Free The Bell Bandit by Jacqueline Davies Page B

murdered.
    "If you throw even one more rock—" The boy took a step toward Jessie. Evan took a step toward the boy. The younger kid circled around behind Evan.
Here it comes,
thought Evan.
    But a voice called out. "Jeff! Mike! Where are you?" It was a woman's voice, and it came from the direction of the house.
    "Good!" said Jessie. "Now you have to go inside, or she's going to come looking for you. And then what? Huh?"
    To Evan's surprise, the older boy hesitated. The younger boy stopped, too—frozen.
    "Right now, you two!" The voice rolled across the yard like a bowling ball. "If I have to call you a second time, you'll be sorry I did!"
    The younger boy took off.
    The older boy looked at Evan and Jessie and said, "You better be gone in five minutes. I'm going to come back out here, and you better be gone." He started walking toward the house, but once he passed the barn, Evan saw that he broke into a run and didn't stop until he was on the porch. He disappeared inside the house, swallowed up by the front door.
    Before Evan could say anything, Jessie started to run inside the barn. "We have to get that frog out of there!"
    But when they got inside the barn and found their way to the wood storage room, the frog looked more dead than alive. It was hanging by its front legs, its back legs making weak kicking movements that seemed like the feeble waving of a surrender flag. Jessie didn't want to touch the frog, so Evan held the frog's body in his hands while Jessie plucked at the strings tied to each leg. When they got the last one off, Evan put the frog down on the dirt floor of the barn.
    It was as if the frog had forgotten how to move. It wiggled its back legs, but couldn't seem to get a solid footing on the cold ground. First one leg and then the other shot out from its body, kicking at the air, but unable to move forward. Evan and Jessie watched, waiting.
    "It's going to die," said Jessie, and Evan thought she was probably right. The frog had forgotten how to jump, or maybe its legs had been broken or permanently damaged in some way. Evan felt a sudden wave of sadness for all the things in the world that were damaged and broken.
    Evan looked down at the frog and said, "We can't just leave it here to die. We need to take it home." But what he was thinking was,
And put it out of its misery.
He reached down to pick up the small animal, and when his hand was just an inch away, the frog leaped through the air and disappeared under the woodpile.
    "Hey!" said Jessie. "He's okay! Did you see him jump? Wow!"
    Jessie smiled at Evan, and he wanted to smile back, but he couldn't. The dark thought was still banging inside his head. "C'mon," he said. "We gotta go. And we don't have a lot of time."

Chapter 13
The Missing Bell
    They went back to the top of Lovell's Hill, where the empty crossbeam stood, because they needed a place to start their search and Jessie couldn't think of anywhere else. Night had fallen, and a thick cover of clouds hung low in the sky. Luckily, Jessie had brought a flashlight on the stakeout. The thin yellow beam illuminated the ground just enough for them to make their way.
    At the top of the hill, Jessie flashed the light ahead of her. There was the heavy wooden crossbeam with its empty space where the bell should have hung.
    The missing bell. What a lousy spy she'd turned out to be! She hadn't learned a thing on the stakeout. She still didn't have any proof that the Sinclair boys had stolen the bell in the first place. And Maxwell had ended up half out of his mind, running off—to where? Where was Maxwell now? Was he missing, too?
    "Maybe Grandma was here," said Jessie, skipping the flashlight beam over the ground. There were hundreds of footprints in the snow. Both Jessie and Maxwell had crossed this hill several times over the last few days, and Evan had come straight over the hill when he heard Maxwell's scream and the broken glass. There were footprints everywhere. The ground was a tangled-up