The Famous Stanley Kidnapping Case Read online

  “Does he do curses and love philters and things like that?” she asked Olivia, but when Olivia started to translate the question into Italian, Amanda stopped her. “Never mind asking her,” she said. “I just wondered if you knew.”

  David began to get the picture. He grinned, thinking maybe he ought to warn poor old Hilary if Amanda was thinking of going shopping for a love philter. Olivia was leaning over the gladiator at the moment, so she didn’t see Amanda kick David in the shins. Actually David didn’t see the kick himself, but he certainly felt it. “Wow,” he said, moving out of range. “What was that for?” But he knew, really. It was for the grin, and for guessing what Amanda was up to. He knew what she was up to, and she knew he knew. Not that that was going to stop her, he thought, and he was right. It didn’t. Before they left the Thatchers’ that day, a visit to the witch doctor was all arranged.

  It turned out to be another long walk, at least as far as the abandoned church. But it wasn’t as steep a road, and fortunately it turned out to be a much cooler day. This time the little kids kept up without so much trouble. David had talked to Esther about how he was tired of carrying people, and if she wanted to come along she’d have to do it on her own feet and without whining. Since she didn’t want to be left behind, she promised, and on the whole trip she only whined softly a few times; and when David reminded her of her promise, she stopped.

  Actually, although the whole trip had been Amanda’s idea, she was the only one who caused any problems on the way there. This time she’d insisted on wearing her sandals, and even when Marzia said she should change them, she refused. So all the way there, she kept getting pebbles in her shoes and having to stop and shake them out; and then when they were almost there, she stepped in a rut and turned her ankle. She sat down on the road for a while, moaning and saying that her ankle was probably broken or at least sprained. But it didn’t seem to be swelling, and after a while she managed to go on, with a very bad limp.

  The witch doctor lived on the other side of the Valle di Chiesa, so the trip had consisted of going down the hill to the village, through it, and then up a long narrow valley in the other direction. It was an interesting walk, but all the way David kept wondering if there was any point in actually trying to see the witch doctor. It seemed to him that it was likely the witch doctor didn’t give interviews to a bunch of kids; and even if he did, he might charge more than the three thousand lire they’re managed to scrape up between them, which after all, was only a little more than three dollars.

  When they finally got to the witch doctor’s house, David was really surprised. He didn’t know exactly what he’d been expecting, but he guessed it must have been something spooky, like a tumbledown shack in a dark forest, or maybe even a cave. So when it turned out that the witch doctor lived in a modern-looking brick and plaster house on what seemed to be a very prosperous farm, he felt a little disappointed, at least at first.

  They walked up the long driveway toward the house, past an enclosure where huge shaggy cattle with long horns were grazing, and then between pens of sheep and pigs. Beyond the house there were several barns and sheds, and on one side there was a large parking lot. There were four cars in the parking lot. But just as they were arriving, a group of people came out of the house and got into one of the cars and drove away. So it looked as if there weren’t too many customers ahead of them. They all sat down on a wall to wait and watch what was going on.

  A man and woman and little boy who had been standing in front of the house went in, and two old ladies got out of their car and went to wait their turn by the front door. The only other person who seemed to be in line was a man who was leaning against a funny little three wheeled pickup truck. He was a big man with bulgy muscles and red cheeks, and he certainly didn’t look as if he had anything wrong with him.

  “I wonder what he’s going to ask the witch doctor,” David said. “He doesn’t look sick to me.”

  “What are we going to ask about?” Janie said. “None of us is sick, either.”

  “I think we ought to go in one at a time,” Amanda said. “Then each of us can ask him whatever we want to.”

  “Did you have something in particular that you wanted to ask about?” David asked, being careful to keep a straight face—and his shins out of reach, just in case.

  Amanda glared at him. “Maybe,” she said.

  “But what if he doesn’t speak English?” Janie said, and for a minute David felt shocked—at himself for not having thought of that possibility. Amanda went around all the time expecting everybody to speak English, but he hadn’t thought that he did.

  “Well, of course he speaks English,” Amanda said. “Olivia said he was a famous witch doctor and people even come from other countries to see him. He’d have to speak English.”

  David shook his head. “You know something,” he said, “Janie is probably right. Ask Marzia, Janie.”

  So Janie asked Marzia, and she didn’t seem to know either. She thought for a while, and then she went over to where the man was leaning against the truck. When she came back, she said the man didn’t know if the doctor spoke English, but he didn’t think so.

  “Marzia says that man is a farmer,” Janie said, “and he’s come to see the doctor about his sick cows. And he told Marzia that if we’re going to ask about a person, we have to have something with us that belongs to the person, like a shirt or handkerchief or a piece of jewelry.”

  “Well, that settles that,” David said. “He hadn’t been too crazy about talking to the witch doctor anyway, and since they hadn’t brought anything that belonged to a sick person, there wouldn’t be any point in trying. But then Marzia pointed to the ring on Amanda’s finger and motioned for her to take it off. When she got the ring, Marzia held it up and talked for quite a while to Janie.

