Minerva Clark Gives Up the Ghost (18 page)

“Sure looks like it,” said Reggie. “Didn't you say that detective said someone had called and told him you'd set the fire? Who else would do that?”

“Daniel Vecchio and his posse of loathsome fifth graders?”

“Dude, I don't even think that kid knows how to dial a phone, forget using one to call the fire marshal.”

“But why would Angus want to frame me?” I asked. “That's the bigger question.”

“Other than that he's a total head case? We say people are whacked, or crazy, or whatever, but this guy sounds truly mental. It's called being a sociopath. And no one knows why sociopaths do what they do. It's part of why dudes like him are so fiercely dangerous. He could have just set both fires because he finds it entertaining, the same way you like to solve mysteries.”

All of a sudden, it felt late. I was thirsty and tired. I put my pillow over my eyes. “So, if it
was
Angus—”

“Minerva! It was Angus! He's an evil creepmeister, all right? Every bad or suspicious thing that's gone down since you got that phone call goes straight back to him, okay? Quit giving him the benefit of the doubt.”

“I was just thinking out loud,” I said weakly.

“Oh, that is so much horse pucky. You girls always like the bad boys. It makes us nerds feel even worse than we already do.”

“But he looked me right in the eyes when I asked him if he started the fires and he said no, he was into creating little schemes, but he wasn't into fire.” I wasn't about to mention that he'd also called me a goddess, which was probably the first and last time in my life that was ever going to happen.

“But that right there was the creation of another little scheme, don't you see? You found that servo, evidence of his pure nut-job evilness, and you still hung out and
had a conversation. You still thought he was worthwhile enough to ask him whether he'd set the fires. You should have known by then that every syllable that comes out of his mouth is a lie.”

“All right! I got it! Point taken!” I said. I threw the pillow across the room and sat up. “Then if I'm being framed, I need to find out why he's doing it, so I can figure out what he's going to do next.” I had no faith that I could actually do this, but it sounded good, and all of us Clarks are firm believers in faking it until you make it.

“That's the spirit, old girl!” Reg said in his fake British accent.

“But how?”

“Didn't you say that lady at the pastry shop is an old friend of the family? Nothing he said is worth diddly, but if the info came from her, maybe she knows something.”

This cheered me up. Maybe I could solve this mystery after all. “Reg, that's a good idea.”

“That's why I get paid the no bucks,” he said. “Now can I go back to sleep?”

In the morning I came downstairs and Morgan was sitting at the dining room table eating a piece of cinnamon toast and reading a paperback book with very tiny writing.

“Where is everybody?”

He looked up from his book. He wasn't wearing his
earflap cap, which meant it was going to be another scorcher. “Getting ready for tonight, I guess.”

“Well,” I said, “I need to go do something.” I plucked his piece of toast from the plate and tore off a bite. “I'll be back in a little while.”

“I'd hang around if I were you,” he said. “In case Mom shows up.” His eyes drifted back to his book. I could tell he couldn't care less. His mind was chasing some brainiac idea, and that was more important than whether I was going out on a Saturday morning for a few hours.

Because Paisley's on 23rd was a pastry shop, it opened early, along with all the Starbucks and coffee places that were Not Starbucks. The rest of the shops on Northwest Twenty-third were still closed. Not many people were on the sidewalks, which had been hosed down earlier in the morning by invisible city workers.

I crossed my fingers that since it was Saturday, Paisley would be there. It had to have been one of her busiest days of the week, right? Or if not, at least there were no doctors in their offices, so she couldn't have yet
another
doctor's appointment.

The bell over the door jingled as I walked in. Yet another girl was at the counter—this one with a crew cut—but I spied Paisley in the back, giving instructions to the elf-like baker.

“Excuse me!” I called out. Desperation had made me bold. Before I'd drifted off to sleep, the pieces had
started falling into place. I realized that unless I nailed Angus for both fires, I would always be a suspect, waiting for Robotective to show up at the door with the handcuffs.

