Runaways (16 page)

The giggling was still going on when the Silver Grill’s front door banged open and Ronnie Grabler came in. After stopping for a moment to look around, he swaggered across the room, heading right for their table.

Ignoring the rest of them, he looked right at Linda and said, “Hey, where you been? I been looking for you.”

“For me?” Linda looked worried, which certainly wasn’t surprising. Hearing that a Grabler was looking for you, even if it was only old Ronnie, would worry just about anybody. What was surprising to Dani was her own reaction, which felt a lot like anger. Throat-squeezing, heart-pounding anger.

She’d had enough experience with anger attacks to know that when you’re in the midst of one, your thoughts can get a little confused. But what she was thinking at the moment seemed perfectly calm and logical. What she was thinking was, Where does a stupid overgrown kid get off telling somebody’s mother that he’s looking for her? She was just about to say so out loud when Ronnie said, “My dad wants to see you. He said to tell you he wants you to come by when you get off work today. He wants to see you today.” He didn’t go on to say, “And you better be there,” but his tone of voice made it pretty clear that was what he meant. Then he swiveled around on the high heels of his cowboy boots and strutted off.

From then on the lunch definitely went downhill. When Linda left for the bookstore, she was still looking upset and worried, and Dani went back to the cabin feeling pretty much the same way. Pixie and Stormy didn’t seem too concerned right at that moment, but a little later, during Stormy’s first turn on the bike, Pixie came into the house looking for Dani.

“Hi?” she said, making the word sound like a question. A question like “Are you okay?”

Dani, who’d been lying on the daybed on her stomach, with her chin resting on her folded arms, raised her head and said, “Yeah, yeah, I’m okay.” And then, after a pause, “I guess I am.”

Pixie came closer. “I don’t think so,” she said.

“What don’t you think?”

“That you’re okay. You don’t seem okay to me.”

Dani shrugged. “Okay, so I’m not okay.”

Pixie stared at her for a moment before she said, “I have some money for our running-away fund.” Fishing around in her pocket, she brought out three dollar bills and some change. “There,” she said. “It’s three dollars and eighteen cents. It’s not enough, I know, but I’m going to get some more. On my birthday. I always get lots of money on my birthday.”

“Oh yeah? When’s that?” Dani asked.

“Next week,” Pixie said. “On June twenty-fifth.”

“Yeah, well, that’s great. But you aren’t really going to get enough for the tickets, are you? I think we’ll need almost fifty dollars more if we’re all going to go.”

Pixie nodded thoughtfully. “I think I’ll get more than that. You know, from my grandmother.”

Dani sighed inwardly. Pixie looked and sounded so confident—and honest. It was hard not to believe her, even though you knew you’d better not.

“That much?” Dani asked.

“I think so.” Pixie nodded again and sat down on the other end of the daybed, folding her hands in her lap. After a minute she asked, “What else?”

“What do you mean, what else?”

“What else is wrong?”

Dani thought about saying, “Nothing. Nothing else.” After that she considered, “None of your business,” but instead she wound up telling the truth. “I don’t know what else is wrong, but something always is when the Grablers want to see you.” She took a deep breath before she added, “I just have this feeling that something very bad is about to happen.”

I
T WASN’T THE FIRST
time that Dani had had a premonition that something awful was about to happen, and her premonitions had usually come true. Although on second thought, she had to admit that the awful thing that happened sometimes wasn’t all that easy to spot. There had been, for instance, occasions when it had taken a while before she recognized as pretty awful some event she might have failed to notice if she hadn’t been looking for trouble.

But the premonition she had that afternoon while Linda was visiting the Grablers was the strongest one ever, and what it was telling her was that something terrible was about to happen. When Linda finally showed up, though, it seemed that just the opposite was true. At least it did right at first.

It was late when Linda finally appeared. The black tank had long since crawled to a stop outside the cabin door, and Pixie had run out to meet it. Even though dinnertime had come and gone Stormy was still right there in the O’Donnells’ kitchen, looking hopeful. At last Dani decided somebody had to do something, so she began to peel some potatoes. She was starting on the second one when Linda finally walked slowly up the back steps and into the kitchen, looking—not angry exactly, but not happy either. Just tired and worried.

