Nightmare Mountain

by Peg Kehret

  She was halfway to the gate when she thought she heard a noise behind her. She stopped and listened for a moment but she heard nothing more. When she shone the flashlight in a wide circle, she saw only meadow grass and trees.

  The sound came again—a sharp, abrupt noise, like a braying donkey with hiccups. This time she could tell it came from the barn. Merrylegs. She didn’t know llamas made any sound except the happy hum, but what she heard was definitely an animal noise. Maybe the baby was coming.

  She walked faster, wondering how long it would take the ambulance to reach the hospital, wondering if Aunt Karen would be all right.

  She reached the gate, lifted the metal rod, and began to push the gate shut. As she did, an engine started behind her. Startled, Molly turned to look back. As she squinted into the darkness, a truck with no headlights on roared down the lane. For an instant Molly stood still, paralyzed with shock. Her eyes widened in terror as the truck rushed forward out of the darkness, straight toward her.

  It was almost on her before she could react. At the last second, she leaped out of the way, flinging the gate open again and twisting her ankle as she stumbled into the pasture. She fell to her knees, tearing her jeans. Pebbles flew up from the truck’s tires and landed like hailstones in Molly’s hair.

  “Hey!” she yelled, but the driver either didn’t hear her or didn’t choose to stop.

  She watched the truck turn off the lane and head toward town; it was nearly out of her sight when the driver finally turned on the headlights.

  She was shaking with anger. She might have been killed by that stupid driver, going around with no lights on in the middle of the night.

  She yanked the gate shut and started to run. All she wanted to do now was get safely back to the house.

  She didn’t know who had been in the barn or why they would drive away without any lights. She’d been so startled when the truck came up behind her, and so anxious to get out of the way, that she hadn’t noticed who was driving. Maybe it was a veterinarian. Whoever it was, he’d better learn how to drive before he killed somebody.

  By the time Molly reached the house, her breath came in short gasps and her twisted ankle throbbed.

  Buckie wagged his tail happily when she came inside. She reached down to pet him and he licked her hand.

  She thought about what Glendon had said. A dog howls like that when his owner dies. She hoped Glendon was wrong. Wearily, she locked the door and then climbed the stairs, with Buckie at her side. It would be comforting to have him sleep on the rug beside her bed for the rest of the night.

  When she passed Glendon’s closed bedroom door, she hesitated. The way Glendon acted, she didn’t want to talk to him any more than necessary. Still, she was shaken by what had happened just now and needed to find out who was responsible. She knocked.

  “Glendon?” she said. “Who was out in the barn tonight?”

  Glendon didn’t answer.

  Four

  Where was she?

  Blinking, Molly struggled to wake up. It had taken her a long time to get back to sleep and now she was so groggy, it took a moment for her to recognize her surroundings.

  Aunt Karen’s house. She was at Aunt Karen’s house only Aunt Karen was in the hospital and . . . someone was pounding on the front door.

  Molly jumped out of bed, fully awake now. Last night’s events all came back to her as she pulled on her blue bathrobe and slid her feet into her fuzzy yellow slippers.

  Buckie was already downstairs, barking, and Glendon must be up, too, because she heard a radio playing. Molly hurried out of her room. As she started down the steps, she heard the front door open.

  “Are you Glendon?” a man’s voice said. “I’m Sheriff Donley. Did your dad call and tell you I was coming?”

  “Yes,” Glendon said. “I just talked to him.”

  Molly crossed the hall and saw a man in uniform, letting Buckie sniff his fingers. Through the open door she saw a white car with a gold star on the side and blue lights on the roof.

  “You must be Molly,” the sheriff said. “Phil said you’d be here, too.” He held a card out for Molly and Glendon to see. It had his picture on it. “This is my identification,” he said. “I need to come in and get some things.”

  “Is Aunt Karen going to be OK?” Molly asked.

  “I don’t know,” the sheriff said. “It was still touch and go when I left the hospital.” He stepped inside. “I need to collect samples of food,” he said. “Any leftovers of what she ate last night.”

