Tangled Webb (9 page)

WEDNESDAY, JULY 24

All
sorts
of things have happened. Where'll I start? With Monday afternoon, I guess, when Alison and I were on Mall Patrol. I really didn't want to do it anymore, I'm
sick
of the mall, but Alison's just like a mosquito for being persistent. A good thing, too. If we hadn't been there—right where we were, right
when
we were, and with
who
, I mean
whom
, we were . . .

I'd better start over. Monday afternoon, when we got to the mall, Alison peeled off to the Clock Shop to leave her mom's watch to be fixed, and I went on to Grover Brothers'. I was supposed to take the escalator up to Four, which is the top, watching all the way for that woman, and Alison would do her errand, then take the elevator and meet me up there. Then we'd both escalate down, looking carefully around each floor as we went.

Well, I was rising slowly from One to Two, peering around below me, and I caught sight of that tall blond kid again. I noticed him because he was practically running—toward the foot of my escalator. I got to the top about then and lost him, but on the way up to Three I kept an eye out, and sure enough, when I was almost there he stepped on at Two. He wasn't looking toward me or anything, and I decided it was
possible
he was just heading for men's suits, which is on Three, but I didn't believe it. It was beginning to make me mad. I mean, I was getting good and
tired
of him tagging me around.

So when I got to Four and spotted him getting on after some women down below me, I just walked behind a big display of curtains up at the top there and waited. There's nothing much on Four but offices, the home decoration department, and the beauty shop. I could peek through the curtain display, and I saw him get off, stand looking around a second, then start hurrying—it happened to be in my direction.

Well, I just stepped out in front of him and glared, and he stopped as if he'd run into a building. I said, “Quit following me around!”

He gave this big gulp that made his Adam's apple bob up and down. I saw he was a kid, all right, probably not much older than me, and staring at me like something in a trap.

I said, “Who are you, anyhow?”

He gulped again, cleared his throat, and said, “Peter John Eliot” in a voice that was just getting over being soprano.

Peter John Eliot. He said it as if it might mean something to me, and all of a sudden it did. I could feel my jaw drop—just the way it says in books. I said,
“Peter Cottontail
?”

He went so red his eyebrows looked almost white. “Pete,” he told me in this sort of strangled voice.

“Sorry,” I mumbled. I mean, if I hadn't been so surprised I
never would've been so tactless.

“Pete Eliot from second grade, Hillridge Elementary,” he explained carefully. He was getting his vocal cords straightened out by now. “And you've got to be Juniper Webb.”

“That's right.”

“I wasn't sure. You've got so tall.”

Other people can be tactless, too. I snapped, “Look who's talking,” and waited for
him
to mumble, “Sorry,” which he did, with another hair-whitening blush. “Is that why you've been following me around?” I demanded. “How come you didn't just walk right up and ask?”

“Not supposed to do that,” Pete said.

“I wouldn't've panicked or anything,” I told him. “Being followed everywhere bugged me lots worse.”

Pete sighed and nodded. “I make lots of lousy decisions.”

I decided to quit being mad at him. I could remember old Peter Cottontail—better than I remembered the rest of second grade. He was always doing something oddball, not quite how the teacher said to do it—but he was a nice kid. Kind of sobersides, with ears that stuck out. And a lot smarter than he looked. We used to be good buddies, way back then. “How come you suddenly show up in Hillridge?” I asked him. “I thought you moved away.”

“We did. To Kansas City. Dad's just now wangled a transfer back to the Portland branch. You still live where you used to?”

“Yeah, on Madrona Lane.”

“Then we're neighbors again. We found a house on Forest Road—about a block from where we used to live.” He had the same slow, white grin, wide as a jack-o'-lantern's. “I'll be going to Hillridge Middle School next fall—same class as you.”

