by Karen Karbo
I expected to see Mrs. Dagnitz putting away the groceries with her back mad-mom straight and her mouth a thin-lipped line of pure rage, but instead, there was Weird Rolando, my mom’s new husband, folding the plastic grocery bag and tucking it into the recycling bin. He wore his brown-and-gray hair in a braid. My mother is married to a man whose hair is longer than mine. That should be against the law.
“Sorry about the groceries,” I said to his back. “I told Mrs. Dag … I told my mom I’d put them away, then I sort of spaced it.”
“It happens,” said Weird Rolando. He turned around and flashed me a smile. It was real, not one of those fake ones where the mouth does all the work. I would never tell my brothers this, but I don’t mind Weird Rolando. He is the sort of person to take home a lost dog and then make up flyers saying he’d found it. Once upon a time, not long after my mom and dad separated, Rolando was my mother’s yoga teacher. My mother lost weight, got very good at standing on her head, then announced she was moving to Santa Fe, and away she went. “It’s not a big deal,” he said.
“It is a big deal when I specifically asked you to put them away not ten minutes ago,” said Mrs. Dagnitz, hurrying into the kitchen from the dining room, flinging open the refrigerator, and grabbing the same spinach Rolando had put away seven seconds earlier.
“Sorry,” I said. “I did put the fish away. Isn’t that the important one?” I didn’t think it would help to make up some excuse. Mrs. Dagnitz had that deep wrinkle between her eyebrows. I remembered how it was with that wrinkle—once it showed up, there was nothing you could do about it. Like with the stomach flu, you just had to wait until it went away.
“Clearly you haven’t heard about what’s going on with spinach,” she snapped. “E.coli and God knows what else.”
“I thought that was from not washing it.”
“Are you trying to kill us?”
“My plot is revealed,” I said.
Out of the corner of my eye I thought I saw Weird Rolando, my stepfather, smile. He started rubbing Mrs. Dagnitz’s shoulders. She rolled her neck around, this way and that. “I’m just so stressed out over this reception,” she said.
“It’ll be fine, Buttercup,” said Weird Rolando.
“We should have splurged for the shrimp,” she said. “It’s the perfect wedding reception nibble. People love shrimp at a wedding reception, don’t they? It’s festive, shrimp is. And so pretty.”
“Just breathe, Buttercup,” said Rolando, and he continued pressing his thumbs into her back.
Buttercup. I looked all around the kitchen—at the bright orange counters that Mrs. Dagnitz had always complained about but that no one else seemed to notice, at the Great Chili Peppers of the World poster hung next to the fridge, at the back door, next to which sat two blue recycling bins, at anything, anything but the two of them. Buttercup. Could they see me cringe? Did they even care?
From upstairs, I could hear thumping around. I hoped Kevin was still watching Jupiter, but I bet he’d drifted back down to the TV room. That was all right. I’d rather have him hypnotized by a video game, safely upstairs with Morgan, than in the kitchen having to hear my stepfather call my mother Buttercup.
I wished I was meeting Angus Paine that very minute. I was getting used to having a mystery to solve. It distracted me from a lot of things, like Mr. and Mrs. Dagnitz standing in the middle of the kitchen, with their eyes closed, breathing loudly.
Eventually Mrs. Dagnitz got over being stressed about the shrimp and started cleaning the spinach. “I could use a little help here,” she said, shaking the water off one small leaf and setting it on a piece of paper towel. Whenever Mrs. Dagnitz was around, we always had spinach salad instead of regular lettuce salad because, according to Mrs. Dagnitz, lettuce was not a real vegetable but only crunchy water.
I went to the sink and tore a spinach leaf from its stalk. It felt limp and gritty.
“No no no,” she said impatiently. “I need you to chop the mushrooms.”
Let me re-introduce myself—Minerva Clark, mind reader. Mrs. Dagnitz was like this. All supernice, buying me clothes no matter the cost, and necklaces I didn’t need, then acting all harsh. I knew I was in the moody freak stage of life, but what was her problem? I know what my brothers say it is: guilt, pure and simple. I retrieved the plastic bag of mushrooms from the fridge.
“And we’re having the fish, too?” I asked, just to have something to say. I promised myself that if I was ever a mother, I would never be so awful that my kid was forced to make conversation about halibut.
Weird Rolando drifted into the dining room to work on his jigsaw puzzle. He was a jigsaw-puzzle freak. He liked the ones that drove you insane—a huge pile of similar-colored marbles, a close-up of a colored pencil, fish scales.
