The Famous Stanley Kidnapping Case Read online

  “He ate it,” Esther said. “He ate Blair’s red and”—she reached out and tucked a crayon under her stomach—“he can’t have mine.”

  “Listen, you guys,” Janie said in an exasperated tone of voice, “aren’t you excited? Don’t you know anything about Italy? Italy is a very exciting place. Just wait till I tell you about Italy.”

  Amanda rolled her eyes and gave David a kind of “here-we-go” expression. Sure enough, Janie started in about the canals in Venice, and how everybody rode around in boats singing opera songs instead of riding in cars, and how Italians said “chow” all the time and “mama mia” and stomped around in barrels full of grapes to make wine.”

  “Where does she get all that stuff?” Amanda whispered, shaking her head.

  “Well, you know,” David said. “TV and books—and the newspapers. She reads the newspaper an awful lot for a seven year old.”

  “I know,” Amanda said. “They oughtn’t to let her.”

  “Who oughtn’t?”

  “Mom and your father. I’ll bet if they asked a psychologist, he’d say that it wasn’t good for her. But instead they just encourage her because everyone thinks it’s just too cute to see someone so little and dumb-looking sitting around reading the newspaper. But what I think is that it’s abnormal.”

  “. . . and godfathers who tell everybody what to do and make them shoot each other, and gangsters. Lots and lots of gangsters,” Janie was saying.

  “See what I mean?” Amanda said.

  Of course, Dad had been kidding when he told David to tell the kids to start packing because it turned out that they weren’t going to leave for Italy until July, and in March that seemed a long way off. The only thing that happened right away was that Dad started bringing home all sorts of books about Italy and, also, a set of books and records that were supposed to teach you how to speak Italian. The idea was that the whole family would study Italian together every evening after dinner. Right at first everyone was very enthusiastic, even Amanda, who seemed to have gotten over hating the idea of going to Italy as soon as she had made her point that she didn’t have to go. But it soon turned out that Blair and Esther were only good for about ten or fifteen minutes of language study at a time. After that, Blair would usually go to sleep and Esther would start asking how to say words like “cookie” and “apple” and then wander off toward the kitchen. David and Amanda lasted longer, but quite often they had too much homework to do, so Janie, who learned everything faster than normal, turned out to be the only kid in the family who learned much Italian.

  The hard part of getting ready to leave didn’t start until June—the sorting and packing and cleaning. Everything that wasn’t going to Italy had to be packed up and stored away so that the house could be left empty for the renters. For a long time Molly spent every day going through everyone’s room sorting things into three piles—things that would go into storage; things that would go into trunks to be shipped to Italy; and things that would go with the family on the airplane flight. And almost every day there were emotional scenes about what things could, or absolutely could not, be left behind—such as Janie’s horse collection and Esther’s toy vacuum cleaner. There were also scenes about pets, like Rolor, Blair’s crow, and Velveteen, Esther’s rabbit, and King Tut, who was a turkey who belonged to everyone, but mostly to Molly, who had saved his life by saying that she’d never before cooked a turkey whom she’d met personally, and she didn’t intend to start. Friends had to be found who not only would keep the pets for a whole year, but also would promise to give them up when the year was over—and it wasn’t easy. After a while, it all began to seem terribly complicated and an incredible amount of work, and there were times when David wondered if Italy was really going to be worth the effort.

  Once when he was sitting on the floor of his closet in the midst of a pile of junk he was supposed to be sorting, he muttered, “Boy, all I can say is, Italy had better be pretty exciting.” He wasn’t really talking to anyone because the only other person in the room at the time was Blair, who was sitting on the window seat staring out the window. Quite often Blair didn’t seem to hear what you were saying to him even if you were practically shouting in his ear, so David was rather surprised when Blair suddenly got down off the window seat and ran across the room. He stood for quite a long time just outside the closet door, looking at David with his head tipped a little bit on one side the way he always did when he was thinking. And then he said, “Janie says it is.”

