by Karen Karbo
“Is your dad okay?”
“The doctor said it was anxiety or something. They didn’t tell me. They just said he wasn’t having another heart attack, and it was a good thing for me.”
“The doctors said that?”
“No no no,” said Chelsea impatiently. “I’m saying that. I’m just lucky I didn’t give my dad a heart attack over this.” Chelsea had gotten herself worked up again. She cried and hiccupped and sniffled some more. Then I heard her take a long deep breath in an attempt to get herself together.
“Why was he so mad?” I asked.
“Probably because I’m always losing stuff. I’m already on my third cell phone.”
“But you didn’t lose the ring, you sold it.”
“I said I lost it. I didn’t want him to get even madder. As it is he’s already probably going to ground me off the computer for the rest of the summer. And I know lying’s bad and stuff, and we’re not supposed to do it, ever, but I’m glad I did. Because it turns out I messed up royally. It turns out my dad had replaced the glass stone in the center of my Claire’s ring with a red diamond.”
“A red diamond? You mean, like a real gem?” This didn’t make any sense to me.
“He does it all the time when he’s bringing gems into the country. It’s too expensive to hire a company to transport it and you have to insure it and a whole bunch of things that are really expensive, I don’t know, I don’t know why he does it! Sometimes I think it’s just to show how smart he is. While we were in London he bought a red diamond for some important piece of jewelry he’s making for someone, and he took the cut glass out of the center of my ring and replaced it with the diamond. He thought it would be easy to get it home that way. Easier and cheaper.”
“You sold some lady a ring with a real diamond in it?” My heart was a bongo played by a mad gorilla.
“Nobody told me he’d made the switch. My mom told me afterward. At the hospital. I didn’t know. They thought if I knew, I’d wreck it. And look, I did wreck it.”
“How much is this red diamond worth?”
“I don’t know. Red diamonds are super rare. Millions maybe?”
“Millions?”
Chelsea de Guzman was a known drama queen. At the end of last year, when we got to watch Seabiscuit as a reward for not throwing pencils at each other in Mass, Chelsea had to go to the nurse because she was so upset when Seabiscuit broke his leg or tore his tendon or whatever it was that made him lame. I doubted the red diamond—who’d even heard of such a thing?—was worth millions. Still, the whole situation was pretty strange.
“Didn’t your dad call the police, or airport security, or whatever?”
“I don’t know. I think my mom called someone. There wasn’t any time. Pretty much the minute he found out the ring was gone his chest pains started. So can you help me? I still have the fifty dollars. If we could just find her, I’ll give her the money back. I’ll give her sixty dollars, even. I just have to get that ring back.”
“I have to finish this thing I’m doing, then I’ll call you back. In the meantime, you sit down and think if there was anything else special about the girl, besides her long dark hair.”
Chelsea begged me to give an exact time when I would call her back. I said as soon as possible. I needed to give this whole thing some thought.
I had only two shelves to go in the fridge, the top ones where we keep the milk and jars of olives and mayonnaise. I threw out a jar of olive juice that probably hadn’t had olives in it since Christmas, the last time I performed this chore. I wiped down the glass shelves with a sponge.
It was just plain weird for a stranger to offer to buy a cheap ring right off your finger. Then again, one time a lady in the canned fruits aisle at the grocery store offered to buy my purple Chuck Taylors right off my feet. I said no way, but thank you very much. What was I going to do, walk around in my holey socks? So the main question was: Why did a strange woman want to buy Chelsea’s ring?
Chelsea and I have known each other since pre-K, but I didn’t know her well. The closest we’d come were friends of friends of friends. These were the things I knew about Chelsea de Guzman: She was the only girl in our class who always wore a skirt on Free Dress Day. She was the only girl who got an A in algebra. Her family had a bunch of money and a bunch of those dogs called corgis, the same kind the Queen of England has. She was commonly thought to be the second-cutest girl in our class, after my friend Hannah. She was someone you always said you liked and thought was sweet and nice, so that she wouldn’t start a mean rumor about you.