“Well. Great.” It suddenly occurred to me that when I'd last seen him—to talk to—Margo had still been alive and going strong. He knew her. He'd been in that second grade Christmas pageant she'd organized. He was the front half of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. I forget who the back half was, but I was a King of Orient—the shortest of the three. Things had really changed since then.
Everything
. I said abruptly, “My mother died.”

All he said was, “Oh,” but the way he looked when he said it told me a lot more—that it shocked him, that he didn't know what to say, that he was sorry, that he remembered being inside the front half of Rudolph the Reindeer and remembered
her
. Nobody, especially little kids, who ever knew Margo ever forgot her. I began to feel as if he'd never been away, that
he
hadn't changed, just got bigger, and that we were still the same old-shoe, sandpile buddies. I started telling him about Daddy getting married again, and Kelsey and Preston and all. Only I guess I shut up pretty suddenly about Kelsey, because he noticed.

“You don't like her?” he said.

“Oh, sure I do. I mean, she's real nice and everything.”

“Only what?”

He hadn't got a bit less sharp since the second grade. I said, “Well, there's some things I don't understand yet. I'm working on it.”

He nodded and dropped the subject, only it didn't stay dropped because the next thing he said was, “How come you ride up and down the escalators all the time?” Well, I didn't know how to answer that one. Fortunately, he went right on. “Is that your best friend, the girl who's always with you?”

“Yeah. Alison Fisher—don't you remember?” He shook his head, and then
I
remembered that Alison and her mom didn't
move here till the summer before third grade.

Just about that very minute, I saw Alison coming toward us from the elevators, her eyes wide and her mouth dropping open when she spotted who I was standing right beside and talking to. I said, “Come on, I'd better introduce you.”

We started toward her and met near the credit office, just across from the up escalator but a good half-block from the elevators, which are clear down by the beauty shop, the whole length of the fourth floor away. All this is important.

So I introduced them. Alison was taking him in, head to foot, with her eyes gleaming in her round black face. She glanced at me and said, “So. Does he say he can explain everything?”

“I'm doing my best,” Pete said nervously. I guess he thought Alison might bawl him out, too. But she only laughed and I started telling her about the second grade, but something red caught my eye down by the beauty shop, and I focused on it and broke off with a sort of electric shock.

“Alison!” I practically screeched. “There she
is.
”

“Who? Where?” cried Alison, whirling around right in my way as I was trying to dodge around her.

“Our woman! Quick! She's about to get on the elevator!” I nearly knocked Alison down trying to sprint past her, but before I could get up any speed somebody grabbed my arm and I did a sort of
tour-jeté
-type leaping turn like in ballet class and darn near landed on my nose. It was Pete, saying something urgent I didn't hear because I was indignantly telling him to LET GO, but then I realized he was saying,
“Escalator! Quicker!”
; and after one glance at the elevator—it was the middle one, and the doors were just closing behind the woman—I also realized he was right. So I quit fighting and
sprinted for the escalator instead, Alison right beside me and Pete galumphing along behind.

We didn't just tamely ride down on the escalator, of course. We pounded down the steps as fast as we could manage without bowling over all the innocent bonafide shoppers trying to ride down too—edging real politely past old ladies and mothers with children, then leaping onward three steps at a time. Pete kept his neck craned to spot the elevators on each floor and gave us instant bulletins: “Middle car didn't stop on Three—going on past Two—”

And wouldn't you know, on the last lap from Two to One we came smack up behind a couple of broad-beamed, unhurried shoppers standing side by side and filling the whole stair, yakking away too hard even to hear me saying, “Excuse me.” When one of them finally did, she simply gave me this drop-dead look over her shoulder and didn't move an inch. They even took their time stepping off at the bottom and moving away, still yakking.

By then the last person was leaving the middle elevator—a man with a briefcase. I couldn't see the woman anywhere. Pete suddenly said, “Red jacket?” Alison said, “Yes!” and Pete pointed toward the side exit doors, the ones that open directly outside to the parking area and the shelter where the special mall buses stop. I just glimpsed a red blob outside, beyond the glass doors—maybe our woman, maybe not—but we all started for the doors anyhow, without much hope because we were miles behind by that time and the main floor was crowded with people going every which way.

