Even Adele seemed a little surprised Mrs. Shedd wanted her to go. “One second she was telling me I absolutely couldn’t go with you and that you were on some secret mission for her. Then Mr. Royal came up to her and wanted to know what the secret mission was. I started to say it had something to do with your neighbor, but before I could even say all of it, she started to walk me toward the door and said I ought to go with. She’s acting very weird,” Adele said. “She said whatever I learned while I was with you, I better keep it to myself or else.” Adele jiggled her head in disbelief. “She ought to know I’m the picture of discretion.” Dinah made a sharp turn and we were all a little thrown around.
“So what’s going on? What are we doing?” Adele leaned toward the front and stuck her head between the seats. “We’re the three musketeers again,” she said, referring to what she’d called us during an earlier adventure. I told her that I thought Emily and Madison might be going to meet Bradley.
“And we’re following them?” Adele pointed vaguely toward the traffic.
“Right,” I said, hoping to end it there.
“So, Pink, what are you going to do if you find the dead guy alive?” Adele was still leaning on the seat. I swallowed. I hated to admit it, but she’d brought up a valid point and one I hadn’t considered.
“I-I am going to do something,” I said. Adele stuck her face closer.
“What?” Adele demanded.
I pulled out my new BlackBerry. “I’ll take a picture of him.” As I said it, I started pushing buttons and clicking on things, trying to find the camera feature. The next thing I knew I’d taken a picture of my knee.
Adele took the BlackBerry out of my hand and looked it over. She demonstrated how to get to the camera and how to take a picture. Unfortunately she did it so fast I didn’t get a chance to make note of it. She fiddled with it some more and when she handed it back, I saw I had the picture she’d taken of herself as my wallpaper. She sat back mumbling something about how it was lucky for us she’d come. “I have to call my boyfriend, Koo Koo, I mean William. If he comes by the bookstore and I’m not there, he’ll get worried,” she said.
A moment later she was telling him she was off to help me track down my supposedly dead neighbor. William must have said something because Adele started telling him about the watch and the afghan, which was followed by an exasperated sound and then she said something about a wild-goose chase. She ended the call with a few icky loud kisses. She was doing her best to ignore the kids, but they were staring at her.
“You know Koo Koo?” Ashley-Angela said in an awestruck voice.
“Of course. He’s my boyfriend,” Adele said in a self-important tone. I wanted to scream that we got it that he was her boyfriend and she didn’t have to keep repeating it. But I kept quiet. Now that the kids were looking at her with such high regard because she knew Mr. Red Shoes, Adele suddenly seemed better about sharing the backseat with them.
“Hey,” Adele said sharply as Ashley-Angela reached out and touched a yarn candy cane on her sleeve. The little girl let go of the cane but kept staring at Adele’s sweater.
“That’s the beautifulest sweater I’ve ever seen,” Ashley-Angela said.
Dinah corrected the little girl’s grammar and announced Emily was headed for the Ventura Freeway. She made a sharp left, zooming through a yellow arrow to stay behind them. There was a car between us and the SUV as we headed up the incline to the west-bound 101. Dinah’s driving maneuvers got my attention away from the backseat temporarily. Ashley-Angela’s compliment apparently made an impression on Adele. More than an impression, it had blasted through her usual reaction to kids. When I looked back Adele was telling Ashley-Angela about the sweater. She was not only letting both kids touch all the objects hanging off the sweater, she was telling them about why they were connected to the holidays. It was actually kind of interesting. Who knew that candy canes were supposed to symbolize a shepherd’s staff? Though she got a little carried away when she started talking about mistletoe and Druids and people using it to ward off witches.
E. Conner reached over to check out the dreidel and Adele told him about a game that could be played with a real one. “If you come to holiday night, I’ll show you how.”
I did a double take. Was this the Adele I knew and was constantly annoyed by?
