by Jen Carter
But Lucy wasn’t going to be stopped. She banged on my window as I continued toward the street.
Ignore her, I told myself.
I pressed the button on the garage remote clamped to my visor and glanced at the big door, making sure it rolled down. Lucy continued banging on my window.
“Jill, I need to talk to you,” she said louder.
I was in the street, having barely managed to miss her car, and she was still banging. This woman did not give up.
As I stopped the car just long enough to push the gear shift from reverse to drive, she scampered in her cute little red heels to the front of the car and threw her hands across my hood.
What the heck?
I threw the car into park. As much as I would have loved to inch forward just a teeny-tiny bit—just to scare her—I knew that she’d scream assault with a deadly weapon and I’d have a bigger problem on my hands.
Plus, my parents taught me better than that.
I opened the door and stepped halfway out of the car. “Lucy, move. I’m not talking to you anymore.”
“I need your help,” she said, her hands still firmly planted on the hood. “Girl to girl. Woman to woman. Off the record. I swear, I promise, I will not print anything that we talk about here. Scout’s honor.”
Scouts honor, ha.
I stared at her for a couple seconds. She certainly was determined, and the longer I fought her, the later I’d be to tai chi.
Boy, I hated that woman.
“Get out of the way,” I said. “Let me park my car on the side of the street. You have sixty seconds to say whatever you want to say. I’m not going to be late because of you.”
She removed herself from the car and stepped aside. I parked, just like I said I would, and got out.
“Your sixty seconds starts now,” I said, arms crossed and eyes narrowed.
She pulled a piece of paper from her skirt pocket and unfolded it.
“What does this mean?” she asked, holding it out to me.
I took it, reading.
It wasn’t actually a piece of paper—it was a three-by-five card, just like the ones sent to Esther and Livy the day before. And just like the ones sent to Esther and Livy, this card had a quote on it. Two quotes, actually.
The first:
Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.
And the second:
Those wretches who never lived went on and were stung by wasps and hornets.
I looked at Lucy. Did she come to me because I was an English teacher and she expected me to know this? Or had something else prompted her to track me down? I just never knew with her. She always had an ulterior motive.
“Dante’s Inferno,” I said.
“I know where the quotes are from,” Lucy snapped. “I Googled them. What do they mean?”
“You’re going to have to be nicer to me if you want an answer,” I said. “Drop the attitude.” The look on her face didn’t change—it was still strained and tense—but she didn’t make a rude retort, so I took that as a step in the right direction.
I held up the card. “Where did you get this?”
“It was in my car,” she said. “I found it last night. I must have left a window cracked at some point yesterday, and the note was slipped inside.” Her eyes flicked to the note. “What does it mean?”
I sat on the curb and read it again.
I couldn’t stand Lucy. She was terrible to people in OV with her hateful articles. It should have been easy to take pleasure in this situation. In a way, it was a little bit like karma.
But I didn’t take pleasure in it. Truly, the messages were chilling and grotesque, and I didn’t really want to be the one to translate.
What were the chances of her believing me if I said that I didn’t know and that she should just hand the card over to Fitts and forget about it?
Probably zero. She did know I taught English. She might have even known that I taught twelfth grade and that we finished Inferno two months ago. The syllabus was online after all, and Lucy was pretty good at digging up information.
“Well,” I said slowly. “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here is written over the entrance of Hell in Dante’s Inferno. So I guess that means whoever sent this to you thinks you belong just right outside Hell. Or that you should enter Hell. Maybe. And the line about the hornets…” I paused, reading it again. “I think whoever wrote this left part of the line out, which probably means they really wanted to emphasize the hornets and wasps.” I looked across the street, processing the quote and not wanting to look at Lucy. “In the story, people who don’t take a side—people who don’t stand for good or for bad—they’re rejected by both Heaven and Hell. So they spend all of eternity running around aimlessly, carrying a blank banner and being stung by wasps and hornets. So…” I paused, dropping my eyes back to the quote. “I guess the person who wrote this thinks you haven’t taken a side and deserve to be stung till you bleed.”
After a moment of silence, I forced myself to look at Lucy. Her face was on the verge of crumpling, like she was going to burst into tears.
“I do take a side,” she said with a trembling voice. “I take a side every day.”
I stood up. Card still in hand, I walked to my car and said over my shoulder, “But do you really? Are you spreading kindness and love? Or are you motivated by evil?” I opened my car door, grabbed my phone, and snapped a couple pictures of the card. On my way back to Lucy, I continued, “I’m not sure what you do fits into either of those categories. You’re not kind at all. But then, even though you’re really mean in your articles, are you evil? I don’t think so. You seem to think your vitriol is meaningful, which makes you misguided—not good or evil. Maybe whoever sent this sees right through you.”
“And that means I deserve to hang out at Hell’s gate and get stung by wasps and hornets?” she asked.
“Well, I don’t think that,” I said. I held out the card to Lucy.
She took a shaky breath. “How did they know?”
