Threaded for Trouble (31 page)

He
was.

Detective Gartener. Out of uniform.

No, that didn’t sound right. In plain clothes. Apparently, he was on duty. Some of that “muscle” was a bulletproof vest he wore underneath his cowboy shirt. Was he also searching for Russ? His cowboy shirt, unlike ours, was red plaid.

Haylee must have recognized him, too. She turned her head away from him, then stopped in her tracks.

On the other side of Corn Alley, a cowgirl wore an ankle-length denim skirt with police-issue boots peeking out from under it. She was making a disgusted expression at the huge fluff of pink candy floss she held as far as possible from her face and from the white cowboy hat perched on her head.

Chief Smallwood.

She didn’t notice us, either.

Where they both looking for Russ?

As one, Haylee and I sped our preassigned saunter in an attempt to get away before Gartener or Smallwood saw us and figured out that we might be dressed oddly so we could snoop in an investigation they’d told us to stay away from.
Walk like a man,
I reminded myself, still having no idea how to accomplish that feat.

It occurred to me that we could go back and tell Detective Gartener and Chief Smallwood that Russ’s truck had been spotted nearby.

But I had some pride. It was bad enough that Clay had seen us in our peculiar garb. He knew us—and that Haylee’s mothers were the ones who usually put us up to such antics—and had never suspected either of us of murder. Gartener and Smallwood, on the other hand…

Besides, Opal, Naomi, and Edna would be very disappointed and unhappy if police officers swooped in and falsely arrested Russ before they did whatever it was they thought they could do to set him on a safer path.

It was hard not to be drawn into the carnival atmosphere—fireworks, laughter, bright lights, and the smells of candy floss, caramel popcorn, and hot cooking
oil. Booths sold deep-fried chocolate bars, ice cream, butter, pickles, and, of all things, strawberry gelatin.

“I’m hungry,” Haylee said.

I was, too, but not for deep-fried gelatin. “French fries?” I suggested. “Or fried jalapeño mozzarella balls?”

Haylee had a great solution. “I’ll get the fries. You get the cheese.”

Standing in line, I glanced up Corn Alley. No sign of Detective Gartener or Chief Smallwood.

But…was Jeremy Chandler in line for the bumper cars?

What was Jeremy really doing here? Last I knew, IMEC judges didn’t go around the world prejudging entries. I couldn’t remember seeing his name on the list of judges. I would have noticed because of the Chandler Challenge.

Carrying our hot snacks, Haylee and I met in the middle of Corn Alley and continued our slow inspection of booths.

We were almost at the end of Corn Alley when we spotted Clay.

With Russ.

O
NE HAND ON RUSS’S SHOULDER, CLAY leaned down, his face serious as if he were trying to convince the boy of something. Even if they’d been closer, I wouldn’t have heard their discussion over the whistling, popping fireworks and the clashing music of the merry-go-round and the Ferris wheel.

Clay and Russ headed down Parsnip Place toward the parking lot where Russ’s truck was supposed to be.

Clay was a particularly nice and caring person. I looked down at my outfit. Ugh. Maybe someday I would look decent, not muddy or in a strange costume, when I was with Clay. With
him
and not only in the same restaurant.

Haylee said, “I guess we don’t have to stake out Russ’s truck after all.” We stopped and shared our yummy fried treats.

Two figures pushed through the crowd around us. Detective Gartener and Chief Smallwood were on a mission heading toward the spot where Russ and Clay had been only moments ago.

Haylee and I traded horrified glances. Smallwood and Gartener must be after Russ. And they were wearing
bulletproof vests and police boots underneath their cowboy outfits. They were probably armed, also. What if Russ did something foolish and endangered himself and Clay?

His red cowboy hat askew on his head, Gartner picked up speed. Chief Smallwood held that giant pink ball of candy floss away from her face and clothes. The two officers dashed around the corner onto Parsnip Place and disappeared.

A crook-necked giraffe, a short clown, and a purple furry bear bumbled along Parsnip Place toward the parking lot.

Haylee muttered, “If they don’t recognize Smallwood and Gartener, they might interfere and get themselves into trouble.”

We stuffed the last of the French fries and jalapeño cheese balls into our mouths, tossed the paper containers into a trash barrel, jockeyed around a group of seniors wearing matching straw boaters with headbands that said
Erie Mystery Tours
, and rounded the corner onto Parsnip Place.

