A Hard Day's Fright Read online

  Maybe that’s what Lucy believed. Personally, I think Patrick Monroe was thinking of a whole different pulse and vibration when he wrote those words.

  But I was getting philosophical. And toeing the edge of more than mildly disturbing when I thought of what Patrick Monroe must have been thinking of when he penned that poem.

  “So what does you having trouble keeping a boyfriend have to do with Darren?” I asked her. “Unless you spoke your mind about something and he dumped you for it?” I knew that couldn’t be possible since Lucy was the one who broke up with him. Besides, that was too much like what had happened to me and Quinn. I shivered at the thought.

  Lucy’s cheeks flushed. “Just the opposite,” she admitted. “I found out he was selling test answers and I…” She glanced away. She folded her fingers together and clutched them in her lap. “We were just friends back when I first found out. We hung around in a group. Me and Darren and Bobby and Janice and Will. We’d go for Cokes after school, hang out at dances. You know, that kind of thing. But I’d had a secret crush on Darren since back in middle school. He liked me. As a friend. But I really wasn’t Darren’s type. He liked…” She gave me a sidelong look. “You know…” I had to lean closer to hear her when she whispered, “The bad girls. The loose girls. You know, like Janice.”

  This was news, though I can’t say I was surprised. There was something about the bleached hair and the beehive that practically screamed, Come and get it!

  Lucy was probably thinking the same thing. She lifted one shoulder to brush off the thought and got back on track. “I told Darren…well, you’re going to think less of me.”

  She waited for me to deny this, and when all I did was wait for her to explain why she was suddenly chewing on her lower lip, she blurted it out. “I told Darren I was going to report him to the principal if he didn’t go out with me.”

  “You blackmailed him into dating you?” All right, I’d never been that desperate. I’d never even been desperate enough to think of being that desperate. This did not seem the time to mention it, so I bit back a lecture that was all about self-respect and just said, “So why break up with him?”

  “Because when I told him I was going to report him, Darren swore he was going to change his ways. He said I’d shown him the light, that what he was doing was stupid and that he was grateful to me for giving him another chance. He said he’d never do it again. We dated all that spring before I died, and we dated into the summer. And all that time, I thought he was being true to his word. And then…well, there was the whole Janice thing. You know…” She stared down at her lap. “I think he was dating her, too. Behind my back.”

  “And you put up with that?” It came out too judgmental, but then, I had trouble not speaking my mind, too. Lucky for me—and my investigation—Lucy didn’t hold it against me.

  “Then I found out that Darren had been lying to me. I caught him selling test answers to one of the football players who was in summer school. That’s when I had it out with him. I told him I didn’t want to see him anymore.”

  I remembered what Ella had said about seeing Janice and Darren together at the Beatles concert, and about how Janice had looked pushy and insistent. “And Janice cornered Darren at the Beatles concert because once you were out of the way, she wanted him all to herself.”

  Lucy shrugged. “I can’t say. I only know that once I found out he lied to me, I didn’t care if I ever had another date ever again in my whole life.” She gulped. “I guess that’s pretty much what happened, isn’t it? I told Darren I’d had it with him. That I never wanted to see him again.”

  “And if he thought that meeting you had scheduled with the principal was about him…” For the first time since I’d gotten involved in this quagmire of an investigation, I felt my hopes rise. “He might have wanted to shut you up.”

  “Yeah, sure he might have. But he didn’t. He couldn’t have. He was with Bobby and Janice and Will. They were all going to his house to listen to albums. If Darren left and was gone long enough to kill me, somebody would have noticed, don’t you think?”

  Yeah, there was that.

  How I hate it when ghosts are right!

  I was sitting at Ella’s kitchen table, sorting through the stacks of old Garden View employee newsletters she’d brought home from the office to shred (and yes, recycle). Bad enough that I was bored out of my mind. Worse, because something was up. And I hated not knowing what it was.

