The Pea Soup Poisonings Read online

  Zoe saw that there were three women in the room: all seated on a black horsehair sofa. The television was shrieking: on the screen a woman’s stomach was ballooning in and out. “I’ve seen that commercial,” whispered Spence. “The lady has gas. And always right at our dinner time.”

  “Get out,” the voice repeated.

  “I’m Thelma Fairweather,” said the woman on the end of the sofa. “I say they stay. You can get out,” she told the first woman.

  “Then I will,” said the woman, and shuffled out of the room in dirty pink slippers, and then back in again. “But there’s nowhere to go in this place.”

  “Then sit down and keep quiet,” said Thelma. She motioned the children over to a bed in a corner of the room. They perched on the edge while Thelma got up and put on the sweater Zoe had brought. “Did they tell you to bring it? That Cedric and Chloe? That pair of phonies? I’d never in my life heard of a Cedric and Chloe until they showed up, and I’ve lived on this earth seventy-six years.”

  “They didn’t tell us,” said Zoe. “We thought of it ourselves. Alice wanted to come,” she explained, “but her mother stayed home from work and wouldn’t let her out of the house. I mean, no one knows we’re here.”

  Thelma squinted at Zoe through round gold spectacles. She was a plump woman with fuzzy white hair that surrounded her crinkly pink face like a halo around the sun. “You were the one who tried to help when they took me away,” she said. “Thank you for that. They say I’m losing my mind. And it might happen if I have to live one more day with that pair.” She pointed at the two frazzled-looking women on the horsehair sofa.

  “You won’t have to,” said Spence. “We’re taking you out of here tonight.”

  “Maybe,” said Zoe. “That is, we won’t take you without your permission. We just need to know a few things. You see, we’re trying to find out who put the herbicide in your sister’s pea soup. And when you were kidnapped, well, we figured the two cases are connected. So Alice let us into your house, and we found...this.” She held up the small gold key. It shone in the dim light of the single ceiling bulb. “They were looking for it,” she said, “that Cedric and Chloe. And we need to know why.”

  Aunt Thelma took the key in her pale veined hands. “So that’s it,” she exclaimed, as though she’d just discovered the answer to a difficult math problem. “It’s the key to my safe deposit box in the Branbury National Bank. Now what on earth would those two want to get into that for?” Her forehead wrinkled with the question. “I don’t there’s much of any value in it.”

  “Think hard,” said Zoe. “They’re coming here tonight, those two. Keep an eye on the window, Spence.”

  “Right,” said Spence, and pressed his nose to the chill glass.

  “Well now, there’s my will,” said Thelma. “But my lawyer has a duplicate, so that won’t do them any good.” She swallowed her lower lip with her yellowy upper teeth and stared at Spence as though he might have an answer. He just shrugged, and went back to his watch at the window.

  “What else?” asked Zoe. “There must be something else.”

  “Oh, a couple of deeds. I own farmland, and then a couple acres in the Branbury swamp – but who wants that except the salamanders? And then...” She paused. She stuck out a pale pink tongue as if to catch the thought.

  “And then?” Zoe urged.

  “And then...” Thelma began.

  “They’re here!” said Spence. “They’re coming up the driveway. I recognize that blue car with missing hubcap!”

  Zoe jumped up. “We can’t stay,” she told Aunt Thelma. “But we’ll get that safe deposit box for you. And hide it.”

  “But you can’t get it without my signature,” said Thelma. “Unless I’m dead, and maybe that’s what they want.” She struggled up from the bed. “I’ll go with you. There’s a dumbwaiter at the other end of the hall. I suppose we could take that. Avoid the stairs. It goes down into the kitchen.”

  “A dumb waiter? You mean he can’t speak?” said Spence.

  “It’s a small elevator that carries trays of food,” explained Zoe, who’d read about one in a book. “Now, come on. Hurry!”

  “Take me, too,” hollered the woman on the horsehair sofa as the three hurried out. “Take me!”

  “Take me!” echoed the third woman, waving a pink chenille arm.

  “We’ll try to come back for you,” said Zoe, not wanting to hurt their feelings, and followed Thelma down the hall.

  “What children? We have no ch-children.” Zoe heard a man’s voice shout up the stairwell.

