CHAPTER TWO
During all the commotion over the bomb threat, it slipped my mind that Max seems to believe the Black Widow is hanging out in someone else’s body. The boardwalk’s still packed since the cops closed the pier while they make absolutely sure there is no danger.
“Let me get this straight.” I lean toward Max so nobody passing by can hear me. People already think I’m crazy enough. “By a Ringer, you mean body-stealer.”
“Something like that.”
“Before the whole switcheroo could happen,” I say slowly, “do you think they grew the host in a spare pod?”
Max wrinkles his nose. “I don’t know what you mean.”
If he’s so culturally illiterate he hasn’t seen Invasion of the Body Snatchers, I’m not about to enlighten him.
“Or maybe this is more of a doppelganger thing.” I scratch my chin like I’m deep in thought. “Except since the Black Widow’s already a twin, how do we know she wasn’t already Looney Leanne’s doppelganger? Before she was murdered and managed not to die, I mean.”
“I get the feeling you’re not on board with the body-switching,” Max says.
Rolling my eyes would be too obvious so I give him the blank stare. “That’s because I’m actually sane.”
“I need to show you something.” He grabs my hand. If we hadn’t agreed to fake a romance, I’d at least think about snatching it back. But I don’t even know where we’re going.
Some of the tourists head for the arcade while others fill the outdoor tables at the pizza and sandwich shops that populate the boardwalk. Most people, including Max and me, stream into the carnival.
“You’re working tonight, right?” Max asks above the chatter of voices and noise from the midway.
“Right.” I’m supposed to be taking tickets at the Monster Slide and handing out burlap bags for the riders to sit on.
“We can do this later if you need to get back to it. I don’t want to get you into trouble with Roxy.”
“Don’t worry about Roxy.” The lying, conniving carnival boss is in trouble with me. I still plan to hunt her down and confront her about what I learned earlier tonight. Later, though. “I’m dying to see what you have to show me.”
Okay, considering the two recent murders in Midway Beach, that’s not the best choice of words.
Max walks straight to the trailer that serves as the administrative hub for the carnival. Since Roxy’s a hands-on boss who spends most of her time walking the grounds, it’s vacant for most of the night. Employees store their stuff in the trailer, so all of us have the combination for the lock on the metal door. Max punches in the numbers while my brain whirs.
“This something you need to show me, is it in your backpack?” If it’s another missing person flier, that won’t make me a believer. But, then, nothing will.
“Nope.”
“Then why are we going in the trailer?”
“Patience, Jade,” Max says and pushes open the door.
The overhead lights are on, shining on an office that looks the same as it always does: sterile and empty with backpacks piled against one of the walls. There’s also a fairly large desk, a desktop computer and a gray file cabinet. The only other thing of interest is the bulletin board where Roxy posts the night’s work schedule.
Max bends over, balancing his hands on the fronts of his thighs.
“Here, Punch,” he calls. “Here, boy.”
Nothing happens. Surprising. Roxy sometimes brings her oversized, calico cat—is its name really Punch?—to work. The last few times the cat was around, it practically accosted me, jumping at my legs and wagging its tail so hard I could feel a breeze.
“Are you sure Punch is here today?” I hadn’t come across him, but then I’d arrived for work tonight before Roxy.
“Oh, yeah. I saw him earlier.”
“I thought Roxy’s cat was a girl.”
“Judy is a girl, but she’s not here today.” Max knows way more about the boss’s pets than I do. “Punch is her dog. ”
“Weird names.”
“Roxy told me they’re from some old-timey carnival sideshow, I think with puppets.”
For a dog, Punch is awfully quiet. The trailer’s completely silent.
“Punch,” Max calls again, using a coaxing voice.
“This is a waste of time, Max. I don’t think—”
“Patience,” he repeats, taking a step deeper into the trailer. “Pu-unch.” His voice is a singsong now. “Where are you, boy?”
A muscular black dog with brown markings, probably a Doberman mix, slinks from behind the desk. It’s a good size, maybe sixty pounds. With lithe, silent movements, the dog pads across the office to Max and rubs against his leg.
“Good boy.” Max runs his hand down the dog’s back, from its head to its tail. The dog arches its back, sticking its backside in the air.
