Hannah West: Sleuth on the Trail (Nancy Pearl's Book Crush Rediscoveries)

by Linda Johns

  “The police officer who came to the house didn’t even bother writing anything down,” one man in the living room said.

  “It’s still a crime to enter someone’s house uninvited, but they don’t seem too concerned.”

  “They’d rather wait until it’s too late, either something is stolen or someone is hurt,” a woman added.

  Everyone started talking at once. Grace quieted them all down. “It looks like everyone’s here, so let’s get started.”

  “Should we wait for Louise?” someone asked.

  “She called me right before I came to say that she didn’t want to miss her yoga class. She said something that sounded like ‘ash-tango,’ whatever that means,” a woman answered.

  “We can fill her in later. Perhaps we could hear from the owners of the two homes that were ‘visited’ today,” Grace said, directing her comments to four people on the sofa.

  Both had the same M.O. as Grace’s intruder: No sign of forced entry, nothing missing. Furniture was rearranged, and piles of books and magazines were tidied up.

  “Hannah may have seen something odd this afternoon when she got home from school,” I heard Mom say.

  All heads turned toward me and Rachel in the dining room. I stood up and cleared my throat. I’m not the shy type, but talking to a roomful of adults is always a little intimidating. “It might not be a big deal, but when I got home from school, around three o’clock, I noticed that all the houses on the other side of the street already had their garbage cans put away. Things just seemed out of balance, because the cans were still out on this side.”

  “Tony must have brought ours in,” one woman said, but her husband was already shaking his head no.

  “I assumed you did it when you got home from work,” the man said.

  “It’s probably not a big deal. It just struck me as odd,” I said. I could feel my face heating up with embarrassment. My mom has all this confidence that because I’m a visual learner it means that I notice things that others might not. “Maybe your neighbor in the house with the turrets took care of it. I saw her and another woman when I got home from school.”

  A man and a woman on the couch interrupted: “That’s our house!” they said at the same time.

  “Oh, I don’t really know who lives where yet,” I said. “Maybe it was your daughter? Or a friend? It was a woman in an apricot hoodie.” I had a feeling they might not all know what I meant, so I quickly added, “A sort of light-orange hooded sweatshirt. She has long dark hair.”

  The couple looked at each other and exchanged “Do you know who that is?” comments.

  “Maybe she was just helping out the woman with the short spiky hair,” I said. “She was outside, too.”

  “Oh, that’s Louise,” the woman said, visibly relieved. “She’s always doing nice things for people. She has a crazy schedule, so she’s often home during the day.”

  “That explains it! I think the woman I saw at your house is friends with Louise,” I said. I was alternately relieved and disappointed: relieved that it wasn’t something creepy going on, and disappointed that I hadn’t discovered something useful for this case.

  “I’m sure that explains it. Maybe Louise felt like being neighborly and returning all the garbage cans and she asked a friend to help. Louise is like that: extremely helpful and bighearted,” Grace said.

  Everyone started talking. Once again, Grace quieted everyone down. I think they all realized that it’s kind of a silly thing to get all worked up about. Still, it was weird.

  As long as I was embarrassing myself, I might as well keep going. “I have one other question, if you don’t mind. Do you use ACE Security? I noticed a sticker at your house.” I directed my question to the couple who owned the house with the turrets, one of the two homes that had been broken into earlier today.

  “No, we’ve never used a security company. That sticker was there when we bought the house, and it was impossible to get off,” the woman said.

  “There’s an ACE Security sticker on my front door, too,” said the man who lived in the other house that had been broken into. “I’ve tried everything to get it off without damaging the wood.”

  Interesting.

  “Most houses on this street used to have ACE Security,” a man said. “They probably all have stickers.”

  I wasn’t sure if he meant that to be reassuring or not, but everyone seemed to be nodding.

  “Does anyone have an active account with ACE Security?” I asked. No one did. Doubly interesting. I made a note of it.

