But nobody answered the phone. A jiffy later it rang again, and when nobody answered it, Poetry said, “Maybe your mother’s out in the woods somewhere with your father; you’d better go answer it yourself.”
I lifted the tent awning, sped out across the lawn to the board walk that leads from the back door to the pump, slipped into the house, worked my way through the dark kitchen to the livingroom, hurried to the phone, my heart pounding from having hurried so fast.
“Hello,” I said into the mouthpiece, making my voice sound as much like my mother’s as I could, and there came screeching into my ear an excited woman’s voice saying worriedly, “Hello, Mrs. Collins? I’ve been trying to get you. Is our boy, Roy, there?”
“Roy?” I asked. “Roy who?”—not remembering for a second that Dragonfly’s real name is Roy Gilbert, the Gang never calling him that. He was just plain Dragonfly to us.
“Roy—my boy. He’s not in his room and I can’t find him anywhere.”
I didn’t have time to tell her anything ’cause right that minute there was a voice hissing to me from outside the window, saying, “Who is it?”
I turned my face away from the telephone mouthpiece and said to Poetry whose hissing voice it was, “It’s Dragonfly’s mother. She’s afraid he’s been kidnapped.”
From behind me I heard footsteps in our dark house, and before I could wonder who it was, I heard Mom’s voice calling from the bottom of the stairs, “What’s going on down here?”
Mom certainly looked strange, standing there in the kitchen doorway in her night gown, her hair done up in curlers, the curlers shining in the light of the lamp she was carrying.
Right then Poetry’s mischievous mind made him say something which he must have thought was funny, but it wasn’t ’cause it made Mom gasp. His squawky duck-like voice was almost like a ghost’s voice coming loudly from just outside the window: “Everything’s all right, Mrs. Collins. The phone rang and Bill answered it, ’cause your husband wasn’t here—but was out in the woods in his night clothes racing around with a lantern and yelling wildly. The last we saw of him he was running like an excited deer with hounds on his trail!”