  Thelma pressed the button and Zoe and Spence waited anxiously as the dumbwaiter cranked slowly up from the depths of the building. Somewhere on the floor above a woman screamed, and Thelma’s eyes gazed into Zoe’s, huge and full of fear.

  Chapter Eleven

  Down the Dumbwaiter

  They were squeezed into the dumbwaiter like glasses of juice. Zoe squatted on Miss Thelma’s lap and Spence on hers. She didn’t dare breathe or she might expand and squash the others. It seemed forever as the square box slowly, crankily, descended.

  When it finally opened up they found themselves in a stainless steel kitchen crammed with hanging pots and pans and gleaming knives. Zoe put a small knife under her shirt just in case. It might come in handy.

  “How do we get out of here?” Spence whispered.

  Zoe looked at Thelma, but she just shook her head. The back door was padlocked. A swinging door led to a dining room that led to the inner part of the building; Zoe could hear voices. One guttural howl she recognized as Cedric’s – upstairs. He would have discovered that Thelma was missing.

  Spence jumped onto the countertop and shoved up a small window. A rush of night air filled the room and Zoe almost laughed aloud. Spence climbed out first, and then helped the others through the window. Aunt Thelma got stuck halfway - her plump purple bottom filled the whole space, but Zoe was finally able to push her out and into Spence’s arms. The pair tumbled together onto the damp grass. Zoe closed the window carefully behind her; she wanted Cedric to think they were still in the building.

  They crept along the side of the building to the front gate.

  But found it locked!

  “We’ll have to climb the fence,” Zoe said, and Aunt Thelma cried, “Oh, no, no, I can’t.”

  “Yes, you can, you have to,” said Zoe, feeling her way along in the dark. There was a sliver of moon, so she was able to see the outline of the fence. It was not especially high, but was made of iron, with something that looked like barbed wire on the top.

  It was not barbed wire, she discovered when she reached the top, but tree branches reaching across. For a mad moment she wondered how it would be to try and walk along the top. Then remembering the kidnappers, she abandoned the thought.

  “Spence,” she hissed, “you help Aunt Thelma get a foothold in the fence and then hang on to her, and I’ll pull her up and over.”

  “Oh, my stars,” moaned Thelma as she groped for a foothold.

  “Ooh-h-h,” groaned Spence, holding Thelma’s weight in his cupped hands. “Hurry and get her over. I can’t hang on much longer.”

  “Grab hold,” said Zoe. When she felt Thelma’s hot damp hands clasp hers, she hoisted her up to the top. For a moment Thelma lay across the narrow top like a body slung over a saddle.

  Finally Spence was able to tip the old lady over and into Zoe’s arms.

  “Jus’ a min - ” Aunt Thelma said, panting for breath, but then moved gamely forward.

  “Keep going,” Zoe whispered, “I’ll catch up.” Pulling out the kitchen knife she went to the blue car and poked a small hole in one of the front tires. With luck, it would slow the kidnappers a little. Then she ran crazy-legged after the others - though she didn’t have far to go because Thelma couldn’t walk very fast.

  “It’s my arthritis,” Thelma explained. “You’d better leave me here. I’m afraid those two will hurt you if they catch us.”

  “They’ll be hunt
ing through the building first. The lady won’t have seen us go out, you know,” said Zoe. “And then they’ll have to change a tire if they want to go very fast.” She held up the knife.

  “Smart thinking,” said Spence.

  “Nothing to it,” Zoe said modestly, though her arms ached from hauling Aunt Thelma through a window and over a fence. And she worried that she’d caused only a slow leak in the tire.

  A quarter of the way to the bus stop, Thelma stopped walking. “I can’t go on another blessed minute. I’m all bruised from that fence.” She sank down on a rock.

  “Then we’ll carry you,” said Zoe.

  “We will?” said Spence, who weighed a good hundred pounds less than Thelma.

  “We’ll make a chair with our crossed arms. Come on, Spence, you can do it.”

  “I can?”

  They crossed their arms and gripped one another’s wrists and Aunt Thelma sank heavily into the human chair. Zoe heard Spence groan but he held on manfully. Zoe’s arms were numb.

  A car came down the road, its lights flashing, and screeched to a stop. “If it’s the kidnappers, head for the woods!” cried Zoe.

