I swore and checked the time. Maybe I could make it home and back before the end of Mrs. Haggerty’s meeting. “Did you try rubbing him in vegetable oil?”
“No. I used the lube in your nightstand to get him out.”
“Vero!”
“Relax. He’s fine. I gave him a bath before I put the kids to bed. And before you ask, the neighborhood watch diary wasn’t in your nightstand either.”
I put a hand to my temple. We only had an hour to find it. Two, at the most, if we stopped for groceries on the way home. “It has to be somewhere.”
“Whoa,” Vero whispered.
“What is it?” I asked, sitting up in my seat.
“I don’t know. I feel a little… strange.”
“Strange how?” God, I hoped Delia and Zach hadn’t brought home any germs from the playground. The last thing we needed was a case of the flu.
“I’m… not sure,” Vero said. “My head’s a little light. And I’m feeling… really,reallyhungry.”
Uh-oh.“When was your last period?”
“I can’t be pregnant, Finlay! I’m on the pill, and Javi and I haven’t had sex since…Oh. Oh, no,” she said. Her phone jostled, her breath coming faster as her feet shuffled quickly down the stairs.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, listening as she opened and slammed the refrigerator, the kitchen cabinets, then the pantry door.
“I think we have a problem,” she sang in a panicky voice. “You know those brownies I bought from Stacey? The ones I hid in the freezer? I think Mrs. Haggerty took them to her meeting.”
“No! Are you sure?”
“My lips are going numb and I’m getting the munchies.” A chip bag crinkled on the other end of the line, followed by loud crunching.
No! No, no, no!
I looked up at the town house and checked my watch. The meeting had only been going on for fifteen minutes. Maybe it wasn’t too late to stop Mrs. Haggerty and her friends before they started sampling the desserts.
I scrambled out of the van.
“What are you doing?” Vero asked as I hoofed it to the house. “You can’t go in there and tell them their brownies are drugged! Mrs. Haggerty will probably put it in her damn diary and report us for distribution of controlled substances! Oh, god,” Vero blurted between quickening breaths. “Do you think Mike Tran has an unmarked cop watching our house? What if he comes to the door and my pupils are dilated? What if I accidentally confess to something? He might look me up in his police database, see I’m a wanted criminal, and send me back to Maryland. I’ll spend the rest of my life in prison making license plates and shivs out of toothbrushes, all because of Stacey and her damn brownies!”
“Now you’re being paranoid.”
“I’m not paranoid,” she said around a mouthful of chips.
Still, she had a point. Those brownies were drugged and they had come from my house. This would not be the first time I had inadvertently drugged an unsuspecting person, and since it was entirelypossible Mrs. Haggerty had written in her diary about the night I’d drugged Harris Mickler, it was probably not wise to let any of her friends eat those brownies.
Instead of knocking on the front door of the town house, I took the sidewalk to the end of the row. I checked both ways before darting behind it, then crept along the privacy fences, counting the units until I reached the right house.
“Oh, wow. Stacey wasn’t kidding,” Vero said. “Those are some killer brownies.”
I got down on all fours and crawled to the nearest window, bringing my eye up to the sliver of light that was visible under the curtain. I risked a peep inside. The women sat in a loose circle of armchairs and ottomans, as they had done before, their chairs pulled close, filling in the gaps around the sofa. The open bottle of wine rested on the coffee table.
“I don’t see the dessert plate,” I whispered. “What if they already ate them all?”
“That meeting is going to be one for the books.” Vero giggled at her own joke. It grew into a fit of hysterics.
“That’s not funny!”
“Maybe a little funny.”
