The Search by Gordon Korman

Author:Gordon Korman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
Published: 2013-07-24T04:00:00+00:00

Aiden thought fast. He could still refuse to admit it, but what would be the point? No, it was time to do something that he and Meg had never tried in all their weeks on the run. It was time to trust someone.

“Please — don’t turn me in. I’m trying to rescue my sister.”

“What — here?”

“I think they’ve taken her somewhere along Route 119. That’s why I stowed away in your truck — for a lift. I know I can find her, but I’ve got to get out of here first.”

They all looked bewildered. “How?” came from half a dozen throats.

“We’re in the police station,” added Matt. “Under arrest.”

Aiden realized that, although he was younger than these boys, he was the one with the life experience. As a fugitive, he had learned that no locked door was stronger than the need to get past it.

“There must be some way out of here,” he mused. “A window? A heating vent? A skylight? Through the basement, maybe?”

Randy looked surprised. “There’s no basement. This whole cop shop is a double trailer up on blocks.”

“A trailer?” The word triggered the memory of Death in Dixie, one of his father’s detective novels. It featured Mac Mulvey’s most ingenious escape. The hero was trapped inside a burning trailer, with the windows boarded up and the doors nailed shut. There was absolutely no way out. But with the walls on fire and the interior filling with smoke, the resourceful Mulvey found one.

“The bathroom!” Aiden exclaimed, and rushed to it, dropping to his knees at the base of the toilet.

“What are you going to do?” wisecracked someone. “Flush yourself out?”

Aiden removed the plastic knobs covering the bolts that held the toilet to the floor. “A trailer has to connect to water and drains,” he narrated absently. “That means it has trapdoors for the pipe hookups. I just need the toilet taken off.”

The teens were bug-eyed.

“Is that how you made monkeys out of the FBI for all that time?” Matt asked. “By doing stuff like this?”

“We did whatever it took to survive,” Aiden grunted, struggling to loosen the bolts with his bare hands. “Just like I’m doing now.”

“You’re never going to budge that without a wrench,” Jason observed.

They searched every drawer, every cupboard, and every surface in the small kitchen. The closest thing to a tool that they found was a bent coffee spoon.

Aiden pointed to a strange device sitting on the microwave. It looked almost like a bowlegged pair of scissors with grooved rubber where the blades should be. “What’s that?”

Matt picked it up and demonstrated. “It’s a Jar-meister. Lots of people have them around here because everybody makes their own preserves. See? It fits all sizes of jars, and you can open them even when the lids are stuck.”

Aiden took the Jar-meister and shrank the ring down to the smallest size. He fitted it over the first bolt and gave a strong twist. The nut held firm for a moment, and then began to turn. The second bolt was tighter, but even it was no match for the Jar-meister.

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