Wax (24 page)

Surely there were better ways of expressing all this​—​perhaps to a licensed therapist and not a freshly minted mannequin​—​but the dam had burst. “See, this is the thing that I haven't been able to tell anyone. Not my shrink, not my parents, not even Jill. That the worst damage wasn't to my skull or to my reputation or to my ego. Those are all things that can heal with time. The thing that terrifies me more than anything is​—​well,
now
the thing that terrifies me more than anything is that a ruthless army of wax pod people will infiltrate my town and destroy everything without anyone stopping them or realizing what they're up to​—​but up
until
now, my biggest fear was living a life that didn't matter.”

Dud widened his eyes. “You matter to
me.
You let me sculpt things and listen to the radio and eat ice cream and chase squirrel monsters. I never did any of those things before I met you.”

She rolled her eyes. “You didn't
exist
before you met me.”

“Exactly! You are the
best.
”

Poppy shrugged her shoulders out of his grip, but she couldn't help smiling.

“What's going on in here?” she heard her father say from outside the closed door.

“Orgy, Dad. Please leave us alone.”

“Ha, ha,” her father said, opening the door.

Poppy held her toothbrush aloft. “Just brushing my teeth.”

“Well, you don't need Dud for that, do you?”

Poppy ran a hand through her hair and tried to banish all thoughts of murder from her head. “I suppose I do not. Actually, I'm going to take a shower, so both of you can leave.”

Her father gave a satisfied nod and disappeared down the hallway. Dud started to follow him, but Poppy called him back. “Dud?”

“Yes?”

“To answer your question: You do make me happy.”

He grinned. “Oh, good!”

“And Tofurky is a fake bird made out of beans.”

“Whaaat?”

17

“
SO THEY FINALLY KICKED HIM OUT?
”
ASKED JILL.

“Not out of the house. Just my bedroom. He has to sleep in Owen's room now, even though
we didn't do anything.
”

Poppy's mom elbowed her away from the kitchen sink. “Poppy, get off the phone. Can't we eat breakfast together as a family without the encroachments of modern technology? No offense, Jill!” she shouted toward the phone.

“None taken,” Jill's tinny voice echoed back.

“Forget it,” Poppy told Jill. “I'll see you at the parade.”

Ordinarily, Jill's morning phone calls were like shots of espresso​—​Poppy always got dual bursts of energy and happiness when she saw her number pop up on the screen. But today grudges prevailed instead. She was still mad at Jill for kicking her out of rehearsal​—​twice!​—​plus Jill's incessant apathy and skepticism were starting to wear on her. But she forced herself to put that aside for the moment. If the town was in real danger, she couldn't risk dooming its citizens because of some petty best-friend drama.

And though Poppy was in a terrible mood for a variety of reasons, the main one was that the message candle had stopped delivering its message. With Madame Grosholtz's ominous last words​—​
but perhaps if this candle finds its way into the right hands, they can still be stopped
—​the tiny scratched letters had ended. After that, it was nothing but pure unetched stone.

Poppy put away her phone and glared at her mother. “It's not enough to force us into dinner together, now you're hijacking breakfast, too?”

Her mother shrugged innocently. “Dud seems to like it.”

Dud, seated at the kitchen table, held up a plate full of scrambled eggs and gave Poppy a smile that was also full of scrambled eggs. She sat down beside him and put some food on her plate, yawning repeatedly.

Dud watched her, confused. “Are you stretching your teeth?”

“No, I'm yawning. It happens when people are tired.”

“You're tired?”

“Ha! Understatement of the year.”

Yesterday's discoveries had kept Poppy up into the wee hours of the morning. She couldn't stop turning the facts over, looking at them from different angles. Dud's relocation to Owen's room had turned out to be a blessing​—​at least with him gone, she could think without being pelted with more unending questions.

“Are you worried about the parade?” he asked.

