“And then I found this,” I say and pull the black-and-white photo from my back pocket. I feel embarrassed that it’s crumpled but I hand it to Emily anyway.
She takes the picture and shows it to Mrs. Hale. “Look, Mom! Remember when the house looked like that?”
Mrs. Hale puts on her glasses and examines the photo closely. “Where did you get this?” she asks me.
I smile at Emily knowingly.
“That book was still there?” she says. “After all this time!”
“In the secret room. In a stack under the Anne of Green Gables train.”
“I can’t believe it.”
“What is she talking about, Emily?” Mrs. Hale asks, confused.
Emily gives me an admiring look. “You really are some detective.”
“She was obsessed,” Ally says.
“Completely,” adds Rose.
“Yeah,” I say, “but we followed the clues to here. To the final clue. I had to get to the end. Even though we already knew that Ruthie Delgado’s alive—”
“Well, you don’t know she’s still alive,” Emily says. “It’s been forty years.”
“But we do!” Rose says. “We called her.”
“You did?”
The three of us nod together in our lineup on the sofa.
“She thought we were crazy,” I say.
“She thought you were crazy,” Ally corrects.
“Well, yeah,” I say. “But it was her. No doubt. Lives in Michigan now.”
“Really,” Emily says. “Ruthie Delgado lives…”
I focus on her like a real detective would and ask, “So what really happened?”
She turns serious and says, “If anyone deserves to know the truth, it’s you three.” She looks at her mother. “Mom, may I have a cup of tea?”
“Here, have mine,” Mrs. Hale says and slides over her teacup. “I want to hear every bit of this.”
“Okay.” Emily McAllister opens with a storyteller’s grin. “It was a dark and stormy night.”
“Really?” I ask. “Isn’t that an old Victorian novel cliché?”
“Yes, but clichés are clichés for a reason,” Emily answers. “The night Ruthie Delgado never showed up to the Allman Brothers concert was the night this really began. And it was a dark and stormy night. But let’s go back.
“Ruthie was a teenager, several years older than me, and maybe the coolest girl in the neighborhood. I watched how she did things and tried to copy her. The way her hair effortlessly floated behind her. The way she walked with such confidence and flair. She was really something.”
“She wasn’t that great,” Mrs. Hale mutters.
“Mom, let me tell the story.”
Mrs. Hale shrugs. “Continue.”
“Okay, so Ruthie never came home from the concert and I was sure I knew what happened. This guy, Martin Smith, kept following her around. I had watched him. A lot. And Ruthie tried to get him to leave her alone but he just kept on bugging her. And it wasn’t normal bugging. There was something scary about Martin. And I could tell Ruthie was scared of him. Then one day, I saw Martin corner Ruthie at the pool and ask her to go to the concert. With him! Ruthie said she was already going to the concert and that she would never go anywhere with Martin. And that she never wanted him to talk to her again. She really told Martin what was what. Even though I could tell she was shaking.”
“That boy was trouble,” Mrs. Hale says. “No two ways about it.”
Emily looks at her mom. “You knew he was trouble, too? I thought I was the only one.”
“Darling, everyone knew,” Mrs. Hale says, her eyebrow lifting.
“Well, that might have changed things,” Emily says, almost to herself, before looking at us again. “Anyway, when Ruthie never came home from the concert—”
“Because she never went to the concert,” I add.
“Exactly. Everybody was so concerned about her, I just knew that it was Martin. So. On a hunch, I snuck into the Delgados’ house and found the unused ticket in Ruthie’s room—”
“You snuck into their house!” Mrs. Hale says.
“Mom, it was a hundred years ago. Relax. And I found the ticket, so I knew Ruthie never even made it to the concert in the first place. And that evening, before the concert, I had seen Martin hanging around her house. And Martin was a butcher. Or at least a butcher’s son. So when we heard that Ruthie was missing the next day, I just put two and two together. There was no doubt in my mind. Martin Smith killed Ruthie Delgado.”
