William S. and the Great Escape Read online

  “Okay. I’m going to take Buddy into the restroom and then I’ll buy him something. Wait a minute and then you guys can come in too. Okay?”

  So that’s what they did. The little café right next to the station was packed with bus passengers. After a quick trip to the restroom, they made their way to the counter, where William ordered two strawberry ice-cream cones.

  He and Buddy were on their way out the door just as Jancy and Trixie came in, which, for a moment, put a big strain on the effort to ignore each other. Trixie was goggle-eyed. Ice-cream cones didn’t happen at the Baggetts. She stared at Buddy’s cone and his gloating, strawberry-smeared face. Before the door swung shut behind them, William heard the beginning of a typical Trixie whimper. But right at that moment William saw something that wiped the grin off his face.

  Leaning against a streetlight pole, smoking a cigarette, was a guy whose pimply face, ducktail hairdo, and wide-legged, floppy pants looked vaguely familiar. Looked like he might be someone William had seen before and wouldn’t have wanted to see again under any circumstances, but particularly not now. A guy who was, at the moment, staring hard—at William and Buddy.

  CHAPTER 19

  Turning his face away from the strangely familiar-looking guy with the weird hairdo, William hustled Buddy back onto the bus and down the aisle to their seat. As soon as Buddy had finished his ice-cream cone, licked his fingers, stuck his tongue way out, and ran it as far as it would go around his face, William began to question him. “Buddy, did you see the guy in the floppy pants leaning against the post in front of the café?”

  After some thought, Buddy said, “Maybe. Maybe I saw him.”

  “The one smoking a cigarette,” William urged. “Did he look familiar to you?”

  “Familer?” Buddy asked.

  “Like someone you might have seen before?”

  Buddy nodded. “Maybe I did before. I don’t like him before.”

  William almost gasped. “How do you know you don’t like him?”

  “He played too hard. He played box fight so hard it made me cry.”

  “He did? When? When did he play with you?”

  “Rudy let him,” Buddy said. “Rudy just laughed, but it hurt me real bad. Right on my nose. It made me cry.”

  William swallowed hard. It was just what he’d been afraid of. The guy with the baggy pants must be one of Rudy’s lousy friends. And if he was, he must have been staring at them because he recognized them and probably knew that they were the missing Baggett kids. And now he was going to tell Big Ed where he saw them. And Big Ed would know where they were going for sure, because the bus was headed for Reedly—just a few miles from Gold Beach.

  William hoped, hoped desperately, that he wasn’t right about that, but he was afraid he was. It took a few minutes of mindless panic for him to settle down enough to start making new plans, or change the ones he’d already made, to deal with the possibility that the guy was going to squeal on them to Big Ed.

  Okay, he asked himself, when is he going to tell Big Ed? How soon?

  Since phone service to the Baggetts had been cut off weeks ago, there probably wasn’t any way the guy could do his squealing until he got back to Crownfield. So how soon depended on where the guy was going, and how long it would be before he would be back in the Crownfield area where he could talk to Rudy and Big Ed in person. So the best news would be if he was going to stay on the bus for a long time, like all the way to Oregon, if the bus was going that far.

  However, William’s next thought went in a different direction. Maybe it didn’t matter all that much, because Big Ed must already have guessed where they would be going. After all, where else could they go? And maybe he’d already gone to Gold Beach, while the four of them were still in the Ogdens’ basement. And if he had, he’d have found out that Aunt Fiona hadn’t seen them and didn’t know where they were.

  In that case, the only way that guy could mess things up was if he told the Baggetts exactly when he’d seen William and Buddy. Because then Big Ed would guess that they were going to show up at Aunt Fiona’s after all, just a little later than he’d expected them to.

  The whole scene was terribly complicated and pretty scary, and it got even more so when the passengers began getting back on the bus and one of them was the familiar-looking tall, skinny guy with baggy pants and a mean grin. A grin that he definitely aimed right at William as he was starting down the aisle to his seat. William tried to put on an “I got nothing to worry about” grin, right back at him, but he didn’t think it came off very well.

