Minerva Clark Gives Up the Ghost (16 page)

“Don't you start, too,” she said, turning on her heel. She collected her giant purse from the end of the sofa
and started toward the door. “You know the testimony of a family member doesn't mean a thing.”

I felt like I was under house arrest, like I already had one of those electronic cuffs around my ankle. Quills poured us each a bowl of Cap'n Crunch. He'd hidden the box in his room so Mrs. Dagnitz wouldn't see it. Quills asked about Angus Paine, and over two bowls of illegal cereal I told him the whole saga. I didn't like being called a liar—even though technically Mrs. Dagnitz was right, I had told her I was at Chelsea's house when I wasn't—and so I made sure I told the exact truth about this mystery as I knew it.

I told Quills how Angus Paine had read the story about me in the paper and called to see if I could find out who'd set the fire at his family grocery store. I told him how strange Angus was, how he could be both cold and distracted, then almost too warm and friendly, how he forgot to mention things that most people would find important but that he did not. I told him about my two suspects who didn't pan out—wheelchair-using Paisley O'Toole, who was too nice for her own good, and the verging-on-hysterical Wade Leeds, who lived in his car.

Then I summoned up my courage and told him about how I believed that Louise, the unhappy household ghost who lived in the walk-in freezer, was responsible for the fire. I said it was not uncommon for ghosts, especially Kikimoras, to go ballistic when their immediate
environment was upset, and how Nat and Nat, Angus's parents, had been redoing a section of their grocery to make room for Paisley's new dessert counter.

“I know it probably sounds woo-woo stupid, but Quills, I saw Louise freaking out with my own eyes. I was at the grocery and Angus's mom has this collection of antique toasters that escaped the fire. Suddenly the levers of the toasters all started going up and down. All of them at the same time. And then the freezer door—the door to Louise's house, I guess you'd say—swung open …”

Quills drank the leftover milk in his cereal bowl, licked his lips, and said, “I'm not saying I don't believe in ghosts. It's like how I'm not totally convinced all of human life isn't just one long test-tube experiment being performed by God. I mean, who knows, right? But that said, you do know that it's a piece of cake for someone to do what you're talking about.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, like, remember when Mark Clark was deep into his haunted house phase? Nah, you must have been too little. He'd figured out a way to make a rocking chair rock, and he also stuck eyes in a skull and could make those click back and forth. It's some animatronic thing. You should ask him.”

“So, what are you saying, maybe the whole thing was staged?”

“Just tossing it out there as a possibility.”

I cleared the table and loaded the dishwasher, being
extra careful not to allow one plate, bowl, or drinking glass to touch anything other than the plastic prongs that held them in place on the washer racks. It took forever, but I didn't mind. I knew when it was time to chillax, and this was one of those times. I would not leave the house, for fear that somehow I would be accused of returning to the scene of the crime, as arsonists were known to do. I would play with Jupiter and work on my rebuses and IM Reggie. I would think about Quills's just-tossed-out-there possibility. I would ponder it. I would take the possibility to the next level, which is that someone had rigged up those toasters on purpose.

I'd been squeezing out the sponge. I stopped in mid-squeeze. I was a pure one hundred percent idiot. Why hadn't I done this before? I tossed the sponge in the sink and dashed to the computer room, where I Googled “Angus Paine.”

What I found made all the horrible sense in the world.

Of the thirty-seven hits for Angus Paine, there were six for an Australian high-jumping champion named Angus Paine and an Angus Paine who sold fancy motor homes. Also roaming the test-tube experiment known as Earth is an Angus Paine who grows daffodils beloved by the queen of Sweden.

My Angus Paine, it turns out, was a boy who lived—small world!—in Portland, Oregon, a kid just a bit older than me, whose full name was Caleb Angus Paine-Presinger, who used to go by Caleb Presinger until he suffered an electric shock while trying to build an electric chair for his haunted house and became the laughingstock of the nation for about a week and a half.

There were a few news stories about my Angus Paine, and his name change was mentioned by someone who kept a blog devoted to the art and science of
creating a truly scary haunted house. The blogger told how there had been a small story in the local paper (
The Oregonian!
The same paper that had profiled me!), and then the national news services had got ahold of it and made Caleb Presinger sound like some zany preteen mad scientist. A few late-night comedians had made some jokes about this dumb kid who'd received the shock of his life, and people had e-mailed them back and forth like mad for a few days. Caleb Angus Paine-Presinger became known as the Geek Idiot Who Tried to Build His Own Electric Chair, and that's when he decided to change his name.

