Chapter Nineteen
Burning Questions
“Hallooo there, ladies!” Mr. Lee crowed. My stomach dropped. He was back. Grace, Trista, and I traded dark looks across the circle as the room burst into a chorus of cheery hellos and sighs of relief.
“Didn’t you work enough this afternoon, Harrison?” Ms. Sparrow asked, and I realized with a jolt that he had been back. He looked happy, healthy, and rested—and not at all like a man who’d spent over twenty-four hours lying in a hospital bed.
After Lee muttered something about have a lot to catch up on and Ms. Sparrow made him promise not to work too hard, he rolled his eyes sheepishly and made an exit with a goofy double-handed wave. “Welp, ciao, my Coral Beauties!” he called out. “Just wanted to personally welcome you to the Festival family!”
Grace pretended to casually walk over and borrow one of my paint pens.
“From Victim Number Two to Suspect Number One,” she muttered to me as she leaned over. “Listen for the signal.”
When Grace knocked the Polybius code later that night, Danica and Denise were still giddily wide-awake. They knocked back. Soon, they’d roped me into playing a version of “name that tune” entirely in knocks, which would have been kind of fun if I a) didn’t have to catch a killer, and b) wasn’t playing with near-telepathic twins. After the umpteenth time they guessed each other’s “songs” right after three knocks, they finally went to sleep.
Still, I held my breath as I eased open my door and tiptoed next door, Mr. Zimball’s firm warning echoing in my mind.
“Sorry, guys,” I whispered as I shut the door gently behind me. A bedside lamp they’d covered in a sheet cast a ghostly glow over the room and sent eerie shadows across the patterned wallpaper. “I thought they were never going to stop.”
I shielded my eyes as they turned their flashlights toward me.
“That last one was totally “Happy Birthday,” wasn’t it?” Grace asked. She was sitting cross-legged on her bed in plaid boxer shorts and a T-shirt from her Chinese summer day camp.
I shook my head. “Kumbaya.”
“Told you,” Trista said to Grace.
“Double or nothing for tomorrow night’s round,” Grace fired back without skipping a beat. The way they joked around, it felt like they’d been roommates forever.
“You mean if we make it through another night,” Trista said as she sat up in her twin bed. She was wearing a matching set of baby blue flannel pajamas dotted with cartoon sheep.
Grace chewed at her lip. “We’ve got work to do, don’t we? Let’s run down the facts.” She pushed her black notebook toward me and reached out a pen. “Want to be secretary again?”
“Okay,” I said as I sat down cross-legged on the bed next to her. “So. Lee is back on the list,” I began. “We have one supershady email from him and a good motive.”
“Right,” Trista nodded. “I’m pretty sure stealing money from the Winter Sun Festival ruins you for life in this town, even if they don’t throw you in jail.”
“And we know he was at the mansion earlier today,” Grace added. “Early enough to have shut us in that fridge? We’ll need to find out.”
“Problem,” Trista interrupted. “He can’t be the same person who locked us in the flower shed. He didn’t even know we’re spying, so how could he have known to scare us off?”
“Or kill us,” Grace reminded her almost proudly. “Whoever it was might have been trying to kill us.”
I shivered and moved to close the window next to Grace’s bed, but I knew it wouldn’t help. The night air outside was perfectly still and soundless. Not even a breeze rattled through the leaves.
“Actually, Lee could know we’re spying,” I said, remembering Grace’s float faceplant the morning they found Steptoe. “He could have seen us run out of the float barn after we eavesdropped on the police and him that morning.”
“Or . . . overheard you and me talking at the Beach Ball,” Grace added with a wince, remembering how careless we’d been. “Then, boom, he fakes a collapse to throw everything off.” Grace flung up her hand and bumped her flashlight. It lit up her face spookily as she leaned forward. “Like Trista said: No one suspects a victim,” she whispered dramatically.
“Maybe.” Trista squinted at us. “But I’d say the lady who basically wrote ‘I’m going to kill you, Steptoe,’ and then sent us to die in a fridge is still probably the number one suspect.”