After I finished with the fridge, I closed the door and stared at the notes each brother had left stuck to the door beneath a magnet. The magnets were life-size pictures of creepy things. Beneath a red-legged tarantula was an orange Post-it saying Mark Clark was at work, would be home around five o’clock. Beneath a black beetle was a scrap of notebook paper saying Quills was out auditioning new drummers for Humongous Bag of Cashews, then going to look at a new guitar, would be home before six o’clock. Beneath a caterpillar was a yellow Post-it saying Morgan was doing some yard work for one of his college professors and would be home before donkeys could fly. Har!
Each note also listed the best number at which to reach each brother. The notes were Mark Clark’s idea. It was the first summer I’d be left alone most of the day. Thirteen is a well-known awkward age, too old for a babysitter and too young to have a summer job.
When no one was home, Casa Clark felt enormous. We called it Casa Clark because, unlike every other old wood-shingled bungalow on our street, ours was a stucco box that looks like a Mexican restaurant. It used to be pink, but before my parents got a divorce they painted it light brown. It has three floors and a brass fireman’s pole that went from the third floor straight into the kitchen, which I used to love as a kid, but now is sort of an embarrassment. I don’t know why.
I woke Jupiter up from his nap. Jupiter is my ferret. His cage is kept behind the grand piano in the living room. He was dead asleep, snoring inside a black denim pants leg. Jupiter loves nothing more than sleeping inside a pants leg. He has a whole assortment of pants-leg sleeping tubes, and as a result my brothers and I have a whole assortment of cutoffs.
I tried to cuddle Jupiter under my chin, but he threw himself out of my arms and ran across the hall to the dining room. He took three mad laps around our big table, leaped on a chair, then onto the table, where he knocked over a near-empty carton of milk that had been sitting there since breakfast. It spilled onto the open newspaper.
I stared at the empty red and white carton, lying on its side. The sight of the milk-soaked newspaper gave me an idea. I tugged my phone from my back pocket and punched in Chelsea’s number, scooped Jupiter up, and dropped him back into his cage. He didn’t like this at all. He thought we were going to play, and we were, until the spilled milk gave me an idea.
“Chelsea, it’s me, Minerva Clark. The girl who bought your ring, you said she was in line in front of you at the coffee place?”
“Yeah, why?”
“What did she order and how did she pay?”
“What did she order? Coffee. That’s why it’s called Coffee People. ’Cause people buy coffee there.” She giggled for no reason. Like many girls in our grade, Chelsea had a laugh that sounded practiced.
“Just a cup of coffee? Not a latte or something more complicated?”
“Complicated how?”
“You know.” I started feeling a mood coming on. Was Chelsea being dense on purpose? “Like a half-caf, half-decaf soy macchiato, extra hot.”
“She did, actually. I remember because I started feeling totally tweaked that it took her so long to explain exactly what she wanted. It was already almost ten thirty.”
“How did she pay?”
“With money?”
“Did she use a card? A credit or debit card?”
“Definitely. One of those. There was some something about the receipt. She gave the cashier person the wrong one and the
y traded. Then she threw it away anyway.”
“You saw her throw it away? You’re sure?”
“Positive. I remember being at amazed at how long her hair was. And the only time she was standing with her back to me was when she was at the garbage can, sticking the receipt through the little flap thingy.”
“I thought you said she was in front of you.”
I could practically hear Chelsea roll her eyes. “She was. But we were too busy talking about my ring for me to notice, you know?”
“Perfectimento. I know how we can find her. Meet me at the airport in half an hour.”
Explore the inner workings of
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www.minervaclark.com
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Copyright © 2005 by Karen Karbo
First published in 2005 by Bloomsbury Publishing
Paperback edition published in 2006
Electronic edition published in 2012
All rights reserved.
You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce, or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages
Published by Bloomsbury Publishing, New York, London, and Berlin
Distributed to the trade by Holtzbrinck Publishers
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Karbo, Karen.
Minerva Clark gets a clue / by Karen Karbo. — 1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.
Summary: A thirteen-year-old girl in Portland, Oregon, loses all self-doubt when she is zapped
by lightning and uses her newfound courage to solve a murder mystery.
[1. Self-confidence — Fiction. 2. Murder — Fiction. 3. Identity theft — Fiction. 4. Mystery and
detective stories.] I. Title.
PZ7.K132Mi 2005 [Fic] — dc22 2005012242
eISBN: 978-1-6196-3104-5 (e-book)
Bloomsbury Publishing, Children’s Books, U.S.A.
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010