The Odds of Getting Even, page 20
“Thanks,” he said. “I’ll look, but all my tools were in that garage. My car. I just don’t know if . . .” His voice fell away like ashes.
He turned to me. “Mo, I’m sorry,” he said.
“I’m okay,” I said, very quick. “I just never seen you like that before.”
“And you never will again,” he said. “Not if I can help it.”
He walked away like a soldier who’d just lost his war.
“He’ll be okay, Mo,” Grandmother Miss Lacy said as his truck roared into the darkness. “He needs time. And time . . . takes time.”
Grandmother Miss Lacy took her tea upstairs, hoping for one last wink of sleep. We settled around the kitchen table with cereal.
“Okay,” I said to Dale as he dug in. “You told Starr you had a plan. What is it?”
“I don’t have one,” he said, milk running down his chin. “I just said I did. I learned that from you. I see how it works now. Very nice.”
“Great,” Harm muttered. “Thirty-six hours and no plan.”
“Thirty-five hours,” I corrected. “Well, I can get us started,” I said, hopping up. I scurried to the darkroom and grabbed my enlargement of Flick’s car. “While you were sleeping, I figured out who took the patrol car from the courthouse.” I tossed the photo in the center of the table. “See this? A torn skull-and-crossbones air freshener.”
“Like the patrol car,” they said together.
“I think Flick tore them both when he opened the pack.”
Harm sighed. “Two-fers. Flick never was that bright. He’s not smart enough to have done it all, though. He needs a boss. Besides, Starr was keeping an eye on him—part of the time, anyway.”
“Then who?” Dale asked, his voice soft. “We got a thread from the church windowsill, a photo of an extra set of tire tracks heading away from my house the day it was robbed, a torn air freshener, and a bunch of stupid letters we can’t read.”
He eyed us like a general surveying his troops. I waited, fighting back an urge to tell him he’d buttoned his pajama top wrong.
“We need Sal,” he said. “The clock is ticking down.”
Chapter 26
And the Clock Ticks Down
At school that morning, we caught a double break: First, Sal was well enough to make it back to class, putting our decoding operation on Go. Second, Miss Retzyl sent us to the school library to scrounge up books for book reports.
I found Sal at a reading table.
“This is fascinating,” she said, closing her book. The Enigma Machine—How Math Shaped World War II. She gasped. “You look terrible, Mo. What happened?”
“The usual,” I said, very cool. “Dale and me saved Lavender from a burning building and got in a fight and I’ve had maybe two hours sleep,” I told her, opening my messenger bag. “I got something to show you.”
I slid my file of letters to her. “Coded messages—like the one we showed you earlier—from Capers’s trash. I tried the 2-6 code, where you start with the second word and read every sixth word, but . . .”
She flipped through the letters. “Each one probably has a different key. But the keys are all torn off the corner of the papers,” she said, her voice thoughtful. “Probably to keep trash thieves like you from decoding them.”
Sal picked up the last page—the page of numbers I found in the parking lot the day Capers came to town—tan numbers and letters over a letter written in blue ink. She held the page to the light as Harm and Dale slid into seats across from us. “Is this the only one like this?”
I slid the second file to her.
Jimmy drifted by. “Lemon juice,” he said, glancing at the paper. “You got to heat it to make it look old. You still won’t get extra credit, not even for the Pilgrims’ Thanksgiving menu.”
Lemon juice?
“Really?” Harm said. “What’s it like before you heat it?”
“Nothing,” Jimmy replied.
“Invisible?” Harm murmured. “Brilliant.” He laughed. “That’s why Capers wanted an iron. She didn’t want to iron her clothes. She wanted to iron out her messages.” He turned to Sal. “Can you decode these?”
The bell rang. “Maybe. I’ll review them during class,” she said.
“Excellent,” Dale told her. He slid one Lemon Juice Message to me. “My detail division will help you, Sal. But hurry.”
I glanced at the clock. “It’s ten a.m.,” I said. “Time’s flying by.”
