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as she leaned against the magnolia. “What are we going to do now?”
    I didn’t know. I still had Picket on the rope, and I got her to walk with me. She could move, and she didn’t limp. My biggest worries began to disappear, replaced by a fire that was new. Something in the center of my chest burned. I wanted to hurt those boys. I picked up the bigger of the two sticks they’d thrown at Picket. It weighed as much as a small bag of sugar. It must have hurt when it hit her.
    “Mama’s gonna skin me when she finds out about the bicycle.” Alice’s voice wavered. Maebelle V. echoed her sentiment with a lusty cry.
    I held the rope to her. “Hold Picket and I’ll go get them.”
    “No!” Alice’s face registered shock and fear. “No, Bekkah!”
    “They stole our bikes. We can’t let them take them. Take Picket and Maebelle and head back to the road.”
    Alice pushed my hand with the rope away. “I won’t do it. Nomatter what you say, I won’t.” Her blue eyes didn’t flinch as she looked at me, and I knew she wouldn’t budge.
    “Those little bastards.” I wanted The Judge to be at home. But the whole summer might be gone before he came back, and I needed him now. Effie wouldn’t do, and Mama Betts wouldn’t be any help either. Tears prickled and burned. I could tell by the noises Alice was making that she was fixing to cry too. “We’ll get them back.”
    “How?” Alice pointed across the creek. “They’re gone.”
    “They can’t take them to the church. How’re they going to explain where they got them? And they can’t ride them in the woods too easily. They’ll have to get out on Kali Oka to ride. We’ll get Arly and some of his friends to help.” Arly didn’t warrant a lot of my faith, but in a crisis he could be useful. Especially a mess like this. Alice was justifiably concerned. It would be impossible to tell our folks that the church boys had stolen our bikes. We weren’t supposed to be around the church.
    Something white fluttered across the creek. “Hold Picket.” I gave her the rope before she could decline again. In a flash I’d waded the creek and was climbing the other bank. Those stupid boys had gone off and forgotten their white shirts. I gathered the five shirts, all hanging together on a scrub oak branch. Clutching them like valuable treasure, I hurried back to our bank of the creek. Panting, I held them out. “Now we have something to barter with.”
    Alice smiled. Even Maebelle V. paused in her crying. “They can’t go home without their shirts, can they?”
    “Not likely.”
    “Then we’ll wait.”
    “Nope. We’re going home. We can get around the bicycles for a few days. They can’t. If they go back to that church without their shirts, everyone will know they’ve been in the woods with their clothes off. Maybe this is a lesson those boys need to learn.” I took Picket’s rope from Alice. We all started walking home. It would take better than an hour, probably closer to two with the baby. There would be lots of time to plot revenge.
    Before we broke out of the woods, I bundled the shirts up and hid them in a clump of dogwood trees. The boys weren’t likely to find them, but I’d know where they were. Just to be on the safe side, I broke off two huckleberry limbs at the roadside to mark the spot. When I’dfinished we started walking. As we were leaving squatty footprints in the sandy part of Kali Oka, I kept thinking about the tallest boy. He was about my age, or maybe Arly’s. He was the leader. He was the one who’d thrown the sticks at Picket while she was tied.
    We were coming up on the McInnis place when Alice finally spoke. Maebelle V. had been crying for the last half hour and there wasn’t a thing we could do. We’d stopped and given her the rest of her bottle. She wanted some food, and so did we, but we still had another two miles to go at least.
    “Do you still believe that place is haunted?” Alice asked, nodding at the old yellow house