The Pea Soup Poisonings (2 page)

“Oh, yes,” said Miss Maud. “I mean, I left it on her kitchen table. She was upstairs resting, young Alice said. And Alice’s mother – ”

“Madeline,” said Zoe.

“Madeline, yes. Though I don’t hold with children calling their mothers by their first names. Anyway, Madeline was there, too, making a meatloaf, as I recall. She said she’d serve the soup as soon as the grandmother came downstairs. Agnes had been poorly for the last month, but before that she was in good health, which is what I don’t understand. I mean how she could up and die? Just like that?” She snapped her fingers.

“Would you repeat that, please?” said Spence, who was taking notes as well as recording the conversation.

“Never mind,” said Zoe. “It’s on the tape. So, Alice and her mother were the only ones there when you came?”

Miss Maud squinted thoughtfully at the ceiling. “Well, Thelma was there, she’d been working in the garden, as I recall. She had a spade in her hand.”

“Maybe
she
put
the poison in the soup,” Spence suggested.

“Oh, but she’s Agnes’s sister!” cried Miss Gertie. “Would Thelma poison her own sister? Not on purpose, anyhow.”

“I wouldn’t think so, oh, no, no. Thelma’s a little spacey, but she’s a good person,” said Miss Maud.

“Mmm,” said Zoe. “Well, that’s all the questions for now, thank you.” She tapped Spence on the shoulder. Reluctantly he got up, still gazing at the doughnuts.

“Now, if my brother Kelby comes over, don’t tell him anything, please?” Zoe begged. “You remember those tricks he used to play in school?”

“Oh, yes,” murmured Miss Maud. “The time he set off alarm clocks every fifteen minutes and they set me back a whole day?”

“You’ve got it,” said Zoe. “And one more thing.”

“Yes?” The sisters looked at her expectantly.

“Could I have a sample of your pea soup? You said you put some of it in the freezer?”

“Of course, dear,” said Miss Maud, and hustled over to the refrigerator, the white topknot wiggling on her head. “Maybe your mother would like some, too.”

Spence groaned, and Zoe narrowed her eyes at him. “She’d love it. But just enough for a bowlful, please.”

“But it’s frozen, dear, take it all. You can eat it. A family of four?”

Zoe thanked the sisters and pushed Spence out the door ahead of her.

“You’re not really going to eat that,” he said. “I hear they make it in a chamber pot!”

“Of course, I am. To prove it’s all right.”

“I’ll come to your funeral.”

“You won’t have to. So let’s go to my house. We’ll listen to that tape again.”

“What for? They didn’t say anything much.”

“It isn’t what they said, it’s what they didn’t say. You have to listen between the lines.”

“What lines?” said Spence. “Speak English, please. Anyway, if you want to know exactly what was going on in Alice’s kitchen that day, why don’t you ask Alice?”

“Exactly
my thoughts,” said Zoe, handing over a couple of chocolate peanuts. “We’ll phone her when we get to my house.” Zoe was angling fo a cell phone for her birthday, but her parents said not till she turned thirteen.

As it turned out, she didn’t have to phone Alice because just as they were entering the house with the frozen soup, her father called to her that Alice was on the line.

“Zoe,” cried Alice, her voice all breathless and quivery, “something terrible’s going on. Next door at Aunt Thelma’s. I need you. Come quick!”

And the line went dead.

Chapter Four

Help! Kidnappers!

Tiny Alice was outside staring over at her Aunt Thelma’s house where a car painted two shades of blue was idling in the driveway. Alice’s face was red with tears; her long chestnut hair was whipping about in the wind. “They’re taking Auntie away!” she cried when she saw Zoe. “And she doesn’t want to go-oo...”

It was true, Zoe saw. Alice’s great-aunt Thelma was being hustled into the car between a man and a woman. The man was big and beefy, he seemed almost seven feet tall. Thelma’s chocolate-brown eyes looked pleadingly at Zoe.
Help me,
the eyes said.

“Get the license number,” Zoe told Spence, and she dashed across the lawn.

“Leave her alone!” Zoe yelled, and yanked at the man’s arm. He brushed her off as if she were a fat black fly.

“We’re just taking her out for a ride, dearie,” the woman said, smiling a fake smile at Zoe. She shoved Aunt Thelma ahead of her into the back seat. Seconds later the car roared off down the road. Zoe sneezed twice from the dust that sprang up in its wake.

“Jeezum, Zoe,” said Spence. “They could of taken you, too. Did you see the way that man looked at you?”

“Like what? How did he look?”

