by Maia Chance
“Agnes, that’s—”
“Listen, Otis. Please.” In a mad scramble that probably made me sound like an escaped mental patient, I told Otis how Dorrie Tucker had whispered to me that Jodi grew monkshood on her farm. “If I walk out that trailer door, I have no doubt in my mind that I’ll be leaving here in the back of a squad car. There is no way my fingerprints haven’t been matched up to all three murder scenes by now, and who knows what Aunt Effie has confessed to in jail. I’ve got to go to that farm and see for myself if there really is monkshood growing there. I don’t want to give up now—I’m so close. Can’t you understand that? And if not, well”—I swallowed—“go, but don’t tell the police I was in here.”
Otis gave me a long look, like he was trying to decide whether I needed a straitjacket or a Wonder Woman headband. Outside, men’s voices grew louder. “Okay,” he said. “We’d better get going.”
Otis pushed open the window, looked both ways, and hopped out feet first. I went next, and Otis took me by the waist to help me down. We were practically in the ditch. Right on the other side, thick forest undergrowth clustered. We leapt across the ditch and burrowed in. Branches scratched, leaves fwapped, and we came up for air in a little clearing. We looked back. Blue-and-red lights flashed through the branches, but no one was shouting.
We’d made it.
* * *
“Okay, which way to the farm?” Otis asked softly.
I looked around. “I’m pretty sure that’s north,” I said, pointing, “and Jodi’s farm is to the northwest of the state park, which is back that way, so we need to follow along the side of this hill for a little while and then drop down into the valley.”
“Wow. Were you a Girl Scout?”
“Maybe.”
At first we crept through the dense hardwood forest with a lot of over-the-shoulder glances. Once we’d rounded a curve in the hillside, we started hiking in earnest, striding and swinging our arms. Dried leaves crunched underfoot, and yellow-and-orange foliage splotched the tree canopy.
“I feel like I’m getting away with something,” I said.
Otis laughed. “You are. You’re on the run from the police.”
“Not really. With any luck, they’ll never know we were in that trailer.”
“What are you going to do if you see monkshood in Jodi’s flower patch?”
“Photograph it and get the heck out. Then . . . start walking back to town, I guess.” Naneda was miles and miles from Jodi’s farm, and we both knew it. I glanced over at Otis. There he was, this frankly beautiful guy, trooping along through the forest with me. Evading the police. Heading for a pot farm where a possible murderer—or two—lived. And why? I had no idea. “Thanks, Otis,” I said shyly.
“For what?”
“Come on. For what? I’m pretty sure you’re risking arrest by sneaking away from that trailer with me, and we’re headed for who knows what at the farm.”
“We’re friends, Agnes.”
“Being friends back in high school doesn’t oblige you to do crazy things for a person once you’ve reached the age of reason.”
“We were friends,” Otis said, climbing over a boulder ahead of me. He turned and reached out a hand. “Good friends. And we’re still friends now.”
I took his hand, big and warm, and he helped me over the boulder. As soon as I hopped to the ground, I slid my hand away. I didn’t like the ideas that popped into my mind at his touch. Let’s just say they probably wouldn’t make the PG-13 cut.
We continued through the trees, side by side.
“You know, it’s funny,” Otis said. “All these years, with all the girlfriends I’ve had—”
“I suppose there have been a lot?” I blurted. Argh.
Otis scratched his ear. “I guess. I get along with women.”
Yeah. With pecs like that, you get along with women all right.
“But with all the girlfriends I’ve had, I was always looking for that friendship.” A pause. “You know, the friendship we had.”
It took work to pry my tongue from the roof of my mouth. “Oh. Interesting. And did you find it?”
“Nope.”
More tongue prying. “Oh.” I concentrated on my orange sneakers going one in front of the other. I did not like the sound of what Otis was saying. Yes, hearing him talk about us made my heart squeeze, but . . . friendship? I mean, there I was fantasizing about pushing his T-shirt up to his armpits and nuzzling his belly button, and he was saying he missed being friends with me? Uh-uh. No. No more “friendship first” relationships for me. That’s exactly what had gone so horribly wrong with Roger. No, I was going to hold out for a passionate relationship with a guy who was deliriously in love with me.
