Wanted! by Caroline B. Cooney Page B

Had he known that somebody else was about to break in for those same disks? If so, he would have wanted Alice out of the house.
    So he did not think Alice was in danger. And he must not have thought he was in danger, or he would have barricaded a door, or called the police himself.
    Fifteen or twenty minutes had passed before the man entered Dad’s condo. So that man could not have been very far away. In a city, however, depending on traffic, ten minutes could mean half a mile or several miles. Everybody Alice knew lived within that sphere. This did not narrow it down.
    That man had spoken in a voice Alice half knew. He knew things about Dad, as if they had worked together. He had entered with a key. Presumably Dad’s key.
    Alice had hid from this trespasser under the Corvette. Time had passed, in which there were strange and awful noises she could not identify, and one she could: the computer keyboard. Then the man left, driving away in that navy blue minivan.
    Could the person to whom the voice spoke have been Dad himself? Could Dad have walked into the condo? No. He would have yelled; fought; warned his daughter somehow. Had he been carried in? Had that heavy sound, that couch-falling sound, been her father’s body when it was dropped to the floor for the police to find? Could he have been carried in unconscious? Had the actual murder of Alice’s father taken place while she lay silently sobbing under the car? Could his body have been in that condo while she was showering and changing clothes?
    He was a big man. Tall and lean and strong. He was fit. It would take another big strong man to move him. And as for killing him, how could somebody as small as Alice have accomplished that?
    But she did not know how he had been killed. If he had been shot, it definitely had not happened at the condo; she would have heard something. Her father possessed no guns; she, Alice, would not have had access to a gun, and her mother would know that. How else do you kill a man? Hit him over the head? Alice wasn’t tall enough. Her mother would know that, too!
    But there again, the excess of cop shows Alice had seen filled her with an excess of images: You could catch a person by surprise. You could come up behind them. You could get them to stoop down to pick something up and brain them with a baseball bat. You did not have to be bigger than your enemy. Just smarter, or luckier.
    But nobody was smarter than Dad!
    Alice wrenched her mind away from pictures of herself, from the very pictures her mother must be forming, of the shape of Dad’s death and Dad’s killer. She forced herself to go on analyzing the events.
    She had not entered his bedroom. She had not gone near his bathroom.
    Alice had taken the time to shower and change and had driven away in the Corvette, as her father had told her to do.
    At least an hour later, maybe an hour and a half, because Alice had no idea how long she had sat, comatose from anxiety, waiting for Dad to arrive, had come the excited claims on the radio that Marc Robie had been murdered; that Alice had sent an E-mail confession to her own mother; that Mom herself called the police; that police were looking for Alice.
    Swiftly; everything had happened so swiftly. As if it had been engineered.
    Next, Alice had called her mother, who, in shock and grief and horror, definitely did believe that Alice had killed Dad.
    So while Alice lay flat and shuddering beneath the car, something other than murder had taken place. The murderer sent a false E-mail message to Alice’s mother. How could the murderer have known the password? How could the murderer have known that Alice signed off Ally when talking to her mother? What possible wording, what possible sentence, could make a person’s own mother say—Yes; my daughter killed her father?
    Alice could hardly bear to think of her mother. The betrayal! How dare Mom believe so readily!
    And if all, or some, of this were true—what vicious and terrible person had