The Candymakers Read online

  For a minute, she felt sure Logan was about to tell them what had happened to him, but as always, he acted as if his arms and hands and the side of his face didn’t have pale pink scars running up and down them. That fact certainly overshadowed a weird pinky toe.

  AJ started laughing hysterically when Logan asked Daisy to reveal something strange about herself. “Why don’t you tell them how you can speak five languages and cross a busy street blindfolded?”

  “I’m allergic to bees,” she admitted.

  AJ stopped laughing. “Hey, that’s right!” he said. “Why did you go into the Bee Room?”

  Why did he insist on asking her questions when he knew she couldn’t answer them? They’d need to have a talk about proper handler etiquette. She couldn’t very well tell him or the others that when she was on a job she didn’t think about the real Daisy, only the Daisy she was pretending to be.

  “All right, enough chitchatting with your new friends. We have work to do. Face-to-face. Can you get away again?”

  Unwilling to arouse suspicion by wandering off, she went over to a tree far enough away that they wouldn’t be able to hear her but close enough that they could plainly see her. As soon as she opened the book, AJ’s face popped up. He grinned his self-assured grin at her.

  “You have spinach in your teeth,” she said.

  “You wish,” he replied.

  She sighed. It was true. Sometimes she did wish AJ didn’t look so perfect all the time. Didn’t he ever get a pimple?

  He pointed above her left ear. “You have purple cotton candy in your hair.”

  “Very funny.”

  “No, really, you do.”

  She reached up, and, sure enough, a strand of purple came off. “Well, you should have seen how that stuff was flying around the room.”

  She flipped the view on the screen until she could see herself and picked out the rest of the cotton candy. It figured that the boys hadn’t told her. A girl would have! When she switched the screen back to AJ, he was holding up a blueprint of the factory.

  “Okay,” he said, straightening out the page. “Here’s the Cocoa Room, where you saw the secret ingredient, right near the front door.” He drew a red X over it. “The good news is that there aren’t any security cameras in the individual candymaking rooms. The bad news is that there’s a security camera above the front door, which means you can’t use that entrance.”

  “Wait, there is? The case file didn’t mention a camera.” She definitely would have remembered that.

  “Nevertheless,” he said, “it’s there. There’s another one by the back door.”

  She thought back to that morning. “I hope they didn’t see me talking to my mother.”

  “Me, too,” he replied.

  To his credit, he didn’t say anything about how she should have been more careful, which he had every right to. Instead, he circled three doors on the blueprint. “These all lead to the basement, where a tunnel runs out to the side of the driveway. They use it to transport grain and other crops from the farm. That’s your best bet for an exit route.”

  She nodded. “Okay. I’ll find out when the shifts start and end. Maybe the Cocoa Room is empty for a period of time during the day.” She figured daytime was her best chance. Then she could just blend back in with the rest of the people milling around.

  “You have the bag?” he asked.

  She reached into her pocketbook and pulled out a ziplock bag.

  “That’s it?” he asked. “That’s the high-tech way to store the secret ingredient?”

  “Hey,” she said, raising her voice. “Don’t knock the ziplock. This thing can withstand—”

  “Love’s Last Dance?” Miles said, interrupting her.

  She looked up to see Miles’s and Logan’s smiling faces. She couldn’t believe she’d let AJ distract her again. Now she had to pretend she would actually read a book with a title like that. It was so embarrassing. She may have kicked Miles a bit too hard in her quest to be playful.

  “Nice,” AJ said in her ear. “Love on a cattle ranch.”

  Once Miles and Logan had disappeared into the bushes, she replied, “How about you stop talking to me unless you’ve got something really important to say?”

  No answer. Perfect. Daisy closed her eyes and leaned back against the tree trunk. With the birds chirping and a light breeze grazing her cheeks, it was easy to forget she was on a job. She let her mind wander from the plan to steal a sample of the secret ingredient to riding Magpie when she got home, to Grammy in Paris, to wondering where her parents were, and then back to the plan again. All was peaceful until a boy’s voice spoke into her ear. She’d have preferred AJ’s voice, which wasn’t saying much.

  “Thinking about how you’re going to lose on Saturday?” he taunted.

  She slowly opened her eyes and fixed them on Philip. With the sun behind him, she was surprised to see that he wasn’t entirely un-good-looking. This made her even more annoyed at him.

  “I’m not going to lose,” she replied firmly. In her head she added, Since I’m not going to be there.

  “Come,” Max said, joining them. “Let’s go find the others.”

  Daisy grabbed her pocketbook and walked with Max into the bushes. Philip trailed behind, grumbling. They found Logan and Miles kneeling beside a row of bushes, drawing a cocoon or something. Logan turned to smile at them as they approached, and Daisy felt a shiver. Logan had been in this exact spot in that photograph from so many years ago. She glanced behind her, but all she could see were low bushes and the field with the pond behind it. Nowhere for a photographer to hide. Whoever snapped the picture must have had a really good telephoto lens.

  On the way to the lab, Max explained the plan for the afternoon.

  AJ made his reappearance in her ear. “Stay in the game. Remember to act really interested in everything.”

  He didn’t have to tell her that. When they got to the lab and saw all the fun equipment they’d get to experiment with, absolutely no acting was required. She loved the white lab coats they were given. Wearing one made her feel like a real scientist. She loved cracking eggs into a glass bowl, heating sugar until it hardened, measuring soybean oil to the exact eighth of an ounce.

  Every now and then AJ popped in to remind her she was supposed to be doing surveillance on the Cocoa Room. When some pans clattered onto the floor, she took the opportunity to whisper, “I’m waiting for the right moment. I don’t want to ask to use the bathroom again. They’ll think I have a problem!”

  A minute later, though, Philip supplied the perfect diversion. As soon as he sent a plume of powdered sugar into the air, she seized the moment and began to sneeze. Voilà! Banished from the room!

  As soon as the lab door closed behind her she said, “Okay, I’m clear. Heading over to the Cocoa Room.”

  “Roger that.”

  She hurried down the long hallway that led to the main entrance. She had expected to see Philip ahead of her, but he must know of a bathroom elsewhere. When she reached the long windows that looked into the Cocoa Room, one of the workers—Steve, she recalled Max telling them—was intently pouring a bucket of bean nibs into the giant roaster. Gooey chocolate oozed its way through one tube and into another. She glanced around but didn’t see the other guy. Steve put down his bucket and caught sight of her watching. She waved, and he waved back. Instead of talking loudly to be heard over the roaster, she mouthed the words, “Hi, can I ask you a question?”

  He put his hand to his ear, as she’d hoped. She asked again. He held up a finger and disappeared from view. A few seconds later the door to the room opened, and Steve stepped outside.

  “That’s better,” he said, closing the door behind him. “Sometimes I forget how loud it is in there when the roaster’s on. Enjoying yourself here at the factory?”

  “Oh yes, it’s great! You’re so lucky you get to work here.”

  He smiled and wiped his hands on his lab coat. Daisy recalled that at the start of the day it had bee