  “Is that what made her sick?” Glendon said. “Something she ate?”

  “Could be.”

  “But we all ate the same things,” Molly said. “If the food was spoiled, wouldn’t all of us be sick?”

  “Maybe you didn’t eat exactly the same things. And maybe the food wasn’t spoiled. She could have some illness that doesn’t have anything to do with what she ate but we have to find out. So many crazy things happen these days; we can’t assume anything.”

  Molly frowned. What sort of illness? What crazy things?

  “You think she was poisoned, don’t you?” Glendon said.

  Molly’s jaw dropped. Poisoned!

  “It looks that way,” Sheriff Donley said. “We need to test the food, to be sure.”

  Stunned, Molly led the way to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator.

  “We had pot roast last night,” she said. “And potatoes and gravy.” A nice, normal dinner. Nothing weird. Certainly nothing poisonous.

  “We had carrots, too,” Glendon said. “And salad.”

  Molly removed a glass dish which contained the rest of the meat and potatoes. She didn’t see any leftover carrots or salad.

  “Let me look,” Glendon said, and he rummaged around in the refrigerator, opening containers and closing them again.

  “Here’s the extra gravy,” he said.

  The sheriff put the food into an insulated box that he’d brought along. “What about dessert?” he asked. “Did you have any dessert last night?”

  “I had cookies,” Molly said.

  “Me, too,” Glendon said, “but Mother didn’t have any.”

  “Are you positive?”

  “She didn’t feel too well, even before we ate,” Molly said. “Her nose was stuffy and she said she had a headache. We thought she was getting a cold or the flu. Are you sure she was poisoned?”

  Molly didn’t mean to doubt the sheriff’s word; it was just so preposterous. Who would poison Aunt Karen? And why?

  “What about snacks?” the sheriff asked. “Did you eat anything later in the evening?”

  “We had some popcorn,” Glendon said. “But all of us ate some, not just Mother.”

  “We all ate the pot roast, too,” Molly pointed out.

  “Where do you keep the popcorn?” the sheriff asked.

  Glendon opened a cupboard and removed a jar of popcorn.

  The sheriff put it in the box with the pot roast and gravy containers. “I don’t see how someone could poison unpopped popcorn,” he said, “but I’ll have it tested. I’ll take along the cookies, too.”

  Molly didn’t see how someone could poison popcorn, either, but then she didn’t see how any of this could be happening. She handed the sheriff the tin of cookies.

  “I know these aren’t poison,” she said. “I made them myself.”

  “Can you think of anything she might have eaten that the rest of you didn’t have?” the sheriff asked. “Anything at all?”

  Both Glendon and Molly shook their heads.

  “Your dad will be calling you, or coming home, as soon as he can,” the sheriff said. “Meanwhile, don’t eat anything from a package that’s already been opened. Do you understand?”

  Molly and Glendon nodded.

  After the sheriff left, Molly said, “I can’t believe this! Who would want to poison Aunt Karen? And how would the poison get put in the food? There was nobody here yesterday except us.”

  Glendon didn’t answer. Moll
y looked at him. He was glaring at her and the expression in his eyes made her take a quick step backwards.

  “Yes,” he said slowly. “Nobody else was here.”

  He thinks I did it, Molly realized. He thinks I poisoned Aunt Karen.

  “Glendon,” Molly said. “I would never . . .”

  But Glendon wasn’t listening. “Wait a minute,” he said. “I just thought of something.” He turned away from Molly, yanked open the door and hollered, “Hey, Sheriff! Wait! I just remembered something.”

  Sheriff Donley hurried back to the house. “What is it?” he asked.

  Glendon spoke slowly, as if he wanted to be sure the sheriff understood. “Last night, when Mother said she felt like she was getting a cold, Dad said maybe she should take one of Molly’s cod-liver-oil pills.”

  Molly looked at him, astonished. Was he telling the truth or was he trying to blame the poisoning on her?

  “Did she take one?” the sheriff asked.

  “Yes,” Glendon said.

