9
SO THE ARSON CASE was solved by… well, by a hunch, but except for Abby and Tree, nobody knew whose hunch it had been. At first Tree had wanted to tell that it had been Abby who had fingered the arsonist, but Abby had begged her not to. They’d had quite a discussion about it the day after Mr. Barker was arrested. Dorcas had left early to follow her latest lead in a missing-person case, and Abby was passing through the office on her way to catch the bus to school.
“Oh good,” Tree said when Abby came in. “I wanted to talk to you.”
“Oh yeah?” Abby said. “What about?”
“About letting people know that you were the one who had the…” Tree paused and then went on. “The hunch about who the arsonist was.” Her eyebrows went up when she said the word hunch, to show that she knew it had been something a little different from a good guess. Or maybe a lot different.
Abby quickly shook her head. “No. No. Don’t. I don’t want you to.”
“Why not? You ought to get the credit for what happened,” Tree said. “The insurance people are very grateful. They might even pay us some kind of bonus.”
“But I don’t want a bonus.” Abby slid out of her backpack and sat down in one of the client chairs. “I don’t want anybody to know that I had anything to do with it. And if you told the insurance people it was my hunch they’d be sure to tell other people, like…”
“Like?” Tree asked, but her smile said she could guess what the answer would be.
“Yeah,” Abby admitted. “Like my mom.”
Tree nodded. “Yes, I suppose they would mention it to Dorcas. But you know, Abbykins, what I don’t understand is why you don’t want your mother to know. I think she’d be delighted. I know she was when you came up with the idea that the Moorehead kid and her father might be at Disneyland.”
Abby cringed. “I know,” she said. She paused, looking at Tree thoughtfully for a moment. “Has my mom ever talked to you about how she thinks that I, well, both of us actually, can do weird things, like suddenly knowing things that we haven’t any way of knowing, and stuff like that?”
Tree shook her head slowly as if she wasn’t sure. “Well, not exactly,” she said. “But she does talk about hunches quite a bit. She seems to have hunches quite often herself, but…”
“Go on,” Abby said. “But what?”
Tree looked a little bit embarrassed. “I’m not saying your mom isn’t a good investigator, because she is. She’s hardworking and fantastically good at picking up on important details and remembering them, which is terribly important in our work. But as far as hunches go…” Tree shrugged. “Most of hers don’t seem to help a lot.”
“I know.” Abby couldn’t help sounding a little triumphant. “She’s always telling me about the great hunches she’s had, but most of them happened a long time ago. Like maybe she had good ones when she was a kid, but she’s pretty much outgrown them now.”
“But yours, on the other hand—” Tree began, and Abby hastily interrupted.
“Most of mine don’t work either. Most of my hunches are no good at all.”
“Well, another thing…” Tree looked uncomfortable. “When I went in to see Mr. Walters—he’s the investigator at the insurance company—to urge him to get the search warrant, I told him I’d talked to someone who thought she’d seen Barker in the area on the night of the fire.”
Abby grinned. “Which is the truth, in a way,” she said. “Isn’t that sort of what I told you?”
Tree looked even more embarrassed. “I know, but I implied that it had been some neighborhood woman. I don’t know why, except I felt that getting the search warrant was urgent, like before Barker had a chance to get rid of the evidence. And I didn’t think they’d take me very seriously if I said…”
“Yeah, if you said it was a kid who saw Barker. And especially if you said that the kid had seen him in a kind of…” Raising her eyebrows, Abby let her voice trail off.
“Vision?” Tree asked.
Abby shook her head hard. “No. Like I told you, it was just a guess.” A disturbing idea occurred to her. “But what if the insurance people or the police want to talk to the person who saw Mr. Barker?”
Tree shook her head. “At this point I don’t think they’ll feel they need to. I told them the person who said she’d seen Barker didn’t want to be identified.” She grinned. “Which is true, right? And besides, when they found all that evidence in Barker’s house and car, he more or less confessed. He admitted that he’d been there that night and might have set the fire accidentally.”
