Free Wanted! by Caroline B. Cooney

between Alice and her mother. Alice could not picture them among the plump quilted pillows, the baskets full of potpourri, and the rows of wooden kitty cats along the windowsills.
    Alice leaned against the wall phone, bursting with anger and grief. Police! Invading both Alice’s homes, answering Alice’s phone, reading Alice’s E-mail, possibly—no, definitely—squirreling through Alice’s bedroom and possessions and privacy.
    She had to call someone. She had to talk.
    She thought of Kelsey, of Laura and Cindy and Mardee and Emma. What if one of their mothers answered the phone? Hi, Mrs. Schmidt, it’s Alice Robie; can I speak to Laura please? And it would be, Alice, aren’t the police looking for you? We don’t let Laura be friends with girls suspected of murder.
    Running away meant you left your friends someplace else.
    I shouldn’t have run, she thought.
    But running had come so naturally. And having started, she was not willing to stop.
    She thought of perfect Paul in high school, but he didn’t know her and she didn’t know how to spell his last name. He had one of those very complex names nobody could spell, so nobody used it. They didn’t call him Paul Chmielewskiwicz or whatever it was; they called him Paul Chem. She wasn’t going to find his number in a phone book that way.
    Alice knew who to call. The number on her father’s Caller ID display. The number where—
    Where he was murdered? thought Alice.
    She believed it now, and yet she could not believe it at all. Would she have to see her dead father to believe it? She never wanted to see him anything except laughing and glad to have her around. If they offered her a chance to see him dead, she would refuse.
    But how else would she know if it was true?
    The telephones were entirely exposed, nothing but a few inches of Plexiglas separating one from another. Alice hoped that the people using the other phones were too pleased with the sound of their own voices to listen in on Alice.
    It was time to find out where her father had been. She needed to know who answered the phone at 399-8789.
    She rang up the zillion digits required for a credit card call. Her hands hurt just tapping the buttons. Sometimes Grandma could not do crossword puzzles because arthritis made holding the pencil difficult and now Alice knew how it felt; it felt cold and cruel and helpless. You didn’t have to be seventy. You could be fifteen and alone.
    The phone rang once. A quick masculine voice said, “Yes?”
    One syllable. One single ordinary syllable that everybody in America used every day, and Alice had to identify the speaker from that.
    I can’t, she thought. I don’t know who this is, and I don’t know if it’s one of the voices in the condo. Am I speaking to my father’s killer? Who is on the phone with me?
    She said, “This is Alice.”
    There was a gasp.
    Alice stood very still.
    The person on the other end hung up.
    Alice’s hand did not let go of the phone, but remained curled around the receiver. She did not know who this man was, but he knew who she was.
    Under the circumstances, it seemed to Alice that any grown-up would have questions for her. Any grown-up would try to keep her on the phone, try to locate her, try to get answers, and bring her in.
    Any grown-up except the man who already had the answers.
    She got her hand loose. She gave it a piece of book bag to clutch instead and she turned herself around and walked away from the phones. A sign poking off the top of a chrome stand said:
LAB OPEN 24 HOURS
    ALL STUDENTS MUST PRESENT ID
    But there was nobody checking IDs and she simply walked in and nobody looked up, because people using computers never look up, and Alice circled the room, found a carrel, sat down, flicked on the computer, and there they were, friendly little icons willing to work for her whether she was accused of murder or not.
    She took out her father’s disk, and she saw his hands, his long thick fingers, strong and clever fingers,