“Were you kidnapped? Or what?” I shook my head. “I’m totally confused here.”

“Who are you anyway?”

“I’m Daisy Savage,” I said. “My daughters are in the play with you. Were.”

“Oh,” she said. “Why are you here?”

“Because...wait. Answer my question first. Were you kidnapped?”

She thought hard for a moment. “Technically, yes. It was the flowers.”

“The flowers?”

She sighed, like she’d told the story a million times already. “I answered the door at my house. It was a flower delivery lady. She had flowers for me. She told me to smell them. I did and totally passed out.” She frowned. “I think it was chloroform.”

“Flowers knocked you out?”

“They were covered in the chloroform. I took a deep breath.”

“And you ended up here?”

She looked around. “Yeah. But I’m only here for like two more days.”

“So you aren’t being held against your will?”

She messed with her ponytail. “I guess that’s what you’d call a gray area.”

“I don’t think there are gray areas when it comes to kidnapping.”

“Well, this is just...different.”

I took a deep breath, then exhaled. I was utterly confused. This hadn’t been at all what I’d expected to find.

“Okay,” I said. “How about if you start from the beginning?”

She sighed again, like starting from the beginning was a huge effort. “I told you. I smelled the flowers.”

“Who brought you the flowers?”

She sighed again. “Mrs. Claussen.”

“Joanne?”

“If she’s the one who owns the farm then, yeah, I guess.”

“Okay. Then what happened?”

“Well, I guess I fainted,” she explained, sitting cross-legged on the bed. “Because I totally don’t remember the drive out here. Next thing I knew, I was waking up on this bed.”

“Alone?”

“No. Mrs. Claussen was here. She had a bottle of water and a bag of Sour Patch Kids. Which I could totally use right now.”

She glanced around the room, as if expecting a bag would somehow magically appear.

“Was she the one who brought you here?” I asked.

She nodded. “Yeah. She had like a delivery uniform and a baseball hat on when she brought the flowers. Plus, I didn’t really know her, anyway. But, yeah.”

“And then what happened?”

“Well, then I freaked out.”

Finally. Something that made sense.

“I mean, freaked,” she said. “I mean, I was cool with the Sour Patch Kids, but I didn’t know where I was or what was going on, you know?”

“I’m sure.”

“So Mrs. Claussen apologized to me,” Amanda continued. “For the flowers. And then she asked if I was interested in striking a deal.”

“A deal?”

She nodded, her ponytail bobbing behind her. “Yeah. She’d pay me five hundred bucks if I’d just stay here until the play was over. At first, I wasn’t too cool with that. Because I also had a cheer competition. But then she offered me six hundred so I said, cool, whatever.”

My temples throbbed as I processed her words. So she had been kidnapped. She hadn’t run away. But she’d been in on it? Sort of?

“So she’s paying you,” I repeated. “To stay here.”

“Pretty much.”

“Why?”

“No clue.”

“You didn’t ask?”

“She’s paying me six hundred bucks and I got to miss school,” she said. “It’s been kinda cool.”

“But you also missed the cheer thing,” I said. “And the play. And everyone’s been worried about you.”

She considered that for a moment. “The cheer thing, I didn’t even care about, to be honest. My coach is kind of insane and I should’ve quit that like a year ago. I don’t even like it.”

Having met Greta Mathisen and seen the level of insanity she’d exhibited, I didn’t doubt her coach might fall into the same category.

“The play, yeah, that was kind of a hard thing,” she continued. “I really wanted to be Snow White, you know? But I knew they’d find someone else to do it. And six hundred dollars is a lot of money.”

“And what about the part where everyone was worried about you?” I asked.

She made a face, like she wasn’t terribly concerned about that. “I figured my family would just think I took off again. I’ve done it before. And I just figured it would be cool when I got home. They’d be mad, but I’d be back and they’d get over it. Like before.”

I didn’t know the Pendleton family, but her reasoning seemed extremely flawed to me.

“Okay, so here’s the...six hundred dollar question,” I said. “Why? Why did Joanne do this? Set this up?”

“You should ask her.”

“Oh, I’m going to,” I told her.

“No, I mean you should ask her right now,” Amanda said.

“What?”

“Yeah,” Joanne Claussen said. “Ask me.”

I turned around.

Joanne was standing in the doorway, her arms folded across her chest, looking very, very unhappy.

FORTY TWO

“I saw you leave the theater,” Joanne said. “With Olga.”

“Is that the clown lady?” Amanda asked. “I think I saw her earlier.”

“I put two and two together,” Joanne said, ignoring her. “You’d been asking questions about Amanda and she was here at the farm. Alone.”

She didn’t have anything in her hands. That was good. Because I’d been imagining her harboring a pitchfork and stabbing both Amanda and me.

“She saw Amanda out here,” I told her. “She actually came to find you, but didn’t know where you were.”

“I had to go pick up the candy,” she said. “For the concessions. Tomorrow.”

“Ah.”

We stood there awkwardly while Amanda went to work on her ponytail again.

“You can’t tell anyone,” Joanne blurted out.

“Joanne. I can’t not tell anyone. You kept her here against her will.”

“Not exactly.”

“Because you were paying her to stay?” I said. “You showed up at her house and knocked her out.”

“It’s complicated. And I didn’t hit her,” she said. “I just let her smell the flowers.”

“The flowers covered in chloroform?”

She shuffled her feet against the wood floor. “My uncle was a chemist.”

“But you went there with the intention of taking her,” I said. “And then you did. And then you paid her six hundred dollars to stay here.”

“Like I just said. It’s complicated.” She looked at Amanda, her eyes narrowing. “And part of the deal was not telling anyone.”

“Whatever,” Amanda said. She made a face. “You kidnapped me. You have to pay me or I’ll tell everyone.”

Joanne frowned.

“Why?” I asked. “Why on earth did you do this?”

She stubbed the toe of her boot against the floor. “I told you. I was desperate.”

“So you took Snow White?”

“No, I did something to generate publicity for the play,” she said. “Which actually worked. We are sold out.”

“You took Amanda so that everyone would talk about the play?” I said, not sure I understood her correctly. “That was the best way you could thing to drum up publicity?”

“There isn’t a single ticket left for tomorrow,” she said.

I blinked. “You do realize that kidnapping is against the law, correct?”

“I don’t think it’s kidnapping if she can leave against her will,” Joanne argued.

“You knocked her out. You brought her here. You kept her here and told everyone that you didn’t know where she was. No matter what you offered to pay her, you took her,” I said, shaking my head. “You took her and that’s not okay.”

For the first time, her steely facade faltered. She looked at Amanda, then me, then Amanda, then me. She chewed on her bottom lip.

“I didn’t know what else to do,” she said, her eyes filling with tears. “I told you, Daisy. Eleanor’s company is in trouble. She needs money. I need another job. I need money. The only way to make sure both of those things happened was to make sure we sold out the play and brought in as large of an audience as possible. And I did. This did it. Everyone in Moose River knows about the play. Everyone. Because of what I did.” She grimaced. “And I will get the job. It’s guaranteed.”