Wanted! (17 page)

“It was awful,” said Alice. “They stalked me. They wanted to throw me to the ground.”

“I don’t think so. I think they wanted to help. We tried to stop them and make them go to school, but you actually had a lot of admirers who weren’t going to listen to any crap about how you hurt anybody. So they were out there in the roads, trying to find you and help. A girlfriend of yours was up at dawn. Kelsey was sure you’d go home. She said your whole life was home. She saw you drive away from your mother’s house and she followed you here. Kelsey called in from her car phone.”

Alice was so tired she could not even picture her best friend. She could think only of being with her mother again. “Are you arresting Mr. Rellen?”

“We’re reading him his rights and asking him to come down to headquarters to talk. You just sit here between us and don’t look. It isn’t pretty.”

“
I’m
not pretty. I’m filthy and disgusting.”

“Yeah, but you’re alive. That’s pretty cool. You know, Alice, if you had just trusted one grown-up, if you’d called just one friend, we would have reached you and explained what we knew and you wouldn’t have had to go through this.”

“I did call!” she said. “I called home. The policewoman sure didn’t make it sound like she believed in me.”

“Nobody handled this real well,” he admitted. “We don’t have many murders like this. We were all a little crazed the first day. Just like you. And it was a heck of a confession, Alice. Everybody fell for it at first.” He paused. “Where did you spend the nights?”

“A girl at State University let me stay in her room. She didn’t call you?”

“Nobody called us.”

So Ginger just thought Alice was an incredibly rude houseguest who fled in the morning without saying thank you. And perhaps Amanda, with her large wardrobe, had not noticed anything missing. And maybe Paul, with exams on his mind, had not thought of her again.

Alice said, “I want my mother.” Alice whimpered softly.

He nodded. “Hop in the backseat; I can’t drive around with you up front. We’ll go over to your house. Your mom and your grandparents should be back from the airport. You just hang on another ten minutes.”

“Does she know yet about Richard Rellen?”

“No.”

“Maybe she’ll be on his side.”

“She’ll be on your side. You’re her world, Alice. And we’ve known for twenty-four hours that your father was not killed in the condo, but brought there dead, so you couldn’t have done it.”

“Where was he killed?”

“We don’t know yet. Maybe Mr. Rellen will tell us. Maybe a quick look at his home and office will tell us.”

Alice got in the back. Like Bethany’s van, it had old and unpleasant smells. Like Bethany’s van, it was a rest from running.

I’m safe. Mom loves me. I still have a home. I had friends all along. But I don’t have Daddy.

She said to her father: I did my best. I’m sorry I didn’t do better. I was pretty dumb most of the time. But so were you! Oh, Daddy, why weren’t you ready? Why didn’t you win?

“Here we are,” said the officer, “and there’s your mom.”

They had to let her out of the car. The doors didn’t open from the inside. By the time Alice was out, her mother was on top of her, and they were sobbing and hugging, and her grandmother was saying, “That girl needs a bath!” and her grandfather was saying, “Alice, Alice.”

And Alice was saying over and over the most important word left to her: “Mom!”

Caroline B. Cooney is the author of ninety books for teen readers, including the bestselling thriller
The Face on the Milk Carton
. Her books have won awards and nominations for more than one hundred state reading prizes. They are also on recommended-reading lists from the American Library Association, the New York Public Library, and more. Cooney is best known for her distinctive suspense novels and romances.

Born in 1947, in Geneva, New York, Cooney grew up in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, where she was a library page at the Perrot Memorial Library and became a church organist before she could drive. Music and books have remained staples in her life. 

Cooney has attended lots of colleges, picking up classes wherever she lives. Several years ago, she went to college to relearn her high school Latin and begin ancient Greek, and went to a total of four universities for those subjects alone!

Her sixth-grade teacher was a huge influence. Mr. Albert taught short story writing, and after his class, Cooney never stopped writing short stories. By the time she was twenty-five, she had written eight novels and countless short stories, none of which were ever published. Her ninth book,
Safe as the Grave
, a mystery for middle readers, became her first published book in 1979. Her real success began when her agent, Marilyn Marlow, introduced her to editors Ann Reit and Beverly Horowitz.

Cooney’s books often depict realistic family issues, even in the midst of dramatic adventures and plot twists. Her fondness for her characters comes through in her prose: “I love writing and do not know why it is considered such a difficult, agonizing profession. I love all of it, thinking up the plots, getting to know the kids in the story, their parents, backyards, pizza toppings.” Her fast-paced, plot-driven works explore themes of good and evil, love and hatred, right and wrong, and moral ambiguity.

Among her earliest published work is the Fog, Snow, and Fire trilogy (1989–1992), a series of young adult psychological thrillers set in a boarding school run by an evil, manipulative headmaster. In 1990, Cooney published the award-winning
The Face on the Milk Carton,
about a girl named Janie who recognizes herself as the missing child on the back of a milk carton. The series continued in
Whatever Happened to Janie?
(1993),
The Voice on the Radio
(1996), and
What Janie Found
(2000). The first two books in the Janie series were adapted for television in 1995. A fifth book,
Janie Face to Face
, will be released in 2013.

Cooney has three children and four grandchildren. She lives in South Carolina, and is currently researching a book about the children on the
Mayflower
.

The house in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, where Cooney grew up. She recalls: “In the 1950s, we walked home from school, changed into our play clothes, and went outside to get our required fresh air. We played yard games, like Spud, Ghost, Cops and Robbers, and Hide and Seek. We ranged far afield and no parent supervised us or even asked where we were going. We led our own lives, whether we were exploring the woods behind our houses, wading in the creek at low tide, or roller skating in somebody’s cellar, going around and around the furnace!”

Cooney at age three.

Cooney, age ten, reading in bed—one of her favorite activities then and now.

Ten-year-old Cooney won a local library’s summer reading contest in 1957 by compiling book reviews. In her collection, she wrote reviews of Lois Lenski’s
Indian Captive: The Story of Mary Jemison
and Jean Craighead George’s
Vison, the Mink
. “What a treat when I met Jean George at a convention,” she recalls.

Cooney’s report card from sixth grade in 1959. “Mr. Albert and I are still friends over fifty years later,” she says.

Cooney in middle school: “I went through some lumpy stages!”