Free What Could Go Wrong? by Willo Davis Roberts Page A

think he was after something else.”
    â€œLike microfilm,” Eddie suggested. He was already eating again, another candy bar. I wondered why his teeth didn’t rot out, and why he wasn’t fat instead of skinny. “Maybe she’s a spy.”
    â€œOh, for pete’s sake,” I said. “They don’t have seventy-year-old women for spies, Eddie.”
    â€œWhy not?” Charlie asked, just when I thought maybe he and I on were on the same wavelength. “They’d be less suspicious-looking than anyone else.”
    â€œShe wasn’t a spy,” I said crossly. “She was just a nice old lady taking her first airplane trip. And I didn’t see anything that looked like microfilm or suspicious documents. Of course I didn’t see what she had in her flight bag, but it probably was only a change of underwear and her toothbrush.”
    â€œMaybe the loot from a bank robbery,”Eddie said thoughtfully, crumpling his candy wrapper. “She could have been a member of a gang, and they had her take the money because she looked the least suspicious, and then she double-crossed them.”
    Charlie laughed, but I didn’t. “You’re an idiot, Eddie,” I told him, and lapsed into silence. My cousins were too silly to talk to.
    I was very much aware of Mrs. Basker’s empty seat across the aisle. I hoped she wasn’t seriously hurt.
    Well, it was all over now, and she was being taken care of. We had nothing more to worry about, I thought.
    That was until I got up to go back to the rest room a little while later and saw something that made me start doing some serious thinking.
    Because when I stood up I saw there were a couple of people already waiting to use the rest rooms at the rear of the plane, and two of them were the unpleasant man in the Hawaiian shirt and Mr. Upton. They had been talking to each other, only when they saw me they pretended they hadn’t been.
    And it suddenly struck me that Mr. Upton fitted the description of the man the clerk in the gift shop had seen with Mrs. Basker.
    It was suspicious enough to make me suddenly very much afraid.

Chapter Eight
    I sat down suddenly, no longer wanting to visit the rest room, at least not while those two men were standing at the rear of the plane. My breath gushed out of me like somebody’d hit me in the stomach.
    â€œWhat’s the matter?” Charlie asked.
    I felt the way I do when I have to stand up in front of class and recite something I was supposed to have memorized—when I wasn’t sure I wouldn’t go blank in the middle of it.
    â€œDid somebody else disappear?” Eddie asked, trying to be funny.
    I gave him a look that told him how funny I thought he was, which was not very. “They’re both on the plane,” I said in a low voice. “The guy in the Hawaiian shirt and the one who boarded late in Seattle, Mr. Upton. They’restanding outside the rest rooms back there, talking, only when they saw me looking they pretended they weren’t.”
    â€œSo?” Eddie asked, his forehead wrinkling up.
    I could tell by Charlie’s face that his thoughts, however, were taking the same track as mine: suspicion.
    â€œMr. Upton,” I said with lips that felt sort of numb, “is wearing tan slacks and shirt. And he’s about forty, wouldn’t you say?”
    Charlie put it together at once. “The man the clerk in the gift shop described,” he said.
    Understanding finally washed over Eddie’s face. “The man with Mrs. Basker, before she disappeared?” He shoved his glasses higher on his nose. “You think he’s the one who did it? Attacked her and robbed her?”
    â€œYou’re slow, Eddie, but you get there,” Charlie told him kindly. “I guess it’s time to do some detective work.”
    â€œLet’s tell the stewardess, so they can arrest Mr. Upton when we get to San Francisco,” Eddie