Magic Nation Thing (8 page)

When they arrived at the O’Malley Agency, Paige spent about two minutes in Abby’s room, where she grabbed the Lemony Snicket books, and rushed right down to the office to hang around staring at Tree and asking her questions in a nervous, gushy way, as if she were talking to some totally famous person. Watching Paige make a fool of herself over Tree really got to Abby. She went from feeling irritated, when Paige asked Tree how she’d learned to be such a great detective, to being really exasperated, when Paige started in on how Tree looked like a combination of Jennifer Lopez and the Olsen twins. At first Tree had just seemed amused, but Abby could tell she thought the Jennifer Lopez-Olsen twins stuff was pretty embarrassing.

By the time Abby finally got Paige out onto the front steps, where they were supposed to wait for her mother, Paige was raving that if she could look like anyone in the whole world, it wouldn’t be Jennifer Lopez anymore; it would be Tree Torrelli. At that point something snapped, and Abby did an incredibly stupid thing. What she did was to say to Paige, “Well, if you want to know the truth, it wasn’t Tree who figured out who the arsonist was. It was me. But I asked her to say she did it, and she said okay.” Paige was staring at Abby in openmouthed amazement when the Bordens’ Mercedes SUV pulled up.

“What? What do you mean?” Paige was asking when her mother honked, and she went down the steps, looking back at Abby with what was turning into a squinty-eyed, really suspicious stare. Abby stood on the front steps while the SUV pulled away with Paige glaring at her from one window and Sky waving enthusiastically from another. Abby waved back while her mind was busy elsewhere. Busy thinking, “Now you’ve done it, you idiot. Now you’ve really done it.”

It wasn’t long afterward, probably as long as it took Paige to get home, that the phone rang. “What do you mean you were the one who figured out who set the fire?” Paige demanded. When Abby insisted she couldn’t talk about it on the phone, Paige kept saying, “Why not? I want to know right this minute.” And then finally, “All right, then. Tomorrow morning. Okay?” And Abby had to agree.

A
BBY LAY AWAKE FOR
a long time that night asking herself how she could have been so stupid as to tell Paige that she was the one who had solved the arson case. Because now she would have to explain how it happened to be the truth.

Of course there was no logical, believable explanation. Not even one that Abby really believed herself. At least not for sure. After thinking it through about a million times, she finally decided that if there was any way to make Paige understand, it was to start at the beginning. As embarrassing as it would be, she was going to have to go into a lot of background stuff, such as Dorcas’s crazy stories about Great-aunt Fianna and the other weird ancestors—and even more embarrassing, the whole Magic Nation thing.

Finally she turned on the light, and, getting out her notebook, she began to write down all the things she would have to tell Paige and the order in which she would do it. The list started out:

1.
According to my mom, her side of the family is descended from ancestors in Ireland or Wales who were some kind of psychic types. Especially one great-aunt named Fianna.

2.
So the story goes, this Fianna person said that a lot of our ancestors could do stuff like read minds, and get messages about someone by holding one of the person’s belongings in their hands.

3
. The main reason my mom decided to become a detective was that she thought she could use some of the weird stuff she’d inherited to solve crimes. Only she’s not very good at it. Not good at the weird stuff, that is. Actually she’s a pretty good detective.

4.
It looks like I might be the one who inherited some stuff. At least when I hold something that belongs to someone else in my hand, sometimes—not always, but once in a while—I can see a kind of vision about the person. That was how I found out about the arsonist.

After she’d written and rewritten the list several times, she practiced reading it out loud. As she read, she tried to imagine what Paige’s reaction might be to each thing on the list. Her first guess was that Paige wouldn’t believe her and would just say something like “You’re making that up, aren’t you?” But then again—considering how crazy Paige was about all kinds of fantastic stuff—maybe not. After she’d thought some more, Abby began to guess that if Paige did get angry at her, the main reason might be because Abby hadn’t told her before.

