by Sharon Short
“Wait a minute,” I said. “You mean to tell me that it was really Cletus who developed the lemon ginseng pies?”
Uncle Otis thought a moment, and then shrugged. “I reckon so. We didn’t talk about it much. I just harvested the ginseng, brought it over to Cletus at the Fireworks Barn. Then next thing I know, a few weeks ago Todd Raptor, who says he’s in on this lemon ginseng pie deal, follows me home one day. Right there, in my front yard, tells me he’ll pay me all this money for the ginseng, that it’s for his company and this deal they’re doing with Cletus, said he heard Cletus talking to Mr. Alan Breitenstrater about how he got ginseng from me. So I even hired the Breitenstrater girl and some of her pals to help me, considering as how they were camping out right near where the ginseng grows.
“But the thing is, he didn’t want it over at the Fireworks Barn. It was a special project, he said, that had to be hush hush for a while.”
This time, I rolled my eyes. “And you believed all that?”
I stepped out of reach of Sally—who was giving me a hard look.
“All I know is he was willing to pay me thousands of dollars. So I harvested the ginseng and stashed it in my special place in the woods instead of taking it over to the Fireworks Barn.”
“But then, Daddy, why were you just saying you had your ginseng stash at the Fireworks Barn?”
“Because I had to move it there from my place in the woods, on account of another special project.”
“And what was that project,” I ground out through clenched teeth.
Uncle Otis shook his head. “I don’t reckon I’d better tell you, given all that’s happened. I could get in a heap of trouble.”
Sally sighed. “Daddy, you’re already in a heap of trouble. And if you don’t tell us everything—and I mean everything—I’m not going to bring Harry, Larry, and Barry over to visit anymore. I’ll just tell ‘em their granddaddy’s a crook.”
Uncle Otis’s eyes welled up at that. “You’d do that to your old pa?”
Sally crossed her arms and glared at him. I had no doubt she would, and I reckon neither did Uncle Otis, because he ended up—after some more blubbering and Sally saying I mean it and so on—telling us the rest of the story.
“See, I had to move my ginseng out of my special place to make room there for, well, for Cletus. Dinky hired me to kidnap his dad on the day of the pie-eating contest. He didn’t tell me why—only said it was just for a few days until some business could get worked out. So I moved my ginseng stash over to the storage room at the Fireworks Barn—Dinky gave me a key to the place and took his dad out to lunch somewhere.
“Then I met up with Dinky and Cletus over by the state park. Cletus was very trusting of Dinky and I guess Dinky had told him he wanted to see this Utopia or something that the little girl Breitenstrater—”
“Trudy,” I put in.
“Yeah, Trudy, that she’d organized. Cletus was all proud of that because Dinky’d always thought his dad’s obsessions, especially the one on Utopias, was really dumb. Anyway, I did feel kinda bad when Dinky held a gun on his dad and had me tie up and gag Cletus.”
Sally put her head to her hands. “Oh Daddy, you didn’t.”
“Well, now, it was Dinky’s idea, and he was paying me lots of money, and it was just for a few days, and I treated Cletus really good, I swear, and made sure I fed him a real nice meal before I left him there.
“But then I had a patch of bad luck. A ranger caught me harvesting a bit more ginseng—and here I am. I suspect he was tipped off. Anyway, I wasn’t ever able to go back for Cletus.”
“So he was just left there—tied up?” Sally said, horrified. “And you didn’t tell anybody?”
“Now, baby girl, calm down. Todd and Dinky knew where my secret place is. I reckoned they’d go back and release him in a few days, which was all Dinky wanted him held for.”
I sighed. “Remember the body that we told you was found in the Fireworks Barn?”
Uncle Otis frowned, like he was thinking this over.
“What if it happens to be Cletus? You know, you could be an accessory to murder.”
Uncle Otis sat down on the bench in his cell and started shaking.
At least he was shaken up enough to tell us where his secret place was.
It was in a cave deep in the woods of Licking Creek State Park. Uncle Otis even told us how to get there.
Out on the sidewalk in front of the town building, Sally and I stood blinking at the sun and arguing with each other.
