While playing in his father's old treehouse, an imaginative 10-year old boy sees things which make him believe two children from across the street have been kidnapped.

"A family version of Alfred Hitchcock's REAR WINDOW."

Family Category Finalist, 1997 Austin Heart-of-Film Screenplay Competition

SYNOPSIS:

While his parents are house hunting in California, Jake Roberts, 10, must spend his last week of summer vacation with his grandparents; Deborah Jean (Nana) Roberts, a spunky former school teacher and Dave Roberts, the soon-to-be retired Chief-of-Police.

On his very first day Jake develops a severe case of poison ivy and is restricted to his father's old treehouse, a kid-size studio apartment thirty feet above the ground. If there is a silver lining to his quarantine it is that this location commands a superb view of the entire neighborhood.

Friday night. Adding insult to injury, Nana accepts an offer to babysit one of Jake's classmates for the evening, Jessica Patterson. Jessica and Jake could not be more different. She is upper crust society, he is working class. While she likes to dress in designer clothes, he likes to play in the dirt with his toy soldiers. She adores him, he despises her.

With the help of Nana's tasty popcorn and a good movie on TV Jake survives the evening with Jessica. However, during the night he is awakened in the treehouse by a scavenging raccoon. Too excited to sleep he steps onto the treehouse balcony to spy on his neighbors. Across the street he sees another one of his classmates, Sara Lauretti, arguing with her parents and a strange man, Bill Warshofsky.

The next morning Sara and her little sister, Abby, are gone. Jake thinks they have been kidnapped. He tells Nana, but she says he is imagining the whole thing. So does Jessica when she comes over to see Jake. But when Jake and Jessica see Sara's parents setting up a tag sale of only children's clothes, furniture and toys, they both become suspicious.

Their suspicions grow when they see Abby's precious cabbage patch doll at the tag sale. Now even Nana thinks there may some truth to what Jake says. They tell Dave who agrees to talk with the Laurettis. He finds out that the Laurettis can no longer afford to keep both Sarah and Abby so they were returned to Warshofsky's orphanage. Dave tells Jake, "Case closed".

Jake refuses to give up and after the elderly woman next door mysteriously falls into her daughter's swimming pool he finds evidence showing that Sara and Abby really were kidnapped. The key is Abby's cabbage patch doll, but it's no longer for sale. Their only option is to break into the Lauretti's house and steal it. But stealing the doll will not be easy, and if successful, could put Jake's life in danger.