Kepler’s Dream (17 page)

“I am going off for a hair appointment today. I may as well look my best, today of all days,” she said, the last part under her breath. “And after that I had thought of lunching at Chez Albertine, to cheer myself up.” She looked like she needed cheering. “Would you care to come along?”

I guess I must have had a long face, as Mom used to call it. (“Ella, sweetie, don't give me one of your long faces. It makes you look too much like Lou.”) “Perhaps you don't care for the
idea,” my grandmother said. She tried to sound light, but her eyes were disappointed.

“Well,” I said, fumbling around for an excuse, “I was planning to hang out with—that is, talk with …” I doubted
hang out
was on the slang menu I was supposed to use.

“Your friend who chews gum?” She meant Rosie, of course. “Would you like to ask her to join us?”

Now, I may have a pretty good imagination—Ms. Nelson always told me I did when we did creative writing—but I couldn't picture Rosie and me and my grandmother all eating frogs' legs together. Or snails. Or even just steak and fries.

Luckily, the GM seemed to have the same thought. We looked at each other without saying anything, and I shivered. There it was: a family tie, after all. I knew what my grandmother was thinking, and she knew what I was thinking, and we didn't actually have to spell it out for each other in words at all.

“Or perhaps you and she would rather stay together and have lunch here,” the GM said in as close to a nice voice as I'd heard her use with anyone other than Hildy. “I'm sure there must be some sandwich ingredients you could forage for in the pantry.”

I nodded gratefully. “That would be great, Grandmother. Thanks.”

“All right. Come out with me now, so I can lock up. Even if it
is an instance of shutting the barn door once the horse has gone.” She gazed back over her shoulder as we left. “I am glad you were looking at the photographs of Edward,” she said. “This is an important day to remember him, Ella. Every day is, of course, but—today in particular.”

“Why?”

“July seventh,” she said, “is the day he died.”

I couldn't think of the right response to that news, so I just stayed quiet. No wonder she was so sad, though. In a minute, she was climbing slowly into her giant white car, and with a tired wave, she drove away.

Leaving me to find my friend who chewed gum.

The person who materialized out of the dust, like someone in a sci-fi movie, wasn't Rosie, though. It was Tweedledum (unless it was Tweedledee). Jackson, the tall, thin one, who was an (expletive), according to Abercrombie's nephew. He was wandering over from the direction of the back tangle, his head full of whatever fills a high-schooler's head.

He reached instinctively for a few sunflower seeds in his pocket and popped them into his mouth. “Hey,” he mumbled through the shells, which was maybe the first word he had ever spoken to me directly.

“Hey,” I replied. “What's up?”

Then I realized that this was one of my suspects and I really ought to interrogate him, as a good detective would.

This was how it went:

Me: So, um, how's it going, working for my grandmother?

(Trying to put the suspect at ease, as if it is easy to put a meanager at ease.)

Him: It's OK.

(
No immediate sign of guilt, just a general spaciness.
)

Me: She's pretty upset about that Kepler book being taken.

Him: I know, yeah.

Me: It was a pretty cool book. All about life on the moon.

Him: Uh-huh
. (Slight shiftiness here, like the look Lou has when there's a plate of salami on the kitchen counter and you' re pretty sure the stack has lost a few slices.)

Me: It's not like whoever took it is going to be able to sell it.

Him: I know, I know. Mr. Abercrombie already explained all that to us.

Me: Oh.
(So much for the investigator's effort to act knowledgeable.)

Him: Which is why I think Jason should have just
chilled
about the whole thing. Chill out, dude!
(For some reason, this random exclamation made the suspect laugh.)
He should have figured that out.

Me: There he is now. He's not looking too chilled.

(Spotting Suspect No. 2 coming up the path, looking pretty grumpy.)

Him: No kidding.

This interview didn't seem to be getting us very far. I guess I couldn't cross the middle-school/teenager divide after all. Tweedledee (or was it Tweedledum?)—Jason, in the distance—didn't seem eager to be part of our party, and I wasn't about to push my luck with him right now. I figured I had just better find
Rosie. I gave the suspect a parting compliment, though, in case it softened him up.

