Stolen in the Night Read Free

noise and her eyes entreated Tess over the knuckles
     of the hand that gagged her.
    Tess looked square in the face of the man who held her sister. “Hey…” she protested.
    “Shut up,” he growled. “Don’t make a sound.”
    Tess was shuddering from head to toe.
    “You listen to me, little girl. If you make one peep or tell anybody, I’ll kill your
     sister here. Do you understand me?”
    Tess felt as if a trapped bird was flying madly around her rib cage, flapping its
     wings.
    “Do you?” he demanded, poking at Phoebe’s throat with the knife. Phoebe made a plaintive
     gurgle in her throat.
    “Yes…” said Tess.
    “Not one sound. Don’t tell anyone. I’ll kill her if you do.”
    Tears rose to Tess’s eyes and her chin trembled. “I won’t,” she said.
    She was not prepared for what happened next. In front of her eyes, Phoebe was jerked
     from her sleeping bag and pulled out through the hole in the side of the tent. One
     minute she was there and then…she was gone.
    Tess’s mouth dropped open and she covered it with her small hands. All she could see
     through the jagged hole was blackness, darkness. She heard rustling sounds outside,
     into the woods. As if monsters were moving among the trees, able to hear if she made
     the smallest sound. She did not dare to move or speak. She kept thinking, Phoebe!
     She kept seeing the look of terror in her sister’s eyes, the man’s knife glinting
     against her pale throat.
    Tess needed to pee, but she did not dare budge. Even if she wanted to go, she wouldn’t
     know the way in the dark to the dimly lit latrine on the campground path. Besides,
     she knew not to go there without Phoebe. They always used the buddy system. That was
     the rule. And she and Phoebe were buddies. They went together or not at all. Tears
     began to run down Tess’s cheeks at the thought of her sister alone in the woods with
     that man with the knife. She wept, she waited. She felt pee soaking the legs of her
     sweatpants but she did not move. She sat like a statue for a long time.
    “Jesus Christ. What the hell…?”
    Jake appeared, wild-eyed, at the hole in the tent. “Tess. What the hell happened?”
     He looked around the tent. “Are you all right? Where’s Phoebe?”
    Tess stared at him, wondering if she should tell. “Where is Phoebe?” he shouted at
     her.
    Before Tess could decide to answer, Jake withdrew from the tear in the side of the
     tent. “Dad!” he yelled. “Mom. Dad, help!”
    In an instant, the campsite was a chaos of flashlights, lanterns, the cries of the
     baby. Tess’s father, his eyes frantic, scrambled into the tent and grabbed her by
     the arms, pressing her to his chest for a moment and then squeezing her upper arms,
     searching her eyes. “Tess, what happened here? Tell me. What happened to Phoebe?”
    Outside the tent, she could hear her mother moaning and Jake pleading in a small voice.
     “I’m sorry, Mom. I’m sorry.”
    Tess began to sob. “I can’t,” she said. “He said not to. He said not to tell.”
    “Who said that?” Rob DeGraff choked out, his voice shaking, the whites showing around
     his eyes. “Tell me, Tess. This instant.”
    Tess’s small body was trembling. Her words came out in a whisper, sloppy with tears.
     “The man who ripped the tent with his knife. The man who took Phoebe.”
    “What? Rob, what happened? Is Tess all right? Where is Phoebe?” Dawn was screaming
     from outside the tent.
    Rob gasped and doubled over, as if he had been stabbed with the ugly man’s knife himself,
     and then he groaned. “Oh my God! Oh no.”
    Her father’s groans made her feel sick to her stomach and gave her bad goose bumps
     from head to toe. She had never before heard a sound like that coming from her father.
     He was the one who was always laughing and saying that everything would be all right.
     But not this time. This time he sounded like an animal howling in pain. She wondered
     if he was mad at her. She couldn’t