We finally got through the doors and outside, and there were all these millions of parked cars, and Alison said, “We'll never find her here!” But Pete, who seems to have more brains
than the two of us together, pointed again. The woman was just getting on a bus. About twenty seconds later it drove off.

We stood in a row and watched it. Pete said—sort of sad but still trying—“It was a number 48.”

We nodded. That one shuttles between Portland and some suburbs south of here. We'd narrowed our search to about two counties.

“At least she hasn't gone back out of town,” Alison reminded me. “She's sticking around, the way we thought.”

“Maybe she doesn't even live there anymore. Maybe she moved here,” I said.

“She might've. We might find her yet.”

Pete had been turning his head from one to the other of us, like watching a tennis match. Suddenly he said, “Would anybody like to tell me what this is all about?”

Alison and I both looked at him for a minute, then at each other. He'd been pretty darn helpful, when you thought about it. Without even knowing the score. Helpful and smart. By the time we broke eye contact, we'd decided.

“Okay,” I said. “Let's get out of here and go someplace where we can talk.”

We went to the park and sat under a tree, and I told him the whole Kelsey mystery, and how far we'd got investigating it, which wasn't far, and about the woman yelling “robbers” or maybe “Robert” and our various dumb theories, none of which would hold water and all of which sounded stupid when I tried to explain them to him. Of course I didn't give away the secret about the new baby.

He just listened, blinking now and then but not saying anything. When I'd finished he took a real deep breath and said, “Wow. I see why you want to find that woman.”

“What d'you think?” Alison said. “Was she saying ‘robbers' or ‘Robert'?”

Pete just shrugged. After a minute he said, “You know what? You better go kind of careful. You better find out
all
about this before you go blowing the whistle on—on Mrs. Webb.”

“It's okay, you can call her Kelsey, everybody does,” I said. “Why have we got to be careful?”

Pete shifted sort of uncomfortably, folding both long legs up like jackknives and wrapping his long arms around them. “Might be dangerous,” he said vaguely. Margo would've said he threw the line away—that's what actors call it when they speak an important line in a real casual voice, only making sure the audience gets it.

Well, I got the line, all right—so did Alison; she sort of came alert—but neither of us really got his point. She asked, “Dangerous for Kelsey, you mean?”

Pete said, “Dangerous for everybody.” Without giving me a chance to ask why, which I was going to, he changed the subject. “I'm kind of interested in this Tim Blockman—or Jim, or whoever.”

“He might not even be real,” I reminded him.

“Yeah, well, even if he's not. Or even if he's dead. There's a lot we don't know about him.”

“If he's dead, what's there to know?”

“Well—like did he drown or did she kill him?”

Alison and I both stared at him. I said—louder than I meant to—“You're crazy. Kelsey wouldn't
kill
anybody!”

“Not even to save her little kid's life? Or her own?”

“No! I mean—I don't know. But I can't even imagine—”

“It's awful hard to imagine somebody else's life,” Pete said.
“Or what a person might do in a real bad situation. What you might do yourself, even.”

I didn't know what to say, so I didn't say anything. Neither did Alison. I don't know what she was thinking, but I was trying to imagine some big bully yanking Preston around, hurting him,
trying
to hurt him. In two seconds I was so mad I was gritting my teeth and imagining myself grabbing up a poker or a lamp or something and just
smashing
it down on the bully's head, over and over, and screaming at him, and kicking him. I mean, it scared me, how I felt, and how
fast
I felt it.

I had to suck in a sudden big breath and sort of pull myself back to the nice quiet park. I noticed Alison was blinking hard and staring at Pete as if he'd opened a box of snakes. Maybe she'd been imagining somebody hurting her cousin Tracy's little boy, Sammy.