by Maia Chance
“You’re sick.”
Dorrie gasped, affronted. “No, I’m not! You’re a bully, Agnes Blythe, just like the rest of them!”
“I hate to break it to you, Dorrie, but you’re the bully—and a serial killer, and probably a sociopath too.”
“Stop picking on me!” Dorrie hurled herself sidelong across the seat, lunging at my throat with both hands. The seat teetered. Holding my phone tight, I threw my arms around the vertical side bar. Dorrie fell sideways. She clawed at the seat for one sickening second before the rocking seat dumped her out. She screamed, and there were some heart-stopping vibrating clunks, other peoples’ screams, and . . . dead silence.
I hugged the side bar and leaned over to look. Dorrie was clinging to one of the spokes radiating from the wheel’s central axis, whimpering.
“Lower the wheel!” someone screamed at the carny. “She’s gonna fall!”
The Ferris wheel juddered into motion again. As my seat sank to the ground, I watched Dorrie slowly turn on the spoke she clung to until she and her pleather purse were upside-down. Then she was helped off by the carny and crumpled into a dead faint.
Chapter 29
The next morning at ten o’clock, I idled at the wheel of Dad’s Subaru in front of the Naneda Police Station. I was driving without a license, but I hadn’t told Dad, who had been so grateful that (a) I wasn’t a murderer and (b) I hadn’t been murdered, that I didn’t want to ruin the good vibe when he passed over the keys.
The police station doors swung open, and Aunt Effie emerged. To be honest, I’d expected to see her bent and haggard after a night in jail, but she looked . . . great. Perfect makeup, smooth hair, and the outfit she’d been wearing when she was arrested yesterday still looked crisp. She trotted down the steps and got into the passenger seat.
“You collared the killer, Agnes,” Effie said, buckling herself in. “Good job, darling. I just knew you would, by the way.”
“Dorrie Tucker!” I said, driving out of the parking lot. “Can you believe it?”
“I can.” Effie lit up a Benson & Hedges. “I never liked her. Sniveling, prim-and-proper little victim. Those are so often the worst bullies—although I really shouldn’t speak ill of her. I saw you on the late news, by the way. Where on earth did you get that pink pantsuit?”
“Do we really need to talk about my clothes?” I turned north, toward the Stagecoach Inn.
“No.” Effie slid a look at my jeans and T-shirt. “Unless you want to.”
I actually thought I looked pretty good. My contacts had arrived at the pharmacy, and Cordelia had picked them up for me, and she’d also laundered my non–high school clothes. Just between you and me, I had very lightly lined my eyes with a brown eyeliner pencil I’d found in my dresser and slicked on a layer of cotton candy Lip Smacker. Oh, and I had slept like a log since, after I’d given my statement and handed over Dorrie Tucker’s recorded confession to the police (my phone battery had held out just long enough), I had been given a checkup from a doctor who gave me a bottle of Xanax.
“Paul dropped the auto theft charges, Dad told me?” I said.
“Mm. Silly old fool didn’t even realize I took his car. He noticed it was missing when he arrived back from Prague and didn’t even pause to think that I might’ve taken it. For God’s sake, we’d been living together for months. Enough of that. Paul can rot in hell. Now. I heard all about your amazing detective work on the news in jail—except for what you and Otis were up to when you were locked in the freezer at that horror-movie farm.”
“We weren’t up to anything!” The truth was, I hadn’t seen Otis since we’d parted at his grandma’s house yesterday. He had called a few times last night after I had gone to bed, and then I’d slept late into the morning. The fact that I’d confessed to being in love with him and the fact that he hadn’t replied in any way, verbal or nonverbal, was starting to give me ants in my pants.
“Oh, I’ll bet it was nothing,” Effie said, “judging by the way your cheeks are hot pink all of a sudden.”
I turned onto the Stagecoach Inn’s overgrown driveway. When we emerged in front of the inn, demolition vehicles were there—dump truck, yellow tractors, dumpster—but like a beacon of hope, so was a sedan with Town of Naneda printed on the door. This, I knew, belonged to the city electrical inspector.
I parked. “Ready?” I asked Effie.
“Ready. Oh God, I hope Chester wasn’t bluffing about his abilities all this time.”
“Fingers crossed,” I said, feeling sick. I had no idea if Chester even knew how to plug in a power strip, let alone rewire an entire building in record time. But he claimed to have done it.
