The Famous Stanley Kidnapping Case Read online

  When Gino and Pietro came down to the cellar the next morning, David observed them very carefully. The little kids ran to the table, as usual, and stood around it watching as Pietro took the breakfast off the tray. This time it was only bread and fruit and cheese. As soon as she saw the food, Esther started whining and telling Janie to say they wanted some scrambled eggs.

  “Tell them I always have scrambled eggs for breakfast,” Esther whined. “And hot chocolate. Tell them we all want some hot chocolate.” And, in spite of David’s warning about not being nuisances, Janie translated exactly what Esther had said, complete with the whining tone of voice. But this time David didn’t try to make her stop, because he was too involved in watching Gino and Pietro and wondering if they really were Marzia’s brothers—and if they were, what difference it might make. What he decided first was that he needed to have a conference with the kids as soon as possible.

  After breakfast David did some more planning and then, although he was pretty sure it would be useless, he tried to talk things over with Amanda. It seemed as if every day she got more withdrawn and sad. She was curled up under the covers on her cot now, where she’d been spending most of her time lately. As he sat down beside her, she sat up and seemed to be listening. But when he was through she only shrugged and curled back up again. So David decided to go ahead with the conference without her. He had to do something. In fact, looking at Amanda’s wide open eyes, staring at nothing, he felt more strongly than ever that he had to do something—and soon. There were dangers, of course. There were always dangers when Janie was involved in anything. And they had been so firm in rejecting all of her escape plans, he didn’t know what her reaction would be to his. Yet, he had to try.

  The little kids were behind the junk pile in the little room they’d made from crates and boxes. They were playing some kind of game about man-eating ants, and right at first David had a hard time getting their minds off the game and onto what he was trying to tell them.

  The first thing he talked about was Gino and Pietro and how important it was not to say anything to them about their being Marzia’s brothers. He wasn’t too worried about Blair saying anything, and Janie apparently understood why it mustn’t be mentioned—but he wasn’t too sure about Esther. However, Esther seemed to understand, too.

  “Janie already told me all about that,” she said. “Janie said they won’t let us go home if we know who they are. When are they going to let us go home, David?”

  “I don’t know,” David said, “but that’s what I want to talk to you about. I’ve been thinking about this plan.” And he went ahead and told them all about his King Tut theory, or at least one version of it. The way he put it to the kids was that if they were particularly cute and charming and good, the kidnappers might get sort of fond of them and decide to let them go. He didn’t say anything about King Tut, however, because it didn’t seem like a good idea to remind the kids of what would have happened to the turkey if the Stanleys hadn’t gotten fond of him.

  While David was explaining, he noticed that Janie was listening very enthusiastically. Her eyes got very round and almost stopped blinking, and she kept nodding her head and giving a little bounce now and then. “I see what you mean,” she said, when he’d finished explaining everything. “I think it’s a very good idea.”

  Actually all David had meant was that Esther should stop whining at the kidnappers and that Janie should stop criticizing and giving advice and that they should all be as polite and clean and good-natured as possible. He was pretty sure the kids intended to follow his suggestions, but he might have done more checking into just how they were going about it, if it hadn’t been for Amanda.

  When the conference was over and David came out of the corner behind the junk pile, he found that Amanda was crying again; and for the next two or three hours, he didn’t have any time to pay attention to what the kids were doing. Instead he sat down on the side of Amanda’s cot and tried to get her to stop crying and talk to him. At first she went on sobbing steadily with a kind of hopelessness that was really frightening—as if she were about to lose control of herself completely. David couldn’t think what to do except to go on trying to get her to talk to him. At last she did start talking, and once she did, she couldn’t seem to stop that either. Most of the time what she said didn’t seem to have much to do with why she’d been crying. At least, she hardly mentioned the kidnapping. Instead she just told David all about things that had happened a long time ago, before her parents’ divorce—things you could tell she’d been feeling bad about for a long time.