I pretended to listen to Miss Retzyl and stared at my Lemon Juice Message, trying to find a pattern. Sal peered at hers and worked a calculator beneath her desk.
Nothing.
I refocused just in time to hear Attila say, “It’s just that I’m so sagacious.”
Dale, who had his head on his desk, opened his eyes. “She’s what, Mo?”
“Mo? Dale? Question?” Miss Retzyl asked.
“No, ma’am,” I said. “We were just thinking there’s maybe a less show-offy word that would work there. I’m guessing obnoxious, but I’m not sure.”
“Try the dictionary,” she said, nodding to the faded book on our shelf. Miss Retzyl is old-school. Blue dictionaries, white chalk, black-and-white composition books.
She likes technology, but she wants us smart if our batteries die.
Dale and I dragged ourselves over and I plopped the dictionary on the windowsill. Dale yawned and thumbed through the pages . . . “I’m too sleepy for this,” he muttered. “Emergency, mushy, saddle . . . Here,” he said. “Page 541.”
I ran my finger down the column of words. “Saddler, safe, saffron . . . Here it is, sagacious. Second column, fourth word. ‘Quick and shrewd . . . ’”
I gasped. “What did I just say?”
“Quick and shrewd,” he whispered. “I don’t think it sounds right either.”
“Not that, the other: Page 541. Second column. Fourth word . . . That’s it!” I shouted, snapping the dictionary closed. The class rustled behind me. “I mean, thank you, Miss Retzyl. May I take the dictionary to my seat for further reading pleasure?”
“You may not. Please sit down.”
I lowered my voice. “Dale, I think I just cracked the Lemon Juice Code. What’s the best way to get out of here?”
Dale practices school exit strategies like Houdini practiced rope tricks. He recited: “Forge a note, set off an alarm, fake a throw-up . . .”
I clamped my hand over his mouth. His nostrils flared. “Stand back!” I shouted.
“Mmfff,” Dale said, struggling against my hand.
“Dale’s sick! Sal, where’s his medicine? We need your help!” Sal grabbed her things and mine. The class leaned away from us, clearing a path to the door.
“They’re faking!” Attila cried, jumping to her feet.
I looked at Miss Retzyl. “Dale could go projectile any minute. Your call.”
Miss Retzyl froze, caught between the probability of a bald-faced lie and the possibility of projectile vomiting. “Go!” she commanded.
Harm jumped up. “I’ll help,” he said. “Everybody stay calm.”
We led Dale into the schoolyard.
“My place,” I said, wiping Dale’s breath off my hand. “I think I broke the Lemon Juice Code. Hurry.” Sal hopped on Dale’s handlebars. We took off like a fleet of bats, dumping our bikes in the café parking lot and sprinting for my flat.
I opened my dictionary—a dead ringer for Capers’s. “First blob of numbers, any message,” I said.
“420A25,” Sal read.
I ferreted out the word: “Page 420. A means first column. 25 means the twenty-fifth word. Doubt.”
We went through the message word by word. Finally I read it out: “Doubt clears your debt to me. The odds of getting even are in our favor. Shell.”
“Brilliant,” Harm murmured.
True. I tried to look modest.
“No, it was mostly dumb luck from trying to use a dictionary while sleepy,” Dale said. “Usually we don’t have to pay much attention to finding words.”
My glory moment keeled over dead.
“Who’s Shell?” he asked.
“Shell. Short for Shelly?” Harm guessed. “Michelle? But whoever Shell is, why would she write in code?”
Dale frowned. “Capers interviewed Slate and Deputy Marla. They’re in prison. Maybe Shell is too. Letters get guard-read going in and out. I know because of . . .”
“Family reunions,” Harm guessed, and Dale nodded.
Sal studied her fingernails. “Dale, if you’d like my help with the rest of these letters, I’d trade my fee for a consulting credit on this case. That would free you up to handle other clues. But if there’s any reward money . . .”
“An even split. A fourth is yours,” Dale said.
Now he learns fractions?
“Deal,” she said. “Don’t worry, Desperados. Sal’s on the case.”