“Know what?”
She looked at me blankly, like my question was taking longer than usual to register. Then her expression morphed into a scowl, and she snatched the card from my hand. She hurried to her car, hopped inside, and peeled out down the street.
Classy.
I walked to my own car, feeling certain that I had given Lucy more than sixty seconds. I didn’t want to be late to tai chi, but I knew I needed to take a couple more seconds to write down what had just happened. If I didn’t, I’d forget later.
Sitting in the driver’s seat, I reached into the backseat for my bag and pulled a stack of papers from it. The stack was mostly extra scripts for students who forgot theirs at play practice, but my notebook was in there somewhere. As I flipped through the scripts in search of that notebook, something fell out. It slipped right between my seat and the console.
Oh my goodness, don’t tell me. I got a three-by-five card, too?
Me?
No, it had to be something else. I reached down between the seat and the console, cringing and cursing my adult-sized hands. Why was the space just big enough for things to slip down but not big enough to reach in and grab them?
Eventually, I managed to pinch the card between two fingers and pull it up.
Sure enough, I had been blessed with my own little Shakespearean message.
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.
Shoot.
That wasn’t good.
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds came from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 94, which was my favorite. I liked it so much that I asked Aldo to fire it into the face of a barrel in the tasting room. The rest of the barrels had Renaissance sonnets fired into their faces as well, but they were all about love and wine. Sonnet 94 was the only one in the tasting room with a complex and somewhat-dark message.
I couldn’t help but wonder if the person who sent this knew me. Like, really knew me.
FOURTEEN
I got to East
Park just two minutes late, but Jules had already started teaching the Council of Elders and Livy a beginning tai chi form. When she taught self-defense on Friday afternoons, she never started on time because there were always so many stragglers showing up late. But this was different. I was the only straggler, and there was no need to wait for me. I was just showing up for fun anyway, and besides, I’d probably be able to catch up pretty quickly.
I trotted up to the group and stood in the back next to Livy. Jules caught my eye, and I gave her an apologetic smile. She smiled back and continued giving instruction, demonstrating a hand movement at the same time, and I tried to jump right in.
About fifteen seconds later, I realized tai chi was harder than it seemed. The hand motions were fluid and slow, but I kept reversing them. I had been pretty confident in discerning my left from my right since kindergarten, but clearly I had been overconfident about this ability. Tai chi was putting me in my place.
“This is hard,” I whispered to Livy as I turned the wrong way and came face to face with her. In front of us, Aldo also turned the wrong way, but he was quicker to correct himself than I was.
“Why were you late?” Livy whispered back. “You’re almost never late.”
I watched Jules demonstrate how to Part the Wild Horse’s Mane again before answering. Shoot, I had the wrong hand on top again.
“Lucy Argyle showed up at my house this morning,” I whispered. “Our literary stalker person sent her a note that implied she belonged in Dante’s Inferno.”
I glanced over my shoulder as Livy’s mouth dropped open. She stepped left and completely forgot the accompanying hand movements.
“And,” I added, “I got a note as well. Found it in my notebook. If Lucy belongs in hell, I apparently belong in a Shakespeare sonnet.”
Jules was moving through the group, correcting the Council of Elders’ stances as needed. When she reached me and Livy in the back, she said in a remarkably smooth, soothing voice, “I love you both, but if you don’t stop yapping, I’ll kick you out of class.”
Fair enough.
“Understood,” I whispered. “Sorry.”
I paid more attention to Jules’ instruction after that, but still probably not as much as I should have. My mind kept wandering back to the note in my car. Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds. Did someone think I was a festering lily?
When class ended, there was a lot I wanted to tell Jules and Livy, but I knew they needed to skedaddle. They had businesses to run after all. They didn’t get a spring break like me.
“Maybe we can meet for coffee sometime this morning,” I said as we picked up our cell phones and keys where we had left them on the grass. “I have some stuff I want to run by you.”
“Ten o’clock?” Livy said. She looked back and forth between me and Jules. We both nodded.
“I’ll tell my sisters to meet us at Amy’s if they’re interested,” I said.
“Oh, Aldo!” Jules said, as the Council of Elders walked past us toward the sidewalk. She reached down and picked up a blue backpack near where our phones and keys had been. “You forgot your backpack.”
Backpack?
I hadn’t ever seen Aldo with a backpack.
He turned, and from the expression on his face, I almost expected him to say what backpack? He looked as surprised as me. Then recognition replaced the look of confusion. He smiled.
“Oh yes,” he chuckled, backtracking toward us. “I forgot. Thank you, Jules.” He pointed to his head. “This memory of mine, you know. Sometimes it’s napping.”
Jules smiled. “No problem. See you later today.”
She was going to see Aldo later today? Maybe she was swinging by the winery to pick up her free wine for teaching the tai chi class.
Before I could ask, she clapped her hands together and took a step backward.
“All right, I better head back,” she said to me and Livy, inclining her head across the park toward her bakery. “See you at ten.”