“You know darn well we ought to tell Chief Worthy about this.”
I couldn’t believe those words were coming out of my mouth. But they were, and I knew I was right.
“But Josie, if Cletus is still there, and we set him free, maybe the law won’t come down so hard on Daddy.”
“C’mon, Sally, Cletus has been missing for several days, now, and what about the body that was found at the Fireworks Barn? That’s probably Cletus.”
“What if it’s not? What if it’s Trudy? Or what if it’s someone else and Cletus can tell us where Trudy went? What’s wrong with just going out to Daddy’s cave and seeing? I mean, what do you think Chief Worthy is going to do if you tell him everything Uncle Otis told you?”
“Probably go out and investigate the cave himself,” I said.
Sally grinned. “Not if I tell him you’re making it up. And I will, too. And Daddy will go along with me.” She crossed her arms, just as she had when she was threatening to keep her triplets away from Uncle Otis if he didn’t cooperate. Sally is one tough woman. “So we might as well go look and hope that Cletus is still there and we can set him free and maybe he’ll be so grateful he’ll get Daddy out of trouble.”
She grinned optimistically. Now I’m a born optimist, too—I guess it runs in the Toadfern genes—but I thought her plan was about as likely as her ex whizzing up to Bar-None on his motorcycle with a bouquet of roses, an apology, and a winning lottery ticket. Still, I did know that Chief Worthy would believe a garden snake over me, given the choice. And if I told him what Uncle Otis had told us, but Sally and Uncle Otis denied it, I’d never get him to believe me.
So what choice did I have? “Fine,” I said. “We’ll go out to the cave. Just one problem, though. Neither one of us has wheels.”
That got her for a minute—but just for a minute. We’d started walking back down the street and were near Sandy’s Restaurant.
She grinned and pointed at the delivery truck pulling up to Sally’s—a Breitenstrater Pies delivery truck. The deliveryman hopped out, went around to the back and did something, closed the back doors again, and went into the restaurant, leaving the truck idling.
“We’ve got wheels now,” she said, taking off in a run toward the truck. And like a fool, I ran right after her.
The pies were loose.
After we heard the third or so pie plop off the rack in the back, we figured out that the delivery truck driver had been getting the pies ready to bring in to Sandy’s and the pies were no longer secure on their racks.
Which wasn’t so bad, since the back door of the delivery van wasn’t fully shut, either, and all the pies went sliding out the back end of the van. We left a trail of pies behind us as Sally screeched out of Paradise.
If John Worthy or any of his officers wanted to pursue us for stealing a van, it wouldn’t be hard to follow us, at least up to Sweet Potato Ridge Road, where the last of the pies plopped out.
So we thought, until we came up behind a tractor.
Sally was driving too fast. She had to brake hard to keep from plowing into the tractor’s back end, and when she braked, we went flying forward into the dash, and some pies that were still on the top racks came flying forward, too—and landed on our heads and all over the cab of the truck.
I yelped, wiping lemon pie—regular lemon meringue, not lemon ginseng—from my eyes, while I said a few choice curse words that would have curdled the cream on top of the chocolate pies—if there’d been any left in the b
ack of the truck.
Sally just stared straight ahead with ferocious intensity as she swerved around the tractor, ignoring the cherry filling that dripped down her back.
“For pity’s sake, Sally, you’re going to kill us.”
“No, I’m not! I’m getting us to that cave and rescuing Cletus and setting everything right!”
Twenty minutes after that, Sally hard-parked the delivery van right at the exact spot where I’d parked when I’d come out to find Trudy and her buddies at their Utopia.
I stood in the heat, watching Sally stare at the directions her dad had written down for us, and wished for the rain that had poured on me the last time I’d been out in these woods. Being pie-drenched on a hot day in the middle of the woods is not a pleasant experience. It turns out that flies and gnats and other bugs really like pie, so we kept swinging our hands in front of our faces.
“Are you sure you have a clue which way we’re supposed to head? Let me see that map,” I said.