“You thought he killed her?” exclaims Mrs. Hale.
Emily nods. “Of course I did. And I told Detective Paulson everything because it was his job to investigate murders. But he just ignored me and—”
“You went to the police station!”
“Yes, Mother. I went to the police station.” Emily leans toward us and speaks more softly. “She acts like she was paying attention, but none of the parents did back then. We kids did whatever we wanted.”
I try and suppress a grin as Mrs. Hale says loudly, “What did you say?”
Emily continues. “I was just saying that nobody believed me, so I decided to go after Martin Smith myself.”
“You didn’t!” Mrs. Hale says, shaking her head.
“I did! But I realized that by facing the killer alone I might be feeding myself to the lions, so I mailed Detective Paulson the letter and then hid all the other clues. Because I was mad. And he didn’t believe me. And I was going to make Detective Paulson work for it. Even if it meant I was walking into my sure and certain death.”
“Your imagination,” says Mrs. Hale.
“Well, that part worked out,” she says and gestures to the books along the shelf behind her. I look at them and register that she wrote them. All of them. So yes, I guess her imagination really did work out for her. “Anyway, when I couldn’t find Martin, I kind of made a scene at Smith and Sons. I confronted his father, the real butcher, and he got pretty angry at me. Didn’t like the idea of me accusing his son of killing Ruthie Delgado, I guess.”
“Yep, he sure remembers you,” Rose says.
“Well, that is regrettable,” Emily says. “But unavoidable. But then a month later, boy was I surprised when Ruthie showed up. Alive! The rumor was that she ran away with some boy and that her father tracked her down and brought her home. But I had worked so hard on the clues. I had funneled all of my paranoid speculation into them. All of my twelve-year-old brilliance.” She grins. “I thought about digging them up. Collecting them again but I kept putting it off. For some reason, I wanted them to be out there. To have a life. Even though no one would ever find them.” She looks at me. “I wasn’t expecting you.”
“I have a question,” Mrs. Hale says to her daughter.
“What, Mom?”
“Why in the world didn’t you come to me?”
Famous, grown-up author Emily McAllister suddenly looks twelve again. The way we all look when our moms ask us something we just can’t answer. “I don’t know,” she mutters. “I just thought…”
“If you had come to me, I could have told you everything,” Mrs. Hale says. “We all knew that Ruthie ran off with her boyfriend that night. It wasn’t a very happy home, the Delgado house. I felt bad for her when her dad found her and dragged her back.”
“Really?” Emily asks. “You knew all that?”
“Of course I did. I’m your mother.”
While Girl Detective takes this new information in, I can’t help but think about my own mom. For some reason, and I’m not sure why, I haven’t told her about any of this. Nothing about the clues, the box, or the girl from the past who sent them to us. Is this what happens to twelve-year-old girls? We stop telling things to our mothers?
“What happened to Martin Smith?” Ally asks like she’s really interested. “We never found out.”
“Martin died,” Mrs. Hale says flatly.
“He did?” Emily asks. “How?”
“Struck by lightning,” she says. �
�Anyone want more tea?”
“Yes, please!” Emily says.
Rose’s mouth drops open and her eyes grow bigger than I’ve ever seen them. “Lightning?”
“Lightning.” Mrs. Hale nods. “It happens, you know.”
“Mom. Tea. Please.”
Mrs. Hale lets out a little sigh. “Fine, then.” She rises wearily and heads toward the kitchen. “What I have to do, your poor old mother.” But there’s a smile in her voice. I can tell she’s kidding.
Emily turns to us dryly. “What a drama queen.”
38
“I WAS a morbid creature,” Emily says as she studies the skinning knife that had been hiding in the Gillans’ mailbox for the past forty-four years.
It’s later that afternoon and I’ve returned by myself. Ally has gone with Rose to help her pack her carry-on for the plane. I’ve laid out all the clues and clue elements (the original clue box, the mood ring, the concert ticket, the knife, and the photograph) on a table in the screened-in porch off the back of Mrs. Hale’s house. Emily McAllister and I sit beside each other on a bench.
