The Girl in the White Van Read online

  With a high-pitched scream, Sir curled over, his hands clutching himself.

  But how long would he stay like that? Frantically, I scanned the ground for a weapon. Tangles of wires, molded pieces of metal and plastic and rubber, a seat from a car, a hubcap … And then I saw it. A rusted axle. I tried to pick it up with just my right hand, but it weighed at least thirty pounds. With a grunt, I grabbed it up with both hands.

  When I turned back, Sir was choking Jenny, shaking her back and forth the way Rex had shaken me earlier.

  Take things as they are. Punch when you have to punch; kick when you have to kick.

  —BRUCE LEE

  SAVANNAH TAYLOR

  I ignored the dizziness that threatened to swamp me. I didn’t feel the pain of my broken wrist. I didn’t feel anything but the desire to stop him. Hefting the axle to my shoulder, I swung it at his head like a metal bat.

  It connected with a dull bong that reminded me of the cast-iron bell Sifu rang to begin kung fu class. Sir let go of Jenny, put both hands to his head, took two steps, and then toppled over.

  Had I killed him? I decided I didn’t really care. Instead of checking, I ran to Jenny. She was on her knees, gagging and coughing. Her hands rubbed dark marks on her neck.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I don’t know.” She looked at me. Her eyes were wide and wet. “But we got him, didn’t we? We got him, Savannah. We’re free!”

  I was just starting to return her smile when she fell over sideways. I dropped to my knees next to her. Her eyelids were flickering. She was still breathing, even though it was shallow and fast. Had he hurt something in her throat? Cut off oxygen long enough that it had affected her heart or brain?

  I looked from Jenny to Sir and back again. I had to get her out of here and to a hospital. But I couldn’t risk him following us. Given another chance, he would surely kill us.

  I ran back to him. He still hadn’t stirred. I grabbed both his feet, tucked them under my good arm, and dragged him on his back to the nearest car, just as he had dragged me earlier. He was completely limp, his head bouncing over the gravel. His left temple was bleeding, leaving a streak on the dirt. I used the kung fu sash from my backpack to tie his hands behind his back and to the car’s bumper. My swollen left hand worked only reluctantly. I had to use my teeth to tighten the knots. He was still breathing, but it sounded rough and raspy.

  Then I ran back to Jenny. She lay where she had fallen, but now her eyes were at half mast.

  “Come on, Jenny, we have to get out of here.”

  She tried to move, but it was like watching an overturned bug. Her arms and legs just scuffed back and forth in the dirt. Sobbing with exhaustion, I knelt beside her, grabbed her around the waist with my right arm, and somehow managed to get us both to our knees and then to our feet.

  “We just have to make it to the van, Jenny. Come on. Stay with me.”

  Like two drunks, we staggered toward it. A couple of times she started to tip over, but through sheer force of will, I kept her upright.

  I opened the passenger door. It was a relief to see the keys dangling from the ignition. The airbags dangled from the dash like deflated balloons. Fine white powder was still floating in the air, like someone had blown flour off an open palm. For some reason, I thought of Bruce Lee blowing Chuck Norris’s chest hair at him, and let out a laugh that sounded like a rusty hinge. Somehow I managed to shove Jenny onto the seat.

  I slammed her door closed, then ran around the front of the van. The headlights were broken, and the front of the van was dented and scraped from ramming the fence open. The driver’s-side door was still open. I dragged myself onto the seat. It was a relief when I started it up without incident. In stockinged feet, I drove past the cinder-block building with a big sign saying ALL AUTOS and out into the empty parking lot. In front of that was a long, lonely stretch of road. I had no idea whether to turn left or right.

  I chose right because that was the only hand that worked. It slipped on the wheel as I turned. Resting on my lap, my left hand was throbbing in time with my heart.

  I looked over at Jenny. She was slumped against the window. I wasn’t even sure she was breathing.

  When I looked back at the road, a car was coming straight toward us. As I swung the van back into our lane, I slowed down and started honking the horn, little beeps that I hoped the other driver would understand were a form of communication, not a complaint. Imitating Jenny, I used the Morse code pattern for SOS. Three short beeps, three long beeps, three short. Still, the car—a dark-colored Subaru Outback—started to pass us.

  But the guy driving it looked awfully familiar. Was I just hallucinating after everything that had happened? In the van’s sideview mirror, I saw brake lights flash. Then the driver flung his door open and started running back to me.

  It was Daniel.

  We looked at each other through the driver’s-side window. I put my good hand up against the glass, and he matched it with his own.

  Then he opened the door.

  “Are you all ri—” he started to ask. Then he looked past me and swore. “What’s wrong with that girl? Is she alive?”

  And when I looked at Jenny’s white, still face, I didn’t know the answer.

  If there is always light, you don’t experience light anymore. You have to have the rhythm of light and darkness.

  —BRUCE LEE

  SAVANNAH TAYLOR

  “Left rear roundhouse kick on my count,” Sifu Terry said.

  I shifted my stance so that my right foot was forward. So did the students in the line on either side of me. Tonight, I was one of three kung fu students testing for purple. Two others were testing for orange. One was Mr. Tae Kwan Do, whose real name turned out to be Jake Clowers. I’d never told him that I had briefly suspected him of being my kidnapper.