  By then David had forgotten what he’d said so he asked, “Janie says what is?”

  “Exciting,” Blair said. “Janie says Italy is exciting.” And then Blair said something really amazing. Of course, at the time it didn’t seem particularly amazing, because it was exactly the kind of thing that Janie was always saying. But looking back at it afterwards it really was strange, because what Blair said then was, “Janie says we’ll probably all get kidnapped.”

  three

  The villa was in a part of Italy called Tuscany, a few miles from the city of Florence, and it turned out to be absolutely perfect. Everyone was crazy about it from the moment they first saw it, which was especially nice since, up until then, there hadn’t been too many things about the trip that had turned out to be all that great. The airplane flight, for instance. The flight over had been one of the things that David had been particularly looking forward to, and there had been some exciting things about it—and some other things that turned out to be a pain in the neck.

  One of the things that hadn’t been so great about the flight was the fight that Amanda and Molly had had about whether Amanda was going to wear her Levis with the frayed-out cuffs on the airplane. Molly had won finally, with Dad’s help, but Amanda hadn’t been happy about it, and she certainly didn’t let anyone forget that she wasn’t happy. Then it turned out that their no-smoking seats were right at the edge of the smoking area, so all the smoke drifted over and gave Dad hay fever and a bad temper. Then Blair spilled his milk all over the seat and floor during dinner, and right after dinner Janie was airsick all over everything that Blair had missed. David had started out being excited about flying, but before long something, either the altitude or the vibrations, gave him a headache.

  The only person who was really crazy about the whole trip was Esther, who got chummy with the stewardess and went around wearing a stewardess hat and apron and passing out earphones and pillows. The flight seemed to last forever, and by the time it was over Esther had decided she was going to grow up to be a stewardess, and every one else had had enough air travel to last for a long time.

  The first few days in Italy were great. There were some very interesting things about moving into the pensione in Florence, which was like a boarding house run by a large Italian family in what had once been a very old private mansion. Finding an Italian car that was big enough for seven people turned out to be a kind of adventure, too. After that the sightseeing and house hunting began.

  Actually the house hunting didn’t take up a great deal of time because the agency that specialized in finding rentals for foreigners had such a hard time finding anything at all that was big enough for a family of seven. The rental agent who got stuck with the job was a short, wide, very excitable man named Signore Bellucci, who spoke a lot of very hard to understand English. Every morning he called Dad and talked and talked, but in the whole first week he only took the family to see two tiny apartments and a farmhouse without any heat or running water. So while they waited for Signore Bellucci to find something more suitable, there was lots of time for sight-seeing.

  Everyone enjoyed the first few days. They started out at the main square, the Piazza Della Signoria, with its old palace and fountain and naked statues. Amanda and Janie had a great time giggling about the statues, especially the very famous one by Michelangelo because it was called The David. They all liked the Ponte Vecchio, too, the old bridge covered with jewelry shops and sleeping hippies.

  And then there was the cathedral. The cath
edral was—well, except for Dad, it was everyone’s first cathedral, and it was certainly not like anything they’d ever seen before. Molly kept whispering, “Oh my God, Jeff. It’s incredible.” And everyone else seemed to be stricken speechless, which was very unusual for the Stanleys, and in Janie’s case, almost a miracle.

  The cathedral in Florence was their first big Italian church, but after that they saw many more, and it turned out that the whole family and particularly the little kids really got into looking at churches. Perhaps it was partly because they had never been in a Catholic church before, but Janie and the twins were absolutely fascinated by the statues and altars and candles and the beautiful frescoed walls and ceilings. And when they found out that Molly, who had been brought up a Catholic, knew who a lot of the statues were, and what was going on in all the pictures, every church visit turned into story hour. Then after they became familiar with all the stories, Janie had to tell them all over again every time they saw another picture or statue. “Oh look, Tesser,” Janie would say. “You remember who that is? He’s the one who . . . ” And away she would go while the twins listened wide-eyed and everybody else stood around and waited.