“The parade is the least of my troubles.” She lowered her voice. “We have a crisis going on in this town​—​we don't have time for a celebration! Things are moving too fast for us to stop them. And I don't know
how
to stop them. Not to mention that our current mayor is an imposter, and the
real
mayor has been kidnapped, and she and Big Bob and Blake are all missing, probably hurt, and possibly dead!”

“What does ‘dead' mean?” Dud asked.

Poppy yawned again. “I'm gonna take a rain check on that one.”

“Happy Paraffin Day, family!” Her father swept into the kitchen. “Pops, are you at the front of the parade or more toward the back? I want to have the camera ready.”

“Can you not?” Poppy dejectedly picked at her eggs. “It's
The
Sound of Music,
and it's reliving my nightmare, and it's going to be a train wreck. I don't even want to be doing this in the first place.”

“Fraulein Maria didn't want to be a governess in the first place either, and look how well things turned out for her!”

“Running for her life through the Alps in the dead of winter with seven slow-moving children in tow?”

Her mother lightly smacked her with the morning paper. “It's in service to your town, sweetheart. Think of all the people you'll be entertaining!”

“It'll be good for morale,” said Dud.

Poppy glared at him. Where was he picking up this stuff? “Do you even know what ‘morale' means?”

“It'll be good for morale.”

Poppy chugged the rest of her orange juice and stood up, grabbing a few more slices of Fakin' Bacon for the road. “We gotta go,” she said, motioning for Dud to join her. “See you guys afterward. Enjoy the festivities.”

Her father held up his glass of orange juice, as if delivering a toast. “Break a leg!”

Dud gasped. “That's not nice!”

Everyone laughed except Poppy, who would have gladly welcomed a compound fracture at this point if it meant getting her out of the von Trappery. “It's an expression, Dud,” her mother explained. “It means ‘good luck.'”

Poppy pulled Dud out of his chair. “We don't have time for English lessons. We're already going to be late.”

“Then you better shake a leg,” said her father. “Which is
also
an expression.”

“Goodbyyye!” Poppy shouted, slamming the door behind her.

∗ ∗ ∗

Poppy needed coffee. Badly.

She parked Clementine near the town square, instructed Dud to stay put, and jogged toward Smitty's; crowds were starting to show up, so Poppy quickly scooted through the door while everyone else was trying to decide whether donuts were the right food for parade spectating.

As she entered, the smell bowled her over, knocking an epiphany into place.

Cup o' Joe.

“What can I getcha?” Smitty half shouted at Poppy, causing her to jump at least a foot back from the counter.

“Um . . . coffee?”

He grunted and started to pour her a cup as she raked her eyes over every inch of his face. “What are you doing?” he asked, looking uncomfortable.

“I​—​I have a question,” she improvised, redirecting her focus toward the various baskets of bagels behind the counter. “About a bagel.”

“Oh, not this again. I know what you're gonna ask. ‘What's on the everything bagel?' Dumbest question I ever heard! The answer's right there in the name! It's got your garlic. It's got your sesame seeds. It's got your onion. It's got​—”

“Actually, my question was about the baking technique,” said Poppy. “How do you prepare them?”

“Oh. Boil 'em first, then pop 'em in the oven.”

“What kind of oven?”

His eye twitched. “The one in the back. It's pretty big.”

“How many bagels can it bake at once?”

“A lot.”

“I know, but how many
exactly?
”

His nostrils were flaring. “Kid, I don't got time for this! You want a bagel or not?”

Poppy shook her head, handed him a few bills, grabbed her coffee, and fled​—​but not before hearing him mutter to himself as he counted the money: “Rotten gutbag.”

“Smitty is an imposter,” Poppy hissed at Dud once she got back into the car. “The real Smitty would never pass up an opportunity to talk up his precious bagel oven. The real Smitty would have known its
exact
capacity​—​would have shouted it from the rafters! This one's got to be a Hollow!”

“That's bad.”

