The Famous Stanley Kidnapping Case Read online

  David was halfway across the graveyard, picking his way carefully among the vines and suspicious-looking mounds, when he noticed something very strange. In midstep, one foot maneuvering for a spot without thorns or dead people, he froze, listening. What he was hearing was—dead silence. No one was talking for once, but it was more than that. The air was heavy and thick with quiet. He opened his mouth and then closed it again quickly, with an uneasy feeling that if he tried to speak the words would be soundless—smothered in the thick air. He checked the other kids, wondering if they’d noticed anything, but they were all busily picking their way through the thorns—all, that is, except Blair.

  Blair was standing perfectly still. With his head turned and cocked to one side, he was obviously listening—his huge blue eyes blank and unfocused. He’d noticed all right, but even if he knew what it was that made the silence seem different, he wouldn’t be able to explain it. Perhaps no one would. Perhaps it wasn’t the kind of thing that could be put into words, but it seemed to have something to do with time. Centuries of time, and ancient and forgotten things.

  Still poised on one foot, David teetered, regained his balance, and made his way carefully to where Blair was still standing motionless. Taking Blair’s hand, he led him across the graveyard, catching up with the others just as they started through an arched doorway.

  The door itself had rotted away, but a small portico still led from the graveyard into the remains of the church. The high walls still stood, but overhead there was only hot blue sky, and underfoot there was grass cluttered by fragments of ceiling beams and bits of shattered roof tile. The remains of one huge beam leaned against a wall near a crumbling altar base, and in the curved wall only empty niches showed where there must once have been gilded statues of saints and angels. Blair tugged at David’s hand. “They’re all gone,” he said pointing at the altar wall. “Where did they all go?”

  “Shh,” David said. Marzia was walking towards the altar, motioning for them to follow. The bright sun beat down between the high walls, and the green grass and gray stone gleamed with heat and light, except where, just to the left of the altar, a small doorway led into darkness. Marzia was heading for the doorway.

  The room beyond the altar might once have been a small chapel or sacristy. Unlike the main part of the church, the roof was still in place and the one small window was shuttered. Coming into the gloom from the bright sunlight, David felt, for a moment, blind and helpless. Something tugged at the back of his shirt, and Esther whimpered, “Hold my hand, David. I’m scared.”

  “Shh,” David said again. In front of him he could hear Marzia whispering; and as his eyes became accustomed to the darkness, he could see that she was talking to Janie and pointing—first at the door, then at the tiny window and then down at the floor at their feet. It wasn’t until then that he noticed the iron ring set in a heavy metal plate, like the covering of a manhole. Motioning for David to help her, Marzia began to tug at the ring.

  The iron door was very heavy. At first it wouldn’t budge, but after trying for quite a while, they managed to lift it up out of its frame and then to slide it to one side. Below was what seemed, at first, to be total darkness. Clustering around the black hole, they all stared down into the musty-smelling nothingness and listened to what Marzia was saying. Even without knowing the words, it wasn’t hard to get the drift of what she was telling—something about fear and despair and someone who called and called for help that never came. When she finally stopped talking, no one said anything for quite a long time.

  “Wow,” David said at last. “What did she say, Janie? Janie? JANIE.” In the dim light Janie seemed to have suddenly disappeared, but she was only lying on her stomach with the whole top half of her body hanging down into the hole.

  “I can see them,” she said. “I think I can see them.”

  David grabbed her by the back of her shorts and pulled her to her feet. “Janie, you idiot. You almost fell in there. You don’t know how deep it is.”

  “Yes I do,” Janie said. “It isn’t very deep. I could see the bottom. There are dead people in there. I think I saw some of them.”

  “Dead people?” Amanda’s voice had a strangled sound. “What dead people?”

  “I’m not sure,” Janie said. “I didn’t understand all of it, except there was something called a rapito, and some people got shut up down there and they died.”

  David remembered then that he had heard Marzia use the word “rapito” several times. “What’s a rapito?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” Janie said. “But whatever it is, there was one, only it was a long time ago and all that’s left of them is bones. I think that’s what Marzia said.”