“Come along, Agnes, and stop chewing your thumbnail,” Effie said. “Oh, look, a motorcycle. Isn’t that Otis’s?”
My heart sank. It was Otis’s motorcycle. Donkey dust. I couldn’t deal with him and the electrical inspection at the same time.
Inside, a burly, sunburned guy in a hard hat cornered Aunt Effie. “You the owner?” he said. “I’m pretty hacked that this inspector told us to hold off. My guys are union. They got a strict break schedule.”
Aunt Effie laid a hand on his arm. “I’m so sorry, darling. Won’t you and your boys wait in the kitchen? I’ll call for coffee and donuts, mm-kay?”
The burly guy’s face softened. “Well, okay.”
Effie sailed past him, and I followed her back to the kitchen. “Agnes,” she whispered, “call Doctor Donut immediately and see about having them deliver two dozen donuts and one of those boxes of coffee.” She passed me a credit card.
I took care of that on my phone in the kitchen. Meanwhile, Effie went off to find the electrical inspector. The donut delivery set up and paid for, I ushered the five demolition guys into the kitchen and told them their coffee and donuts would be there shortly. Then I went to find Effie and the inspector.
I found them, along with Chester and—eep—Otis, in the grand dining room. The inspector was a fastidious-looking man with a clipboard. He worked in silence as the others hovered and fidgeted.
Otis’s face lit up when he saw me in the doorway, and he came over. “Hey,” he said.
“Hey.”
“I’m so glad to see you’re okay. You look great.”
I reached up to give my glasses a nudge and then remembered I wasn’t wearing them. I scratched my nose instead. “Oh. Thanks. How is the inspection going?”
“Really well, actually, and I think he’s almost done.”
“Really well?”
“Yeah, Chester seems to know wiring.”
I looked over at Chester, who was obviously sucking in his paunch as he talked to the inspector. “Well, he is really smart,” I said.
Chester had told me on the phone all about the crazy aftermath of the drama at the fair. Dorrie had been taken away to the hospital, where she was treated for low blood pressure, contusions, and sprains (apparently a sprained ankle had prevented her from ever making a break for it). Roger had been taken to the hospital in an ambulance (to be treated for shock, I guess), and Susie had been arrested for firing her gun in the Tunnel of Love. It turned out that after Chester had seemingly ditched me to my fate with Susie outside the Tunnel of Love, he had indeed called the police. Once I had given my statement to the police and they had listened to Dorrie’s confession on my phone, they had gone to the hospital and arrested her. I would have to testify in court, but with the recorded confession, it would be a cut-and-dry case.
“Sorry about your grandma’s Rolodex,” I said. The police had found it in the Tunnel of Love, but it was in rough shape. “I’ll get her a new one.”
“I already did.”
Heavy pause.
My throat tightened. Otis wasn’t ever going to respond to what I’d confessed to him in the freezer, was he? I was going to be permanently trapped in the weaker position of Person Who Loves Unrequitedly. And we were going to be pals, just like in high school. Yay.
The sound of a car engine out front saved me. �
�Who’s that?” I said. “Better check.”
When I reached the porch, a white-haired man was just climbing out of a Lexus two-door sports coupe. He wore slacks, pointy loafers, a yellow sweater, and sunglasses.
Otis was next to me. “Florida license plate,” he whispered.
“This the Stagecoach Inn?” the man said, mounting the steps on stiff knees.
“Yes,” I said. “You must be Paul.”
“That’s right. Paul Duncan.” He had that snappy, old-fashioned way of talking, kind of like an elderly Jimmy Stewart. “Where’s Effie? Is this the place she inherited? Whew. Needs a little TLC, I’d say—and about half a million clams. Is this the way in?” Paul went past Otis and me and through the front door.
“I don’t have a good feeling about this,” I whispered to Otis. “Effie hates his guts.”
“Why? He seems nice.”
“Why? Actually, I have no idea.”
Another ponderous pause.
“Well,” I said, “I guess I’ll go inside and see how—”
“Wait.” Otis touched my arm. “Just a minute.”
I swallowed. “Why?”
“You know why.”
“No, I don’t!”
Otis’s brown eyes glowed. “You do.”
Why was he so close? Pals didn’t get in each other’s grills like that. I backed up a few inches. “Okay, fine. The freezer incident. Yeah, well, the thing is, Otis, when people think they’re about to die, they’ll say all kinds of crazy things.”