Then it makes a strange guttural noise that sounds almost like a purr.
“Well, that’s weird,” I say.
The dog’s tail sticks straight up, not quite wagging but quivering. Max looks straight at the animal, but the dog won’t meet his eyes. Suddenly the dog retreats, moving with feline grace across the office and leaping onto an armchair in one fluid movement. Without paying us any more attention, it starts licking its coat.
“That’s weirder,” I say. “Do you think he was raised by a family of cats?”
Max tilts his head and raises his eyebrows, looking thoroughly confused. Come on! You mean he hasn’t seen Jungle Book or Tarzan, either?
“That’s not what’s going on here.” Max gives me a measured look, like he expects me to figure it out myself.
But the conclusion he wants me to reach? Well, it’s impossible.
“You need more convincing.” Max crosses the room to the file cabinet with me following. On top of the cabinet is a small silver tin can with one of those easy-open lids. Max pops the tab, and I smell tuna.
Punch makes the strange noise again. It’s not a bark or a yap or anything normal like that. More like a rasping... meow.
Max empties the open can of tuna into a bowl, carries it to the armchair and sets it down on the floor. “Here, boy.”
Punch leaps down from the chair with an easy grace and delicately laps at the tuna with his tongue.
“Well?” Max looks at me with raised eyebrows.
What I’m thinking is too fantastic for words.
“Have you noticed how odd Roxy’s cat acts?” Max asks. “The other day, she chewed up some backpacks. Guess that’s why Roxy started bringing her dog to work instead.”
Except that’s backward logic. Cats are typically the pets that can be left alone indoors for hours on end. Yeah, some of them get bored and tear up things. But with their claws, not their teeth.
Max gazes at me expectantly. We’ll be here all night if I don’t say it aloud.
“You think Roxy’s dog and cat switched bodies.”
It sounds even nuttier when spoken aloud.
“No,” Max says. “I think someone—or something—caused them to switch bodies.”
I shake my head back and forth. “There must be another explanation.”
He crosses his arms over his chest. “I’m listening.”
I close my eyes and concentrate but nothing comes to me.
“Okay, I can’t come up with one right now. But even if Punch and Judy switched bodies, and I’m not saying they did, it doesn’t follow the Black Widow did the same thing.”
“Why not?”
“Because if she was part of a body switch, the other person would be inside her body.” I feel proud of myself for making such a logical point. “Like Punch and Judy.”
“Not if someone made it seem like Constance committed suicide after the switch was made.”
“What would be the point of that?” I ask.
“She can’t risk being exposed. If everybody thinks the Black Widow is dead, she doesn’t go to trial. She gets away with her husband’s murder.”
I
t’s preposterous, yet it makes a creepy sort of sense. Constance Hightower wasn’t charged with her husband’s murder until months after he died, which gave her plenty of time to stash his money where only she could access it. “She’d be rich, too.”
“Now you’re catching on,” Max says.
If not for Punch freaking me out by the way he’s lapping up tuna beside the armchair, I’d give in to my weakening knees and sit down. I still can’t entirely buy the switcheroo, but at this point I can’t afford to discount anything. Besides, it it’s not true, it means Max is up to something and I’ll be in position to figure out what.
“There’s something else I didn’t tell you,” Max says. “Something that might help to convince you.”
I brace myself. Whatever it is, I have a feeling I don’t want to hear it.
“You were right yesterday at the field. I did get another memory back. A strong one. Another person was there with me.”
“Who?”
“I only heard him.” Max maintains that, like me, his face was covered by a hood when he was tied to the chair. “He was moaning about how his head hurt. I think he was supposed to switch bodies with me.”
“But how is something like body switching even possible?” I speak my doubt aloud. “How would it work?”
“I don’t know,” Max says. “But when it’s happening, I think it hurts. That’s why both of us had such crushing headaches.”
“Hold on. If somebody abducted me to do a...” I can hardly get the words out. “...body switch, why don’t I remember another person moaning?”
“You remember an animal crying.” He’s right. It was a plaintive, pitiful noise that I thought was coming from a fox. “Think about it, Jade. Before experimenting on humans, it’s common to have animal trials.”
