And then…I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t steal the Margaret rose. I kept thinking of Hugo bringing his wife all the way from Victoria. I thought of all these other oldsters, so happy to be here.
It was like there was a force field around the rose, stopping me from reaching any farther. I pulled back.
Behind me, an old woman whispered, “I’ve had the same impulse myself. It would be fun to break off a petal, wouldn’t it? But imagine the trouble we’d be in!” She giggled.
I shook my head. I didn’t have to imagine trouble. I already had it. I had nothing to give Trenchcoat. I’d blown it.
I wiped sweat off my forehead with the back of my arm.
“You all right, dear?” asked the old lady.
I turned to say, “I’m fine, ma’am”—and saw, over the old lady’s snowy white hair, the stocky woman from the roller coaster.
The stocky woman smiled, showing those pointy teeth I’d noticed before. “Hi, Joe,” she said. “Remember me?”
“You’re the nurse,” I said, staring at her. I couldn’t believe it. “This is some coincidence, both of us being here.”
She smiled wider. “My name’s Babs Beesley, Joe. We should talk about last night.”
“Sure,” I said. “I’d like to know what you saw. Did you talk to the police?”
Babs Beesley glanced down at the old woman, whose eyes had lit with interest at the word police. “We’ll talk in the gift shop, Joe. Not here.”
In the gift shop, people crowded around display cases and shelves. Nobody was leaving the shop, so it was getting more and more crammed. “They need a traffic monitor,” someone grumbled. I heard Hugo politely ask someone not to step on his foot.
I squeezed into an alcove called the Children’s Corner, with shelves holding coloring books, crayons, beads and tubes of glitter.
Babs Beesley struggled through the crowd behind me. She held her big purse up like a battering ram, forcing people aside. As she got close to me, her pointy-toothed smile spread wide.
I didn’t like that smile. It wasn’t friendly. It was hungry.
Alligator hungry.
And Ellie’s jumping rhyme came back to me.
Call for the doctor, call for the nurse,
Call for the lady with the alligator purse.
Well, this wasn’t an alligator purse. More like cheap fake-leather plastic. Still, I studied the purse as Babs Beesley heaved it through the crowd toward me.
I’d thought before that the purse was big enough to hold a gun, that the stocky woman might have shot Jake. But the woman had claimed to be a nurse. She had tried to help Jake.
Tried to help him…or tried to force dying-breath information out of him?
“Almost there, Joe,” Babs wheezed from behind her purse.
I remembered someone else who wheezed and puffed at physical exertion. Trenchcoat, in the school basement.
Trenchcoat wasn’t a guy. Trenchcoat was…Babs Beesley.
“Okay, Joe,” Babs panted. “Time for a little chat.” She cracked her purse open and plunged her hand in.
The idea I’d put aside jumped back into my brain in grisly Technicolor. Babs Beesley was Jake’s murderer. She’d shot Jake with a gun she’d pulled out of her purse.
The gun she was pulling out now…
I grabbed a mega-size tube of gold glitter off the shelf. Peeling off the cap, I squirted it into her tiny black eyes and all over her big, pasty face. She brayed like a mule.
The purse fell, exposing the black gun she clenched. We’d already attracted attention with the glitter. Some had missed Babs and sprayed other people. Now, at the sight of the gun, screams filled the shop.
“Grab the gun,” shouted Hugo. He sprang at Babs and started wrestling it away from her.
Babs may have been out of shape, but she was strong. In spite of the glitter I was dousing her with, she kept gripping the gun. Hugo slowly bent her arm backward. Though braying with pain, she didn’t release her hold.
Hugo’s wife and another woman pushed their way into the Children’s Corner. Uncapping more tubes of glitter, they joined me in slathering Babs Beesley. A huge gold pool of it plopped into her open mouth. Choking for air, she finally let the gun go.
Hugo and I forced her to the floor. Hugo sat on her. He beamed at me. “And I thought VanDusen would be boring!”
People crowded around. Two security guards pushed through, ordering everyone to stay calm. They’d called the police, they said.
The police! I couldn’t let the police get hold of me.
One of the guards put a hand on my shoulder. “Good work, son, helping to disarm this woman. There could have been a tragedy.”
I just nodded. I couldn’t say what I was thinking—that there still could be a tragedy. Sure, the stocky woman was out of the picture—but where did that leave Ellie? Where was she?
I tried to edge my shoulder free of the guard’s hand without seeming too abrupt.
“The cops will want a statement from you,” the guard said. He was smiling, but he still held on to my shoulder.
The ear-splitting crackle of a loudspeaker made everyone jump. A crisp voice announced, “Phone call at the entrance for Joe Lumby. Repeat, for Joe Lumby.”
“Joe Lumby?” repeated the guard, releasing my shoulder. “Where I have heard that name before?” He crinkled his brow. “Hey, you’re Mojo Lumby.”
Everyone’s gaze swiveled to me as I walked to the entrance.
The cashier handed the phone to me under her window.
“Hello?” I said.
I glanced back into the gardens. The two security guards were striding toward me—along with two police officers. The cops must have used a service entrance.
The guards didn’t look so friendly now. They had grim “gotcha” expressions.
A voice hissed into my ear. “Very funny with the shenanigans at VanDusen, Joe.”
Ellie’s kidnapper! Not Trenchcoat, a.k.a. Babs Beesley, after all. Someone else.
Someone who was here, watching.
“Yeah, funny, ha ha,” I gabbled, buying time. “Mojo, the one-man entertainment show, that’s me.”
I craned around, surveying the gardens, the entrance, Granville Street. Where was he?
“Cut the cackle, Joe. You want your sister back, or what?”
“Yeah, I do. I’ll have the rose for you, I promise. Uh…” My gaze panned the street again, past a man talking on a cell phone—
And swung back to the man. He wore a Vancouver Canadians baseball cap.
It was the lean man from the roller coaster. He’d run away with Babs. He was her accomplice—and Ellie’s kidnapper.
He was talking to me on the phone right now.
I turned away, in case Baseball Cap looked at me. He looked leaner and meaner than I remembered. I didn’t want him to know I’d spotted him. Now I had an advantage. I knew what Ellie’s kidnapper looked like, but he didn’t know I knew.
I blathered, making my voice uncertain, as if I had trouble remembering, “Behind the roller coaster at closing time, right?”
He gave a scornful chuckle. “Bravo, Joe. By the light of the…shivery moon, shall we say?” The voice grew grim. “And remember: no rose, no kid sister.”
Click.