  For the next hour or so, while the bus headed north and then west, there was nothing William could do but worry. He kept wishing he could talk to Jancy about Rudy’s mean friend and find out how much of a problem she thought he might turn out to be. But of course he couldn’t. Meanwhile Buddy had a lot to say about doughnuts and ice-cream cones and which he liked best and which one William liked best—and, of course, why?

  It was more than an hour later and the sun was pretty high in the sky before the bus stopped again. “This is the end of the line for those of you going to Summerford,” the driver said. “Just a restroom stop for the rest of you. Be back on the bus in fifteen minutes.”

  In that case, William thought, he’d just as soon not get off and run the chance of coming face-to-face with Rudy’s pal, which might just remind him to do something about having discovered where the runaway Baggetts were. Remind him maybe to do something right away, and since he couldn’t call and tell Rudy, perhaps he’d think the next best thing would be to tell the Summerford police. It was a frightening thought. The only thing that made that idea a little less alarming was the definite possibility that the baggy pants guy was the type of person who, like his Baggett friends, always kept as far away from the police as possible. A likely possibility, William told himself hopefully.

  Meanwhile Buddy was tugging at his sleeve and saying he wanted to get off. And when William turned the tables on him and asked him, “Why?” he thought for a minute before he announced that he needed to go to the bathroom. What he actually said sounded like a question. “’Cause I need to go to the baffroom?”

  William wasn’t sure if the question was whether he really needed to go, or whether William was going to believe him if he said he did. But knowing Buddy, he thought he’d better not risk it, so they got off the bus. And of course, a minute or two later Jancy and Trixie got off too. Trixie wasn’t one to let anybody else have a privilege—and maybe an ice-cream cone—that she didn’t get in on.

  The whole scene might have been kind of amusing, except that there he was again—Rudy’s weird-looking friend—standing on the sidewalk and staring at William and Buddy as they entered the station. And what happened next might turn out to be even more worrisome.

  The scary thing was, when they came out of the men’s room the guy was gone. He wasn’t there in the bus station, nor was he one of the people who got back on the bus. Which meant that the only person who knew where the missing Baggett kids were had gotten off the bus in the little town of Summerford, where he might be making a short visit and then going back to Crownfield, which was only about sixty-five miles away. Not a very comforting thought.

  The rest of the trip to Reedly was only about thirty-five miles, according to the map William had picked up at the bus station, but it seemed an awful lot longer. Having to make conversation on a four-year-old level while trying to figure out the best way to get from Reedly to Gold Beach as quickly as possible, as well as wondering what kind of welcome they might expect once they got there, made for an effort that was pretty exhausting, especially after Buddy decided that he wanted to hear a story.

  “What story? I don’t know any stories,” William said.

  “Yes, you do. You did a story at Clice’s house. The one about setting everything on fire.”

  “But that wasn’t the sort of story you can just tell. You have to run around and act it out. And I can’t do that here.”

  “Why not?” B
uddy said.

  William snorted and made a gesture with both arms. “Because, look, there’s no room. You can’t run around in a bus.”

  “Oh.” Buddy seemed to get the picture. But then he added, “But you could sing it. There’s enough room to sing it.”

  William considered the request. There really hadn’t been any singing in act one of The Tempest. However, in act four … That’s how it happened that William sang his favorite Ariel song all the way through twice, on the way to Reedly. Sang it just the way he’d done in the play, only not nearly as loudly.

  “‘Where the bee sucks, there suck I:/In a cowslip’s bell I lie;/There I couch when owls do cry./On the bat’s back I do fly/ After summer merrily./Merrily, merrily shall I live now/Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.’”

  He sang so softly he thought no one except Buddy could hear, but when he finished, a gray-haired man and woman who were seated just in front of them clapped softly, then turned around and stared.

  William couldn’t help grinning and taking a little bow, even though he knew it was a dangerous thing to have done. Like, what if those gray-haired people had heard about the Baggett kid who’d been such a hit last year in Crownfield High’s Shakespeare production—and then had gone missing? All he could do was hope they were from Los Angeles and had never heard of William Baggett or Crownfield High, and just happened to like Shakespeare. In the meantime, Buddy seemed about to go back to sleep.