Me: I like your T-shirt.
(It was the one that said POLARIS: FIND YOUR TRUE NORTH.)

Him: Thanks.
(For a second as though noticing me as an actual human being.)
Everyone has to find theirs, you know.

Me
(with no idea what this meant, but not wanting to seem like an idiot)
: Yeah. Definitely!

Him: Later.

Me: OK.

And I wandered off to the back tangle to look for Rosie, leaving the tall boy to gaze at the trees and chew his sunflower seeds, sharing the shells with the grateful peacocks.

It wasn't the best morning's work I've ever done. Let's just say I've had spelling tests that went better. I wasn't ready, as Encyclopedia Brown would have been by then, to close my eyes for two minutes and come up with the story of who took the Morris Kepler, and where the book was now, and why. There were plenty of mysteries: the ashes in the fireplace, the Abercrombie Books angle, the unknown argument between Tweedledum and Tweedledee. My brain hurt trying to figure it all out.

I had gone rootling around in the bushes back behind my bedroom, trying to figure out where Rosie had gotten to, when I heard a voice calling me from somewhere above.

“
Helloooooo, Ella!”

“Rosie?”

“Hellooooooooo.”

It really seemed like her voice was coming from above my head. What was she, an angel all of a sudden?

“Where are you?” I craned my head back to gaze up into the cottonwood trees. All I could see were the long, bright green tail feathers of some of the birds.

Suddenly I saw a face. A laughing face. Near the edge of the roof.

“Up here!”

She gave a little wave.

“How did you get up there?”

“Shhhhh! I'll show you.” And she stood up and walked along the edge of the flat adobe surface. She gestured for me to follow her, so I did, along the ground, until she led me around to a place in the back where one of the smaller trees, not a cottonwood but some smaller, thicker-limbed tree, grew up close to the side of the house. “You just climb up there,” she said, pointing. “And then onto the roof from that branch.”

She made it sound so easy. It was a good climbing tree, though. It had a nice rough bark that made it easier to hold on. I swung up onto a low branch, and then monkeylike made my way through the branches, over, and on up.

“Hi!” Rosie said to me when I landed.

“Hi!” We high-fived.

I couldn't believe I'd been at my grandmother's this long and hadn't figured out that you could get onto the roof. I would have to include that on the house plan I had started drawing.
It was so cool up there: you could see the whole shape of the land and buildings around the House of Mud, the freeways not far off, and the Sandia Mountains in the distance. It was like being able to see ahead into your future—you got a sense of the whole master plan. There were a few peacocks nearby who weren't thrilled to be sharing the space with us, but they didn't make a racket about it. No more than usual, anyway.

“This is excellent,” I said.

“Yeah,” said my business partner. “It makes a great place to spy from.” She looked at me. “So—any clues on the Killer Dolphin?”

We had decided it might be a good idea to come up with a code name for the stolen book, and she had come up with Killer Dolphin. Same initials.

“Nada,” I reported. “Just some little spat between the two boys and a weird talk with Jackson. How about you?”

So then Rosie told me what she had heard.

She had staked herself out there, up on the roof, for much of the morning. Nothing much was happening, but she said she wanted to figure out where the thief might have gone when he or she left the Library. It was easier to get a sense of that with the aerial view.

I was impressed. There I had been, trying to get someone to confess, with zero results. Rosie was the one making lofty discoveries while I had been busy at ground level. I guess that was what you'd expect from a soccer player, keeping my feet on the ground.

After a while, she heard something. It sounded like Abercrombie, so she ducked down to be out of his sight line. He was pacing around the back of the property, talking with someone in a low voice. He must have figured they wouldn't be seen or overheard.

He hadn't taken into consideration the possibility of someone on the roof.

The problem with the exchange was that although Rosie could hear Abercrombie pretty clearly, the other one was a mumbler.

“Jason!” I told her. “It was Jason he was talking to. His nephew.” I began to see what was irritating about mumblers: how could you eavesdrop on people if they didn't enunciate properly?

