“Where are we?” Pippa asked. “Did I already miss the turnoff?” It was difficult to make our way in the dark.
I couldn’t resist. “Hmm, do you want me to consult the map on my smartphone?”
“Yes, okay, please.” She slowed the truck down. “These woods are always creepy after dark. I don’t want anything to happen to us or our precious cargo.”
Behind us, a dark black truck slowed down as well. “Hang on,” I said, sliding down into my seat. “Wasn’t that truck behind us earlier, when we were in town?”
Pippa glanced into the rearview mirror. “I’m not sure,” she said softly. “It’s kind of hard to make out. Why? Do you think it’s following us?” She squinted and then nodded. “Yes, okay, I definitely recognize that truck. Shoot, why is it slowing down so much?”
I slid upwards a little bit, my head throbbing. I gulped. “What if it’s Rocky?” I whispered, as though he might be able to hear us. “If it is, we haven’t exactly done a smart thing, leading him into the woods behind us after dark.”
“Maybe if we stop, the truck will pass us,” Pippa said, turning to the side of the road and putting on the brake. When the truck slowed down almost to a crawl, I started to think that wasn’t the wisest move.
“Oh my goodness, they’re stopping too!” I cried. “We should go. This is a bad idea.”
But Pippa shook her head and stuck firm. “Just wait.”
She was right. The truck sped up again when it was just about to pass us and then sped off.
“Whoever that was, they didn’t want us to get a good look at them,” Pippa said, turning the ignition again.
I blinked a few times. “What if they are also heading toward the ice cream factory?” I commented. “What if Rocky knows exactly what we’re up to?”
“Do you want to turn back now?” Pippa asked. “Athena is hiding something she doesn’t want us to know, and I have a feeling it’s in that ice cream factory. We’ve come this far.”
I shook my head. “No. No turning back now.” I checked my map. “Well, some turning back. You were right, we did miss the exit.”
“No security guards,” Pippa commented, climbing out of the truck as we made our third stop at Pure Gelatosphere that week.
“That’s not that surprising,” I commented. “It’s an ice cream factory. What are people going to steal? Vats of milk?”
There was a camera above the front entryway but there was no blinking light. It was possible it was just there for show, to scare people off. We had one like that above the bakery. Like a ‘beware of the dog’ sign when there’s no actual dog.
I pulled at the front door, which was, unsurprisingly, locked. It was a deadlock, with a key code required as well, so there was no way that Pippa would be able to get it open, even with her lock-picking skills.
“Let’s check around the back,” I said. “There must have been half a dozen entrances there. Surely one of them is flimsy enough to get open.”
But all the doors around the side appeared to be deadlocked as well. We crept around until we found a door that was on the ground, like it led to an underground bunker. And this one was just a regular lock.
“What’s down here?” Pippa said.
I made a face. “It looks like it probably leads to the underground freezers.”
Pippa shrugged. “Well, that’s where we want to go, right?”
“I’m not sure ‘want’ is the right word to use right now. What I want to do is to go home and get into a bath of ice water.”
She knew how to pick a lock, but this one was old and rusty, which didn’t work to her advantage because the lock was warped and out of shape. I would have to guess this was not the way people usually got to the freezers.
“Come on,” I pleaded. “Hurry.”
“I’m trying,” she said, using a pin. “But it’s corroded.”
She was just about to give up when the lock popped open.
“Aha! Success!”
Success was one word for it. Stupidity was another, I thought, when I poked my head into the darkness. There were stairs that led down into the freezers.
“Are you going to turn your flashlight on?” Pippa whispered to me as we began the descent. The ladder we clung to shook back and forth. It didn’t take long to reach the bottom, though, and we both tripped over and fell onto the floor when it was closer than we’d expected it to be.
“Didn’t you bring a candle with you to light the way?” I asked, unable to help being sarcastic.
I felt her elbow me in the ribs. “I’m being serious!” she cried. “I can’t see anything.”
“Well, you’re not allowed to use any light that comes from a phone…”
She grabbed the phone from my hands and turned on the flashlight herself.
“So I take it that this is the end of your digital diet then?” Gosh, I hoped so.
“Shh,” Pippa said, creeping around. “Do you hear that?”
“Hear what?” I asked. I couldn’t hear a thing except for the dim hum of the freezers.
Pippa froze and turned the flashlight upwards, not that it did much good. “It sounds like an engine stopping over head,” she whispered. The flashlight caught her eyes and she looked frightened. “A car engine stopping.”
“I think it’s just the freezers,” I said, trying to convince myself.
“What if it’s that black truck? What if we’ve been followed?”
I tried to keep calm. I swallowed my own fear. “Even if it is the truck, they won’t know that we’re down here. You did shut the door behind us, didn’t you?”
“I don’t remember!” Pippa hissed.
I grabbed the phone from her. She was flashing it around too wildly; she’d hit a window, if she wasn’t careful, and give us away. I used the settings to turn it down to ‘dim’ and crept forward. “Just stay quiet,” I said, trying to find the door to the room where the display freezers were kept.
“Here!” I said, handing the phone back to Pippa. “I’ll push it open and you follow me.”