“Where to?” Dale asked as we grabbed our bikes.
The café door swung open. “Message for you, sugar,” Miss Lana shouted, holding up a note. “From Thes. He has a clue. He wants a meeting at four thirty, at the church.” She winked at Dale. “Glad you’re feeling better, Dale,” she said.
I plucked the message from her fingertips. At least Thes has a clue, I thought. “Thanks,” I said, glancing through the window. “Is Capers in there?”
“She’ll be back tomorrow morning. Why?”
I pictured that last note sitting on her desk. “I still have the Colonel’s skeleton key. We’ll pick up her trash for you,” I said, and we zoomed away.
As we crossed Fool’s Bridge, my chain slipped and my pedals went into free spin.
“Not again,” I muttered, coasting over to the old store. I hopped off and bulldogged the bike to the ground.
“I got the back,” Harm said.
I fed the chain around the big sprocket, and rocked the pedal. The chain clunked on. “Come on, Dale,” I called, wiping grease on my jeans.
“No,” Dale replied.
He stood by the door, his fingers thick with webs. “Smell these. I thought they smelled bad when I got them in my hair the day we lost the patrol car. They’re fake.”
Fake cobwebs?
He pointed to a faint trail in the dirt. “Bicycle tire tracks.”
Harm knelt. “Perfect tread,” he muttered, studying the track.
My heart jumped. Only Attila possesses perfect tread. The rest of us ride on the slick memory of new tires. “Attila’s show bike,” I said. “From the break-in.”
We followed the tracks around the building to a small, lop-sided back door. A hammock of webs covered its lock. Dale sniffed. “Also fake,” he said.
Harm went up on his toes, ran his fingers along the top of the casing, and flashed a tiny key. “Score.”
The lock clicked and the door scraped open . . . Slowly my eyes adjusted to the dim light. “Nobody’s here,” I said. We stepped inside. In the corner sat a pile of pale shadows. “What’s that?”
The door slammed and the room went dark.
The lock clicked shut behind us.
“Not good,” Dale whispered.
“Hey!” I shouted, wheeling to the door. “Let us out right this minute!”
Footsteps pounded around the side of the building. Please, I thought, don’t let me smell smoke. “We got to get out.”
I stumbled to a crooked door outlined in light and rattled the knob.
“We need a plan, now,” Dale said, his voice tinged in panic.
“I got one. Move,” Harm gasped. He lowered his shoulder and charged the door. “Jeez,” he said, ricocheting into Dale and then into me. “That hurt more than it looks like on television.”
He backed up and charged again. The door splintered and he tumbled out, Dale and me on his heels. Tires screamed against the blacktop.
“Fast car,” Dale murmured, listening.
I knew we were all thinking the same thing: Flick.
Dale plucked something from the grass at his feet. “Attila’s turkey earring,” he said. “It’s ugly, but they wouldn’t throw it on the ground, not on purpose. Somebody’s moving the loot. Another rookie move.”
“They know Lavender’s coming to look at the building,” I said.
He hopped on his bike. “We need to talk to Lavender. Now.”
Lavender straddled a kitchen chair as we settled on his worn sofa and chair. I glanced at his NASCAR clock. 1:15 p.m. Our time was melting away.
“I’m glad Starr’s got a man watching you,” I said, nodding at the car outside.
“Me too,” he admitted. “And to answer your question—sure. I told people I was thinking about the old store for a garage.”
Lavender’s fall-apart gorgeous, even in a torn T-shirt and tired jeans. “I told Sam and the Colonel and a twin or two,” he said, hopping up and padding to the kitchen. “Let me get you guys something to eat. It’s way past noon.”
I strolled to the window and peeped across the street, at the twins’ House of Hair. Four cars and a golf cart sat outside. “If you told the twins, you told the town,” I said.
“The old store will be a good garage,” Dale said as Lavender handed Pepsis and Nabs around.
Lavender sank onto his chair. “I wanted to talk to you about that, little brother. I was going to tell you later, but . . . I’ve been thinking. That blessed fire took most of my tools. I might try to find work in a garage that has its own tools. Someplace close—Greenville or Kinston, maybe. But not here. Not in Tupelo Landing.”
