Wax (21 page)

Better than Madame Grosholtz's.

“Nah.” Dud waved her off, but looked pleased. “It's easy.”

“I'm serious, Dud. This is good on a level that I didn't know existed. You could sell these for thousands of dollars!”

He was unimpressed. “It's just for fun.”

“Except that . . .” The joy dissolved. “I don't want anyone to see this. I mean​—​I
do
want people to see this. It should be in a fancy art gallery in Brooklyn or something. But here . . .” She bit her lip and tried not to imagine what was lurking up at the factory. “I want to make sure it stays safe.”

And so for the second time that day, Poppy found herself loading a wax body into her car.

As she slid Wax Dud II into the back seat (as Wax Crawford already occupied the trunk), it occurred to Poppy that she was more or less reenacting what Madame Grosholtz had done right after they'd parted ways. What was running through that woman's head in those last moments? What had she tried to warn Poppy about? Just the Chandlers, or something more?

Poppy covered the sculpture with the big green blanket she kept in the car for impromptu picnics, then slammed the door and sighed.

“What's wrong?” asked Dud.

“I can't believe I'm saying this, but I have to put all of this Madame Grosholtz business on pause. Jill's right. Tomorrow's a big day. A big, stupid von Trapp day, and all I'm
supposed
to be thinking about is doorbells and sleigh bells and schnitzel with noodles. I don't have room in my brain for any of . . . this.”

It would have to wait. It was immense, and strange, and unsettling, and pressing, and it would have to wait. The show must go on.

“What's a schnitzel?” Dud asked.

“You know what, Dud? I have no friggin' idea.”

But as they turned to head back to Gaudy Auditorium, passing Blake Bursaw's usual parking space, his absence bit at her harder than ever. The end of the day had arrived and she still hadn't seen him. She still hadn't heard from him despite the dozen or so voice mails she'd left. And though the kid regularly ditched school for days at a time just because he could, this felt different. Ominous.

She stared at the empty parking space.

“Aren't you going back to rehearsal?” said Dud.

“Yeah, but first . . .” Poppy lingered for another moment, then pulled her keys out of her pocket. “We need to run an errand.”

∗ ∗ ∗

“Why aren't you in school?”

“School is over, Mr. Kosnitzky. The final bell rang an hour ago.”

Mr. Kosnitzky humphed and glowered at Poppy's perky hair. “Then why are you here?” He glanced suspiciously at her empty hands. “You don't have a trophy.”

“No. I have a question: Have you seen Blake Bursaw at all today?”

He rubbed his chin. “Bursaw?”

“Yeah. He wasn't in school, and I figured that if anyone saw him out and about, it would definitely have been you, sir.”

“Yes, it would have,” he said with a proud nod.

“So you saw him?”

“No.”

“Oh.” Poppy's shoulders dropped. “Well, do me a favor and keep an eye out. A keener eye than usual, okay? Because Principal Lincoln is really starting to crack down on kids who skip, and he needs all the help he can get.”

“I'll do what I can. Now buy something or leave.”

Poppy left. “Well, that was a dead end,” she muttered. Looking up and down the sidewalk, she felt nervous. Worried. Anxious. Fearful of the state of things and unsure that anything would ever be all right again. So even though she needed to get back to Dud, who was waiting for her in the town square gazebo, she decided to take a quick trip to the place she always went when nothing in the world made sense: Paper Clipz.

“Mmmm,” she uttered as she drifted blissfully down the aisles, taking in the decadent scents of office supplies, of paper and ink and binders and index cards and sweet, sweet organization. Proximity to color-coded things always made her feel better. She was about to hug the Sharpie display when she remembered the tragic fate of The List.

Darkness clouded the aisle as she pictured its cruel demise. She certainly wasn't going back into that cavern to retrieve it. But on its own, it would never survive those open flames, the dank moisture, the page-spoiling rot​—​

“No!” she shouted.

The employee at the counter looked up. “Can I help you with something?”

“No, I​—​I was having a traumatic stationery-related flashback.”

The employee put a sympathetic hand over her heart. “I
completely
understand.”

