“Junie, help me clean up,” I said when the front door closed behind Dad.
“But I want to watch TV. The Hardy Boys are on.”
“Then you better hurry so you don’t miss too much.”
While she washed dishes and I dried and put away, she chattered about how excited she was for tonight’s Hardy Boys episode, and how sad she was the fair was gone but that she couldn’t wait until next year, that she supposed grape lip gloss tasted better than strawberry because strawberries made her nose itch, please could we have spaghetti and meatballs for dinner tomorrow, did I think Dad would let me take her to see The Hills Have Eyes, and who would be stupid enough to get out of their car if it broke down like they showed that family doing in the trailer, it was almost as stupid as hitchhiking.
My breath snagged in my throat.
Almost as stupid as hitchhiking.
“Junie, I need to go out.”
“You’re not going to watch the show with me?”
“I’ll be back in an hour,” I said. “Now go upstairs. I have to quick make a private phone call.”
“Then do it in the basement,” she said, pointing at the stairway off the kitchen. “The cord’s long enough.”
I growled at her.
She smiled and skipped out of the kitchen and onto the living room sofa, well within earshot. The little stinker. My plan was to call Brenda and straight-out ask her if she and Maureen had hitchhiked anywhere other than to the Cities. It didn’t matter that the answer was guaranteed to hurt my feelings. Junie’s The Hills Have Eyes comment had gotten to me. What if a stranger had picked up Maureen and was holding her captive somewhere right now?
I cupped the phone to my ear and was about to dial when I heard someone on the line. I reflexively went to hang up—party line courtesy—before recognizing Ant’s voice.
“。 . . picture,” he grumbled. “You said if I got it, I could take a turn.”
My blood iced.
When the person on the other end didn’t respond, Ant continued, his voice reedy with emotion. “Don’t worry about Nillson. I know my way around a basement. She won’t—”
“Private phone call!” Junie screeched, bopping back into the kitchen.
I slammed the handset onto the wall-mounted body. “Junie!”
She laughed.
My heart was hammering a backbeat against my ribcage. No way could Ant know it was me on the other end of the line, not unless he’d recognized Junie’s voice. I pictured the twisting tunnels below my feet. If I raced to Ant’s house and shoved my ear to his door, what else would I hear? What other terrible things was he saying, what awful secrets about basements and Jerome Nillson and a she?
A Maureen.
Now that I’d let my mind wander to the tunnels, it wanted to keep going, to fly to the haunted section, to the basement room where I’d witnessed Maureen on her knees. Brenda had said it might have been Sheriff Nillson’s basement. She’d even said Nillson could have kidnapped Maureen, but then she’d backed off it. Of course she did. A sheriff wouldn’t abduct a girl. But what if we’d dismissed the possibility too soon? What if Nillson had her, and Ant and someone else—Ricky? Ed?—knew about it, were taking advantage of a wounded, terrified Maureen?
My stomach grew oily at the thought.
Our house keys hung on a hook next to the phone. The one marked with a piece of electrical tape was the key to our basement door.
The key that also unlocked Brenda’s and Claude’s basement doors.
Goose bumps glittered my flesh.
Maybe it’d unlock Ant’s, too.
And Sheriff Nillson’s.
I didn’t have the nerve to do it alone.
I was too scared to pick up the phone again—Ant could be lurking on the other end, mad as a meat axe, waiting for the person who’d overheard him to come back on the line—so I walked to Brenda’s instead of calling. Her parents told me she was at work and that they’d be picking her up after. I headed to Maureen’s next. I still wanted to check her room for her diary, but no one answered the door. After five minutes of waiting on her front porch, I crossed the street to Claude’s.
“How nice to see you, Heather!” Mrs. Ziegler said, opening the door for me, releasing a wash of fresh-baked cookie smells. She was wearing her perennial red checkerboard apron over a housedress, her hair tightly curled. She had the most welcoming smile in all the neighborhood. “Won’t you come in.”
“Thank you,” I said, running through a mental picture of how I looked. It was something I did whenever I was around grown-ups. Ball cap pulled low, rainbow T-shirt, shorts, white sneakers. I hadn’t worn my Quadrafones since Maureen had disappeared. I wanted to be able to hear what was coming.