  But a girl’s voice called out, “Want a ride? Somebody hurt there or somethin’”?

  “It’s our grandmother, she sprained her ankle,” said Zoe. “Are you going to town? We have to catch the nine-forty-eight bus.”

  “Hop in,” said the girl, and the children climbed in back, while Thelma sat hunched and rubbing her aching legs in the front passenger seat.

  “Are you all right, Spencer?” Thelma asked. “I could hear your bones crunching, carrying me like that. It would be on my conscience the rest of my life if you broke something.”

  “It was nothing,” said Spence, massaging his bruised wrists. “We could of carried you all the way to Branbury.”

  Zoe smiled.

  The girl had just gotten her license, she told them, and she was sixteen – skinny as a pencil with dyed yellow hair frizzy as a mop. “Why, I just love to drive! This is my stepfather’s car. He let me use it to get ice cream. But the stores are all closed in this hick town so I have to go to Vergennes.”

  “Ice cream?” said Spence, forgetting his hurt wrists.

  “You can drop us at the bus stop, please,” said Zoe, ignoring Spence, although she wouldn’t mind some ice cream herself.

  But when they got to the bus stop the blue car drove slowly past and careened into the gas station across the street. The kidnappers were honking, trying to get the owner of the gas station to open up and patch a tire. Thelma had seen the car, too; she hunched way down in her seat.

  “I think we will go to that ice cream store with you,” said Zoe. Spence said “Hurrah!” and the girl drove on. Thelma’s head came slowly up, like a night flower.

  It was a slow, loud ride to Vergennes. The car had a broken muffler. The girl wasn’t always sure which was the gas pedal and which was the brake. But they arrived safely at an Eat Good Things shop where Spence had a large Chunky Monkey cone and a chocolate Cow-Pie, and Zoe had a cup of her favorite Cherry Garcia. Aunt Thelma downed a Tylenol in a glass of water. She was too nervous, she said, too exhausted to eat.

  “Have you thought of what else is in that safe deposit box?” asked Zoe while the girl was still at the counter paying for her stepfather’s ice cream. Zoe had bought the girl an ice cream soda – it was the least she could do.

  “Well, I do remember I had a diamond ring in there. It was a present from the man I was engaged to. When he died in a war, I couldn’t bear to wear it anymore. But it wasn’t a very big diamond, and I can’t imagine that’s why they want the key.”

  “Keep thinking then,” said Zoe. For the girl was coming back with her soda and Zoe figured they’d better be getting on back to Branbury. Her parents would be calling Lili Laski’s house if she wasn’t in by ten o’clock. She glanced at her watch. It was already nine fifty-five. “Oh dear,” she said, and got up to use the phone.

  “We’re playing Monopoly, and I’ve almost enough money to win this big red hotel,” Zoe told her father, who loved Monopoly himself and was always indulgent, except when it came to walking high beams. “And please can I have another half hour? Just till ten-thirty, that’s all? I mean, it’s summer, Dad! Lili’s mother will drive Spence and me home. Oh, and would you mind calling Spence’s mother for me? He’s in the middle of a big move and can’t possibly call...oh, thanks, Dad. You’re a sweetheart, Dad.”

  Her father sounded a bit dazed after all that explanation, but he said he supposed it would be all right. Their mother was watching an old video of Vanity Fair and probably wouldn’t come up for air, he said, until ten-thirty or eleven o’clock.

  “So we’d better get moving,” she told Spence.

  “How?”

  “We’ll get a taxi. I’ve still got two dollars since we saved the bus fare.”

  “Hey, it’s only twenty minutes down the pike, lemme take you,” the girl offered. “I’m just getting the hang of this driving thing, it’s fun. Whee-hee!” She wouldn’t hear No, and they all piled back into the ancient car.

  “I’m afraid your ice cream will melt,” said Aunt Thelma.

  “Nah, it’s frozen up like the North Pole,” the girl said as they sped noisily off.

  This time she drove faster, and in fourteen minutes by Zoe’s watch they were in Branbury. Zoe asked the girl to stop in front of the blacksmith shop.

  “You live here?” said the girl. “In this cute little stone house?”

