Minerva Clark Gives Up the Ghost (10 page)

Or maybe she was seeing a psychiatrist-type doctor because she had done something bad. Like set a fire.

“Hello?” said Butterfly Tattoo in a POed tone of voice. “You want something or not?”

I knew I'd spaced out. “No … but thanks,” I said. Just as I turned to go, she hurried around the counter and opened the door. “Here she is,” she said.

Into the shop came a woman in an electric wheelchair. She wore white pants and a sheer lavender-and-pink paisley blouse. She looked only a little older than Mark Clark, who was turning twenty-six in a few days. One curled hand lay in her lap, and the other one operated the joystick on her chair.

Paisley of Paisley's on 23rd?

She and Butterfly Tattoo talked about business, about a late delivery of flour, and something about one of the mixers. Paisley of Paisley's on 23rd smelled like lavender. Butterfly Tattoo wanted next Thursday off. I stood there like the goofball I was. I should have been paying attention—a sleuth messes up when she fails to pay attention—but I couldn't keep from glimpsing at Paisley's curled hands. They were narrow and pale and useless-looking.

“Yes?” she was saying to me. She had white, even teeth, the kind I hoped to have after my braces came off.

“Oh,” I said. “Oh.”

“We're not hiring at the moment, but Michelle here
can give you an application if you'd like to fill one out. We keep them on file.”

“I was wondering about your new location,” I said. “About when you were moving.”

“Not for a while now,” she said.

“There was that fire,” I said.

She didn't looked surprised that I knew, or as if I'd found her out. She didn't cut her eyes over to the side, or look down in her lap, or change the subject, or get all huffy and ask how I knew about the fire. She looked straight up into my face and said, “Yes, the fire. That kind of calamity is always so sad. Even though it wasn't Nat and Nat's home, still, they've put their heart and soul into that grocery. It's practically a Portland landmark.” Paisley had huge gray eyes, like a Portland sky in early spring.

“Were you closing up this shop then?”

“Never!” sputtered Butterfly Tattoo, and then she laughed.

Paisley gave her the same patronizing look our science teacher Mr. Hale gives Reggie when he belches in class.

Paisley said, “I was hoping to open a small kiosk, where I'd have a limited menu, just some cookies and a few pastries. Now, of course, everything is on hold. But we're hoping to open in the fall.”

“That must have cost you a lot of money,” I said. I didn't know what I meant by
that
. It was one of the
benefits of being thirteen. You could say something completely random and no one thought anything of it. I'd just tossed this out there to see if perhaps Paisley would get excited and say, “Oh yes! It was going to be so expensive …” Something to show that she was relieved that she wasn't going to have to spend the money to open the
kiosk
, whatever that was.

“I imagine normally it would have been, but Natalie was giving me the space for free. One of the benefits of growing up together. Actually, I was friends with Maureen, her youngest sister. Natalie was the oldest. They had one of those huge Catholic families.”

Paisley talked on about the old neighborhood, and about the kinds of trouble she and Maureen used to get into. She talked about Maureen's kids, and about how she was the first person outside the family to hold Angus when he was born. She wouldn't let me leave without giving me a cookie and some raspberry seltzer water to take with me. She wanted to give me a half dozen cookies, but Butterfly Tattoo stepped in and said no.

I hopped back on Angus's Go-Ped and sped through downtown to Corbett Street Grocery. I carried my cookie and seltzer water in a small white paper bag, folded over at the top. Although it seemed like Paisley wasn't much of a businesswoman, giving away the profits to undercover do-it-yourself girl detectives, I knew she hadn't set the fire at the grocery. This gave me a bad case of swirled-around feelings. Paisley was cool, and
so it was good she wasn't an arsonist. But if it wasn't Paisley who set the fire, who was it? And what would Angus say when I told him? I was relieved to find out he'd been telling the truth about Paisley's renting a small space at the grocery instead of taking it over completely. This didn't seem like a big deal, but it proved he wasn't a hedger, a person who was always trying to find a way not to tell the truth, without having to tell an outright lie.