  At long last they passed a sign that said it was just two miles to Reedly, and there began to be stores and gas stations instead of just open fields. And then finally they made a left turn and pulled up in front of a Greyhound bus station. So they were almost to the end of their journey. But what William knew only too well was that what was left was the three or four miles between Reedly and Gold Beach. And he wasn’t at all sure just how he would get himself and Jancy, two little kids and two big pieces of luggage, the rest of the way there.

  CHAPTER 20

  Well, here we are in the fine little city of Reedly,” the bus driver was announcing. “For you passengers going on north, this will be your lunch stop. There’s a good little coffee shop just down the street to my left. For those of you who are leaving us here, be sure to check under your seats for any personal belongings.”

  This time William motioned to Jancy that she and Trixie should get off first, and by the time he and Buddy reached the front of the bus, the driver had retrieved the big suitcase from the rack and delivered it to Jancy. “Here you are, little lady,” he was saying while William was still helping Buddy down the bus’s steep steps. “Hope you’re going to have some help getting this heavy thing all the way home.”

  “Oh, I am,” Jancy told him. “We’re visiting my aunt, and she’ll take care of everything.” Jancy had always been good at telling a thing in a way that made it not quite a real lie, and worked just as well.

  William, with Buddy in tow, continued to keep a certain distance from Jancy and Trixie, until the other passengers had pretty much dispersed, most of them heading toward the coffee shop the bus driver had pointed out. But then he sidled closer. Close enough to say, “Well, here we are.”

  He got a three-way response—three questions, almost in unison. Trixie said, “Where’s Aunt Fiona?” Jancy asked, “Where are the taxicabs?” And from Buddy, “Where’s lunch?” But then he added, almost apologetically, “That bus man said lunch stop. I heard him say it.”

  Typical Buddy, but this time he might be right. It was well past midday, and except for ice-cream cones and that very early doughnut breakfast, they hadn’t had anything to eat all day. And it would be best not to arrive at Aunt Fiona’s as hungry as a bunch of stray dogs.

  But could they afford it? There still had to be around twenty-some dollars in his Getaway Fund, which would probably be more than enough for the taxicab to Gold Beach. So maybe they could afford lunch, as long as it wasn’t too expensive.

  William looked around. On the block to his right were several small stores, including the coffee shop the driver had pointed out. Not there, William thought. Better to let all those other passengers, particularly the ones from Crownfield, forget about the four kids who’d been on their bus.

  Down the sidewalk the other way, you could see what seemed to be the main part of town. Some bigger stores came first—a JCPenney department store and a Sears, Roebuck—and then just beyond Sears, another café where a bright neon sign said ELMER’S EATERY.

  “Do you think it would be all right for us to go to lunch together?” Jancy was asking. “All four of us?”

  Trixie was doing her tiptoes thing. “Yes, yes please. All of us together?”

  William thought it over for a minute before he shrugged. “I guess it would be all right.” Chances were that way up here in Reedly no one had heard anything about the Baggetts and their missing kids. “Yeah, I guess we can go together,” he said.

  But there was still the luggage problem. Would a restaurant nice enough to have a fancy flashing neon sign let people come in dragging a huge leather suitcase and a bulgy knapsack? Probably not. He’d gotten that far in his thinking when, as if a neon sign had been flashing on his forehead, saying, LUGGAGE PROBLEM, LUGGAGE PROBLEM, Jancy said, “Maybe we could leave it here. In the ticket office.” Another example of the sort of mind-reading thing Jancy was so good at—reading William’s mind, at any rate.

  A few minutes later, with the knapsack and suitcase safely stored away by the friendly ticket clerk, all four of them were entering the nicest restaurant any of them had ever been in. Well, actually the only restaurant they’d ever been in—except for William himself, of course. Since Miss Scott and the whole cast of The Tempest had gone out to eat three times—two lunches and a closing-day banquet—William was pretty experienced at that sort of thing.