The SUV got off at Topanga Canyon Boulevard and went north. Dinah was good at keeping us a couple of cars behind. When I saw Emily’s turn signal go on, I realized where they were going.
“They’re going to the mall?” I said, feeling dismay. It wasn’t the kind of clandestine meeting place I’d imagined. “I must have been wrong.”
“Don’t be so sure,” Dinah said. “Think about it. Crowds of holiday shoppers. It would be easy for him to get lost in the crowd. Who’d notice him?”
“While you two go looking for the dead guy, I’m going to Sephora. I need some purple eye shadow,” Adele announced. It took some wrangling to convince Adele that none of us were going shopping and to get her to take off the sweater. She argued everybody loved it and that people even stopped to look at it and tell her how great it was.
“That’s the point. We don’t want to be the center of attention,” I said. Finally she took it off, but she told me I was depriving the shoppers of seeing a treat.
Dinah stayed close to the SUV until they parked and then she pulled into a space nearby. Topanga Mall had recently expanded and now was a huge sprawling shopping extravaganza with everything from Target to Tiffany’s. By the time we got everybody out of the car, Emily and Madison were almost to the entrance to the mall. We rushed to catch up. Emily had the shopping bag from the jewelry store. I was surprised to note that Madison carried a plastic grocery bag. The afghan she’d shown us was peeking out of the top.
Dinah had to drag the kids past the indoor carousel and I held on to Adele to make sure she didn’t take any shopping side trips.
Emily and Madison turned into the area they called the Canyon that ran between the old mall and the new addition. There was a whole Santa Claus setup, with a little house and the man in red on a throne.
As we followed at a distance, the kids started jumping up and down and waving at Santa. This wasn’t good. They were drawing attention to us. Emily and Madison had stopped and seemed to be waiting for something. I pulled Adele next to me and we acted as a wall as Dinah calmed the kids. I was winging it. Nothing in my sleuthing bible,
The two women kept shifting their weight and it was obvious they were waiting for somebody and impatient for them to get there. I kept checking the crowd for any signs of Bradley, but all I saw was a sea of faces. When I checked the pair again, a woman had stopped in front of them and some kind of interchange was going on.
Dinah looked around me and saw what was going on. “Is that Bradley in drag?”
“What? Who’s in drag?” Adele said, swiveling her head frantically.
“Nobody and can you keep it down. The point is for us to blend in,” I said. I laughed at myself. Adele blending in? Like that was ever going to happen.
The woman gestured and pointed at the crowd before handing Emily a piece of paper. Emily looked at it and grabbed Madison’s arm and they started retracing their steps.
“We’re moving,” I said to our little group. We let them get ahead and then took up their trail.
They went back to Emily’s Element and we rushed to Dinah’s Honda. Adele tried to talk me into letting her have the front seat. What a surprise. I held firm as she went through her list of reasons, starting with that she was better at tracking Emily’s Element than I was. As a last-ditch effort she said something about getting carsick and throwing up on the kids. I said we’d take the chance.
As we trailed the Element to the mall exit, I said I bet the note was telling them to go somewhere else.
We followed the black SUV to another mall in the east Valley. This one was smaller and the crowd was a little thinner and I worried the women might notice they were being followed. Dinah came up with a solution. Whenever we stopped, the whole group of us would turn and pretend to be admiring a store window. It got a little weird when we stopped in front of the storefront of the mall office and ended up staring at a security guard eating his lunch.
They stopped at the Santa area again. Emily still had the jeweler’s shopping bag and Madison clutched the grocery bag. When we got too near them, I pushed the group behind a sign advertising the food court. A tall elf stood next to the counter with an ad touting photos with Santa. He ignored the line of kids and surveyed the crowd. His gaze landed on Emily and Madison before he walked over to them.
I had the BlackBerry in my hand. Was the elf Bradley in disguise? Nope. He said something to them but didn’t pick up the packages. Emily looked annoyed as she turned away. Madison’s posture sagged as she followed. I