  Then there were the museums and art galleries. No one had anything against art galleries to begin with; but Dad and Molly (Molly in particular) wanted to see an awful lot of them, and since there was no place to leave the kids, they all had to trudge along whether they felt like seeing any more Renaissance masterpieces or not.

  By the end of the first week in Florence, what with so many art galleries and being cooped up in two rooms in the pensione when they weren’t out sight-seeing, everyone was beginning to get very tired and irritable and very much on each other’s nerves. And then Signore Bellucci found the villa.

  The villa was a huge old house in the country. It sat near the top of a hill about a mile up from a little village called Valle di Chiesa, and all around it were acres and acres of vineyards, olive orchards and forest. The villa had been the home of the Bartoli family, who had owned the land of the fattoria, or farm, for hundreds of years; and although the house had been remodeled and added to many times, there were still parts of it that were over five hundred years old. A small wing of the villa had been a rental for some time and was at the present occupied by an Australian couple. Clustered around the courtyard behind the main house were several other foreign families living in houses and apartments that had once been farm buildings. Only recently, the Bartoli family had decided to move into the city to live, so now the main body of the old house was for rent, too. It would be perfect for such a fine large family, Signore Bellucci said. And as soon as they saw it, the Stanleys couldn’t have agreed more.

  “Isn’t it wonderful,” Molly said when they were on their way back into Florence in Signore Bellucci’s car. “Don’t you love it, kids? I know I would have adored living in a house like that when I was little.” Molly turned around and looked at them—all five of them jammed together in the back seat. Blair was sitting on David, and Amanda was holding Esther. “It makes me want to be ten years old again, so I could play games about knights and dragons and captive princesses.”

  “It makes me want to play vampire,” Janie said. She flapped her arms in spooky slow motion and bared her teeth at Esther. Esther squealed and fell over on top of Blair and David.

  “Don’t let her,” she screamed, clutching her throat. Don’t let Janie suck my blood.”

  After Dad finished glaring at Janie, he asked everyone for an opinion about the villa. Molly thought everything about it was wonderful, but mostly she raved about colors. “Italian colors,” she said. “Why is it that in other countries ancient things go gray and grimy, but here in Italy everything manages to turn gold and cream and russet like leaves in autumn?”

  Of course, Molly was always talking like that—artist talk about form and light and color—but what she said about the villa was true. Instead of being one solid color, its thick walls were a mixture of soft red-gold shades. And even where the plaster had crumbled so that the thin dark red bricks showed through, it only looked artistic—like a painting or stage set, instead of just old and worn-out.

  Its age was what Dad seemed to like best about the house. He had several things to say about how people had been living in those rooms before the Pilgrims landed, and about all the famous Italians who might have stopped there on their way into Florence.

  David couldn’t help agreeing that there was something very intriguing about living in a house that old. He’d sat for a while on the wide window ledge in one of the strangely shaped little attic rooms, looking down at the courtyard below, and there had been something very intriguing about it. Sitting there, you couldn’t help thinking about the other kids who’d probably sat there hundreds of years before. In fact, if you thought about it enough, when there wasn’t anyone else around, it got almost too intriguing—like maybe someone was going to tap you on the shoulder suddenly, and when you turned around there would be this kid in tights and a tunic asking you to get off his window ledge. But when Dad asked, David only said that he thought the villa was great, and how soon could they move in.

  When it was her turn, Esther said she liked the kitchen best, which was pretty predictable. Then Janie said she liked the cellar best because that’s where Count Dracula lived. She lifted her lip at Esther, and then did a quick change to doll eyes and dimples when Dad turned around to glare at her. But Dad knew Janie well enough not to be fooled that easily, and he went on glaring until she said, in a phony sweet voice, “Not really, Tesser, honey. I was just kidding about Count Dracula.” But as soon as Dad turned back around, she rolled her eyes at Esther and gave her lip another quick vampirish twitch.

