Minerva Clark Gives Up the Ghost (11 page)

Angus's house was six blocks away, straight down the tree-lined street. He lived in one of the old arty hippie houses. It was tall and skinny, and painted the
color of a raspberry, with purple-and-cream-colored trim. The front yard was a lush garden of lavender and white roses and a bunch of other flowers I couldn't name.

A lady wearing faded jeans and a big straw hat knelt in the garden, working a trowel in the dark soil beneath one of the roses.

“Angus is inside,” she said, looking up briefly.

This must be Angus's mom, I thought. She had the same dark eyes and freckles. I took a step forward, then stopped. “I'm sorry about your grocery,” I said.

Then she smiled, and it was Angus's smile. “Why thank you. That's very sweet.”

I steered the Go-Ped up onto the porch and tapped on the door.

Angus opened the door for me to enter. “I called Robotective and told him about that Paisley chick. He's going to look into it. He didn't say when or anything. Isn't there anything else we can do to nail her? We don't want her to strike again or anything.”

I tripped over the doorstep, dragging the Go-Ped in with me. He didn't grab it from me, or tell me to leave it on the porch, or anything. As I passed him, I smelled his Old Spice aftershave. For some reason, it made me want to giggle. Angus was an oddball, and I don't just mean the trench-coat wearing in the dead of summer. There was something else, something I couldn't put my finger on.

He sauntered into the living room. It was cool and dark. Nat and Nat must have had air-conditioning.
The red walls were plastered with black-and-white photographs of people with lots of long hair, big grins, and a lot of beaded necklaces. In some of them I recognized the lady gardening in the front yard. Angus dropped onto the couch. The springs creaked.

I stood in the entryway, still holding his Go-Ped by the handlebars.

“Oh right,” he said. “Just stick that over by the coat-rack thing.”

“Thanks for letting me borrow it,” I said.

“No worries. I've got another one,” he said.

“I thought you were so hot to get this one back,” I said.

“I was hot to see you,” he said.

“Uh-huh,” I said. I hoped it sounded cool. Maybe that's why he struck me as weird. I'd never had someone madly in love with me before. Kevin liked me, but not in a desperate way that caused people to hatch plots and order beheadings, like in long-ago England. Maybe that's where Angus had found himself. Desperately in love with Minerva Clark, whom he'd contacted one day to help him solve a mystery. Now he found himself in over his head.

“Anyway, the other one's broken,” he said, and then he laughed. He flipped on the TV, a flat-screen plasma job, sitting in the corner by a spidery tree in a green ceramic pot.

“Can I wash my hands or something?” They were
sticky from the snickerdoodle, and I wanted a minute to figure out how to break the news to him that our number one suspect was no suspect at all. He directed me to the kitchen, at the back of the house. After I washed my hands, I searched around for a towel and spied a stack of orange-striped ones folded in a pile atop a metal rack in the mudroom. I grabbed one, and as I dried my hands, I noticed there was a mangled-looking bag of Only Ferrets ferret food in one corner.

“Do you have a ferret?” I asked as I came back into the living room. He pressed the Mute on the remote.

“No, but I'd like one. We babysat a friend's ferret for a week while they went on vacation. They are such cool little creatures.”

“Listen, we've got to talk. I don't think Paisley set the fire,” I said.

“Just because we don't have any evidence yet? That's typical of arson, isn't it? The evidence gets burned up in the fire.”

“Have you ever met Paisley?” I asked.

His gaze shifted to the TV screen. A science program was on. A man with a British accent was talking about coral reefs. “Don't think so. Maybe.”

“She said she's a good friend of your aunt Maureen's.”

Angus stared at the screen and pulled on his bottom lip. I figured out what his eyes reminded me of—chocolate M&M's. “They're all dying off, the coral
reefs. It's because the ocean has heated up. All's it takes is, like, one degree, and there go all the coral. They bake to death.”

“Paisley said she was the first person outside your family to hold you after you were born.”

“Really?” The lopsided grin, the chipped front tooth. “Did it rock her world?”

“Like you need to ask?” I could play this game, too. I sat down on the other end of the couch. It was cushy and cool on my legs. I could have curled up and taken a nap.