  Sifu began the count. “One.” The five of us kicked into the air and then set our feet back down. “Two … three … four…” As he counted to ten, Sifu and the other black belts observed our kicks, sometimes scribbling a note or leaning over to whisper to each other. Behind us, the room was crowded with higher-ranking students as well as friends and family.

  This time my mom was among them. Three months ago, we had moved into a new apartment, partly financed by my half of a GoFundMe account a stranger had set up after Jenny’s and my story hit the news.

  “Nine,” Sifu called out.

  My left leg shot out, but as I brought it back, I lost my balance and my toe touched the mat. I quickly moved my foot to the correct starting position. Sifu Terry and at least one other black belt noticed, but I didn’t obsess about it. There was a lot I didn’t obsess about anymore. I just threw the tenth kick when told to and then waited for the next instruction.

  “Go to horse stance.” Sifu shifted his gaze to the rest of the room. “I need five helpers with air shields on the mat.”

  Daniel was the first to respond. Holding the three-foot-long black pad, he stopped in front of me. His expression didn’t change, but after spending a lot of my free time with him over the past three months (including winter formal), I could now guess his thoughts. You got this.

  After calling 9-1-1, he had tried to stop Jenny’s wrist bleeding while I begged her to stay strong and with us. Once we got to the hospital, though, it turned out that her recent injuries were not that dire. They gave Jenny antibiotics and a couple of units of blood. They also called in a plastic surgeon to consult about her face. Since then, she’d had two surgeries and was now undergoing laser treatments to reduce the redness of her scars. The plastic surgeon said that even after treatment, there would always be faint white lines on her nose and lip, but her scars were no longer the first thing you noticed about her. Jenny was back at school and also working with a one-on-one tutor her parents had hired to bridge the months she had missed. Her goal was to graduate in June.

  At the hospital, my wrist had been reset under local anesthesia. And they replaced the Real Simple magazine with a more official spli
nt.

  The ER doctor had marveled over how thick the magazine was. “Three hundred ninety-four pages!” She weighed it in her palm. “That’s got to be one of the thickest issues they ever printed. If you tried to stop a knife with a current magazine, it’d probably go right through.”

  Even with my arm in a cast, I had kept coming to kung fu class. Sifu had modified the drills so that I could still participate.

  “Right side thrust kicks on my count,” he said now. When I turned to my left, I was facing the two students testing for orange. Mr. Tae Kwan Do was no longer on the end. Jenny was. Her counselor had suggested it might be good for her to add to the kung fu I had already taught her that desperate day in the RV. She turned out to be a natural. Her long legs could snap kicks as high as a man’s head.

  Daniel turned his shoulder to me and braced himself. His arms were threaded through the straps of the four-inch-thick pad that shielded him from shoulder to thigh.

  “One,” Sifu said. As I drove my foot into the pad just over Daniel’s ribs, I didn’t hold anything back. He let out a grunt and took a half step back. “Two.” Jenny’s partner was also having trouble staying in place.

  I snuck a glance over my shoulder at the audience. Jenny’s brother, Blake, was in the front row of folding chairs, sitting next to his parents. Amy and Bob Dowd were sitting together, with eyes only for their daughter. Jenny had said that her dad had moved home the week before.

  A few seats down from them was Officer Diaz, Daniel’s father. Daniel had told me that he and his dad had some long talks after Daniel found us. Last week, I had watched Enter the Dragon at his house with his whole family. And when his dad caught us kissing in the kitchen when we were supposedly making popcorn, the three of us had all pretended that he hadn’t seen anything.

  One person not in the room was Tim. My mom still saw him every now and then, but she no longer called him her boyfriend. She had told me a few things about his past that made me feel sorry for him. Last month, she passed on a handwritten note. In it, Tim apologized for his behavior and said he was in anger management counseling. He wrote that he was trying to learn what it meant to be a man. For her part, my mom was attending Co-Dependents Anonymous, which said that true happiness couldn’t come from another person.

  She’d also promised that we wouldn’t leave Portland while I was still living at home. Because of the GoFundMe, I would have enough to make at least a start at college.

  Sir, whose real name was Milton Thorne, was in jail awaiting trial. He’d had a fractured skull, but he’d healed up, just like me and Jenny. Everyone seemed certain he would receive a prison sentence so long that he would never get out. After we escaped, the police had searched the wrecking yard he owned for hidden graves, but they had turned up no evidence of earlier girls. It seemed Jenny had been his first and I was his last.

  Milton might have been going to prison, but Rex was getting out. A rescue group in upstate New York that specialized in rehabbing vicious dogs had offered to take him. Despite what Rex had done to her face, Jenny hadn’t objected. The dog was what Milton had made him. Maybe he could be unmade, and maybe he couldn’t. But it didn’t seem fair not to give him a chance.

  Sifu Terry clapped his hands. “Thank you, helpers. You may salute off the floor. And those of you who are testing should go to horse stance.” Then he and the other black belts left the room to confer.

