Sweet Valley High #13: Kidnapped!
Publication Date: October 1984
Tonight’s the night. The Morrow family has just moved to town and their sixteen-year-old daughter, Regina, is throwing a party for the whole junior class even though she hasn’t met any of them yet. Regina has an older brother, who Jessica has heard is gorgeous. Jessica puts on her most revealing dress and packs her skimpiest bikini and waits for Liz to come home from working at the hospital and then a tutoring session with Max Dellon so they can ride together. Jessica and brother Steven have a weird Folgers siblings moment when he comes out of his bathroom wearing a towel and zips up Jessica’s dress and tells her she’s dressed too sexy. It’s…uncomfortable. After a while, Jessica gets tired of waiting for Liz and she’s anxious to get to the party, so she leaves a note for Liz and has Cara pick her up.
Jessica and Cara are the first to arrive and they are very impressed with the Morrow estate. It’s the biggest residential property in Sweet Valley and it takes several pages to describe it. We meet the Morrow parents, who are on their way out for the evening. Dad Kurt is friendly and mom Skye doesn’t say much. A butler shows the girls into the den, which is roughly the size of my entire house, probably. Regina appears, raven haired and beautiful, but she only seems to be paying attention to Cara, ignoring Jessica. Jessica assumes she’s drunk, because to her way of thinking you’d have to be drunk to ignore a Wakefield, but Regina quickly explains that she’s deaf and she has to read lips to communicate. Brother Nicholas enters the den, also raven haired and beautiful, and Jessica gets to work on making him fall in love with her.
And now we finally get an update on Elizabeth. You might remember the last book ended with her being chloroformed and put into a van. Now she’s blindfolded with her hands tied behind her back and she doesn’t know where she is. She panics and passes out again. Meanwhile, Max Dellon is waiting for her to come over to tutor him. He’s grounded because of his failing English grade and we spend a lot of time talking about it. Liz is about two hours late and he’s starting to worry. He calls her house and gets no answer, so he sneaks out of his house to go look for her.
Back at the party, things are going great with Nicholas. Then Todd comes up to Jessica and says he needs to talk to her. Jessica is rude to him and Nicholas tells him she doesn’t want him around, but Todd ignores him and says he’s worried about Liz. Jessica is a little concerned, but she’s more concerned that if she lets Nicholas out of her sight Lila will swoop in and steal him, so she makes up a lie about Liz having to babysit Mr. Collins’ kid for a while before coming to the party. Todd walks away thinking that doesn’t make sense, but he’s not smart enough to do anything about it.
Elizabeth wakes up again, still blindfolded and gagged. She’s now tied to a chair and still has no idea where she is. A door opens and she hears a man walk up to her. He undoes her braid and caresses her hair and says he isn’t going to hurt her, which is very creepy. He takes her blindfold off and she sees it’s Carl, the sad orderly from the hospital who’s been creeping her out for weeks. He removes her gag and she starts screaming for help.
It takes Todd about half an hour of worrying about Liz before it occurs to him to call Mr. Collins’ house. When Mr. Collins answers and says Liz was never there, Todd searches the party for Jessica. He finds her at the pool and pushes her in, which causes Nicholas to be a big protector guy some more. Todd ignores him again and yells at Jessica, telling her it’s 9:30 and Liz should have been there an hour ago. Jessica finally decides to care about something besides Nicholas and jumps into action. She calls home and Dad Wakefield says Liz isn’t there. Jessica and Todd run out of the house and jump in Todd’s car to go looking for her, while Ned calls the hospital to see if she worked late. It should be noted that Jessica is still wearing her bikini and has forgotten to grab her clothes.
Back to Elizabeth. Carl tells her this is his house and he wants her to think of it as her house, too. Liz looks around and it’s just so dingy and dirty! The whole kitchen/living room is the size of her bedroom and the furniture is shabby. How could she ever live in such a terrible dump? Carl says he kidnapped her because he loves her. He eventually moves her from the chair to the sofa, which Elizabeth finds too soft and lumpy. I hope next time she’s kidnapped the accommodations are more to her liking. She convinces Carl to untie her hands and feet and then makes a run for the door, but Carl scoops her up and throws her back onto the couch.
Jessica and Todd drive around and find nothing, so they go to the Wakefield house, where Ned is somehow still on the phone with the hospital. They’re paging Elizabeth and someone went to go look for her. Ned hangs up and calls Max Dellon and learns that Max isn’t home and Liz isn’t there. Finally, having made all the other phone calls he can usefully make, he contacts the police. Jessica is still wearing a bikini so she puts on some real clothes. And no, I don’t know why I think it’s funny that she’s been running all over town half naked this whole time.
Max, the only one who thinks to look for the Fiat, goes to the hospital and finds Liz’s car in the parking lot with the door half open. He starts going through the car in the hopes of finding something helpful, but some cops show up and arrest him for attempting to steal the car. The cops are a couple of assholes who harassed Max a couple weeks ago for daring to go to 7-11 and being “suspicious.” They won’t listen to him when he says it’s his friend’s car and she’s in trouble. They interrogate him for four hours before they let him go.
Elizabeth spends the night tied to her chair. When she wakes up she’s sure she’ll be rescued in no time because if Carl doesn’t show up to work someone will be sure to put the pieces together. Carl feeds Liz some terrible frozen pancakes with no syrup and gives her an odd assortment of books to read, and then he goes to work, sending Liz into a panic, then into depression. She thinks about how worried her family must be and feels bad that Jessica must have missed the party because Liz never showed up to drive her there. She doesn’t always know her sister very well. When Carl gets home from work, he tells Liz he’ll be taking her to a cabin in the mountains tomorrow night where they’ll live together forever and ever.
At the Wakefield house, Alice makes French toast for breakfast and a crowd has gathered for support and search parties. Nicholas shows up with the clothes Jessica left at his house the night before, and he takes Jessica for a walk. She tells him how guilty she feels and cries in his arms. The next day is Monday, and for some reason Jessica and Todd are both at school, and so is Max. Poor Max. Everyone has heard about Liz’s disappearance and Max’s arrest, and about half the school seems to think Max kidnapped her. Which, I mean, what? Where would he keep her, in his basement with his guitars? Do they think his parents wouldn’t have noticed? Todd lumbers up to him after school and tries to shake some kind of information out of him, and then he hulks out and punches him in the face. God, I hate Todd. Jessica breaks up the fight. She knows Max is innocent. Todd apologizes and the three of them decide to go investigating.
They go to the hospital and start questioning everyone they see. Carl is there, and when he sees Jessica he freaks out and tries to grab her, saying he doesn’t know how she escaped. The cops are called and Jessica rides along to Carl’s house to rescue Elizabeth. The twins throw a party and everything is fine. Nicholas Morrow shows up and I don’t know why but he falls in love with Elizabeth the second he sees her. The End.
Okay, now that that’s out of the way, please listen to the podcast for this episode for the very serious interview I conducted about this book with one of my best friends.
