The Clue of the Linoleum Lederhosen Page 5

  “Do I have to do this myself?” yelled the kidnapper.

  At that point Jasper turned off his light. They were plunged into darkness.

  The Manley Boys ran for the exit; Jasper, half tied, wildly hopped. They could hear the kidnapper right near them.

  Jank, tripping over the rug, fell. Jasper stopped hopping to help him up. Jank was on his knees. The man barreled toward them. Jank grabbed Jasper’s head and shoved. Jasper went ricocheting into their masked opponent.

  “Sorry!” said Jank and Fud, scrambling up the steps. “Don’t worry—we’ll be back!

  “Those brave Manley Boys have solved it again! They know,” said the fleeing boy detectives, “exactly where the kidnapper’s cave is …”

  Jasper tried to pull away, but there was a tight grip of gloved fingers on his arm. He kicked and thrashed.

  To no avail.

  “Stop struggling, Dash,” said the kidnapper. “You’re not going anywhere.”

  And, indeed, he was not.

  His ankles were tied.

  Jasper Dash was trapped.

  Meanwhile, Katie had an encounter with the Cutesy Dell Twins. She was sunning herself by the pool, reading Snazzy, when the two of them walked out in their bathing suits and asked her about one of the articles on foot binding.

  “It’s a really good issue,” said Katie. She didn’t want to say too much. She was afraid that at any moment the Cutesy niceness could be retracted.

  “Do you think this swimsuit makes me look Venezuelan?” asked one of the Twins, turning sideways. “I think that might be one of its powers.”

  “You look totally Venezuelan,” said the other Twin. “Doesn’t she?”

  “Are these chairs taken?” asked the first Twin. Katie said no, and the girls sat on either side of her.

  Children played in the water. They floated on inflatable wildlife, and the water around them reflected the pines.

  The three girls sat in a line, their eyes blanked out by silver sunglasses.

  “What a great resort,” said one of the Twins.

  “We’re really happy we came,” said the other one.

  “Did you get the coupon for the free dinner?” asked the first one.

  “Yeah,” said Katie. “Well, Jasper did.”

  The Cutesy Dell Twins looked at each other over her and mouthed, “Jasper.”

  One of them said, “We think Jasper is SO cute.”

  The other said, “But we hope the dinner isn’t a buffet.”

  “We hate buffets,” explained the first one.

  “The red light over the roast beef is creepy,” said her sister.

  “And the beans are super creepy.”

  “And potatoes au gratin make me feel like somebody wants something out of me, and they just won’t ask.”

  Katie didn’t completely understand. She ventured, “Potatoes shouldn’t make anyone feel that way.”

  “You’re right! I hate them for that!”

  “So no buffet,” a Twin said.

  “You don’t have to worry about it,” Katie pointed out. “The dinner coupons were fake, anyway.”

  “Fake, like not from the hotel?”

  “Yeah,” said Katie. “Someone sent out fake coupons.”

  “Weird,” one of the Twins said, rolling her eyes.

  “That is so weird,” said the other one.

  “Who would do that?” asked the first.

  Katie shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know.”

  “I thought you were the big mystery solver,” said one of the Twins. “Like with ghosts and electrical beings.”

  “I’ve given it up,” said Katie. “I’m tired of Horror Hollow. I’m totally tired of being chased and being hunted and picking up sticks to fight things off.”

  “It’s kind of cool, though,” said one of the Twins. “It makes you kind of exciting.”

  Katie liked the idea of being exciting.

  “Well, anyway,” she said, “I’m giving it up because I’m on vacation.”

  “Yay for vacation!” said one of the Twins.

  Katie smiled. “Hey,” she said, “should we get all dressed up for dinner?”

  “Sure,” said one of the Twins. “We could do that.”

  And they all were glad that she had said “We.”

  An hour later the three of them floated in the water on inflatable cushions. They floated in a triangle, looking up at the clouds. The pool beneath them was as blue as the sky above. They were discussing products.

