The Tiara on the Terrace (8 page)

“See? I'm not cut out for this, Grace. I told you,” I groaned as we hung up the guest coats and prepped the soup course that—lucky for me—adult waiters were serving. The last thing I needed was to splatter boiling hot puke-green split
pea soup in someone's lap.

“Practice makes perfect,” she said with a smile.

“Or even pretty perfect?” I nodded toward Lauren Sparrow who was gliding over the dark polished wood floors in her high heels, visiting clusters of guests like a hummingbird floating from flower to flower. Her cheeks glowed—probably thanks to a little Pretty Perfect magic—and her hair cascaded to her shoulders in relaxed waves. Grace gazed at her as if in a trance.

As Ms. Sparrow nudged Mr. Lee and Mr. Zimball away from the group they'd been talking to, I shot Grace a look. I'd told her about Sparrow's reaction at the Court announcements—and neither of us was sure what to make of it. Was she trying to tell Zimball and Lee something? “Eavesdrop opportunity at ten o'clock,” I whispered. “Or is it two o'clock?”

“Target acquired,” she said, grabbing another tray of deviled eggs. “Going in.”

As Grace held out her tray to the cluster of people next to Mr. Lee and Ms. Sparrow, I lingered at the table behind them, filling water glasses and wishing I could use Grace's mouth-open, hands-cupping-ears spy trick to hear better.

“I'm just saying we need to do some damage control here, that's all,” Ms. Sparrow said, sounding like she was at
a board meeting. “Typical of Barbara, isn't it? I mean, she knew two days ago that's what we'd all decided. And she doesn't pull Lily then? She waits until we
crown
her? It's an embarrassment. And cruel to her daughter, by any stretch. What kind of person does that?” She shook her head. “As if the Festival doesn't have enough of an image problem right now.”

Grace slipped off with her tray toward the kitchen. I rushed behind. “Did you hear that?” I whispered. “
Two days
ago. Barb knew Lily wasn't going to be queen.”

Grace nodded solemnly. “Motive: established.”

A tinkling like a bell interrupted us. Harrison Lee stood at the head of the long Royal Court banquet table at the center of the room, tapping the rim of his champagne glass with a spoon. “A toast,” he called out. His cheeks were flushed. Rod's dad sat next to him, smiling; he was the Festival's second-in-command now, after all. I caught myself wondering if Rod would look the same when he was older. Mr. Zimball had brown curls, too, only gray and wispy at his temples.

“To our beautiful Roses,” Lee raised his glass to the Royal Court, obviously still relishing his new role as Festival President. As Sienna beamed and held up her water glass, Jardine turned to the ballroom crowd as if expecting something more, like a ritual foot washing—or mass
kneeling in worship. Kendra Pritchard smiled, her braces gleaming. I had to blink away a vision of myself polishing her headgear at bedtime.

Grace leaned closer to me while everyone clinked glasses. “Listen, I'm trying out for pages—alone, if I have to.”

Her words stung like a slap. Just like that, she'd do this without me? I looked over to the Royal Court. They'd recovered from the hors d'oeuvres crisis and were squeezing in for a picture, their arms slung around each other like they'd been friends since daycare.

“That's a terrible idea,” I said quietly.

Grace shrugged. It was like she thought deciding to go undercover alone was no bigger deal than picking an ice cream flavor. “Sophie, someone killed Steptoe, I'm absolutely sure of it, and if we don't—”

“Ladies?”

My heart shot up to the mansion's top floor and back. I turned to find Lauren Sparrow smiling back warmly, completely unaware she'd nearly thrown me into cardiac arrest. “Table Six needs a bread refill when you get a chance,” she said. “Got to get ready for the soup course.”

Grace and I both practically flew to the kitchen to get more bread.

“She heard me, didn't she?” Grace said breathlessly,
pulling a loose strand of her hair to her mouth. “Oh, man. She totally heard me.”

I seized my opening. “This is what I mean, Grace! If a murderer is on the loose—that's a huge ‘if'—and they find out what we're up to? They might try to kill us.”