  I glanced over to where Ella was busy removing staples and tapping old newsletters into too-neat piles. Her head was down, her eyes were focused on her work, the saggy skin under her chin shimmied as she went through the motions: Grab a newsletter. Pull the staple. Set the pages aside.

  I looked the other way at Ariel, who was sitting on the other side of me, doing the same thing. Her head was down, too. Her eyes were focused on her work. The muscles in her jaw were pulled so tight, I swear before the night was over, I was going to hear the ping when they snapped.

  The two of them hadn’t spoken two words to each other since I’d gotten to Ella’s thirty minutes earlier. They’d barely spoken to me.

  Maybe I was curious. Or just plain uncomfortable. Either way, I couldn’t stand it anymore.

  “So…” I looked from one of them to the other. “What’s up?”

  “Nothing.” They answered in unison and glared across the table at each other, then silently fell back into the grabbing, pulling, setting aside routine.

  This reminded me of the Ella-Ariel relationship of old. And that was not a good thing.

  I found myself in the uncomfortable position of peacemaker. It might have been a whole lot easier if I knew what was going on.

  Determined to get them talking so I could find out, I settled for the most obvious subject. It was Friday night, the school week was over. “Any plans for this weekend?” I asked Ariel.

  Innocent question, yes?

  Which says something about how surprised I was when she punched the nearest pile of newsletters, hopped to her feet, and stomped to the kitchen sink. She poured a glass of water, drank one sip of it, then tossed the rest away with so much oomph most of the water ended up not down the drain, but on the floor. She didn’t bother to clean it up. Instead, she stomped back the other way.

  “Some people have things planned for this weekend,” she said, completely ignoring me and focusing on her mother. “But then, some people don’t live in a dictatorship.”

  “Now, honey.” This comment came from Ella, of course. She clasped her hands together on a stack of newsletters and tried for a smile, but since it wobbled around the edges, I knew this wasn’t the first time they’d had this discussion. “Some people,” she said, so much more sweetly than Ariel had, “have to learn to live by the rules.”

  Ariel dropped back in her chair. She shoved the nearest pile of newsletters aside. “This recycling stuff is stupid,” she grumbled.

  “I’ll second that.” I was going for funny, but neither of them laughed. It was exactly the opening I needed.

  “You two…” I looked from one of them to the other, suddenly sounding so much like Ella when she’s trying to be sensible, it made me a little queasy. “You two are obviously not getting along. And I need to know why.”

  “She doesn’t trust me,” Ariel blurted out.

  “She’ll thank me for it later when she calms down and realizes it’s for her own good.” Ella’s words washed over her daughter’s.

  And I was left just as confused as ever. I tried a no-nonsense look again, and when that got me nowhere, I knew it was time to change the subject. A little end run, and with any luck, I’d get them back to where we started before they ever realized it—and I’d get some answers, too. As I’d seen in the past weeks, nothing could get these two going like talking about my investigation.

  “I’ve spent a lot of time working through the whole Lucy thing,” I said as if it were the only thing on my mind. “I’m pretty sure Darren did it.”

  Ariel grunt
ed and rolled her eyes.

  Ella shook her head. “Absolutely not!” She pressed her lips together. “Lucy and Darren were friends.”

  “And she had something on him.” I told them about how Darren had been stealing tests and answers. Since they were both in such foul moods, they didn’t ask how I’d discovered this. Even after hearing this news, Ella dismissed my theory out of hand. “And you said Darren and Lucy had been dating, though I’m really not so sure about that, either. If they were, though…” The way she wrapped her tongue around that if pretty much said that my information about them dating wasn’t only wrong, it was impossible. “That would indicate that they had feelings for each other.”

  Or not.

  I didn’t elaborate because really, there was no way I could tell them about how Lucy blackmailed Darren into being her boyfriend. Not without confessing about this Gift of mine. And not without betraying Lucy’s confidence. I told myself I was doing it for the first reason. I knew it was really for the second. I couldn’t see the point of adding major embarrassment to everything else Lucy had already suffered.