“Yeah, Jason. I thought so. So Abercrombie begins by saying, ‘Now what did you need to talk to me about?'” Rosie did a pretty good Abercrombie imitation: she had his “I'm so important” tone down just right. She made her face kind of snooty as she spoke his lines. She'd probably end up in Drama Club one day. “And the answer was
mumble mumble mumble.
‘Good Lord, Jason, what
do
you mean? You're not suggesting—' Then the boy, Jason, mumbled some more. Abercrombie started huffing. ‘Are you really suggesting that you would—' More mumbling. ‘Well, I think Jackson was quite right to say that. After all, Mrs. Von Stern has been very generous. And you have
no
idea—' Then Jason must have started to get impatient, because his voice finally picked up, and I definitely heard him say, ‘… ripped you off, remember? At least that's what you told me,' and then his
uncle goes, but in a lower voice, ‘Yes, that's true, but it was long ago, and besides that was Edward, not Violet. In any case, please leave that worry to me. I have been working on another—'”

Rosie broke off.

“What?” I asked. “What? Working on another what?”

Her eyes got wide with frustration. “I don't
know
! Because then I heard some kind of weird creaky sound, like something opening, and then I heard Jason, crystal clear all of a sudden, SWEAR super-loudly—”

“That's meanagers for you.”

“I know, and Abercrombie says, ‘For heaven's sake, what is it?' and then Jason goes into some
very
quick mumble, then Abercrombie goes, ‘I didn't think you were serious!' and at that point …”

At that point, Rosie had decided she had to try to see for herself what was happening, so she tried to inch closer to the edge of the roof to take a look. As she did that, though, a peacock standing not far from her started making one of those loud crying sounds, which startled her, and her foot slipped, sending a small pile of dead leaves and guano—which is bird poop, if you haven't read enough Tintin lately to know—over the edge of the roof.

“What the (expletive deleted)?” Abercrombie shouted. Not being a dog, he wasn't too fond of the stuff. “Who's there?”

Rosie had held her breath and lain absolutely flat. She said she asked her
abuelito
to keep the peacocks quiet for a minute, and it must have worked, because they shut up. Then she
heard rapid footsteps, and she figured that though Abercrombie wanted to know if someone was watching them, he wanted to get them out of there even more.

And that was it.

Rosie stared at me in the bright noon Albuquerque sun. It was getting hot up there. “So? What do you think?” she asked me.

“I think we had better keep a very close eye on Christopher Abercrombie.”

“Me too,” she agreed. “And Jason. Didn't you say Abercrombie's leaving soon?”

“In a few days.”

“We have to find a way to see if he's got it. You know, hidden in his bags or something.”

So we started working on a plan of how to do that—stage an accidental-on-purpose search of Abercrombie's luggage. Then something surprising happened.

My cell phone rang. “Nowhere Man.”

Nowhere Man hadn't called me for quite a while.

I hadn't even remembered I had the phone on me, it rang so little. But ever since Mom had the tomato juice put in her, I wanted to have the device nearby, just in case Auntie Irene ever needed to call me. For any reason.

“Dad?” I said, giving Rosie a
What do you know?
look. I had told her how flaky my dad was, how he had promised he would come to the GM's while I was staying here. And how he hadn't made it yet.

“Belle, old girl!”

Same greeting as usual, but he didn't sound quite as hearty as he sometimes did. There was a lot of static on the line.

“Hi.”

“How's the crxxxxZcrsxxxx? Still crcxxxZing?”

“Where are you, Dad? Out on a raft somewhere? I can hardly hear you.”

“Oh. Yeah, that's probably because I'm crxxxxZZxxxxZ.”

This seemed so typical: by the time my dad was finally trying to call me, he wasn't even somewhere where he had a decent signal. I decided to lay—ahem!
lie
—flat on my back on the roof, soaking up some sun. There was some ratty old cloth up there, conveniently nearby, so I used that as a grimy sort of pillow and settled down.

“Uh-huh,” I said into the phone, like I had any idea what he had just said.