“It's very bad.” She nervously blew on her coffee. “So that means they've got all three Bursaws, plus Smitty​—​hang on a sec.” She handed Dud her cup and pulled out her notebook. “The first day of BiScentennial candles was Big Bob and Miss Bea. The second was Blake and Smitty. Which means that today there should be two new candles, but . . .” She looked at her phone. “Crap, we don't have time to get to the factory and see what they are.” She slumped in her seat. “Not that it matters. If the Chandlers process everything overnight, their victims are probably beyond saving. Whoever it is, they could already be dead.”

“And what is ‘dead' again?”

She turned on the radio. “Here, listen to NPR.”

He turned it off. “Tell me!”

She sighed. Better he learn it from her than from Dr. Steve. “Well, if you'll recall our lesson on the miracle of life, humans are born, then they grow up, then they hopefully live long, meaningful lives, and then they die. They . . . stop living.”

Dud frowned. “I don't understand.”

“It is a hard thing to understand. And no one likes to think about it. Or talk about it. So can we not?”

“That means that one day,” Dud persisted, “you won't be here anymore? Because you're human?”

Poppy fidgeted in her seat. “Yeah.”

“But I will be, because I'm wax?”

“Right.” She took the coffee cup back from him and took a sip. “That's what this whole thing is about​—​the Chandlers moving their souls from body to body. They don't want to die. They want to live forever.”

Dud fell silent. He looked out the window. “Oh.”

Poppy glanced warily at the teeming crowds as she pulled out of her parking spot. The last time she had seen this many Paraffiners in the same place at the same time was on the satellite feed during her final
Triple Threat
performance. The show had repeatedly cut to that shot of them gathered in the town square, cheering for her and holding up signs. Then, after the fall, to a shot of them no longer cheering. Lowering their signs.

“You know what?” Poppy said. “I changed my mind. I don't think you should come to the parade.”

Dud looked at her. “Why?”

“Because . . . there are too many people. And they'll point at me, probably, or stare. And you​—”

You are the only one in this town who sees me as a real person and not as a national laughingstock. You might change your tune once you see the way they gawk. You might join in.

“You might be seen as suspicious,” she said. “It's a small town​—​new people stick out, and if anyone starts to ask questions, you might not know how to answer them, and that could lead to trouble.”

“And we don't want trouble.”

“That's right.” She bit her lip and looked away from the crowd of people, feeling their eyes drawn like magnets to her shiny orange car. “How would you feel about a game of hide-and-seek?”

“Okay!”

She turned the wheel. “Emphasis on ‘hide.'”

∗ ∗ ∗

“So what are you saying? That all the Bursaws bit the dust?” Jill started in again once she and Poppy were reunited.

“Your nonchalance in the face of such tragedy is disturbing, Jill.”

“Well, call me insensitive, but it's hard for me to get weepy over things that haven't really happened.”

“They
have
happened!”

“Poppy, the Bursaws are alive and well and sitting in the grandstand. I saw them not twenty minutes ago.”

“Even Blake?”

“Even Blake.”

Poppy frowned. “But those are the wax Bursaws. The real Bursaws are elsewhere​—​and yes, possibly dead. I mean, there is a
chance
they're still alive​—​the Chandlers could be holding them hostage. That's the hope, but I'm starting to have my doubts.”

Jill looked at her watch. The parade was to start in ten minutes, and the Price Chopper parking lot serving as the staging area was filling up fast. A few other community groups mingled about​—​the Boys & Girls Club, the American Legion, a loose confederation of elderly dancers who called themselves the Boogie Woogies. A fire engine here, a Lincoln Town Car there, the Coalition for Antique Tractor Collectors. The Rotary Club and the Paraffin Town Library had both produced well-intentioned efforts in the float category, but the Grosholtz Candle Factory promised to be the most popular of the bunch​—​primarily because it would be giving out free candle samples, with Vermonty performing a dance when it reached the grandstand.

Of course, Poppy was more concerned with the occupants of the grandstand, the waxy pretenders to the throne. Would anyone pick up on the fact that Big Bob and Miss Bea were not who they appeared to be? Probably not, if Wax Blake was doing his best to keep people from getting too close.