Poppy spent the next ten minutes test-driving the newest makes and models of notebooks. She liked the coil strength of the Noteworthy 3000, but the leather-bound Write It Down! was not without its charms.

Finally she settled on the Pen Dragon 2.0, which boasted extra-weighted paper​—​the better to clutch worriedly. She paid for her purchase and headed back to the gazebo, where Dud was picking through the grass.

“Poppy, I have a question,” he announced.

“Shoot.”

“If I find something that belongs to someone else, but that person isn't around, am I allowed to take it?”

“Usually no, but that depends on what it is. And where you find it.”

“What if it's a watch that I found over there?”

He pointed at the ground, at a spot a few feet away from the gazebo. Something in the grass glinted in the setting sun. Something silver.

An unnecessarily large titanium scuba diver watch, its face splattered with blood.

∗ ∗ ∗

“I thought you said you're not usually allowed to take things.”

“This is one of the times when I am allowed. That's what ‘usually' means, that exceptions can be made.”

She grasped the watch in one hand and steered with the other, weaving Clementine in and out of traffic. Hopefully, Jill had things under control back at rehearsal. Poppy was too deep into this to stop now.

True, she still couldn't prove any foul play. Blake
was
the sort of person who might lose a thousand-dollar watch and not think anything of it. And the blood? Could have come from a goose. Or a pigeon. Or a goose . . . attacking a pigeon?

“Where are we going now?” Dud asked.

“Somewhere I vowed I'd never return.” Poppy glanced at her rearview mirror; she thought it unlikely that she was being followed, but she couldn't be too careful.

“What's a vow?”

“A solemn promise.”

“Why are you breaking a promise?”

“Because I guess deep down I'm a good person and I care about what happens to my fellow man, even though my fellow man does nothing but crap all over me time after time after time.”

“Oh,” said Dud. “Okay.”

A wave of revulsion crested as the Bursaws' mansion came into view, its resemblance to the White House more striking in broad daylight. Poppy half expected a team of government snipers to take her out as she turned onto the long circular driveway.

“Stay here,” she instructed Dud after parking the car haphazardly​—​the only way to do so in a circular driveway. “Do not follow me. I'll be out in a few minutes, okay? Here, I'll leave the radio on.”

Dud smiled as the melodious sound of NPR filled the car. “Mmm,” he said, nodding.
“All Things Considered.”

She shut the door as quietly as possible and made her way up the steps to the front door, listening for the hounds that were surely about to maul her. But everything was still. She willed herself not to think about the pool in the backyard, the infamous setting of “Hogwash,” but she couldn't help it.

She refocused her hatred on the doorbell, which she pushed harder than necessary. A lilting chime of bells sounded within.

Poppy waited.

The door opened.

She didn't know what she'd been expecting. Maybe a confused butler. Maybe Blake, ready with a cream pie to hurl at her. But not Big Bob Bursaw himself, along with Miss Bea, both with gigantic smiles plastered across their faces, as if they'd been expecting her all along.

“Hello!” said Big Bob.

“Hello!” said Miss Bea.

“Um,” said Poppy. “Hi.”

“What can we do for you?” they asked in unison.

Poppy didn't know how she managed to keep it together in the face of such weirdness. “I'm looking for Blake. He​—​we're doing a project together, and he was supposed to be in school today, but I didn't see him, so I wanted to check in and make sure everything was all right.”

“Oh, Blake's fine,” said Big Bob.

“Just fine!” Miss Bea added.

“He's in his room.”

“Studying for a quiz!”

“I'm sure he'll be back to school tomorrow.”

“To take the quiz!”

Poppy blinked at them. “O . . . kay.” She reached down to scratch her ankle, trying to peek past them into the hall, but they stood as a united front.

“Are you all right?” Miss Bea asked. “You look a bit . . . off-kilter, dear.”

Big Bob leaned in. “Drugs are not rad, you know.”

“I've heard,” Poppy said with a nervous chuckle. “Um, I don't mean to be a pest, but can you check? To see if Blake is here? He borrowed my notes,” she lied, “and I need them back.” She smiled. “To study for the quiz.”

The Bursaws' smiles got wider while their eyes got meaner.

