“I tell you, Danny, I’ll rip their throats out,” Agford growled into the phone.
The door was ajar, but Agford had turned inside. She grasped the phone in one hand and kicked off one of her high heels. Realizing with horror what she had in store for the “raccoons,” I shielded my head. A four-inch heel thrown at that range could probably crack my skull.
Nothing came. Instead Agford wriggled her toes and scratched her leg with her foot. Please don’t turn around, I begged.
“But don’t worry,” Agford continued into the phone. “They won’t put it together. If they find us, we’ll take care of it. Simple as that,” she said. She slammed the door shut just as my lungs surrendered and pushed out the breath I’d been holding.
I sprang to my feet and sprinted for home, assuming Grace was right behind me.
I was halfway across the street before my walkie-talkie squawked to the neighborhood, “This is Agent Yang! Hidden Dragon! Come in, Hidden Dragon!” I hugged it to my chest and groped for the volume control.
“Oh my God . . .” Grace’s voice trailed off.
“Agent Yang?”
Nothing. I shook my walkie-talkie. All I heard was the hammering of my own heartbeat.
“Do you copy?” I tried again. “Grace?”
Dead air.
A bolt of adrenaline sent me tearing back to Agford’s. I dashed along the side yard—leaping to avoid the hose—and dove for cover by the hedge, where Grace had huddled in the shadows only a moment ago.
She was gone.
I looked back across the dark stretch of Agford’s lawn to the house. Every light was ablaze and her blinds were pulled low, creating a milky white screen. And projected onto that screen was the most terrifying image I had ever encountered.
Agford’s silhouetted figure loomed before me, twenty feet high and ten feet wide. Her balloon boobs wobbled as she raised one arm and paused—the black outline of a cleaver hovering overhead—before swinging violently downward.
I stifled a scream and wildly scanned the yard for Grace.
Agford’s silhouette bore down the cleaver again and again.
“Um. Agent Yang?” I croaked into my walkie-talkie. My heart pounded so hard, I was sure my radio broadcast it.
“Shhhhh!” the handset hissed back.
I let out a breath. What was I thinking? That Agford would mosey out to the yard, catch Grace, then bring her inside to chop her to pieces?
“What’s your twenty?” Grace’s voice came over the walkie-talkie.
“Hedge. Back fence,” I whispered back.
I was about to return the question when I caught a glimpse of a black shape in the flower bed directly under Agford’s kitchen window. My chest tightened in panic. It was Grace. She was going to get us caught. I knew she was.
“Get your binoculars, Sophie.” Grace could barely keep her voice steady. “Now.”
From inside came a dull grunt and a thwap of a cleaver loud enough for me to hear even from my hiding spot at the back of the yard. In a daze I rummaged in the backpack. My hands shook as I adjusted the binoculars and looked toward Agford’s kitchen. A slight gap in the blinds gave me a direct view.
Still holding the phone tucked between her shoulder and neck, Agford hunched over something on the floor. I chuckled, relieved. Grace was playing it all up, of course. It’s not like you can murder someone while chitchatting on your cell. I was about to lower the binoculars when my eye caught sight of the cleaver.
I gasped. It sat on a large carving board, smeared with blood. Even more blood pooled in the board’s gutters like a moat. Splatters of crimson covered the sink, the faucets, and the tile countertop.
Agford hoisted something up then let it thud to the floor. On her second heave, I saw it was a large trash bag.
The director of counseling at Luna Vista Middle School had just butchered someone with a cleaver, and now she was cleaning up the body parts as if she were gathering some old odds and ends for Goodwill.
Charlotte Agford stood up. Grace must have seen it when I did. Emblazoned across her oversized chest were the unmistakable outlines of two bloody handprints. In their final moments, grasping fingers had streaked long red ribbons down her cream-colored sweater.
“Run!” Grace’s voice gasped through the walkie-talkie.
By the time I caught up to Grace outside her room, we were both panting so hard, we couldn’t speak.
“Do you . . . have . . . your . . . phone?” Grace wheezed as she caught her breath. She pulled off her knit cap and wiped her forehead. Her long black hair rose with static. Her eyes were wide.