“I might have met her,” he said. “After she'd held me as a baby and all, but I gotta tell you, all my aunt Maureen's friends look alike.”

“You'd remember Paisley. She's in a wheelchair.” I remembered Paisley's curled pink hands, her perfect polished nails.

I let this information soak in. On the television, purple sea fans waved drowsily at us from their tropical ocean home.

“Yeah, so?” said Angus.

“So,” I said, “I'm not sure she could have set a fire, even if she'd wanted to. And I doubt she wanted to, since your mom and dad were giving her the space in the grocery for free.”

“Just because someone has a disability doesn't mean they're incapable of arson,” he said. His tone was that of a stern grandpa.

“What are you
talking
about?” I said.

“It's not cool to discriminate against people like that,” he said.

“Wait,
you're
the one who made fun of Detective Huntington's Eye of Doom.”

“I'm mocking. That's different from discriminating.”

Suddenly, the room didn't feel as cool as it had when I'd walked in. The air smelled stale. Talking to Angus was like trying to stand on an air mattress in a swimming pool. Just when you thought you had your balance, over you'd go into the drink. I thought about what Wade had said about Angus being bad news.

“She could have been faking it,” he said.

“The wheelchair? She was not faking the wheelchair.” This was truly beginning to bug me. I flipped open my phone to check the time. “Look …,” I said. “It's not Paisley, all right?”

“You're not giving up, are you?” he asked suddenly. I didn't think Angus was a mind reader, but he did always seem to say just what I was thinking two seconds before I was able to formulate the thought. Was I giving up? “That newspaper story about you made it sound like you weren't a quitter. You're not a quitter, are you?”

“I don't know,” I said. I couldn't think of one reason why I shouldn't quit. Other than that I wanted a mystery to solve. Mrs. Dagnitz was probably home by now, pitching a fit about Morgan and me skipping out on her dumb yoga class. I'd been to a yoga class once, with one of Mark Clark's girlfriends, and it had made me all
noodle-y and lazy. Why it didn't have this effect on my mother was probably a better mystery to be solving than this one.

“What about Wade Leeds?” I asked. I so totally did not think it was Wade Leeds—He Who Lived in His Car—but the idea of going back out into the afternoon heat and trying to figure out what bus would get me home, where I would get GOT for sure, made me want to pretend I thought it was him, just so I wouldn't have to move. I felt my eyes drift close.

“Wade. That weird dude. I never thought of him!” said Angus. “I bet it was him. He's a total freak.” Angus was so enthusiastic I opened my eyes and glanced over at him. He was joking, right?

“It was not Wade Leeds,” I said. I told him about the whole weird event, finding him looking in the attic for the file box, and him sobbing, and seeing all the stuff in his car.

“That Explorer belonged to Grams,” said Angus.

“Who wasn't his grandma, but his mother, FYI,” I said.

“Really? Weird.”

“And no will. I asked him.”

“Maybe he was lying,” said Angus. “He wasn't lying,” I said.

We sat there for a few minutes. I felt myself dozing off again. Suddenly, I heard the squeaky springs on the couch again and got a whiff of Angus's Old Spice. He'd
moved over closer to me on the couch. He put his hand gently on the back of my head, where it rested against the cushion. I stared into his chocolate M&M's eyes, and then he moved in for a kiss.

I had now been officially kissed by two boys, and I was only going into eighth grade, and I did not have straight swingy hair or a closet full of Juicy Couture. Not bad, huh? We opened our eyes, and I said, “I have a boyfriend, you know.”

“I know,” he said.

“You do? Did I ever tell you?”

“How could you not have a bf? You're so incredibly awesome.”

“Well, thanks,” I said. “You're incredibly awesome, too.” It only seemed polite to say that back, even though I didn't quite mean it the way Angus did. I meant it more like the old-fashioned meaning of “awesome,” as in “I'm in awe at how weird you are.”

“Look,” he said, playing with my hair, “it's okay if you think we've reached a dead end here.”

“It is?” Only moments ago, he'd basically said I was a quitter.

“Of course. I totally trust your expertise. But would you do me one favor?”

“What?”