“It’s freezing in here,” Pippa said, her teeth chattering.
“Yeah, I think that’s kind of the point,” I said, trying to find the old freezers. What was it that Athena didn’t want us seeing in here?
I shook my head and scoffed when I saw rows and rows of unused display freezers. “I mean, I knew she was lying to me, but I’m still peeved about it,” I said, counting them all. There were eighteen of them.
Pippa glanced around. “There doesn’t seem to be anything too sinister down here, though,” she said. “Maybe she really just didn’t want us down here. Maybe just the sight of us is enough to traumatize her after what happened. She is a sensitive artist, after all.”
“Hmm,” I said, moving the light around the room. We couldn’t stay in there too long without freezing ourselves, so I had to make sure I checked every last inch of the room. “Not such a sensitive artist,” I said to Pippa.
“What do you mean?”
“Apparently, the paintings she was doing two years ago were not sensitive and delicate at all. Apparently, they were filled with blood and gore…”
There was a frightened look on Pippa’s face now. “That was around the time Harry was killed.”
“Yes. Maybe something traumatized Athena around that time. Perhaps it was something that she did.”
Pippa gulped. “You think Athena killed Harry? And kept his body here?”
I shrugged. “Perfect place for her to keep an eye on it.” I stopped when I thought I heard something overhead.
“Maybe she didn’t want us down here because there are other incriminating pieces of evidence. Maybe there’s something here that proves she killed Harry.”
“Did you hear that?” Pippa gasped.
“What?” I didn’t want to tell her that I thought I’d heard something earlier as well.
“It sounded like the door to the outside just opened.”
I paused and shook my head when I couldn’t hear any
thing.
“What if it’s Rocky?” Pippa whispered. “What if he’s tracked us down?”
I stopped and listened. I could hear the movement now, the sound of the latch clicking shut. Maybe we hadn’t closed the door after us, then. Hadn’t covered our tracks well at all.
Well, if it was Rocky, then we needed to act quickly.
“Come on,” I said, pulling Pippa back toward me. “We don’t have long to find out what Athena is trying to hide.”
Pippa pulled herself free from me. She wanted to escape. “We need to hide, before Rocky catches us,” she whispered. “Turn off the flashlight!”
I shook my head. “Just stop panicking, okay? We need to stay calm. We need to use our eyes and our brains right now.”
“I can’t see anything down here!” Pippa exclaimed, throwing her hands up. “Let’s just get out of here before we’re trapped! Athena just didn’t want us snooping around. That’s all it was. Let’s just leave it at that, okay?”
I shook my head. “Fine,” I said, pulling my phone up so that I could kill the light. Maybe she was right. I couldn’t see anything in the room except for the freezers.
Just as I was about to flee, my flashlight fell on the display freezers. “Hang on,” I said, taking a step back to them. “What if the thing that Athena doesn’t want us to see is in one of the freezers?”
I stomped back over to them, my heart pounding, knowing we only had seconds before we were caught. “Are you going to help me?” I called to Pippa, lifting the lids of all the freezers. The first three I opened were empty, but I kept going, lifting another, and another…and…
I froze.
That was when I saw what Athena was trying to hide.
It turned out that Rocky Morlock was in the freezer room with us that night.
Just not living or breathing. His body was laying, dead and frozen, stuffed into the display freezer.
And there were footsteps hurrying toward the door.
Chapter 9
I had zero chance to come to grips with what I had just discovered. Our main suspect, Rocky, was not our main suspect at all. At least, he wasn’t any longer.
I guess we knew now why no one had heard from Rocky in such a long time.
But for the moment, I was more focused on the fact that we were about to be caught and cornered in a freezer.
I spun around, holding my breath in the dark and trying to figure out who it was coming toward us, with something long and hard-looking in their hands.
I could make out curly hair, high-waist pants, and a glimpse of red beads around the person’s neck.
Suddenly, the lights were on. Pippa had found the light switch. The whole freezer seemed unbearably bright and I covered my eyes and bent down like an animal caught in the headlights of a car.
“Athena?” I gasped.
“What are you two doing here?” She didn’t sound terrifying or intimidating at all. In fact, she seemed terrified of us. She caught sight of the open freezer and started to back away. “I-I told you two to stay away…”
She dropped the crowbar she had been holding and backed out of the room, shoving Pippa out of the way as she headed toward the exit.
“Pippa, she’s about to run!” I called out.
Athena tried to dart back out the door but Pippa caught her and pulled her to the ground, wrestling with her on the concrete.
With Pippa’s arms around her waist, Athena tried to wiggle her way free like a worm on the end of a fishing hook, but Pippa had a firm grip and Athena wasn’t going anywhere.
“I-I swear I had nothing to do with it.” Athena’s voice was trembling. Maybe she was genuinely traumatized or maybe it was just really, really cold in there.
I let out a low laugh as I stood above her. “Yeah, right. Do you really expect us to believe that? Two dead bodies found in your freezers, and you’re just entirely innocent?”
Pippa still had Athena in a death-grip. “Yes, please, you have to believe me.”