My world wobbled.
Dale shook his head. “No,” he said. “That would be what? Twenty miles? You’d have to drive back and forth . . .”
“Maybe not,” Lavender said, opening his Nabs. He watched Dale’s face. “Maybe it would make sense for me to live somewhere else. For a while.”
Tupelo Landing without Lavender? The sky without blue would make better sense.
“You can’t live somewhere else because this is where we live,” Dale explained.
Lavender leaned toward him. “Dale, no matter what I do in this town, I’ll never be more than Macon’s son. I want to be more than that.”
Dale’s soft frown crinkled his brow. “You’re already more than that,” he said. “You’re my brother. You’re Mama’s son.”
And you’re my date in just seven more years, I thought.
The room went so quiet, I could hear Dale breathe.
Dale tossed his Nabs on the sofa. “I see. Desperados, mount up,” he said, his voice hard. He walked out, grabbed his bike, and flew across the yard.
“I better catch him,” Harm said, and dashed out the door.
The NASCAR clock on the wall ticked the time away. Lavender raked his fingers through his hair. “Mo, every tool I own burned in that fire. My ride out of here went up in smoke. If I don’t get out now, I’ll wind up as bitter and twisted as Macon one day. You understand that, don’t you?”
I crossed the room, right and kind fighting inside me like bobcats.
I turned at the door. “I ain’t making the same mistake with you that I made with Dale,” I said. I took a deep breath. “I think you’re feeling sorry for yourself, and you want to run away. I got news for you. You’re going to be Macon Johnson’s son no matter how far you go. The Azalea Women don’t decide who we are and what we think and do. We do.”
He jumped like I’d pinched him. “Feeling sorry for myself?”
“There’s other tools in this town and other cars and Grandmother Miss Lacy will back you in a garage. She already said so.” I put my hands on my hips and took the biggest risk of my life so far. “If you leave Dale now, I got just one thing to say to you.”
I gazed into eyes so blue I could float away in them.
“I won’t go out with you in just seven more years,” I said, my voice wobbling. “Go get yourself a big-haired twin, Lavender Shade Johnson. Because our wedding’s off.”
I slammed the door and pedaled away in a blur of tears.
“Are you all right?” Harm asked as I skidded up beside him. Dale had gone pale as a ghost boy on a faded Schwinn.
I nodded—a total lie.
“Whoever locked us in the old store went toward the inn,” I said, trying to focus on the case. “Capers is still our best lead. I say we go there,” I said, and pushed off on my bike.
“No,” Dale said, clamping my handlebar tight. “To capture a Capers, think like a Capers. In her mind, where’s the safest hiding place? A place that’s already been searched. Where did she make us search?”
“The old fish camp,” Harm and I said at the same time.
“She’s loop-brained,” Dale said, nodding. “We were straight-line thinking the day we lost the patrol car and she was already looping back to make a Plan B. She’s smart, but she’s never run over the Desperados before.”
Somehow it seemed like bad luck to let that one go.
“You mean run up against the Desperados,” I said. “And you’re right. Let’s ride.”
Twenty minutes later, we rumbled through the forest, past the old marl pit, to the fish camp at the edge of the river. We held our breath as the shack door swung open.
“Ba-ba-bing,” Dale said as we stared at the loot from the break-ins. “They moved everything from the store to here. Sad for them, good for us.”
We checked the stash: the collection plate, Attila’s bike, a sack of jewelry, Mr. Macon’s shoes. “If they didn’t need these shoes to fake footprints, they’d have thrown them out,” Dale said.
I wrapped the collection plate in my jacket as the coyotes howled in the distance. “Starr can pick up the rest.”
“Right,” Dale said. “We’re meeting Thes a quarter past a while ago at the church,” he added. “We better hurry.”
I was out of breath as I read the clock in the church office. “We got just twenty-four hours left,” I said as I dialed the phone. I left a message on Miss Retzyl’s answering machine: “The loot’s at the old fish camp shack. Please ask Starr to pick it up—pronto.”