  People had been passing around the stones that had been left at each of the three houses. When they got to Mom, she handed them to me with a meaningful look. I knew exactly what she meant. I placed them on the coffee table to compare them. Each one had a different symbol, but now that I’d researched the first one, I could see that all three stones had Japanese kanji. I copied the symbols into my sketchbook.

  “Is there anything else that seemed amiss in your houses?” Calvin asked the neighborhood group.

  “There’s one thing,” the woman from the brick turret house began. “It’s just a little thing, but I’m sure the toilet lid in the foyer bathroom was open when I left for work this morning. It was closed when I got home.”

  “Maybe Charlie closed it on his way out,” someone suggested.

  Charlie shook his head. “I left before Jodi and got home after her. If she says she left it open, it was open. She does it on purpose.”

  That’s kind of a weird thing to say.

  “I leave it for the animals,” she said, turning bright red. “I’m not gross or anything. It’s perfectly clean. We never use it as a toilet. I just have this fear that I’ll be away from home and there will be an earthquake or some other disaster and I won’t be able to get home to our dog and cat. This way I know they have water.”

  “That’s weird,” I said, not realizing I said it out loud at first. Then I was the one turning bright red. “I mean, it’s not weird that you leave it open. It’s weird that it was closed. It just seems like a totally odd thing to do, doesn’t it?” My voice trailed off, but it didn’t matter, because all the adults seemed to be talking at once. This gave me time to think things over. To me, it didn’t seem at all unusual to keep a toilet lid open so their animals could have water. If anything, it was practical. We had the opposite instructions in our current house-sitting gig. We had to make sure all the toilet lids were closed. One of the cats, Sport, had a thing for water. His owners feared he’d dive into any water he could find and not be able to get out. It might be a crazy thought, but better to be safe, right?

  I was lost in my own watery thoughts until I saw Jodi, my fellow animal lover, holding up four red squares, each about three inches by three inches. Everyone quieted down. Was this some weird meeting ritual, where a red card meant “stop and be quiet”?

  Turns out the red cards had an even weirder meaning.

  CHAPTER 9

  “THEY LEFT A paint chip at the house?” Lily asked me at lunch the next day. We were standing in line to get our daily dose of burritos. People never believe me, but the burritos at our school are truly delicious. The school buys them from Trader Joe’s, so they’re actually the same kind of burritos most of us have at home anyway. There’s just a stigma about school lunch food being bad. It turns out it doesn’t have to be.

  “Several paint chips,” I said. The thief, or rather the un-thief, as Lily and I decided to call the culprit, had left paint sample cards—the kind you get in the paint aisle of the hardware store—in Jodi and Charlie’s house.

  “Maybe it was an accident and it fell out of a pocket or something,” she said, grabbing a tiny bag of organic baby carrots. We headed for a long table where Jordan Walsh and some of our other friends were sitting. This was our best schedule ever, since we had first lunch, and it turned out that a bunch of our friends from elementary school had the same lunch. We sat together at the same table every day. After Jordan and I became friends, she started
sitting with us, too. We spent most of our time trying to avoid making eye contact with eighth graders. Of course, next year we’d be eighth graders. We’d have to find something else to be insecure about.

  “The un-thief is cleaning things up. It hardly seems like this type of person would make a mistake like that. Besides, these weren’t random paint samples. They were all in the same color family. Plus,” I said, pausing to emphasize my next statement, “they were taped to a wall.”

  I’d seen the paint chips, and they were all these deep shades of red. They had names like “Long Johns Red,” “Cardinal,” “Red Barn,” “Firecracker,” and “Heart-Pounding Red.” Since our friends had heard part of our conversation, we all spent the rest of lunch thinking of paint names. (Siamese Kitten Brown, Bloody Gash Red, Poisonous Purple, Scabbed Knee Brown … you get the idea. Of course, Jordan had to throw in Crimson Lake, the color we had dubbed the red streaks in my hair.)

