Finding Daddy by Louise Plummer

Author:Louise Plummer
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780375890659
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2007-11-13T00:00:00+00:00

We are up until three with the police, who tell us that our phone line was cut. Dylan’s parents, who come to see what’s going on with all the cop-car lights flickering in front of our house, insist we stay at their place. “If he comes back, let it be to an empty house,” Neil Madsen says. Mom and Bella don’t say anything about what a bother we’d be but follow Ruth Madsen gratefully into the house. We sleep in the guest room on the second floor, which has two full-size beds in it. I lie next to Mom awake, listening to the night noises real and imagined. A thought comes to me that I haven’t considered: Someone wants to kill us. He’s not after Bella’s antiques; if he were, wouldn’t he wait until we were all out of the house? No, he comes when he knows we’re home. That isn’t a thief. That’s a killer. A serial killer, maybe. Someone who kills women related to each other. The Generational Killer. That’s what he’d be called. We’d be one of those unsolved crime cases on A&E and the same bad photos of Mom, Bella, and me would appear on the screen over and over again. I can hardly breathe, it makes so much sense there in the dark. I grab Mom’s arm. “You awake?” I whisper.

Mom turns in the bed to face me. “Completely.”

I stare into her eyes, not sure I want to form the question.

“What?” she whispers.

“Do you think this guy—the one tonight—is the same person who killed Maude?”

Her lips press together. “Maybe—I don’t know. There seems to be a pattern forming.”

“I’m scared.”

She brings the blanket up around my neck and holds it there. “Yes.” She tucks her hair behind her ear. “We’re going to a hotel for a few days.”

“I’m awake.” Bella’s voice fills the room. “We’ll survive this just fine.” She flicks on a bedside lamp and sits up. “We will,” she says, thrusting a small fist into the air, “because we’re survivors.”

I want to believe her, but I can’t really think of anything serious we’re ever had to survive, except maybe the two-day power outage three years ago when we had an ice storm. Hardly a trial. We watched movies in heated theaters. All three of us gained weight on cheese nachos and Dove bars.

“We don’t even know who we’re fighting,” I say.

“A coward,” Bella says. “He kills a poor defenseless dog, and so far he’s been scared off by a seventy-year-old man and a teenager with a toy laser gun.”

I smile, but then I think about the wire tying Maude’s paws together. Why? Only a psychopath would think of that. Someone without rational sense. My limbs grow weak with anxiety. “Maybe we should go to Europe right away,” I say. Now, in this cowardly moment, it seems like an excellent idea.

“We can get a passport within a week,” Mom says. Obviously she thinks so too.

Bella adjusts her pillows. “Sounds fine to me,” she says. “It’ll take a week to get my business in order.

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