Snatched by Pete Hautman Page B

deposited a thick slab of gray matter onto Roni’s plate.
    “Oh? What have you been doing?”
    “When I got to Alicia’s there were cops all over the place, but no Alicia.” Roni paused, letting the suspense build for a couple of seconds. “They think maybe she got abducted.”
    “Abducted?” Nick dropped the slice of meat loaf she was moving toward her own plate. It hit the table with a thud. “Are you serious?”
    “Yeah. Some guy grabbed her while she was waiting outside the hospital. Her mom’s freaking.”
    “I imagine she is! A kidnapping in Bloodwater!” She shook her head and made a second attempt to load the slice of meat loaf onto her plate. “The mayor will be apoplectic.”
    Roni stuck her fork into the meat loaf and sawed off a chunk with her knife.
    “Mom, is this one of your special recipes?”
    “It’s low fat, dear. I made it with extra-lean organic beef, soy flour, fat-free yogurt, and bulgur wheat. Remember, you said you wanted to lose a few pounds.”
    Roni sampled a small piece. Half a minute later she was still chewing. How tragic that a cow had died to make something so inedible.
    “Interesting texture,” she mumbled. She would definitely lose weight trying to eat this concoction. She could feel the calories burning off as she tried to chew a second piece.
    “How awful!” Nick said.
    At first Roni thought that her mother meant the meat loaf, but Nick was back on the subject of Alicia.
    “That poor family has been under so much stress lately. And now this!”
    Sometimes it seemed as if her mother knew every single person in this town of thirty thousand people—not only knew them, but knew who they were related to and who they knew and how they knew who they knew.
    “What kind of stress?” Roni asked.
    “That house, Bloodwater House . . . Arnold Thorn had such good intentions. He wanted to turn it into a showcase. He took out building permits for some major renovations, but they just haven’t been able to find the financing.”
    “I thought they were rich.”
    “Not rich enough, apparently. That old house is a money pit.”
    Roni thought of the photo they had seen on Driftwood Doug’s boat. “Who owned Bloodwater House before the Thorns?”
    “Oh, it’s gone through many, many owners. No one stays for long. That house has been nothing but trouble for everyone who has owned it. Let’s see . . . when I first started working for the mayor it was owned by a man named Campbell. He had it for less than a year and then he disappeared. Ran away from some gambling debts, I heard. No one has heard from him since. The bank took over the property and sold it to Douglas and Cecilia Unger, a nice young couple. That house bankrupted them, and poor Cecilia committed suicide. She hanged herself to death from that awful iron fence.”
    “What happened to the husband?”
    “Obviously he couldn’t live there anymore. He simply walked away from it, and the bank took over the property again. It sat vacant for years before Arnold Thorn came along and bought it.”
    Nick took a bite of meat loaf, chewed on it for a while, and swallowed. Roni watched the lump work its way slowly down her mother’s throat.
    “It’s a little chewy,” Nick said.
    “It doesn’t actually taste all that bad,” Roni offered.
    Nick pushed her plate away. “How do you feel about ordering a pizza?”
     
    After the two of them had put away an entire pepperoni and green olive pizza, Roni helped Nick clean the kitchen. The meat loaf went straight into the trash.
    “Maybe next time I’ll skip the soy flour,” Nick said.
    “How about next time we skip straight to the pizza,” Roni suggested.
    Nick laughed.
    One thing about her mom, Roni thought. She had a sense of humor.
    When they were done cleaning up, Roni went up to her room and turned on her laptop. Technically, under the terms of her punishment, she was supposed to use her computer for homework only. But technically, she had once read, bumble-bees should