“Of course,” Big Bob said hollowly. “Just a moment.” He turned around and walked up the immense staircase behind him. Poppy tried to peek around Miss Bea, but alone she still made a formidable wall. All Poppy could make out, through the windows of a French door to the floodlit backyard, was the bright blue tarp covering the pool for the coming winter.

“It's nice to meet a friend of Blake's,” Miss Bea said in the tone of someone who was unaccustomed to conversing with teenagers.

Poppy nodded politely.
Friend. Sure.

Big Bob's voice drifted down from upstairs, but it sounded like he was now talking to someone on the phone. She caught snippets here and there​—​“all set”​—​“Anita, wait”​—​“how should we​—”

“What's your name, dear?” asked Miss Bea.

And there, at that moment, Poppy knew for sure something was wrong. That name of hers had been drummed so hard into the citizens of Paraffin that they knew it better than their own.

“Poppy Palladino.”

“Oh, my,” Miss Bea said with relish. “That's a catchy one.”

“Apologies,” Big Bob boomed, appearing at the top of the staircase. “Guess he's not here after all.”

“Oh.” Poppy tried to look innocent. “Well, aren't you worried about him? Like I said, he wasn't in school​—”

“We heard you the first time, dear,” said Miss Bea, abruptly dropping all pretenses of friendliness as Big Bob walked down the stairs. “And like
we
said, we don't care.”

“You don't care? That he might be hurt, or missing, or​—”

“No,” Miss Bea said flatly. “We don't.”

“But maybe
you
should,” Big Bob added.

Poppy cocked her head. “Excuse me?”

“Well, I was looking for your notes,” he said, twisting his voice into the same fake-innocent tone Poppy had used not two seconds before, “and I came across this little number.” He held up a notebook.

The List.

Poppy's jaw thunked open in shock. “That's
mine.
How did you​—”

“It doesn't matter,” Big Bob said, flipping through the pages. “What matters is this.”

He held up the notebook, his finger pointing at a familiar item.

#19025: KILL BLAKE BURSAW. FOR REAL THIS TIME.

Ice slivered through Poppy's veins. “That was just​—​I didn't mean it, obviously. I didn't
do
anything.”

“Perhaps not,” said Big Bob. “But if this should fall into the wrong hands​—​those of the police, say​—​they wouldn't hesitate to identify you as a person of interest. Again.”

Poppy took a couple of steps back from the door, reeling. “What's happening here? Are you
blackmailing
me?”

“That's right, you little gutbag,” Miss Bea said cheerfully. “You stop asking questions about Blake, and we'll keep this little evidence of attempted murder between us.”

“Attempted
what?
”

Big Bob took a step toward her. “Do we have a deal?”

Poppy silently gaped at them. What else could she do? She couldn't call the police. Heck, she couldn't call
anyone.
Who would believe her? The only one who would was Blake, and he was most definitely missing.

“Do we have a deal?” Big Bob extended his hand.

Poppy cowered under his grinning form.

“Um, okay,” she whimpered. “Deal.”

When she shook his hand, it took everything in her power not to gasp out loud.

It was as room temperature as Dud's.

15

“
POPPY?
”
HER MOTHER SAID WITH SURPRISE WHEN POPPY
and Dud barreled through the front door. “What are you doing home? I thought you had rehearsal​—”

“I do. Can't talk. Forgot something,” Poppy huffed as she ran upstairs.

Thankfully, the flame had stayed lit this time​—​in the hours Poppy and Dud were away at school, more of the message had been revealed. “I don't even know what to hope for,” she told Dud as she picked up the stone candle and magnifying glass.

AND EVENTUALLY THE CHANDLERS GOT GREEDY. THEY WANTED MORE. THEY WANTED TO FEEL WHAT IT WAS LIKE TO BE OTHER PEOPLE. THEY WERE ACTORS, AFTER ALL. THEY WANTED TO “EXPAND THEIR CRAFT,” AS THEY PUT IT. AND THAT WAS THE POINT OF NO RETURN. THAT'S WHEN EVERYTHING GOT MESSY AND COULD NOT BE PUT BACK THE WAY IT WAS.