The Boys Return (9 page)

“It
was
!” said Tony.

“The road bridge wasn't even there in 1867,” said Eddie. “I checked that too. And this
house
wasn't here in 1867 either! Your story has more holes than Swiss cheese, Tony Benson!”

The boys started to grin. “But we had you going, didn't we?” laughed Steve, playfully swatting at her with a newspaper. “Sort of had you wired? Psyched? You were scared enough that you were all three squeezed into one little bed. You said so yourself.”

“And we had
you
going when I told you Annabelle had your horseshoe key chain,” said Eddie. “We found it in the basement.”

“You should have seen your face!” laughed Caroline.

“You should have seen
yours
when that man knocked at the door.”

“Yeah?” said Caroline. “It takes a lot to scare
us
!”

“I'll bet you would have been scared if you'd been
with us outside your house the other night,” said Wally.

“Yeah,” said Jake, eager to be part of the conversation. “We were waiting for Tony to crawl back out of your basement—”

“Aha!” Beth said.

“—when the cougar came right up to us and brushed against me.”

“Really?” asked Eddie.

“Wow!” cried Peter and Doug.

“We barely got Tony out in time and ran like mad,” said Steve.

“Did it try to
eat
you?” asked Doug.

“I don't know what it was trying to do. Check us out, maybe,” said Josh. “The sheriff says you sure don't see many around here. Dad thinks maybe someone raised it as a cub and it got loose or something, because cougars usually stay off by themselves.”

Nobody spoke for a moment.

“Wouldn't it be something if we caught it?” said Steve.

“We already tried that,” Jake said quickly. “We set up a trap in our backyard, with bait and everything.”

“What happened?” asked Bill.

“We caught Caroline instead!” said Wally.

Everyone laughed, including Caroline.

“What were you using for a trap?” asked Steve.

“A big crate propped up on a stick,” said Josh.

Steve shook his head. “You need something bigger
than that to catch a cougar! Why don't you try to trap it in our old garage?”

“Oh, sure!” said Eddie. “Dad's going to let you do that!”

“All you have to do is talk him into parking outside for a couple of nights,” Steve told her.

“Yeah? And how are you going to persuade the cougar to march into your garage and wait until we call the sheriff?” asked Jake, annoyed that Steve just seemed to be taking over.

“That's the hard part,” Steve admitted. “Wouldn't it be something, though, if we
did
catch it? We'd get our names in the paper and everything.”

“We'd get our
picture
in the paper, along with the cougar's!” said Caroline.

“Sure,” said Wally. “You could even pose with your arms around its neck, Caroline. Kiss it on the mouth if you want.” Bill and Danny laughed.

But Steve looked thoughtful. “What if…?”he began, and thought some more. “What if we were to leave the door of the garage open some night and put a chicken in there? And what if one of us was hiding up in the loft to pull the door shut when it happened?”

“Wait, wait, wait!” said Josh. “You're going to keep a live chicken waiting around in an open garage for—”

“A chicken from the store would probably do,” said Steve.

“Even if it worked, that cougar would bound into
the garage, snatch up that chicken, and be gone before you could blink,” said Beth.

“Yeah, Steve,” said Jake.

“No, I've got it!” Steve said. “We buy this roasting hen, see. And then we get this really strong wire, and we fasten it tight to the chicken, so when the cougar tries to run off with it, he really has to work to get it free, and meanwhile…”

“Meanwhile the guy in the loft will probably have a heart attack,” said Josh, and the boys laughed. All but Wally.

He could see it coming. Everyone else would set up the trap and get stuff ready, but
he'd
get stuck being the guy in the loft. It always happened that way. His brothers seemed to be able to talk him into anything, and with the Bensons on his case too, he wouldn't have a chance.

“Even if that worked, Steve, how would the guy in the loft get the door closed in time?” asked Josh.

“He'd have to do it from the window in the loft,” Steve said. “I mean, the minute the cougar got inside, he'd have to be able to lean out the window and turn the latch.”

“Are you nuts? That's a fifteen-foot drop,” said Wally.

Tony looked over at the girls. “You haven't changed the latch on the garage door, have you?”

“No,” said Beth.

The doors of the Bensons' garage were more like the doors of a barn. Above the large door was a window, in
the loft. The door itself had two sections, each covering half the opening, and when they came together in the middle, a metal piece on one section fit over a latch on the other. When someone turned the latch sideways, the doors were fastened and couldn't rattle and bang in the wind.

“What a guy would need to do, see,” Steve continued, “is leave just half the garage door open, and the minute the cougar got inside, he could reach down with a fishing pole, push the other half of the door shut, flip the metal piece over the latch, then knock the latch sideways using the pole.”

“Yeah?
Then
what?” asked Wally.

“Then we call the sheriff and tell him you're trapped in the garage,” said Tony, grinning a little.

“Dad said if any of us sneaked out again at night, he'd ground us for a week,” said Wally. “Who's the lucky guy who gets to wait up in the loft for the cougar?”

“Who says it has to be a guy?” Eddie challenged him.

“Okay. It could be any one of us, except Peter or Dougie,” said Tony, and he immediately turned to the two young boys. “You guys aren't to say one word to anyone about this, understand? Not a
word
!”

“We won't!” said Peter. “What do you think we are? Babies?”

There was silence for a moment. In one way, each of them wanted the job, and in another way, no one wanted it.

“I've got it!” said Jake at last. “Let's put our names in a hat, mix them up, and have somebody draw. Whoever's name is drawn is the person who will spend the night in the loft and wait for the cougar.”

Beth got a piece of tablet paper and tore it into ten pieces, and all but Peter and Doug wrote their names on a piece. They folded them once and dumped them in Eddie's baseball cap. Eddie bounced the slips of paper around a little, then held the cap above Peter's head and asked him to draw one.

