Free The Pea Soup Poisonings by Nancy Means Wright Page A

“Please?” she asked. She had an idea about how to prove that the kidnappers were after the deed to the Alburg farm.
    The car ran out of gas right in the sisters’ driveway. Zoe told Miss Gertie to call her dad, and he would bring along a canful. Her dad was fond of the old ladies. Miss Maud had taught him in school, too.
    Zoe told Miss Thelma her plan, and Thelma grinned and hugged her. “We can make a copy of the deed,” she said, “but how will we do it? We don’t have a copier here.”
    “My mom has one,” said Zoe. She ran up the street with the folded deed.
    Kelby met her at the door. “What’s that in your hand?”
    “Nothing. Just a drawing I did at the sisters’ house.” She held it tightly in her fist. She didn’t want her brother to see it. She didn’t want him to know she had evidence. Not yet.
    “You told them what I said about the argument, didn’t you,” Kelby accused. “You ran right down and blabbed. You didn’t like to hear about that argument, did you? You know I’m right. That the sisters poisoned that soup. The officer came back here. He said they had a poisonous plant in their kitchen.”
    “Really?” said Zoe, lifting an eyebrow. “What kind of plant?”
    Kelby couldn’t remember the name. “Olee-something,” he said. “It would kill you just like that.” He snapped his fingers.
    “Oh, scary,” said Zoe, and ran upstairs to her mother’s study. In a jiffy she made two copies of the deed and placed them inside a folder.
    “Two and a half days. Two and a half days left to earn your badge,” Kelby warned when she came back down. He shook his head sorrowfully.
    “I’ve been practicing,” she said. “I could walk that beam right this minute.”
    “Sure you could.” He looked skeptical. “But you haven’t solved the crime. You won’t get the badge till you do. And,” he said, lifting his chin, “it looks like I’ve got the crime sewed up. That officer agrees with me. It’s definitely the sisters who did in Alice’s granny. They’re professional poisoners.”
    “Is that so?” said Zoe. She watched him shuffle off to the kitchen. Then she called up Tiny Alice to ask her friend to meet her with the key to Miss Thelma’s house.
    For good measure she brought along Spence’s tape recorder. She’d found Spence’s parents still huddled by the phone, hoping for good news, or maybe a ransom call. But his dad waved her on upstairs when she asked to borrow the recorder. She could hide it somewhere in Thelma’s house, couldn’t she? She’d seen a TV show once where the police did exactly that and caught the bad guys.
    “You could put it in a kitchen drawer,” Alice suggested when Zoe got there with the deed. “You can’t just leave it out or they’d suspect something. I mean, it wasn’t there before when they looked.”
    Zoe thought that was good advice.
    There were several papers folded up in one of the kitchen drawers. Zoe hid the folder between instructions for how to clean the oven and how to work the electric can opener. The relatives, if they really were relatives, would need an original deed to prove they owned the farm. And then, Miss Thelma said, they would have to show that Alice, her heir, was too young to run a farm on her own and that Thelma was mentally incapable of making her own decisions.
    Or they could do away with her, Zoe thought, and panicked. She must catch the pair before they found Miss Thelma!
    It was eleven-thirty and Zoe decided to wait in the house until the couple came.
    “Can I hide, too?” asked Alice. “I can squeeze into a small space.”
    “I’d like the company,” said Zoe, “but someone has to know what’s going on in case they get me. You never know.” She smiled, but her insides froze. Alice, too, was in danger, she realized. Although at least she had her mother to protect her. Alice’s mother wasn’t born a Fairweather. She probably wouldn’t know Fairweather relatives if she fell over them.
    “How will I