Slayer Sloane screamed.
Screamed as a demon dog with razor-sharp teeth and drool like acid tried to devour her.
This—this is why she should have stayed in her own bed, in her own house, in her own room. She knew every creak and groan of every settling wall and floorboard in her home. There weren’t any horrors in her house.
Here, there were nightmares.
Across the room, Amelia shot up out of bed too. In fact, she moved so quickly that she practically floated in the air over her bed, clutching her blankets to her chest and matching Sloane’s scream of terror with one of her own.
However, rather than treating Sloane like an oversized Snausage, the demon dog pawed past her face to wriggle down beneath the blankets. Once there, it pressed itself against Sloane’s leg, shivering and whining.
“What is it? What is it?” Amelia screamed. “Is it a doll? It’s a doll, isn’t it?”
“It’s not a doll!” Sloane peered under the covers. “I think it’s Chiave.”
Two droopy eyes stared back pleadingly at Sloane, begging Sloane not to make her come out as the rain picked up, rattling furiously at the windows.
“Oh.” Amelia dropped her phone and rubbed at her eyes, still only half awake. “That’s too bad. I bet we could have made a lot of money off a video of that.”
Before Sloane could figure out why there was a bloodhound in her bed and what she should do about it, Amelia’s parents stumbled into their room, switching on the lights and causing Amelia to shriek all over again. The Judge wore a long black nightshirt that looked very much like his court robes. He brandished a particularly large book about peonies, as though trying to intimidate their attacker with his knowledge. Amanda Miller wore black pajamas that looked like a suit. She clacked a flat iron menacingly, similar to a crab snapping its claws.
Hair awry, eyes bleary, they swung their heads about, looking for someone to attack.
“What is it? Who is it? What’s going on?” Amanda Miller demanded, while the Judge threatened the lumpy pile of Amelia’s clothes with “I’m a judge, I’ll have you know! How dare you attack my Amelia!”
Before he could have Amelia’s costumes arrested, Sloane said, “I think it’s Chiave.”
She tried to roll back the blankets to show them, but the dog whimpered and scooted farther down the mattress.
The Judge looked around in confusion. “Chiave? There’s cheese in your room? Why is there cheese in your room? We didn’t get any cheese in our room!”
“No, Dad. That’s the name of Mr. Lindsay’s dog.” Amelia slid down off her bed and came over to join Sloane in comforting Chiave.
Outside, lightning flicked through the night sky, turning the trees of the woods into long, pale ghosts. Thunder snapped immediately afterward, harsh and too-close. Like it wanted to crack those trees apart. Everyone in the room jumped, Chiave included. The dog howled, scurried out from under the blankets, and buried her face in Amelia’s mass of hair.
“I think Chiave got out of Mr. Lindsay’s room somehow,” Sloane observed. “I guess she was frightened and sniffed her way over to me and Amelia.”
Lightening flared again, thunder snapping across the roof. Once more, everyone flinched. If it had sounded before like it wanted to break the trees, it sounded now like it wanted to tear right into the roof. Amelia’s hair was no longer enough for Chiave. The bloodhound frantically dug her way back under Sloane’s covers until only her tail could be seen. The mass of blankets quivered and whined.
“We’d better call Mr. Lindsay,” Amanda Miller said briskly. “We don’t want him out in the storm, looking for his dog. Listen to that wind! There will be tree limbs down tomorrow.”
As if hearing her words and wanting to show off, the wind blew harder than ever. It wailed and wrapped itself around the house, shaking at the windows as though begging to be let in. When no one let it, the wind rattled the siding and swept upward to tug at the roof like a spoiled child determined to break a toy.
Each burst of lightning showed branches waving wildly back and forth as though the trees were shaking their fists at the wind.
Shaking…
And shaking…
And…
Falling.
The trees around Tangle Glen had stood for over a hundred years. That made them very big. And very tired.
In the angry, flickering light of the storm, Sloane, Amelia, and her parents watched in horror as an enormous old oak tree collapsed toward the mansion.
“Everyone away from the window!” Amanda Miller cried, grabbing both Sloane and Chiave and yanking them backward to the far side of the room. The Judge likewise pulled Amelia along and away from the room’s enormous plate-glass windows.
The oak tree fell against the mansion with enough force to make the sturdy brick structure shake, knocking Sloane and Amelia’s phones to the floor. A branch broke through one of the window panes, sending glass tinkling onto the floorboards below. Having expected much worse than that, everyone in the room cringed and half covered their faces.
Fortunately, however, the tree mostly didn’t land against their room.
The attic broke its fall.
Plus, a big chunk of its massive trunk hit the room next door.
