Free The Vanishings by Tim Lahaye, Jerry B. Jenkins Page B

me?”
    â€œHe bragged on you all the time. So, anyway, a guy comes in the diner who knows us, and he asks me am I waiting for Eddie. I say yeah, and he says Eddie was in a wreck a couple miles up the road. I ask him is Eddie all right, and he says they couldn’t find him. All his clothes and stuff were in the car, but he was gone.”
    Vicki was crying.
    â€œThe guy tells the diner guy to get the TV on, that people have disappeared all over the world. The waitress runs to a booth in the back and screams. She says, ‘I thought those guys had sneaked out on their bill! Their suits are all still here!’ She about fainted. Anyway, we all watched TV for a while, then I came home. You know where all these people are, don’t you?”
    â€œI think I do, Bub. Do you?”
    â€œEddie talked about it all the time. He told me about your mom and dad getting religion—‘saved’ he called it. He starts going to church, and he gets saved. Dragged me along a coupleof times, but it wasn’t my thing, you know. You think that could be it? They’re all in heaven?”
    â€œI don’t know what else to think,” Vicki managed. “What else could it be?”
    â€œYou gonna be all right?”
    â€œI don’t know what I’m going to do.”
    â€œYou want me to come down there and look after you? Far as I know I didn’t lose any family but maybe a couple of other friends.”
    â€œDon’t worry about me, Bub. I usually ride the school bus with a black girl who knows all about this stuff. I’m going to try to find her. I hope she’s still around.”
    â€œGood luck,” Bub said. “This is really wacky, you know?”
    That seemed to Vicki a pretty mild thing to say about the craziest thing that ever could have happened in history. She hung up and turned all the way around. From where she stood she could see her mother’s bedclothes in the chair, her father’s T-shirt in the bed, and the door to her and Jeanni’s bedroom down the hall.
    Vicki didn’t know what to think. Part of her was glad her family was right. She wouldn’t wish her own feelings on anyone, especially on people she loved. Loved. Yes, she realized, she loved them. Each of them.All of them. She only hoped they were in heaven. It wasn’t like they were dead.
    But they might as well have been. She had become an orphan overnight. And all of a sudden all those so-called friends of hers, the waste-oids who hid from their feelings and their problems behind a buzz of booze and pot, didn’t interest her in the least. The girl she wanted to find was the one she often sat with on the bus, the one who had tried to explain to her what had happened to Vicki’s parents when they “got saved.”
    Vicki looked in the phone book under Washington. There were dozens of them, and she didn’t know Clarice’s father’s name. She dialed every Washington whose name began with an A or a B and about half of them whose names began with a C, but none knew a Clarice Washington. Then she remembered that Clarice had said her mother worked at Global Weekly magazine.
    Vicki looked up that number and dialed. She was told that Mrs. Washington was not in yet and that no, they could not give out her home number. “Is it an emergency, young lady?”
    â€œIt sort of is,” Vicki said. “I’m a friend of her daughter Clarice, and I need to talk to her.”
    The woman at the magazine told Vicki she would call the Washington home and pass on her message. “I’m sure she’ll call you,” the woman said.

EIGHT
Lionel and Uncle André
    T HERE was no clock in the basement of the Washington home where Lionel and his uncle slept soundly. Lionel never had to worry about getting up on time. His father made some racket before he pulled out at six every morning. Then Lionel’s mother made sure everybody was up and in the process of