“Oh, yeah?” Otis closed the distance between us. “What kind of things?”
“I’m not going to say it again. At the time, I wasn’t thinking rationally. Has it occurred to you that . . . that thing I said wasn’t even, strictly speaking, an accurate representation of the truth?”
“Nope.” Otis took my head in his hands. “I know you meant it.”
He kissed me, for the first time ever, standing on the front porch of that ramshackle inn with the birds twittering and the lake softly lapping. The rational part of my brain fluttered away like a moth, leaving nothing but blissed-out mush. Did I care that he hadn’t said anything about loving me too? Not at that moment, no. Later, though. There was plenty of time to fret and fidget and get a sweaty upper lip about that later. At that moment, everything was . . . perfect.
Voices bubbled louder inside, and then the front door burst open, and people crowded out. Otis and I pulled apart, reaching for each other’s hands.
“We passed inspection, Agnes!” Aunt Effie cried. Through the doorway she shouted, “Paul, hurry up with the champagne!”
“Congratulations,” the city electrical inspector mumbled, trotting down the steps to his car.
“Good job, Chester,” I said.
Chester looked self-important. “I told you I could do it.”
“I shouldn’t have doubted you for a second,” I said.
The burly demolition guy came out, followed by four equally burly workers. “Hey, what’s going on?” he asked Effie.
“The demolition is off!” Effie crowed. “Champagne?”
The guy shrugged. “Sure.”
Someone switched on extraloud country music on the dump truck’s stereo. Paul appeared with a tray of champagne bottles and paper coffee cups. Corks popped, champagne frothed, and we drank toast after toast out on the porch until everyone was buzzing with goodwill. I finally let go of Otis’s warm hand—he was talking engine parts with one of the demolition workers—and cornered Effie.
“Well?” I said to her softly. “What’s up with Paul?”
“Such a darling!”
“What? Last thing I knew, he was a pustule.”
Effie sipped her champagne. “I changed my mind. Everything that happened in Prague was a mix-up.”
“You never told me what happened in Prague.”
“Didn’t I? Oh. Well, we were at a simply adorable restaurant in the Old Town, and he got down on bended knee with a little velvet box, and I fully expected a large diamond ring, naturally, but when he popped it open, there were little pills inside.”
I frowned. “Little pills?”
“You know.” Effie raised her eyebrows suggestively. “Little blue pills?”
Oh. Oh! For . . . masculine complaints. “Seriously?”
“Yes! Of course I was utterly insulted, and I packed my bags, got on the first flight back to the States, and when I reached Naples, Florida—that’s where Paul’s condo is—I took his Cadillac and drove straight up here, determined to make a fresh start with the inn. But—don’t mention any of this to anyone—Paul’s mix-up was really due to memory loss from his incontinence drug, and he really did mean to propose.”
“Oh. That’s great! Yeah, about the inn . . . Now that you and Paul have made up, I guess you’re going to get married—after he gives you the ring—and then what? You’ll go back to Florida?” Why in the heck was my throat so tight?
“I’m staying put. I’ve fallen in love with the inn, you see, and do you know, Paul is going to invest in the entire endeavor, whatever it takes. He’s got buckets of money. He’ll be the majority shareholder, but I don’t mind. I have ways of making him do whatever I like, if you know what I mean.”
“Ew. No, I don’t know what you mean—and don’t tell me.”
“What about you, Agnes? Now that you’re no longer a person of interest in a murder investigation, you’re free to leave Naneda—and I wouldn’t blame you a bit if you did.” Effie studied me with her sharp blue eyes.
“Oh. Well, actually, I was thinking . . .” I took a deep breath. “I was thinking of staying in town for a while. Maybe I’ll start my grad program next year, if they’ll still have me.” I had sort of missed the first week of classes. “If, that is, you still need help with the inn?” I fell silent. Then I realized I was holding my breath. Home, in its weird, secret ways, had sneaked up on me and hugged me tight. Maybe I was crazy to stay. Maybe I would be smothered. But maybe—my gaze floated over Otis laughing and Chester stuffing Doritos in his mouth, along the peeling paint of the inn’s railing, past the orange-striped cat hunting in the grass, and out to the glistening blue of the lake—maybe this was where I was supposed to be.
“Agnes, darling,” Effie said. “You’ve got the job.”