  “Well, I think you’d better get out of here before you get rapitoed, too,” David said. “Go on. Get out of here. You too, twins. Amanda, help me close this door.” But Amanda was leaving, too.

  “Let her help you,” she said. “She’s the rapito expert.”

  David pulled on the ring, but by himself he couldn’t begin to move it. “Marzia?” he asked, and she came over and pulled, too, and together they managed to drag it back to where it slipped into place. By the time they’d finished, his eyes were more used to the dim light, and he noticed a funny look on Marzia’s face—almost as if she were trying to keep from smiling. But when they came out into the light where the others were waiting, she seemed perfectly serious again.

  On the way home, except for Esther’s whining and asking to be carried, no one had much to say. Perhaps it was just because they were tired; but David, at least, was doing a lot of thinking about the deserted church, the strange quiet, and the dark, musty-smelling hole under the chapel floor. Amanda, too, seemed unusually quiet and preoccupied. David remembered then that she didn’t care much for spooky things, except, of course, spooky things she’d organized herself. Watching her, David got the feeling that something about the afternoon had really bothered her. And he wasn’t the only one who noticed. Marzia was watching Amanda, and it occurred to David that Marzia might not be too unhappy about Amanda’s being upset.

  Although going downhill was easier than going up, it was still a long time before they came in sight of the plateau with the big, barny house. When they were almost there, and the house was visible through the trees, Marzia stopped suddenly, said something, and gestured down the road. Then she waved and said, “Ciao,” and started running through the trees towards the house.

  “She said we should go on home alone,” Janie said. “She said go right on down the road.”

  The path Marzia had taken through the trees approached the house more directly, and by the time the others reached the open area, she had disappeared, probably into the house. They went by slowly, checking out the scene again—the trucks and cars, the chickens and turkeys, the chained dog. At least David and the kids did. Amanda seemed to be still busy with whatever it was that was on her mind.

  “Where did the motorciders go?” Esther asked, tugging on his shirt.

  “Motorcycles, Tesser,” he said. “Motorcycles not ciders.” Feeling just generally tired and particularly tired of being tugged at, he pushed her hand away and said, “How should I know where they went?” A minute later he found out.

  They heard the roar first, but the cycles were coming so fast that they barely had time to get out of the road before they swept into sight around the curve ahead. Tilting on the sharp turn, the three cyclists raced up the bumpy road toward the shed and braked to a sliding stop in a cloud of dust.

  Lined up along the edge of the road, the kids stood staring after the motorcycles while the dust drifted down around them. At last Janie said, “Wowee!” She had a funny kind of open-mouthed smile on her face, and her eyes were huge and glassy looking. “Wowee!” she said again. “I’m going to do that when I get bigger.”

  “Not if Dad has anything to say about it, you’re not,” David said. “Dad says they pollute the environment and the only good thing about them is that it doesn’t take them
long to kill off most of the idiots who ride them.” But Janie wasn’t listening. Apparently forgetting all about being tired, she charged off down the road, leaning over imaginary handlebars and going, “Va—room! Va—room! Va—room!”

  Molly was starting dinner when they all trudged into the kitchen, hot and dirty and tired. She took one look at them and sent them upstairs to clean up and rest until time to eat. Janie wanted to stay and tell her all about it, but she said no.

  “You run along now and rest,” she told Janie. “I’ll hear all about it at dinnertime. Your father will be home then, and we can both hear about it at once.”

  Upstairs, David washed and then flaked out on his bed for a while, but he kept thinking about the church and the dark hole. He really wanted to know more about it. When he felt rested, he got up and went back downstairs. Dinner seemed to be almost ready, but Dad still wasn’t back from Florence.

  “Do you know if the Thatchers are home yet?” he asked Molly.

  “I think so,” Molly said. “I think I heard their car an hour or so ago.”

  David finished putting the silverware on the table, and then he said, “I think I’ll run over to the Thatchers’ for just a minute, okay? I want to ask them something.”