“Like a cobra. Like a striped cobra, ready to strike. He was wearing a striped shirt, too.”

“Did you get his license number?”

“Oh, sure,” said Spence. “It was a white one, New York. MBV um...umm, well, something like that.”

“You didn’t write it down?”

“I didn’t have a pencil.”

“You had your tape recorder.”

“Oh,” said Spence. “I didn’t think of that.”

Zoe ran into Alice’s house to call the police. The door knob came off in her hand as she entered – the house could use a few repairs. She was in the front hall describing the blue car when Alice’s mother interrupted on an upstairs phone.

“It’s all right, officer. Just relatives taking my daughter’s great-aunt out for a ride. Thelma’s not well, you know. I mean, she gets confused. And you know children, their imagination...” She gave a little laugh. “Bye then, and sorry.” The line clicked off.

Zoe went back outside and thumped down on the steps beside the others. Tiny Alice was crying, and Zoe put an arm around her thin shoulders. “We’ll get your auntie back,” she said. “We know what the kidnappers look like.”

“How are you going to get her back?” Alice sobbed. “You’re just a kid.”

“I’m bigger than you.” Tiny Alice’s head only came to her chin, Zoe saw, and Alice was the same age. “And Spence here will help.”

“Sure,” said Spence, looking brave now that the aunt-knappers were gone.

“You’ve never seen that man and woman before?” Zoe asked Alice.

“Oh yes,” said Alice. “Once, when they came to visit. They were Fairweather relatives, Madeline said. The woman smiled a lot and Aunt Thelma said she was a phony. That’s what Auntie called her: “a phony.”

“They were sisters, right?” she asked Alice. “Thelma and your grandmother?”

“Half sisters,” said Alice, “on my dad’s side.” She blew her nose loudly into a tissue. Alice’s father had been killed in an automobile accident when Alice was only four, but the girl still cried whenever she thought about him.

“Well, they must have something that somebody wants. Can you think what that would be, Alice?”

“N-no,” said Alice, wiping her damp face with an orange shirt sleeve. “They were poor, that’s why my granny came to live with us, and Madeline fixed up a room for her. You see, Auntie Thelma has only that little yellow house with one tiny bedroom. Besides, I wanted Granny here.” Her face puckered again.

The door banged open behind the trio and Alice’s mother stood in the doorway. “Alice, love,” she said in her baby-sweet voice, “you haven’t cleaned your room yet. Don’t you think you’d better? And then I have a surprise for you. Something sweet and chocolate.”

Alice looked helplessly at Zoe, and then went inside.

Mrs. Fairweather shook a finger at Zoe. “That was naughty of you to call the police,” she said. “When those folks were just taking Thelma out for a ride. They’re her relatives,” she said, as though all relatives were innocent as lambs.

“Then why was she calling for help?” demanded Zoe.

Mrs. Fairweather smiled indulgently. She ran her fingers through her frizzy blonde hair. “Thelma is so-so theatrical. She was once an actress, you know. She’s always on stage, so to speak. Now run along, both of you. Alice has work to do.”

She shut the door, and then opened it again quickly. “I’ve just made a chocolate cake. Would you like to take along a piece?”

“No, thank you,” said Zoe. “And neither will Spence.” Mrs. Fairweather shrugged, and shut the door firmly behind the pair.

“I
can
speak for myself,” said Spence, glaring at Zoe. “And that’s all it was then. That Aunt Thelma was making a scene. Alice got us over here for nothing. And I wasted all this tape.” He stuck the recorder back in his pocket.

“You got it all on tape? The whole kidnapping scene?”

“Yup. Everything but the license. Nobody said the numbers aloud.”

“Smart kid,”  said  Zoe,  and gave Spence a handful of chocolate peanuts. He made a face like an ape and dashed off.

“We’ll listen to the tape after lunch,” Zoe yelled after him.

He swiveled about. “Why not now? We’ve got doughnuts in the pantry. I can eat as many as I like of my own.”

“I have to practice walking the beam, that’s why not now. Anyway, those doughnuts are probably stale. Your dad buys them by the carload, and after a week they taste like cardboard.”

“I’ll take them any day over that pea soup.” Spence made a gagging sound and did a cartwheel in the grass. He landed on his back.

“I wish you’d learn how to do a cartwheel,” said Zoe.

“I’m trying. I’m just top-heavy, that’s all.”

“Well, you do have a big head.”

“Better to think with,” said Spence.

“Yeah, yeah.”