“Are you kidding? Don’t you remember how you got lost on the orienteering club overnight in high school and it took two search parties three hours to find you?”
Truth be told, I hadn’t remembered. I worked very hard to forget that incident. I resisted the urge to say, oh thank you, cuz, for reminding me. But I also didn’t ask for Uncle Otis’s map again either.
Suddenly, Sally moaned.
“What’s the matter now?”
“We don’t have a flashlight. How are we going to see once we get to the cave?”
“Just a sec,” I said. I got back in the cab of the truck, rooted around in the toolbox that sat in the passenger-side floor, and popped back out with a flashlight and a utility knife.
“Ta da!” I said. “One flashlight, plus a knife.”
“What do we need a knife for? Are you planning on skewering a deer for our lunch?”
“No. But if Uncle Otis tied Cletus up, we can use the knife to cut the rope.”
“Oh. Damn. I wish I hadn’t mentioned lunch. Now I’m hungry.”
I grinned. “Life’s short. Eat dessert first.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“We just hijacked a pie delivery truck.”
“So? We’re wearing the pies—at least the ones that didn’t fall out the back.”
“Betcha there’s a box of mini-pies in there.”
Sally scowled at me, a look that had once driven terror into my heart. Now, with cherry pie filling on her head, and flies making a buzzing halo, the look had lost its power.
I went around to the back of the truck, and sure enough, found a box of Breitenstrater mini-pies, unharmed. I got two chocolate ones and popped out.
“Will chocolate do?” I asked with a grin. “Or do you prefer cherry?”
“Don’t press your luck,” Sally said.
I didn’t. I tossed her the chocolate mini-pie.
20
Sally ate her pie as we hiked, but I saved mine, tucking it in my roomy jeans-shorts pocket. (I’m pleased to say Sally was not a litterbug. She handed me her pie wrapper to put in my other pocket.) I was saving my pie as a treat for later—when, I prayed, we’d found Cletus.
Twenty minutes later, though, we were in the front room of the cave, and I was shining the flashlight around, and no one except Sally and me was there. Just take-out boxes from Sandy’s Restaurant, and three kerosene camp lamps to prove someone had once been here.
“Well, that’s it, Cletus isn’t here. Might as well head back to town and talk to Chief Worthy . . .”
“I’m going farther back. This cave could extend quite a ways,” Sally said.
I gripped the flashlight harder. “I’ve got the flashlight,” I said, waving its light all over the cave walls and ceiling. “You can’t go anywhere without that.”
“Whatever. I’ve got matches.”
With that, Sally knelt down, lifted the glass globe to the top of one of the kerosene lamps, pulled a book of matches out of her pocket, and lit the wick to the lamp. The lamp put out far more light than the flashlight did. Suddenly, we could see the whole front room of the cave—and darkness at the back where it continued farther under the earth.
She grinned at me. “Knew carrying Bar-None matches for the occasional cigarette would pay off some day,” she said. Then she stood and started toward the back of the cave.
I watched her take a few steps, and a few steps more, and then I grabbed one of the other kerosene lamps and trotted after her. “Wait!” I said. She paused, turned, and tossed me the matches.
The cave went pretty far back, at least a quarter mile or so, I reckoned. But it didn’t have any tunnels running off of it. And soon enough we came to a dead end, which was appropriate enough, considering that at the end of the cave were two graves with crude stone markers, shaped like crosses.
Above ground, the markers would have worn to nothing by our lifetimes. But they were below the earth, protected from the weather, and so, with our kerosene lamps, both burning, we could clearly read the hand-hewn names in the side-by-side crosses: A. BREITENSTRATER. And C. BREITENSTRATER.
At first, Sally and I didn’t say anything. We just stared in awe at the old graves.
Then Sally cleared her throat and said, “Urn, Josie, you reckon one of us should say some words here?”
“Like what?”
“Like maybe a prayer.”
“You don’t reckon a prayer was said over them back when they were buried?”
“Well, sure, there was, but it’s been a while. It could have worn off. Maybe it’s bad luck, finding them like this, after all this time, and so maybe a prayer . . .”
