Calamity Jayne and the Sisterhood of the Traveling Lawn Gnome (34 page)

"Neither did my horse," I said.

"I told you. We didn't have anything to do with that! I swear!"

"Where to?" Taylor asked.

"The
Gazette
. There shouldn't be anybody else around at this hour. We'll park in back and use the alley door."

We parked, and I herded everyone into the breakroom/conference room, taking a moment to call Shelby Lynn and give her a head's up.

"What a dump!" Dixie said.

"You're free to leave at any time, party pooper," I pointed out.

By the time I got Jada a soda out of the machine and handed it to her, and I'd grabbed some munchies from Vendo Land (hey, I think better when I'm chewing), Shelby Lynn had arrived. I performed intros all round before we got down to business.

"I'm not sure this is a good idea," Jada said, fidgeting with her pop-top. "I don't know if I can trust you. But Mick seems to think you're okay, even if you did dump his cousin."

"Dump his—"

"For another time, Tressa," Taylor said.

"And when you brought that delicious cake—"

"Good Lord! Did everybody get cake except me?"

"Tressa!"

"Start from the beginning," Dixie said, "for those of us at the table who've been kept in the dark so long we are now sensitive to the light."

"Need to know basis, Dix," I said, joining everyone at the table. "Need to know."

She shook her head.

I reached over and popped the top on Jada's soda and set it back in front of her.

"Calm down, take a drink, and, as Miss Grumblepuss just suggested, take it from the top."

Jada took a long sip of her drink, made a loud swallow, and set the can down.

"It's so confusing. I don't really know where to begin."

"Let's start with the gun. That seems to be the most pressing thing right now. Tell us about the gun," I instructed.

"It was
me
, not Mick.
I
stole the gun. But I didn't want to. Cissy made me!"

"Cissy? Cissy McCoy?" Shelby said.

She nodded.

"How does a fellow cheerleader make you steal a gun?" Taylor asked.

Jada shook her head.

"You won't understand. I know you won't. It started so innocently. We'd all been on the squad last year. Me, Kylie, Natalie, Dani, Kiera, Portia, and Cissy. When Martina was hired at the end of last year, we were so excited to have someone like her be our coach."

"When you say someone like her—"

"You remember Mrs. Tomatich, the PE teacher and cheerleading coach," Shelby said.

Enough said.

"Martina Banfield is different," Jada said. "She's uber cool! Before the end of the school year, she made a point to get together with us. We hung out all the time. She took us places, bought us lunches, pedicures, manicures, clothes. She got us alcohol and once in a while, even weed."

"Okay. That's way beyond the pale," Taylor observed.

"I was going to say 'creepy as hell,'" Kari said.

"Oh, it was nothing like that. She just really, really wanted us to bond. She's really into team building and establishing trust and things like that. She's super smart about psychology and group dynamics and relationships and stuff."

"I'll just bet she is," Kari said and cracked her knuckles.

"Martina told us all the work we put in on the exercises as a group would help us in our competitions. And it did! It worked. We were totally in sync. We had such a level of trust."

"You keep saying using past tense. We
were
in sync. We
had
a level of trust. Did something happen to cause that to change?" I asked.

She took another drink of soda.

"This is where it gets hard and where you won't understand."

"Try us," I said.

She took a deep breath.

"Those exercises I mentioned? They were trust exercises."

"Trust exercises? What do you mean?" Taylor asked.

"Martina said in cheerleading and dance, trust is the most important thing. We had to trust that our sisters would be where they were supposed to be when they were supposed to be there and do what they were supposed to do when they were supposed to do it. She said that in order to establish that level of physical trust we needed to establish psychological trust. She put it like we
literally
have each other's backs."

I looked at Taylor.

"Does that sound kosher?"

"It depends on what those 'trust' exercises were."

"At first they were harmless," Jada said. "We'd tell each other things no one else knew."

"Like secrets?" Shelby asked.

Jada nodded. "First we'd tell our own secrets, things we'd done or thought, and then we started to share secrets about other people. Things we knew about other people that the others didn't know."