Grace blinked as she gazed through the archway at the guests. The piano had stopped, and the roar of conversation had overtaken the room. She let the strand of hair drop back to her shoulder and turned back to me. “You know, maybe you're right, Sophie—”

A crash and thud rang out from the ballroom. We whirled around.

Rod's dad stood at the banquet table, waving both hands like a shipwrecked castaway. His chair lay knocked over on its side. “Someone call nine-one-one!” he shouted, cords straining in his neck.

Next to him a man was slumped over his soup bowl.

The gelled black hair was unmistakable.

It was Festival President Harrison Lee.

T
wo Festival Presidents down within forty-eight hours. My knees went weak. The ballroom air suddenly felt stifling, and the yellowed photos of past Winter Sun Festivals along the wall blurred together. The Doctors Yang sprang from their seats, pushing through the crowd that had closed in around the Royal banquet table. Sirens wailed as Janice Yang felt for Mr. Lee's pulse. Moments later paramedics tromped across the ballroom floor, their first aid kits and oxygen masks rattling. The lights from the ambulance flashed through the ballroom's arched windows. Grace and I stood in shock as their red glow swept over us dizzily.

We didn't speak. No one did. I gripped Grace's sweaty hand as the paramedics hauled Harrison Lee past us on a stretcher, my heartbeat crowding out the other sounds in the room. Lee's eyes were half closed, and his hair was slicked to his
forehead in greenish pea soup–drenched clumps. He let out a long moan. Thank goodness—otherwise I wouldn't have even been sure he was breathing. It was a relief, too, that he looked only a little bit worse than Kendra Pritchard, who had also required medical attention for her fit of hyperventilating—and for the nasty gash on her forehead where Jardine Thomas's tiara had hit her when it tumbled off her head. One more inch and Kendra would have been waving from the Royal Court float wearing a bedazzled eye patch.

I caught sight of Rod across the room, clutching his mom's arm. He locked his wide eyes on mine. And that's when I realized it. His dad could be next.

By the next morning my mind was a whirling mess. All night I'd tossed and turned, nightmares of Mr. Zimball being drowned in vats of pea soup and Coral Beauty rosebuds playing on a feverish loop. Grace had probably sent me a zillion texts, but once I'd come clean about getting in trouble with Barb Lund, my parents had confiscated my cell.

Grace and I had expected Officer Grady to leap into action after Lee's collapse—to rope off the banquet table with crime tape, to gather witnesses to interview, to hustle soup bowls off for evidence. But, apart from some help with crowd control, Grady didn't call other officers to the
scene. The adults were really worried, of course, but if they thought it was strange that a
second
Festival President was down, they sure didn't show it. The most I heard were a few people muttering about a cursed Festival. “The ghost of Willard Ridley is getting his revenge,” the lady who'd handed me her lipstick-stained glass had joked. The Yangs explained to everyone that Lee had most likely collapsed from stress, dehydration, and low blood sugar. “He sure has been dealing with a lot,” Mr. Zimball had said, sighing, but I thought I saw a nervous flicker in his eyes.

When I came out to breakfast, Grandpa and Dad were sitting at the table sipping their coffee and silently trading sections of the newspaper as the dishwasher hummed behind them. “Oh good, you're up,” my father said as I came in. He tried to look stern. “Last thing you need is to be late reporting to Ms. Lund.”

“Huh!” Grandpa squinted at his section of the newspaper. It showed a really complicated diagram of what I assumed was the Girl Scout float. He rapped his knuckle on the picture and gave a low whistle. “What a way to go.”

I stared down at the 3D cross-section diagram with all its swooping arrows. It looked so official, as if the police had flown in a team of physicists specializing solely in fake marshmallow deaths to figure it all out.

“Have you heard any updates on Mr. Lee?” I asked my dad.

“The Yangs say he's still resting in the hospital, as far as I know.”

I cleared my throat. “Do you think it's weird that, you know, first Mr. Steptoe has an accident”—I stumbled over the word—“and then Mr. Lee collapses?”