“I’m amazed by all of this,” she says. “I’m amazed I did it, but I’m really amazed that you were able to make sense of it. What an interesting twist to my trip.”
“I have a question,” I say.
“Okay. Shoot.”
“Why do you think you did it?”
“The clues?” she asks.
“Yeah,” I say. “It sounds like you were as obsessed making them up as I was obsessed finding them.”
“Well…” She thinks about it for a second. “I guess because being twelve was hard for me. I was different. You know, kind of introverted. I felt like nobody understood me, like I would never fit in. And looking back, I think making up the clues gave me something to hold on to while I was growing into who I was going to be. Does that make sense?”
“Yeah. It makes a lot of sense. And you really grew up here?”
“Well, you saw the room.”
“That was weird. I mean, it hasn’t changed in a long time and you don’t live here anymore.”
“I know,” she says. “My mom is strange that way. After I left for college, I thought she might redecorate it, but she didn’t. It’s like a museum piece from the 1970s.”
“Where do you live now?”
“Brooklyn. In New York. My husband is a professor there and my office overlooks the East River.”
“No kids?” I ask.
“No kids. A cat named Jeremiah. And my books.”
“You’ve written lots of them?”
“Lots,” she says. “With an imagination like yours, maybe you’ll be a writer, too.”
I roll that over in my brain. “I don’t think so. That’s not really me. I’ll probably be a teacher.” I hesitate, then add, “Or a librarian.”
“Librarians are awesome!” she exclaims. “A librarian really inspired me when I was your age. I don’t know if I would have been a writer had it not been for her. She worked at the local library. Where I signed today.”
“Mrs. Thompson told me about her. Mrs.…”
“Mrs. Parsons,” Emily says.
“Right! Mrs. Thompson said people thought she was mean but she wasn’t.”
“Well, she was mean to some people, but if you were a reader, if you loved books, Mrs. Parsons loved you. She opened a whole world to me with books. She made suggestions. She encouraged me. That’s why I come back and sign at the library as often as I can. In honor of Mrs. Parsons.”
She grins, then stands up. “I’ll be right back.” As I wait patiently for her return, I gaze at the clues and artifacts arranged on the table. I know that they bind us together. But I also realize something else. That there are people like me out there in the world. As much as I will always be connected to Rose and Ally, I will find those other people, too. I know this now because I’ve just met one.
Emily returns with a book in her hand. “This might be a little old for you, but I think you can handle it.”
The book is her new book. The one she was signing at the library today. She opens it and grabs a pen off the table. “Thanks, Girl Detective,” I say.
“Girl Detective! You never told me what that means!”
I can feel myself blushing. “It’s you,” I say. “You’re Girl Detective.”
“What?” she asks, confused.
“That’s what we called you from the very start. Right after we opened the box. You became our Nancy Drew. Our Girl Detective.”
She smiles. “Okay. Girl Detective. I can get behind that.”
Then Girl Detective opens her book and writes something inside. When she finishes, she hands the book to me. “Thank you, Birdie,” she says. “Thanks for solving my mystery. And thanks for making me feel like a twelve-year-old again.”
39
THE NEXT day, Rose, Ally, and I climb over the new, charred tree bridge to the island. We carry certain items in our hands. This is our last full day together.
They came to my house for breakfast. Dad made us Mickey pancakes, and Zora sat in Rose’s lap the whole time. It made me realize that Zora will miss Rose, too. Mom took a Polaroid picture of the four of us shoving pancakes in our faces, one of our best pictures ever.
On our way to the island, we passed Mrs. Hale’s house. Girl Detective was going back to New York today. She gave me her e-mail and told me to keep in touch. Now that I will be corresponding to New York and London, it’s time to get an e-mail address.
We also passed Romeo, Joey, and Connor riding their bikes. They stopped and Rose said her good-byes to them. She seemed really okay with everything. She even pulled Romeo aside and whispered something into his ear.