“Stop by the grocery on your way home and just have one last look around. I at least want to think I tried to help Nat and Nat.”

“How do I get in?”

He laughed. That chipped front tooth. “That padlock doesn't need a key. It only looks locked. Just pull down on it.”

I left Angus's air-conditioned raspberry-colored hippie house, passing his mom, still on her knees in the garden. She didn't see me go. I walked back down Southwest Corbett Avenue, just the way I'd come. I headed for the grocery. Of course I did. Angus Paine had kissed me. I wasn't
into
Angus Paine, but I still liked knowing he was into me. He thought I was incredibly awesome. I picked a daisy from someone's raggedy parking-strip garden and stuck it behind my ear. La la la. It fell out immediately, then I stepped on it.

I moseyed along. My feet were sweating so much inside my Chucks, I feared you could smell them from the outside. Maybe Mrs. Dagnitz was right about venturing into the world of shoes, or at least the world of sandals. I should have asked Angus for a cool drink of water before I left. I thought about Jupiter, snoozing in the cool basement at home. I hoped he had enough water. It's very easy for ferrets to die of dehydration. I texted Kevin and told him that Angus Paine was a freak who wore Old Spice. He told me about taking Harvey and Otis to get tacos for lunch and finding a Band-Aid in his enchilada. All of a sudden, I was so glad to have Kevin as my boyfriend.

I called Mark Clark on his cell and weirdly, I was not
on the verge of getting GOT until Christmas. He'd gone to lunch and to run some errands with Mr. and Mrs. Dagnitz and they'd just walked in the door. He thanked me for cleaning up the TP without him having to ask.

“Are you all right?” I asked. “You sound wiped.”

“I am wiped.” One of the errands had involved going to four different stores to find him a suitable suit for the Wedding Reception of the Century, as Quills called it, now only three days away.

“Suitable suit, ha ha ha,” I said.

“Shut up, Minerva,” said Mark Clark.

At the grocery, I gave the padlock a tug, just as Angus had instructed, and the shackle slid open easy as you please. I closed the charred door behind me. I didn't know what I was supposed to be looking for here. I found a piece of wood in a corner and poked through some of the debris. Aside from some half-burned potato-chip bags, I couldn't identify much of anything. I walked around the empty deli case and stepped over some scorched floorboards. How nice it would be to find an arson note: “I burned down this grocery because they stopped selling my favorite kind of red licorice. Signed, Lunatic Down the Block.”

I sighed, planted myself in the middle of the store for a long minute, and looked around just because I couldn't think of anything else to do.

Suddenly, there was an odd sound—a cross between
a squeak and a click.
Squweeker. Squweeker-squweeker-squweeker.
It sounded like a cartoon mouse jumping on a trampoline, or no, that wasn't quite it …

The first noise was joined by a second one. Now it was a duet.
Sqweeker-squweeker-squweeker
. The sound was coming from inside. More squeaky clicks joined by what sounded like a wind-up monkey banging his tiny cymbals together. What was going on?

I spun around. Out of the corner of my eye I glimpsed something moving atop the shelf that held the antique toaster collection.

The levers on the ends of the toasters were going up and down, up and down, all by themselves.

The chrome-plated doors of the older toasters fell open, then slammed shut, making that strange cymbal noise. What the heck? A thought appeared that I couldn't shake—where were Mrs. Potts and Lumiere, the teapot and the candelabra from
Beauty and the Beast
?

I didn't think to get scared until the handle of the walk-in freezer clicked down and the freezer door slowly opened.

How could I have forgotten the ghost?

When I walked in the back door, Mrs. Dagnitz was standing in the middle of the kitchen with her hands on her hips, saying, “Why does it still smell like fish in here?” She had that crease between her forehead. Everyone was in their normal places. Mark Clark was in front of the computer. Quills was in the basement practicing his bass. Morgan was in his room reading.

She was talking to Quills, Mrs. Dagnitz was. He'd come upstairs for a Mountain Dew. He was tapping out a rhythm on the top of the can with two fingers, still listening to some inner tune. For a split second, I felt a little bad for Mrs. Dagnitz. Really, no one listened to her. When you're a mom who follows your yoga instructor to another state, no one listens to you.