Who Stole New Year's Eve?

by Martha Freeman

  Meanwhile, I’d been thinking about my idea—and the more I did, the more I thought Mr. Glassie was definitely our prime suspect. More important, if Mom was going to nab him, she needed to act fast. She should be calling the highway patrol! The FBI! If he’d gone north, he and the ice sculptures could be in Canada by now. Maybe she should call the Royal Canadian Mounted Police!

  “Mom!” I was excited. “I think I might’ve figured something out.”

  Mom used to think of me as a little kid with little-kid ideas. She never took me seriously. But things have changed since I solved those other mysteries. She pays attention. Now she sat back in her chair and looked me in the eye. “Okay, sweetie,” she said. “Shoot.”

  But I never had the chance. I was just about to name our prime suspect, the one hotfooting it for the international border, when Ms. Price did it for me: “Mr. Glassie here to see you, Detective!” she yelled from the reception desk. “Can I send him back?”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Mr. Glassie is small for a grown-up man. He has a pointy nose and wire glasses. Today he was wearing plaid pants, nice shoes with tassels on them, and a black down vest over a long-sleeved turquoise polo shirt. He came into Mom’s office, said “Hi-hi-hi-hi” to everybody, sat down in a chair, and then bounced back up and paced.

  I could see from Mom’s expression she was going to say something sympathetic about the sculptures, but before she could, Sophie blurted: “So how come you haven’t paid Eve’s uncle Jim in two years? He’s a starving artist, you know!”

  Mom, Eve, and I all said: “Sophie!” at various volumes.

  Sophie shrugged. “This is no time for chitchat.”

  Mr. Glassie sat down and stood up again. “It’s no secret the Carnival’s finances are a shambles. Without the support of all the downtown business owners and the city, it’s very difficult for us to prosper. That woman—”

  “He means Mrs. Miggins,” Sophie put in.

  “We got that, Soph,” I said.

  “—has done a lot of damage. We don’t have the money to do anything new, so people lose interest, so we lose money, so people lose more interest. Almost more than we need the sculptures back, we need an idea to get people excited about Ice Carnival,” he said, then added, “A cheap idea.”

  Eve looked up. “Where I used to live in California . . .” Then she looked down again and said, “Never mind.”

  “No, tell us,” I said.

  “But you’re all sick of California,” Eve said.

  “You’re right,” Sophie said, “but this is an emergency.”

  “We had a costume parade,” Eve said, “to celebrate the winter solstice. You know, December twenty-first? Only, it was for pets. Everybody gathered at this park downtown with their pets in wild getups—like Hawaiian leis, and hats, and bows, and sweaters . . . The littler pets rode in wagons. Birds and big lizards rode on people’s shoulders. There was music and then we paraded to City Hall. It was about a mile. So you could maybe do something like that. It’s cheap and everything.”

  When no one reacted for a few moments, Eve looked as if she wanted to sink through the floor. This is a feeling I know well.

  But then Mom said, “People here are crazy about their pets.”

  And Mr. Glassie said, “We could charge an entry fee.”

  And Sophie said, “It’s brilliant. And the best part is we can pull it together in an afternoon.”

  Everybody looked at Sophie. “We can?”

  “Two words.” Sophie nodded. “Social media.”

  “She has a point,” Mr. Glassie said. “Besides, the main downtown streets are already closed, so traffic control is easy. If we start at the college gates, we can end over on the north side of campus by the stadium.”

  Mom looked at me. “Luau is going to love it!”

  I looked at Mom as if she had just sprouted antlers. Luau was going to hate it! He’s much too dignified for a pet parade.

  “Marshmallow won first prize two years in a row in California,” Eve said.

  “Okay, that you can put a lid on,” Sophie said.

  “We need prizes, and refreshments, and judges,” Mr. Glassie said. “And we need them by six o’clock. Looks like I know what I’ll be doing this afternoon.”

  “Who says the parade is at six?” Mom asked.

  “I do,” said Mr. Glassie. “Executive decision.”

  “What about the ice sculptures?” Mom asked.