"You mean gossip," Dixie said.

"Sort of. But it was shared with the understanding that it wouldn't go any further than the group. And it worked. None of us broke that trust."

"So you had a big love fest and dished dirt on other people. Where does breaking and entering and stealing a firearm come in?" I asked.

"Martina said we needed to 'up the ante,' she called it. We needed to put ourselves at actual risk of harm to build upon the trust we'd established. Without inherent risk, trust is irrelevant, Martina said."

"Martina says a lot of things," Kari muttered.

"Upping the ante? So, that's what they're calling criminal activity now?" Dixie said. "Nice."

"It wasn't a big deal at first. We'd go into a store and help the other sister shoplift and cover for her. Then that wasn't enough so we started stealing weird items from people's homes. Stupid things like solar lights and pin wheels and outdoor thermometers and bird baths—"

"And garden gnomes from Planet X!" I said.

Jada's forehead crinkled and then cleared.

"Oh. You mean
Fides
."

"Fides?"

"It's Latin for
trust
. Cissy showed up with him one day and proclaimed he was a symbol of our trust. Cissy decided
Fides
would 'mark' our territory."

I grimaced. Eww.

"What I meant is that we would place Fides
somewhere on the property we planned to hit next, take a picture, and have this ceremony in the woods where we'd drink and dance around Fides and burn the photo of the place we'd just hit. I thought it was lame, but you don't say no to Cissy."

"So that's what you were doing in Dusty Cadwallader's woods," Shelby said. "Drinking and dancing around a garden gnome?"

"Portia's grandparents live on the other side of the clearing. Their property backs up to Dusty's. We'd sneak through her grandparents' woods to get to the clearing. It's not that far. We'd park our cars at Portia's grandparents and take one car for our exercises."

"Those aren't exercises, Jada. They're crimes," I said.

"So you went from stealing lawn gnomes and black and gold flamingos to spray-painting? Why?" Taylor asked.

"It just got out of control. We started with a few pink tornadoes on a few buildings, and it just snowballed."

"Those chubby tornadoes from your middle school booklet!" Kari said. "I knew it!"

Jada looked up.

"That's it? That's how you knew it was me? From a middle school assignment?"

I nodded.

"Mrs. Davenport is a language arts teacher. Your former teacher kept your work, and Kari here came across it when she took over. She remembered seeing the drawings and mentioned it to me when they found their way into the works of the vandals."

"I thought you were suspicious of me from the beginning, but I never knew why."

"I'm still waiting to hear about the gun," I said.

"I wanted out. I wasn't comfortable. I'd been talking to Mick, and he said we should go to the police, but by that time I was in too deep. And I was scared. Cissy is scary. It's like she needs this in her life. It's the most important thing to her. The Sisterhood, she calls it. She started bullying and threatening. She threatened my little sister if I didn't stay with the group. I'm sure she threatened most of the others, too. When she saw I was ready to quit cheerleading, get out of the whole thing, that's when she told me if I proved my loyalty to the group by doing one more exercise, she'd let me quit. If I didn't, something terrible could happen to Jules."

"Your sister."

She nodded.

"I know I should have gone to the police, but I believed her. There's something not right about Cissy—something that this bond of trust brought out in her. Something ruthless. So I went along. I helped with the break in, and I took the gun."

"And you gave it to Mick."

She nodded.

"I sure wasn't going to give it to Cissy. She's psycho! So, yes, I gave it to Mick. He promised to get rid of it, and that was it. I was out."

"Only it didn't work out that way, did it? Because Cissy wouldn't let you leave after all," Taylor said.

Jada nodded.

"She told me we had an 'unbreakable bond' and no one left The Sisterhood."

"That's seriously medieval," Dixie said.

"Let's go back to Dusty Cadwallader for a minute," I said. "I know you're the one who made the call to me from his phone that may have saved his life."

Her eyes got big again.

"How?"

"I have a gift, my friend," I said, figuring I could let her in on the dead zone and vanilla musk clues later.

"Oh. God. Hand me something salty. Quick! I need to settle my stomach," Dixie moaned.