Sally sounded scared, so I decided the best thing to do was go along with her. I’m not much for praying out loud, so nervously, I ran my hand over my head—then wiped the stickiness of the lemon meringue pie off on my jeans-shorts leg. Then I cleared my throat, too. And said, “Dear God, only you knew the hearts of these men. Like I always say, love ‘em all and let God sort ‘em out. Well, however you’ve sorted them is great, of course. You being God and all. Just guide us to know what to do with this knowledge we’ve discovered about how Paradise was founded. And help us find Cletus. And let Trudy be okay. And let Uncle Otis end up okay, too. Amen.”
Sally sniffled. “Josie, that was beautiful.”
“Thanks,” I said.
We turned and started back to the front of the cave.
I should have prayed for us to be okay, too. Todd Raptor and Dinky Breitenstrater were waiting for us in the front room of the cave—but they weren’t exactly waiting with a warm welcome.
Dinky was on his knees on the ground, so scared he was shaking. And there was a big blotchy darkness on the front of his pants. No wonder. Todd stood behind him, a gun pointed at his head. The third kerosene lamp burned near him.
“Nice prayer,” Todd said snidely. “Oh, yeah, I could hear you,” he added in response to our surprised looks. “You must have spent a lot of time in Sunday school classes in this stupid small town of yours. Noah’s ark. David and Goliath. All of that.” He spoke in a taunting voice. “But we made sure to be quiet out here. So we could surprise you. Right, Dinky?”
Todd shoved the gun hard into Dinky’s head, and Dinky whimpered. For the first time ever, I felt sorry for Dinky.
“What the hell’s going on here?” Sally said, putting her lamp down.
I pushed back a moan. What was going on was pretty obvious—and I was hoping she’d have the same idea I did, to throw the kerosene lamps at Todd to distract him long enough to get the gun from him.
Instead, Todd had the same idea. “Glad you put the lamp down. Now, Josie, take a few steps forward, and do the same.”
I hesitated. He shoved the gun into Dinky’s head again. Dinky whimpered again. I did as Todd had told me.
“Now, to answer your question—what’s your name?”
“Sally.”
“And you’re here because?”
“My dad told Josie—she’s my cou
sin—and me that Dinky had hired my dad to kidnap Cletus and bring him here, but then my dad got arrested for ginseng poaching and couldn’t come back for Cletus. We were hoping to find Cletus and rescue him and then maybe he’d go easier on my dad . . .”
Todd laughed. “Cletus won’t be going hard on anyone. He’s dead. Now, this is interesting. What should I do with the two of you? Obviously, I’m going to have to kill you—”
At that, Sally roared and ran forward—but Todd lifted his gun, shot her through the shoulder, and had the gun back at Dinky’s head before Sally hit the ground. I started to her, but Todd’s voice stopped me. “Don’t move, Josie. I could have killed her right then, but I didn’t.”
“Why? So you can prolong your fun?”
“You think this is fun? Really? I’ve already had to dispose of Cletus’s body in the explosion.”
“You started the fire?”
“Yeah. And now I have to get rid of Dinky, plus the two of you. This is getting complicated. Only so many places to hide bodies.”
I thought of the two graves at the far back of the cave. They’d remained there two hundred years and no one had found them until this day. Todd could just shoot us all, drag our bodies back there, and forget about us.
Why didn’t he? Maybe he didn’t know the cave went that far back? But he’d heard our voices coming from back there—in a few seconds, he’d figure out that the cave ended fairly far back.
I decided to take a chance. “Sally, why didn’t you listen to me when I said we should go out the back entrance? Now look what you’ve gotten us into. No, you said, that would put us too close to the hiking trail, you said . . .”
“S-s-sorry, Josie. You were right.” Sally’s voice was full of pain. “We’d have been better off if we’d gone out the back entrance.” God love her, I thought. Shot in the shoulder, probably wondering what would happen to Harry, Barry, and Larry if she died, and still sharp enough to go along with me.
Well, somehow, I decided, I wasn’t going to let her die in the cave. Or me, either. Dinky I’d try to save, but one must have one’s priorities.