I pulled out my cell. Walkie-talkies or not, I was never without my phone. I steadied my hands enough to dial—at the last second remembering to deactivate caller ID. If our parents found out we’d sneaked out of the house at midnight, the police would have two more murders on their hands.
“Nine-one-one. What’s your emergency?” answered the operator.
I tried to keep my voice steady, deepening it to disguise myself. “Uh, yeah, hello, uh . . .” I wanted to sound like a guy. Instead I sounded like an idiot.
“Ma’am? Please state your emergency.”
“My emergency?” There was only one way to put it. I looked at Grace. She nodded. I cleared my throat. “Murder,” I said. “I just witnessed a murder.”
Chapter Three
The Root of the Matter
By third period French, I had replayed the night’s scenes in my head at least a thousand times—and that’s not counting my nightmares. The deep-red blood clotting the cutting-board moat. The way Agford’s hair bounced with each swing of her cleaver. The police cars skidding to a halt in front of her house, their doors slamming, boots pounding up her front walk. It was hard to picture Agford behind bars. Would she wear pantyhose under her orange jumpsuit? Would they even have an orange jumpsuit that could accommodate that chest?
“Le Massif Central. That’s what it’s called, right?” Rod Zimball’s voice interrupted my thoughts.
I stared at him blankly. I suppose that was as good a name for Agford’s chest as any.
“Le Massif Central?” he repeated, pointing to a mountainous area on a blank map of France. “For the quiz?” Rod’s hazel eyes peeked at me from underneath his brown curls. At Luna Vista the guys weren’t allowed to let their bangs hang over their eyes. It made him seem even cuter that he was so adorable and a rebel.
Things had started looking promising with Rod last year. He’d signed my sixth-grade yearbook: “Stay smart. Love, Rod.” It took me a long time to figure out which I liked better—that he admired me for being smart or that he used the word love. I called it a tie and decided they were the four most beautiful words I’d ever seen in a row. A few weeks into seventh grade, he’d started passing me notes. His first was a bug-eyed caricature of our French teacher, Madame Tarrateau, her generous armpit hair penciled in like seaweed. Underneath the picture he’d coined a new nickname for her and scrawled: “Madame Tarantula est très ennuyeuse.” (“Madame Tarantula is very boring.”) Maybe that doesn’t sound romantic. But it got better. We started texting at the start of October, hiding our cell phones behind our French in Action workbooks. Our latest thing was trying to stump each other by texting secret codes.
“Uh, yeah, le Massif Central,” I stammered back. “That’s right.”
“Merci, Agnès.” Rod smiled. Madame Tarrateau had given us all French names. It didn’t matter that my name was the same in French—or that she assigned all the other girls runway-model names like Rochelle and Simone. I was Agnès. It was supposed to be pronounced “an-YES,” but only Rod said it right. Trent Spinner and his charming friends called me Ay-nus.
As Madame Tarrateau attempted to wrangle the class to order, the door swung open to reveal our school principal, Mr. Katz. He looked as gray and fierce and tight-lipped as ever.
“Madame Tarrateau? I apologize. I can see you have—” He paused as a lone paper airplane came in for a shaky landing near his feet. �
��I can see you have your hands full, but I need to talk to . . .” My heart thumped so loudly, I didn’t even hear him finish. I didn’t need to.
“Sophie? Euh . . .” Madame Tarrateau frowned, searching her brain. Euh was the sound she made between everything she said. I think it was the French version of uh, but it always seemed like she was just disgusted by whatever she was saying. Finally it dawned on her. “Ah, oui!” she exclaimed, her tight poodle curls bouncing as she flipped one end of her long silk scarf over her shoulder. “Agnès!”
Rod looked puzzled as I made the long, slow march to the front of the classroom. Why did I feel like the one who murdered someone in my kitchen?
I had just reached the front of the room when I realized that lurking in the hall behind Mr. Katz was Officer Grady, our local police deputy, who’d once pulled me over for not wearing a bike helmet. His hands were on his hips and his fat fought to break free from his polyester uniform. Standing next to him was . . .
No. It was impossible. My heart stopped. She cocked her head and opened her lips in her best imitation of a smile. “It’s okay, Sophie,” Dr. Charlotte Agford called out before forcing a laugh that sounded like a snort. “We don’t bite!”