He turned to me. “Mo, I’m sorry,” he said.
“I’m okay,” I said, very quick. “I just never seen you like that before.”
“And you never will again,” he said. “Not if I can help it.”
He walked away like a soldier who’d just lost his war.
“He’ll be okay, Mo,” Grandmother Miss Lacy said as his truck roared into the darkness. “He needs time. And time . . . takes time.”
Grandmother Miss Lacy took her tea upstairs, hoping for one last wink of sleep. We settled around the kitchen table with cereal.
“Okay,” I said to Dale as he dug in. “You told Starr you had a plan. What is it?”
“I don’t have one,” he said, milk running down his chin. “I just said I did. I learned that from you. I see how it works now. Very nice.”
“Great,” Harm muttered. “Thirty-six hours and no plan.”
“Thirty-five hours,” I corrected. “Well, I can get us started,” I said, hopping up. I scurried to the darkroom and grabbed my enlargement of Flick’s car. “While you were sleeping, I figured out who took the patrol car from the courthouse.” I tossed the photo in the center of the table. “See this? A torn skull-and-crossbones air freshener.”
“Like the patrol car,” they said together.
“I think Flick tore them both when he opened the pack.”
Harm sighed. “Two-fers. Flick never was that bright. He’s not smart enough to have done it all, though. He needs a boss. Besides, Starr was keeping an eye on him—part of the time, anyway.”
“Then who?” Dale asked, his voice soft. “We got a thread from the church windowsill, a photo of an extra set of tire tracks heading away from my house the day it was robbed, a torn air freshener, and a bunch of stupid letters we can’t read.”
He eyed us like a general surveying his troops. I waited, fighting back an urge to tell him he’d buttoned his pajama top wrong.
“We need Sal,” he said. “The clock is ticking down.”
Chapter 26
And the Clock Ticks Down
At school that morning, we caught a double break: First, Sal was well enough to make it back to class, putting our decoding operation on Go. Second, Miss Retzyl sent us to the school library to scrounge up books for book reports.
I found Sal at a reading table.
“This is fascinating,” she said, closing her book. The Enigma Machine—How Math Shaped World War II. She gasped. “You look terrible, Mo. What happened?”
“The usual,” I said, very cool. “Dale and me saved Lavender from a burning building and got in a fight and I’ve had maybe two hours sleep,” I told her, opening my messenger bag. “I got something to show you.”
I slid my file of letters to her. “Coded messages—like the one we showed you earlier—from Capers’s trash. I tried the 2-6 code, where you start with the second word and read every sixth word, but . . .”
She flipped through the letters. “Each one probably has a different key. But the keys are all torn off the corner of the papers,” she said, her voice thoughtful. “Probably to keep trash thieves like you from decoding them.”
Sal picked up the last page—the page of numbers I found in the parking lot the day Capers came to town—tan numbers and letters over a letter written in blue ink. She held the page to the light as Harm and Dale slid into seats across from us. “Is this the only one like this?”
I slid the second file to her.
Jimmy drifted by. “Lemon juice,” he said, glancing at the paper. “You got to heat it to make it look old. You still won’t get extra credit, not even for the Pilgrims’ Thanksgiving menu.”
Lemon juice?
“Really?” Harm said. “What’s it like before you heat it?”
“Nothing,” Jimmy replied.
“Invisible?” Harm murmured. “Brilliant.” He laughed. “That’s why Capers wanted an iron. She didn’t want to iron her clothes. She wanted to iron out her messages.” He turned to Sal. “Can you decode these?”
The bell rang. “Maybe. I’ll review them during class,” she said.
“Excellent,” Dale told her. He slid one Lemon Juice Message to me. “My detail division will help you, Sal. But hurry.”
I glanced at the clock. “It’s ten a.m.,” I said. “Time’s flying by.”
I pretended to listen to Miss Retzyl and stared at my Lemon Juice Message, trying to find a pattern. Sal peered at hers and worked a calculator beneath her desk.
