Amelia marched all the way out of the mansion, mainly because she needed room to breathe. She was sick to death of the smell of peonies. Why was it totally normal for her family to get all competitive about some flower competition but totally weird for her to be into detective work and old movies? The rules felt completely random to Amelia, and the unfairness of it weighed as heavily on her as the mansion did on the grounds of Tangle Glen.
Sloane hurried after her friend with her arms full of muffins and fruit.
“So, I take it we’ve definitely decided to check the grounds for Ma’s missing money?” Sloane asked, biting into an apple as they walked around the side of the house and toward the formal rose garden.
“It has to be out here somewhere. It just has to be.” Amelia gestured toward the woods with her muffin.
“What’s that, then?” a voice asked as Sloane and Amelia pushed open the white gate and went through the brick archway into the garden.
Looking down, they saw Mr. Lindsay on a wooden bench next to the long reflecting pool. As usual, he didn’t seem to be sitting on it so much as growing out of it. His brown clothes matched the wood and his floppy hat looked more than ever like a mushroom cap. He was leaning on his walking stick and watching the Koi fish flit about beneath the lily pads. Chiave lay at his feet, sopping wet and panting, a lily pad sliding from her ear. Mr. Lindsay’s socks, shoes, and shorts were wet too, and he looked completely exhausted from fishing his bloodhound out of the reflecting pool.
Peering up from beneath his grubby hat, he asked, “Did the two of you lose something?”
Sloane and Amelia exchanged a look, not sure how much to tell him. Mr. Lindsay did not seem the most likely person to have shut them in the old bootlegger hiding spot simply because he couldn’t move very quickly. However, someone had done it, so maybe Mr. Lindsay was looking for Ma Yaklin’s missing money too.
Maybe that was why he’d posted information about it on Tangle Glen’s website.
Maybe he wanted his guests to look for that money.
Maybe he was using them the same way Sloane and Amelia had been used when the whole seventh grade was looking for the long-lost Hoäl jewels.
Maybe he was just faking his injured back. Pretending to be helpless so no one would suspect his nefarious plan.
Then Chiave sneezed, leaped to her feet, and took off running. Her leash slipped easily from Mr. Lindsay’s damp fingers, and before anyone could stop her, the dog shot out of the garden gate and back toward the front of the house.
“Chiave, no!” Mr. Lindsay cried, struggling—and failing—to get to his feet in time. He fell heavily back onto the bench with a whimper of pain.
“Don’t worry! I’ll get her!” Sloane sprinted after Chiave, determined that some bloodhound was not going to get the better of Slayer Sloane the Volleyball Queen. She tackled Chiave as the dog stopped to snorf one of the many peony bushes lining the front of Tangle Glen.
The dog didn’t seem to mind that Sloane had pinned her to the ground. Chiave kept her nose buried in the bright pink blossoms, tail thumping happily.
It took all of Sloane’s strength to drag the bloodhound back to Mr. Lindsay.
“See? Got her,” she panted, wiping mud and grass stains from her legs.
Chiave grinned up at her person, doggy lips curling back so her tongue could dangle out and give him a slurp. Mr. Lindsay massaged her ears. Without any resentment, he admonished, “What a bad dog you are, Chiave. Who’s the bad dog? You are! Yes, you are!”
“What kind of name is ‘Chiave,’ anyhow?” Amelia asked, blowing a few more bubbles from her pipe. Chiave snapped at them, trying to catch them in her mouth. It confused her when it seemed she couldn’t.
“Don’t know,” said Mr. Lindsay. “But we’ve always had a Chiave in the family. Even when my daddy was a little boy, they always had a Chiave about. I think it might be Italian for ‘cheese.’ The family name was originally ‘Linzi,’ you know. Granddaddy changed it to ‘Lindsay’ to make it sound more English, but he spoke fluent Italian.”
“Yeah, I had a great-great-grandpa who did something like that too,” Sloane said. After a moment’s pause, she asked, “Mr. Lindsay, what would you do if someone found that missing two million dollars of Ma Yaklin’s?”