“So what happened? What did they want?” Dani demanded immediately. “What did the Grabby Grablers want to see you about?”

Linda put her purse down on the table and stood for a second or two with her back to Dani before she turned around slowly and said, “It seems the Grablers want to buy our ranch. They made an offer for all of it. The house and the land too.”

Trying to control a surge of hope and excitement that for a moment almost swamped her voice, Dani said, “But why? I mean, why do they want to buy it? When we were trying to sell it before, they said it was worthless.” Dani remembered very well what the Grablers had said, which was that the O’Donnells’ land was worse than worthless because the upkeep and taxes would be more than what you could sell it for.

Linda nodded. “I know. I don’t understand why they’ve changed their mind.” Sitting down at the table, she stared off into space for several seconds before she went on. “Brenda tried to make it sound as if they were doing it out of the goodness of their hearts, because they’d heard I might be losing my job. But I found that a little hard to believe.” She smiled ruefully. “However, it’s true that whatever their motivation was, there didn’t seem to be much of it. Judging by what they were offering, at least.”

But at that point Dani wasn’t concerned about offers and motivations. The rising tide of hope was getting higher and higher. Putting down the half-peeled potato, she sat at the table opposite her mother. “Well, what I think,” she said, her voice a little jittery with excitement, “is that you ought to take it. I mean even if it’s not very much it’s got to be enough to pay off our debts and move us back to Sea Grove. It has to be that much, doesn’t it?”

Out of the corner of her eye Dani noticed that Stormy had taken her place at the sink and was finishing the potato she’d been working on. A move which she should have questioned since Stormy often had bad luck with sharp objects. But her mind was elsewhere. “It has to be that much, doesn’t it?” she asked her mother again.

Linda sighed. “That’s just it. It isn’t that much. What they’re offering is ridiculous, really. They’re willing to honor my lease to the Smithsons for five more months and pay me three hundred dollars besides, if they can buy the property immediately. Which means they’d get the house and all that land for just three hundred dollars of their own money.” She shook her head slowly. “It would pay off our debts, just barely, but with hardly anything left over. It’s really an unbelievably low offer.”

“But we have to take it,” Dani wailed. “It’s probably the best chance we’ll ever have to get out of here. We have to take it.”

But Linda only shook her head, and it was then that the premonition about something terrible happening began to come true. This time it turned out to be the worst argument that Dani and her mother had ever had. The argument went on and on, with both of them saying the same old things, only getting angrier and meaner than usual. After a while they were practically shouting at each other.

At one point Dani yelled, “You just don’t care about what I want or what happens to me. You wouldn’t care if I just dried up and blew away, would you? Then you could just go on reading your mushy books and listening to your soap operas without anyone bugging you all the time. That’s right, isn’t it?”

And then Linda said, “No that’s not true, Danielle O’Donnell, and you know it. You know I want to leave here too, but there’s no way we can do that when we have nowhere to go and no money to get there.”

There was no telling how and when the argument might have ended except that just as the shouting was at its worst Stormy started yelling too. But what he was shouting was, “Ow, ow. I’m bleeding to death.”

Of course Stormy wasn’t bleeding to death, but it was a pretty deep cut, and everything else came to a stop while Linda ran to get her first-aid things and then worked at getting the bleeding to stop. By the time she was finished with the bandaging, Stormy had stopped worrying about his finger and had started worrying about the potatoes. “Did I bleed on the potatoes?” he kept asking. “Can you eat bloody potatoes?”

It was just about then that Linda got very stubborn and insisted that there would be no more discussion about selling or moving until dinner was over. “Absolutely none at all,” she said. “Do you hear me, Dani?” It sounded like she really meant it, and it turned out she did, because when Dani tried to sneak in one more important point her mother put down what she was working on and said she was going to throw the dinner in the garbage and go lock herself in the bathroom if Dani didn’t shut up.

