Read Online Took by Mary Downing Hahn - Free Book Online Page B

I’m really sorry and I’ll find the doll after school.”
    â€œHe won’t find her no matter how hard he looks.” Erica turned her face to the window and pressed her nose against the glass. “She’s been took,” Erica whispered to herself in a voice so low I scarcely heard her.
    Mrs. Plummer looked at me in the rearview mirror. “What makes you think I won’t believe you?”
    â€œMy parents don’t.” She was slowing down to pick up Brody. With him getting on the bus, I couldn’t tell her what I saw.
    â€œTell me later,” Mrs. Plummer told me.
    As usual, Brody gave me a nasty look as he walked past. He was heading for a seat at the back of the bus where he and his friends sat.
    Ignoring him, I looked straight ahead, and Erica looked out the window. We rode in silence all the way to school.
    My day was no worse than usual. A B-minus on a history report because I’d gotten a date wrong. A bloody nose in basketball—an accident of course. And so on and so on.
    The bus ride home was worse than usual because Erica still refused to speak to me. Without her to talk to, I had to listen to rude comments about my sweater, my haircut, my shoes, and who knows what. I wondered how the kids on the bus had entertained themselves before I’d had the bad luck to move to Woodville.
    After Brody got off, Mrs. Plummer glanced at us in the rearview mirror once or twice, but she didn’t have anything to say until she stopped at the end of our driveway. “I hope you find the doll, but be quick about it. It gets dark early, and I don’t want you getting lost in the woods.”
    She shut the door and drove away, heading home, I guessed, to her husband and kids. We stood at the side of the road and looked down the driveway. The trees were a tunnel of darkness already.
    â€œLet’s go straight to the woods and look for your doll,” I said.
    â€œShe won’t be there,” Erica said in the flat little voice she’d been using all day.
    â€œYes, she will.” I took her hand to hurry her along, but she pulled away and ran ahead.
    I chased her through the field’s tall weeds and into the woods. In a few minutes I came to the dead tree, the clearing, and the fallen log. How had Dad and I missed it last night?
    Erica waited for me, empty-handed. “She’s not here.”
    â€œShe must be.” I ran around looking in piles of fallen leaves, under bushes, behind logs, even leaving the clearing to search the woods.
    Erica stayed where she was, her arms folded across her chest, shivering.
    â€œI don’t understand it.” I pointed to the place where I’d last seen Little Erica. “She was right there.” I kicked at the leaves, scattering them, thinking the doll had to be under them.
    Erica hugged herself as if she still held the doll in her arms. “She’s been took.”
    â€œâ€˜Took’? That’s how the kids in Woodville talk, not you and me. We say ‘taken.’ And besides, who took her?”
    â€œSelene.” The name dropped from Erica’s lips like a stone. “The girl who lives on the tippity top of a hill with her old auntie.”
    â€œAre you crazy or just a liar? Selene disappeared fifty years ago. Nobody’s seen her since.”
    Honestly, I wasn’t as sure as I tried to sound. My feeling of being watched, the darkness of the woods surrounding the house, Erica’s behavior, the tension between Mom and Dad, the unhappiness we’d all sunk into—everything was wrong. Maybe, just maybe, it all tied in with Selene Estes. Or something else—I didn’t know what.
    My brain was muddled. My hands and nose were cold, and I wanted to go home, light the fire, and play games on my iPad.
    Erica stared into the woods, at the very spot where I’d seen, or thought I’d seen, the shadow thing.
    â€œYou saw something yesterday,” I said. “I know