Who Stole Halloween? (13 page)

Luau closed his eyes and purred, which meant,
And you're lucky to be a kid
.

Apparently, the stir-fry did not kill my dad; he was standing in the kitchen.

“How did it taste?” I asked.

He pointed at the garbage disposal. “Rest in peace,” he said. “But I'm pretty sure my culinary skills will improve when my eyes do. I took a double dose of the pills.”

“Is that a good idea?” I asked. “What if you get X-ray vision?”

Dad threw a dish towel over his shoulder like a cape. “
Super
dad!”

I nodded. “Could come in handy solving crimes.”

“Which reminds me,” Dad said, “how goes the case of the missing cats?”

“Well, so far today, Yasmeen and I have realized that we're idiots,” I said.

“That's not necessarily bad,” Dad said. “Often, the first step toward wisdom is to recognize one's own foolishness.”

“Is that from a fortune cookie?” I asked.

Dad said it might be, or he might have made it up. “When you get to be my age, it's not only your eyes that fail, it's your memory, too.”

“You're not old, Dad,” I said, which made him grin.

“Keep picking up your cues, Alex. Otherwise I'll have to hire a new sidekick.”

I told Dad good night and took the old newspapers up to my room. Like the love letter, they were crinkly and yellow. It was weird to think how long they'd been around. Not a single person mentioned in them was still alive.

The two newspapers on the top were from 1876.

Then there was one from 1877. In them were articles about new buildings going up, streets
being laid out, businesses opening. Most of the stuff was pretty boring.

And then I found it.

Page one, November 3, 1879.

H
ARVEY
R
ITES
T
OMORROW
AT
S
T
. B
ERNARD
'
S

I guess the newspaper reporters had already written about the murder itself because this article mostly talked about plans for the funeral and how important Mr. Harvey's business was. Toward the end the article reviewed the “peculiar circumstances” under which the body was found. From what this said, it looked like Mr. Stone's version of the story actually was right. The big black cat was found in the parlor with the body, the body had been so badly mauled it was “unrecognizable,” Marianne Harvey had been strangled in the same room only two days before.

The last sentence read:

So bizarre and bloody a tragedy has never yet been heard of in the brief history of our fair town nor yet for many miles around
.

I flipped through the rest of the papers quickly, but there was nothing else from 1879. I was about to turn out my light when I spotted a little tiny article at the bottom of the front page, easy to miss because the headline was small—like nobody thought it was important at the time.

And the way it turned out later, nobody in all the years since had thought it was important either.

Not till I did. But first there was the case of the missing cats to solve.

“Stouthearted Floyd disappeared?” Yasmeen repeated. We were on our way to school the next morning, Halloween day. “Right after Gilmore Harvey's body was found?”

“That's what the old newspaper said: ‘One Floyd Anderson, an employee of Mr. Gilmore Harvey's dry goods emporium, was reported missing by his friends and colleagues.' ”

Yasmeen thought for a minute. “Well, I suppose that might make sense,” she said. “Probably he was afraid people would find out about him and Marianne Harvey. Probably he was
afraid the police would suspect him of killing her husband, so he left town.”

“Maybe,” I said, “or maybe he was just so sad about her being dead that he ran away.”

Sometimes, I swear, I can hear the wheels whirring in Yasmeen's head. This was one of those times. “What does it mean?” she muttered.

“I know,” I said. “It's like the explanation is dangling right above us, but we can't jump high enough to reach it.”

“It's been bad enough trying to find Halloween,” Yasmeen said, “then you had to go and introduce a whole separate mystery.”

“That is so unfair,” I said. “You're the one who likes detecting. I never told Kyle we'd find his cat for him.”

“Well, that, at least, we are going to do,” she said. “Tonight—with a little help from Luau and Sophie.”

Halloween used to be a fun day at school. We would have a costume parade and a class party. The teachers would read Halloween stories. But
that all ended a couple of years ago when some parents complained that Halloween celebrates wickedness. Since then, October 31 has been a regular day like every other regular day. And this year it was worse than that, at least for Alex Parakeet, notorious abuser of his own cat. Only a person who has been hated by everyone in his entire school knows how bad that day was for me, knows how much I'd like to just forget it.

The only reason I even survived is I knew Monday would be better. Once Kyle's cat was home, Yasmeen would tell Billy Jensen the truth, Billy Jensen would tell the entire population of our town, and my life would go back to normal.

The three-o'clock bell finally rang, and I shot down the hallway and out the front doors. It was a few minutes before Sophie and Yasmeen came out to meet me. Sophie had something to show us: the radio collar for the undercover kitty. She smiled a huge smile when she pulled it out of her backpack.