  Elmer’s was the kind of place where there were cloth napkins on the tables, and waitresses in white aprons. As a friendly waitress led them to a table, William made an effort to look relaxed and self-confident, but with Trixie walking on tiptoe and Buddy staring at everything goggle-eyed, his cool, worldly-wise role was a little hard to hang on to. After they were all seated, with a fancy high chair for Buddy, came the problem of ordering from a menu where everything was shockingly expensive, with even a hamburger sandwich costing an incredible twenty-five cents.

  But it wasn’t as if he didn’t have the money. Without too much soul-searching, William wound up ordering four hamburgers and four milk shakes. He hated to see that much of his hard-earned money disappear, but it was, he tried to convince himself, worth it. And the stunned expressions on the kids’ faces, when all the food arrived on a big tray that the waitress carried expertly, way up high over her shoulder, made him almost forget about the expense.

  With Trixie and Buddy concentrating on their hamburgers and milk shakes, there was a chance for William and Jancy to have a serious discussion about what was going to happen next. William grinned at Jancy and, just as a joke, began by saying, “You know it’s not as far from here to Gold Beach as it was from the Baggett’s to Crownfield. We could walk it, if we had that old three-wheeled wagon of yours to put the luggage in.”

  Jancy didn’t seem to be in the mood for kidding around. “It wasn’t mine, and we don’t,” she said coldly. “I thought you said we could go the rest of the way by taxicab.”

  He nodded. “Yeah, I said that, and I guess we can. It’ll be expensive, but I’m pretty sure I have enough.”

  “Pretty sure?” Jancy asked sharply. “I thought you said you had plenty.”

  “Oh, I do,” he reassured her. “I’ve got plenty. It’s just that I hate …”

  He kind of ran down then, but Jancy the mind reader finished the thought for him.

  “You just hate to part with your precious getaway money, I guess.”

  He grinned sheepishly. She was right, he supposed. He remembered how he used to make the dangerous trip, slithering down over the crossbeams in the attic, even when he didn’t have anything to a
dd to his Getaway Fund. Just to stack up his nickels and dimes and count them, like a miser counting his gold. It was an embarrassing thought. “Yeah, you’re right,” he told Jancy. “We’ll go by taxicab.”

  But then, back at the Greyhound ticket office, he found out that his generous offer wasn’t going to get them anywhere. There wasn’t a single taxi in the whole town of Reedly.

  “Not anymore,” the clerk told them. “Used to be Tony Martinez had a license, but then his old cab broke down and he quit. Where is it you kids want to go?”

  It was Jancy who answered. “To Gold Beach,” she said. “We’re going to our aunt’s house in Gold Beach.”

  The ticket clerk, a tall man with a kind of Shakespearean-type beard, almost like Prospero’s in the Rockwell Kent illustration, rubbed his fuzzy chin while he peered over the counter at the four of them. At Buddy, who was leaning against William’s leg and staring up at him wide-eyed, and Trixie, who was giving him her cutest Shirley Temple smile. “You know what?” he said. “I live in Gold Beach, and if you kids can wait a couple of hours till I get off, I can take you there. If you don’t mind riding in a beat-up old Model A.”

  Of course they didn’t mind, and for a while it looked like their troubles, as far as getting to Aunt Fiona’s house anyway, were pretty much over. Of course, there was still the chance that they wouldn’t be welcome when they got there, but that possibility was one that William had been trying hard not to worry about. They’d cross that bridge, he kept telling himself, when they came to it.

  So that was the way things were, and for the moment the only problem seemed to be keeping Trixie and Buddy from punching each other while they waited for almost two hours on the hard wooden bench in the ticket office.

  But it was then, right there in the bus station, that another serious problem started to develop. It began, for William at least, when he noticed that Jancy was pawing around in the little crocheted bag she used as a purse. Pawing around, taking things out and putting them back, and finally dumping everything onto the bench. As far as William could see, there wasn’t much—only a broken comb, a stubby pencil, a handkerchief, a quarter, two dimes, and a penny—and what looked like a badly wrinkled envelope. And when William asked what she was looking for, she only gasped and said, “I know I put it in here. I know it. But now it’s gone.”