  “That’s crime, and crime is your department, right?” He was moving around Mom’s office like a whirlwind. “Anyway, they were insured.”

  Mom looked up. “Oh?”

  Insurance is something I know about from other cases. It means you pay a little bit of money to a company, and then, if something bad happens, like your house burns down or your ice sculptures get stolen, the company pays you a lot more money, enough to fix it.

  This might seem like a bad deal for the insurance company, but it isn’t. Most of the time fires and robberies don’t happen, and they get to keep the money.

  Mr. Glassie dropped back into his chair. “Don’t look at me that way,” he said to Mom.

  “Well, to be honest, insurance does give you a motive for taking the sculptures,” Mom said. “They disappear, you get paid, the Carnival’s financial problems are fixed.”

  Mr. Glassie raised himself to his full height and puffed out his chest. “I have put my life into the Carnival,” he said, “and I would never do anything to harm it! Now, let that be my last word on the subject. If we’re going to organize a pet parade by six o’clock, there’s a lot to do. Can you kids help out?”

  “No problem,” Sophie said. “And while we’re at it, we’ll solve the mystery, too. It’s only one o’clock.”

  Eve looked at me. “Is she being sarcastic?”

  I shrugged. “I can never tell.”

  During the next few minutes, we worked out all the parade details. We would charge a ten-dollar entry fee per pet, and there would be ribbons for the winners.

  “I’ll put an entry form up on our website,” Mr. Glassie said. “You”—he pointed at me—“go over to the Middle Daily Times and tell that reporter, Tim Roberts, what’s going on. You two”—he pointed at Eve and Sophie—“make a page for the social media sites. Also, ask your own friends and neighbors to participate.”

  Mr. Glassie would not take no for an answer. And maybe Sophie was sarcastic, but she was also right. If her mom picked her and Eve up now, they could go home, get on the Web, and interview the neighbors—all in an afternoon’s work.

  Meanwhile, I was going to tell Tim Roberts about the parade, then walk around and look at the storefronts where the sculptures used to be. Maybe the thief had left a clue.

  “Can you give me a ride home after that, Mom?”

  Mom nodded. “I’ve got a ‘tipster’ to talk to and some paperwork to finish up. So the timing should work out about right.”

  “Meet at my house at fifteen hundred hours to plan our next move,” Sophie said to Eve and me. “Is that a deal?”

  Eve looked confused. “Fifteen hundred hours? What’s that?”

  Sophie rolled her eyes. “Three o’clock, duh. I see we still have some work to do to catch you up.”

  We all walked out of my mom’s office together. In the lobby, Mr. Glassie said, “Thanks for the idea, Eve. I’m feeling a lot better about the Carnival now. Oh, wait—Alex. Before you go, I have been wondering about one thing.”

  “Yeah?” I said.

  “Where’s Yasmeen?”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  In College Springs, the newspaper office is on Main Street, next door to the police department. This is lucky if you happen to be one kid trying to do two things—organize a costume pet parade and figure out who stole nineteen ice sculptures—at the same time.

  Tim Roberts’s desk is on the second floor in a sea of other desks, most of them empty. There used to be lots of reporters at the Middle Daily Times, but the paper doesn’t make that much money anymor
e because—my dad explained to me—most people get news from TV or the Web. So visiting Tim Roberts at his office is a little like visiting a ghost town.

  “Don’t tell me. You’re here about the ice sculptures,” Tim Roberts said when he saw me coming.

  “Hi, Tim. Very nice to see you. What’s going on?” I always try to be polite—even when other people aren’t.

  “Busy,” Tim said. “I’m working on a twenty-part series on hydraulic fracturing, also known as fracking. Did you see my piece in the paper today?”

  “My mom did.” I remembered it on her desk.

  “How’d she like it?” Tim asked.

  I had no idea. I hadn’t asked. “She loved it,” I said.

  “Good! I’m hoping it will win some big award and be my ticket out of here.”

  “So, have you found out anything about the sculptures?” I asked.

  Tim Roberts shook his head. “I haven’t even had time to look into it yet.”

  “There’s something else, too,” I said, and I explained about the costume pet parade. “Do you think you could put something up on the paper’s website? Mr. Glassie would appreciate it.”