“Why would that be weird?” My dad frowned as he smoothed the tufts of hair around his ears—the only hair he still had—then looped his AmStar lanyard around his neck and straightened his tie. “Poor Harrison. It's no wonder. His good buddy dies, he's thrust into the spotlight, in charge of everything. He has to manage the press, take over the Festival, give improvised televised speeches—all while putting on a brave face? I doubt he's slept at all since they discovered Jim. I'd have fallen apart even earlier with all that stress.”

“I don't know,” I said. “I thought it could look like—like maybe someone was after the Festival Presidents on purpose.” I mumbled that last part as quickly as I could.

Grandpa scratched his head, as if seriously considering my theory. He turned his newspaper sideways and peered so closely at it that his nose practically grazed it.

“The thing is, after Kendra found Mr. Steptoe, Grace and
I . . .” I wasn't sure how to put it without getting myself in more trouble. “We went back into the float barn and overheard the police saying that it would take at least two weeks to investigate—”

“You sneaked back into the float barn after they evacuated you?” My dad interrupted before I finished, his blue eyes widening. “Soph! Do you realize how dangerous that could've been?”

He shook his head at me and leaned forward in his chair. “Listen, you and Grace went through a lot with all that Tilmore Eight fugitive business.” He softened his tone and ruffled my hair. Usually, I liked it when he did that, but right then it made me feel about six years old. He might as well have counted the freckles on my nose, like he used to do when he tucked me in at night. “You were excellent investigators. I know that. We all know that. If it weren't for you girls, Deborah Bain would still be on the loose in this town.”

“Darned straight!” Grandpa interrupted, winking at me. “Ow.” He frowned and rubbed his knee under the table where my dad must've nudged him too hard.

My dad ignored him. “But you're getting carried away.” He sighed. “And I think your pal Trista is getting carried away too. Last night Jason from AmStar told me that she thinks she knows the float couldn't malfunction. She asked
the float engineers to explain it to the police.”

“Did she?” I asked, relieved to hear it.

“She's a firecracker, that one,” Grandpa Young interrupted. “We could have used someone like her in the 187th Airborne.”

My dad ignored him. “This was a terrible, one-in-a-million accident, but trust me, Sophie. The police have covered their bases.” He waved to the newspaper. “Ensuring a safe Festival is everyone's number one concern.” He grabbed his car keys and gently squeezed my shoulder on his way to the door. “Now why don't you worry about staying off Barb Lund's radar instead, huh?”

I stared at my half-eaten toast and nodded. Little did he realize that staying off Barb Lund's radar was exactly what I was worried about.

“Lee is still in the hospital, Sophie,” Grace said, shaking her head as we walked into the float barn to report to Barb that morning as commanded. The floats' half-built ice cream sundaes and Ferris wheels and cartoon figures looked creepy without volunteers scrambling all over them. I shivered a little. The fog had made the morning especially chilly, but I would have been freezing no matter what. I felt cold from the inside.

“The doctors say it's stress, but off the record, they told my parents they don't know what's up. They're keeping him there. Dehydration? Stress? Or attempted poisoning? I think this was an attack. Pure and simple.” She shot me a firm look and then held out her pen.

“It's now or never, Sophie.”

I knew she was right, but I kept my arms glued to my side. “You know, Lee
has
been under an awful lot of stress,” I said, repeating my dad's words at breakfast.

She thrust the pen toward me again. “You really want to wait around to see who the killer hits next? Rod Zimball's dad is Festival president now, you know.”

I looked at the white teardrop-shaped half of our yin/yang friendship pendant hanging around her neck. She used to claim the necklace didn't go with any of her outfits, but we'd both worn our pendants every single day since we'd captured Deborah Bain. I felt a little pang as I remembered that night on the beach below the bluffs two months earlier, when it looked like we might not even make it out alive—gunshots echoing above, waves crashing around us.

Grace sighed impatiently. “You captured a killer and now you're afraid of a little royal-page primping?”

I opened my mouth to argue, but Barb Lund's screechy voice saved me.