“I don’t know.” Mr. Lindsay swiped the hat from his head and scratched at his wild tangle of hair. It looked like roots growing upside down. “Honestly, I probably wouldn’t tell anyone. It’s been too good for business.”
Amelia wasn’t at all certain that she liked the sound of that. “Would you lock us in a basement hiding spot to keep us from finding it?”
“Good heavens, no!” Mr. Lindsay looked aghast at the thought. “No, I’d just offer you some of the money to keep quiet about it.”
Both Sloane and Amelia sagged with relief after hearing that. If Mr. Lindsay was looking for the money too, at least they probably didn’t have to worry about him doing something terrible to them over it.
You know. Probably.
Chiave the cheese-named dog slipped from Mr. Lindsay’s grasp again. She dove back into the reflecting pool, emerging with another lily pad clamped happily in her jaws. Mr. Lindsay groaned, wincing in pain as he leaned on his cane and tried to get up.
Sloane and Amelia exchanged a look as Sloane fished the dog out of the water.
This time, their looks actually meant the same thing.
Heaving a martyred sigh, Amelia said, “Hey, why don’t we take Chiave for a walk for you again?”
“Oh, would you?” Mr. Lindsay asked, pathetically relieved. “I was going to ask Sergeant Pepper. I thought I’d find her out here trimming the rosebushes since she’s the only one around who hasn’t gone peony-mad and she loves to play fetch with Chiave. But I think I she’s off trimming some of the honey locust trees. Terrible creatures.”
Neither Amelia nor Sloane knew what a honey locust tree was or why it was terrible, and were afraid to ask. It made Amelia imagine a tree covered with gross insects that had been glued to it with honey.
Sloane took Chiave by the leash. As she did so, she had one more question for Mr. Lindsay. “Where do you think the money is hidden in Tangle Glen?”
Mr. Lindsay shrugged his squat shoulders. “Wherever Jacqueline Yaklin hid it, I think it was long gone by the time Granddaddy bought the house. Over the years, we’ve put in all-new plumbing and electricity. Every wall and floor in this house has been torn up, and no one ever found a thing.”
“What about the woods?” Amelia asked, earning her a nudge in the ribs from Sloane. No sense in giving Mr. Lindsay ideas of where to look before them. Just in case he was faking that back injury of his.
However, Mr. Lindsay just shook his head and waved a dismissive hand at the idea. “Nah. Too easy to lose. Even back then, the woods around here were a tangled mess. Why do you think it was called ‘Tangle Glen’? I’ve grown up here, and I still get lost out there sometimes. We have to tie bits of cloth to the trees to mark the path from one place to the next. Why would a smart, successful bootlegger hide her money someplace she couldn’t easily find even with a map?”
That was an excellent question. One to which neither Sloane nor Amelia had an answer.
Still, they were determined to at least take a look at the woods themselves. They headed toward the nearest path, with Mr. Lindsay calling after them, “Mind you, follow those ribbons and stick to the path! If you’re not back by sundown, I’ll send out a search party for you!”
That wasn’t exactly super reassuring.
Overhead, clouds began to gather, blocking out the sun. However, Sloane and Amelia hadn’t gone more than a few steps into the woods when the thick green canopy of leaves blocked out even that bit of grayish light. They were plunged into a humid twilight with ferns licking at their ankles, brambles at their clothing, and branches at their hair.
As Mr. Lindsay had promised, strips of colored cloth had been tied to the trees, helping Sloane and Amelia spot the narrow trickle of dirt that formed the path.
“He’s got a point about this being a terrible hiding spot,” Sloane admitted, wiping sweat from her face. “Even with a map, you’d have to look around for landmarks, and they just wouldn’t be easy to see in the daytime. Let alone at night.”
Amelia nodded unhappily.
“And it wouldn’t even have been any good to have, like, a mathematical map in your head. You know, like, ‘Walk fifty paces forward and then twenty paces to your left.’ Even using the path, you have to zig and zag all over the place.”