The class could hear her, of course. Grandpa Young could have heard her even without his hearing aid.
“It’s all right, AY-NUS!” Trent Spinner added. His buddies smirked and snickered, right on cue.
My parents were already waiting in Mr. Katz’s office. My dad stared straight ahead, jiggling one heel up and down like a human sewing machine. My mom raised her head and looked at me, her eyes red-rimmed and questioning. My parents were not angry. Matters were much worse.
They were disappointed.
“Take a seat, Sophie,” Mr. Katz said. He sighed and gestured to a black armchair positioned under a picture of a golf course bearing the block-letter caption EXCELLENCE. I glanced around. His office was decorated with an entire family of pictures flashing similar one-word motivational slogans, all framed in black and spaced along the room’s bland gray walls.
Mr. Katz waited as Officer Grady waddled across the room and crammed himself into a narrow armchair next to Agford. His leather belt creaked in agony as he strained to get comfortable.
“I want to thank you again for interrupting your workday, Mr. and Mrs. Young,” Mr. Katz said as he laced his fingers together. “My son’s a project manager at AmStar, so I’m especially aware of what a stressful time this is.”
I cringed. My parents—and half of Luna Vista—worked for AmStar, a company that made missiles, rockets, and radar systems for the military. For months they’d been preparing for an important missile test, which was now just two weeks away. Since their last one cost many millions and was a huge failure, everyone had been working overtime. Another bungled launch, and a lot of people in Luna Vista would lose their jobs.
“Officer?” Mr. Katz said. “We’re ready.”
Officer Grady pressed a button on a handheld device.
“Uh, yeah, hello, uh . . .” My pretend deep voice crackled through the tiny speakers. I wanted to crawl under Mr. Katz’s lacquered black coffee table and live there for the rest of the school year.
My mother bit her lip. My father rubbed the back of his head. I stared at a pointy glass paperweight on Katz’s desk. The recording continued. In the background I heard the faintest hiss. It must have been Grace’s breathing. Did they hear it?
“Uh, Charlotte Agford. A-G-F-O-R-D,” my guy-voice clarified. “She just killed someone.”
Agford coughed delicately and shifted in her chair. I didn’t dare look her way. Just smelling her perfume was enough to turn my stomach. Sometime in September I’d named the scent eau de Lysol.
I closed my eyes as my recorded voice blared on. It was like I thought that if I couldn’t see them as they listened, they couldn’t hear it. I’d been so stupid to think disabling caller ID would keep the police from tracing a call.
“Eighty-seven Via Fortuna. F as in French fry . . . O-R-T as in turd . . .”
I never had quite understood how to phone-spell.
By the time I’d opened my eyes again, my parents had sunk low into Mr. Katz’s sofa, cowering in the shadow of the mountain-range poster commanding us all to BELIEVE & SUCCEED.
Officer Grady clicked off the recording, and Mr. Katz finally spoke. “I am baffled,” he said, removing his glasses and resting one of the arms in his mouth. It was a practiced gesture that he must have thought conveyed the proper mix of thoughtfulness and superiority. “Over the years kids have pulled a variety of pranks, but none has found it hilarious to accuse a staff member of murder.”
Who said it was hilarious? Mr. Katz could add me to the list of the Baffled. Last night Agford had hacked someone to death with a cleaver and put the pieces in trash bags, yet here she was, buoyed up by her balloon boobs, smiling her fake smile.
“Officer Grady has spent all night investigating this lie and will spend the better part of his afternoon filling out paperwork associated with it. He certainly doesn’t find your midnight shenanigans hilarious,” Mr. Katz continued. “Nor do your parents, who have now been pulled away from work for an entire morning.” His face was getting flushed. “And how hilarious is being spied on and accused of murder, Dr. Agford?”
After years of being forced into a permanent smile, Agford’s lips quivered with the strain of taking a neutral position.