  Molly’s stomach did a flip-flop. “Do you think that might be what happened?” she said. “Was there poison in one of the cod-liver-oil pills?”

  “Anything’s possible,” the sheriff said. “There have been many cases of product tampering lately.”

  “No one in their right mind would poison cod-liver-oil pills.”

  “Of course not. But people died because some nut put cyanide in painkiller capsules, so it could happen with cod-liver oil, too. Where are they?”

  Molly got the bottle and handed it to the sheriff. “I take one of these every morning,” she said, “and I haven’t been sick.”

  “Maybe you were lucky,” the sheriff said. He opened the bottle and looked inside. “They’re soft pills; it would be possible.”

  Molly stared at the bottle. The gold-colored capsules were visible through the glass and she thought of all the mornings when she had routinely swallowed one of them. If one of the cod-liver-oil capsules contained poison, then it could have been her, not Aunt Karen, who almost died. Almost? They didn’t know yet if Aunt Karen would get well or not.

  Molly had promised her mother that she’d take a pill each day, just as she did at home. If there was poison in one of them and if Aunt Karen hadn’t swallowed the one with poison in it, Molly would have taken it eventually. Maybe, as the sheriff said, she was lucky. But it wasn’t lucky for Aunt Karen to be poisoned. It wasn’t lucky, at all. It was terrible.

  “Call me if you think of anything else,” Sheriff Donley said. “Here’s my number.” He handed Glendon a business card and left.

  Molly fought back tears. She wished she could go home. She wondered if she should try to call her mother. Mom had told her that the office in Los Angeles would be able to reach her in Japan, in case Molly needed to get a message to her. The office telephone number was written on a piece of paper in Molly’s wallet.

  “But don’t call them unless it’s an emergency,” Mom had said. “Life or death.”

  Was this an emergency? Aunt Karen’s condition would be considered life or death but there wasn’t anything Mom could do to help, even if she were here. Aunt Karen was in a hospital; the doctors were caring for her and Uncle Phil was there.

  If I called now, Molly thought, what message would I leave? I’m scared. Glendon hates me and I don’t know what to do about it. Neither of those reasons could be called emergencies.

  No, Molly decided, I can’t bother Mom with all of this. Not yet. Probably Uncle Phil will come home soon and maybe Aunt Karen, too. If they pumped all the poison out of her stomach, she might get better fast. She might even be able to come home today.

  Glendon took a fresh box of cereal out of the cupboard, opened it, and poured himself a bowl.

  “What time do you leave for school?” Molly asked.

  “I’m not going to school. I’m going to stay home and do Dad’s chores.”

  That reminded Molly of the barn.

  “Who was out in the barn last night?” she asked.

  “Nobody.”

  “Somebody was. I saw a light. And later, when I went back out to shut the gate, a truck drove away.”

  Glendon looked at her as if she’d announced that a flying saucer had landed in the pasture. “Are you sure?” he asked.

  “Yes. The truck almost ran over me because it didn’t have any lights on.”

  “There shouldn’t have been anybody in the barn last night,” Glendon said.

  “Maybe Uncle Phil called a veterinarian. Maybe the baby llama was born. Someone might have come before Aunt Karen got sick, while we were both asleep, and Uncle Phil just forgot to tell us.”

  “We never need the vet for birthings.” He sounded disdainful.

  “Someone was in the barn and whoever it was ran me off the lane in the dark.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense. Are you sure you didn’t dream it?”

  Molly was sure she didn’t dream it. On the other hand, he was right. It didn’t make any sense.

  Glendon poured milk on his cereal and started to eat. Molly didn’t want any breakfast. She was too upset to be hungry. Even cold pizza wouldn’t taste good today.

  Glendon was the most obnoxious person she’d ever known. If she had known what he was like, she would never have come here. Mom could have hired someone—anyone—to stay in their condo so Molly wouldn’t be alone. Even an unknown housekeeper from one of the agencies, like they hired when Mom had her appendix out, would be better than this cousin who barely talked to her.