I slumped back in the chair and pressed my fingers against my eyes. For a few seconds I watched the colors swirling behind my lids. Once I'd heard Weird Rolando say he couldn't get his head around something and I'd had no idea what he was talking about. Some of those old-time hippie expressions are baffling. What does it really mean to get your groove on? Does anyone really know? But now I got it. My head could get around Angus Paine the Hedger and Angus Paine the Moody Freak Flirt Monster and maybe even Angus Paine the Cruel Prankster, who'd rigged up his mother's antique toaster collection to scare me, but I could not get my head around the fact that Angus Paine was the one other person besides me in the known world who'd suffered an electric shock and then a personality change.

I thought back to my first appointment with Dr. Lozano. She had worn a maroon handwoven vest with crocodiles on it, and I remembered thinking how un-doctor-like that was. I was there because there was
some concern
that my brain had been messed up in some way after my accident. Dr. Lozano had made me draw a self-portrait and take a bunch of tests that measured my self-esteem. I tried to picture her with her gold nose ring and spiky dark hair, sitting behind her desk making a tent with her fingers, telling Mark Clark that she'd seen only one other case like mine, and it was that of a kid named Caleb Presinger, a.k.a. Angus Paine.

So, what did this mean? That Caleb/Angus had also received a giant dose of self-esteem, and now thought he was perfect just the way he was? I thought about the times we'd hung out. He'd thought he was pretty funny, but every boy I knew thought he was a laff-riot, whether he was or not. The last time I'd talked to Angus on the phone he'd seemed too worried about having insulted me, or whatever. Wasn't being obsessed about how you came off to other people a sign of insecurity?

I sat up and stared at the computer screen without seeing anything. I just didn't know. How could I know? I was no expert. But I knew someone who was.

Dr. Lozano never answered her phone. She had a special answering service where you could leave your messages that were screened by a live human being. The two other times I'd called her—once when I'd
wanted to ask her whether she thought my new self-esteem could wear off, like a magic spell or a temporary tattoo, and once to ask her the exact days we'd be in New York City for the medical conference and whether she thought there'd be time to go to see
Wicked
, which Chelsea de Guzman said totally rocked—and both times she'd called me back in a few days. I didn't have a few days, but it was worth a try. I looked up her office number online.

“Hi, Dr. Lozano, it's me, Minerva Clark. I'm calling about that boy you told me about named Caleb Presinger, a.k.a. Angus Paine. It turns out I know him. I have a question about what happened to him after he got electrocuted. Oh! And I am sooo excited about our trip to NYC. It's going to rock, and of course be supereducational, too. Call me.”

I'd just pressed the End button on my phone and slid it into my back pocket when my wild gorilla ring tone sounded.
Oooo-oooo-oooo-ahhnn!
It was Dr. Lozano, calling me back.

“Hi, Minerva, I got your message.”

“I just had a question about that boy you told me about, Caleb Presinger, who changed his name to Angus Paine.”

She hesitated. “What was your question?”

“What happened to him? Was it like with me? Did he score like I did on all those tests? Did his self-consciousness and all that disappear, too?”

“That's more than one question.” She laughed, a bit uneasily, I thought.

I didn't say anything else. The computer room was on the side of the house that faced the street my school was on. I looked out the window and tried to see over the pink rhododendrons and down the block. I knew I wouldn't be able to see the school, but if the fire had been huge enough, maybe they'd blocked off the street. I couldn't see a thing but a tangle of leathery rhody leaves, and over that, two neighbors standing on the sidewalk talking.

“How do you know Angus?” asked Dr. Lozano.

I couldn't bear to spell it all out. “He tracked me down after that story ran in the newspaper. Did you see it? The one—”

“Tracked you
down
?” She sounded worried or something. I couldn't tell. This entire conversation was putting me into a moody freak mood.

“He called to say ‘hey,'” I amended.

“Then you know he's a patient of mine, just as you are,” said Dr. Lozano.