Beyond the giraffe, the clown, and the purple teddy bear struggling along in their ungainly costumes, Parsnip Place dead-ended in a vast parking lot. Roofs of cars and trucks reflected fireworks.

I didn’t see Gartener and Smallwood. Or Clay and Russ.

Haylee and I caught up with her mothers and jogged beside them.

Edna’s clown shoes were above her knees again, pointing forward this time. “Run faster,” she yelled.

Opal swung around, endangering Naomi with the giraffe head swinging from the bent neck. “They turned left.”

From inside the purple fur, Naomi yelled something. Mmmmpfhl?

Haylee and I dashed ahead and turned left at Wheatfield Way. Several rows into the parking lot, Clay’s head and Gartener’s red cowboy hat showed above the roof of a van.

We zigzagged around vehicles until we were in the
same row as Clay and Gartener. Slowing, we tiptoed toward them, although the sound of our approach had to be masked by the fireworks.

Next to Russ’s truck, Russ and Clay were being held at bay by a police chief wearing a white cowgirl hat and brandishing candy floss, and a tall detective wearing a red cowboy hat and brandishing…a baby?

Clay leaned against Russ’s truck in a casual pose, but his arms were folded and a muscle twitched in his jaw. Trying not to laugh at the strangely rotund cowboys, the red-haired clown, the jolly purple bear, and the pathetic goose-necked giraffe creeping up behind the two unsuspecting police officers?

Russ, however, stood stiffly with his back pressed against his truck, his ropy teenaged arms angled out from his body, his palms flat against the fender, as if the hard metal gave him comfort. He shook his head. “I didn’t do anything,” he wailed. “Someone’s trying to kill me! I had to run away.” In his rumpled jeans and dirty white T-shirt, he looked about eleven years old. A lock of his hair covered one eye.

Gartener asked in his made-for-radio voice, “Why do you think someone is trying to kill you?”

Bang!
A rocket spiraled up into the night sky.

Russ flicked the hair out of his face, jutted his chin, and became sixteen again. “That sewing machine didn’t just fall on my mother. Someone slammed it down on her.” His voice broke and his chin trembled.

Smallwood started to respond, but Gartener interrupted her. “Did you see this happen?” He spoke with empathy and without talking down to the boy.

“No, but…dude, that thing was heavy, but not that heavy.”

“It wasn’t so much the weight,” Gartener told Russ, “as
how
it fell.”

Plus, I thought, all the trouble someone took to make certain that it did fall, making it run at top speed and partially detaching the front legs of the table it was on.

Russ looked bilious, possibly because of the green fireworks opening with a deafening crash above us.

Smallwood must have wanted to distract Russ from the images he must have been seeing of his mother. She asked, “Are you the one who loosened the front legs of the sewing table?”

Russ tilted his head. Lines appeared between his eyebrows. “What are you talking about? I made that table. I put those legs on nice and tight.”

“How were they fastened?” Gartener asked.

Russ shrugged. “Bolts. And this’ll sound dumb, but it worked. The bolts were held on with wing nuts.”

Red fireballs exploded like crazed popcorn.

Gartener moved closer to Russ. “Could the wing nuts have come loose if the table was jiggled a lot, say by sewing?”

“No way! I do good work. I tightened them really, really tight.”

Clay reached out and squeezed the boy’s shoulder as if agreeing that Russ’s carpentry was good.

“With your hands, or a tool?” Gartener asked. “Pliers?”

Russ stared at his palms. “With my fingers. But I’m strong.”

Gartener suggested, “So someone strong came along and loosened them.”

“Guess so.”

“Who is that strong, besides you?” Gartener asked.

“I don’t know,” the boy said wretchedly. Tears glistened in the corners of his eyes. “My…my dad’s
girlfriend
didn’t like my mom.”

Gartener waited for a quiet moment between fireworks. “Do you think she did all those things that caused your mother to die? On purpose?”

Russ went back to shaking his head. “I don’t know.”

Smallwood apparently couldn’t let Gartener do all the questioning. “And who tampered with the second sewing machine so that it shorted out and caused a fire and nearly killed your dad’s…er…your family’s nanny?”