Sloane opened her mouth, but before she could say anything, Chiave spotted a chipmunk. She tore off after it, yanking the leash free from Sloane’s fingers
“Chiave, no!” Amelia cried, clamping her hand onto her hat to keep it from flying off her red curls as she and Sloane raced after the bloodhound.
“Bad dog!” Sloane yelled desperately. “Bad! Dog!”
The chipmunk must have thought Sloane was talking to it. Because the chubby little rodent shot into a hole.
Rather than stopping to snorf it, Chiave kept right on romping through the undergrowth, sending last autumn’s leaves flying through the air and squirrels racing up the tree trunks.
On and on, Chiave ran, letting out happy woofs and occasionally turning around to make sure that Sloane and Amelia were following her.
“Very bad dog!” Sloane pushed back at all the whippy little branches smacking at her face as she tried to catch up with the bloodhound. She’d been in track, but hurdles were not exactly her thing.
At least she was doing better than poor Amelia, who tripped over a mossy log with a “WHOA!” She threw her arms up into the air, both her bubble pipe and her cap disappearing into the thornbushes as she crashed into the mud.
Sloane ran back to help her now-very-dirty friend up. They both thought they’d lost Chiave, but the dog must have realized she’d taken things too far. She sat down under an oak tree by some wild blackberry bushes and whined apologetically.
“Oh, it’s okay,” Amelia assured the dog, going over to her as Sloane searched about for the lost cap and pipe. “I know you didn’t mean it. You just get a little too enthusiastic sometimes. I do that too.”
Apparently deciding that she was forgiven, Chiave tried to dig after another chipmunk that must have been hiding in the rotting leaves and old acorn caps beneath the tree.
Amelia took Chiave’s leash firmly in hand and pulled her away. “Nope. No more chipmunks for you. If they organize with the squirrels, we’ll never make it out of these woods alive.”
Chiave whined guiltily, muzzle and paws both covered with mud.
“Good news: I found your hat and pipe.” Sloane held them up with a wince. The pipe was broken in two and the hat now had a long rip in the top. “Bad news: I think they’re ruined. Worse news: I don’t know where the path is.”
Both Sloane and Amelia looked around helplessly.
This deep in the woods, they couldn’t see a single bit of the mansion or the lawn or the river. Heck, five feet into the woods, you couldn’t see those things. The bits of torn cloth they’d been following were bright yellow, easily seen against the brown of the tree branches and the green of the leaves. However, in chasing after Chiave, they’d lost sight of the scraps.
And neither one of them could remember what direction they’d come from.
Or how far they’d run.
“Sloane, do coyotes come out in the daytime?” Amelia asked in a small voice.
“No, I don’t think so,” Sloane assured her, managing to sound far more confident than she felt.
“We really have to stop getting into situations in which we have to worry about getting eaten by coyotes.” Amelia handed the quivering, straining Chiave over to her friend.
“On the bright side, there aren’t any bears in our part of Ohio.” Sloane exchanged the ruined hat and bubble pipe for the leash.
“Getting eaten by coyotes isn’t any better than getting eaten by bears,” Amelia countered. “I don’t want to be on the menu for anything.”
Hot and sticky, Sloane turned round and round, trying to decide which direction they should go. Maybe if they could see the sun, they could tell what direction it was moving? And that would somehow tell them where north was?
Except that Sloane didn’t know how it would tell them that.
Or how knowing where north was would get them back to the mansion.
Plus, between the clouds and the leaves, the sun was impossible to spot.
“Look, over there!” Amelia gripped her friend’s arm and pointed toward a bit of red tied to a tree branch. Walking over to it, they were able to see another red cloth tied up ahead.
“Yeah, but the markers for our path were yellow.” Sloane made a face.
“Does it matter? A path is a path. It’ll take us somewhere.”
Deciding Amelia was right, they followed the trail from one red flag to the next. Chiave kept trying to break away to chase after more chipmunks, squirrels, and a very alarmed snake, but this time, both Sloane and Amelia held on to her leash.
Finally, up ahead, they spotted a gap in the trees and grassy lawn beyond.
“It’s Tangle Glen!” Amelia sagged in relief.
Only to discover that they hadn’t left the woods at all.