“Kids will be kids, Mr. Katz. Nobody understands that better than a professional.” She looked first to my parents, then to me. “But in the two years since I’ve moved to Luna Vista, I have to say—I’ve never felt quite so . . .” She fingered an ugly brooch on her suit lapel that looked like a bedazzled, cursive version of the letter A. In my mind’s eye, I saw the red, bloody finger streaks smeared across her cream-colored sweater. Agford chose her next words carefully: “Quite so hurt.”
My mother’s shoulders sank. She searched her own shoes for clarification about how and when I became such a horrible person.
Mr. Katz shook his finger at me. “Miss Young, we’re all very curious about what you might have to say for yourself.”
I opened my mouth and hoped the right explanation would find its way out.
“I thought—I mean,” I stuttered. “The whole place was covered in blood!” I blurted out at last.
My mom sighed. Agford made a little gurgling sound that might have been a stifled laugh or an expression of sympathy, I wasn’t sure which. When I looked over, she tilted her head at me, squinted, and smiled.
“Soph, honey,” she cooed, shaking her head slowly.
I shuddered. I allowed maybe four people to call me Soph. Charlotte Agford was not one of them.
“I understand if you’re not ready to apologize, sweetie, but I think we need to get a few things clear. You sneaked out of your own house at midnight, correct?”
Reluctantly, I nodded.
“You trespassed on my property?”
Dr. Agford waited for my agreement.
“You sat in my backyard and spied on me through my windows? Yes?”
“I guess so,” I said.
“You guess so?” my dad erupted. “You guess so?” An actual vein popped to the surface of his forehead.
“I mean, that’s correct,” I said, fixing my gaze on the basketball hoop in Mr. Katz’s AIM HIGH poster.
“When the police came, Sophie, do you know what they found?” Agford asked. There was the slightest edge to her falsetto.
I was tempted to reply that they’d found mutilated pieces of a human corpse when Mr. Katz answered Agford’s question for me:
“Beets, Sophie. They found beets.”
The room closed in around me. I couldn’t breathe.
“Dr. Agford pickles root vegetables every year and gives them as gifts for Thanksgiving. She’s famous for it,” Mr. Katz explained. “Perhaps you’d better explain your findings to the Youngs, Officer?”
Officer Grady detailed in his gravelly voice how he and his par
tner had indeed discovered Dr. Agford cleaning up her kitchen after preparing beets. She’d had an unfortunate incident with the blender. He smiled at Agford as he finished. “The suspect then invited us to enjoy a glass of freshly prepared beet juice. Delicious, Dr. A. Really. Thank you.”
“I jar them,” Agford said. “They make great holiday gifts.”
“I hope I’m on your list this year,” Officer Grady chimed in.
“They’re amazing, Charlotte,” Mr. Katz said. “Honestly, I never liked beets before.”
Agford pushed her smile so wide, I feared her face might snap like a rubber band and catapult across the room. “They sure are messy, though!” She snorted as if she’d made a joke. No one else laughed.
I looked around the room. I thought of the red smears. The way Agford brought down her cleaver in such rhythmic blows. The chopping, the cutting board, the trash bag . . . it was for beets?
My mother spoke then, her voice small and strangled. “It was very neighborly of you to include us last year, Charlotte.”
I had a vision from last Thanksgiving of my older brother, Jake, jamming his hands into a jar of bright red lumps before waving his fingers in my face and laughing like Dracula.
Beets. Agford’s beets.
Dr. Agford studied me. “You understand now, Soph, dear?”
Her voice faded into the background. My cheeks felt hot. The red droplets were awfully red for blood, weren’t they?
“I thought it was blood,” I mumbled.
“Oh. Oh, dear.” Dr. Agford slowly shook her head again. She exchanged a knowing look with Mr. Katz. He gave a curt nod.
Agford turned to my parents. “I believe Sophie is depressed,” she announced, folding her arms across her massive chest.
Officer Grady looked at his watch.
“Depressed?” my mom repeated. She looked pale. “That doesn’t really seem like—”
“Soph, sweetie,” interrupted Agford. If she had been close enough to lay her hand on my shoulder, she would have. “Needless risk taking is a sign of self-destructiveness. Not to mention anger.” She nodded at her own pronouncement. “We have to ask ourselves—you, Sophie, have to ask yourself, ‘What is the root of this rage?’”
The Wig in the Window Page 2