  While they were talking, he was vaguely aware of noises in the corner, Janie’s voice mostly, but at the time he was too interested in Amanda’s problems to pay much attention. He did notice that Janie came out once and got the wash basin and some water, and another time she asked if she could get the comb out of Amanda’s jacket pocket. The jacket was lying on the floor near Amanda’s cot, and Janie fished around in the pocket for a moment and then disappeared again behind the junk pile. But David didn’t even suspect what she was up to until Gino and Pietro came in with the noontime meal.

  The kids didn’t rush out to meet them and crowd around the table commenting and criticizing the way they usually did. Gino and Pietro put the food on the table and were starting to ask David something about the kids when all of a sudden Janie came out from behind the pile of boxes. She was skipping and holding the bottom of her bathrobe out on each side, and when she got to the center of the room, she stopped and did a sort of curtsey. David noticed then that her hair was combed and her face was clean, except that she had a big blob of smeary lipstick around her mouth and two more round patches of lipstick on her cheeks. Smiling in a very exaggerated way, she looked all around the room as if there were a big audience, and then she curtsied again, and said, “ ‘The Death of Juliet’ by William Shakespeare.” Then she pulled the tail of her bathrobe up over her head like a monk’s hood and said, “Alack, alack, what blood is this, which stains the stony entrance of this sepulchre?”

  During the time that Janie had been going through her Juliet phase that summer, she’d memorized a whole lot of the last scene of Romeo and Juliet, and apparently she hadn’t forgotten any of it. She went on for quite a long time, pulling her bathrobe up around her head when she was being Friar Laurence, and dropping it down again and making her voice high and squeaky when she was supposed to be Juliet.

  Gino and Pietro seemed interested. At least they stood perfectly still and stared at Janie, although, since it was all in English, and Shakespearean English at that, they probably hadn’t the faintest idea what was going on.

  Janie was down on her knees pretending to kiss the dead Romeo and saying the part about kissing Romeo’s lips in case there might still be some poison on them so she could die, too, when David realized what was coming next. Oh, oh, he thought, and he started to get to his feet, but it was too late. Grabbing a butter knife off the lunch tray, Janie shouted, “Oh happy dagger. This is thy sheath,” and stabbed herself.

  David had gotten so used to Janie’s ‘dying Juliet bit’ last summer that he’d quit paying much attention, but now seeing it through Gino and Pietro’s eyes, he had to admit it was pretty impressive. Gino even lunged forward once as if to take the knife away from her, but Pietro must have realized that she couldn’t really hurt herself with a butter knife, and he grabbed Gino and held him back. So no one interfered, and Janie went on whooping and screaming and gurgling and kicking until she was through dying, and then she got up and curtsied again and skipped back behind the junk pile.

  For a second act all three kids came skipping out singing the Mickey Mouse Club song, holding their hands behind their heads to represent Mickey Mouse ears. Janie had painted the twins’ lips and cheeks with Amanda’s lipstick, too, and they really looked unusual, to say the least. When they finished the song, Janie lined them up and said, “One-two-three,” and they all started trying to do a tap dance routine that Janie had taught herself a lo
ng time before by watching old Shirley Temple movies on the TV. After the first few steps Blair mostly watched Janie’s feet and did a few little quick shuffles, trying to catch up, but Esther was doing surprisingly well until, just as they were starting to dance off stage, she tripped on her shoestring and fell down and started crying. Janie came dancing back out and pulled Esther to her feet and said, “Come on, Tesser. Dance off the stage,” but Esther just braced herself and wouldn’t move and went on crying. Janie kept tugging until Esther got angry and took a sock at Janie and said, “Leave me alone. I don’t want to dance anymore. I want to eat lunch.”

  So, of course, Janie hit her back, and Esther hit Janie again and ran. She ran around the table with Janie right behind her with her fist in the air. When Esther ducked behind Gino and Pietro, Janie skidded to a stop right in front of them. She jerked her fist down and did a very quick cat-that-ate-the-canary smile, and then she curtsied again and danced backwards, smiling harder all the time, until she disappeared behind the boxes.

