The Shadow by Kelly Green Page B

the walls, which was covered with wallpaper that depicted teddy bears dancing in a parade. I wanted to rip the wallpaper down, but at that moment there were more important things to do.
    I opened the oven and a puff of black smoke billowed out. Sure enough, the smoke alarm began to whine again. I scooted back into the living room and hid behind the same chair as Leo emerged from the basement once more and jogged to the kitchen. “I’m gonna kill this fire alarm!” he shouted.
    That was my cue.
    I tiptoed past a posse of GI Joe’s and over a half-finished game of Cranium to the basement steps. I expected to find Ms. Peterson cutting Paul open in a dungeon, or a torture chamber, or one of those terrible basements you see in kidnapping movies with a filthy, bare mattress in one corner and a bucket in another.
    Instead, there were two boys playing an Xbox game on a giant flat-screen TV. The floor of the basement was covered in the same unfortunate orange linoleum as the kitchen, but other than that, nothing seemed foul at all. The sun’s afternoon glow peered in through a small curtained window facing the bay. It looked out over a backyard overgrown with purple wildflowers. Not exactly the dungeon I was picturing.
    I turned my attention to the two boys who were staring, enraptured, at the video game on the big screen while they fidgeted in their purple bean bag chairs. One boy was hulking and muscular and looked about Leo’s age, and the other I recognized from the picture in my room. It was the same dusty-haired, younger brother type that Brooke put her arm around in front of Stonehenge.
    Paul laughed and tossed his controller casually to the floor. “I,” he said calmly, “am a master.” There were no bruises on his face, no chains linking him to the floor. He was free to go at any time. In fact, he seemed perfectly ecstatic to be in that basement. “Leo!” he called. “Turn that freaking fire alarm off, man!”
    I did it. I found Paul.
    Only  . . . Paul was playing video games. So now what?
    I crept back up the stairs silently, wondering what was going on, when the smoke alarm stopped blaring—which meant that Leo was on his way back down. I bolted for the front door, but he had already entered the living room. “Hey!” he cried, and he hurtled after me.
    The next few minutes were something of a blur. I couldn’t hear anything over the rushing of breath in and out of my mouth, and the incessant pulsing of blood through my temples.
    I ran through the scrapyard, the long grasses whipping my shins, with Leo sprinting after me. I tripped over a tire and skinned my palms on some gravel, nearly slicing my face open on a loose fender, but I got up just in time to elude Leo, who had tripped over the excessive fabric at the bottom of his flared pants.
    I climbed the eight-foot fence, faster this time, paying little attention to the sharp nips of wire at the top.
    I would have felt relieved as I hopped to the ground on the other side of the fence, except that I wasn’t alone. A man in a baseball cap and denim jacket was waiting there for me, as if he knew I was coming. It was the man who had been following me the night before. He had his hands in his pockets and his head bowed, the shadow from his brim obscuring his face.
    Leo unlocked the door to the fence and came through and stood behind me.
    I was sandwiched in between Leo and the man who was following me. Maybe they were in cahoots the whole time. Maybe they kidnapped Paul in order to get to me.
    The man in the denim jacket reached into this breast pocket, and I darted to the right. “Wait, doll,” he said gruffly, catching me by the shoulder and holding on tight.
    Doll?
    The man flashed a gold police badge. But I didn’t have to see the badge to recognize the voice of the male officer from the other night, the one who drove me back to my father’s porch and called me Doll. “I’ve been keeping an eye on you. Didn’t want anything bad to happen to you,