Hostage by Willo Davis Roberts Page B

anyway?” Mrs. Banducci wanted to know. She didn’t sound as petrified as I felt. “You carrying any lunch, by chance? I only had coffee for breakfast because I was expecting my friend, and it’s long past lunchtime. My stomach’s rumbling.”
    Lunch. Food was the last thing I was concerned with, but I had packed a lunch for school, the way I always do. “I have a ham sandwich with mustard, an apple, and two oatmeal cookies,” I told her. “And a granola bar I was planning to eat on the way home.”
    She made a sound of approval. “Let’s get these ropes off and get at it,” she said.
    It took an interminable time to get Mrs. Banducci untied. The ropes were tight, I couldn’t see the knots, and my fingers werepainfully numb. Once in a while she’d say something like, “I made an apricot coffee cake this morning. My friend loves it.” Or, “That Bo fellow has bad breath, did you notice?”
    Mostly I just sweated and grunted as I fumbled behind me while we sat back-to-back. At one point I broke a fingernail, and it stung where it tore down into the quick. I didn’t have the luxury of time to rest and wait for the pain to ease. I gritted my teeth and kept working at the knots.
    When they finally came free, I grunted in exultation, though of course we were still locked inside a truck that had been abandoned and hidden under some trees in the hope that nobody would notice it or investigate.
    â€œI haven’t been bound up that way,” Mrs. Banducci declared, “since my brother Tommy tied me to a tree when I was eight. We were playing Joan of Arc, and he went off to find kindling to put around my feet so he could burn me up. Mama wouldn’t let him take any matches out of the house, and he got hungry and stopped to fix a snack and forgot all about me. It wasn’t until suppertime when I didn’tcome in to eat that he remembered where he’d left me. He got his butt blistered for that one, I’ll tell you. Served him right.” She moaned a little as she rubbed her chafed wrists, apologized for taking the time to do it, and began to work on my knots. “Speaking of suppertime, it might be easier for me to undo these ropes if we took the backpack off. Can I unfasten a strap or something and do that before I get you untied?”
    I agreed it would be a good idea, but hoped she wasn’t going to want to find my lunch and eat before she accomplished the important thing, and she didn’t. Since she was working with her hands in front of her, even though she still had to contend with pitch-blackness, she did the job much more quickly than I had.
    I brought my hands around front and rubbed circulation back into them. My torn fingernail hurt, and I sucked on that finger for a minute, then bit off the loose part of the nail as best I could. Finally I reached for the backpack, but Mrs. Banducci had already felt her way into it.
    â€œAh, here’s the sandwich,” she said with satisfaction. “You don’tmind if I help myself to half of it, do you?”
    â€œHelp yourself to all of it,” I invited. “I’ve always thought it was crazy to make a big deal out of a last meal before a prisoner is executed. What good is it? Whose stomach would be settled enough so you could swallow and not have it all come back up?”
    Surprisingly, Mrs. Banducci chuckled. “We’re not dead yet, child. Put that good young brain of yours to work and think of something. What else you got in this backpack thingy?”
    â€œBooks, papers, and the rest of my lunch,” I told her. In the short time she’d been our next-door neighbor, I’d thought she was kind of a pain with her nosiness. And of course if she hadn’t been overly inquisitive this morning, she’d never have been captured after letting the air out of one of their tires and peeking in the windows of our house. But I was glad I