  “All the more reason he would have been pissed if she was going to turn him in,” I told Ella. I’d like to think I was telling Ariel, too, but she was so busy shaking her head like I was an idiot, I decided it was better to ignore her. “Lucy had that appointment with the principal. You told me about that. And yes, she might have made it to discuss that grade she got in her summer school class, but Darren didn’t know that. If he thought she was going to rat on him—”

  “That’s just bullshit.”

  At the comment from Ariel, Ella gasped, and her shoulders shot back. She held her temper. But just barely. I have a feeling the only way she was able to do it was to pretend Ariel didn’t exist. “You’re forgetting,” she said to me through gritted teeth, “that Darren was with the other kids that night.”

  I hadn’t forgotten this; I’d just chosen to ignore it because then I could pin the crime on Darren. After only one meeting with him, I knew I didn’t like him so I’d be thrilled if he was guilty. Leave it to Ella to introduce the logic that shot my case to hell. Even when she was deep in the drama zone with Ariel.

  I sighed and fed a pile of papers into the shredder near my chair.

  Ella tapped and organized. “I think it was Chuck Zuggart, the guy from the biker bar.”

  “Because you saw him talking to Lucy once about a thousand years ago?” Ariel barked out a laugh. “If you were a real detective like me, Mom…If you were paying attention and keeping notes like I do…” She reached over to what I thought was the empty chair beside her, and came up with her cell and a legal pad. She set her phone on the table and brandished the pad. “There’s absolutely no other connection between Lucy and Chuck Zuggart. And there’s never going to be. Not that either of you are going to find, anyway. That’s because Patrick Monroe did it.”

  I wasn’t sure she was right, but I didn’t know she was wrong, either, so as much as I would have liked to meet Ariel’s show of attitude with a little of my own, I didn’t. Besides, she sounded awfully sure of herself, and I wondered if her version of an investigation had turned up something mine had not. I plucked the legal pad out of her hands.

  “I’m organized and efficient, see.” Ariel leaned over and tapped the pad with one finger, and I saw she was right. She’d made columns that listed suspects, motives, alibis. There was nothing new or surprising on her list, but it was pretty darned impressive, anyway. “I’ve even done a spreadsheet on the computer,” she added as if she knew what I was thinking and had to get in this one last dig. “You know, who was where when and what they know and say they know. And I’ve even been through Mom’s old scrapbook over and over again. You know, the one about Lucy.”

  This was news, and I looked Ella’s way. “You have a scrapbook about Lucy?”

  She brushed off the information. “There’s nothing important in it. Just the old articles from the newspaper, and the one that appeared on the twenty-fifth anniversary of her disappearance. There’s nothing in any of those articles that we don’t already know, right, honey?”

  Her attempt at smoothing things over with Ariel was met with icy teenaged contempt.

  “Your theory about Darren Andrews . . .” When she looked at me, Ariel dispensed with the contempt. But she wasn’t above a little one-upmanship. “Pepper, you’re way off base. It was Patrick Monroe. It had to be. He’s still in town, you know. He’s working on a video of ‘Girl at Dawn,’ and they’re filming it here since this is where he wrote the poem. If I could just get him alone, I know I could make him talk.”

  “That”—I emphasized my point by slapping her legal pad back down on the table—“is a really bad idea.”

  I had meant it more as advice than as a pronouncement, but I’d forgotten that when a fifteen-year-old girl is feeling touchy, even the most well-intentioned comment sounds like a decree.

  “Oh, you’re going to gang up on me, too?” Ariel pushed back her chair and stomped to the door and back again. “What, you guys are tag teaming me? Is that why you asked Pepper to come over tonight, Mom? So the two of you could—”

  “Now, honey…” Ella pulled herself to her feet so she could face her daughter.

  I got up, too, the better to look my imposing tallest and to send the message that I was past putting up with their sniping. “All right, you two,” I said, swinging a look from one of them to the other. “Somebody better explain what’s going on. And don’t tell me you live in a dictatorship,” I warned Ariel. “I’m not buying it, and it doesn’t explain anything, anyway.”

