5,000 dollars ransom for them and you’d better not call the FBI or I’ll melt the trophies down. Do you get that?”
“Who is this?” asked a bewildered Logan brother.
“Never mind who it is. Just keep listening. You’ll be getting a note from me instructing you on what to do next. Remember, I want 5,000 dollars for the bowling trophies and don’t call the FBI if you know what’s good for you and the trophies.”
“What?” the Logan brother answered. “Who is this?”
Then click . . .
They had hung up.
The note never came and the Logan brothers never heard from the person again.
Once they got a breather who sounded as if he were in the last stages of TB, a real death rattle.
hhhhhhhhhhh (Cough
“Who is this?”
Middle Fork, Colorado
A month after the bowling trophies had been stolen, the Logan brothers came to the conclusion that the bowling trophies had been taken some place else and they hadn’t the slightest idea where, but it would be up to them to find out.
America was a very large place and the bowling trophies were very small in comparison.
The Logan brothers knew that they just couldn’t sit around town, waiting for something to happen because it might not happen and they would never find the bowling trophies.
The trophies would be gone forever.
The Logan brothers started making plans to leave town. The Logan brothers had no idea where they were going but they had to go someplace if they were ever going to find the trophies.
The day before they were going to leave, not knowing where they were going to go but anyplace would be a beginning, somebody called up on the telephone and told them that they thought the bowling trophies were in Middle Fork, Colorado.
The Logan brother who answered the telephone said thank you.
The brothers got a map and looked up Middle Fork, Colorado. The town was over a thousand miles away in the Rockies. They stared silently at the map for a long time.
Finally, one of the brothers spoke. “It’s a beginning,” he said.
Logan farewell
The next morning they said good-bye to their mother and she cried a lot at the parting. They would have liked to have said good-bye to their sisters but they couldn’t do that because their sisters were at that place again where they had been seven times before. By now, they must have set some kind of world record. The place was a hundred miles away in the opposite direction of where the bowling trophies might be, so . . . They would see their sisters at another time. Perhaps by then they would have recovered the bowling trophies and it would be a pleasant occasion and things would be like they used to be with the trophies in their cabinet again.
The Logan brothers had quit their jobs the day after the trophies had been stolen, so they could devote all their time to looking for them, a path that had led them only to frustration until they got the telephone call telling them that the trophies were in Middle Fork, Colorado.
The Logan brothers put three suitcases in the trunk of their car that had formerly transported many a just-won bowling trophy from the alleys to the cabinet. The car had once been full of happy Logan brothers. The Logan brothers that got into the car now were not the same boys they had been before.
They were all sitting in the front seat of the car because the back seat was filled with cakes, cookies and pies. The car drove slowly away. Their mother waved tearfully at them from the front porch of the only home they had ever known.
Their future was America and three long years of searching and a process of gradual character disintegration and a slow retreat from respectability and self-pride. In three years they would become what they had always despised.
They drove over to the garage where their father worked on transmissions. They didn’t get out of the car because they were very anxious to get going.
Their father stood beside the car with a wrench in his hand. He didn’t know what to say to them.