Gracie's Game: Sudden Anger, Accidentally on Purpose (55 page)

Gracie pointed a finger at Kelly with a look of glee. "You're
right
! And then it seemed like it took her a long time to get back and…there's something I can't quite remember, something that seemed out of place at the time."

"Maybe she took a side trip to the ladies' again," Shawna suggested.

"What, does she have a bladder infection?" Cheryl asked dismissively.

"No, but Brittney had…" Gracie flicked her eyes in Kelly's direction and stopped.

"A female infection," Cheryl put it a bit more delicately.

"Yeah, she was complaining about the effects of the antibiotic and of course Allison had to jump in with
her
medical advice but then it turns out that Allison's allergic to the antibiotic," Gracie said.

"Was there a point in there somewhere, Gracie?" Cheryl asked.

Gracie frowned. "No, I don't think so! It feels like I'm close, I thought maybe if I just kept talking an idea would come." She offered a quick self-deprecating grin.

"Keep going, Gracie," Kelly urged her on. "Just tell us everything that happened and maybe something will jog your memory."

"Well, Amy was standing off to the side, talking on her phone. It pissed Serene off that she wasn't helping. And, um…"

"Maybe she was making some of those calls then," Shawna said.

"It
did
seem kind of strange, her standing where no one could hear what she was saying," Gracie said, nodding. "I think it was after that that she went to get the poster board, like she was trying to make up for it. But I think the, um, medical discussion was before she left. And, I know!" Gracie grew excited. "She came back with only a few pieces of poster board and dropped them on the gym floor and went to go put hand lotion on."

Kelly looked confused. "So?"

"It's a girl-thing," Cheryl explained. "She washed her hands after she went to the loo and then put on hand lotion when she got back."

"Which could easily explain why it took her longer than you expected," Shawna said.

Gracie was frowning again, and shaking her finger back and forth as if that idea wasn't quite right. Then she smiled and her friends could almost see the metaphoric light bulb glowing above her head. "Latex gloves!"

"Huh?" they all said nearly in unison.

"I dropped by the bathroom on my way out that evening, and I noticed a pair of latex gloves in the trashcan," Gracie said.

"I get it," Kelly said. "Amy – or
whoever
– rubbed poison ivy on something backstage, but they wore latex gloves and washed their hands afterward to make sure they didn't get any of it on their own hands."

"Right," Gracie said. "But you're right too; that doesn't mean it
had
to be Amy. She certainly had the opportunity, but so did a lot of other people. And a lot of the girls there go out with Jake."

"So far we've got three out of three where Amy definitely had opportunity," Kelly counted. "But nothing more definite than that."

Chapter 49

"Okay, on to the parking lot damage to Madison and Emily's cars," Kelly stated.

"Which could've been done with a baseball bat, and there was a bat in Jake's truck bed," Shawna said.

"Anyone, including Amy, could've picked it up and bashed the two cars and put it back; or they could've brought their own bat," Cheryl added.

"Do you think they meant for Madison to fall on the broken pieces, or just hoped they'd get into a catfight over the damage?" Gracie wondered.

"Everyone knows what a tomboy Madison is," Shawna said. "And she wears those Heelies all the time, even though she can't put the wheels down in the school building."

"There'd be a good chance that she would roll over those pieces of taillight, but she might well keep her balance and not fall," Kelly said. "I think this one was a spur-of-the-moment thing, whoever's doing this is probably keeping tabs on all the girls Jake goes out with and noticed the two cars parked across the row from each other. They couldn't resist the chance to create a scene and if Madison happened to trip so much the better."

"Okay, what's next?" Gracie asked.

"Serene's desk failure," Kelly read off. "Hey! Guess who sits at
that very same desk
the period before? Amy!"

"Well now, isn't
that
interesting," Cheryl remarked.

"She'd have plenty of time to work at the bolts, oiling them if necessary, until they were loose. Then just before she left she could take them off and be pret-ty darn sure the top would come off when Serene was there," Kelly said.