I was about twenty minutes late and Angus still wasn't there. I leaned the Go-Ped against someone's garden wall and sat on the curb across from the grocery. I waited. I ate the snickerdoodle and drank the raspberry seltzer. There was a huge pink rose shrub on the parking strip filled with bumblebees, and they cruised me until I couldn't stand it. It was the cookie or my kiwi-scented hair conditioner. I wiped my hands on my legs, and just as I was about to walk across the street to the grocery, Robotective Huntington cruised by in a dark blue Dadmobile. He slowed the car, turned to look hard at me through his mirrored shades, then drove on.

I crossed behind the street, and as I got closer to the charred front door, I noticed that the door was ajar. I pushed it open with one finger. “Angus?” I called out into the gloom. Everything looked just as it had before—the piles of burned junk, the flap of soggy ceiling.

The whole place still smelled burned. It hurt your nose
to smell it. I wondered if it would always smell that way in the heat, even after Angus's parents, Nat and Nat, had the grocery rebuilt, or however you fixed a half-burned building. Debris crunched underfoot as I walked toward the back of the store, past the tall shelf with the row of shiny antique toasters. I stopped and stared up at them. One looked like a little drawer set on end, with the handle on top. Another one was sleek and square and looked like one of the messenger droids from
Star Wars
. I counted ten of them—who knew toast had such a history?

Then I heard footsteps overhead. I hadn't forgotten there was an apartment upstairs, but I'd let it drift to the back of my mind. It was easier to think about how, whether the fire was ruled an arson or an accident, Angus's family would be able to rebuild, and how all that was lost was a lot of snack food, meats and cheeses in the deli case, and newspapers piled in the wire stand beside the door. The footsteps upstairs made me think of the lady Angus said everyone called Grams, and how she had burned to death up there. They made me realize that if this was an arson and not an accident, the arsonist was also a murderer.

“Angus?” I called out, louder than necessary. It was Angus upstairs walking around, right? Not the murderer/arsonist, or even creepy Robotective Huntington, with the flat voice and strange off-kilter eyes. For a split second, I remembered the ghost. What did Angus call her? Louise. But she lived in the freezer, didn't she?

“Uh, NO, Minerva,” I said aloud to the empty store. I believed in ghosts, but only as a joke. The same way I still said I believed in the tooth fairy, just for laughs. Or this was my official position.

At the rear of the store, across from the walk-in freezer I glimpsed the bottom steps of a narrow wooden staircase. The steps were painted red. It didn't look as if the fire had reached them. Before I could give it a thought, I marched over and took them two at a time, to the second floor.

The door at the top of the stairs had been burned off its hinges. The fire had done more damage up here than downstairs in the grocery. Everything was black or ashy gray—walls, floor, piles of what must have been furniture and books. Holes in the walls, the floor. A huge hole in the ceiling, through which I could see the white afternoon sky. The only snap of color was a red metal ladder standing in the corner. Balanced upon the ladder was a person who was neither Angus nor Deputy Chief Huntington, but a guy poking around what looked to be an attic space. A guy in his twenties, cussing to himself, mad as spit.

“Hello? Hi there, I—”

The guy's head snapped around. Like that girl in your class who's created a whole personality around being scared of spiders and bugs, he shrieked, high and loud. He wore work boots, jean cutoffs, and an old red-and-brown flannel work shirt with the sleeves hacked off. Threads dangled beneath his armpits. He had huge muttonchop sideburns that stuck out from the sides of his face and thick aviator glasses. His face was red and sweaty. “Who are you? What do you want?”

“I'm a friend of Angus's. I was supposed to meet him—”

“He's not here! Does he look like he's here? That little twerp. You just about gave me a heart attack. And after all that's gone down around here lately, that's the last
thing I need, believe you me.” He poked his head into the attic space and thrust his arms up there, too. He grunted with the effort of reaching, then pulled down a green metal file box. He set the box on the top step of the ladder before climbing down.

“I'm Minerva Clark.” I stepped forward and offered my hand. It was a trick I'd learned—if you want someone to tell you their name, give them yours first.

“Wade. Wade Leeds,” he said, without shaking my hand. He was too busy moving the file box from the ladder to the floor. So this was Wade, the grandson of the lady Angus called Grams, the poor lady who had died up here. I tried not to think about it. I watched Wade kneel beside the box. He struggled to open its tiny latch. The lid creaked open. I peeked over his shoulder. It looked as if it were full of school papers, cards made out of construction paper and glitter. Suddenly, he bent his head and started sobbing.

