Free Blossoms Meet the Vulture Lady by Betsy Byars

didn’t you? Well, that was what we were talking about. He asked me to keep an eye on her and to make sure she didn’t get close to you. So you go with someone else.”
    “No. Anyway, I don’t believe you. I’m going to ask her if she has a belt made out of boys’ ears.”
    “Oh, never mind. Come on back.” Color flushed Ralphie’s ears. “Come back! Listen, I was just kidding.”
    But before Ralphie could stop him, the little brother was at the porch. “Do you have a belt made out of little boys’ ears?”
    Maggie looked down at him. Maggie had noticed Ralphie as soon as he’d arrived. She had been so glad to see him it had made her feel bad. Nobody should feel happy when their brother is lost. She was trying to make herself feel better by explaining to herself that the reason she was so glad to see him was that if anybody could find Junior, he could. She was saying to herself, Remember how he took over last summer and made everything come out all right? when Ralphie’s brother asked about the belt. “What?” she said.
    “Do you have a belt made out of little boys’ ears? My brother said you do, but I don’t believe him.”
    “Out of what?”
    “Little boys’ ears.” He took his ears in his hands and wiggled them.
    “Oh, ears.” Maggie nodded. “Yes.”
    “You do?”
    “Yes.”
    “Where is it, then?”
    “Hanging up in my closet.”
    The little brother came running back across the yard. “She says yes. She says she does. She says it’s in her closet.”
    Maggie looked right at Ralphie, the first time she had looked at him since he’d arrived. Then she grinned. Ralphie’s heart almost turned a flip in his chest. She still had her lovely chipped tooth.

CHAPTER 22
The Blossom and the Ball
    The face wasn’t quite as bad as Junior had remembered. He had taken his hands off his eyes as soon as Mad Mary had said, “Is there something wrong with your eyes. Let me see.”
    “No,” he had cried, dropping his hands instantly. “They’re fine!”
    He removed his hands—they were stiff at his sides now—but he didn’t look at her face. He couldn’t. He looked at her boots. He recalled with a slight shudder the way he had clutched one the night before.
    The boots were coming closer. He swallowed aloud. Closer. Now she was there, directly in front of him, and she said, “Who locked you up in that cage?”
    The question surprised him so much that he looked directly up at her face. That was when he saw that it wasn’t as bad as he had thought. “I wasn’t in any cage.”
    “What was it, then?”
    “A trap.”
    “Then who locked you in the trap?”
    “Nobody.”
    “Nobody?”
    “It locked itself.”
    “What are you telling me?”
    “I made the trap. I was going to catch that coyote everybody’s been talking about and get the reward, one hundred dollars. I had it all figured out. I made the trap just perfect—you saw it. Every part of it was perfect. Only, while I was setting the trap, the hamburger meat got stuck on my hand, and the trap sprang and the door slammed down and I couldn’t get out.”
    “Oh, dear,” Mad Mary said.
    “What’s wrong?”
    “Oh, dear.”
    “Why do you keep saying that?”
    Mad Mary’s look sharpened. “Who are you?”
    “Junior. Junior Blossom.”
    “Are you kin to Alec Blossom?”
    “That’s Pap, my grandfather. Why?”
    “Because I hope he comes looking for you instead of the police.”
    “Why?”
    “Because over the years, Junior, the police have not been kind to Mary.”
    Mud lay curled in a ball of misery.
    Since dawn he had been watching the clearing without hope. The only living thing he had seen was blue jays and squirrels.
    All Mud’s life he had hated squirrels. He hated them so much that a couple of times he had run headlong into trees trying to catch one. This morning he did not care. He would not have felt like chasing a squirrel, even if he could have.
    Sometimes, in happier days, he had chased blue jays, too, but only when