“Back in high school,” Otis said, “I really, really liked you, Agnes.”
Liked? Liked? “I liked you too,” I said primly.
Otis looked confused, and the conversation petered out.
After about fifteen more minutes of walking, the forest opened out onto a vista of green-and-gold sloping fields and vineyards framed by stands of trees. In the distance, the long swathe of Naneda Lake glowed blue-bright.
I shaded my eyes from the afternoon sun and scanned the landscape to the northwest. “There,” I said. “Down there—see that red barn? That’s Jodi and Jentry’s farm. We can cut straight across this field below us here, go through that cluster of trees, and then the next field after that is on their farm. But first, I kind of have to, um, use the restroom.”
Otis grinned for the first time since our little “friendship” talk. “Me too. Meet you back here in three minutes.”
We split up, did our business in the trees, convened, and set off down the steep field of tall grasses and flowers. “I hope I don’t get a tick,” I said. “This is tick grass.”
“Too late in the season,” Otis said. “You could lie down in this grass and roll around and be totally fine.”
I walked a little faster. Rolling around in fields of grass was not something I needed to be discussing with Otis right then—with all due respect to Sting.
Chapter 26
Otis and I reached the bottom of the field, where a broken-down barbed wire fence gave way to trees. We picked through the barbed wire, through the trees, and stopped when we reached the other side. A cow-dotted pasture stretched before us and, beyond that, Jodi and Jentry’s farm. Sunlight shimmered on the fruit orchard. Solar panels on the barn roof glinted.
“No vehicles parked in front of the farmhouse,” I said. “That’s a good sign. Maybe nobody’s home. Okay. See the flower patch between the orchard and the rows of vegetables? That’s where we’re headed. I don’t remember seeing flowers anywhere else on the property when Aunt Effie and I were here before, and I don’t see any now.”
“There are flowers growing in this field right here,” Otis said.
True. I peered around. “Monkshood is purple—I don’t see any purple. Do you?”
“Nope.”
I pulled my phone from my backpack and checked the battery. Fourteen percent. That ought to do it. “Ready?”
“Ready.”
We hunched down and hurried across the field. In the orchard, we picked around rotten fallen fruit. We reached the flower bed, where orange, pink, red, yellow, and white flowers tangled their leaves and stems together into one big buggy mass.
“Purple!” I whispered. “I see purple!” I waded through clinging stems to a tall stalk. My heart leapt to my throat. “Omigod. This is monkshood. It’s monkshood!”
“I think someone’s coming, Agnes,” Otis whispered, crouching low. “Get down!”
“But I found monkshood!”
“Get down. Maybe he hasn’t seen us.”
I fell to my knees. “He?”
“Gothboy, over by the barn.”
Gothboy? I could deal with him. Jentry was the one to avoid like a rat with hantavirus—Jentry and his Dobermans—which, come to think of it, I didn’t hear barking. My fingers shook as I fumbled for my
phone in my backpack. I dropped the phone, and it disappeared into the mesh of vegetation at my feet. Frantically, I patted around for it.
“Stop moving!” Otis whispered.
Somewhere off in the distance, I heard the gargle of an engine. Maybe—please-oh-please—it was out on the main road.
My fingers closed around my phone. I swiped it on, fumbled around to the camera app, and aimed it at the monkshood stalk. The sunlight was bright, and I got several good shots, including one with the red barn in the background. I stuffed the phone into my backpack, zipped it, slung it on my back, and started crawling toward Otis.
The engine noise crescendoed, then abruptly stopped. A door slammed, a man’s voice said, “Sic ’em,” and then two dogs were barking like they’d spotted giant T-bone steaks on legs.
I reached Otis. “The pasture,” he whispered, eyes wide. “Hurry.”