"What happened to Dusty in the first place?" I finished.

"Cissy. Cissy happened. She was pissed that we were losing our Sacred Sisterhood Ground. We'd not only picked that location to meet because it was close to Portia's grandparents, but because of that Dusty guy."

"What do you mean because of Dusty?" Taylor asked.

"Everyone knows he's got issues. Everybody laughs at him and calls him names and says he's crazy. You know. For believing in all that UFO stuff. Cissy said it would be the perfect place to meet. Even if the guy did report strange activity in the woods, no one would believe him. And they didn't. Until you did," she told me. "When we lost the meeting place, Cissy was so angry. She said that we needed to get back at him and teach him a lesson for interfering with The Sisterhood. So she bought these ridiculous alien masks that glow in the dark, and we put them on and went back out and found the guy working on these four-wheelers. He ran. We chased him, and he fell."

"And you left," I said. "All of you just left him there."

"I didn't know he was hurt! I thought he just tripped and he'd just make his way back home. When I found out he was missing, I got worried."

"How did you find out Dusty hadn't been seen?" I asked.

"Some kid at school has a relative who dispatches. He said something about the guy being missing, and he must've been abducted by aliens. You know. Being a smart ass."

"So you drove out there, found him, took his phone and charged it, got a signal, called me, and took the phone back to Dusty. And the vodka?"

"I shouldn't have done that. I wanted to make it appear the guy was drunk and fell. I figured if he said he was being chased by a pack of aliens everyone would think he was hallucinating or whacko or both. Especially if it appeared he'd been drinking."

"But it backfired because Dusty doesn't drink," I said.

"It also backfired because that's what got Mick arrested," Jada said.

"What do you mean?"

"The vodka bottle. The cops found one in the woods and traced the sale back to Mick. I took both bottles from Aunt Mo's."

"So, the bottles link Mick to the vandalism
and
the attack on Dusty Cadwallader," I said.

"And lead them right to the gun! You've got to do something! Mick didn't do anything. No vandalism. No trespassing. No thefts. The only thing he did was clean the paint off the trees in the clearing to help me. That's all."

"Wait a minute. What about my place? What about my horse? If you and Mick didn't do that, who did?"

"It wasn't us! I swear!"

"Wait a minute. She could be telling the truth," Taylor said. "Look at the photos of the tornadoes at your place and all the previous ones. Notice any differences?"

"These are tall and skinny and rather crudely done," Kari said, pointing to the ones on the folks' garage door and the barn.

"The other ones are short and plump," Shelby said.

"Don't say it," Dixie said, giving me 'don't-go-there' look.

"They could have been drawn by someone else."

"I am telling the truth! I am! I swear it wasn't Mick or me!" Jada said.

"Then who was responsible then?"

"Wait a minute. Didn't you say Robbie Rodgers was arrested, too?" Shelby Lynn said.

Jada nodded.

"He's Natalie Jorgensen's boyfriend."

"He is?" I asked, thinking Jada might really be telling the truth about the hit out home. All of a sudden it started to make a sick kind of sense.

"Robbie's big buddies with Dani's boyfriend, Caleb Tucker," Jada said.

"And he could have found out about Abigail's gnome from his girlfriend or even Stan and made that call to Abigail," Taylor pointed out.

"You think Stan's kid caused the damage at your place to provide an alibi for his girlfriend?" Dixie asked.

I shrugged. "You've heard the saying, 'the things we do for love.'"

Including, it seemed, finger-painting an Appaloosa.

"Please! You've got to help Mick before they find the gun!" Jada said.

I considered my options for a moment. "I'll see what I can do," I finally said and left the room to make the call. One advantage you have when you call Manny is that it never takes up much of your time. The conversation went something like this."

Ring, ring!

"H'lo."

"Manny?"

"Yo."

"Tressa"

"Yo?"

"What's that called again where police can search an arrested person's vehicle and look in a trunk?"

"On it."

End.

I returned to the break room. Jada jumped to her feet and ran to me.

"What happened? What did you do?" she asked.