Grace grabbed her pillow to her chest and sank back on the bed. “Point taken, Page Bottoms. You’re getting this all down, Soph, right?”
I nodded. “That meeting with her and Mr. Zimball got me thinking too. Steptoe was on her case all the time, right? But Mr. Zimball is always jumping to help her. If she wiped out Steptoe and Lee, she’d get revenge for Lily and have her man in charge.”
Trista and Grace exchanged a look, and I felt like I’d said something dumb, so I hurried to add a new idea. “And then there’s Lily. She’s everywhere. It’s like Lund sent her to track us twenty-four/seven.”
“We can’t forget that Lily could be acting alone,” Trista said. “How much do we really know about her except that her mom has prepped her since the Paleolithic era to be the Queen? And that she hunts?”
I pictured Lily and her stringy dull hair standing next to her friends back in the float barn earlier that week and realized what it must have felt like to be her. I was afraid of living with the Royal Court for three days. She’d had a lifetime of growing up surrounded by smiling photos of Sun Queens with long legs and shiny hair that looked nothing like hers—and her mom worshipping it all.
“Hard to picture her hunting by s’more,” Grace deadpanned. “But let’s do some countersurveillance and see what we can dig up. Speaking of which, I’ve updated our Polybius squares with a few new codes for meeting spots.” She handed new index cards to us.
“‘PP’ for ‘meet in the pantry’?” Trista read aloud, the lines around her eyes crinkling. “You’re giving me a hard time about being a bad spy? What top secret agent is, like, ‘Breaker-breaker, I’ll meet you in the pee-pee place!’”
I covered my mouth, trying not to laugh.
“Shhh!” Grace giggled. “Roll with it.”
“I move that ‘PP’ stand for the first-floor bathroom,” Trista said. “Makes more sense.”
“I second the motion,” I said, raising one finger officially. “I’ve already asked Rod to meet me in one pee-pee place. He won’t be surprised when I do it again!”
The room fell silent except for a faint buzz coming from Trista’s flashlight. Grace and Trista traded glances again.
I frowned, puzzled. “I mean, I should copy a Polybius square card for him, too, right? He’s in with us now,” I said, my eyes darted back and forth between them.
“Trista and I were talking . . . ,” Grace started with a wince, as if by feeling uncomfortable about what she was about to say she would somehow make it gentler, when really the opposite was true. I pictured them huddled together, discussing me, and it felt like something inside me was crumbling. “The thing is . . . ,” she tried again, twisting and untwisting a lock of her hair around her finger.
“Rod needs to stay out of the loop,” Trista said flatly. It felt like she’d slammed a book down on the nightstand. “At least until we can confirm an alibi for Mr. Zimball.”
“Alibi?” My voice squeaked higher like I’d been sucking helium.
“Sophie, Mr. Zimball caught us spying,” Grace said in a pleading tone. “He told us to back off. He knew we were at the float barn decorating and could’ve seen us go to the refrigerated compartment. And he sure is helpful to Barb.”
“He has no motive,” I pointed out. The bed creaked as I flung up my hands.
“If Lee had died too, he’d be Festival President,” Grace whispered gently. “His motive is almost as good as Mr. Lee’s.”
Shadows of tree branches outside clutched the wall like bony fingers. I remembered Mr. Zimball’s conversation with Ms. Sparrow on the day of auditions. Could he have been trying to keep us out of the Court? My throat tightened like a fist.
“I mean, it’s Rod’s dad, though,” Grace added quickly. “We know it’s not him! It’s just—we’ve got to rule out all possibilities.”
“Right.” I straightened and flipped to a fresh page in Grace’s notebook, trying to wipe from my mind the image of the two of them pacing the bedroom, making decisions about me. I guess it made sense that they’d talked about the note. And it was true that Mr. Zimball couldn’t be ruled out as a suspect. But even when I cleared my throat, the sadness stayed caught inside it. Reluctantly, I jotted Mr. Zimball’s name at the bottom of our suspect list so we would remember to clear his alibi.
“So. What else do we have?” Trista asked. She got up and rolled her desk chair over to Grace’s bed and hovered over the spread of emails.