"She couldn't have known Serene would get
hurt
," Shawna objected.

"No, but it would still be scary," Gracie said. "And it's unlikely that anyone else might get caught in this particular trap."

"Next up is Tony Fletcher's trip over a rock at your step-mother's boutique," Kelly said.

"Amy has long brown hair, and she's pretty quiet," Shawna said.

"Anybody got a picture of Amy?" Gracie asked.

"I think I've got a group pic that she's in, why?" Cheryl asked.

"'Cause I want to e-mail it to Jennifer to see if she was in the boutique that day with Tanya and Meaghan."

"Doesn't mean it was her," Cheryl said. "I know I've said it before, but I
still
think that brat moved that rock himself.

"O-kay, on to Andrea's brush with cyanide," Kelly said before the girls got into an argument.

"
Amy
is in Andrea's cooking group!" Cheryl crowed.

"That would give her the perfect opportunity to put the poison in the food, but surely she wouldn't eat it herself," Shawna said.

"Ken said it would depend on how much they got, and maybe what form it was in," Gracie put in.

"I remember thinking Amy must not have liked the lasagna, she didn't eat much of it," Cheryl said.

"Which she wouldn't do if she knew it was poisoned!" Shawna said.

"Or maybe somehow she just put the stuff on Andrea's plate," Kelly suggested.

"How would you carry cyanide around without risking contaminating anything else, like yourself?" Gracie asked.

"A small container of some kind, with a tight lid," Kelly ventured.

"Like maybe a pill bottle?" Shawna asked.

"Cheryl, think back carefully," Gracie said. "What do you remember about that pill bottle you saw in Amy's backpack. That
was
the same day, wasn't it?"

"Um, yeah, I think. Last Friday, before Meaghan's wreck," Cheryl said. "Let's see. It was
big
, I remember that. But it was light, like there weren't many pills left."

"Did it rattle?" Kelly asked.

"I don't remember; I didn't actually pick it up, just saw it roll across the floor," Cheryl said. "And I couldn't see inside it, it was all dusty."

"Like it was coated with cyanide powder," Shawna insinuated.

"But that stuff's
dangerous
," Cheryl protested. "I bet you wouldn't need very much,
especially
if you weren't really trying to kill someone. Certainly not as much as that bottle would've held."

"Form," Gracie stated. "What form of cyanide would take up a lot of space?"

"Here, let me look it up again," Cheryl said, getting up and going to the computer.

"Wait a minute," Kelly said. "We did that before, and now
I'm
trying to remember something about that. Something that Gracie didn't like." He put his chin in his hand to think. "I know! Didn't the site say there was cyanide in apple seeds? Because Gracie said she wished she hadn't known that; she likes apples."

Cheryl had found the website again and was scrolling through the text, muttering as she read. "Yes," she said simply.

"Now that I think about it, I do remember my dad telling me that years ago," Kelly said. "We were camping and I'd found a wild apple tree and he told me not to eat the seeds."

"It says here that just eating a few seeds won't hurt you," Cheryl reported. "Though chewing them up makes them more hazardous. Um, oh here it is! It says it would take half a cup to be lethal."

"Would that pill bottle hold half a cup of apple seeds, do you think?" Gracie asked.

"Maybe," Cheryl allowed.

"You said chewing makes 'em more hazardous," Shawna began. "What about chopping them up? Wouldn't that do the same thing?"

"I'd think so," Kelly said. "But wouldn't you notice even chopped up seeds in your food?"

"It was lasagna," Cheryl reminded him. "The meat sauce is between layers of noodles, and it's chock full of onions and garlic so you probably wouldn't notice."

"And I bet all that stuff would hide any odd taste, too," Shawna speculated.

"If she only meant to make Andrea sick she wouldn't have had to use a whole half-cup," Gracie pointed out.

"If she'd chopped the seeds up the juice would get all over the inside of the bottle, maybe that's what made you think it was dusty-looking," Kelly said.

"Well, what are we going to do, dig through Amy's trashcan looking for apple cores? Call her mom and ask if Amy's been baking pies?" Cheryl wanted to know.