  All of this color talk gave me an idea. I’d have to wait until I got home to check it out, though. The last three hours of the school day truly crawled by. A new house meant a new bus route, so right after seventh period I said good-bye to Lily and walked four blocks to the Metro bus stop on Martin Luther King Jr. Way. I waited for the Number 8 with Chandra and Ari, two eighth-grade girls from my gym class.

  “We can wait for you by the lockers next time, and we can all walk here together,” Ari said.

  “Are you going to keep taking the 8?” Chandra asked.

  I told them I’d be on the Number 8 for a few weeks. I like that they didn’t ask questions, but maybe they didn’t ask because they weren’t that interested in a seventh grader. Still, I didn’t want anyone to know that Mom and I didn’t have a real home. And as much as I’d like to be rich, I didn’t want anyone assuming that I really lived on Millionaire’s Row. They got off the bus before my stop on Fifteenth.

  As soon as I got home, I greeted the cats and checked on my goldfish. I’d moved Vincent and Pollock to a larger bowl with a custom-made metal screen over the top, thus protecting them from any kitty who might feel tempted to go fishing. Still, I’m a little paranoid about these two guys, so I checked on them several times a day. I think they appreciated the company.

  It was Friday afternoon, and I had a couple of hours to myself before I went next door to babysit Rachel. I pulled out my sketchbook and looked at the symbols on the stones the un-thief had left in three different houses. I resketched them, just as a way to focus my mind. Drawing does that for me. Soon I was lost in drawing and shading things, until I really looked at what I’d done. In addition to the kanji characters, I’d shaded the page with different reds. I’d also drawn a diamond shape with the word ACE in capital letters inside it.

  ACE! How could I have forgotten? A few online searches later, I decided to pull out the phone book and simply look up the company in the business listings. There were two columns of companies that had names starting with the word Ace, but none of those companies dealt with home security. I randomly picked a security company from the yellow pages. I felt like a classic detective from an old movie, looking for information in a phone book.

  “Hello? I just bought a house on Capitol Hill,” I said into the phone. I don’t know why, but when I’m trying to sound like a grown-up on the phone, I stand up and begin pacing. “It used to have a burglar system, I mean an anti-theft system, and the sticker is still on the front door. I just hate having stickers, so I’d like to start service with that same company.

  “No, it isn’t your company. And I completely understand that this isn’t something you would normally do, but I would be so appreciative if you could tell me how to get ahold of ACE Security Watch.”

  The reply wasn’t quite what I’d expected. It didn’t really matter since the people on Millionaire’s Row didn’t have active burglar systems. Apparently they wouldn’t ever be active with ACE again. The company went out of business three years ago.

  Maybe I’d have better luck looking at kanji. I picked up my sketch. The combination of the shades of red and the kanji reminded me of something … of something I’d seen recently. I closed my eyes and willed the original thing that had triggered my memory to pop back into my head. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

  This time it did.

  I went to the reading area that Happy and Frank had set up in the sun porch. The coffee table held a stack of books. There it was: the second one down, a red spine with kanji. I pulled out Feng Shui for Your Home and paged through the book until I came to a photo of stones with ideograms. There they were: harmony, serenity, and simplicity. The same as the three stones left in our neighbors’ houses. I turned to a chapter on color, skimming the type until the word red caught my eye.

  “Red is an auspicious color. Consider using it on a south wall of an office or studio to increase creative energy and enhance prosperity.”

  I looked out the sun porch window to figure out which way was north and which way was south. Jodi and Charlie’s house, the one with the turrets, faced west. Based on the way they’d described the scene, I was pretty sure that the red paint samples had been left on a south wall in the living room.

  I flopped down on the bed to look through more of the book. Placement of flowers were discussed in another chapter. Still another had an extremely interesting passage:

  “Career opportunities enter the home through the front door. If a bathroom is located near the front entry, be sure to keep the toilet lid closed when not in use. Otherwise, your opportunities could flow away immediately. Chi and fortune can be literally flushed away.”

