The Return of Harley

Jack Davis would rather read about mysteries than eat breakfast, and his mother has finally had enough of having puzzles served alongside her grapefruit. She takes the book away just as Jack is about to learn who blackmailed Lady Bracknell, and she suggests that if he wants excitement he might open his eyes and find some, starting with a visit to Whit's End. Jack agrees without much enthusiasm. His parents head into town to run errands, and Jack sets off on foot, wishing out loud that something, anything, would happen in Odyssey.

Something does. A motorcycle pulls up beside him, and the rider turns out to be Officer David Harley, who once patrolled Odyssey and has come back for a couple of days while his wife visits her mother. He has driven all this way to keep a promise to take Steve Larson for a ride, only to discover that the Larsons moved away months ago. Jack breaks the news, Harley cheerfully muddles his way through the disappointment, and then offers the ride to Jack instead. Helmets on and jokes flying, the two of them roar off toward Trickle Lake.

Near the lake, Jack spots a gap in the trees that almost anyone else would have missed - an old road, overgrown and forgotten. He talks Harley into exploring it. A little way along, the road delivers something far stranger than either of them expects: a van parked in front of a cave, and two men carrying boxes out to it. Harley decides that a friendly conversation can't do any harm. He tells Jack to climb down and wait, then rides ahead alone.

He never gets there. Something is stretched across the road, and the motorcycle goes over the side and down the embankment. From above, the two men congratulate each other on their booby trap - and then notice Jack. One of them, called Jonesy, comes after the boy while the other, Thompson, goes down after Harley. Jack crashes through the bushes, hides, holds still while Jonesy calls out to him, and finally slips away and runs the whole distance back to town.

He runs a little too well. At the end of an alley, Connie Kendall is taking her very first driving lesson in Whit's old truck, with Whit himself talking her through the clutch, and Jack darts straight into their path. Nobody is hurt, but everyone is rattled. Scratched and breathless, Jack pours out the story of the road, the cave, the van, the boxes, and Officer Harley's crash. Whit insists on collecting Jack's parents before anyone goes anywhere.

On the drive up, Al and Ellen Davis remind Whit of their son's history. Jack once invented an elaborate tale about a neighbor smuggling laboratory experiments in a van at night, and now here is another van story. Whit allows that it sounds unlikely, but he has learned that when a child is that insistent, something is usually going on.

At the site, the road is empty. There is no van, no motorcycle, no sign of a crash at the bottom of the embankment, and not so much as a tire track on the ground. The cave is dark and, as far as anyone can see, entirely bare. Jack shouts Harley's name into the ravine and gets nothing back. His mother, tired and worried, tells him the joke has gone far enough, and his father sends him to the back of the truck. As the others walk away, Whit says quietly that maybe it isn't a story at all, and asks Connie to mind the shop while he makes some phone calls.

The calls turn up almost nothing, which is exactly what interests him. Nobody answers at the Harley house, and the state police confirm that the officer has the next few days off. It proves nothing, Whit admits, except that David Harley is not where he usually is. Connie points out that they found no evidence and that the whole thing sounds far-fetched. Why, she asks, would two men be hauling boxes out of a cave? Whit turns the question over and repeats it back to her without an answer.

That evening on the porch, Jack's mother sits with him. She tells him gently that God has given him a wonderful, creative imagination and that this is one of the times it has run off with him, then sends him to bed with one small chore first: take out the garbage. Alone by the cans in the dark, Jack lists the people who don't believe him - his mother, his father, Whit, Connie - and admits he is no longer sure he believes himself.

A hand clamps over him. It is Jones, who has found out where Jack lives and has been listening. He confirms that they have Jack's friend, and that whether Harley stays all right depends entirely on the boy. Nobody believed the story, Jack tells him. Good, Jones says - then tomorrow Jack will go around and tell every one of them he made the whole thing up, or he will never see his friend again. Jack promises. Left alone in the dark, he can only whisper an apology to Officer Harley for whatever he has gotten him into.