Russ shook Clay’s hand off his shoulder and yelled, “I didn’t do it! And I don’t know who did! Just because I ran away doesn’t mean I
did
anything! Whoever killed my mother and tried to kill Tiffany and that other woman could have been after me.”

I knew Russ was good with electricity and could have figured out how to reconnect wires in a sewing machine to make it catch fire. I wanted to ask him if he ever used sewing machines, but I didn’t want Gartener and Smallwood to realize we were there. They might send us away and we’d never know what really went on.

Bang!
A spangled white sphere bloomed above us.

When all was quiet again, Smallwood tapped the ground with the toe of one of her police boots. “And you don’t know anything about other fires that have been mysteriously cropping up on farms all around yours?”

Russ looked off to his right. “No. The fields are dry. And there’s been lightning.”

“And arson,” Smallwood said firmly. “And you and some of your friends have shown up at nearly every fire. Very quickly.”

“We’re firefighters, dude!”

“This goes back to last summer, before any of you joined the force,” she told him.

Russ again remembered how to sneer. “Well, don’t ask me. We didn’t set those fires. And don’t think I ran away because I was afraid you would accuse me of that, either. Someone killed my mom and almost killed Tiffany and that old broad who tried to show my mother how to use her new sewing machine. How do you know they weren’t trying to kill me, too?”

Behind me, Edna’s voice rang out, “Who would want to kill you?”

Smallwood jumped and whirled around, smashing her candy floss into Haylee’s black cowboy shirt. “Hold that for me,” she ordered.

Haylee complied, though she didn’t need her hands. The candy was stuck to her shirt.

Flares lit the sky with painful white light.

With Smallwood no longer blocking his escape, Russ slipped behind his truck and dashed away.

Smallwood chased him.

Detective Gartener thrust a blanket-swaddled baby doll into my arms and took off after both of them. Obviously anticipating that Russ might turn the other way, Clay ran around the front of Russ’s truck.

Haylee peeled the candy floss off her shirt. Hanging on to its paper cone and pointing the gooey ball like a weapon, she sprinted after the officers and Russ. Not knowing what else to do with Gartener’s baby doll, I cradled it in my good arm and ran after Clay.

Behind us, Edna exclaimed while Opal and Naomi mumbled into their fur masks.

Then all I could hear were fireworks, bursting forth in a noisy and brilliant grand finale.

Smoke, sharp with the tang of gunpowder, blurred everything. I kept Clay’s head in sight as I skidded around cars and trucks.

Echoes of the last fireworks died away. Far behind me, the merry-go-round played its hurdy-gurdy music and the Ferris wheel tinkled out its bell-like tones. I kept running.

Shouts erupted in front of me. Had someone caught up with Russ?

The smoke became thicker.

I could no longer see Clay. I ran toward the shouts.

The fire truck blasted noise through the night. The smoke in front of me turned a ghastly yellow, and I understood what people were shouting.

Fire.

T
HE FIREWORKS MUST HAVE IGNITED THE hay stubble beyond the parking lot. I kept running, searching for Russ.

Clay was near the tanker truck, pulling on boots. Another tall man was already suited up. That had to be Isaac. With the help of a couple of shorter firemen, he aimed a hose at burning grasses. The wind was blowing toward the parking lot. If any of the vehicles caught fire, the firefighters would have a huge problem. They? We. I was a firefighter, too.

Maybe this was the time for me to don the outfit and help. One of my hands was fine.

A third short firefighter joined the others. Russ? With only one tanker truck, they’d soon run out of water.

Clumsily balancing my cell phone in my bandaged palm, I dialed 911 and was told that the other tanker was on its way.

To my left, Chief Smallwood was keeping rubberneckers at bay. Purple furry teddy bear ears, a black cowboy hat, the angle of a broken giraffe neck, and the lime green pom-pom at the peak of Edna’s conical hat showed up above heads in the crowd milling around the chief.

To my right, two more short firefighters had joined the crew. Russ’s friends? It must have been more than an hour since Isaac had sent them to their pickup truck. I hoped they were sober enough to help the firefighters, not hinder or endanger them.

Wind blew flaming wisps toward me, cutting me off from the fire truck and gear. Gartener didn’t seem to be anywhere around, and Smallwood needed help with crowd control. That was something I could do despite wearing a bandage around my hand and a bolt of batik around my middle.