Nothing.
I refocused just in time to hear Attila say, “It’s just that I’m so sagacious.”
Dale, who had his head on his desk, opened his eyes. “She’s what, Mo?”
“Mo? Dale? Question?” Miss Retzyl asked.
“No, ma’am,” I said. “We were just thinking there’s maybe a less show-offy word that would work there. I’m guessing obnoxious, but I’m not sure.”
“Try the dictionary,” she said, nodding to the faded book on our shelf. Miss Retzyl is old-school. Blue dictionaries, white chalk, black-and-white composition books.
She likes technology, but she wants us smart if our batteries die.
Dale and I dragged ourselves over and I plopped the dictionary on the windowsill. Dale yawned and thumbed through the pages . . . “I’m too sleepy for this,” he muttered. “Emergency, mushy, saddle . . . Here,” he said. “Page 541.”
I ran my finger down the column of words. “Saddler, safe, saffron . . . Here it is, sagacious. Second column, fourth word. ‘Quick and shrewd . . . ’”
I gasped. “What did I just say?”
“Quick and shrewd,” he whispered. “I don’t think it sounds right either.”
“Not that, the other: Page 541. Second column. Fourth word . . . That’s it!” I shouted, snapping the dictionary closed. The class rustled behind me. “I mean, thank you, Miss Retzyl. May I take the dictionary to my seat for further reading pleasure?”
“You may not. Please sit down.”
I lowered my voice. “Dale, I think I just cracked the Lemon Juice Code. What’s the best way to get out of here?”
Dale practices school exit strategies like Houdini practiced rope tricks. He recited: “Forge a note, set off an alarm, fake a throw-up . . .”
I clamped my hand over his mouth. His nostrils flared. “Stand back!” I shouted.
“Mmfff,” Dale said, struggling against my hand.
“Dale’s sick! Sal, where’s his medicine? We need your help!” Sal grabbed her things and mine. The class leaned away from us, clearing a path to the door.
“They’re faking!” Attila cried, jumping to her feet.
I looked at Miss Retzyl. “Dale could go projectile any minute. Your call.”
Miss Retzyl froze, caught between the probability of a bald-faced lie and the possibility of projectile vomiting. “Go!” she commanded.
Harm jumped up. “I’ll help,” he said. “Everybody stay calm.”
We led Dale into the schoolyard.
“My place,” I said, wiping Dale’s breath off my hand. “I think I broke the Lemon Juice Code. Hurry.” Sal hopped on Dale’s handlebars. We took off like a fleet of bats, dumping our bikes in the café parking lot and sprinting for my flat.
I opened my dictionary—a dead ringer for Capers’s. “First blob of numbers, any message,” I said.
“420A25,” Sal read.
I ferreted out the word: “Page 420. A means first column. 25 means the twenty-fifth word. Doubt.”
We went through the message word by word. Finally I read it out: “Doubt clears your debt to me. The odds of getting even are in our favor. Shell.”
“Brilliant,” Harm murmured.
True. I tried to look modest.
“No, it was mostly dumb luck from trying to use a dictionary while sleepy,” Dale said. “Usually we don’t have to pay much attention to finding words.”
My glory moment keeled over dead.
“Who’s Shell?” he asked.
“Shell. Short for Shelly?” Harm guessed. “Michelle? But whoever Shell is, why would she write in code?”
Dale frowned. “Capers interviewed Slate and Deputy Marla. They’re in prison. Maybe Shell is too. Letters get guard-read going in and out. I know because of . . .”
“Family reunions,” Harm guessed, and Dale nodded.
Sal studied her fingernails. “Dale, if you’d like my help with the rest of these letters, I’d trade my fee for a consulting credit on this case. That would free you up to handle other clues. But if there’s any reward money . . .”
“An even split. A fourth is yours,” Dale said.
Now he learns fractions?
“Deal,” she said. “Don’t worry, Desperados. Sal’s on the case.”
“Where to?” Dale asked as we grabbed our bikes.
