Out of the Frying Pan

by Robin Allen

  I heard movement on the other side of the hay bales, but couldn’t relate it to anything. Was she leaving? Climbing over the bales? Laying her hands on the bottle of food-grade peroxide she had hidden so she could blind me with it and make me dependent on seeing-eye dogs and Nina for the rest of my life? That got me moving.

  I stepped onto a hay bale and then another. They’re knee-high, so it was like hiking up a staircase custom made for Michael Jordan. Whether sensible or stupid, I didn’t know, but my frantic mind didn’t offer up anything else. Funny, given my fear of heights. But the barn was dark, and for us acrophobes, it’s not the elevation, but the perception that’s incapacitating, so in a way, it was a blessing that I couldn’t see. Two more steps and I reached the top.

  If I could crawl to the other side, the side by the barn door, I had a chance to make it to safety.

  I heard what sounded like a match strike and, like anyone in a panic, assumed that Megan had calculated my coordinates and was fixing to light the hay on fire, damn the barn and damn the farm. I threw my body toward the far edge and my right leg wedged between two hay bales.

  The sound wasn’t a match striking, but the four-wheeler coming to electric life. What was Megan doing? She couldn’t outrun me in that thing, much less run me down. And then the headlights came on.

  Oh.

  I watched the four-wheeler roll forward and start to turn the corner, the recharged lights painting Guernical shadows over the wooden beams and plank walls. I tried to free my leg, but the bales pushed apart and my leg sank farther down. I put my other leg between the bales to get enough leverage to heave it off the edge, which left me four bales high. I jumped off the side and came down on my ankle, which pitched me onto my back, landing me in the exact spot I had just escaped.

  Megan exploded out of the four-wheeler and pounced on me, her hands around my neck. I tried to push her away, but she was used to wrangling cattle, and I ran out of air before she ran out of strength.

  And then I did the only thing I could do in that situation. I let her win—or think she won. I closed my eyes and went into savasana, a yoga pose that has you relax every muscle, going completely limp. The English translation is corpse pose.

  “Megan!” Ian cried.

  Her grip slackened and I inhaled desperately.

  “Shut up, Ian!” she said, and tightened her fingers.

  Ian dragged her off me. “You’re going to kill her!”

  I let my head loll to the left, overselling the idea that I had passed out. The four-wheeler’s headlights weren’t directly on me, so I slitted open my right eye and saw Megan stand up and wipe sweat and blood from her face.

  “That’s the idea,” she said. And then she kicked me in the thigh. Hard. Not to see if I would move, but to punish me, the way a redneck kicks a dog that gets into his TV dinner when he goes to the fridge for another Pabst.

  “Not like this, Meg,” Ian said. “They can figure out she was stran-

  gled.”

  Megan began to pace, fussing up dust, but not moving more than two or three feet away from me. I felt safe for the moment, and my eye was watering, so I closed it and listened.

  “We could burn down the barn,” Megan said. “Blame it on her.”

  Oh, come on! Why on earth would I burn down their barn? I don’t smoke. It wasn’t the dead of winter, so I didn’t need to start a fire for warmth. I’m not an arsonist. Yes, I had earned my Fire Starter badge in Girl Scouts, but that was years ago.

  “Burn her alive?” Ian said. I heard disgust in his voice, but whether it came from the idea of me being grilled like a T-bone or that his sister was serious, I didn’t know.

  “Smoke inhalation will get her first,” Megan said seriously.

  “We can’t operate without the barn,” Ian said. “And I’m not burning the cars.”

  “Then run her down with one of them.”

  I actually felt heartened. I had a slim chance of surviving that, depending on what parts of my body were hit and if they didn’t park the car on top of me. How much did an SUV weigh, anyway?

  “How are we going to explain that to the police?” Ian asked. “That I was driving too fast inside the barn and couldn’t stop?”

  “Where’s the pitchfork?” Megan asked.