  “Marzia says we’re going to ask the witch doctor about Amanda,” Janie said. “She says we’re going to ask for a predizione for Amanda.”

  “Predizione?” Amanda said. “What does that mean? Is that like a prediction, of the future?” She looked at Marzia suspiciously for a minute. “A prediction of my future?” But then she shrugged. “Okay,” she said. “Why not.”

  The witch doctor turned out to be almost as unspooky as his house. He was a small man with short gray hair and a normal-looking middle-aged face. The only things that made him at all unusual were his clothing and his eyes. He was wearing a long black robe with a high collar, almost like a priest’s outfit, and his eyes were small and dark and very bright. When he looked at you, you felt that he was seeing more than most people did. When they all filed in to his little room, he looked hard at each one of them, and they were all very quiet. When the dark, bright eyes looked at him, David felt certain they could see that he’d only come on a kind of adventure. But the witch doctor didn’t sound angry when he talked to Marzia. He took the ring and held it in the palm of his hand for a while. Then he went behind a little desk and sat down. On the desk there were three shallow bowls of what seemed to be ordinary water. The witch doctor took a little bottle out of a drawer and poured a few drops of something that looked like olive oil in each of the bowls. The oil separated into little blobs and moved around on top of the water, and when it stopped moving, the witch doctor looked at it very carefully for quite a long time. Then he talked to Marzia, except that some of the time he seemed to be talking to Janie, and then he got up and went to the door and held it open for them to go out. Marzia gave him the three thousand lire, and he smiled and gave it back and went back into his office and closed the door.

  Of course, Amanda was very impatient to hear what the witch doctor had said about her; and as soon as they were all out in the parking lot again, she started saying, “What did he say, Janie? What did he say?”

  But Janie had to confer with Marzia for a long time before she began to translate. Finally she said, “Okay, everybody. I’m ready. The first thing the witch doctor said was about Amanda’s foot. And I understood most of it when he said it, be
fore Marzia told me. He said the person whose ring it was had hurt her foot—”

  “See!” Amanda said to David. “I told you it was really sprained.”

  “—but that it wasn’t very bad and that it would be all right soon,” Janie went on. “But then—he started talking about pericolo. He said that the person whose ring it was, was in ‘molto pericolo’ and that she’d better be very careful.”

  “What’s pericolo?” Esther said, tugging at David. “What’s pericolo?”

  Now that Janie mentioned it, David suddenly remembered hearing the witch doctor say that particular word several times, but it wasn’t until now that he realized he knew what it meant, too. “It means—” His voice came out funny, and he found he had to stop and swallow. “It means danger,” he told Esther. Esther began to whimper.

  “Is that all he said?” Amanda asked. “Didn’t he say what the danger was?”

  “Nooo,” Janie said thoughtfully. “Just that you’d better be careful.”

  Marzia grabbed Janie’s arm and pulled her a few steps away and talked to her for quite a while. From her tone of voice, it sounded as if she didn’t think Janie had told it right. David didn’t get much of what she was saying except for the word “padre.” It seemed as if Marzia was saying something about Amanda’s father. Janie was listening very carefully, but she seemed puzzled or maybe doubtful. Finally she said, “Marzia says the witch doctor said that Amanda ought to go away because of the danger. She says that the witch doctor said Amanda ought to go back to live with her rich father in California.”

  “Back to California?” David asked.

  “That’s what Marzia says,” Janie said; but David got the feeling that Janie wasn’t too sure she’d gotten it right.

  “The witch doctor said I ought to go back to California?” Amanda asked.

  “Marzia says he did,” Janie said.

  Amanda gave Marzia one of her long, cool looks. “Yeah,” she said at last. “I’ll bet she did.”

  On the way home David had lots of time to think about the witch doctor’s prediction. It was obvious that Amanda thought Marzia had made up the part about going back to California; and when he thought about it, David had to admit he hadn’t noticed the witch doctor saying the word “California,” which was a word he would surely have recognized. On the other hand, however, he had heard the pericolo himself. There wasn’t much doubt that the witch doctor had said that Amanda was in some sort of danger. All the way home, and for quite a while afterward, he wondered what kind of danger it might be; but then, with things like Venice and Verona and the beginning of school to think about, it slowly got crowded out of his mind.

  nine

  Right at the end of the summer, the Stanleys decided to go on one last sightseeing trip before school started—this time to Venice and Verona. They were all mad about Venice. Riding in water taxis and gondolas, watching the glass blowers, getting lost in the maze of tiny streets and squares and feeding the pigeons in front of San Marco’s appealed to everyone; and the whole time they were there, Molly was in such a haze of excitement about form and light and color that she had to be watched to keep her from walking into walls and off bridges.

  Verona was great, too, particularly Romeo’s and Juliet’s houses. Dad brought along a copy of the play, and in the hotel room, the night before, he told the story and read the parts that weren’t too hard for the little kids to understand. He did a great job of it, and everybody got into the story. So when they actually got there and went through the rooms and stood on Juliet’s balcony, it made a big impression on all of them. Particularly on Janie, who went around being Juliet for days afterwards. Even after they got back home to the villa, Janie kept hanging out of windows and yelling, “Wherefore art thou, Romeo?” and stabbing herself with imaginary daggers and dying dramatically all over everywhere; until Dad got tired of it and told her that from then on she could only commit suicide in her own bedroom, and quietly.

