The Famous Stanley Kidnapping Case Read online

  “But Ghita said it wasn’t just the judge’s decision that was making her feel so much better. She seems to think that her boys have developed a different attitude about a lot of things lately. Apparently they’ve worried her a lot in the last few years, but now she seems to think they’re starting to become much more—well, as she expressed it, ‘giudiziosi.’ ”

  “Giudiziosi?” David asked.

  “Serious and responsible.”

  David nodded and after a moment shook his head—thinking of the poor Lino boys. He couldn’t help feeling sorry for them. Of course, they had brought it all on themselves by taking up with crummy people and listening to bad advice, but they’d started paying for it almost from the beginning—from that first bitten thumb—and now, even with the judge being lenient, they still had a lot more paying to do.

  As for Red Mask, there were times lately when David even felt a little sorry for him. The papers said that when the polizia had first found him, tied up in the bathrobe belts, he’d been kind of babbling, and recently they were saying that his trial was going to have to be postponed until he’d recovered from the nervous breakdown he’d been having. It was too bad, actually, but perhaps it was the kind of thing you had to expect if you went into something like kidnapping.

  * * *

  That night in the villa the whole family sat up late listening to Amanda tell about her visit with her father in Florence, and talking over things in general. The Thatchers were there, too, and everybody was in a great mood. They made a huge fire in the fireplace and then grilled steaks on the coals, and there was a lot of laughing and singing and kidding around, until a long time past everyone’s regular bedtime.

  Since the next day was Saturday, David was planning to sleep late; but practically before dawn Esther came through his room pushing her toy vacuum cleaner and making a loud whirring noise through her teeth, which was supposed to represent the vacuum cleaner motor. He’d just gotten through yelling at her to get out, when Blair wandered in looking for his shoe, and David had to wake up enough to tell him that he’d seen it under the kitchen table. Then just as he was about to get back to sleep, Janie came in and climbed up on the foot of his bed and announced that she’d finally found the part in Isabella and the Secret of Holby House about being hysterical with terror, and she was going to read it to him.

  David sat up. “Forget it,” he said. “I have to go to the bathroom.”

  “You can’t,” Janie said. “Amanda’s got the door locked. I just tried.”

  David groaned and flopped back down on the bed and pulled the pillow over his head. Through the pillow he could hear Janie reading in a very hysterical tone of voice, and after a while he took the pillow off his head and listened because at least it was better than thinking about how badly he needed to go to the bathroom. He was just beginning to get involved in wondering what it was that Isabella was so hysterical about, when Janie stopped reading and listened. “I think Amanda came out,” she said.

  “Whew,” David said, “what a relief.” But before he could get untangled from the blankets, Janie threw down her book and dashed out the door. He could hear her yelling, “My turn. Me next. My turn,” all the way down the hall until the bathroom door slammed shut behind her. He was already out of bed by then so he went to look out of the window, but that didn’t help a bit because it had started to rain. So he sat down quickly on the bed to wait.

  Wow, he thought. Rain. What happened to the perfect weather? And while he was on that subject, what had happened to perfect in general? What had happened to everything being so perfect for the whole last week? For a moment he considered lying back down and pulling the pillow over his head again—but just then he heard Janie coming back down the hall.

  Shooting out the door, he careened off the wall on the other side of the hall and got to the bathroom door just as Esther chugged through it with her vacuum cleaner. There wasn’t time to argue, so he just picked her up, vacuum cleaner and all, and set her back down in the hall.

  All the time he was in the bathroom he could hear her fussing at him outside the door. “Good-bye perfect,” he muttered to himself. Everything was back to normal. Amanda had spent her normal couple of hours in the bathroom. Janie had been normally sneaky. And now Esther was doing her normal whine outside the door. But a moment later while he was splashing water on his face, another thought struck him and he grinned at himself in the mirror. Maybe perfect was over, but at least in the Stanley household, normal was hardly ever boring.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Snyder, Zilpha Keatley.

  The famous Stanley kidnapping case.

  SUMMARY: Kidnappers in Italy have their hands full when the captive American children advise them on running a better kidnapping and on proper nutrition.

  [1. Kidnapping—Fiction. 2. Italy—Fiction]

  I. Title.

  PZ7.S68522Gr [Fic] 79-12308

  ISBN: 978-1-4424-8446-7

  ISBN: 978-1-4814-0332-0 (eBook)

  Copyright © 1979 by Zilpha Keatley Snyder

  All rights reserved

  Published simultaneously in Canada by

  McClelland & Stewart, Ltd.

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  Designed by Mary M. Ahern