  Pitchfork! I almost threw my arms across my belly, but I waited for Ian to talk her out of death by perforation.

  “How’s that going to work?” he said.

  “She attacked you, and—”

  “No, Meg. They can tell if she was already lying down.”

  Didn’t they have farm chores to do? Where were all the interns? The sons? The alcoholics? Somebody to come into the barn and halt these grotesque plans of theirs.

  I opened my left eye, the one turned away from them, and saw a tire, so I knew I was near an SUV. If they really did leave the keys in them as Kevin had said, and I could get inside of it, I would … be captured before I got the car door shut. If I crawled under it … they would pitchfork me out.

  “The loft,” Megan said. “Take her up and drop her. We’ll say she fell.”

  “What was she doing up there?” Ian asked.

  “Why does it matter?” Megan said, demonstrating what insanity sounds like. “She was chasing a cat.”

  I waited for Ian to ask why an on-duty health inspector, or anyone over the age of six, would ever chase a cat, but he said, “I can’t lift her. Not with my back.”

  The four-wheeler’s headlights flickered, and I realized that it was running out of juice! The effect was a sort of 1970s disco stroboscope thing that distracted them for the five seconds I needed to jump to my feet and run.

  Two yards from the exit, from freedom, from survival, I was tripping and falling, caught up in a nest of baling wire. I landed hard on my stomach, and tried to kick off my wiry trap as I elbowed my body toward the door. If I could wedge it open a few inches, I would let loose a scream that had been building in me since I realized it was two against one. I was three inches from the door when I felt small, rough hands dragging me away. Nooooo!

  I reached out my right arm and thrust my hand inside a cardboard box full of my last hope. I used my teeth to twist off the little red top then poked my finger through the foil. I flipped onto my back and squirted Megan’s face with OxyGrowth. She shrieked and fell to her knees, and Ian rushed me. I sat up and aimed the bottle at him, but he vaulted past me, flung open the barn door, and tore outside.

  I tugged the baling wire off my legs and pulled myself to standing.

  “You ruined it all!” Megan screamed, crying through her hands covering her face.

  “No, she didn’t, Meg,” Ian said. He had returned with a garden hose and squirted water on his sister’s face. He looked at me. “Are you alright?”

  I still didn’t trust him, so I backed out of the barn and ran for my life.

  thirty-one

  Apparently, girl fighting takes a lot out of you, so I didn’t wake up until 8:00 the next morning, and to a surprisingly clear decision about my two good men. After I washed my face and combed hay out of my hair, I called the one I knew I wanted and invited him over for breakfast.

  I made coffee, swallowed a couple of ibuprofen tablets, then checked local news sites. Megan’s arrest had used up a lot of bandwidth: “Farmer’s Wife Kills Rival” and “Dana White Murdered” and “Organic Means to an End.” That last one from Amooze-Boosh.

  After I escaped the barn, I had run Chariots of Fire to my Jeep and called the police, telling them where to find me in the parking lot and to send an ambulance for Megan. Half an hour later, while I gave my statement to the police, the EMTs debrided my scrapes with, of all things, peroxide. They said I had a bruised windpipe, but I declined their offer of a ride to the emergency room. Sunshine is the best thing for a bruise, and there’s none of that in a hospital. So I took the rest of the day off, went home a
nd indulged in a bubble bath, then sat near a sunny window and read the dictionary until I felt sleepy.

  As I pressed the button to power down my monitor, my phone rang. “Morning, boss,” I said. I didn’t know Olive’s latest alias, and boss was as unfitting as the other names she had tried on.

  “We got another tip,” she said. “A customer saw a busboy pick his nose at the Alright Flashlight.”

  “It’s All-Night Flashlight,” I said. “Do you ever eat anywhere besides a vending machine?”

  “I get takeout from General Chew’s a lot. Why?”

  “It’s General … never mind. I’m getting a slow start this morning, but I’ll be ready to go this afternoon.”