“Some accident.” Abby shrugged into her backpack. At the door she turned long enough to say, “Well, that’s it then. It was you who figured out who the arsonist was. Nobody else. Okay?”
Tree grinned, sighed, and said okay.
So that was the end of the arson episode—except where Paige was concerned. Paige was absolutely hung up on the whole thing and how the case had been solved. And of course Paige, like everyone else—almost everyone else, that is—thought Tree had come up with all the clues that had solved the case. For a while it seemed to Abby that she and Paige were never going to talk about anything else besides the arson case—and Tree Torrelli.
The trouble was that Paige was the kind of person who always had to be absolutely fixated on somebody. A year or two before, it had been Leonardo DiCaprio, and right after that it had been Britney Spears. But now she seemed to have forgotten all about singers and movie stars and instead had become totally fascinated by Tree. She talked about her all the time, not only about what a great detective she was, but also, of course, about how totally gorgeous and glamorous she was.
At first Abby went along with Paige’s Tree gush sessions, but before long they began to bother her. A lot. She wasn’t sure just why, except that Tree had been her own private friend ever since she had begun working for Dorcas, and Abby had always known all the things about Tree that Paige was raving about. All the things except what a great detective she was, because she really wasn’t, at least not right at first. But now, to hear Paige talk, a person would think Tree was a world-famous detective and Paige herself was the founding president of the Tree Torrelli Fan Club.
The picture thing was almost the last straw. Paige asked Abby if she had a picture of Tree, and when Abby admitted she did have an old snapshot, Paige insisted on seeing it. And then after she’d seen it, it somehow wound up on her bulletin board, right where she used to keep her favorite picture of Leonardo.
But it was even worse when Paige began to find reasons for visiting the office of the O’Malley Agency—and of course Tree. Like the time Paige started asking about the books Abby owned, and when Abby mentioned that she had three of the Lemony Snicket books, Paige insisted she had to borrow them, like immediately.
“Why?” Abby said. “I don’t mind loaning them to you, but…” She grinned. “But I’ll bet if you told your mother that you wanted to read the Lemony Snicket books, she’d buy you every one of them, like five minutes later.”
“I know,” Paige said. “But then I’d have to wait until they came in the mail, and I want to start reading them right now. So why don’t we take your bus after school and I can just stop by your house and pick them up.”
So Paige used her cell phone to call her mother from the bus stop to ask if she could go home with Abby, just long enough to borrow some books that she “really, really needed,” and her mother said she would check with Abby’s mother and call back. Then after about two minutes Paige’s phone rang, and it was her mother calling to say that Abby’s mother wasn’t in but that she had talked to Ms. Torrelli in the agency office, and it would be all right for Paige to go by to pick up the books she needed. And then she was to wait right there until her mother picked her up on the way to take the boys to their karate lesson.
When they arrived at the O’Malley Agency, Paige spent about two minutes in Abby’s room, where she grabbed the Lemony Snicket books, and rushed right down to the office to hang around s
taring at Tree and asking her questions in a nervous, gushy way, as if she were talking to some totally famous person. Watching Paige make a fool of herself over Tree really got to Abby. She went from feeling irritated, when Paige asked Tree how she’d learned to be such a great detective, to being really exasperated, when Paige started in on how Tree looked like a combination of Jennifer Lopez and the Olsen twins. At first Tree had just seemed amused, but Abby could tell she thought the Jennifer Lopez-Olsen twins stuff was pretty embarrassing.
By the time Abby finally got Paige out onto the front steps, where they were supposed to wait for her mother, Paige was raving that if she could look like anyone in the whole world, it wouldn’t be Jennifer Lopez anymore; it would be Tree Torrelli. At that point something snapped, and Abby did an incredibly stupid thing. What she did was to say to Paige, “Well, if you want to know the truth, it wasn’t Tree who figured out who the arsonist was. It was me. But I asked her to say she did it, and she said okay.” Paige was staring at Abby in openmouthed amazement when the Bordens’ Mercedes SUV pulled up.