  Tim said, “Why not?” and swiveled around to face his computer monitor. While I gave him the details, he typed. Then he read what he’d written out loud so I could make sure he had the facts, punched his keyboard and announced: “There. It’s live. I hope it generates some interest. I’ll go down and take some pictures later when the parade entries are assembling. We could use the art”—Tim yawned, picked up his coffee mug, looked into it sadly, set it down again, then finished his sentence—“for tomorrow’s paper.”

  I stood up to go. “Cool,” I said. Then I noticed that the design on his mug was the same as on the truck that had pulled up behind Mr. Yoder’s studio—a black cat with the words FRAIDY BROTHERS FRACTURING: WE SCARE UP THE GAS.

  “Hey, where did you get that?” I asked.

  To my surprise, Tim Roberts blushed. “You’re right. I shouldn’t’ve taken it.”

  “Huh? What do you mean?”

  “In my defense, I had just dropped my old mug and broken it, so I really needed a new one,” Tim said. “When these guys offered, I said sure—even though reporters aren’t supposed to take gifts from the people they interview.”

  “Oh, wow—was that mug a bribe?” I asked.

  “I hope not,” Tim Roberts said. “The Fraidy Brothers seem like good guys.”

  “What do they do?” I asked.

  Tim said he’d explain if I sat down a second. Since I was curious, I did.

  Tim leaned back in his chair. “Okay, so underneath a lot of Pennsylvania and neighboring states is a kind of rock called shale that’s porous. You know what that means?”

  “Full of holes?” I said.

  Tim nodded. “Tiny holes. But here’s the thing about them. Trapped inside is gas, the kind that could be used for heat and electricity and other things. Now, up till recently, it was so hard to get the gas out of the holes, it wasn’t worth it. But then engineers figured out a cheaper, simpler way to do it. They force water, sand, and chemicals into the rock to break it up—fracture it, in other words.”

  “So that’s where the word fracking comes from?” I asked.

  “Exactly,” said Tim. “Once the rock is broken up, the gas can be piped to the surface and collected.”

  I remembered the tanker truck outside Mr. Yoder’s studio. “So is it gas in the tanks on the Fraidy Brothers trucks?”

  Tim shook his head. “In their trucks it’s probably dirty water and chemicals, the liquid that’s been used for fracking,” he said. “The Fraidy Brothers and other companies suck that liquid up and take it away. Otherwise, it might pollute clean water underground. Here, I’ll show you something funny.”

  Tim swiveled back to his computer, brought up a video clip, and pressed Play. The scene was a normal-looking woman in a normal-looking kitchen. She turned on the tap in her sink, and water came out. I looked at Tim like, What’s your point?

  But then something amazing happened. There was a poof, and all of a sudden the water stopped being water and turned into . . . a flame?

  “Is that for real?” I said.

  Tim Roberts nodded. “Sometimes gas or dirty water gets in a neighbor’s well, so if there’s a spark or something near the faucet”—he threw his hands in the air—“kablooey!” Then he laughed and shook his head. “It’s funny every time.”

  “Flammable water.” I shook my head. “I don’t think I’d want to drink that.”

  “Yeah, kind of gives new meaning to the word heartburn, doesn’t it?”

  I got up to go. “Thanks for explaining. And thanks for your help with the parade, too.”

  “Don’t mention it,” said Tim. “Hey—I didn’t even ask . . .”

  Here it comes, I thought. He’s going to say: Where’s Yasmeen?

  But he didn’t. Instead, he asked if I was investigating the missing ice sculptures, too.

  I wondered what he meant by too, but I didn’t ask. I told him yeah, Sophie, Eve, and I were all helping out my mom.

  He nodded. “Let me know what you find out.” Then he peered into his mug again—still empty—and looked up. “Hey—I’ll see you tonight before the parade. I bet Luau will look sweet when he’s all dressed up in costume.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Outside, I could see what Mr. Glassie meant about Ice Carnival not doing so well. There were a few people by the booths selling cider and pretzels. Otherwise, downtown College Springs was so quiet it was almost spooky.