  “Gert is better than Clow.”

  “No way” said one of the Twins. “Clow is better than Gert. It’s almost brave.”

  “Gert gets all brittle,” said Katie. “I had a box once.”

  “Clow gets under my nails,” said one of the Twins, “and people think I’m a caveman from the jungle era.”

  “Gert is a sweet buy.”

  “Clow, it’s supposed to be made from really good things.”

  “My sister,” said one of the Twins, “knows quality when she sees it.”

  “I just appreciate, you know, the finer things in life.”

  “Like she does woodworking. All the time.”

  “It kind of drives you crazy, doesn’t it?”

  “Only the hammering, because it sounds like you’re inside my abdomen.”

  “I make tables and bureaus and things.”

  “They’re really cool, even if they’re kind of loud.”

  “I get a migraine headache for days if my sanding comes out sloppy. I have to stay in the dark and drink ginger ale and pretend I’m mahogany.”

  “I take her ice-cream floats like our grandma used to make.”

  Katie liked that they had hobbies. It made her feel kind of relieved. She had always thought they just worried about boys and their skin. Instead, here they were telling her about this weird little world of interests that no one even knew about. She was starting to like the Cutesy Dell Twins more and more.

  And more and more, as they talked and told secrets, the overheard theft, the search parties, and the kidnapping seemed to Katie to be twelve or fifteen miles away.

  Meanwhile, Jasper Dash, Boy Technonaut, was trussed to a chair and gagged with duct tape. He couldn’t even have screamed for help if he had wanted, the tape was so tight on his mouth.

  He hadn’t learned much about his assailant since he had been trussed. They had not talked a lot. As the mysterious kidnapper tied Jasper up, the man had murmured, “Let me just tie the loose end to the … that thing … on the back of the chair.”

  Jasper made muffled noises like he was trying to speak. The kidnapper yanked off the duct tape partway.

  Jasper gasped. “I believe, sir, it is called a splat.”

  “Yeah. Thanks,” said the kidnapper, slapping the tape back over the boy’s mouth. “One more peep out of you and that’s not going to be the only splat around here.”

  When he was done tying Jasper to the chair, the kidnapper went over to the desk and turned on the radio to the easy listening station. Out came an orchestral version of “Plaid Ballad for Stacey.”

  The man picked up a flashlight, turned it on, and crawled through the opening into the next cavern.

  Jasper heard the man’s voice echoing over the music—the kidnapper was yelling, “Would you be quiet? BE QUIET! I’ll take off your tape, now BE QUIET.”

  And then Jasper heard the Quints start calling for help. They piped, “Help! Help!” while over them, the man growled, “Shut up! I told you to shut up! And for pete’s sake, don’t sing!”

  Jasper struggled in his chair—every muscle in his civic-minded body wishing to leap up, to spring down the corridor, to biff the cad, to knock him down, to throw off the Quints’ ropes and run with them to freedom.

  But freedom, alas, was far away. As Jasper listened in consternation to the screams of distress, he felt a creeping little feeling. It was inside his nose. His hay fever. It was getting worse.

  He sneezed. He couldn’t open his mouth, of course
, so the sneeze was trapped.

  His nose was dripping.

  He was momentarily distracted from the Quints—for he had realized something horrifying: Due to his allergy to mountain laurel, his nose was going to slowly fill up over the next hour or so. And when it did fill up, if the tape had not been ripped from his mouth, he would suffocate. And die.

  One by one, the Quints’ voices fell silent.

  The man must be putting the tape back over their mouths, too.

  Jasper decided he would explain the situation regarding his unfortunate allergic condition to the kidnapper, and they would agree manfully that if the kidnapper removed the duct tape, Jasper would be honor-bound not to speak or yell for help until he had been tagged by someone from his own team.

  The kidnapper came striding out of the Quints’ prison.

  Jasper made mooing noises to attract his attention. He hopped the chair up and down.

  The man ignored him. He lit a lamp. In its light Jasper saw the man reach into his black bag and pull out a necklace of some kind. The man looked around for some place to put it and finally hung it on the antenna of the radio.

