Boys Against Girls by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor Read Free Book Online Page B

down. Wonder of wonders, there was nothing holding it at all. It was just sitting there, over the opening. Her heart began to race.
    Was it possible that, for once in his life, Wally Hatford had been telling her the truth?
    Now the problem was how to get through the trapdoor without anyone seeing. Customers called two different men “Mr. Oldaker,” so Caroline figured the owners were a young man and his father.
    Since it was almost dinnertime, there were only a few customers in the store, and some of them were leaving. This could be her lucky day, Caroline thought. She hung around, moving slowly among the racks of new calendars, of notepaper and stationery, past the shelves of paperback books and dictionariesand large flat books with beautiful pictures that people kept on their coffee tables back in Ohio.
    “Well, Mike, I'm going to head home’ she heard the older Mr. Oldaker say to the other. ‘I'll set up that sale table, and there will be time tomorrow morning to put the merchandise on it.”
    “Okay, then. I'll leave at six,” the younger man said, and after a little more talk with a woman who came in just then, the older man left.
    “Do you have any books with photographs about the way Chinese children live?” the woman asked Mike Oldaker.
    “Have you seen City Kids in China?” he suggested, and led her to the back of the store.
    Caroline looked around. No one else was there.
    She moved quickly over to the trapdoor and bent down, grasping the edge with her fingers. At first it didn't seem to move, and she was afraid it might be nailed shut after all, but was relieved to find she could lift it with both hands. She slid it off to one side.
    Caroline could see narrow, steep stairs just inside. Before she could think of any reason she should not go, she started down, pulling the lid back over her as she moved down the stairs until she felt it settle into place above her head.
    She stood very still, heart pounding, the damp,musty smell of earth filling her nostrils, the cold of the ground seeping into her bones.
    This is what it's like to be buried alive¡ she thought. Buried Alive , starring Caroline Lenore Malloy.
    Any minute she expected the trapdoor above her to open and Mike Oldaker to stare down at her. But as she waited, the sound of footsteps grew louder from the back of the store, and passed right over her head. No one lifted the door.
    Emboldened at last by the talk and laughter, the comings and goings above her head, Caroline turned on the flashlight and directed it to the bottom of the steep, narrow steps as she went on down.
    There were cobwebs everywhere. Goose bumps rose on her arms. She was the daughter of a kind king but had an evil stepmother. And while her father was out of the country, the stepmother had her put in a dungeon, hoping she would die before her father returned.
    At this point, Caroline knew, a sob should escape her lips. The books always said so, and Caroline practiced it, giving out soft little sobs that would not be heard from above, just tiny baby sobs as she moved on around the cellar, brushing cobwebs away from her face.
    There were a few boxes on the dirt floor of the cellar, some wooden window frames standing on end, assorted junk, but mostly the place seemed unusedAny books stored here for long would become damp and moldy, Caroline was sure.
    She started in one corner, working her way along, moving a box here, a crate there. The cellar wasn't as large as the floor above, so it did not take long for her to cover every foot of space with the beam of her flashlight. She was looking for bones—a piece of a skeleton sticking up out of the floor, perhaps. Something hidden that only Mr. Hatford and the Oldakers knew about. There was nothing. Absolutely nothing.
    Could they have dug up the bones and taken them somewhere else? Thrown them away? She began looking in all the boxes, but the boxes were empty.
    What a disappointment¡ Well, Wally didn't have to know she'd come. If he ever