  I put my hands in my pocket, turned right, and headed down Main Street. Passing the entrance to Cloud Alley, I felt a chill as a gust of wind blew between the buildings. At the same time, I heard footsteps behind me and glanced back.

  No one there.

  But what was that purple shadow in the doorway of the apartment building?

  Did it move? Or did I imagine it?

  I turned my eyes ahead and kept going, walking a little faster. Was I being followed? How do you know if you’re being followed?

  Then I heard it again, definite footsteps. This time I didn’t look back. Instead, I gave myself a pep talk: Alex, you’re being ridiculous. It’s daylight and you’re on the main street of your own town. Even if someone is behind you, it doesn’t mean they’re following you.

  The pep talk made me feel better, and that was when I realized part of the problem. I was all by myself, and I’m not used to it. Usually, Yasmeen is with me. What I really wanted to do was turn to somebody and talk about the case. So I did the next best thing. I talked to myself. I don’t mean out loud (duh!) but in my head.

  —So, Alex, you want to know what’s bugging me most about this case?

  —Sure, Alex, what?

  —It’s motive, Alex. Why would anybody want ice sculptures?

  —Maybe there’s some other Ice Carnival somewhere, an Ice Carnival even more broke than ours, and the thief couldn’t afford to buy sculptures so he stole some.

  —You have a good idea there, Alex. But if there was another Ice Carnival, there would have to be publicity for it, and if there was publicity, we would’ve heard.

  —Why, that’s an excellent point, Alex.

  —Thank you, Alex.

  One thing I noticed about talking to myself: There was a lot of encouragement and not much argument. In that sense, it definitely beat talking to Yasmeen.

  By now I had arrived at the Knightly Bank, where a little printed sign, DOLLAR SIGN, marked the space where the sculpture used to be. I looked at the empty space, then looked up and out over the street.

  —So, Alex, if you were trying to steal a bunch of sculptures at once, how would you do it?

  —Hmm, Alex. Let me try to think like a thief. I guess what I’d do is park one big truck in the middle of downtown, get a whole mess of people and a whole mess of dollies, and fan out.

  —Yeah, Alex. Downtown isn’t that big. If everybody moved fast, you could do it in a few
minutes.

  —How long did Mom say it was between cop patrols?

  —Half an hour.

  —But what if there was someone else downtown to see you? Someone besides the cops?

  —Unlikely, Alex. It’s the middle of the night in December. Besides, Bub always says when people act like they know what they’re doing, they generally don’t get questioned.

  —You know what, Alex? That makes me think whoever committed this crime was someone with a lot of confidence, a class president kind of person.

  —Yeah, you could be right—a person like Yasmeen, in other words.

  —Oh, come on, Alex. What would Yasmeen want with ice sculptures?

  —I’m not saying she stole the ice sculptures! I’m just saying someone like her stole them. What did Mom say? “Military precision”? Who do we know with military experience?

  —Good question, Alex. There’s probably a lot of people, but the only ones I know are Bub and Sam Banner, my old baseball coach. I don’t think either of them would want a bunch of ice sculptures, though.

  Here is another thing I learned that day about talking to yourself, at least in public. It makes you look strange to the outside world. How I know is because right about then a voice behind me said, “Alex? Son, are you all right?”

  I was so surprised I probably jumped a mile. Then I turned and saw that it was my other baseball coach, Coach Hathaway. He’s kind of an old hippie, with long hair and a little gold earring, but he’s a good coach and I really like him.

  “Hey!” I grinned. “How ya doin’? Six weeks till pitchers and catchers.”

  Coach and I bumped fists, and he asked me what I was up to. I didn’t tell him I was talking to myself. I just said I was downtown helping my mom with the case of the missing ice sculptures. Then I added, before he could ask, “Yasmeen is busy practicing for choir auditions.”

  “So I hear,” Coach Hathaway said. “And I hear you have a new friend, too, Eve Henry. I’m interested in her dad’s research into grassoline. Green technology—that’s where it’s at. In fact, our good friend Coach Banner might be investing big-time in Professor Henry’s work—and PYB is getting involved, too.”