The next morning the conversation started just inside the gate of the Barnett Academy the moment Abby got off the bus. Paige was right there waiting for her, and she hardly had both feet on the ground before Paige pounced like a cat on a mouse. Grabbing Abby by the straps of her backpack, Paige pulled her down the driveway as she whispered, “Okay. So tell me.”

So Abby started the telling, and she hadn’t gotten very far when she began to realize that nothing she’d imagined about Paige’s reaction came even close. She’d rehearsed what to do and say if she met with a certain amount of suspicion, as well as how she might handle it if Paige got mad at her. What she hadn’t prepared for at all was what she’d have to do and say if Paige believed every word of it and was totally thrilled to death.

Abby started, as she had decided would be necessary, by saying, “Well, according to my mom, we’re descended from some ancient ancestors who were kind of like supernatural, and she thinks both of us inherited some things from them.”

She got about that far before the last bell rang and Paige reluctantly turned loose of her backpack strap and let her head for her first-period class. The next time Paige caught up with her was during the lunch hour, when she once again appeared and dragged Abby away to an unoccupied table. That time Abby got into the whole thing about being able to hold someone else’s possession in her hands to produce a kind of vision about the owner.

She could feel her cheeks getting red, and she found she couldn’t look Paige in the eye as she went on. “I did it a lot when I was a little kid, and when I told the day care lady about it she said it was my imagination, only I thought she said it was my Magic Nation and for a long time I thought it was something that happened to everybody. That is, I did until my mom started telling me about us being descended from these weird ancestors.”

Up until then Paige hadn’t said anything, so Abby went on, still looking down at her hands. She told about how she had found the little Moorehead girl’s locket on her mother’s desk, and how it had made her have a kind of vision about Miranda and her father at Disneyland.

Paige, who had been amazingly quiet the whole time, finally broke in to say
“Wow!”
Abby looked up quickly, wondering,
Wow
what? Wow, what a liar, maybe?

Several seconds passed before Paige went on in a tense whisper, “That is so
insane
!”

Forgetting for a moment what
insane
meant when Paige said it, Abby said, “I know. I think so too. So please don’t tell anybody. Promise you won’t. Please?” It was then that she realized, mostly from the expression on Paige’s face, that what Paige was saying was that she really believed what Abby had told her. Not only believed it, but was absolutely,
insanely
crazy about the whole idea.

“I knew it,” Paige said. “That is, I should have known it. I should have seen that there was something totally supernatural about you.”

“About me?” Abby winced. “Like what?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Like the way you pick up things about what people are thinking and feeling. Like the way you knew about Sky’s being caught in the refrigerator by Ludmilla. And the way you can do things without half trying.”

Abby shook her head. “No, I can’t. What kinds of things?”

“Oh, you know,” Paige said. “Like the way you could ice-skate the first time you tried. And ski too. Like Ms. David said, that just wasn’t natural.”

Abby tried to interrupt to remind Paige that what Ms. David had said was that Abby was a natural, which meant something quite different, but Paige never stopped talking long enough for Abby to say anything.

That was about where things stood when the school day was over, except that, when Abby begged her to, Paige did promise she wouldn’t tell anyone else. But by the time they were on the bus heading for Pacific Heights, Paige’s enthusiasm had expanded to include some plans for the future. Plans about how she and Abby were going to form their own detective agency and start solving all kinds of mysteries by using Abby’s psychic abilities. “We can call it the P. and A. Agency, for Paige and Abby,” she said, “and people will hire us to solve all kinds of crimes and mysteries.”

Paige’s plan seemed to be for this “agency” to get under way immediately, even after Abby brought up a few difficulties they might run into. Difficulties such as being too young to get a detective’s license, as well as the questions that were sure to come up when people brought them cases to be investigated and found out that neither one of them was quite thirteen. But Paige didn’t seem to think that was going to be much of a problem.

“We’ll just find our own cases to solve, then,” she said. “I bet I can find some myself.”

Abby was pretty skeptical, but it was only a couple of days later that Paige came up with a mysterious circumstance that she felt was a candidate for the honor of being the P. and A. Agency’s first investigation.