We crawled to the edge of the flower bed where it met the orchard.
Gothboy stood looking down at us, his black trench coat flowing back like a cape and his powdery-white face expressionless. He held a shovel aloft. He went for Otis first, whacking his beautiful head with the back of the shovel as I croaked, “No!”
Otis slumped face-first on dirt and rotten plums. The dogs were somewhere nearby, but I didn’t see them; I only heard their shrill, snarling barks.
Gothboy came at me next, shovel high. I dove sideways and felt the breeze from the shovel first, opened my mouth to cry out, but blinding force at the back of my skull knocked everything dark and silent.
* * *
The first thing I was aware of was that my head felt like a giant, aching block of cement. The next thing I noticed was that my back was cold—so, so cold—and it was dark, and I couldn’t really move, and my arms and legs were sort of bent and tangled like a baby horse’s. Why was it so freaking cold? Where was I? Was this hell? Omigod—was this a coffin?
I tried to jerk my legs.
“Ow!” someone said really, really close by. “Careful.”
“Otis?” I whispered. Our voices sounded smothered. “Where are we?”
“Inside a chest freezer.”
Panic sizzled through me.
“Stay still!” Otis whispered. “Your knees are right on top of . . . me.”
My knee wasn’t the only thing on top of Otis; we were smushed together like gummy worms. He was on his back with his knees bent, his head forced forward by the side of the freezer. I’d been dumped sideways on top of him. My knees were—oh Gawd—nestled between his, er, legs, and my face was pressed into the crook of his neck, my glasses by some miracle still on. My right backpack strap was cutting off the circulation in my arm. Otis’s warm breath on the side of my head would’ve been totally awkward under other circumstances, but in this case, it was reassuring. Especially with that deep, black, persistent cold enfolding us on all sides.
“Sorry,” I mumbled against Otis’s neck. “Let’s get out of here.”
“I think we’re locked in.”
“What?”
“I came to when Jentry and Gothboy dumped you on top of me, and right after that, they shut the lid, and it sounded like they locked it.”
“How long ago was that?”
“Only a couple minutes.”
I pushed at the lid just a few inches above me. Frost burned my fingertips; the lid didn’t budge. “We’re going to die in here!” I said. “We’re going to freeze!”
“Suffocation is possibly more of an issue.”
Okay. Okay. All I had to do was stop breathing. And stop thinking.
“Maybe there’s a way to break the lock,” Otis said. “Let me feel—could you move your back a little—yeah—and then—oof! That’s my stomach!”
“Sorry,” I whispered. “Is that better?”
“Yeah.” Otis bumped and fumbled with something next to my head. Frost fell onto my scalp. “Crud,” he said. “The latch is completely inside the wall of the freezer. There’s nothing to work with.”
“What?”
“Someone will come along, Agnes—”
“We might die!” Icy tears squeezed out of my eyes. I burrowed my face closer into Otis’s neck. His skin was chilly, but he smelled good.
He wrapped his arms around me tight. “It’s okay,” he said into my hair.
“I want to tell you something, Otis,” I mumbled in his ear. “I wasn’t completely honest earlier. Yes, I liked you back in high school, but also . . . I was also in love with you.” Our hearts thumped together for a few beats. My voice sank to a whisper. “I still am. I never stopped. I dreamed about you all the time. I wondered about you, even though I thought you’d—you know. With the sign on the locker.”
Otis’s arms tightened still more around me. “I would never do anything like that to you, Agnes. Never. Okay? And I—” Muffled noises outside the freezer made him fall silent. Voices. A door slamming.
Otis and I both started shouting and screaming and thumping with feet and fists on the freezer walls with all our strength. After about twenty seconds, the lid lifted, and someone stared down at us. I blinked painfully in the light.
“Oh, for frick’s sake,” a woman said. “Jentry’s been at it again with his ridiculous commando games? When he gets back with the beer, I’m gonna tear him a new one.”
“Jodi?” I said, pulling myself upright.
“Ow,” Otis said underneath me.
