Kepler’s Dream (14 page)

“Yes, I see what you mean,” she said vaguely. It sounded like she was considering something else. “I understand your point. I'll think that over.”

Was she agreeing with Officer Barker? Or was she beginning to lose faith that he and his team were going to get the job done? Maybe she was thinking she would have to find the
Dream
thief herself. Maybe she was hoping brainy Ella Mackenzie would help her!

“Thank you, Officer Barker.” He looked relieved that the GM had managed to be polite at last. “It's been a long night. I feel my granddaughter ought to get to bed. We all should, in fact.”

“Yes, ma'am,” he agreed. We made our way out of the Librerery. When the policeman and I were outside, she went back in to set the alarm and close up.

Officer Barker watched her, frowning. “That alarm should have been on during the night, right?” he said.

“Yes,” I chipped in. I didn't really think he was talking to me, but I wanted to be helpful.

“But it wasn't the library door that triggered the security system.” He took a quick look at his notes. “That wasn't the code the company received. I thought Wilson said they got a general alarm. Someone hit the panic button.”

The GM, back beside him, didn't argue with the officer on this one.

“Yes, that was I,” she said. “I heard the sound of the shots outside, and I became alarmed. So—I sounded the alarm.” She laughed feebly at her little joke.

This was weird; my grandmother hadn't mentioned pulling the alarm herself until that moment. I was beginning to think I ought to start taking some notes, too. There were already a few
things in this case that didn't add up. (Why had Miguel left his cabin in the first place? Why hadn't the library alarm gone off?)

But like I said, though I was good at math, the middle of the night was a bad time for adding anything up, and the GM was right that I needed to get to bed. Rosie and Miguel had disappeared back to his cabin. I had to go into Our Guest's room again—it was a design flaw in the House of Mud that you had to go through Haiti to get to where I slept—but I was ready to be back under my musty old blankets, with Lou at my feet.

Usually the main thing I had to worry about before going to sleep at night was whether I would have nightmares about my mom. Now there was something new troubling my brain: what in the world might have happened to my grandmother's rare copy of Kepler's
Dream.

SEVEN

I SL
e
PT L
a
T
e
TH
e
N
e
XT D
a
Y. NOT TH
e
B
e
ST ST
ar
T TO M
y
new career as a detective, as it meant I missed seeing Abercrombie's expression first thing the morning after the theft. As far as I was concerned,
Darling Christopher,
who had talked about the Morris book as if it were the Crown Jewels, was a chief suspect. His face might have held clues.

All it seemed to hold by the time I got into the kitchen, though, was the slight jitter of too much coffee—and shifting secrets. Both he and my grandmother stopped talking when I came in, and I had the distinct idea they had been having a conversation about
me
.

We traded Good Mornings. At the GGCF it was very important to greet people properly and say good-bye properly if you didn't want to lose cake privileges.

“Well, Ella,” my grandmother said, after a minute of watching me pour pieces of bark into a bowl. (I hadn't talked her into the Cheerios school of grocery shopping.) “Christopher and I were just having a discussion.”

“
Mmm hmm.” I tried to sound polite, with my mouth full of fiber.

“And he asked me an interesting question.” She was watching me intently. Like a hawk, in fact. “He wondered why you and Rosie were
outside
when the alarm went off last night. I was too flustered to notice, but Christopher pointed out that when you came in through the front door, Rosie was with you.”

Thanks, Abercrombie.

“What were you doing up?” she asked.

I swallowed. “Rosie couldn't sleep,” I explained. “She knocked on the door outside my room. But the door was stuck, so I had to walk all the way around.”

“So that's why you came galumphing through my bedroom in the small hours,” Abercrombie commented.
Galumphing
: how rude. I was being so quiet!

“Wasn't that rather unusual—for Rosie to come talk to you in the night like that?” the GM asked.

Well, yes, it was, of course. But I suddenly worried about mentioning that Miguel hadn't been in the cabin. I didn't want to get him into trouble.

“I was trying to be nice,” I said. “She seemed—upset.”

That didn't sound too good either, though.

“I see.” My grandmother looked at Abercrombie, her eyebrows raised. He raised his in reply. It was like a code—the eyebrow code. “And was Miguel with you girls?”

I kept chewing, to give myself time. “I think Miguel was
already looking for the—uh—intruder,” I finally said. “That's why Rosie was upset. She was scared, for her dad.”

Abercrombie Books was looking right at me. From his unfriendly gray eyes I knew he thought I was lying. I wondered if he thought
I
had done it: that I had taken Kepler's
Dream
or had something to do with taking it. Was Our Honored Pest going to try to persuade my own grandmother that I was a criminal?

She cleared her throat. “As you know, Ella, this theft is a very serious matter.”

“I know.”

“It is not some sort of amusing joke.”

“Right.” Was I laughing? No, I was not. There was nothing funny about the fact that the guy with the goatee was trying to frame me.

“And today, to explore one possible explanation, or at least to have a better sense of what happened, Christopher and I are going to talk to—Tweedle—that is—”

“Jackson and Jason?” I suggested.

“Indeed. We are going to see whether they can shine any light on the situation.”

“But if you think you saw anything last night that might explain what happened, Ella,” Abercrombie put in, oilily, “it would be helpful if you told us.”

I was thinking,
“Us”?
Get this guy out of the room, lady, and then I'll talk.
Though all I would have been able to confess was that yes, I had smuggled Froot Loops and one, ahem,
borrowed
photograph into my room, and played the occasional mindless game of Jewel Quest. None of which would have advanced our case against the thief of Kepler's
Dream
.

