The Girl in the Window by Wilma Yeo, 1988.

Kiley Mulligan Culver lives in a fairly small town, Meander, in the southern United States.  Although not much usually happens in their small down, about a year before the story begins, a little girl named Leedie Ann Alcott was kidnapped.  The crime literally hit Kiley very close to home because she and her father (Kiley’s mother died when she was a baby) live on the Alcott family’s estate.  The Alcott mansion was once a plantation, and Kiley and her dad, who is an author, live in the old house that once belonged to the plantation’s overseer, so they know the Alcott family well.  Mr. and Mrs. Alcott are divorced, and Mr. Alcott lives in another state.  Mrs. Alcott owned a children’s clothing shop in town, Kiley would sometimes babysit or play with Leedie Ann, who was younger than she was.  In some ways, Leedie Ann was kind of like a little sister to Kiley.  At the time she disappeared, Leedie Ann was four years old, and Kiley was about nine.  Mrs. Alcott never received a ransom note for Leedie Ann, but everyone is sure that her disappearance was a kidnapping, not just a child wandering off.

A year later, when the story begins, Leedie Ann has still not been found, and no one knows what happened to her.  After Leedie Ann disappeared, her mother closed her clothing shop, and a strange gypsy woman named Pesha came to stay with her.  Pesha is mysterious and secretive, and no one knows why Mrs. Alcott has her staying with her, although they seem to be holding seances.

Then, one evening, Kiley looks up at the Alcott mansion and sees Leedie Ann Alcott standing in the window of her old room! But, before she can do anything, another, shadowy figure closes the drapes on the window.  By the time that Kiley can tell her father what she’s seen, Leedie Ann is gone.  Her father goes to the Alcott house to ask Mrs. Alcott if everything is all right and if she needs anything, and everything seems to be normal (or what passes for normal at that time).  Kiley’s father thinks that Kiley imagined the whole thing, but Kiley knows that she didn’t, and she is sure that she wasn’t mistaken and that it was really Leedie Ann.

Kiley tells her friend, Sarah, about what she saw and persuades her to help find out whether Leedie Ann is really in the Alcott house or not.  Sarah is nervous about it, but she agrees to go along with Kiley’s plan to go to the Alcott house and ask to use the bathroom, pretending that she has been waiting for Kiley to meet her at her house but that she just can’t wait anymore.  While Sarah is supposedly using the bathroom, she’s supposed to check Leedie Ann’s room upstairs.  Kiley can’t do this herself because she wouldn’t have the same excuse that Sarah would and because Mrs. Alcott would know that Kiley knows where the downstairs bathroom is and that she would have no reason to go poking around upstairs.

When Sarah follows through on Kiley’s plan and checks Leedie Ann’s room, she tells Kiley that she did see Leedie Ann there!  However, Pesha saw her spying and made her leave the house.  Kiley and Sarah think that perhaps Pesha has both Mrs. Alcott and Leedie Ann under a spell and is holding them prisoner in their house.  But, what can the girls do to help them?

Kiley comes up with a daring plan to trick Pesha into revealing what she knows about Leedie Ann Alcott by writing an anonymous letter to her as if she already knew that Pesha was involved in her disappearance, but the plan backfires.  The police reopen the inquiry into Leedie Ann’s disappearance (don’t ask me why they didn’t notice that the letter appeared to be written by a child), but Kiley accidentally implicates an innocent person.  Adults in town are nervous, and Sarah’s mother doesn’t want Kiley to see her anymore.  Just as Kiley thinks things can’t get any worse, Pesha asks for her help, offering a charm to help restore Kiley’s friendship with Sarah in return.  Pesha claims that her only purpose is to use her psychic abilities to help Mrs. Alcott find Leedie Ann and that what Kiley believed was Leedie Ann in the window was actually a mannequin left from Mrs. Alcott’s clothing store that Leedie Ann had always begged to have as a life-size doll for herself.  Is Pesha really as innocent as she claims to be?  Can Kiley trust her?  What about Mrs. Alcott?  Above all, where is Leedie Ann Alcott?