  “Good. Bennett quit, so you and Kowsaki are covering for her. He said to give you booger boy.”

  I laughed because I was sure that’s what Gavin had called him, and I was also sure that Olive repeated it without thinking. “Speaking of names,” I said, “did you settle on a new one for yourself?”

  “Violet,” she said.

  “Violent,” I repeated. “It’s unusual, but, yeah, okay.”

  “Let. Like let sleeping dogs lay down. Violet.”

  “That’s a color and a flower,” I said. “And it’s Olive rearranged with a T on the end.”

  “That’s the poetry of it, Markham,” she said, then hung up.

  Poetry? More like she cheated an anagram. But I didn’t have time to dwell on that because I had to answer my ringing doorbell. John With stood on my porch cuddling Liza. He handed her to me, but rather than lick me with glee, she sniffed the interesting smells in my hair.

  “Are you okay?” he asked as I let him into the living room and we sat on the couch. “We read the paper. That farmer’s wife killed the chef?”

  “This whole thing is heartbreaking,” I said, then told him about Dana White being a founding member of the farm in the seventies, but she left after Perry found out she hit on Ian one night. A few months later, Megan came to the farm and a few months after that, she married Perry. I told him that Megan admitted everything to the police.

  She realized that voting Dana and Herbivore onto the farm was a mistake, so she had the idea to pour peroxide into Dana’s cup when she delivered the tour eggs to the walk-in while Dana was in the Field yelling at Randy. Then she used the confusion at the end of the party to sneak off the farm in Kevin’s SUV and throw the evidence in the nearest Dumpster.

  “Dana died from a heart attack,” I said, “but it’s going to be hard to prove that Megan caused it.” Liza started to fidget, so I placed her on the floor and she dashed down the hallway to my bedroom, which held my fresh-from-the-farm clothes. “Megan didn’t intend to kill Dana,” I said, “she just wanted to warn her to stay away.”

  “But she intended to kill you,” he said, pointing to the violent violet poetry Megan had written around my neck.

  I nodded. “That got her a charge of attempted murder, so she’ll be serving time for that at least.”

  He covered my hand with his. “Do you need anything? I can make you breakfast.”

  “I’m fine,” I said, “but thank you.”

  He stood and called for Liza, then said, “I’m a holler away.”

  “How is John doing in the election?” I asked.

  His face brightened. “No one wanted to run against him, so he’s the new president of the HOA!”

  “Is that so.”

  John With called again for Liza, and she came tearing into the living room as if being chased by all the bulls in Pamplona. He scooped her up, waved her paw at me and said, “Ciao, ciao, Poppy Markham.” He opened the front door, then called over his shoulder, “You have a visitor.”

  I went to the door and saw the one who gives me peace coming up the front walk, Drew Cooper, smiling like he knew all along I would choose him.

  THE END

  Acknowledgments

  Heaps of love and thanks for my friends and helpers, Tina Neesvig Pfeiffer, Letty Valdes Medina, Paul Allen, and Hannah Matthes, who support me in unquantifiable ways; for my writing accountability partners, Melinda Freeland and Melody Valadez, who keep my butt in a chair and my fingers on a keyboard; for my first readers, Lorie Shaw and especially Melody Valadez for her eleventh-hour read-through and insightful suggestions that made this book better; for the Austin WriterGrrls and my talented brainstorming partners Wendy Wheeler, Jennifer Evans, and Kimber Cockrill, who know how to help when I don’t even know what to ask; and for my yogis, who keep me humble.

  Special thanks to my patient subject matter experts: Detective Brian Miller with the Austin Police Department, who always makes time to answer my questions about fake murders; former Austin/Travis County senior health inspector Susan Speyer, RS, owner of Safe Food 4 U in Austin, Texas, who makes Poppy credible; and Salem, Massachusetts, public health inspector Liz Gagakis, who told me the chicken story.

  ©leigh-ann shrum

  About the Author

  Robin Allen lives and writes in the great state of Texas.