the gravel road out of Westerville, kicking up a cloud of dust that would have done a herd of wild horses proud.
“Oh, crap,” I said.
“Take it easy, Odie. Just stay cool.”
The morning sun glinted off the windshield, blinding me to the policeman at the wheel. I stood petrified. I could look the Black Witch in the eye and hold my own against her husband, but there was something about a guy with a uniform and badge and gun that made my guts turn to jelly.
“Wave,” Albert said as the cop approached. “And smile.”
I lifted my hand. My arm felt like lead.
The cop car sped by so fast I wasn’t even able get a good look at the driver. It shot down the road, across the bridge over the Gilead River, and kept on going.
We walked to the bridge and lingered, just to make sure the cop wasn’t coming back and that no one else was around and watching us. Then we slipped into the trees along the river and made our way to where we’d left the canoe. When we got there, Albert and I looked at each other with complete astonishment.
Mose and Emmy were gone, and the canoe with them.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
NOTHING, NOT EVEN the worst of what DiMarco had ever threatened, frightened me as much as finding Mose and Emmy gone.
“Where are they, Albert?”
“I don’t know.” He stood on the bank, looking upriver, then down. “Something must have scared them.”
“Or somebody took them.”
“And the canoe, too? I don’t think so. They’re on the river.”
“Which way did they go?”
Albert studied the ground where we’d laid our blankets the night before. He walked around tree trunks, and I had no idea what he was doing.
“Here,” he finally said, kneeling in some wild grass.
Two sticks had been laid on the ground in a way that formed a V pointing toward the east. It was a trail sign technique that Mr. Seifert had taught us in Boy Scouts.
“They’re downriver,” Albert said.
We followed the Gilead, working our way among the trees and brush, carrying the boxes of Red Wing boots. We’d gone half a mile when I heard Emmy call to us. We found her and Mose pulled up where a small creek fed into the river.
“What happened?” I asked.
Mose signed, Kids fishing.
Emmy said, “They were walking on the other side of the river, but they didn’t see us. Mose thought we should leave.”
We slipped into our new socks and boots. I put my back to the others and quickly transferred the five-dollar bills from my old shoe to my right boot. When I stood up, I thought I was wearing the clouds that angels walked on. I’d never felt anything so comfortable.
We hit the river again and spent the rest of the morning putting more distance between us and Lincoln School. I watched Emmy in front of me dragging her fingers in a bored way through the water, and I had a thought. I took the sewing kit the nice woman had given me, which included a little cutting tool, and snipped three black buttons from my shirt, which I sewed in a triangular configuration to the sole of one of my old socks. From the pillowcase, I took a piece of red ribbon that had bound up some documents, cut from it an oval, which I sewed to the sock heel. I stuffed my other old sock inside the one I’d been working on, all the way up to the toe. In the end, I had a puppet—two button eyes, a button nose, and a little red ribbon mouth. It was a bit on the soiled side, but not bad, all things considered.
I put the sock puppet on my hand. “Emmy,” I said in what I thought was an appropriately high-pitched, puppetlike voice.
She swiveled toward me, and when she saw my little creation, a look of delight lit her face. I handed it to her, and she slipped it onto her hand and gave it her own special voice, a croaking thing not unlike a frog. She named the puppet Puff, because of its puffy, sock-stuffed head, and all that day she and Puff carried on a conversation between themselves and with the rest of us, and the time passed quickly.
In the early afternoon, we saw a church spire and a water tower above some trees along the railroad tracks a quarter mile south of the Gilead. Albert took money from the pillowcase and went to buy us food for lunch and