Being told to shut up was something that Dani wasn’t used to, and it made her really angry. For a second she actually thought about saying, “Go ahead and do it.” But then she happened to look at Stormy. It was the horror-struck expression on Stormy’s face, along with the fact that by then she herself was pretty hungry too, that made her bite her tongue. But as soon as dinner was over and Stormy had gone back to the hotel the argument started up again.

Linda was still sitting at the table finishing her cup of tea and Dani sat down too. Trying to keep her voice calm and reasonable, she said, “Anyway, you didn’t tell them no, for sure, did you?”

Linda shook her head. “No, not exactly,” she said. “I said I’d need a while to think about it.”

So there was still some hope. Keeping her voice as calm as possible, Dani said, “Okay, then just promise me one thing. Just promise me that you won’t tell them no, for sure, until we have time to talk about it some more.”

But then Linda said she didn’t think she could wait very long to decide. “They really seem to be in a hurry,” she said. “When I reminded them that the ranch was leased to the Smithsons for almost five more months, they said that was all right but the sale had to go through right away or they wouldn’t be interested.”

“That’s crazy,” Dani said. “If they’re in such a hurry to buy the house, why don’t they care if someone else has the right to go on living there for such a long time?”

“That’s right,” Linda said. “It does seem strange. In fact it seems to me that there are just too many suspicious things about this whole offer.”

That didn’t sound good. “But you won’t say no right away, will you?” Dani pleaded.

Linda sighed and shook her head. “Dani,” she said. “I promised them I’d give them an answer by Thursday. And I’m afraid the answer will have to be no.”

At that point Dani slapped both her hands down on the table and jumped up so fast her chair fell over backward. As it crashed to the floor she ran from the room, pausing only long enough to shout, “You’ll be sorry. If you make us stay here forever you’re really going to be sorry.”

I
T WAS THAT VERY
night, the night of the big fight with her mother, that the feeling of certainty came back. It was then that the absolute certainty that she, Dani O’Donnell, was about to leave Rattler Springs returned with all the strength it had that day in April, in the old graveyard.

Sitting cross-legged on her bed—much too hot and angry to even think of going to sleep—Dani thought for quite a while about the reasons she’d almost lost her determination. Part of it was Stormy’s fault, of course. His fault at first for insisting that he was going with her and then, after she’d gotten used to the idea and begun to depend on it, losing interest in the whole project. She didn’t know why Stormy had finked out, but it wasn’t hard to figure that Pixie’s arrival on the scene had something to do with it. Pixie and, of course, the Black Phantom.

It really made Dani angry when she thought about Stormy turning into such a two-faced traitor after she had been his best, almost his only, friend for such a long time. And after all those hours of reading out loud, too, not to mention all those healthy meals. Of course she had to give Linda some of the credit for the meals, but if Dani hadn’t been letting the little pest hang around he wouldn’t have been there to be fed all that healthy stuff. And then, after all that, for him to throw her over for a lousy little liar and her expensive bicycle.

And speaking of the little liar, Pixie herself was also to blame for Dani’s feelings of discouragement. No one but Pixie could have caused the hopeless feeling that happens when something terribly important is promised to you and then, at the last moment, snatched away. As when you were promised one hundred and seventy-five dollars for the running-away fund and then, at the last moment, discovered that all that money had been spent on one stupid bicycle.

So losing that wonderful fierce certainty had been partly Stormy’s fault and partly Pixie’s—and, an even larger part, Linda’s. Like maybe Linda had guessed what Dani was planning to do and, instead of saying so, had tried to stop it by being pitiful.

Like that day she’d cried about losing her job, for instance. Dani had felt that those tears were definitely unfair. And the other things that Linda had been doing to make Dani feel guilty weren’t fair either. But she wasn’t going to feel guilty anymore. All that guilty stuff had ended when Linda decided to turn down the Grablers’ offer and threw away the best chance she and Dani would ever have to get back home. She would never, Dani told herself, forgive her mother for that. In fact she probably would never speak to her mother, ever again.