  I spread my feet and settled down into a low horse stance, my arms held up as if ready to block an imaginary blow. From my previous test, I knew the black belts would not come back for at least five minutes, long enough that my legs would be trembling.

  But I was sure that they would stand up to the challenge. And I was also sure that when the black belts returned, Jenny and I would both be awarded rank. Without turning my head, I managed to catch her eye.

  And then we grinned.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book got started with a real and terrifying event. A few years ago, an ex-con who had already kidnapped one young woman began stalking girls in my neighborhood. He was confronted by our local school resource officer and ended up in a gunfight—right in front of my martial arts school. It seemed like the plot of one of my books come to life. I immediately started wondering what would have happened if he had tried to take one of our students hostage.

  So many people helped me pull this book together.

  Sifu Wally Jones, who holds a black belt in kung fu, has been my teacher in various martial arts and self-defense techniques for nearly a decade.

  Robin Burcell, a retired cop and author in her own right, explained many aspects of police procedure. Julia Rico, an officer in Portland Police Department’s Juvenile Runaway Unit, answered my questions about what would happen if a teen was a possible runaway. A former FBI agent and current police officer who preferred not to be named answered my questions about Tasers.

  Rich Hoyt, coordinator of Portland’s Derelict RV Towing Program, gave me a tour of dozens of impounded RVs. He proved to be a person with a lot of heart—and he was also great at brainstorming how to hold a captive in an RV, as well as how said captive could escape.

  Building on what Rich taught me, Karen Pfundtner, whose blog is called RVing: The USA Is Our Big Backyard, was willing to answer weird questions from a stranger about escaping from a padlocked RV when you have no tools. She even sent me photos.

  Kevin Beckstrom, public information officer for the Oregon Department of Transportation, explained how license plates and registrations work. Kevin has answered research questions for me since my very first book in 1999!

  Sam Naficy, MD, FACS, a plastic surgeon in Seattle, has done amazing reconstructive work on people who have suffered horrific dog-bite wounds. He cheerfully answered questions about my imaginary victim while walking his own dog early one morning.

  The folks at Sherwood’s Pick-n-Pull let me tour their yard and gave me some tips on things my character might find lying around that could be used as weapons.

  The Bruce Lee exhibit at the Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience reminded me why Bruce Lee is considered the best martial artist of all time.

  Even I find it hard to believe, but this is my twenty-fourth book with my agent, Wendy Schmalz.

  My editor, Christy Ottaviano, helped me dig down deep and make this book even better. I feel lucky that I got to start working with associate editor Jessica Anderson at the beginning of her career. Morgan Rath can coordinate events across a half-dozen states without breaking a sweat. Mallory Grigg and Angela Jun designed the amazing cover. Other wonderful folks at Henry Holt include Lucy Del Priore, Melissa Croce, Katie Halata, Jennifer Healey, Catherine Kramer, Molly Ellis, and Allison Verost.

  OTHER MYSTERIES BY APRIL HENRY

  Girl, Stolen

  The Night She Disappeared

  The Girl Who Was Supposed to Die

  The Girl I Used to Be

  Count All Her Bones

  The Lonely Dead

  Run, Hide, Fight Back

  THE POINT LAST SEEN SERIES

  The Body in the Woods

  Blood Will Tell

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  April Henry is the New York Times–bestselling author of many acclaimed mysteries for adults and young adults, including the YA novels Girl, Stolen; The Night She Disappeared; The Girl Who Was Supposed to Die; The Girl I Used to Be, which was nominated for an Edgar Award and won the Anthony Award for Best YA Mystery; Count All Her Bones; The Lonely Dead; Run, Hide, Fight Back; and The Body in the Woods and Blood Will Tell, the first two books in the Point Last Seen series. She lives in Oregon.

  Visit her online at aprilhenry.com, or sign up for email updates here.

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  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Savannah Taylor

  Sir

  Savannah Taylor

  Savannah Taylor

  Savannah Taylor

  Daniel Diaz

  Savannah Taylor

  Savannah Taylor

  Savannah Taylor

  Jenny Dowd

  Michael Diaz

  Jenny Dowd

  Daniel Diaz

  Tim Hixon

  Savannah Taylor

  Blake Dowd

  Savannah Taylor

  Jenny Dowd

  Bob Dowd

  Savannah Taylor

  Jenny Dowd

  Savannah Taylor

  Jenny Dowd

  Amy Dowd

  Sir

  Savannah Taylor

  Savannah Taylor

  Daniel Diaz

  Sir

  Daniel Diaz

  Jenny Dowd

  Lorraine Taylor

  Savannah Taylor

  Lorraine Taylor

  Savannah Taylor

  Savannah Taylor

  Jenny Dowd

  Daniel Diaz

  Savannah Taylor

  Jenny Dowd

  Savannah Taylor

  Jenny Dowd

  Daniel Diaz

  Savannah Taylor

  Savannah Taylor

  Savannah Taylor

  Savannah Taylor

  Acknowledgments

  Other Mysteries by April Henry

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2020 by April Henry

  Henry Holt and Company, Publishers since 1866

  Henry Holt® is a registered trademark of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC

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