There was a shuffling at the door, Hildy started yapping again, just in case we'd been missing the sound, and before I knew what had hit us, there was an outbreak of teenagers right there in the kitchen. Tweedledum and Tweedledee appeared, the tall one chewing on a seed or two as usual and the other one, phoneless, looking incredibly uncomfortable, like he had no idea what to do with his thumbs. For lack of a better option, he had them hooked into his jeans pockets.

Grandmother greeted them, and they grunted and nodded in reply. Usually that wouldn't be good enough for her, but I guess the rules for workers at the facility were more lax than for us inmates.

“How's it going, Uncle C?” Textless said to Abercrombie.

“Well enough, thank you, Jason,” he replied. “Are you getting ready for the holiday?”

More nods and grunts.
Uncle C?
I looked back and forth between Jason, the texter, and Mr. Books, and now I could see the resemblance. Yes, they were related. That did suddenly explain something about how he got a job with the GM. But then that also might mean that Jason had
aided
his uncle, like they say in detective stories, in the heist.

“Something has happened, boys,” the GM announced, “that we need to discuss.”

“
Yes, Violet,” Mr. Books said. He looked over at me like I was a TV channel that needed to be changed. Switched off, even. “But first, shouldn't we—er—?”

“Ah, yes.” She nodded. “Ella: after last night's commotion, I felt it would be a good day for you to be occupied elsewhere, so earlier this morning I made a telephone call. Carlos Aguilar has kindly offered to give you a riding lesson in about an hour.”

Well, I wasn't going to say no to that. It was a little hard to see how I was going to combine my new detective career with my ambitions to become a cowgirl, but maybe, I figured, there was a way to be both at once.
Ella Mackenzie, the Galloping Gumshoe. She solves in the saddle. She guesses while she gallops …

It was clear I was supposed to disappear, so I took Lou outside for a walk. I wandered around in my now slightly scuffed boots, and then saw something very strange: a bright blue peacock the size of an ostrich half hiding behind the feed bins.

Only it wasn't a peacock. It was Rosie. She stood up when she saw me. “Oh,” she said, trying to act casual. She popped a pink bubble. “Hi.”

I looked at her. I didn't want to be rude, but, “Um—what are you doing?”

She seemed only a little embarrassed. “I was just”—she lowered her voice to a whisper as she brushed the dirt from her hands—“trying to listen.”

To the feed bins? The birds? “To what?” I asked.

“Those guys. Those slobby guys. Who are they?”

“You mean Jason and Jackson?” I decided not to confuse her,
so I gave the right names. “They're these two high school seniors who are helping my grandmother out in her library. They work for her.”

“They work for her? Seriously?”

“That's the idea. I guess they know a lot about computers.”

“That part I can believe.” Rosie shook her head. Her hair was back in its neat riding braid down her back. “But, I don't like to say this—well, they don't talk about your grandmother with a lot of respect.”

“Really?”

She told me how she had heard Tweedledum and Tweedledee out in the driveway joking about “the Stern One” and her “Labyrinth of Books,” and then how one of them—the short one, she said, who by now I knew was Jason, Abercrombie's relation—made some crack in a low voice that made the other guy explode with a loud, laughing … expletive.

I explained to Rosie about “expletive deleted” and how handy it was around foulmouthed people. She thought that was funny. We started walking around the back tangle together with Lou, talking about teens—how when some people turn sixteen they suddenly seem to stop doing anything but swearing and texting. I told Rosie about the day in Santa Rosa when there was an obnoxious bunch of high schoolers on our bus ride home and Abbie had made up a new word:
meanagers
.

“I like that,” Rosie said. “My cousin Lola can be a meanager sometimes.” She ducked under a low-hanging branch. “Do you have cousins?”

“
Two,” I told her. “They're boys who live in Arizona and who only care about football.”

Rosie rolled her eyes, like, Enough said. By now we had circled around and were back in the driveway. Rosie stopped and looked at me. “Ella,” she said. “I want to figure out who took your grandmother's book.”

This surprised me. Why should she care? I couldn't think of a polite way to ask, but Rosie answered anyway. “If I don't figure it out, people might think my dad, or someone he's connected to, had something to do with it. So—”

“Abercrombie,” I interrupted her. “He's the only one who would think that. My grandmother wouldn't.”

She shrugged, and suddenly I felt an awkwardness between us.

“Well, anyway,” I said, “I want to figure it out, too. I think it
was
Abercrombie, and I think he's a creep and my grandmother doesn't realize it.”

So that was how Rosie and I decided, kicking around the dust while we waited for Miguel, to go into business together as the Aguilar and Mackenzie Agency. We were jazzed about it, until Miguel came out to drive us to the Circle C.

He looked distracted. Not exactly unfriendly—Miguel was always kind, whether you were a person, a pooch or a peacock. He just wasn't a hundred percent
there
in the truck with Rosie and me. A piece of him was somewhere else. The way a piece of me drifted off to Seattle to be with my mom when the GM was telling me about her travels in Haiti, or why she hated the way I used the word
like
as a filler.

As the truck crossed the Rio Grande, I said, “There she is, the mighty river,” hoping to get some kind of laugh at the sight of that rusty brown soup, but Rosie just looked away, and Miguel said “Uh-huh,” like he wasn't even listening.

Once we got to the Circle C, though, none of that mattered, because for an hour at least I only thought about horses. Getting good at riding turned out to have a lot to do with your butt. Sure, the reins were important, but Carlos said that what marked a true cowgirl from someone slopping around like a kid at a pony ride (I blushed) was having their butt in the right place and communicating with their legs. “Don't tell your horse one thing with your legs and something else with your reins—that'll only confuse 'em. That's like your mom telling you not to eat candy and your dad saying it's fine.” He winked, and I realized Carlos didn't know my own dad never told me anything about what to eat, unless it was before a six a.m. fishing trip.