Jodi narrowed. “The mayor’s daughter. Somehow I’m not surprised. What were you doing here? Taking pictures of Jentry’s pot? You’re such a little snoop! You’re sick! Where’s your old battle-axe of an aunt?”
“Um. In jail,” I said.
Jodi made a nasty smile.
I climbed out of the freezer. We were on the back porch of the farmhouse. Warm afternoon sunlight slanted through the trees, but my joints felt like chunks of ice.
“Wait,” Jodi said, looking around me. “Otis?”
Otis climbed out of the freezer, teeth chattering. “Yeah?”
Jodi tossed her blonde dreads over her shoulder. “Don’t you remember me? Jodi Todd? From Camp Ti-Ki-Rah? We were both counselors back in high school one summer.”
“Um . . .” Otis brushed frost from his hair.
“My sister and I went to boarding school, but we were here in Naneda most summers—”
“Oh, yeah,” Otis said. “Jodi. Now I remember. You were the craft counselor.”
“And you were the lifeguard.” Jodi raked her eyes down and up Otis. “God, I had such a crush on you.”
Otis wrapped an arm around me. I felt him shivering. “I’d love to hang out and reminisce, Jodi,” he said. “but your boyfriend almost killed us in this freezer, and we really need to get out of here.”
“Say, Jodi,” I said, “I happened to see that you’re growing monkshood in your garden. Care to explain?”
“I grow all kinds of medicinal plants out there.”
“Monkshood is medicinal?”
“Yes. I harvest it and sell the roots to a homeopathic drug manufacturer in Ohio.”
“Okay, well how did Dorrie Tucker know you were growing it out here? She told me I’d find it, and I did.”
“Dorrie Tucker? No idea. Maybe just a good guess—we’ve discussed growing medicinal plants before at the farmer’s market. She’s an avid gardener—”
“You don’t put monkshood in the bouquets you sell at the farmer’s market?”
“No way. That would be dangerous.”
“What do you know about your mom’s Rolodex?”
Jodi’s eyes squinched. “How do you know about that?”
“Your sister Megan mentioned it to me, for starters, not long before she died. People are looking for that Rolodex, Jodi. The murderer is . . . and I can tell by the expression on your face that you know all about it.”
Jodi bit her lower lip. “Yeah, okay, I know what’s in that Rolodex—sort of. But why should I tell you?”
“You don’t have to. You could tell the police—”
“Because you’ve been withholding evidence,” I said.
“I guess.”
“Mommy!” A little blond kid burst out of the kitchen door and pointed at me. “Mommy, that lady is on TV!”
Jodi, Otis, and I rushed inside.
An old television set droned on the kitchen counter. Bold letters on the bottom of the screen said Manhunt. A news lady from Rochester Shore 7 News was saying, “Police are uncertain whether or not Agnes Blythe is armed, but she is considered extremely dangerous. She is wanted for questioning regarding the three murders that have rocked sleepy Naneda in the past week. Here’s one more look at the police composite sketch of Agnes Blythe.” A black-and-white sketch flashed on the screen. Supposedly me, although honestly it looked like a cross between a hard-boiled egg and a Neanderthal with glasses. Great.
“Should we call the police, Mommy?” the little kid asked.
“Go play with your Legos, Aspen,” Jodi said. Aspen scampered off.
Otis had my hand and was tugging me toward the back door. “We’d better go,” he whispered in my ear.
“Wait,” I whispered back. I swung to face Jodi. “Come on, tell me about the Rolodex,” I said. “Give me a chance to solve this thing before it’s too late.”
“Why?” Jodi said. “You’re nothing but an amateur snoop. You should be arrested—for being a pain in the ass.”
“That’s probably true. But I’m trying to figure out who killed your mom.”
“Hated her.”
“Okay, well”—I swept a hand around Jodi’s kitchen with its stacks of canning jars, food dehydrator, and light fixture made out of deer antlers—“then help me out in the spirit of doing-it-yourself.” I held my breath.