. Not Zack.

But we've forgotten something. Sheesh. The barrel of nails is all the way down below, and only one nail is left in my mouth.

“Don't worry about minor things,” Zack says. “We'll lay the board out across a branch. You sit on one end. I'll sit on the other.”

A balancing act. Good.

You can't beat Zack for brains.

But it's not so easy to keep the board steady. Zack scootches in on his side; I scootch out. It's windy up there, and the board seesaws. How can I search for a kidnapper if I'm trying to steady the board?

Wait a minute. I do see something. First I think it's just a shadow. My imagination.

But on the other side of the board, Zack gulps.

It's urgent that no one sees us. I duck behind the leaves, forgetting to balance the board and myself. The board tips toward me. I tip toward the ground far below. Zack is somewhere above me.

“Looook oooouuuut!”
I shout.

I slide . . .

Fall.

The board snaps back.

We sail through the air, dislodging leaves and small branches.

“Yeooooowwwww!”
I scream all the way down.

Across the street, Fred yowls, too.

“I'm dead,” Zack moans.

“You're right.” I try to figure out if I'm breathing.

“Not even close to dead,” a voice says. “Just scrambled brains.”

The kidnapper? A female kidnapper?

I look up. Sarah Yulefski.

“I can't believe it.” Yulefski, the echo I heard, the shadow I saw.

“Believe it,” she says. “But I'm out of here. Your father's coming this way.”

Yes, the front door is open, and Pop is coming down the steps. We must have made enough noise to wake the whole town. Leaves are still floating down.

I scramble up, searching for a place to hide. But Pop has eagle eyes. I watch helplessly. There's nowhere in the woods he won't see. Nowhere in town.

Of course he'll see us.

I hear Zack gasp. He knows it, too.

But no. It's something else.

Pop starts across the newly seeded lawn. “Sheesh,” Zack says. “Pop doesn't see the coyote's gravestone.”

There isn't time to yell
“Watch out!”

Pop slams into the gravestone. He slides over the top and ends up draped over the whole thing, his head on one side, his feet on the other.

He's down.

But not dead.

His yowl is louder than Fred's.

“You'd better do something,” Sarah Yulefski says over her shoulder as she heads out of the woods. “He's probably broken his neck.”