Zoe looked up at the mountains that rose lavender-blue beyond the apple trees. They looked as far away as all the crime solving she had to do in five days.

“We have to find those kidnappers,” she said. “They might be the ones who killed Alice’s granny.”

“How’re we going to do that? We don’t know where they went.”

“We’ll find out. Somehow. We’ll keep our eyes and ears open.”

“Right now I’m more interested in my mouth and stomach,” said Spence. He winked at Zoe, then dashed off; she heard his front door bang shut.

Kelby popped out from behind a pricker bush as Zoe started for home. “I got evidence against the Bagley sisters,” he said. He held up a green stem with a droopy flower on its end.

“What evidence is that?”

“Purple nightshade.” He sounded triumphant. “It’s
deadly. I
found it in their backyard. They put it in the soup.”

“Huh,” said Zoe. “It looks like a purple iris to me.” She ran down to the orchard to practice her high-beam walking.

“Deadly nightshade!” Kelby yelled after her. “And you’ve got four and a half days to prove it’s not.
If
you
can.”

He laughed a diabolical laugh.

Chapter Five

New Clues on the Tape

Zoe was standing on the stone wall that divided the apple orchard from a neighbor’s cow pasture. The black-and-white Holstein cows stood in a row, staring at her. “Hi, girls,” she said, but they just went on chewing the tall grass. Holding out her arms for balance, she began to walk the bumpy wall.

After fifteen boring minutes, she decided it was time go next door to Spence’s house and listen to the tape. His mother was giving a piano lesson when Zoe entered. Bong, bing, bang, went the piano under the chubby fingers of a frustrated little boy; his face looked like a squeezed lemon. Mrs. Riley looked as though she needed to go to the bathroom but was forced to wait out the lesson.

“We’ll listen to the tape in my room,” said Spence, and Zoe followed him upstairs.

The room was the usual mess: papers, books, puzzles, old baseball cards, a guitar and cello, and a baseball bat and mitt on the floor,  although Mrs. Riley disapproved of Spence playing sports. It might hurt his cello fingers, she said; she wanted Spence to play in a symphony orchestra. Which wasn’t exactly in Spence’s plans, but he gave in to the lessons anyway. He pushed aside a pile of
Boys’ Life
and
Sports Illustrated
magazines and sat down with the recorder. Zoe sat cross-legged beside him.

At first it was all static and Zoe glared at Spence. “Just wait,” he said, and finally the Bagley sisters’ voices came on, sweet and serene like they had nothing in the world to worry about.

“When they might face a hundred years in jail,” Zoe protested, “if we can’t prove them innocent.”

The recorder switched to a new scene. Zoe heard a woman’s shrill cry, and then a man’s voice thick as mud, saying, “Get in, I said.” Then a woman’s voice saying, “Just for a little ride, sweetie, it’s such a nice day.” And then Miss Thelma’s voice saying, “You’re hurting me. Let me go. I don’t feel well.” And the other woman: “We’ll stop at our place for a drink, won’t we, Cedr…” Here the recording was interrupted by Tiny Alice’s outcry.

“Play that back!” cried Zoe. “I want to hear that Ced name again.”

But the tape ran all the way back to the Bagley sisters’ interview and they had to listen to the whole conversation about pea soup again. Finally the kidnapping scene came up and Zoe held the recorder close to her ear. “Ced-ric,” she said. “It sounds like Ced-ric.”

“Who ever heard of a name like that?” said Spence.

“We have now. And the woman said they’d stop at
their
house. That means they might live nearby. Or rent a house nearby. Or at least in Vermont.”

“Vermont’s a big enough state if you don’t have a car.”

“Will you quit putting obstacles in our path?” Zoe folded her arms tightly across her chest. “We’ll look up all the Cedrics in Vermont and New York. We’ll find that pair. They must have Aunt Thelma with them.”

“They’ve maybe locked her in the cellar. With the rats and cockroaches.”

“Enough, thank you, Spence. Now let’s hear the rest of the tape.” She pressed PLAY. She heard Auntie screaming “Help!” and then her own voice shouting, “Leave her alone!” And the woman insisting they were just taking the aunt for a little ride, and to go away. But then she heard a beeper.

“Hey!” she shouted, hitting the STOP button. “I’d forgotten that beeper. It went off in the man’s pocket. It must be connected with something. Some place he works for.”

“A hospital?” Spence suggested. “He’s a doctor? A volunteer?” Spence’s father used to volunteer for the local ambulance until the beeper went off one time in the middle of his own concert and spoiled the guitar solo he was playing.