  Esther came out from behind Gino and Pietro still dripping tears but looking very pleased with herself. She climbed up in the chair and took a bowl of soup off the tray—and in a minute she was whining about the soup being all cold.

  As far as David was concerned, that was pretty much the end of the King Tut plan. They went back to the same old scene. Esther whined, Janie gave advice, and Amanda sat around like a zombie. Even worse, Blair took to just standing and staring at the kidnappers in a way even David found unnerving. There wasn’t much chance that any of them would come off as appealing.

  sixteen

  It was during another long quiet period a night or two later that Blair had the dream about the Blue Lady. The Blue Lady was what Blair called the statue of the Virgin that stood in the little niche on the landing of the front staircase in the villa. He’d taken a special interest in it from the day he first saw it, and he talked about it a lot. At least, a lot for Blair, who didn’t ordinarily talk very much about anything.

  Everyone in the cellar had been asleep, and David was just beginning to wake up. He’d been lying there, half-awake—wondering if it were morning yet and thinking how, if he ever got out of that cellar, he’d always remember to appreciate having nights and days that looked different from each other—when Blair sat up very suddenly, pulling off all the covers.

  “What are you doing?” David asked, whispering because everyone else seemed to be sleeping. Blair didn’t answer. Instead, he just scrambled over David’s stomach and ran across the room toward a box sitting against the wall in the corner of the cellar. When he got to the box, he stood there staring at it for a moment, and then he moved it and looked behind it, and then all around it on the floor, as if he’d lost something. He came back to the bed looking puzzled and thoughtful.

  “What is it?” David asked. “What were you looking for?”

  “The Blue Lady,” Blair said. “Where did she go?”

  “The Blue Lady? Do you mean that statue on the stairs at home?”

  Blair nodded slowly. “Like that,” he said. “Only she was right there on that box, but when I sat up to see her better, she went away.”

  “You must have been dreaming.”

  Blair thought for a moment before he said, “What is dreaming?”

  That was a hard one to explain, especially to Blair, who never seemed to take much interest in the meaning of words like “actually” and “imagine” or even “real” and “not real.” “Well,” David said, trying to think of a way to put it that would make it clear to Blair. “Dreaming is what happens at night when you’re lying in your bed, only when you open your eyes it isn’t happening any more.”

  Blair nodded, looking as if that cleared it all up for him. “Oh,” he said, “that’s dreaming.”

  “See,” David said, “you were asleep, and you dreamed that the Blue Lady was on the box.”

  Blair looked pleased. “I was dreaming the Blue Lady was on the box,” he agreed. But then he asked, “Didn’t you see her, David?”

  Later on, when the others were all awake, David heard Blair asking Esther if she’d seen the Blue Lady; so David had to explain to them all about Blair’s dream. They all talked about it for a while—about Blair’s dream and dreams in general. All of them, that is, except Amanda, who still wasn’t taking any interest in anything. While the rest of them discussed Blair’s dream, Amanda just sat on her cot with her face in her hands, and you couldn’t tell if she had even heard the conversation.

  It was that same day, right after lunch, that they all heard the sound of a motorcycle, and everyone stopped what they were doing and watched the stairs. They all knew by now that when a motorcycle came in the middle of the day, it was Red Mask. Sure enough, a few minutes later he came down the stairs. This time the dark eyes in the center of the radiating yellow zigzags looked angrier than ever. He jerked the chair away from the table, sat down and hit the table with his fist. As Pietro grabbed the broken leg and propped the table back up, Red Mask yelled, “Venite qui,” at Amanda.

  Janie, with her eyes wide and frightened looking, said, “He wants you to come here, Amanda.”