Peter reached up. His fingers closed around a slip of paper, and he handed it to Eddie. She unfolded it and read the name aloud: “Wally.”

Twelve
Getting Ready

I
t was raining again on Thursday morning. Not a shower, not a thunderstorm. Just a steady cold rain from a steady gray sky.

“Perfect!” Eddie said to her sisters as they trooped downstairs to breakfast.

Even more perfect was that Mrs. Malloy was looking out the kitchen window saying, “Poor Mrs. Hatford! Imagine having nine boys cooped up inside your house on a day like this!”

Most of the houses in Buckman—near the college, anyway—were old and big, but they weren't big enough where it seemed to matter. A few had wraparound porches, but most had no family rooms, and rough play was not allowed in the parlors. The basement of a Victorian house was likely to be damp, with winter sleds and summer lawn furniture, rakes and
shovels, and Christmas decorations all stored in its corners and along the walls. The old Benson house, where the Malloys were staying now, had a basement big enough for a Ping-Pong table but not much else.

Eddie went to the window and stood beside her mother. “Yeah, it's too bad, all right! And I invited the guys here today.”

“Oh, Eddie!” said her mother. “Not with all this rain! Even if they stay in the basement, they'll be tracking mud all over the place.”

“Well, it seemed the polite thing to do,” Eddie answered.

“We can't very well make them stay outside,” added Beth.

Mr. Malloy was checking the weather forecast in the newspaper. “Rain all week,” he said. “I guess that's a chance you take over spring vacation.”

Eddie gave Caroline her cue.

“I know!” Caroline said brightly. “Why couldn't we play in the garage? We could turn it into a clubhouse or something, just for the rest of the week, and all twelve of us could hang out there.”

Mrs. Malloy turned from the window and looked at her husband. “You know, that's not a bad idea. I'd rather have mud out there than on my rugs.”

“Okay,” said Coach Malloy. “When I get home this evening, I'll park under the sycamore and they can have the run of the place.”

Beth raised her eyebrows in a victory signal, and as soon as the girls concluded that Mr. Hatford had left
for his job at the post office and Mrs. Hatford had gone to work at the hardware store, they phoned the boys.

Josh answered.

“We're on!” said Eddie. “Dad said we could hang out in the garage.”

“Way to go!” Josh said. “We'll be over.”

It was an hour before they got there, however. Peter and Doug looked very sleepy. Peter, in fact, was still wearing the bottom half of his pajamas, and Caroline realized that the older boys had probably forced them to get up, since they weren't supposed to be left at home alone.

But the older boys had come prepared. Jake was carrying a sleeping bag.

“Okay, guys—Peter, Doug—follow me,” he said, and climbed up the ladder nailed to the inside wall of the garage. Jake disappeared through an open square in the floor above them. The old garage, like a barn, had a loft at the top, where the Bensons, and now the Malloys, stored window screens. The center of the loft was just high enough for the older boys to stand up in. Everyone followed Jake to the floor above, where he tossed the sleeping bag onto the floor, and Doug and Peter, giggling, crawled into it, more awake now than sleepy.

The others sat on the floor, listening to the rain drumming hard on the roof above.

“You know, I don't see how this is supposed to
work,” said Bill. “Suppose we
do
lure the cougar into the garage. Suppose Wally
does
hear it down below. How is he supposed to crawl over to the loft window, stick the fishing pole out, push the door closed with it, flip the metal plate over the latch, and knock the latch sideways with the fishing pole—all in the
dark
?”

The boys looked at the girls, and the girls at the boys.

“He's right,” said Jake finally. “It won't work. The cougar's not going to sit down and politely eat his dinner while we lock him in.”

“Okay. Plan B,” said Steve.

“What's plan B?” asked Eddie.

“I don't know,” Steve said.

Shoulders slumped, and the loft became quiet again.

“We've got to think of something!” said Tony. “We're so close. You just
know
that cougar will be back again. If it was traipsing around when we didn't have any food out there, you know that with a fat roasting chicken, it will probably come inside long enough to grab it.”

More silence. Finally Eddie said, “The only way that makes sense is for Wally to be hiding on our back porch instead of the loft. He'll have to be watching every minute, and as soon as he sees the cougar go inside, he runs over, slams the door shut, and locks it.”

Wally gave a small whimper.

“Yeah, but what if Dad sees him on our porch?” said Beth.

“Listen, Wally. You'll have to hide out in the loft till we give the signal that Mom and Dad have gone upstairs,” Eddie said. “We'll flick Beth's light on and off three times, and that means the coast is clear.” She looked at Tony. “What time did the cougar show up the other night?”

“Between eleven and midnight.”

“Then that's probably when it'll come again.”

Wally looked plaintively at his brothers. “There are an awful lot of probablys in this plan. What if the cougar doesn't show up till four in the morning and I'm sound asleep? What if I'm half frozen? What if it's so dark he comes around and I don't even see him?”

“I'll sleep with Caroline tonight and leave the light on in my room,” Beth said. “It shines out on the space between the house and the garage. If there's a tasty chicken inside, I don't think a little light will stop the cougar from going after it.”

“Where do we get the chicken?” asked Danny.

“We'll go to the store this afternoon,” Eddie told them.

“How much is a chicken?” Caroline asked her sisters when the boys had gone home for lunch.

“I don't know,” said Beth. “A couple of dollars, maybe? How much do you have, Eddie?”

“Enough to buy a new glove before baseball tryouts, but not much more,” Eddie said.

“What about you, Caroline? We already spent some money on wallpaper, remember?”

“A dollar-fifty,” Caroline said.

They pooled their money and came up with three dollars and a quarter.

“How come the boys aren't forking over anything toward this chicken?” asked Caroline.