“What? What do you mean?” Paige was asking when her mother honked, and she went down the steps, looking back at Abby with what was turning into a squinty-eyed, really suspicious stare. Abby stood on the front steps while the SUV pulled away with Paige glaring at her from one window and Sky waving enthusiastically from another. Abby waved back while her mind was busy elsewhere. Busy thinking, “Now you’ve done it, you idiot. Now you’ve really done it.”
It wasn’t long afterward, probably as long as it took Paige to get home, that the phone rang. “What do you mean you were the one who figured out who set the fire?” Paige demanded. When Abby insisted she couldn’t talk about it on the phone, Paige kept saying, “Why not? I want to know right this minute.” And then finally, “All right, then. Tomorrow morning. Okay?” And Abby had to agree.
10
ABBY LAY AWAKE FOR a long time that night asking herself how she could have been so stupid as to tell Paige that she was the one who had solved the arson case. Because now she would have to explain how it happened to be the truth.
Of course there was no logical, believable explanation. Not even one that Abby really believed herself. At least not for sure. After thinking it through about a million times, she finally decided that if there was any way to make Paige understand, it was to start at the beginning. As embarrassing as it would be, she was going to have to go into a lot of background stuff, such as Dorcas’s crazy stories about Great-aunt Fianna and the other weird ancestors—and even more embarrassing, the whole Magic Nation thing.
Finally she turned on the light, and, getting out her notebook, she began to write down all the things she would have to tell Paige and the order in which she would do it. The list started out:
1. According to my mom, her side of the family is descended from ancestors in Ireland or Wales who were some kind of psychic types. Especially one great-aunt named Fianna.
2. So the story goes, this Fianna person said that a lot of our ancestors could do stuff like read minds, and get messages about someone by holding one of the person’s belongings in their hands.
3. The main reason my mom decided to become a detective was that she thought she could use some of the weird stuff she’d inherited to solve crimes. Only she’s not very good at it. Not good at the weird stuff, that is. Actually she’s a pretty good detective.
4. It looks like I might be the one who inherited some stuff. At least when I hold something that belongs to someone else in my hand, sometimes—not always, but once in a while—I can see a kind of vision about the person. That was how I found out about the arsonist.
After she’d written and rewritten the list several times, she practiced reading it out loud. As she read, she tried to imagine what Paige’s reaction might be to each thing on the list. Her first guess was that Paige wouldn’t believe her and would just say something like “You’re making that up, aren’t you?” But then again—considering how crazy Paige was about all kinds of fantastic stuff—maybe not. After she’d thought some more, Abby began to guess that if Paige did get angry at her, the main reason might be because Abby hadn’t told her before.
The next morning the conversation started just inside the gate of the Barnett Academy the moment Abby got off the bus. Paige was right there waiting for her, and she hardly had both feet on the ground before Paige pounced like a cat on a mouse. Grabbing Abby by the straps of her backpack, Paige pulled her down the driveway as she whispered, “Okay. So tell me.”
So Abby started the telling, and she hadn’t gotten very far when she began to realize that nothing she’d imagined about Paige’s reaction came even close. She’d rehearsed what to do and say if she met with a certain amount of suspicion, as well as how she might handle it if Paige got mad at her. What she hadn’t prepared for at all was what she’d have to do and say if Paige believed every word of it and was totally thrilled to death.
Abby started, as she had decided would be necessary, by saying, “Well, according to my mom, we’re descended from some ancient ancestors who were kind of like supernatural, and she thinks both of us inherited some things from them.”
She got about that far before the last bell rang and Paige reluctantly turned loose of her backpack strap and let her head for her first-period class. The next time Paige caught up with her was during the lunch hour, when she once again appeared and dragged Abby away to an unoccupied table. That time Abby got into the whole thing about being able to hold someone else’s possession in her hands to produce a kind of vision about the owner.