They were just in a clearing.
“At least there aren’t any chipmunks out here.” Sloane tried to find something positive as Amelia flopped down onto the grass in despair.
“Nope. There’s no good to any of this.” Her hair streaming about her, Amelia lay on her back and folded her hands on her chest. Closing her eyes to complete the corpse look, she declared, “We shall die out here, Sloane! All that is left is to do it with dignity. Join me, Sloane! We shall face the grave together.”
“There’s a garter snake by your elbow,” Sloane pointed out dryly.
Amelia shot straight up into the air with a shriek. She landed on Sloane’s back, clinging to it like a monkey. Fortunately, the snake didn’t turn to Sloane for protection too, sliding off into a patch of violets instead.
Less fortunately, the impact of Amelia against her shoulders caused Sloane to let go of Chiave’s leash as she staggered about.
Amelia slipped off Sloane’s back, and the race was back on once again. However, Chiave didn’t go far, having encountered a patch of nearby peonies.
Inky purple peonies.
Joining the bloodhound, Sloane and Amelia looked them over. They hadn’t seen anything quite like them at the competition so far. All the other peonies had mostly been different shades of pink, red, orange, or white. Some of them had been magenta, but nothing as deep and dark and dramatic as these.
“What are these doing, growing all the way out here?” Sloane wondered. “I’m pretty sure I heard someone say that peonies don’t grow in the wild, when they were all showing off how much they know.”
“How much do you want to bet these are Shakespeare Wikander’s?” Amelia guessed. “He was out in the woods last night, right? And it seems pretty clear that he and Chef Zahra are both entering the peony competition.”
“I’m betting you’re right. The peony petal that fell from his sleeve matches these,” Sloane agreed, pulling with all her might to get Chiave away from her favorite plant. The dog only agreed to leave after she had peed on one of the bushes, marking it as her territory. “But, just like Chef Zahra and the peonies she’s growing up in the attic, it’s a pretty good cover for looking for Ma Yaklin’s missing money. Maybe last night he was out here digging for it. When Chef Zahra saw him, she assumed he was taking care of his secret peonies just like her. Maybe she assumed it because that’s what he wanted her to think.”
“We still have too many suspects and not enough clues,” Amelia said unhappily as they walked back across the meadow and toward the red marker tied to the tree. Since they’d followed the cloths in one direction and it had led them here, it seemed likely that following them in the opposite direction would take them back to the mansion.
“What I’ve been thinking is that maybe we’re going about this all wrong,” Sloane said, keeping a firm grip on the leash as Chiave tried to make friends with more forest critters. “Maybe we don’t need to figure out what Ma Yaklin was thinking or how she planned on finding the money. If she buried it in the forest, I bet she would have put it into a metal box first. You know, to keep it from getting damp and falling apart? I read about that in a book once. Maybe we just need to get a metal detector and walk all over the woods with it.”
It was a lot of woods, but Sloane was running out of ideas.
Amelia, however, hadn’t.
“And what I’ve been thinking is that we need to interrogate our suspects!” She rubbed her hands gleefully. “Really rake them over the coals! Make them sing like canaries until they squeal and tell us all that they know!”
“Canaries squeal?” Sloane asked doubtfully.
“Not the point!” Amelia waved a hand dismissively, her eyes going glassy. A dreamy smile slid onto her face. “We’ll question them all like we’re 1920s detectives and they’re bootleggers! You know, shine lights into their faces and call them ‘Mac’ a lot! Then, we’ll upload the interviews to YouTube and let our subscribers decide who shut us in that room!”
Amelia didn’t mention that at least it might get them a few more clicks.
And hopefully prevent anyone from noticing that they hadn’t really found out anything about where Ma Yaklin’s missing millions could have gone to.
So far, all Osburn and Miller-Poe Detective Agency had found were some empty crates, old newspapers, and a pack of obsessive peony enthusiasts.
Little did they know that they’d already seen all the clues they needed to solve the mystery.
Then again, those clues had been right there in front of lots of people for the last ninety years.
And no one had ever noticed.