The café door swung open. “Message for you, sugar,” Miss Lana shouted, holding up a note. “From Thes. He has a clue. He wants a meeting at four thirty, at the church.” She winked at Dale. “Glad you’re feeling better, Dale,” she said.
I plucked the message from her fingertips. At least Thes has a clue, I thought. “Thanks,” I said, glancing through the window. “Is Capers in there?”
“She’ll be back tomorrow morning. Why?”
I pictured that last note sitting on her desk. “I still have the Colonel’s skeleton key. We’ll pick up her trash for you,” I said, and we zoomed away.
As we crossed Fool’s Bridge, my chain slipped and my pedals went into free spin.
“Not again,” I muttered, coasting over to the old store. I hopped off and bulldogged the bike to the ground.
“I got the back,” Harm said.
I fed the chain around the big sprocket, and rocked the pedal. The chain clunked on. “Come on, Dale,” I called, wiping grease on my jeans.
“No,” Dale replied.
He stood by the door, his fingers thick with webs. “Smell these. I thought they smelled bad when I got them in my hair the day we lost the patrol car. They’re fake.”
Fake cobwebs?
He pointed to a faint trail in the dirt. “Bicycle tire tracks.”
Harm knelt. “Perfect tread,” he muttered, studying the track.
My heart jumped. Only Attila possesses perfect tread. The rest of us ride on the slick memory of new tires. “Attila’s show bike,” I said. “From the break-in.”
We followed the tracks around the building to a small, lop-sided back door. A hammock of webs covered its lock. Dale sniffed. “Also fake,” he said.
Harm went up on his toes, ran his fingers along the top of the casing, and flashed a tiny key. “Score.”
The lock clicked and the door scraped open . . . Slowly my eyes adjusted to the dim light. “Nobody’s here,” I said. We stepped inside. In the corner sat a pile of pale shadows. “What’s that?”
The door slammed and the room went dark.
The lock clicked shut behind us.
“Not good,” Dale whispered.
“Hey!” I shouted, wheeling to the door. “Let us out right this minute!”
Footsteps pounded around the side of the building. Please, I thought, don’t let me smell smoke. “We got to get out.”
I stumbled to a crooked door outlined in light and rattled the knob.
“We need a plan, now,” Dale said, his voice tinged in panic.
“I got one. Move,” Harm gasped. He lowered his shoulder and charged the door. “Jeez,” he said, ricocheting into Dale and then into me. “That hurt more than it looks like on television.”
He backed up and charged again. The door splintered and he tumbled out, Dale and me on his heels. Tires screamed against the blacktop.
“Fast car,” Dale murmured, listening.
I knew we were all thinking the same thing: Flick.
Dale plucked something from the grass at his feet. “Attila’s turkey earring,” he said. “It’s ugly, but they wouldn’t throw it on the ground, not on purpose. Somebody’s moving the loot. Another rookie move.”
“They know Lavender’s coming to look at the building,” I said.
He hopped on his bike. “We need to talk to Lavender. Now.”
Lavender straddled a kitchen chair as we settled on his worn sofa and chair. I glanced at his NASCAR clock. 1:15 p.m. Our time was melting away.
“I’m glad Starr’s got a man watching you,” I said, nodding at the car outside.
“Me too,” he admitted. “And to answer your question—sure. I told people I was thinking about the old store for a garage.”
Lavender’s fall-apart gorgeous, even in a torn T-shirt and tired jeans. “I told Sam and the Colonel and a twin or two,” he said, hopping up and padding to the kitchen. “Let me get you guys something to eat. It’s way past noon.”
I strolled to the window and peeped across the street, at the twins’ House of Hair. Four cars and a golf cart sat outside. “If you told the twins, you told the town,” I said.
“The old store will be a good garage,” Dale said as Lavender handed Pepsis and Nabs around.
Lavender sank onto his chair. “I wanted to talk to you about that, little brother. I was going to tell you later, but . . . I’ve been thinking. That blessed fire took most of my tools. I might try to find work in a garage that has its own tools. Someplace close—Greenville or Kinston, maybe. But not here. Not in Tupelo Landing.”