Can I just say … awkward!

Had I ever seen a grown man cry? I tried to remember whether there was something special you were supposed to do, like CPR, only for a man crying jag.

“I'm sorry about your grandma,” I said to Wade Leeds. I took a step toward him.

Just as abruptly as he'd started weeping, he stopped. He snuffled loudly, blew his nose into his fingers, wiped them on his shirt, and stood up.

“Who you talking about?”

“Uh, your Grams?” I said.
Please
, I prayed,
do NOT make me say, “You know, who burned to death in the fire
.”

“You mean my
ma
? Who was a good woman who never hurt a soul in her entire life? It's that Angus, he and his snot-nosed friends called her Grams, but she was hardly old. She was forty-seven. Her hair …,” his voice wobbled, “… her hair was prematurely white. That's all. She was a beautiful woman, a beautiful soul. I bet that twerp didn't tell you she cooked for the homeless, did he? Every Wednesday night for seventeen years. She painted, too. Watercolors.”

“I'm really sorry,” I said.

“This is all that's left,” he said, shutting the file box. “This is it. Finito.”

“But maybe … well … isn't there always a will or something?”

He picked up the box by its skinny wire handle and started toward the door. He stopped once and looked around the place, at the charred walls, the broken windows. He squinted up at the hole in the ceiling. “Ha, yeah, a will. Sure thing. A lady who cooks every week for the homeless has a will. Try debts. Up to her sweet ol' eyeballs.”

I followed him back down the narrow staircase, through the grocery, and out onto the sidewalk. I waited while he replaced the padlock. “If you're looking for Angus, I ain't seen him,” he growled.

“Where were you when the fire broke out?” I blurted out.

He turned and glared at me through his thick glasses. “Not where I shoulda been, which is home making sure Ma got out okay, now, was I?”

Around the corner from the grocery, parked beneath the shade of a huge Hawthorne tree, sat a dusty old Ford Explorer. A faded bumper sticker said, NOBODY DIED WHEN CLINTON LIED. Through the back window I could see a pile of stuff—some clothes and shoes, a box of groceries, some empty two-liter soda bottles, a sleeping bag, and a pillow with a dirty flowered case.

I watched stupidly while Wade Leeds unlocked the car door and stuffed a pile of shirts into the back. He put the green metal file box on the passenger seat next to a shaving kit. The zipper was open. Inside I could see one of those plastic travel boxes you keep soap in, a red-and-white can of shaving cream, a razor, and a hairbrush.

Before he slammed the car door and drove off, he said, “That Angus is bad news, and if you're a smart girl, you'll stay away.”

Oooo-oooo-oooo-ahhnn!
Thumpa-thumpa-thumpa.
Oooo-oooo-oooo-ahhnn!
Thumpa-thumpa-thumpa. Before answering the call, I watched Wade Leeds drive slowly to the end of the block. The rear bumper hung down on one side, making the vehicle and Wade Leeds look more
pathetic than ever. I sighed and flipped open my phone.

“Where are you?” said Angus. He sounded mad. Mad! When he was the one who was an hour late.

“Huh? I'm here. Where are you?”

“Waiting for you.”

“Where?” I looked up and down the street. Two houses down from the grocery a lady sat on her front porch smoking a cigarette and petting her cat. There was no other human activity that I could see.

“I'm here. At my house. Waiting for you, Minerva, intrepid goddess of warriors and poetry. Did you know Minerva invented music, too? I looked it up online. No wonder you rock.”

“At your house?” I said. What was he talking about? I stared at the mural on the side of the grocery, at the snow-covered volcano spewing out tomatoes, zucchinis, and corn. When we'd talked the night before, I was sure we'd agreed to meet at the grocery.

“I'm a-waitin' for my wheels, too.”

“Oh, right!” My meeting with Wade Leeds had been so bizarre I'd forgotten all about Angus's Go-Ped. I dashed back around the corner. It was still propped where I'd left it, against the garden wall across the street. I exhaled. That would have sucked if someone had stolen it.