“That you, Young and Yang?” she shouted from her office.

Grace and I cringed and bolted down the float barn aisle like Olympic track runners, stopping to catch our breath for only a second before shuffling into Lund's office. It was a stuffy little room in the far corner of the warehouse.

It took me a moment to even notice Barb Lund amid all the clutter. She might have run a tight ship when it came to float decorating, but her office looked like the entire archives of Festival history had exploded inside of it. Photo collages of past Winter Sun Festival floats hung crookedly on the wall next to autographed headshots of former members of the Royal Court. “Love and Hugs, Princess Stephanie,” read one photo of a big-haired teenager wearing a pink dress that looked like a birthday cake. Then there were the stuffed animals. I mean, I like Winnie the Pooh as much as the next person, but do you really need a shelf of twenty of them in various sizes?

Barb hunched over a dusty computer monitor reading email. Judging from her deep frown, she wasn't anywhere near over Lily's royal snub. If anything, she looked even angrier. “Late with the onion seed delivery again,” she exclaimed. “I could wring their necks!” Her chair squealed as she turned to us. “Speaking of late.” She thrust a finger at
a dusty digital clock. The clock's red numbers stared back: 7:00 exactly.

Grace opened her mouth to say something, but Lund cut her off. “Don't tell me you don't know about Festival Time,” she said, then singsonged a little rhyme: “On time? You're late! Gotta hurry up and wait!”

Grace and I stood in silence, not daring to look at each other. “We're really sorry,” I offered, at last.

Ms. Lund didn't seem to hear me. “You don't even want to know what happened when Queen Marianne only showed up
on time
for float boarding on parade day in 1998,” she said, shaking her head. Ms. Lund took Festival tradition so seriously, she talked about past Royal Court queens as if they were actual monarchs. If Lily were still on the Court, Barb would have been so busy bowing and curtseying to her she would have had trouble showing up at any time, let alone Festival time.

We flinched as Barb unclipped a Winnie the Pooh key chain from her belt loop, unlocked a desk drawer, and shoved two jars and two pairs of tweezers our way. “Start with the ice cream sundae. Any wrong-colored petal”—I gulped as she leaned forward—“make sure it's gone for good. Understood?”

“Yes, ma'am!” Grace cried out before we both turned
and ran away. We didn't stop until we were back at the Root Beer float. “Jeez, that was scary,” she said, leaning against the side of an ice cream cone as I caught my breath. “How can a woman with that much love for Winnie the Pooh be such a pain?”

“Haven't you heard?” I looked at her sideways. “She's not a pain, Grace. She has high standards.”

Grace laughed. “Guess I didn't get the memo.”

“Maybe she's just misunderstood,” Trista interrupted, poking her head out from the camouflaged front compartment where a driver would hide away to steer the float during the actual parade. I was surprised—and relieved—to see her there so early. She grunted as she shimmied herself free from the compartment. “Ugh, it's awful in there,” she said, then sneezed into the crook of her arm loudly—twice. She held up a small device with several levers. “Remote control is going to revolutionize this festival. Worth showing up early to get the quiet time in.”

“Hey, weren't you supposed to be volunteering with us last night?” I asked, realizing she probably didn't even know about Lee yet. I couldn't wait to hear what she'd think.

Trista shrugged. “My tuxedo T-shirt was at the dry cleaners.”

“Oh,” I said, as if that actually explained it.

Grace launched into a reenactment of the Beach Ball disaster, stopping short of actually imitating Lee's moan as they carried him off on the stretcher. When she'd finished, Trista set down her remote control and made a face. “Dehydration? Stress?”

“Ridiculous, right? You'd think he'd be stabilized by now.” Grace folded her arms.

Trista sighed and ran her hand through her thick curls. “I'll tell you what's ridiculous. I went to the AmStar team and asked for help explaining why it can't be an accident to the LVPD. They wouldn't take me seriously.” She looked at us sheepishly. “They think I'm letting you two mess with my head. Like, we think everything's a murder mystery now because of everything that went down.”