  “Not exactly,” said Zoe. “It’s just that we’re late, and we don’t want our parents to see us being dropped off at the house by a stranger. You know how it is.”

  “I sure do,” said the girl, sticking out her hand. “Well, it was a pleasure, I’m sure.” She refused the two dollars Zoe tried to fold into her pocket. “Heck, it was a learning experience. I mean, I really know where the brake is now! I’m thinking I might be a race car driver. Brr-oom!” She peeled off, leaving her three passengers waving away the fumes in front of the blacksmith shop.

  It was ten-twenty. There was time to settle Thelma in.

  Or was there? A car limped down the road on a saggy tire.

  “Get down,” Zoe said, and they dropped into the bushes in front of the shop. The lights flashed by and then turned in at Thelma’s house.

  “Get the shop key,” Zoe told Spence, “and we’ll meet you around back. Bring a blanket and pillow.”

  “And a couple of doughnuts,” whispered Spence. “We’ll have a homecoming party.”

  But he was no sooner across and into his house when the blue car came slowly back up the road.

  Chapter Twelve

  Mum as a Chrysanthe-Mum

  “Quick. This way,” said Zoe as the headlights illuminated the area and lingered in front of Spence’s house. She hustled Miss Thelma around behind the blacksmith shop and next door to the Bagley sisters’ house, where a kitchen light was shining. Surely Spence wouldn’t come out with the key while the blue car was waiting...

  “Besides,” she whispered to Thelma, “the sisters have a bed and a bathroom. You might not find either in the blacksmith shop.”

  Miss Maud threw her arms around Thelma. “We heard you were up in Rockbury. Oh, you poor dear thing! Oh come in, come in. How did you ever get back?”

  “This dear child rescued me,” said Thelma, still puffing and out of breath. She dropped gratefully into a kitchen chair.

  “Oh, you sweetheart,” said Miss Maud, and hugged Zoe.

  Miss Gertie came into the room and served up hot lentil soup, cheese and crackers and Kickapoo juice, made from lemonade and iced tea. When they were seated around the table she flung up her arms and said, “Now tell us all about it. Every last detail.”

  So Thelma and Zoe took turns with the story of the kidnapping and then the Rockbury rescue. It turned out that Miss Gertie had actually watched the relatives with Thelma from a window.

  “So I said to Maud, ‘Maudie, something is wrong her
e. Thelma doesn’t want to go with that pair. You can see it by the way she’s resisting!’ So I can be a witness when you take them to court, Thelma.”

  “First we have to catch them. Prove they’ve done something really bad. But we’re working on the case,” Zoe said.

  “My stars,” said Thelma, patting Zoe’s shoulder, “this is one precocious child. Without her and that young Spence Riley I’d still be in that awful room with those two crazies.”

  “Maybe they weren’t so crazy when they got there, either,” said Zoe thoughtfully. “Maybe we can reform the whole system.”

  “My,” said Miss Maud, “I taught you right, didn’t I, child. I’m so proud of you!” She pulled herself out of her seat and planted a soupy kiss on Zoe’s cheek.

  The four talked for a while longer until Miss Gertie noticed the glazed look in Thelma’s eyes and escorted her up to bed.

  “Don’t let anyone know she’s here,” Zoe warned. She followed the sisters upstairs where Miss Gertie was already running a warm bath.

  “Oh no, dear, we’ll keep mum as a chrysanthe-mum,” Miss Maud promised.

  “And soon,” said Miss Thelma, rubbing her bleary eyes, “we’ll go to the bank and get out that safe deposit box. And see what it is those two are looking for.”

  “Tomorrow morning, please?” said Zoe.

  “Tomorrow? Well, all right, dear,” said Thelma. “We’ll have to take a taxi.”

  “But Miss Thelma will have to go in disguise,” Zoe reminded the sisters. “In case those kidnappers are hanging around the bank. Can you help us?”

  “Count on us,” said Miss Gertie. “I still have that blond wig I wore at Halloween.” She wiggled her hips in a mock dance, Zoe giggled. Gertie had looked absurd at Halloween in a yellow wig and a pink mini skirt with her knobby knees bulging out.

  Zoe was on her way downstairs when she had another thought. “Have you seen that pair before? That Cedric and Chloe? I mean, before they took off with Miss Thelma?”