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door and walked out without looking back, slamming it
shut behind him.
     

CHAPTER FOUR
    Agatha
     
     
    The note had
been there when I woke up, slipped under my bedroom door. I’d been
staring at it since then, trying to figure out what to do.
     
    Farley,
    Sorry about Daniel. He said you had questions. Meet me at the
Monterey Fair   tonight, 8 p.m. sharp.  I’ll do my best to answer
them.
     
    Agatha
     
      There was no sane reason on earth to go and
meet with this Agatha. She could be a psycho killer, intent on
luring me out to chop me into little pieces. Only the faintest
voice of reason suggested that if that were the case, this Agatha
would likely have killed me when she broke into the house to leave
the note. That would make more sense. The house was quiet and
secluded, whereas the fair was the exact opposite, filled with
over-excited children all hopped up on sugar. Killing someone there
wouldn’t exactly be easy to get away with.
    Tess would
usually provide sage advice on the matter, but when I called, Mrs.
Kennedy informed me she was off on some epic day hike with Oliver.
She wasn’t expected back until late. The thought of Tess in the
outdoors, hiking no less, only served to confuse me more. Tess
thought the great outdoors was the realm of survivalist nuts who
lived off road-kill stew.
    Her thoughts on the Monterey Fair matter were pretty much
guaranteed, anyway.  I could almost hear her
now:  This is awesome! I’ll run
interference in case anyone’s watching. I’ll bring my dad’s taser.
If it looks like things are going south, I’ll pop the crazy
bitch.
    She was going
to be mad that she’d missed the opportunity to camo up and break
out the walkie-talkies we hadn’t used since we were eleven. She
would probably be even madder that I was considering going alone,
but what else was I supposed to do? The likelihood of Daniel
showing up and filling in the gaps of his own volition was slim to
none.
    That left only
one option: Agatha.
    The decision
had been fairly easy to make, but as the day rolled by and
seven-thirty approached, things suddenly seemed less clear-cut.
What if the hundreds of people at the fair were a distraction,
designed to make me feel safer than I truly was? I had no way of
knowing what these people’s motives were or what they wanted from
me. What if this woman had nothing to do with Daniel at all?
    I grabbed my
leather messenger bag and pushed down the jitters playing havoc
with my stomach. This was about my mom. Every fiber of my body told
me so, and even if it was incredibly dangerous, there was nothing I
wouldn’t do to find out where she was.
    I marched out
of the house, only to freeze in the driveway. The truck. Of course.
The Tacoma had been torched. I didn’t even know where the wreck had
been taken. The insurance company needed calling, and who knew how
understanding they were going to be. Was accidental destruction due
to being caught in supernatural crossfire even covered under car
insurance policies?
      I called a cab before I could change my mind
about the fair, pulling the huge red coat my mom had bought me for
Christmas tighter around my body. The battered yellow taxi arrived
shortly afterwards. The car journey didn’t last long enough, and I
was still riddled with nerves by the time I pulled into the swamp
that was the Monterey Fair parking lot. Yesterday’s rain had turned
the ground to sticky, churned up mud, and the thick brown mess had
somehow found its way up the walls of the white canvas tents
erected around the perimeter of the fair. It sucked greedily at my
shoes, trying to pry them from my feet as I struggled to avoid the
worst of it on my way to the entrance. Bare light bulbs in red and
yellow formed a brightly lit archway, where a ticket booth was
located to one side. The female vendor inside smiled broadly when I
finally made it to the window without slipping over.
    “ Ev’n, honey. You want ride tickets?”
    I shook my
head. “No. Just