  “I’m going out to the barn and look,” she said.

  “For what?”

  She didn’t want to say she was looking for a clue to who was there the night before—some proof that she hadn’t dreamed the whole thing. “The llama,” she said. “I’m going to see if the baby was born.”

  She opened the barn door and stepped inside, inhaling the sweet smell of new hay. She knew where to turn on the lights because she saw Uncle Phil do it when he brought her out to introduce her to Merrylegs.

  Now Molly looked around the empty barn. Was it only two days ago that they had stood in the llama pen and laughed together? So much had happened since then.

  She passed the ladder that led to the hayloft, and walked slowly toward the pen where Merrylegs was kept.

  As she passed the stacked firewood, the garden tractor, and the tools that were stored in the barn, she looked carefully around, watching for a flashlight, or a scrap of paper, or some indication that a person had been here last night. She saw nothing.

  When she reached the llama pen, she stopped and stared in disbelief. Then she turned and ran out of the barn, across the field, and back to the house.

  “Glendon!” she cried, as she burst inside. “Merrylegs is gone!”

  “Gone!” he said. “She can’t be gone.”

  “Come and see for yourself,” Molly said. “The pen is empty.”

  Glendon ran to the barn, with Molly beside him, and looked at the empty llama pen. Then he turned and ran outside again.

  Molly followed. “Where do you think she is?” Molly asked.

  Glendon shook his head. “Dad put her in last night. I saw him do it.”

  “Maybe the person who drove off in the truck last night let Merrylegs out.”

  Glendon scowled. “I’m going to look around,” he said. “Maybe she got loose somehow. Maybe Dad didn’t get the door of the pen shut tightly.”

  “It’s shut now,” Molly said, “and I didn’t touch it.”

  “If someone was here with a truck, why didn’t we see the truck when the ambulance came?”

  “Maybe we were too upset to notice.”

  “I think we’d notice a strange truck parked by our barn.”

  “How much are llamas worth?” Molly asked.

  “Male llamas cost about a thousand dollars. Females cost several thousand.”

  “Several thousand dollars?” Molly was astonished. She had no idea the llamas were so valuable. And Merrylegs was going to have a baby soon,
so she’d be worth even more.

  “The most we ever got for one was ten thousand.”

  Molly said softly, “I think she was stolen. We should call the sheriff and report it.”

  “I’ll look for her first,” Glendon said. “Let’s be sure she’s gone before we call the sheriff.” He went around the corner of the barn to the back side.

  Molly knew he was being stubborn. He didn’t want to admit that Merrylegs had been stolen because that would mean Molly was right about seeing a light in the barn last night and about the truck that drove away.

  Molly walked slowly back to the llama pen. Someone was here last night and she needed to find something, anything, to identify that person.

  At least this explained why the gate had been left open and why the truck driver didn’t have any lights on in the middle of the night. He was stealing the llama; Merrylegs was in the back of the truck.

  She scrutinized every foot of the llama pen but found nothing.

  She decided to call the sheriff herself. If Glendon didn’t have sense enough to report the theft, she would have to do it. It would probably make him angry if she called, but what difference did that make? He was already angry at her anyway.

  “My cousin,” she said out loud, as she gave the side of the pen a kick, “is a jerk.” She heard a faint scuffling sound and whirled around. She thought Glendon had gone outside. She would never call him a jerk to his face, even if it was true.

  He wasn’t behind her and she realized the noise had come from overhead.

  She looked up just as a huge bale of hay tumbled over the edge of the loft. It was a solid, oblong bale, bound tightly with wire, and the sight of it falling rapidly toward the top of her head made her freeze momentarily. She quickly recovered her senses and leaped backwards, trying to jump out of the way, but she couldn’t move fast enough.

  The heavy hay landed on her shoulder, sending a sharp pain through her arm. As she fell, she hit her head on the railing of the pen. She tried to yell but no sound came from her lips. The barn walls seemed to whirl briefly in a circle and then everything went black.

  Five

  Sheriff Donley drove her to the hospital.