Grace plucked Lauren Sparrow’s message about flower orders from the top of the pile and handed it to her.
Trista’s eyes flicked across the page. She wrinkled her nose. “What’s Ms. Sparrow doing emailing Mr. Steptoe about float flowers?”
“Exactly,” I tapped my pen against the notebook. “We think they might have been working together to push Lund out or take over.” I explained that Grace and I thought Barb might have been trying to take them out to avoid losing her control over float decorating. “Sparrow could be in serious danger.”
“Or . . .” Trista rubbed her chin. “Something went wrong between Steptoe and Sparrow, and he wasn’t ‘in her corner’ anymore.”
Just then a muffled thud echoed from down the hall. We flipped off our flashlights and froze. After a long minute, Grace turned on her light again. “Probably only Ms. Sparrow going to bed.”
I felt like I could still hear all of our hearts pounding at once, but it was just my own pulse thudding in my ears. As it clunked around in my chest like sneakers in a dryer, I steadied my hand and summarized our main suspect details in the notebook:
#1—BARBARA RIDLEY-LUND
MOTIVE: LILY REJECTED FROM COURT. BATTLES WITH STEPTOE.
ALIBI: UNKNOWN
#2—LILY LUND
SAME AS ABOVE. MIGHT BE ACTING ALONE.
ALIBI: UNKNOWN
#3—HARRISON LEE
MOTIVE: FESTIVAL PRESIDENCY. POSSIBLY COVER-UP OF SHADY DEALINGS.
ALIBI: UNKNOWN
#4—JOSHUA KATZ
MOTIVE: REVENGE/SHAME OVER POOPER SCOOPER DEMOTION.
ALIBI: UNKNOWN
#5—SPARROW
MOTIVE: ROMANCE GONE WRONG OR STEPTOE AND HER IN SOMETHING TOGETHER.
ALIBI: UNKNOWN
#6—DAVID ZIMBALL
MOTIVE: FESTIVAL PRESIDENCY.
ALIBI: UNKNOWN
Trista butted in. “Listen, people. We’re on borrowed time.” Her chair squeaked as she sat up suddenly. “No matter what, the killer thinks we’re onto him. Or her.”
“And the murderer could strike again at any time,” I said, swallowing hard. I glimpsed our reflections floating like bluish ghosts in the dark windowpane behind us and a chill rippled down my back.
Trista rolled her chair back to her desk and riffled through her pink orientation binder. She pulled out the next day’s schedule. “Tomorrow kicks off with a 9 a.m. photo shoot at the Luna Vista Rancho and Stables,” she read. “That’s Outfits 2C, D, and E, by the way,” she looked at us chidingly. “Horse-riding clothes.”
“Yee-haw,” I said sarcastically, circling a pretend lasso in the air. Then something dawned on me. “Wait, no, seriously: Yee-haw!”
Grace realized what I was saying. “The overflow float barn! The Girl Scout float’s got to be there, doesn’t it?”
Since not all of the Festival floats could fit in the warehouse at the Ridley Mansion, several were parked inside one of the covered riding rings at the Luna Vista Rancho and Stables a couple of miles down the road. Half of it was sectioned off and served as a graveyard of parts from past years’ floats. Though we couldn’t be a hundred percent sure, chances were the Festival officials had probably towed the (not so) Beary Happy Family float over there to disassemble it.
“I think so,” I said, feeling a sudden lightness.
Trista kicked back and forth in her desk chair. “I might be able to get permission to work on my remote-control programming in the float barn tomorrow,” she said, explaining that everyone really wanted to roll out the first driverless float for the anniversary year. “We’re at least a full day behind. The team’s stressed. If Ms. Sparrow lets me skip the hoedown photo shoot or whatever it is, I could try to gain access to Lund’s office while I’m there.”
“Perfect.” Grace clapped her hands together. “Soph and I will try to sneak into the overflow barns.”
A minute ago I’d been shrinking from the weight of everything that lay ahead, but now a hopeful feeling bubbled through me. I looked down at the list I’d jotted down neatly in the book. As long as all our plans fit between ordered lines, it felt like nothing could go wrong.
Of course, that was when we smelled the smoke.