She could feel her cheeks getting red, and she found she couldn’t look Paige in the eye as she went on. “I did it a lot when I was a little kid, and when I told the day care lady about it she said it was my imagination, only I thought she said it was my Magic Nation and for a long time I thought it was something that happened to everybody. That is, I did until my mom started telling me about us being descended from these weird ancestors.”
Up until then Paige hadn’t said anything, so Abby went on, still looking down at her hands. She told about how she had found the little Moorehead girl’s locket on her mother’s desk, and how it had made her have a kind of vision about Miranda and her father at Disneyland.
Paige, who had been amazingly quiet the whole time, finally broke in to say “Wow!” Abby looked up quickly, wondering, Wow what? Wow, what a liar, maybe?
Several seconds passed before Paige went on in a tense whisper, “That is so insane!”
Forgetting for a moment what insane meant when Paige said it, Abby said, “I know. I think so too. So please don’t tell anybody. Promise you won’t. Please?” It was then that she realized, mostly from the expression on Paige’s face, that what Paige was saying was that she really believed what Abby had told her. Not only believed it, but was absolutely, insanely crazy about the whole idea.
“I knew it,” Paige said. “That is, I should have known it. I should have seen that there was something totally supernatural about you.”
“About me?” Abby winced. “Like what?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Like the way you pick up things about what people are thinking and feeling. Like the way you knew about Sky’s being caught in the refrigerator by Ludmilla. And the way you can do things without half trying.”
Abby shook her head. “No, I can’t. What kinds of things?”
“Oh, you know,” Paige said. “Like the way you could ice-skate the first time you tried. And ski too. Like Ms. David said, that just wasn’t natural.”
Abby tried to interrupt to remind Paige that what Ms. David had said was that Abby was a natural, which meant something quite different, but Paige never stopped talking long enough for Abby to say anything.
That was about where things stood when the school day was over, except that, when Abby begged her to, Paige did promise she wouldn’t tell anyone else. But by the time they were on the bus heading for Pacific Heights, Paige’s enthusiasm had expanded to include some plans fo
r the future. Plans about how she and Abby were going to form their own detective agency and start solving all kinds of mysteries by using Abby’s psychic abilities. “We can call it the P. and A. Agency, for Paige and Abby,” she said, “and people will hire us to solve all kinds of crimes and mysteries.”
Paige’s plan seemed to be for this “agency” to get under way immediately, even after Abby brought up a few difficulties they might run into. Difficulties such as being too young to get a detective’s license, as well as the questions that were sure to come up when people brought them cases to be investigated and found out that neither one of them was quite thirteen. But Paige didn’t seem to think that was going to be much of a problem.
“We’ll just find our own cases to solve, then,” she said. “I bet I can find some myself.”
Abby was pretty skeptical, but it was only a couple of days later that Paige came up with a mysterious circumstance that she felt was a candidate for the honor of being the P. and A. Agency’s first investigation.
The case involved an old woman named Mrs. McFarland, who had lived almost in the Bordens’ backyard for a long time. The little house she lived in had once been the stable of the mansion next door to the Bordens’. The mysterious circumstance that Paige came up with was that Mrs. McFarland seemed to have disappeared. At least Paige hadn’t seen her for quite a long time, several days in fact, and she felt quite sure that Mrs. McFarland had met with some kind of foul play.
“So,” she said to Abby. “Why don’t you just close your eyes and concentrate on Mrs. McFarland and see what you get?”
Abby tried to tell her that she didn’t think it worked that way, but Paige went on insisting until she tried, closing her eyes and waiting to get some kind of a message about Mrs. McFarland. Nothing happened. No vision. Not even any uncomfortable feeling that something was terribly wrong, like she’d had when Sky had been about to die of fright from being captured by the cook.
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