My world wobbled.
Dale shook his head. “No,” he said. “That would be what? Twenty miles? You’d have to drive back and forth . . .”
“Maybe not,” Lavender said, opening his Nabs. He watched Dale’s face. “Maybe it would make sense for me to live somewhere else. For a while.”
Tupelo Landing without Lavender? The sky without blue would make better sense.
“You can’t live somewhere else because this is where we live,” Dale explained.
Lavender leaned toward him. “Dale, no matter what I do in this town, I’ll never be more than Macon’s son. I want to be more than that.”
Dale’s soft frown crinkled his brow. “You’re already more than that,” he said. “You’re my brother. You’re Mama’s son.”
And you’re my date in just seven more years, I thought.
The room went so quiet, I could hear Dale breathe.
Dale tossed his Nabs on the sofa. “I see. Desperados, mount up,” he said, his voice hard. He walked out, grabbed his bike, and flew across the yard.
“I better catch him,” Harm said, and dashed out the door.
The NASCAR clock on the wall ticked the time away. Lavender raked his fingers through his hair. “Mo, every tool I own burned in that fire. My ride out of here went up in smoke. If I don’t get out now, I’ll wind up as bitter and twisted as Macon one day. You understand that, don’t you?”
I crossed the room, right and kind fighting inside me like bobcats.
I turned at the door. “I ain’t making the same mistake with you that I made with Dale,” I said. I took a deep breath. “I think you’re feeling sorry for yourself, and you want to run away. I got news for you. You’re going to be Macon Johnson’s son no matter how far you go. The Azalea Women don’t decide who we are and what we think and do. We do.”
He jumped like I’d pinched him. “Feeling sorry for myself?”
“There’s other tools in this town and other cars and Grandmother Miss Lacy will back you in a garage. She already said so.” I put my hands on my hips and took the biggest risk of my life so far. “If you leave Dale now, I got just one thing to say to you.”
I gazed into eyes so blue I could float away in them.
“I won’t go out with you in just seven more years,” I said, my voice wobbling. “Go get yourself a big-haired twin, Lavender Shade Johnson. Because our wedding’s off.”
I slammed the door and pedaled away in a blur of tears.
“Are you all right?” Harm asked as I skidded up beside him. Dale had gone pale as a ghost boy on a faded Schwinn.
I nodded—a total lie.
“Whoever locked us in the old store went toward the inn,” I said, trying to focus on the case. “Capers is still our best lead. I say we go there,” I said, and pushed off on my bike.
“No,” Dale said, clamping my handlebar tight. “To capture a Capers, think like a Capers. In her mind, where’s the safest hiding place? A place that’s already been searched. Where did she make us search?”
“The old fish camp,” Harm and I said at the same time.
“She’s loop-brained,” Dale said, nodding. “We were straight-line thinking the day we lost the patrol car and she was already looping back to make a Plan B. She’s smart, but she’s never run over the Desperados before.”
Somehow it seemed like bad luck to let that one go.
“You mean run up against the Desperados,” I said. “And you’re right. Let’s ride.”
Twenty minutes later, we rumbled through the forest, past the old marl pit, to the fish camp at the edge of the river. We held our breath as the shack door swung open.
“Ba-ba-bing,” Dale said as we stared at the loot from the break-ins. “They moved everything from the store to here. Sad for them, good for us.”
We checked the stash: the collection plate, Attila’s bike, a sack of jewelry, Mr. Macon’s shoes. “If they didn’t need these shoes to fake footprints, they’d have thrown them out,” Dale said.
I wrapped the collection plate in my jacket as the coyotes howled in the distance. “Starr can pick up the rest.”
“Right,” Dale said. “We’re meeting Thes a quarter past a while ago at the church,” he added. “We better hurry.”
I was out of breath as I read the clock in the church office. “We got just twenty-four hours left,” I said as I dialed the phone. I left a message on Miss Retzyl’s answering machine: “The loot’s at the old fish camp shack. Please ask Starr to pick it up—pronto.”