  “Well, don’t be gone long,” Molly said. “We’ll be eating as soon as Jeff gets home.”

  David knew that besides speaking fluent Italian, the Thatchers were what Dad called Italy buffs. They were absolutely crazy about everything Italian and were real authorities about Italy in general and about Tuscany in particular. Just as he suspected, they knew all about the deserted church at the top of the ridge.

  “Oh yes, we’ve been there several times,” Olivia said. “It’s a fascinating place and just far enough away for a nice comfortable hike, don’t you think?”

  Actually, “comfortable” wasn’t exactly what he would have called it, but if you were experienced hikers like the Thatchers were, and if you weren’t carrying a fat five year old, he guessed it might not be too uncomfortable. “Yeah, sure,” he said. “But what I want to know is, about that hole in the floor in the little side room, like a chapel. Do you know anything about that?”

  “My word,” Olivia said, pulling her hands out of the bunch of clay she was pounding on and turning around to stare at David. “Andrew, did you hear that? I told you that hole was dangerous.”

  Andrew gave one more little tap with his hammer, leaned forward and blew the dust away, then squinted at the marble head he was working on. Finally he turned around and grinned at David. “You kiddies couldn’t lift that door could you?” he asked.

  David nodded. “I lifted it. Well, that is, Marzia and I lifted it together.”

  “You hear that?” Olivia said. “I was right. That hole should be filled up, or at least the door should be bolted down.”

  “Well, it is pretty heavy,” David said. “Little kids couldn’t lift it. But what I wanted to ask is, what is it? Why is there a hole there? Marzia was telling us something about somebody being shut up in there, but we didn’t understand all of it.”

  “Hmm,” Olivia said thoughtfully, taking another punch at the clay. “It was obviously a burial vault originally, but I did hear something else about it. I think it was Ghita who told me. Something about a feud between two old Florentine families several centuries ago. Can’t remember the details, I’m afraid. But somebody got abducted and shut up down there among the ancient bones.”

  “Did he die there—the person who got shut up?”

  “Quite likely. Family fights were pretty serious affairs in those days.”

  Marzia kept saying something about a rapito,” David said.

  “Rapito? Oh yes, rapire. To kidnap. Rapito would be referring to a kidnapping. I imagine the victim was kidnapped for ransom, or perhaps for revenge.”

  “Wow,” David said. The thought of being shut up in that dark hole along with a lot of dead people made his stomach do a kind of lurch. He was still just sitting there thinking about the poor guy when he heard Dad’s car in the courtyard, so he thanked the Thatchers for the information and hurried home.

  During dinner he waited until Amanda and Janie had told all about the hike and the church and the hole in the floor, in between arguments about who got to tell the best parts, and then he told what he’d found out from the Thatchers. Everyone was very interested—and it was kind of fun. With Janie and Amanda in the family, it wasn’t too often that he got to hold the floor.

  Finding out about the meaning of rapire led to a long conversation about kidnappings. There had been another kidnapping in the news just the day before—the son of some rich man in Milan—so kidnapping was on people’s minds. They discussed recent kidnappings in the States as well as in Italy, and Dad and Molly brought up some famous old kidnappings. Whenever anyone tried to change the subject, Janie brought it back to kidnapping. It was her kind of discussion, and she was obviously loving every minute of it. When everyone began to run out of kidnapping stories, she started in on the plot of some book she’d read about a girl named Isabella who got kidnapped and shut up in a tower in an old mansion. She probably would have told the whole book practically word for word if Molly hadn’t convinced her she shouldn’t give away the ending in case someone else might like to read it.

  Okay,” she said. “I won’t tell the rest of it.” And everyone breathed a sigh of relief. But then, just a minute later, she said, “I sure hope no one kidnaps me.”

  Amanda said, “Who’d want to kidnap you?”

  So Janie said, “A lot of people would, that’s who.”

  And Amanda said, “Well, maybe. If they were running a sideshow.”

