The Case of the Missing Mascot (A Sherlock Shakespeare Mystery Book 1) (7 page)

Still no Champers.

While yesterday's chaos had a decidedly hopeful undercurrent to it, today was like going to school in the middle of a funeral service. Even my classmates who normally cut up in class and the teachers who were famous for letting the frivolity go on much longer than we all knew they were supposed to wore the faces of zombies, going through all the motions of education with no life sparking behind their eyes. Everyone, it seemed, was deeply affected by the loss of our mascot except for my economics teacher. She had no qualms about giving her grieving and devastated students a pop quiz to drag down the curve.

Sadistic bitch.

But other than economics, the rest of the day was more like what you'd find at the end of the school year than the first month. After giving us busy work, teachers barely looked up when students walked in late. No one even bothered to ask for a hall pass before leaving class for the bathroom or make-out stairs or wherever. I didn't even think much of it when I walked by a group of girls crying in the hallway after lunch.

The Karmic Kafe was a very different scene after school than it had been on Friday. A few people in front of me in line were speculating about canceling Homecoming, but otherwise you could hear a flea jump off a pin before it hit the floor in this place. Tanya was there, holding court as usual, even though she looked worse than I had after my nightmare. It was always a little weird for me when Tanya, self-appointed queen of Devils Reach High, looked like hell. Sort of like that
Twilight Zone
episode where everyone looked like a pig and the one person who didn't totally freaked out over the wrongness of the world.

Don't get me wrong, Tanya was still gorgeous when she looked like hell, but seriously, I think she actually wore pajamas to school.

The Pig World strangeness went on through my entire shift at the bookstore. It was always a little dead after the college students had their books and the high schoolers made a mad dash for the books they were supposed to have read over the summer, but this was straight-up crazy. After nearly two hours of sitting behind the counter pretending economics made any kind of sense, I still hadn't seen a single person. Surely someone out there needed a steamy romance to spice up their night.
 

Pirate adventure? Space pirates? Steamy space pirate adventure?

Ugh.

About an hour later, Drew walked in and slid a to-go cup across the counter to me. I wouldn't say that he looked like hell, but his hair was plastered to his forehead with sweat and his clothes had grass stains all over them. "I thought you could use a refill."

"Thanks. Trying not to fall asleep takes a lot of energy."

He gestured to the door over his shoulder with his thumb. "You ought to just close up early. Pretty much the whole town is out searching for Champers tonight."

I took a grateful gulp of juice. "Again? You'd think something important happened the way everyone's acting."
 

"Yeah, have you met this town? Homecoming has pretty much been the most exciting thing for everyone at the start of the school year since we were kids."

I set the cup on the counter and tilted my head to the side. "There was a group of girls crying in the hallway after lunch as though life was over."

"Freshmen?"

"Probably. I didn't know any of them."

He looked thoughtful for a minute. "Life might actually be over for some of them. The freshman cheerleaders decided to have a sex party last night at Lacy Warren's house. Her parents came home early and, well... we don't have a freshman cheerleading squad anymore."

Holy shit. Who had sex parties in high school? Especially as a freshman. I'm pretty sure I’d spent most of my nights playing video games with Drew. Well, until he joined the freshman cheerleading squad and stopped having as much free time, anyway.

Since I didn't have anything clever to add to the sex party conversation, and I really didn't want to know whether Drew had ever gone to sex parties with his squad, I changed the subject. "So you're going back out to search for Champers again?"

He shook his head and glanced up at the clock behind me. "No, but I've got to go. Irene needs me to cover the cafe for a while for her."

"Hot date?"

"I have no idea. Probably a chanting circle or something. She said something about sending out positive vibes to the search party."

That sounded like something she'd say.

Boredom set in a few minutes after Drew left me alone in the bookstore. Part of me wanted to follow his suggestion and head home early, but my parents paid me by the hour, not by the shift. I set aside my homework and turned instead to all the junk that we'd let accumulate on the shelf under the cash register during the end-of-summer rush.
 

The problem with being a small town business was that everyone let everyone else leave flyers and business cards in their shop. We had notices about town hall meetings, expired dental coupons, pool party invitations... yeah, some people basically invited the whole town over for pool parties. Most of it was total junk that needed a trip to the trash. I held onto a few of the notices about changing ordinances in case my parents hadn't seen them yet. Since they spent most of their time teaching in Angels Grasp, they weren't always current on what our crazy mayor was trying to enforce.

I was nearly done sorting the paperwork when a fluorescent orange flyer caught my attention. This one called the death of the high school's llama a tragedy that shouldn't be allowed to be repeated. There was a lot of talk about animal cruelty and how school officials couldn't be trusted with the life of another living creature.

Clearly, this person didn't realize that our llama had been around since before the beginning of time.

I scanned the rest of the flyer and managed to only roll my eyes three more times. Then I saw something at the bottom that made my jaw drop.

After reading the flyer again without smirking my way through it, I set it on the counter. It shouldn't shock me. Really, nothing about Irene Holmes should shock anyone in town at this point, but asking people interested in holding a rally against the new mascot to meet at her home was over the top even for her. The meeting may have passed and the rally may have been little more than a pipe dream, but I doubted Irene had ever let go of any of it.

Was it even possible that the woman who gave me discounted juice might have taken our mascot and hidden him somewhere?