We waved our goodbyes to her.
Time to head home. And probably time to tell Nico about the card in my bag.
Today was already more eventful than I expected.
***
Back at home, I had been sitting at my computer with Uni napping on my feet for at least twenty minutes before realizing that I had forgotten to call the detective. I had been on a roll applying for English teacher jobs to schools within a twenty-mile radius with my new-and-improved resume. There were only two more applications I needed to send out when I remembered that a call to the detective was in order.
As much as I wanted to get those last applications out, it was probably more important to call Fitts first. The applications could wait ten minutes.
I picked up my phone from the desk and looked at it, wondering what Fitts would say. When I had told Nico, his response was both cautious and level headed.
Give the detective a call and let him know, he had said. Have Fitts pass it on to the handwriting expert, and let’s just see what happens. We still don’t know why these cards are popping up, if they’re written by more than one person, or if they are even related to Fleming’s death. Let’s just see what the police say.
I should have called Fitts the second I finished speaking with Nico, but I had gotten distracted by eating breakfast. Then by playing with Uni. Then by applications. But now that I remembered, time to get it over with.
I tapped my phone’s screen to place the call.
“How important is this, D’Angelo?” he answered. “I’m pretty busy.”
“Lucy Argyle showed up at my house this morning with a three-by-five card like the ones that Livy Green and Esther Bellows got yesterday. Hers had quotes from Dante’s Inferno on it. Did she call you about it?”
Fitts let out a frustrated grunt. “No.”
“I took pictures of it. I can text them to you.”
“Don’t bother. I’ll need to get it from her as evidence.”
“All right. And then I also found one of those cards in my car this morning. It was stuck in a stack of play scripts in my bag.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“No. It has a quote from my favorite Shakespeare sonnet.”
“Who knows you like that sonnet?”
Good question. “Well, it’s on a barrel in our tasting room, so I might have pointed it out to some people in OV over the years. And then my students probably know since we do some Shakespeare in class. But those kids are all in Carlsbad, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a single student up here.”
“This case makes my head hurt.” Fitts sighed. “Okay, I’ll be by to pick up your card later today. I have some interviews I have to get done first.”
“Any word on Fleming’s cause of death or the other weird quotes that were left for other people here?”
Fitts sighed again, this time longer and a little louder. I pictured him sitting at his desk, leaning back in his chair and flicking a pen between his fingers. “Fleming likely died of starvation. Dehydration would have gotten him in a couple days, and we found some water in that little cell where he was trapped. Whoever left him there wanted him to suffer before dying.”
Goosebumps rose on my arms. “That gives me the chills.”
“Yep.”
“And any update from the handwriting expert so far?”
“Not officially. But I have a buddy who does handwriting analysis on the side—not for the police department—and I ran it all by him, too. He thinks all the messages sent to the ladies were from the same person. The high school girls and the drama teachers—their notes all came from the same person. Our sneaky wannabe poet tried to make some of the writing look different but didn’t do it well. Most people can’t. The note written for the boy was from someone else.”
“So, two possible people involved.”
“Possibly. Could be two people in cahoots. Or could be one mastermind and one copycat. I gotta go. I’ll text you when I’m on my way over.”
And
with that, he hung up.
My stomach felt queasy. Fleming likely died of starvation. My friends and I had suspected that, but it was still hard to hear. Not only did someone want Fleming dead, but they also wanted him to suffer first. That made me sick.
And when it came to those handwritten notes, neither option posed by Fitts sounded good to me. It didn’t matter if we were talking about two people in cahoots or a mastermind and a copycat. Bad, bad, bad.
I went back to sending out job applications, though my mind was elsewhere.
Who had I told about Sonnet 94? Who knew I liked that poem? My mind scrolled through the kinds of situations where I might have mentioned it. In the classroom when we were doing Shakespeare, in the tasting room when patrons remarked about the barrel faces, and maybe in Amy’s bookstore whenever I stepped into the Classics section. I might have even mentioned it at play practice this week. I didn’t have a good reason to mention it at play practice, but sometimes I prattled on about literature without realizing it, so the possibility was definitely there.
An idea struck me. I could do a quick experiment to test how often I talked about the sonnet.
I grabbed my phone off the computer desk and sent a message to my sisters.
Do you know my favorite poem?
Then I sent the same message, one at a time, to my friends in OV: Livy, Amy, and Jules. For the true test, I even sent it to self-centered Elita who rarely paid attention to anyone.
Stella wrote back first.
When? As a kid you liked stuff by Shel Silverstein. In high school you didn’t like poetry. In college it was probably something Victorian. And now, isn’t it that one on the barrel in the tasting room?
Dang, she was good. Not exactly clear about the barrel poem, but overall very impressive.
Then I got a succession of answers rapid fire.
The one about the lilies and weeds, Holly said.
Sonnet 94, Amy said.
Hopefully not the one on that little notecard you got this morning, Livy said.