  And Dad yelled, “All right, that’s ENOUGH!”

  And that was the end of conversations about kidnapping. At least for that night.

  eight

  One morning in the middle of August, Amanda and David were at the Thatchers’ watching Olivia modeling a Roman gladiator out of red clay and chatting about Italy in general and about people and things in and around Valle in particular. They talked first about the Bartolis, the family that had owned the villa and the land around it for generations, and then Olivia started talking about Marzia’s mother.

  “I admire Ghita tremendously,” Olivia said. “She’s had a very hard time since her husband died, and yet she’s always so cheerful and positive about everything.”

  “What kind of hard time?” Amanda asked.

  “Well, I don’t think she and her children are too welcome in her sister’s house, as you can imagine, but they really can’t afford to live anywhere else on the money Ghita is able to earn.”

  “Can’t her kids help out?” David asked.

  Olivia shrugged. “One might think so,” she said. “But from what I’ve heard, Marzia is the only one who helps out at all. Some of the children are still quite young, and it seems that the older boys are more inclined to add to the problem than to help out. Ghita says that whatever money they earn they spend on their cycles.” Just then Olivia nodded towards the door and said, “Speaking of Marzia . . . ”

  Marzia was coming into the studio with Janie. Janie, as usual, was talking. She’d picked up an amazing amount of Italian, but even so, half of the words she was using were English words with Italian-sounding endings tacked on. It didn’t make much sense to David, and he didn’t suppose it did to Marzia either. It seemed that Janie had been trying to tell Marzia about their house in California, and the poltergeist that was supposed to have haunted it, but she had finally decided that she didn’t know quite enough Italian words, so she’d come to Olivia for help.

  “If I tell you about it in English, will you tell Marzia?” she asked Olivia.

  “Well, my supernatural vocabulary is a bit shaky, I’m afraid,” Olivia said, “but I can give it a try. I’ll have to go on working while I translate, though, or this old boy is going to set before I get him into shape.” So Janie told Olivia, and Olivia told Marzia, all about the ghost that was supposed to have haunted the o
ld Westerly house and how it had thrown furniture and rocks around the house and chopped the head off the cupid on the staircase, and how, for a while after the Stanleys bought the house, it began to look as if the ghost had moved back in. As usual, Janie threw in lots of original details, and Olivia got so interested she almost forgot about finishing the Roman gladiator; but Marzia looked a bit skeptical, as if she thought Janie might be making the whole thing up. When Janie finished telling everything she could remember, or think of, about the Westerly House, she asked Marzia if there were any haunted houses around Valle.

  Olivia translated the question, and Marzia shook her head.

  “Or ghosts?” Janie asked. “Or witches?”

  “Le streghe?” Olivia asked Marzia.

  “No,” Marzia said, but then she said, “Oh, sì. Ce uno stregone.”

  “Marzia says there is a male witch,” Olivia said. “I think I’ve heard of the one she’s referring to. He was pointed out to me once in the village. Actually I think he’s more what we might call a witch doctor, or even a faith healer. I think he may predict the future a bit and things of that sort, but mostly people take their health problems to him. Last spring Ghita told me about taking one of her younger children to him with some kind of digestive problem, if I remember correctly. Anyway, whatever the problem was, the witch doctor told her what to do and she did it and the child recovered very quickly.”

  Up to that point Amanda had been looking rather bored; but when Olivia started telling about the witch doctor, she suddenly began to listen very carefully. When she asked Olivia to explain some more about exactly what a witch doctor did, David wasn’t surprised, because when Dad and Molly were first married, Amanda had been studying to be a witch. She’d been into learning about making spells and potions and philters and doing seances and all kinds of things like that. But then, when it began to look as if the real, original poltergeist had moved back into the Westerly House, Amanda had suddenly seemed to lose interest in the supernatural. Lately she’d been more into records and rock stars and people of the opposite sex. It had been quite a while since David had heard her mention anything about spells or potions or even curses, which had been sort of her specialty. But now it was obvious that she was very interested in the Italian witch doctor.