“Aiden and Ashley’s room!” the Judge gasped, and took off to check on his son and stepdaughter.
Amanda, Amelia, Sloane, and Chiave all followed, hot on his heels.
(Well, Sloane had to drag along a very reluctant Chiave. The rest of them were hot on his heels.)
“Aiden! Ashley!” the Judge and Amanda cried together. He pounded on the door with his fists while she tugged at the doorknob, desperate to get inside. Sloane and Amelia joined them in crying out Aiden and Ashley’s names…
…only to step back when the Judge snatched a lamp off a nearby hallway table and brandished it about. “Stand back, Amanda! I’m battering this door down!”
Expecting her mom to be the voice of reason, Amelia was shocked to hear her instead let go of the doorknob and cry, “That lamp won’t do it! Grab a chair!”
However, before the Miller-Poe family could run up an enormous bill at the inn by smashing its furniture, Aiden and Ashley came scuttling up the servant stairs.
They each held a vase of peonies in their hands.
Realizing everyone was standing outside their room, they both jerked to a guilty, horrified halt.
Exchanging a panicked look with Aiden, Ashley said, “We were—”
“We can explain—” Aiden said at the same moment.
Rather than letting them explain anything, the other Miller-Poes rushed forward to hug them.
Sloane hung back with Chiave, relieved that Amelia’s half-siblings were all right but not really eager to get in on the hugging. She narrowed her eyes at those two vases of flowers. Which Aiden and Ashley both slid onto the hallway table without explanation. Neither their parents nor Amelia thought to ask them why they were lugging around peonies in the middle of the night. They were just happy to discover that their children/siblings were in one piece.
Again, Sloane was happy about that too.
But she also really wanted to know why Aiden and Ashley had those vases full of peonies.
Not just any peonies, either.
Competition peonies.
Now wasn’t the time to ask, however. When Aiden and Ashley opened up their door, everyone let out a cry of horror. A large branch lay across one bed, glass shards sprinkling the pillows and covers. More branches had torn through the ceiling, snapping the chandelier off and dropping it onto the other bed. Chef Zahra Abu-Absi’s work bench had half slid through from the attic above, spilling dirt, leaves, and blossoms onto the floor.
Rain poured in through the shattered window, pooling against the dust and broken bricks. More joined it from the attic, leaking in from the hole where the roof had once been.
The wind swirled into the opening, sending the tattered remains of the curtains flying.
Sloane and the Miller-Poes took in the damage.
“If—we’d been here—we would have been crushed,” Aiden said in a much smaller, more hesitant voice than he normally spoke. Amelia reached out and took his hand reassuringly. He squeezed it tight, pulling her close.
By now, the other guests staying at Tangle Glen had begun to come out of their rooms. They all rubbed at their eyes and looked around blearily, trying to figure out what was going on. Shakespeare Wikander, Chef Zahra, Sergeant Pepper, and Mr. Boening-Bradley were all last to arrive.
With earthy, mushroomy Mr. Lindsay nowhere in sight.
It made sense that it would take the house manager, the chef, and the gardener a minute to get there. Their rooms were on the other side of the mansion, one floor up and next to the attic in the old servant quarters. Fortunately, that was at the opposite end of where the oak tree had bashed into the house, but it would still take them a bit to get to Aiden and Ashley’s room.
Mr. Boening-Bradley made less sense. As head of the judging committee, his room was just down the hallway from the Miller-Poes’ rooms.
Yet instead of coming out of his room, he came up the stairs from the entry hall below.
Sloane pointed this out to Amelia when she finally managed to pull her friend off to the side. Everyone was on their phones and talking excitedly, trying to decide if the mansion was safe to stay in for the rest of the night, if they could still have the awards ceremony the next day, or if the whole building was about to come tumbling down.
“Where is Lindsay?” Mr. Boening-Bradley kept crying, hopping around in agitation, his hands clamped nervously behind his back. He wore green silk pajamas and looked more than ever like an enormous praying mantis. “Blast that man! His house is falling down, my peony competition is falling apart, and he’s nowhere to be seen!”
Shakespeare tried to soothe him by saying that Mr. Lindsay actually lived in the old carriage house closer to the road, but that only upset Mr. Boening-Bradley more.
“Then what’s his dog doing here?” He waved a hand at Chiave in disgust. Probably because dogs also tended to eat bugs and were therefore Mr. Boening-Bradley’s natural enemies.
All the same, the president of the Ohio Peony Enthusiasts Club had a good question that no one had an answer to.