  Jasper made another attempt to explain his scheme for a reasonable agreement. Of course, all that came out were moans and a little bit more hopping.

  “I just told you to shut up,” growled the man.

  Technically, Jasper wished to point out, the kidnapper had just told the Quints to shut up, not him; but that correction, like his idea for the gentleman’s agreement vis-à-vis his hay fever, came out sounding like Jasper was barfing into a sauceboat.

  The kidnapper prepared to leave the cave.

  Jasper was desperate to catch his attention. He bellowed silently. His nose dribbled.

  The kidnapper paused at the top of the crude stone stairs. Pensively, he looked down at his black pants. “Clothes always look better on mannequins,” he said. Then he turned and walked away.

  Jasper’s gulps and gargles went unnoticed.

  The kidnapper was gone.

  For a while Jasper sat there, his head hung low.

  He was, however, a boy of pluck and spirit, always ready to take on any challenge that perfidy might box and hand-deliver.

  He reminded himself of that.*

  He looked up.

  Aha. His ankles had been tied only very loosely by Fud, who had been unable to recall how to tie a bow. Jasper could move them a little bit.

  He believed he could hop to the mouth of the cave. And he thought if he really were very careful, he could then hop the chair he was tied to up the rocky steps that led out of the cave. And then—home free. From there it would just be a two- or three-day scrape down the paths, moving a few centimeters at a time, until he reached the lodge and could be unfastened.

  But what about the Quints?

  Quickly, he hopped his chair over to the fissure in the rock that led to their prison. The radio played soft favorites: “Bridge Over Troubled Water” and “Babe, You’re a Kernel (of Wow).”

  He did not think he would fit into the hole in the wall with the chair attached to him. He slammed against it. No luck.

  He would have to come back for the Quints later.

  Gradually, agonizingly, he scratched his way back across the floor toward the exit.

  Tottering, he swayed and clonked up the rock steps, swiveling and tipping the chair with his toes. At each move, he almost toppled. Every muscle was tense. He felt his calves ache with the strain. His arms twitched, trying instinctively to balance him as he edged his way up toward the light.

  Almost there …

  He realized that the kidnapper could come back at any time.

  He had reached the entrance to the cave.

  His breath was heaving through his soupy nose. In and out, it punched through torrents of mucus.

  But he had made it. He wobbled on the edge, half in the sunlight, half in the darkness.

  For a moment he rested, his eyes closed.

  Something cool wrapped itself around his ankle.

  Jasper opened his eyes.

  It appeared that a Kentucky mountain asp* lived in the cave. And it was wrapping itself around his leg.

  It was very important that Jasper didn’t move …

  … except that at any moment, the kidnapper would be back …

  His eyes above the duct tape were wide with fear. He trembled in his seat.

  And then he kicked off and went rolling down the hillside through bracken, leaving the asp far behind.

  Whenever Jasper slowed, he’d strike out again with his heel and keep himself rolling. Heather mauled his cheeks. Saplings swatted him in the face. Rocks bashed at his trunk. Still the ropes held firm.

  He looked down. As the view swung around—forward, backward, forward, backward, forward—he saw that he was heading straight for a precipice. A cliff!

  Scrabbling, he tried to stop himself. He stuck out his elbows as far as possible.

  BAM!

  He came to rest against a small birch that leaned out over the cliff.

  Safe. He was still trussed up, hanging over the edge of a chasm, but now at least he was several hundred feet away from the cave, hidden in the long grasses and mountain laurel.

  Mountain laurel. To which, as we know, he was seriously allergic.

  The sun shone above. The hills all around were dazzling. The air itself was golden with pollen.

  Jasper sputtered behind the tape. He needed to breathe. Otherwise, he would pass out soon. He sucked in as much air as possible.

  The air, of course, was poison to him.

  His sinuses pounded like a blacksmith forging manacles.

  And suddenly he felt something slithering on his back.