As we worked, Mrs. Dagnitz got over my leaving the nonperishable groceries out for ten minutes. She said, “Tomorrow afternoon we need to get you some shoes.”
“Okay,” I said. The second the word was out of my mouth I remembered that I was meeting Angus Paine at two o’clock. “I’m supposed to meet Chelsea at two o’clock. Do you remember my friend Chelsea? The one with the really cute clothes all the time?”
“The well-groomed one?” asked Mrs. Dagnitz.
“With the nice, straight, shiny hair,” I said. In Mrs. Dagnitz’s book, having nice, straight, shiny hair was the sure sign that you were a superior person in all ways.
“Well, we need to get you some shoes,” said Mrs. Dagnitz. “I haven’t seen what’s in your closet, but I’m sure you’ve got nothing suitable.”
“When I get home maybe? We’re just hanging out at her house. She has some hair products she wants to show me, and we want to burn some CDs, and maybe we’ll go to the mall and people-watch.” What was I saying? Why was I going on and on? Lying was bad enough. But it seemed to make my mother feel better that I had a friend who knew about the joy of living in the world of shoes.
Mrs. Dagnitz didn’t say anything else about shopping. She chopped the red onion and kept saying “damn it” as she wiped away her tears with the pinky finger of each hand, daintily.
“There’s a skin-diving mask under the sink. Mark Clark uses it when he chops onions and he never cries.”
She stopped chopping and looked at me. “A skin-diving mask?”
“It works,” I said.
“This family is so strange,” she said.
This family is so strange.
Whenever Mrs. Dagnitz is around, time slows to half its normal speed. She put the fish in the oven, then performed her evening yoga exercises in the backyard. Kevin came downstairs and said he needed to head on home. His cousins were coming over, and they had tickets to a baseball game. He got a drink of water at the sink. Together we watched Mrs. Dagnitz bend over and lift one of her legs high in the air. I am a bad person. I chose that moment to let the dog Ned outside. He scampered over to Mrs. Dagnitz, barking and leaping in the air and nipping at Mrs. Dagnitz’s heel until she was forced to chase him around the yard. Kevin left without trying for another smooch. I waved at his back as he sped off down the driveway on his bike. Just as I thought he wasn’t going to turn around, he did. He grinned and waved and almost ran into a parked car. I got the helium-balloon-in-my-chest feeling all over again. Kevin had just gotten his braces off. He has the nicest teeth.
3
It took almost an hour to get to Corbett Street Grocery by bus, which gave me plenty of time to wish I hadn’t told Mrs. Dagnitz I was hanging out with Chelsea de Guzman today. After we’d solved the mystery of what happened to the red diamond belonging to her father, Louis de Guzman, Chelsea had been my best friend for forty-eight hours. Then, over the last week, Chelsea had become best friends with Hannah, who used to be my best friend, long ago, last year. Chelsea changed best friends more often than most people floss their teeth. Chelsea hadn’t answered any of my text messages in more than a week. One day I was moping around and Quills asked me what was wrong. I told him and he said girls my age were e
vil incarnate. I’m not sure what “incarnate” means, exactly. I bet girls who lie to their moms are also evil incarnate.
Corbett Street was shady and lined with narrow two-story houses. Some were painted purple and pink and had crazy lawn ornaments and gardens overgrown with roses and sunflowers. Some of the houses had those Tibetan prayer flags strung across their sagging front porches. People had small gardens between their houses. A CD was playing somewhere—or it may even have been a vinyl record—one of those old seventies man singers with a high bleating voice. Corbett Street was a street of old hippies.
I’d never seen a real live burned-down building before. On the phone Angus Paine had said there was only one wall left standing. But Corbett Street Grocery didn’t look burned down to me at all. It sat on the street’s only sunny corner. There was a mural on the side—an erupting volcano shooting out not lava but wholesome food. The volcano had snow on it, and there were pine trees in the background. The biggest tomatoes and zucchinis you’ve ever seen in your life were spewing out of that snowy volcano. This looked like a lot more than one wall to me. I wondered if there’d even been a fire. Then I walked around to the front of the grocery and it was a different story.
The door looked as if a giant had borrowed it for a bonfire, then put it back on the hinges. It was as black as black could be, shiny with tiny cracks. The address numerals—222—were made of some metal that hadn’t burned but gave off a weird rainbow sheen. The windows on the second floor above the door were all broken. The black smears above the windows looked as if they had been made with the side of a charcoal stick (the most difficult art media to work with, according to our art teacher, Ms. Schulte-Vincente).