"That was nearly a week ago," Kelly said. "The trash would be gone by now. I wonder if the hospital still has that sample and can test it?"

"I'll ask Ken about it," Gracie said. "Next?"

"Shaun's locker door," he replied.

"After what Clay told us last night it sounds like it was just a
real
accident," Shawna stated her opinion.

"Agreed," the other three said. Kelly crossed it off his list.

"All right then, next is Meaghan's wreck," Kelly said.

"If we go with the apple-seed theory then that knocks out the possibility that Amy was high when she ran into Meaghan," Cheryl pointed out.

"There's the call-log on Amy's phone, to a Mazda dealer – and the website about ABS brakes," Gracie said.

"Either of which could've been made
after
the wreck," Kelly said with conviction.

"It seems odd, though," Shawna insisted.

"And Amy was
really
upset when she got to the hospital," Gracie reminded them. "Though I suppose she might be if she hadn't really meant to
hurt
Meaghan."

"Maybe she's a good actress and it was all part of her plan," Shawna said.

"She could've thought that if she
admitted
that she caused the wreck then nobody would think she might've tampered with the brakes," Cheryl said.

"Or the airbag," Kelly put in. "But we don't even know if it
could
be done, much less how."

"I
definitely
need to call Ken," Gracie said. "The police mechanics would know more about that than we do, know what kinds of things to look for."

"Good idea," Kelly said. "All right, how about the antifreeze in the park?"

"We don't know for sure that's what it was," Cheryl reminded them. "Could the cops test that, too?"

"How would Amy know about antifreeze being slick?" Kelly asked. "She doesn't strike me as the type to do more than put gas in her car!"

"Well, how would Gracie's aunt know?" Shawna asked. "Because she fell on her keister in some, that's how! Amy could have too, if her dad had spilled some on their driveway."

"Or Bobby mentioned it to her," Kelly said.

"Or
I
told her the story about Aunt Jeanine," Gracie said in a flat voice. "I remember telling Amy all about it in school the next day." She sighed loudly.

"Don't beat yourself up, Gracie," Kelly pleaded. "You couldn't have known she'd use it against you."

"Against
Brittney
," Gracie insisted. "I just happened to get in the way, but I gave her the idea."

"It's still just circumstantial," Kelly reminded them. "We don't have a dripping bottle of antifreeze covered with Amy's fingerprints."

"Dripping bottle?" Cheryl inquired. "Is that supposed to be like a smoking gun?"

"There aren't any guns in this case!" Shawna said.

"Okay, okay, it was a bad pun," Kelly admitted. "Nails on the road that caused Shawna's flat and Allison just happened to stay late at school that afternoon."

"Did you see Amy's car anywhere around?" Gracie asked.

"Huh-uh, but she'd be long gone if she deliberately spilled the nails," Shawna said. Then she hung her head in embarrassment. "Okay, yeah, I get it. Duh. If she'd gotten a flat too she'd look innocent."

"But she didn't and we don't know where she was," Cheryl said. "Next!"

"Jennifer's acid-burn," Kelly read off. "Yesterday morning, 1st hour chemistry lab. I know this one, too! Bobby said he'd found Amy sitting on the steps at school yesterday morning. No telling how long she'd been there, it could've given her time to get to the lab and spill the acid."

"Then her prints would be on the bottle," Shawna said.

"Maybe," Gracie said. "Depends on how often they use that kind of acid and how many people might have handled the bottle.
If
she wasn't smart enough to wipe them off."

"If she's watching Jake's girlfriends she'd know their schedules, but we don't know who else might have had access to the lab," Cheryl said.

"And then there's Tanya's wreck this afternoon," Kelly said. "Last one. It
sounds
like her car was tampered with, but we don't know how or by whom. You know, a lot of these 'accidents' involve cars and mechanical things – could Bobby Summers be involved?"

"I can't imagine Bobby as a killer!" Shawna said. "He's not the type. Besides, why would he do it?"