  The snake. It had not become fully disentangled.

  And now it was sunning itself on his back.

  That would be no problem, Jasper thought to himself, if he had all the time in the world. He had been suspended above enough pits of asps by arch-villains over the years to know that, come night, this one would slither back to its lair.

  And under normal circumstances, remaining absolutely still for several hours would be no problem for Jasper Dash, Boy Technonaut; he had spent many months studying meditation and martial arts at an ancient monastery hidden high in some jagged mountains somewhere, and knew well how to achieve an inner calm and stillness in the most disastrous circumstances.

  But within another thirty or forty minutes, Jasper would be in the convulsions of allergic suffocation—unable to breathe through mouth or nose.

  And at that point, roused by Jasper’s struggles, the mountain asp would wake up and get nasty.

  Blinking back tears, Jasper tried to remain perfectly still.

  The snake slept on his ribs.

  And slowly, the tide rolled in inside his skull—dripping inexorably—and he faced the very real possibility that he, Jasper Dash, Boy Technonaut, would soon drown in his own snot.

  * It said so in Jasper Dash #14: Jasper Dash and His Sonic Lava Submersible.

  * The most poisonous of the imaginary North American snakes.

  Lily, Eddie Wax, Mrs. Mandrake, and Rick did not have much luck. Besides the mounted bear head, they found nothing. They came back to the hotel tired and frustrated.

  Mrs. Mandrake immediately stopped at the front desk and asked for the number of the fancy Schuyler-Brugghensnock Hotel in New York City so she could call them and ask what the smallest ransom demand they had ever received was. “I don’t know what class of yegg you foster around here,” she said, “but I have a suspicion this criminal is decidedly of the Kmart holdup variety. I absolutely refuse to be menaced by anyone who would steal from a store that sells snack cakes in bulk.”

  Lily wanted to go up to her room to check to see if Katie was there, but she realized she couldn’t, since it was inside someone else’s bathroom. She wouldn’t have minded sitting down and resting for a minute without someone talking to her. When too many people talked to her, she felt sunken and then, later, itchy. />
  It would be good to see Katie, though. Maybe she would be in a better mood by now. Maybe they could try to find out about the ransom call that was made to the front desk.

  Lily went up and stood near the door of 46B, the room where their vacation capsule had landed. She stood there, too timid to knock. She didn’t want to bother anyone. The man could be sleeping.

  The lights in the hallway hummed.

  She put her hands in her pockets, blew back her bangs from her eyes, and stared at the number plaque on the door.

  No one came out or went in. She realized she couldn’t stand there forever.

  She walked around to a porch and looked out the back of the hotel.

  There was Katie down below, floating in the pool with some other kids.

  Lily ran for the elevators.

  No sooner had she stepped out into the lobby and had time to notice that three of the animal heads on the wall were now missing than she heard a bloodcurdling scream. She stopped cold.

  It was a man in a black cloak and black glasses walking out of the hotel bar. He smiled pleasantly and tipped his hat.

  But then there was another scream.

  This one was a voice she recognized: Mrs. Mandrake.

  “I’ve been robbed!” shrieked Mrs. Mandrake, coming down the stairs. “The priceless Mandrake Necklace is gone!”

  Lily ran over to her. “When?” asked Lily. “When did you last see it?”

  “Earlier!” said Mrs. Mandrake, covering her eyes.

  “Figures,” said Sid, the hotel manager, nodding grimly.

  Lily sprinted for the pool. There was no time to lose—she and Katie had to get on the trail of the thief!

  Katie and the Cutesy Dell Twins were laughing and talking with a team of brawny water polo players.

  “You could play around us,” said one of the Twins. “We’ll just drift.”

  “We can be like sand traps in golf,” said the other Twin.

  “Water hazards,” said Katie, smiling.

  Lily ran right up to the edge, her old ripped sneakers squeaking on the tiles.

  “Katie!” she said. “Someone stole a priceless necklace!”

  All the kids stopped talking and turned to look at her.