The closer it got to closing time, the antsier I got. In the span of a half hour, I'd gone from not caring what happened to the mascot to wholeheartedly believing that my best friend's aunt had stolen the pig in some kind of attempt to protect his rights. It didn't make any good kind of logical sense, but in this town, that was the only kind of logic that seemed to work these days.

The more I thought about it—okay, obsessed about it—the more I believed that Irene had to be involved in Champers' disappearance. Of course, the last time I thought I was onto something had nearly led to my rape and murder in the alley behind Ricardo's favorite club, so I needed to be sure this time... not that I really thought Irene would murder me. Still, if I was seriously going to put myself on the line by playing detective again, I needed to think like a detective before I made my next move.

As an outsider, someone who'd only moved to Devils Reach at the beginning of the summer to stay with Drew when his parents accepted teaching positions at Cambridge, she wouldn't be as invested in our football team as everyone else in the town. Her opposition to the high school using live animals as mascots was fact. In her quest to preserve animal rights, she'd already made at least one enemy in the town by having a meat supplier shut down. I'd even watched as Irene remained ice cube cool during the incident with LePort on Friday.

Not a lot of evidence.

No matter how I came at the facts I knew, I couldn't manage to come up with a cohesive framework of a case that would be sufficient for even the bungling detectives I'd seen on the few TV cop shows I once binged on. Everything I had was too small to be true evidence, yet I couldn't shake the feeling that I might actually be onto something. What was it that Sherlock Holmes used to say? Something about the little things being the most important.

Well, if little bits of faulty evidence were good enough for the fictional detective during a murder investigation, they were good enough for me to use during a pignapping.

At the stroke of seven, I locked up the bookstore and walked a few businesses down the street to the cafe. I was the picture of stealth itself as I walked by and cast a nonchalant gaze in the front window to ensure Drew was still working. Until I tripped over my own feet and nearly face-planted on the sidewalk. It didn't matter. Drew's back was turned and no one was on the street anyway. Besides, it's not like anyone in town would think twice if they saw me heading toward the Holmes home instead of my own.

Irene's car wasn't out front when I arrived, but that didn't necessarily mean anything. In a town as small as ours, it wasn't unheard of to drive somewhere and decide to stroll home if the weather was nice. Considering the sun was still up, the birds were chirping and only a few fluffy cotton clouds dotted the sky, this was definitely nice weather.

I didn't bother to knock. Instead, I turned the unlocked knob slowly and poked my head inside. "Hel-lo? Irene?" No answer. I stepped across the threshold and closed the door behind me with a soft click. "I'm just going to look for a book I think I left here last week."

Silence.

I doubted Irene was home, but if she was, I at least had a halfway decent reason to be rummaging around the house. Yet again, I hadn't thought things through very well. Clearly she wasn't keeping the pig in the house or Drew wouldn't be spending all his free time searching for it. Or would he? He could be looking for the pig as a way to throw everyone off. I couldn't rule him out of this just because he was my best friend.

Okay. So I wouldn't find the teacup pig snuggled up in Irene's underwear drawer. That didn't mean I wouldn't find some clue as to where they were keeping Champers. I'd need to search the whole house and I'd need to be quick about it. The cafe closed at eight during the week, but I wouldn't necessarily have that long. Either Drew or Irene could come home at any moment.

I started my search in Irene's bedroom. It was the one room in the house my flimsy book-search alibi didn't cover. Well, the bathrooms would also look a little odd, but I guess I didn't need an excuse to be in there if someone came home.

It turned out that Irene Holmes was every bit as eccentric in her private space as she was in public. Everything was tidy, which made the cursory search go fast, but let's just say I'd be surprised if I found the same types of items in my parents' bedroom.
 

Each corner of the room featured identical piles of small stones and crystals. Instead of the usual boring pull on the ceiling fan, two crystals hung from the chains. The top of her dresser was bare except for a bundle of sage, what looked like a partially-burnt rope of something that smelled somewhat sweet, and a feather. Her nightstand had a CD player-alarm clock combo, a few candles and a book on talking to your angels on top.

I stood by the nightstand for several long moments before I screwed up the courage to open it. The New Age stuff everywhere didn't bug me, but you just didn't open the nightstand of a single adult woman. Anything could be in there. I mean, not Champers, but...
anything.

"Please don't let a big black vibrating dildo pop out at me."

I blew out a breath and pulled the drawer open before I could talk myself out of it. No freaky sex toys. No incriminating paperwork. No Champers. Just more crystals and candles.

Seriously, how many candles did this woman need? There had to be two dozen tapers of different colors in there.

Moving on. The dresser gave me the same mild hesitation that the nightstand did, but I got over it quick. Time was running out and it wasn't like I'd never seen women's underwear before.

Hmm. I still needed to buy underwear to replace the Hello Kitty ones from Nana. Later.

The dresser, closet and under the bed didn't reveal the secret hiding spot for Champers, so I ran up to Drew's room—yes,
ran
. I was seriously running out of time now. Irene's room must've been some kind of a black hole time-warp because I spent more time in there than I realized.

I'd been in Drew's bedroom a million billion times over the years, so I knew the layout well. He was very much a minimalist. No girlie posters on the walls. No sports memorabilia. He did have the remnants of some poorly-arranged constellations on his ceiling that we'd try to do in glow-in-the-dark stars when we were six, but that was about it.

I conducted the same quick yet thorough search of his room that I had Irene's. Closet... nothing interesting. Chest of drawers... clothes. Nightstand... about a half dozen protein bars and an eReader probably filled with books on science. Under the bed... dust bunnies.