  “How about you, Blair?” Dad asked. Blair was staring out the window, and he didn’t answer until Dad asked again in a louder voice. Then he tipped his head on one side, blinked his eyes slowly and after a long time he said, “Like? Best?” He blinked some more, and finally after another long wait, he said, “That lady. I liked that lady on the stairs.”

  For a moment that gave David a jolt because of a secret theory he’d had about Blair for a long time. Because of some things that had happened in the past, he’d developed this theory about how Blair could see and hear things that no one else could. Supernatural things. And since there hadn’t been any lady at the villa, except of course for Molly, David couldn’t help wondering. But then Molly said, “Oh, he means the statue of the Virgin on the landing.” And then David remembered the ceramic statue that sat in a little niche in the wall above the turn in the front stairs.

  That left only Amanda, and when Molly asked her if she liked the villa she said, “Yeah. It’s okay, I guess.” Which for Amanda was wild enthusiasm, so it was unanimous.

  There really were all sorts of things to like about the villa. There was, for instance, the huge fireplace that stretched across one end of the living room, or great hall, like a small stage. There were the two staircases—the wide marble one with the statue on the landing, and another behind the kitchen that went clear down to the cellar in a dark, narrow spiral, like the steps to a dungeon. There were the windows—all the windows in the house—that you could climb up and sit in because they were set into walls that were over two feet thick. There were the brick archways, the huge ancient-looking ceiling beams, the dark tunnellike hallways on the third floor, and all kinds of strange little nooks and crannies everywhere. Outdoors, there were a series of terraces covered with cobblestones or planted to lawn and bordered by hedges and tall, thin cypress trees. And behind the big manor house, there was a courtyard surrounded by large stone buildings that had once been barns and workshops and storage places of various kinds, but now were rentals for other foreign families. Beyond the courtyard, the dirt road wound up the hill through a wooded area and on towards a high ridge, and on either side the vineyards and olive orchards stretched away over rolling hills that climbed gradually to other high horizons. On one distant hilltop you could see what looked like a castle wit
h turrets and towers.

  That afternoon, back at the pensione in Florence, the whole family talked about the villa. Dad said they shouldn’t come to too hasty a decision, even though their first impressions were very good, because a year was a long time and they wanted to be sure. Dad even insisted on calling up Signore Bellucci a couple of times to ask questions that had come up about schools and shopping. But by dinner time it was all decided, and the next day the Stanleys moved into the big villa on the fattoria above the village of Valle.

  four

  His first morning in the villa David woke up very early and sat in the window of his room on the second floor to watch the dawn. The hot Italian sun was still out of sight behind the eastern ridge of hills, but a glowing halo of light showed where it would soon appear.

  He opened the casement window and leaned out, breathing deeply. There was a summery smell, but with a difference, a spicy tang that came, perhaps, from grapes and olives. It was very still, except for an occasional popping noise like the far-off report of a gun. Hunters probably. He’d heard about bird hunters in Italy. Squinting, he looked far up the hillside, searching among the trees for a glimpse of men with guns, but nothing moved except for a silvery stir of olive leaves in the slight breeze.

  Then suddenly the silence was broken by a distant noise, an angry snarling sound that grew rapidly louder and louder. Something shiny flashed among the trees, and David’s heart gave a quick extra thump of alarm. Then a swiftly moving shape swept into view on the dirt road below the forest, trailing a cloud of dust. Just as David was realizing that it was only a motorcycle, a second appeared as if in pursuit of the first. One behind the other, the two motorcycles twisted and turned down the road toward the villa, and the sound of their motors grew to a shattering roar. If anyone had still been asleep in any of the villa’s houses and apartments, they were certainly awake now—awake and probably sitting straight up in bed scared to death. The two cycles flashed past the courtyard gate and roared on down the hill toward the village. The angry noise faded to a distant snarl and then died away. He was thinking about getting down out of the window to get dressed when another movement caught his eye. Something else was coming down the road.