Although Kiley may have made a big mistake, the reopening of the kidnapping case does bring to light the real secret behind Leedie Ann’s disappearance.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

Themes and My Reaction

One of the side plots in the story is about how differences between people can lead to mistrust because people sometimes get a false impression.  Kiley knows that her friends’ mothers don’t really approve of her because she is being raised by her father alone.  Some of her friends’ mothers, especially Sarah’s because she’s overprotective, think that Kiley is a wild child because she doesn’t have a mother to look after her, and they worry that Kiley will be a bad influence on their daughters.  Kiley does sometimes get into trouble because she’s a little daring and a little impulsive, but those are more personal character traits rather than the result of growing up without a mother, and some of her escapades are undertaken in the name of helping someone, like trying to find Leedie Ann.  Her friends’ mothers don’t understand Kiley’s intentions, though, and they never ask enough questions to find out what is really going on.  It seems oddly cold behavior from mothers to me.  Where I grew up, other people’s mothers would have taken more of an interest in a motherless child, purposely checking up on her and wanting to have her hanging around where they could keep an eye on what she was doing.  If they push her away, then she’s even less monitored than she was before.

However, Kiley realizes that everyone’s suspicions about Pesha, including her own, were also based largely on the fact that Pesha is different from everyone else.  For awhile, Kiley helps Pesha to hide from the police because Pesha fears their inquiries.  The two of them get to know each other better.  Pesha is actually a Holocaust survivor. Pesha has the tattoos on her body that the Nazis used to put on prisoners in their concentration camps (I’ve see those tattoos in real life, and I recognized them from the book’s description before Kiley understood what they were) and she tells Kiley about a place in Germany where her family was and terrible things happened.  Besides Jewish people, gypsies were also targets of the Nazis during the Holocaust and were sent to concentration camps along with them.  Pesha fears the police because she fears being locked up again, something that Mrs. Alcott tells to the police to explain Pesha’s sudden disappearance.  Knowing this helps Kiley to become more sympathetic to Pesha and more determined to help straighten out the mess that she helped to cause, eventually discovering the real whereabouts of Leedie Ann in the process.

Something that bothered me about the adults in the story, pretty much all of them, is their lack of interest in asking questions and taking charge.  Even after Kiley’s father realizes that she was helping Pesha to hide from the police, he doesn’t ask enough questions about why she was doing it.  He simply reports Pesha to the authorities and orders Kiley to stay out of it, just like he simply told her to stop imagining Leedie Ann Alcott and making up stories back when Kiley first saw the girl in the window.  Kiley’s father didn’t want to ask the awkward questions to verify what Kiley saw, so it was easier to assume that she didn’t see anything.  Part of that is a plot device, so that Kiley has a reason to dig for the truth herself, but it also figures into the way other adults, like Sarah’s mother, treat Kiley and how they approach the whole inquiry into Leedie’s disappearance.  Instead of checking on what motherless Kiley is doing and helping her father to supervise her, they want to just shrug her off as a problem they don’t want to deal with, figuring that someone else will handle it because they don’t want to get involved.  Then, when Sarah’s mother finds out about Sarah helping Kiley to write the letter that reopened the investigation, she refuses to tell the police the truth about it, allowing the investigation against Pesha to go forward even when she knew it was groundless, just because she didn’t want to get involved.  Disbelieving adults/adults not wanting to get involved is a trope of children’s mysteries because the adults’ non-involvement provides a reason for the children to investigate, but I still find it annoying and irresponsible.

Pesha’s innocence is finally established when Kiley finds the courage to admit what she did in front of everyone at Pesha’s court hearing.  Kiley comes to realize that a quality that she and her father both have is honesty.  Her father didn’t try to hide it when he discovered that Kiley was harboring a fugitive the way Sarah’s mother tried to hide the truth to avoid becoming involved and to hide her child’s involvement, and that’s something to be proud of.  The aftermath of her confession also gives Kiley the opportunity to spot the tell-tale clue of Leedie Ann’s current whereabouts, and Leedie Ann is safely returned to her mother.