The Famous Stanley Kidnapping Case by Zilpha Keatley Snyder

Author:Zilpha Keatley Snyder
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atheneum Books for Young Readers

twelve

The stuff that one of the kidnappers had gotten tangled up in when Janie started screaming turned out to be a couple of folding metal cots with woven wire springs. David had just started to set them up when the cellar door opened again and one of the black masks came back with an armload of blankets. Actually, he didn’t come all the way back. What he did was to come down a few steps and stop to look around. Janie was still standing against the wall at the farthest side of the cellar. The kidnapper looked at Janie for a minute; then he threw the blankets down to the foot of the stairs and went away again.

The cots weren’t easy to put together, but finally, with Amanda’s help, David managed to get them untangled and made up with mattresses and blankets. They put Janie and Esther to bed in one of them and Blair in another. Amanda wrapped herself up in a blanket and sat down on the third one, but she said there wasn’t any use for her to try to sleep because she knew she’d never be able to sleep there, not if she stayed a million years. David didn’t think he would either, but it was cold in the cellar so he got in with Blair. It wasn’t too comfortable because the springs were so saggy that David immediately sank down into a kind of valley, and Blair rolled down on top of him. He tried pushing Blair back onto his own side several times, but the bed sloped so much he rolled back down. So at last David just decided to make the best of it. He was still telling himself that he probably wouldn’t be able to sleep anyway, when suddenly he was waking up feeling as if he’d been asleep for quite a while.

He woke up all at once, going from deep sleep to a full realization of where he was and what had happened with a kind of mental lurch that sent a sharp pain through the lump on his forehead. Opening his eyes a little bit, he looked around. The one dim bulb was still burning inside its metal shade, sending out a pale, shadowy light. In the windowless room it was impossible to tell if morning had come, but some kind of internal clock seemed to be saying that it had. Closing his eyes again, David pictured the villa with the morning sun slanting in through the deep-silled windows—into deserted rooms where the covers were thrown back on empty beds. He imagined the front door opening, and the Thatchers coming in. The Thatchers would have worried faces because it was late and the twins hadn’t arrived to spend the day. He could see their faces become more and more worried as they looked into one empty room after the other. Then he saw Andrew’s face, round and reddish, but not smiling the way it usually was, as he talked into the telephone.

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