The case involved an old woman named Mrs. McFarland, who had lived almost in the Bordens’ backyard for a long time. The little house she lived in had once been the stable of the mansion next door to the Bordens’. The mysterious circumstance that Paige came up with was that Mrs. McFarland seemed to have disappeared. At least Paige hadn’t seen her for quite a long time, several days in fact, and she felt quite sure that Mrs. McFarland had met with some kind of foul play.

“So,” she said to Abby. “Why don’t you just close your eyes and concentrate on Mrs. McFarland and see what you get?”

Abby tried to tell her that she didn’t think it worked that way, but Paige went on insisting until she tried, closing her eyes and waiting to get some kind of a message about Mrs. McFarland. Nothing happened. No vision. Not even any uncomfortable feeling that something was terribly wrong, like she’d had when Sky had been about to die of fright from being captured by the cook.

“Don’t you think she could be all right?” Abby said. “Maybe it’s just that you didn’t happen to be watching at the right time? I mean, couldn’t she have gone in or out of the house when you were at school?”

“No way,” Paige said. “I mean, every afternoon she walks down that little alley that I can see from the window of my own room. I see her there almost every day. And besides that, when she wasn’t walking down the alley she was out in that garden you can see from the hall window. You know, pulling weeds and picking flowers and stuff like that. No. Something’s happened to her. I’m positive. I’ll bet if we got my dad’s ladder out of the basement and climbed up and peeked in her window right now, we’d see…” Paige paused long enough to make her big round eyes get even bigger. “We’d see,” she went on, “something totally horrible.”

“Like what?” Abby swallowed hard. She was having mixed reactions. She couldn’t help thinking that Paige’s imagination was running away with her again. But imagining climbing up to peek in a window and seeing something really awful
was
enough to make the skin prickle on the back of her neck.

There was another scene that a much less active imagination could come up with quite easily: a scene that involved Paige and Abby too, way up on a ladder peeking in a window and being caught in the act by a perfectly healthy Mrs. McFarland, and probably a couple of policemen as well. A situation that, coming so soon after their going downtown without permission and messing up Tree’s arson investigation, just might result in their parents deciding that they really shouldn’t see much of each other for a while. Which would be totally unbearable, particularly since it might mean that Abby would have to give up going with the Bordens to Squaw Valley during winter vacation.

But when Abby came up with the suggestion that they just go down and knock on Mrs. McFarland’s door and ask her if she was all right, Paige’s response was not encouraging.

“As if,” she said. “What if she’s not dead?”

Abby thought that was a sensible question. “Well, okay. What if she isn’t?”

“Well, that would really be scary,” Paige said. “I mean, that woman really hates our whole family, especially Woody and Sky. Actually, she hates everybody. That’s one reason I’m positive somebody bumped her off.”

Abby thought that was a good point, but she still had her doubts, and her lack of enthusiasm for the window-peeking expedition did manage to put the whole thing on hold, at least for the rest of that day. As it turned out, that was all it took. When Abby called Paige that evening about a math assignment, Paige answered her question and then said, “Oh, by the way, I guess Mrs. McFarland isn’t dead after all. Woody and Sky were fooling around in her garden a little while ago, and she came out and whacked them with her cane.”

Paige’s sigh sounded disappointed. But after a moment she lowered her voice to a whisper and said, “But I’m on the track of something even
worse.
I’ll tell you about it at school tomorrow.” She hung up abruptly then, leaving Abby to wonder if what Paige was on the track of was worse than Mrs. McFarland being dead, or worse than her not being dead after all.

T
HE NEXT DAY PAIGE
was waiting in the hall just outside their fourth-period class. The moment she saw Abby, she pulled her across the hall by the sleeve of her jacket and started whispering so fast that Abby couldn’t make any sense of what she was hearing.

“Wait a minute.” Abby was grinning as she finally managed to interrupt. “What are you raving about? What about a dead horse?”

Paige took a deep breath, looked around to be sure no one was within earshot, and started over. Speaking distinctly, she said, “Not a dead horse. A dead
corpse.
A body. There’s a dead body out behind the goalpost.”