Paisley drove herself right over and asked what she could do for me. She didn't say, “Can I help you?” which often sounds like “What do you want from me now?” She asked how could she help me. How
could
she help me?

Save my life, I wanted to say. Keep me out of juvenile hall. I noticed again Paisley's square white teeth. She was so clean and pretty. I felt like throwing myself at her feet like a zealot in a trance and begging her to help me, help me!

I sat at the small metal table near the front window. “You don't look very good,” Paisley said. “Should I call someone for you?” She reached a curled hand out and laid it on my knee, then turned to crew-cut girl. “Evie, could you bring some juice over?”

“I wanted to ask you a few things about Angus Paine,” I said. And then like a big idiot, I started to cry.

“Oh dear,” she said. “What's he done now?”

It turned out that since Angus suffered his electric shock two years ago, he'd been in nothing but trouble. He'd been kicked out of one school for stealing the frogs from the science room, and at another school he'd accused his pretty French teacher of hitting on him, a complete fabrication. Nat and Nat—they were such
good people!—had taken him to doctors and tried different medications. That's why everyone was so excited when Dr. Lozano—another wonderful person—said she was going to take him to New York with her. He'd been so looking forward to it …

“What?” My tears stopped, sucked clean out of my head by the shock. “Dr. Lozano was taking Angus to New York? For the big brain-doctor conference next month? Is that what you mean?”

“She was giving a speech on—I don't know exactly—something to do with trauma to the young adolescent brain. Angus was going to be her example. Then there was the fire at Nat and Nat's grocery, and it was assumed Angus had something to do with it, and she just thought perhaps it would be better if she took someone else. Someone less troubled, I guess.”

I drank some of the orange juice Evie had brought, just to have something to do. I remembered how, at my appointment with Dr. Lozano, she'd made that phone call to the conference organizers to make sure they had my name on the program. Didn't she say that she'd originally selected someone else? Oh man. I rubbed my forehead with my palm. “I guess I'm the less troubled one,” I said.

“You?”

I gave her the condensed
TV Guide
version, how I, too, had suffered an electric shock that gave me loads of self-esteem that was uncommon in a kid my age.

“I don't know if his trauma gave him self-esteem, exactly,” Paisley said. “It's more like it gave him license to do whatever he wanted to do, no matter the consequences. Or, that's the best they can come up with at the moment. At any rate, being uninvited to the conference sent him into a tailspin. He was not happy.”

“When did Dr. L.—Dr. Lozano—uninvite him?”

“Two weeks ago maybe? Ten days? I'm terrible with time,” she said, laughing.

Mere days before he'd called Minerva Clark, begging for her to help him solve a mystery.

“I want to be clear that they never arrested him for setting the store on fire. That was only conjecture on his parents' part. They're at their wits' end. No one found any evidence to suggest it was Angus, and I'd like to think it wasn't. He isn't a bad kid.”

I tried to look into Paisley's eyes to see if she really believed that or was just trying to convince herself, but she was staring down at her small pink hands, crying a little herself.

I was too late.

As I pedaled up the street to Casa Clark, I saw Detective Huntington's dark blue sedan parked in front. Robotective was standing in our living room with his hands clasped behind his back, his face as blank as a dry-erase board on the first day of school. I noticed that this time no one had offered him tea.

It was a regular family reunion. Mrs. Dagnitz was sitting on the edge of the sofa in her sherbet-colored yoga outfit, sobbing into her hands. Weird Rolando sat beside her, rubbing her back. He wore braids on either side of his head and a purple T-shirt that said something woo-woo about the magic of yoga on it. Mark Clark was dressed in his usual polo shirt and khaki pants, standing at the living room window looking out at the neighbor's half-built porch. Morgan sat
on the piano bench, scratching Ned behind the ear. Ned was panting with delight. Quills was probably still asleep, which was okay with me. There were enough people here to see me dragged off to jail for something I didn't do.