  As she got up off her cot and crossed the room, Amanda’s face was so stiff and white that David wondered if she might be going to faint. Before she’d even reached the table, Red Mask began to rant and rave at her in Italian. Waving his hands and shaking his finger at Amanda, he went on yelling for quite a long time before he leaned back in the chair and waved his arm at Janie.

  But this time Janie only stood there, looking back and forth from Amanda to Red Mask in a confused, worried way. It wasn’t until Red Mask prompted her by repeating some phrases, that she began to translate. “He says that you were lying to him about your father being a millionaire, or else your father is lying,” she said hesitantly. “He says your father is coming to Italy, and he called a newspaper in Florence and had them print a message in the paper.” Janie stopped and looked at Red Mask uncertainly, and after he prompted her, she went on. “The message said that your father was bringing some money for the kidnappers, but it isn’t even half a million dollars and it was all that he could get.” Janie stopped again, and Red Mask shouted at her, and she went on hurriedly. “He says that he is very angry, and you must write another note saying that your father must get the million dollars if he wants to see you ever again.”

  Looking at Red Mask’s angry eyes and listening to him shout, David felt very frightened; but when he looked at Amanda, his fright became mixed with confusion. Considering the circumstances, Amanda had a very strange expression on her face. It wasn’t a smile, but it looked as if it might be getting ready to be one. “My father is on his way to Italy?” she asked Janie.

  “That’s what he said,” Janie told her.

  “Are you sure? Ask him if he’s sure.”

  Janie asked Red Mask, and he nodded curtly and then began to say more threatening-sounding things; but Amanda hardly seemed to be listening. She went on acting as if her mind were on something else all the time she was writing the new note.

  After the kidnappers had gone away with the second ransom note, everyone, that is nearly everyone, felt depressed. David had been telling the little kids that almost enough time had gone by for Amanda’s father to get to Italy, and that they all might be allowed to go home very soon. And now it seemed certain that nothing was going to happen soon—and maybe not at all. Suddenly everything seemed a lot worse. Esther had a crying spell about being hungry and dirty and went around and around the table wailing that she wanted scrambled eggs and clean pajamas and her toy vacuum cleaner. Blair had a crying spell because Janie slapped him for accidentally stepping on her favorite ant; and Janie had a crying spell because David shook her for slapping Blair. David was sitting on a cot thinking about having a crying spell himself, when Amanda sat down beside him and began to talk about making plans. Because Amanda had not been planning or talking, or doing much of anything for quite a while, it surprised him enough to make him forget
about crying, at least for the time being.

  “I’ve been thinking about what we can do,” Amanda said. Her face was still pale, but her expression was more normal than it had been since the kidnapping. She looked over at the little kids and lowered her voice. “I think there’s something that might work,” she whispered.

  The minute Amanda started whispering, Janie, who had been pouting under the covers on her cot, came out from under the blankets like a jack-in-the-box. A whisper was one thing that Janie absolutely couldn’t resist. Dad always said that if Janie were stone cold dead and somebody started whispering, she would immediately come back to life, at least for long enough to get in on the secret. She was halfway across the room before Amanda could say any more.

  “Get out of here, Janie,” Amanda said. “Go away.” And David couldn’t help feeling relieved to hear her sounding so much like her old self.

  “I want to hear your plan,” Janie said. “Why can’t I hear the plan, David? I’m supposed to be helping.”

  “Why can’t Janie hear the plan?” David asked.

  “Because it would ruin it. This plan depends on not many people knowing about it.”

  It took quite a bit more argument before Janie gave up and went back to pouting and Amanda went on. “It’s about that dream that Blair had,” she said. “It made me remember a movie I saw on television. It was about some kids in Italy who saw a vision of the Virgin Mary in a vacant lot, and when they started telling people about it, everyone believed in it and pretty soon they built a shrine. Then the television people came and all sorts of officials and pilgrims from all over Europe. If we could convince those thugs that Blair had had a vision of the Virgin Mary, maybe they’d be—” She stopped and waited to see if David was beginning to catch on.