“Try it out,” she said, and handed me a receiver the size of a cell phone. Then she ran ahead a little ways and stopped. “Switch it on!”
she called. I pushed the button on the side. There were crackles and hisses, then Sophie's voice, kind of scratchy but plenty loud: “Can you hear me?”

“I can't believe it.” I looked at Yasmeen. “She
is
a genius!”

Sophie was running back toward us by now and heard me.
“Duh,”
she said.

It annoys Yasmeen to discuss somebody else's genius, so she changed the subject. “What about the batteries?” she asked. “How long will they last?”

“Yeah, that might be a problem,” Sophie said. “The one in the collar won't last that long. There's no way for a cat to switch it off, plus it's small. The ones in the receiver will probably go quite a while, but you might as well turn it off till we need it.”

“
If
we need it,” I said.

“Which we won't,” Yasmeen said.

For once, Mom was home when I got there. She was in the family room, taking a break before going out on her Halloween patrol. I asked her
whether any more cats were missing, and I was really glad when she said no.

“How was school today?” she asked.

The truthful answer would have been, “Terrible.” But I didn't want to say that, because I didn't want her asking a bunch of questions. So I tried to think of something good and said, “I finished my map finally.”

Mom smiled. “School hasn't changed in some ways,” she said. “We made relief maps, too. I remember the dough left your hands all dried out.”

I nodded. “Because there's so much salt in it. Salt, and flour, and . . . 
Oh, my gosh
.”

I guess my face must have gone funny because Mom said, “Alex, are you okay?”

I nodded. I stood up. I said, “Kind of, Mom. I'm kind of okay. But I've got to call Yasmeen right now. I think I've just figured the whole thing out: I think I know the identity of the catnapper!”

At the time I was ticked off at Mom for not taking my bright idea more seriously. But now I see it was probably good that she didn't—at least not right then. Instead of letting me call Yasmeen and instead of phoning dispatch and having Officer Krichels go arrest my new prime suspect, she sat me back down and made me explain what I had figured out.

When I got to the part about the grocery receipt, she said, “Wait one minute, Alex. Let's think this through, shall we? Chances are Mrs. Timmons
did
buy salt-dough ingredients. But
there are other classes at your school making relief maps, right? So other teachers may have bought the ingredients as well. Are all those teachers catnappers?”

I sighed. Till that moment, I had never realized the journey from genius to idiot could be made so quickly. “Probably not,” I said.

Mom got out her notebook and a pen. “Tell me the items on the receipt again,” she said, and wrote down each one. Then, probably just to make me feel better, she asked, “Have you found out anything else?”

I thought of telling her about Prime Suspect No. 2—the mysterious Mr. Lee. But I didn't even have a grocery receipt's worth of evidence against him. So I just shook my head no.

“I'm frustrated, too,” Mom said. “In fact, I'm almost hoping something happens tonight, something to blow the lid off the case once and for all.”

Of course I knew something
was
going to happen that night. But I couldn't tell Mom about it. She would have put a stop to the whole
thing, probably would even have called Yasmeen's parents and Sophie's parents, not to mention Mrs. Lee because it was her baby monitor we kind of borrowed when we were supposed to be taking it back to the store.

Yasmeen had said she was going to rest up this afternoon since we'd be awake practically all night. That sounded like a good idea to me, too. But before going upstairs, I took Luau's bed from its usual corner and put it out on the front porch so we'd be ready after trick-or-treating.

In my room, Luau was napping with his new catnip ball tucked under his ear like a pillow. I had the collar and the receiver in my backpack.

“Hey, lazy,” I said. “Wake up.”

Luau opened one eye and
mrrfed
, which meant,
You know, Alex, to us cats the word “lazy” is a compliment
. Then he saw the collar in my hand and stretched to give it a sniff. Usually he hates collars and tries to shake them off, but when I buckled this one around his neck, he sat up tall like a person proud of new clothes. I took a good look at the microphone, which was dangling
from the ring where you were supposed to put a license. It looked like some fancy electronic beeper to scare birds. At least I hoped it did.

“Are you ready to catch a catnapper?” I asked Luau.

He bumped his head against my head, which meant,
Undercover Kitty at your disposal, sir
.

“Good man,” I told him. “Now, move over.”

A little before six, I was in the bathroom making final adjustments to my ears when someone rang the doorbell. On my way to answer it, I stopped in my bedroom to get the receiver, which I put in my sweatpants pocket. Luau followed me down the stairs and slipped outside when I opened the front door.

It was Yasmeen.

“You're early,” I said. “Where's Jeremiah?”