  As I read that, I was struck by an obvious realization.

  Our un-thief was studying feng shui.

  CHAPTER 10

  I DON’T KNOW much about feng shui, except that it’s a Chinese term and it refers to the theory that where you place things in a room helps determine the positive flow of energy. I went to my favorite online dictionary and found this:

  feng shui: The Chinese art of positioning objects in buildings and other places based on the belief in positive and negative effects of the patterns of yin and yang and the flow of chi, the vital force or energy inherent in all things.

  According to the little bit I’d garnered from paging through the book, someone who practices feng shui would pay attention to color, balance, and placement of things including couches, mirrors, and a bowl with sea glass in it.

  Now I just needed to find someone locally who practiced feng shui and had a way of getting into other people’s houses. That’s all.

  It was almost five o’clock. Mom wasn’t home yet, so I called to let her know that I was heading next door for my Friday-night babysitting job. She made me promise to call when I got there, too. It’s so embarrassing. Then again, having to call to check in so often was a small price to pay for all the independence I had.

  Libby opened the door and Izzie came running to meet me, with Rachel close behind. Izzie sat down and looked at me expectantly. In one swoop I knelt down to hug Rachel and pet Izzie.

  “Where’s the Special Day Suitcase?” Rachel asked. She said “special” so it sounded like “spess-ul.” So cute.

  “It’s on the front steps. Do you think you could help me bring it in?”

  Rachel didn’t need to answer. She pushed past me to get outside and grabbed the suitcase handle, proudly wheeling in my babysitter suitcase o’ stuff.

  “We’re going to have so much fun tonight!” I said as Rachel led me by the hand into the living room.

  Libby was going downtown to meet Calvin after work. They were going out to dinner and to a play at the Fifth Avenue Theatre. “We should be home by eleven o’clock. Rachel’s bedtime is eight o’clock. The pizza just came. Lots of root beer in the refrigerator,” Libby rattled off as she bustled around the kitchen/family room getting her purse, her keys, and her jacket. She kissed her daughter good night and headed out.

  “Let’s eat pizza!” I said, gratefully noting that Libby had ordered from Pagliacci,
my favorite pizza-delivery place. One half was plain cheese. The other was artichokes and mushrooms—my favorite! “How did your mom know what kind of pizza to get?”

  “She called your mommy,” Rachel said

  This was a pretty sweet arrangement.

  “Are you going to be in the parade tomorrow?” Rachel asked me.

  “What parade?”

  “The one that goes right down our street. The one that goes tomorrow. I’m going to be a firefighter in the parade,” she said proudly. Could I love this girl any more? I’ve seen lots of four-year-old girls who are obsessed with being princesses. But not Rachel. She was a free-thinking preschooler who was going to some parade somewhere dressed as a firefighter. I couldn’t think of any holiday or big celebration that would be happening that weekend. Maybe it was a neighborhood parade down on Broadway or up on Fifteenth.

  After two games of Trouble and three hands of Go Fish, Rachel was ready for story time. Four times through Skippyjon Jones (featuring a Siamese cat who is convinced he’s really a Chihuahua), and Rachel’s eyes were starting to close. Izzie and I waited in her room until she was completely asleep, and then we quietly tiptoed downstairs.

  “Ready to be my model again?” I asked the dog. I’d drawn Izzie several times when she was at the shelter. In fact, one of my drawings was in a frame on the wall here. She’d truly found the perfect home (especially since her new family appreciates fine art by moi). I got comfy on a couch in the family room and started sketching. My yearlong studio-art project at school was all about dogs. We did lots of other things throughout the year, but we were supposed to be working on one theme consistently during the year to see what kind of progress we made. The first drawings I’d done of Izzie focused on her and her alone. Maybe if I put some things from a family home into the picture I could signify that she now had a permanent place to live. I invited Izzie up onto the couch. I moved a photo of Rachel on the end table so that it was closer to Izzie. A vase on the end table would give some nice height.