Sergeant Pepper assured the nervous guests and judges that she’d already contacted a building inspector and repair crew and that the mansion was well built and not likely to tumble down from one itty-bitty wallop from a tree. Chef Zahra encouraged everyone to come downstairs for a comforting cup of hot chocolate. Shakespeare promised that he and Sergeant Pepper would move some mattresses downstairs. Between those and the many couches on the main floor, there would be plenty of places for people to sleep for the rest of the night until the inspector and repair crews could make sure everything was safe.
Everyone thought this a terrific idea, especially after Chef Zahra promised to whip up some gourmet s’mores to go along with the hot cocoa. As they followed her downstairs, Amelia noticed that the hems of the chef’s pants were wet, and her shoes were squishing damp imprints down into the rug.
Like she’d been outside.
But why would she be outside in the middle of the night? Let alone during a storm?
She thought back to the others upstairs. It was hard to remember through her sudden panic that her annoying, exasperating, beloved siblings might be hurt, but Amelia was pretty sure that Sergeant Pepper’s hair had been wet, the rose she always seemed to have stuck in her ponytail sodden and wilted.
And… she’d been wearing heavy work boots with her pajamas.
Why would the gardener be wearing boots if she’d just gotten out of bed?
Having collected China cups filled with hot cocoa and delicate plates heaped with s’mores, Amelia grabbed Sloane by the elbow and led her out of the kitchen. Everyone else seemed to be relieved to be nestled in the kitchen’s cozy, golden light while the storm raged on outside. The rest of the mansion hulked large and cavernous like a bear curled up in its cave as they tiptoed through it to the portrait gallery.
“In here.” Amelia jerked her head toward the double glass doors, confident that no one would be sleeping in there tonight. They flipped on the lights, finding the long room now jam-packed with tables covered in white cloths. Pedestals sat on top of the cloths, a vase with a single peony bloom on each.
It smelled heavenly as the many portraits of Chiave’s great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandpa, Eli, looked down at all the floral competitors.
Sloane and Amelia wedged their way past one of the narrow tables to sit down on a velvet couch in front of the enormous portrait of Jacqueline Yaklin, the peony-sniffing Eli, and her roadster. As they drank their cocoa and ate their s’mores, Amelia told Sloane what she’d observed about Sergeant Pepper and Chef Zahra.
“And where is Mr. Lindsay?” Amelia concluded. “Why hasn’t anyone been able to get in touch with him? Everyone has been calling and texting him, but he’s not answering.”
“Maybe he’s a heavy sleeper,” Sloane suggested, crunching a bit of graham cracker thoughtfully. “But that doesn’t explain how Chiave got out. Or how she ended up at the house. Unless someone let her out. Maybe because they were looking for the money at the carriage house where Mr. Lindsay lives? It would make sense for Ma to hide her money there. Her roadster would have been there too, so she could have just grabbed her money and driven off.”
“And yet she didn’t. Which makes it seem to me that the money isn’t there.” Amelia frowned at the gooey marshmallow sticking to her fingers. “But whoever let Chiave out wouldn’t necessarily have known that. My bet is Sergeant Pepper or Chef Zahra, since they both were definitely out in the storm.”
“Y-e-e-e-s-s-s,” Sloane agreed hesitantly. Now it was her turn to frown up at Ma Yaklin and Eli, before finally saying, “But, Amelia, Chiave was dry when she hopped up in bed with me. If she was out in the storm, why was she dry?”
That surprised Amelia and caused her to choke on the sip of hot chocolate she’d just taken. Sputtering into the back of her hand, it took her a minute to speak. Hoarsely, she said, “That means Chiave was in the house for a while! Why wouldn’t Mr. Lindsay have her with him? Sloane, do you think someone dognapped Chiave?”
“You can’t kidnap someone if they’re still in their own home,” Sloane said.
“Which Chiave is,” Amelia agreed, as more thunder rolled across Tangle Glen and lightning lit up its grassy lawn.
“Yeah, but as far as we can tell, Mr. Lindsay isn’t. Amelia, I think someone might have kidnapped him.”
They both turned and looked out through the windows at the thrashing trees and threatening, storm-streaked sky.
If someone had kidnapped him, where could Mr. Lindsay be? Both Sloane and Amelia worried about the answer to that question.
Little did they know that it was themselves they should be worried about.
Because the person who had taken care of Mr. Lindsay now worried that Sloane and Amelia had gotten a little too close to solving the riddle of what happened to Ma Yaklin’s missing money.
In fact, that person was peering in at them right now, hidden in the darkness behind the vase of peonies in the entry hall.
Watching them—and plotting.
Planning how to take care of Sloane and Amelia for good.