Wild Horses

Chapter One

But the feet only moved down the hallway, into the front room, and the voices got so far away she couldn't tell what they said. It was dark now, really dark, and a little cold under the house, in the dust and the dark.

Her tummy made growling noises. "Hear that?" she whispered to the doll, Mandy. "Do you think the bad man can hear it?"

Mandy's head drooped like she was trying to say no, the bad man couldn't hear Suzy's tummy growl, that everything would be OK.

Then there was a sharp noise overhead in the house, a noise like a dog barking. Did the bad man have a dog? She had told Daddy she wanted a puppy for her birthday. Maybe he was getting her a dog from the bad man. But there was just the one bark. If that's what it was. Then a thump. Then everything so quiet her breathing sounded loud.

Heavy footsteps again, coming closer. Now they were in the bedroom. She scooted behind a pier, hugging Mandy, too scared to whisper, but thinking really, really hard, trying to tell Mandy not to make a noise while the bad man was near. There was a flash of light that was the trap door opening. Even though she knew Daddy wouldn't like it, she peeked around the pier, seeing a square of light shining on the dust of the crawl space and a light poking at the darkness, the beam of a flashlight.

"Suzy? Are you there? Can you hear me?" It was Uncle Sherman's voice.

Uncle Sherman, not the bad man. He must have come in when she was listening too hard to Daddy and the bad man to hear him. She was tired of being down in the dark, and she was glad to hear Uncle Sherman, but she remembered just in time not to move or make a sound. That would make Daddy mad. It was against the rules of the hiding game. And Mommy had promised that if Suzy was good and didn't make Daddy mad, he'd let her come back to Mommy and live with her always and have lots of storybooks and all the drawing colors she wanted.

"And a puppy?" Suzy had asked.

And Mommy said, "Yes, Suzy, and a puppy."

That was why she couldn't go to Uncle Sherman, no matter how much she wanted to. She could only think really, really hard, trying to make him understand why she couldn't come to him even though she loved him more than anybody except Mommy and Daddy and her doll Mandy.

He must have understood her thinking the way Mandy had understood, because the flashlight clicked off. The trap door slammed shut. Then heavy feet went away, creaking through the hall, out the back door.

She went to the vent at the back of the house, the one that have her a ground-level look at the outside. The man was leaving. He wore boots like Uncle Sherman's, and she almost called him, almost didn't care what Daddy would say. Then the man looked back at the house and her mouth got too scared to make a sound.

By the faraway shine of a streetlight, she could see a mask covering the man's face, a scary Halloween mask. It couldn't be Uncle Sherman after all. Uncle Sherman would never try to scare her. It must be the bad man. She ducked, scared he could see her even though the dusty vent. Then a car started. She waited until the car noises went away before she looked out again. The bad man was gone.

Her tummy was growling a lot now. When would Daddy come and take her to get the ice cream like he'd promised?

Sometimes after bad men left, Daddy fell asleep before he remembered to let her out of the hiding place. When that happened, Suzy crawled out on her own and got cereal out of the box on the kitchen counter to eat and went to bed with her doll. And in the morning, Daddy would say he was sorry, so sorry, Suzy, and he wouldn't be mad after all.

She went back to the trap door, stretched as high as she could to push it open, set her doll on the closet floor, and scrambled out. Everything was dark.