  Ella folded her arms over her chest.

  Ariel balled her hands into fists and held them close to her sides.

  There couldn’t have been a worse time for the oven timer to ring.

  Ella had put a frozen pizza in when I arrived, and ever the mom, she went to get it out. She set it aside to cool, put napkins and silverware at the places where none of us were sitting anymore, and cut the pizza into slices. She slid pizza onto plates, handed them around, and sat down with hers. It wasn’t until she’d cut it into neat pieces that she set her shoulders, lifted her chin, and said, “Ariel wanted to go out with Gonzalo tonight.”

  This was a surprise! I turned to Ariel. “So he’s back, huh?”

  Ariel might be plenty pissed at her mother, but she was a teenager, after all. She’d attacked the pizza with gusto, and her mouth was full. “He’s forsaken his plebeian ways,” she said.

  “And Tiffany Slater? Has he forsaken her, too?”

  Ariel chomped, her mouth clamped shut.

  “I told her that I don’t have a problem with her seeing Gonzalo again but—”

  “That’s not what you said, Mom.” Ariel swallowed around the protest. “You said he wasn’t good enough—”

  “I never did.” There were spots of color in Ella’s cheeks when she looked my way. “You know I’d never say that, Pepper. Not about anyone. I simply pointed out that after Ariel’s irresponsible behavior a couple weeks ago—”

  “Oh, am I going to be made to suffer forever just because of one little mistake?” Ariel flopped back in her chair and groaned.

  “I explained…” Ella was always reasonable, even when the situation wasn’t. “I tried to explain,” she said, “that I don’t have a problem with Ariel seeing Gonzalo again. Once she proves she’s trustworthy.”

  “I’m going to have to join a convent before I can prove that to you,” Ariel wailed. “Are there Jewish convents? I’ll have to found the first order of Jewish nuns.”

  I didn’t wipe the smile off my face fast enough. Ariel saw it, and her irritation knew no bounds. “You’re just as bad as Mom.” She pointed at me, her voice sharp. “I thought we were colleagues, fellow detectives. But she’s pushing me around and you…you’re laughing at me.”

  It wasn’t all that long since I’d been a touchy fifteen-year-old whose irritation knew no bounds myself, and I never have been one to put up with this kind o
f crap.

  “You’re just a kid,” I said. “You don’t—”

  “See, that proves it.” She stomped one sneaker-clad foot. “You and Mom, you both think alike. ‘Don’t do this, Ariel.’ ‘Don’t do that.’ But the two of you, you do whatever you want. You investigate, Pepper, and nobody ever said you were a real detective. But you don’t let that stop you. And Mom goes right ahead and does whatever she wants to do, too. Even with that creepy homeless guy who was at the cemetery the other day.”

  The color drained from Ella’s face, and her mouth fell open. “Ariel, honey, if this is about Will—”

  “You can see that grubby guy and I can’t see Gonzalo?” A single tear splashed down Ariel’s cheek. “That not fair, Mom, and you know it.”

  “It’s not fair. It’s not anything. Because I’m not seeing him.” Ella wrung her hands. Her breaths came in sharp gasps. “Honey, if you’re having issues because of Will—”

  Ariel threw her hands in the air. “I am not having issues. I’m having a life crisis. And if the two of you weren’t so old and out of touch, you’d realize it.”

  So much for me acting the peacemaker. Since I’d tried to make things better, they’d only gone from bad to worse. I scrambled for a way to save the situation, and keep these two from going at each other’s throats.

  “Ariel…” I pivoted her way and kept my expression neutral, so I couldn’t be accused of anything. “I’d love to see that scrapbook of your mom’s.”

  “Why, so you can look through it and tell me I don’t know what I’m talking about? I do. I’m a good detective. I’m a better detective than you are, Pepper. I could prove it if I could just get Patrick Monroe alone.”