I am so glad all of that is over.
Ally carries the pool-house shovel over her shoulder, and I carry the clue box and a small plastic bag. Rose holds a canvas bag with a drawstring handle. We step onto the island and walk to our usual spot under the willow tree.
“Where should we do it?” Ally asks.
“How about up there?” I say, pointing toward the bush at the high point on the island. “Where we found it.”
“Yeah,” Rose says. “It should be there.”
We hike up to the spot where we dug up the clue box at the beginning of the summer. The hole is mostly filled in now. So Ally starts digging.
It’s a hot, sunny day, so I sit down on the grass. Rose joins me and we listen to the sounds of the shovel.
“You ready?” I ask.
“Yeah,” Rose says, then gives me a pout. “But no. Not really.”
“Maybe we can come visit,” Ally says between digs.
“Or you can come visit us,” I say.
“Sure,” Rose says and draws little circles with her finger in the grass. We sit there silently, weighed down by the knowledge of what’s coming next. What’s coming tomorrow. And then what’s coming after that. Rose looks up, her blue eyes more vulnerable than I’ve ever seen, and says, “You won’t forget me, will you?”
Ally throws down the shovel and sits beside us, forming our familiar circle. “Are you kidding?”
“It happens,” Rose says. “People move away and things change. It just happens.”
“It won’t happen with us,” I say.
“Not a chance,” says Ally.
“You promise?” Rose asks.
“We promise,” Ally and I say at the same time.
We look at one another as if we are searing this moment into our minds. So we can reach back to it time and time again like a talisman or a good luck charm.
“And in ten years, we’ll be twenty-two,” I say.
“Or twenty-one,” says Ally.
“Either way, we’ll be old enough to meet here again. No matter what.” I open the silver Open If You Dare clue box and place it between us. “This will forever be our Open If You Dare box. Our time capsule. To remind us—”
“Of us,” Rose says.
“Of us,” echoes Ally.
“As a testam
ent to our last summer together.” I smile, then ask Ally, “What do you got?”
She digs into her shorts pocket and pulls out two things. She holds up the first item—a red, white, and blue tassel—and says, “This came off Joey’s dad’s convertible on the Fourth of July—the day you guys saved me from being a total embarrassed joke.”
“Yay,” I say as she places the tassel into the empty clue box.
“And this”—she shows us a piece of tissue with something wadded up inside of it—“is the piece of gum I was chewing—”
“Ewww!” Rose interjects. “That’s disgusting, Al.”
“Hold on,” she says. “It was the piece of gum I was chewing when I got my period on the pitcher’s mound and you guys rescued me for the second time this summer. So I truly believe this piece of gum has sufficient sentimental value to qualify.” She looks at me and I nod.
“Okay,” Rose concedes, too.
Ally drops the piece of gum into the clue box beside the tassel.
“Thanks, Ally,” I say. “It’s perfect.” Then I turn to Rose.
She pulls open the top of her canvas bag and reaches inside. “I have two things, too. First”—she opens her hand—“this small unused stink bomb.”
“No way!” I exclaim.
“And you were giving me crap about my gum!” cries Ally.
“Okay. Okay,” Rose says. “But this stink bomb is a symbol of our friendship, too. Birdie came with me when I perpetrated my stink bomb crime.” She looks at Ally. “And, Al, you didn’t.”
“I didn’t help you,” Ally says. “How is this a symbol of our friendship?”
“Because you stood up to me and told me I was wrong. And Bird, you told me I was wrong but did it with me anyway. Both were acts of friendship. Both of you had my back in different ways.”
“Okay,” I say.
“Yeah, it’s good,” Ally says to her.
Rose places the stink bomb carefully inside the box, then slips her hand back in the bag. She pulls out the next item, which is tied together with a piece of string. “Did you know that a violin bow is strung with the hair from a horse’s tail?” Rose says.
Open If You Dare Page 19