“Good morning, Minerva,” said Robotective Huntington.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

Mrs. Dagnitz looked up from her hands and opened her mouth. Dollars to doughnuts she was going to tell me not to be rude, but I shot her the stink eye, and her mouth fell closed. Didn't some famous person once say that the truth shall set you free? I didn't know about that, but one thing was for sure, it made you feel free to sass. After my freaky-weird encounter with Angus Paine at the grocery, where he admitted that he'd wired up his mom's toaster collection to make me think it was the Kikimora who set the fire, and Paisley O'Toole's juicy bit of evidence that Angus had been Dr. Lozano's original choice to go to New York for the brain-doctor conference, I was sure I had enough new information to keep myself out of juvy, at least for a few days.

Robotective Huntington stared at me for a long, awkward moment, and I stared right back at him. I could stand there all day. I was an eighth grader on summer vacation, after all. Just as I was trying to figure out how I would drop the gems from my own
investigation into his hands, something happened that we in the Clark family call the First Cousin of a Miracle. Robotective Huntington had found a clue that would nail Angus Paine. The cool thing was, he didn't even know it.

“Can you tell me what this is?” he said slowly, as if I didn't speak English. He opened a small black-leather portfolio and pulled out a plastic bag marked EVIDENCE in orange marker. He dangled the plastic bag before me, but wouldn't let me hold it or touch it.

Inside was a scrap of paper the size of a piece of notebook paper. I cocked my head to read it. I recognized the bold red typeface, and the familiar picture of a sable ferret.

“It's from a bag of Only Ferrets ferret food,” I said.

Robotective frowned. I tried to read the expression in his good eye. Nothing.

“This was found at the scene. Another piece of this was used to set the fire.” He carefully placed the plastic bag back inside his case. Behind me, Mrs. Dagnitz made a noise that sounded like a cross between a tsk and a gasp.

“Yeah,” I said. “And your point would be?”

“Minerva!” said Mrs. Dagnitz. I knew she couldn't help herself. I was a teenager sassing a grown-up. She was probably genetically programmed to butt in.

“I was told you have a ferret,” Robotective said a little impatiently.

“I don't feed him
that
stuff, if that's what you're thinking. Never have. Never will.”

“I'm afraid I don't follow.” He was now exasperated. I felt a small prick of triumph. I was ruining his Saturday morning bust.

“She feeds Jupiter only cat food,” said Morgan. “We just got a new bag the other day up at Green's Pet Food on Fremont. You can ask Mrs. Green.”

“Cat food?” said Robotective.

“High-protein cat food is just as good as ferret food,” I said. “Everyone who keeps ferrets knows that.”

“You've never used Only Ferrets?”

“Never,” I said. “It a total ripoff. Twice as expensive as cat food.” I paused then, just for drama. “But I do know someone who has a torn bag of Only Ferrets sitting in his mudroom. And he doesn't even have a ferret.”

A spark of intrigue showed itself in Detective Huntington's good eye. “Angus Paine has a bag of ferret food that matches this scrap?” he asked.

I smiled a big smile. A-ha! He'd fallen for the old detective trick. “I didn't say
who
had the bag, did I?”

Robotective Huntington rolled his thin lips inside his mouth and nodded. By robotective standards, it could probably have been considered a smile. I imagined that just like Cryptkeeper Ron and Wade Leeds, Robotective Huntington thought Angus Paine was bad news. And like Paisley O'Toole and Nat and Nat, he figured
Angus had had something to do with the grocery store fire, but he couldn't prove it. Detective Huntington was probably sick to death of Angus's lopsided smirk and phony good manners, the way he strutted around the grocery as if it belonged to him and not his parents. I am a detective and not a mind reader, but I would guess that he was the kind of man who would be dog-on-a-walk happy to nail Angus Paine to the wall.

“I need to check this out, of course,” said Detective Huntington.

Mrs. Dagnitz hopped to her feet and started toward the door.

“I can let myself out,” he said. “You're still a person of interest, Miss Clark. I'll need to investigate this a little further, but I still wouldn't leave town.” Then he looked around the room at my brothers, and Rolando, who'd also leaped to his feet, and Mrs. Dagnitz, who was wringing her hands. “You've got quite a support crew here. I'll be in touch.”