  Even without the trip, every day would have been busy. Along with hikes and picnics and explorations—and for Dad and Molly, painting and research and writing—everyone was gradually learning how to cope with the Italian way of life. Like learning how to count out the thousands of lire it takes to buy anything, how to eat spaghetti properly, and where to find the things they needed to buy—like matches, which are only sold at the tobacconist. Dad, in particular, learned how to collect belongings sent to Italy by ship—a procedure that used up time and money and patience, not to mention a huge stack of form letters and an awful lot of rubber stamp ink. Dad said that if he were Italian, he’d certainly try to corner the rubber stamp business and become the world’s richest man.

  Being so busy made the time go very fast, and all of a sudden it was almost time for school to start, and nothing had been done about finding out where everyone would be going. The twins were no problem. They had just barely turned five, and Blair, at least, was young for his age in some ways. So it was decided that they would just stay home for one more year. Janie could go to the village school. Her Italian was already very good, and she didn’t seem to be at all nervous about going to school in a new language. The real problem concerned David and Amanda. From what they’d been able to find out, the local school was quite different from an American junior high school, in more ways than just the difference in language. Of course, Marzia went there, which to David was a plus; nevertheless whenever he thought about it, it made him nervous. As for Amanda, she said she wasn’t going to go. David had never had much luck telling Dad he wasn’t going to do something when Dad said he was, but he was considering giving it one more try when another possibility came up.

  At the university where she was taking a painting class, someone told Molly about a school in Florence where all the teachers were from America and the instruction was in English. So she stopped by the school on her way home from Florence and the information she got was really interesting. The school was in a beautiful old palace on a hill across the Arno River from Florence; the classes were small; there was instruction in all the arts; and the students got to go on excursions to famous places, not only in Florence, but also in other nearby cities like Siena and Pisa. Most of the students were from American families who happened to be living in Florence, but there were quite a few from other places all over the world. Molly thought that David and Amanda would love it. It would be expensive, she said; but with the inheritance, they would be able to afford it. Dad thought it was a fantastic opportunity, and David thought it sounded okay. Amanda didn’t think she was going to like it until she heard that the More-houses had enrolled Hilary there, too. After that she couldn’t wait for school to start.

  Leaving out the ordinary things that make going to school very interesting at times and a pain in the neck at others, the school in Florence turned out to be great in some highly unusual ways. One of the ways was the building itself. It had been a castle originally, with a moat and fortified walls, but the castle had been mostly destroyed by invaders and rebuilt as a grand Renaissance palace. For kids who were used to the chicken-coop contemporary of most modern American school buildings, it was mind-blowing just to find yourself attending classes in rooms with enormous fireplaces, ancient hand-carved wood paneling, and ceilings that were beamed and crossbeamed or painted by Renaissance artists.

  For the first couple of weeks David couldn’t get used to it. He’d look up in the middle of a math problem or a grammar lesson and look around, and all of a sudden he’d feel as if he could almost tune in on all the secrets of the palace’s past—as if he were moving through time, and any moment he might become aware of some strange event that the old walls had witnessed hundreds of years before. Once he got the same feeling in the midst of a soccer game—a game played on a wide terrace with a high palace wall on one sideline, and an incredible view of the whole city of Florence on the other. The feeling of moving through time started during a time out, but he was still in the past, staring down the hill at the lances and banners of an invading army
when the game got underway again. He didn’t come back to the present until a soccer ball bounced off the side of his head.

  Another good thing about the school was the fact that it was an easy place to get acquainted. Since almost everyone was from a family that was only temporarily in Florence, there weren’t any of the usual tight little groups that had been best friends for years and didn’t want or need anyone new. Within a very few days, David had met almost everybody and had made a couple of special friends—a guy from Israel and another one who was half-Italian and half-American.

  As far as learning went, the school was pretty much like most schools—what people learned depended on what they wanted to learn. But there was one thing the school did an especially good job of teaching: Italy. Not long after school started, David noticed that he was really seeing things he’d only looked at before—buildings, works of art, even people. Something—maybe it was partly the palace itself—was doing a good job of teaching Italy appreciation. Not long after he realized that he was seeing a lot of things differently, he heard Amanda, who had always made a point of either yawning or giggling at Italian art, having a violent argument about whether Donatello or Cellini was the best sculptor. So then he knew it probably worked on everybody.

  After a while Amanda even admitted that she liked the school, too. Like David, she got to know everyone in a hurry, and everyone got to know her even faster. She even went so far as to say a couple of her teachers were okay, which was, for Amanda, almost unheard-of. But what she liked most of all was the ride back and forth to school every day. The Stanleys and the Morehouses were taking turns driving Hilary and Amanda and David to school, so twice a day Amanda was sharing a back seat with Old Knobby Knees, and she couldn’t have been happier, even though he usually read a book or did math problems and never paid any attention to her at all.