In The Fly, the eccentric scientist turned a baboon inside out while teleporting it from one pod to another. Too bad for him the experiment worked on the second baboon, because we all know what happened to the housefly. Except maybe movie-illiterate Max.
“Then why aren’t I inside a fox’s body and running through the woods right now?”
“Not every trial is successful,” he says.
“How do I know you’re not someone else?”
“You get my point. You can’t tell.”
“You can’t even tell if there’s been a body switch if there’s not a dead body,” I say, going with the far-fetched flow.
“Exactly. But sometimes a dead body is just a dead body. How many people committed suicide in the field at Wilder Woods after that singer killed himself?”
“Six or seven.”
“If either of us had turned up dead, the police would have written it off as a suicide,” Max says. “I think that’s why we were taken to that particular field.”
“But who took us there? What we’re talking about is impossible. People can’t just do something like that.” My mind buzzes with supernatural possibilities: Aliens, demons, magic amulets.
“I don’t pretend to have all the answers,” Max says. “But just because we don’t understand something doesn’t mean it’s not happening.”
“If you’re right,” I say slowly, “how do I know the body switch wasn’t successful on you?”
“Check the dates. There won’t be a suicide in that field.”
I’m not willing to take his word for it. Too bad my phone’s a dinosaur. “Does your phone have Internet?”
He nods and hands his phone to me. Moments later, I confirm that no one died in Wilder Woods or anywhere close on the dates he was missing. The most recent suicide in the coastal forest was last November.
“Let’s assume you’re on the mark about all this,” I say slowly. “You were taken about a month before me. Why try a human-to-human switch before an animal-to-human switch?”
“We don’t know when Punch and Judy were switched, but it was probably before I was abducted. Maybe I was part of the first human-to-human try. Since that didn’t work, it makes sense to go back to animal trials.”
“Animal-human trials, you mean.”
“Yeah,” he says.
“But if the Black Widow is in somebody else’s body, that means a human-to-human switch succeeded.” And somebody, likely one of my friends, is dead. I can’t help but shiver. If there’s even a chance this is true, we need to do the responsible thing. “We should go to the cops.”
“The cops already think we’re unreliable. They won’t change their minds if we come into the police station with a dog that acts like a cat.”
“But we can’t let this go on!” I cover my mouth as something occurs to me. “Oh, God. Julian and Suri. What if one of them are next?’
I’m taking no chances with the safety of my brother and sister. I whirl and head for the door. Max gets there before me, blocking the exit. “Hold on. Where are you going?”
“To confront Roxy.”
He can’t say the carnival boss isn’t involved. We suspected Roxy of something even before her dog and cat started acting strangely. She’s the one who lied about me being on a ski trip with her when it turns out I could actually have been an unwilling participant in an unconscionable experiment.
“Are your brother and sister at the carnival tonight?” Max asks.
When I’d run into Mom earlier, she said Uncle Landon was baby-sitting, just like he and his wife used to when I was a kid. “They’re at home.”
“Then they’re safe. Now slow down and tell me why you think they’re in danger.”
Max knows Roxy rescued Julian from drowning. I’d discovered earlier tonight that Roxy told Julian and his friend Tommy that swimming near the pier was fun, that the currents were no longer treacherous. I air my suspicion that Roxy orchestrated the rescue to ingratiate herself with my family. My mom even invited her to dinner.
“Can you get me invited to dinner?”
“Probably.” My mom likes Max. She even asked him to watch over me. “It might be tough for you to get the time off, though. Roxy’s already letting me come in late.”
“I can ask,” Max says. “We need to figure out what Roxy’s up to before she guesses we’re on to her. In the meantime, you can’t go after her. We can’t afford to tip our hand.”
I chew my bottom lip, digesting that. “I hate it when you’re right.”
Across the trailer, Punch has finished his tuna. The big dog practically prances over to the litter box and does his business. Yep. I need to seriously consider the notion that Midway Beach is becoming the body-switching capital of the world.
“Dinner’s not until the day after tomorrow,” I say. “What do we do until then?”
“We make our best guess about whose body the Black Widow took,” he says. “How early can I pick you up tomorrow morning for surveillance work?”