I was starting to succumb to frostbite. Or so it felt. “Maybe we should have this conversation somewhere a little warmer,” I said, nodding for Pippa to drag Athena back into the other room.
Out in the warm, Athena was no more willing to admit to her guilt. They were standing now, but Pippa still had Athena’s wrists held behind her back.
“I swear I had nothing to do with the deaths, either of them!”
“Then why were you so desperate to keep us away from the freezers?” I asked. “You have to admit, Athena, it makes you look pretty guilty.”
She slid out of Pippa’s grip until she was practically kneeling on the floor. Pippa stood close to her to make sure she wouldn’t try to run again.
“Look…” Athena was panting with the desperation to be believed, or at least listened to. “I found that body…that—that second body—” She stopped and pointed to the freezer room. “—a few days ago. We had been so busy and we’d had to rent out so many freezers that I got desperate. I’d sworn I would never go back into that room after we found Harry, but, well, I had no other choice.” She shook her head and started to weep. “I never should have gone back in there.”
Pippa and I exchanged a glance. Did we believe her story? These could have been crocodile tears for all we knew. Maybe she was just a really talented actress.
“So why didn’t you tell anyone about it?” I asked her. I was starting to feel a little sorry for her, but if she was lying, we couldn’t just let her get up and leave.
“Because I was scared,” Athena said, starting to sob. “And I knew that if another body was discovered that we’d be shut down and I’d lose my job. I don’t make any money off my art, you know! I need this job to support my art career! So, I just shut the door and tried to forget about it.”
Pippa dropped Athena’s wrists. I think we both felt a little bad for her.
“What do you think?” Pippa whispered to me.
“I don’t believe her. Why would she not tell anyone about what she’d found? It only makes her seem more guilty.”
Pippa sighed. “She seems genuinely terrified. I think she just got scared.”
I thought Pippa was being far too trusting. She was probably just feeling soft toward Athena because she was a fan of her art. She needed to look at the facts in front of us— Athena had been hiding a dead body for days.
Pippa had made a mistake feeling bad for Athena and letting go of her wrists. While we had been talking, Athena had sprinted up the stairs and bolted out the door. I could hear her car starting and speeding away.
“Great! She’s gone.”
We sat outside in the truck for a long time. “What does this all mean…” Pippa murmured as she stared at the gray exterior of the factory.
I shivered as the first cool breeze I had felt in weeks hit me through the open windows. It was past 1:00am. “It means that we’ve got a serial killer on our hands.”
“You mean an ice cream killer,” Pippa said. “Maybe Athena is right to be scared.” She turned toward me. “Maybe we should be scared too.”
Chapter 10
I looked out the window and felt a little flutter of excitement when I saw clouds in the sky. “I think it’s going to rain!” I called out with excitement as I sprinted into the living room where Sue was sitting in front of the fan with a solemn expression as she ate her cereal.
“Don’t go getting too excited,” she said. “The forecast says not to expect rain for days yet. This is the longest heat wave in Belldale’s history, apparently.”
“Great,” I said, going back to the kitchen to fill the ice cube tray back up so that we’d have ice by the time I got home that evening.
Sue brought her empty cereal bowl in to the kitchen and started rinsing it out in the sink. She dropped it just a little too heavily and stared at me, with her hand on her hip. “Hey, you know how you were asking a lot of questions about Athena Greenwood?”
“Hmm?” I said, trying to pretend I was too busy with the ice tray to pay attenti
on to her question. It had been two days since the incident in the ice cream factory, and Pippa and I had no idea where Athena was hiding either.
“Well, apparently, Athena didn’t turn up to her early morning shift yesterday morning at the ice cream factory. And no one’s heard from her for two days. She was supposed to drop by the gallery yesterday to pick up the money she earned from her art sales this week, but she never turned up. It was very strange.”
“That does sound strange,” I said, taking far too long to fill the tray. It had overflowed twenty times by the time I finally turned off the tap.
“So you don’t know anything about her disappearance?” Sue said.
I shook my head.
After Athena had run off that night, Pippa and I had sat in the truck until the police arrived. We’d explained what had happened and what we’d found. Pippa added a little white lie when she told the story to Jackson. “We found the door to the freezer downstairs wide open so we just climbed inside. We assumed someone was in there! We thought they might be in trouble.”
But Athena had never come back. We hadn’t heard from her the following day, and neither, it seemed now, had anyone at the ice cream factory or the gallery. I’d said to Pippa that it only made her look guiltier, now that she had gone into hiding. Pippa wasn’t so sure; she said that Athena might be in trouble.
Sue left at the sound of a knock on the door and returned with a parcel for me. “I signed for it for you, I hope you don’t mind.”
I shook my head and thanked her, but I had no idea who could be sending me a package. I hadn’t ordered anything online recently and it was still months before my birthday. The package was small, not a box but something sealed in a padded envelope.
There was only a small label on the cover, a sticker with just my name and address on it. I glanced over the handwriting. It was only a few words, but I recognized it.
I dropped the package to the floor.
“What is it?” Sue said, jumping out of the way in alarm.
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