‘Kidnapped!’

“Scotty, someone’s here to see you,” Mom called from the front door.

I paused the video game I’d been playing since vacation started and went to see who it was.

“Hey, Jordan,” I said. He was in my class at school. There was a girl with him who looked about six.

“This is my sister, Emily,” Jordan said. “She has a case for you.”

See, everybody knows I’m going to be a detective someday. I’ve already solved quite a few cases. “What is it?” I asked.

“I saw Miss Leoni get kidnapped,” Emily said.

Yikes! “Miss Leoni who teaches first grade?” I asked, and Emily nodded.

“She lives next door to us,” Jordan added. “For some reason, Em actually likes having her teacher living that close.”

“But she’s missing! A man came to her door and when Miss Leoni opened it he grabbed her and carried her to a big car and then drove away!”

Jordan rolled his eyes in a way that told me he didn’t believe her story. But Emily didn’t look like she was lying.

“Can you describe the car?” I asked.

“It was bigger than other cars and black and looked like a gangster car.”

As far as I knew, there weren’t any gangsters in town. “You‚re sure she’s gone?”

“She seems to be,” Jordan said, “but I doubt she was kidnapped.”

“I saw it!” Emily cried. “The man grabbed her and she kept yelling — ‘put me down!’ But he must have been tickling her, too, because she was laughing.”

“Tickling her?”

“You know, tickle torture.”

“Hmmm, this is a strange one,” I said, “but I’ll check it out.”

Once they had gone, I thought about the case. There seemed to be three clues: the big “gangster” car, the fact that the man grabbed her, and strangest of all, the fact that she was laughing. I decided to start with the car. I asked Mom if anybody in town might have a car like that, and she told me. That was when everything started to make sense. Gathering up the newspapers from the last week, I searched for proof of my theory and finally found it on the Community page. I knew why Miss Leoni had been laughing instead of screaming for help, and I figured that Emily would find out pretty soon, too.

But a week later I got a call from her. “That man is back!” she cried. “He’s loading Miss Leoni’s furniture into a truck! He’s a thief, too!”

“I’ll be right over,” I said.

When I got to Jordan and Emily’s house, the man next door was struggling with a table. We went over to see him. “Hi, kids,” he said, setting the table down. “What can I do for you?”

“Tell us what you did with Miss Leoni!” Emily said.

When the man answered, “There is no Miss Leoni anymore.”

I thought Emily’s eyes would fall out. But then he laughed and added: “She’s Mrs. Young now. We were married last week and now we’re moving to a new house.”

“See, Emily,” I began, “you just didn’t understand what you were seeing. That big car was a limousine, the kind people rent when they get married. Mr. Young was probably carrying Miss Leoni over the threshold.”

“I was just being goofy, actually,” he admitted.

Emily’s teacher now came out to say hi, and when I explained the story, she laughed, too. “I told Tom that carting me around like a caveman was going to lead to trouble,” she said. “But if you can’t get carried away on your wedding day, when can you?”

Special thanks to Brendan Mallory for his illustration. To see more of his work, visit mallorycomics.com To learn more about the author, visit michaelmallory.com. michaelmallory.com

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