“Well, he didn't exactly say that. He never mentioned it at all, actually. I found out on the Internet.”

She sighed. “It's an amazing invention, isn't it. The Internet.”

“It is,” I said. Duh.

“Minerva, look. I can't tell you anything about Angus. It's called patient-doctor privilege.”

“I know. Lawyers have the same thing.”

“What I can tell you is that Angus did experience a change after his accident, but it wasn't the same one as you did. Or rather it was, but it manifested itself in a different way. I hope that makes sense, because it's all I can really say.”

Manifested? I knew what a manifesto was. Mark Clark's nerdy friend from work, DeMaio, had one—it involved changing how people paid taxes; I never listened—but I was a little unsure about “manifested.”

“All right,” I said.

“And Minerva,” she said suddenly, as if she'd just thought of something, “you're not involved with Angus, are you?”

“Involved? Like, is he my boyfriend?”

“Yes, that's exactly what I meant.”

“No,” I said. When I heard myself say this, I felt sad and mad in equal measure. Sad because I'd grown to wish Angus was my boyfriend, and mad because from the beginning he'd been jacking me around. How much he'd been messing with me was the bigger question.

Dr. Lozano and I talked a little about New York—the trip was only two weeks away, a short time in Adultland but a long time in Kidland—and how we should definitely try to see a Broadway musical and buy a hot dog from a street vendor on Fifth Avenue. I didn't tell Dr. Lozano that if Robotective Huntington was going to pin
the fire at Holy Family on me, I wouldn't be going to New York, or anywhere other than juvy.

For the rest of the afternoon, I did something I haven't done since I got into the mystery-solving business—made Mark Clark's Famous Kettle Corn and watched six straight hours of Animal Planet. I did a report on kettle corn in fifth grade. It was America's first snack food, made by the New England colonists in big iron kettles. It is exactly as sweet as it is salty, and delicious in its zit-creating goodness.

As I shoveled in the kettle corn, and watched the parade of lemurs, Cuban crocs, tiger sharks, and three-legged dogs that could do simple math, I called Mark Clark at work and asked him to explain how you might go about animating a bunch of toasters.

“You and Reg up to something?” he asked.

I was not about to lie. As Mrs. Dagnitz said, it was pernicious. I didn't know what that meant, but I'm sure it had to do with lying getting you in more trouble than just telling the truth, however sticky, icky, or inconvenient it was.

“No, I think I'm being punked by someone,” I said.

“Oh, okay,” he said. “What do you need to know?”

Apparently, truth is like Tabasco sauce—all you needed was a little. Mark Clark didn't ask who was trying to punk me, or what they were trying to do, or anything. He probably just wrote it off as some boring teenage saga.

Instead, he launched into a Mark Clark lecture about servos, short for servomechanisms or servomotors. They're called servos because they serve to turn a smaller mechanical action into a larger mechanical action. Radio-controlled cars depend on servos for all their action. Disneyland as we know it would not exist without servos. The Jungle Ride hippos that rise up and threaten each boatload of passengers at the exact same place in the river? Servo-driven. The hundreds of kicking, spinning, hopping, singing dolls of It's a Small World? It's a servo after all! Those silly pirates of the Caribbean chasing wenches while looting and pillaging? Yo ho, yo ho, a servo's life for them.

By the time Mark Clark got to how servos were used in the Haunted Mansion with its fake, chain-rattling ghosts, I could have rigged up those toaster levers myself.

I felt stupid, suddenly. I switched off a show about a frog infestation in Hawaii and closed my eyes. The kettle corn had given me a stomachache. Of course there was no ghostly arsonist lurking in the walk-in freezer at Corbett Street Grocery. There was, however, Angus Paine, who was up to something, and I had no clue what.

I summoned up every strange thing he'd ever done or said, everything I'd written off as being just how boys were, or just how this boy was. The way he was so different in person than on the phone. The mood swings.
The lies and half lies he'd told about the store being burned to the ground when it wasn't, about Grams Lucille being Wade's grandmother and not his mother, about not remembering Paisley, about how he said we'd meet at his house and not at the grocery—I
knew
he'd said the grocery! Why had he lied? And of course, his failure to tell me he was the boy version of me, the young teen who'd suffered a terrible electric shock and lived to create trouble.