I peeked inside the plate-glass window. It was pure disaster, nothing but big piles of unrecognizable rubble. Strips of ceiling hung down. Paint curled away from the wall. The only thing that didn’t look blistered or burned was a sink and a tall metal shelf that jutted out into the middle of the room. This must have been the wall Angus Paine was talking about.
Oooo-oooo-oooo-ahhnn! Thumpa-thumpa-thumpa. Oooo-oooo-oooo-ahhnn! Thumpa-thumpa-thumpa. My cell phone. I fished it out of my back pocket.
Before I could say hello, a voice said, “You’re way better looking than your picture in the newspaper.” It was Angus Paine, being a total flirt monster. This was nothing like what he’d been like before on the phone. And they said that girls were total schizos.
“I could have told you that,” I said. “I’m at the grocery. Where are you?”
“Behind you,” he said.
I spun around to see a boy about my height wearing a black trench coat, cell phone pressed to his ear, striding across the street. I try not to judge people by their clothes, but a boy in a black trench coat in the middle of summer means one thing only: tragic gamer who’s convinced deep down that he’s a vampire, even though he won’t admit it. Angus Paine had dark copper-colored hair and a million dark brown freckles. He had stubble on his jaw. Stubble. I didn’t think he was any older than me, and he already shaved.
We stared at each other. His eyes were dark brown. He even had a few freckles on his eyelids. I am the queen of staredowns, but Angus Paine just kept looking at me. Maybe he wasn’t a flirt monster at all, but a total nutcase. Finally, he released a lopsided grin and asked me if I wanted a Starburst. His big front tooth had a chip out of it that shouted skateboarding accident.
“Starbursts are my all-time favorite candy,” I said.
“I know,” he said. “It was in the paper.” He groped around in the pocket of his trench coat and pulled out a package of Tropical Chews.
“Oh, right.” I’d read the story about seven times, but I’d forgotten how the reporter said I loved Starbursts.
“I’m a Mango Melon man myself,” he said, unwrapping one and popping it into his mouth. Angus Paine even had freckles on his lips. “Did you see the damage?” he asked.
Together we pressed our noses against the plate-glass window. I sniffed. Angus Paine was wearing cologne or aftershave. It was Old Spice, the same stuff Mark Clark put on too much of before he went out with someone he really liked. O-kaay. What was that about?
“I thought you said there was only one wall left standing,” I said.
“Yeah well, I exaggerated.” He laughed. He reached over and gave me a slow-motion punch in the arm. “The toaster collection’s still there, though. That’s a good thing.”
“Toaster collection?”
“On top of that metal shelf. Moms has the biggest old-toaster collection in America. See?” He tapped the glass with his finger. The shelf was at the back of the store, near the walk-in freezer. It was dim near the back of the store. I could just make out a row of square shapes along the top of the shelf.
“In the entire country?”
“Nah,” he said. “But it’s pretty big.”
He reached again into the pocket of his trench coat and pulled out a key. It seemed odd to me that it wasn’t on a key chain. The burned front door was locked with a shiny silver hasp and padlock.
Inside, the grocery smelled like a campfire. I remembered Angus telling me about his Grams, who had died in the apartment upstairs. I breathed through my mouth; I didn’t want to smell anything at all that reminded me of what happened to her. I tried not to think about it. I tried to be interested in the piles of debris. On top of one of them was a half-burned box of Lucky Charms. In the back of the grocery, I saw where the entire ceiling had collapsed.
Now that I was here, I remembered it from Cryptkeeper Ron’s Tour of Haunted Portland. Cryptkeeper Ron was a local weirdo my dad’s age who owned a bunch of auto dealerships and was always running for mayor. He broke out his Tour of Haunted Portland every Halloween, advertising like mad on cheesy cable stations.
As I walked around, I realized I didn’t know the first thing about finding an arsonist. I thought about what Kevin had said, that fire consumes its own evidence. Why did that sound so creepy?
“How did you say the fire started?” I asked.
“Didn’t,” said Angus Paine. “The investigators are saying the gas main broke sometime during the night and the grocery store filled up with gas—then when the electric motor for the world-famous walk-in freezer kicked in, the gas caught fire. The freezer and the gas line are, like, ancient. Of course, I have my own ideas.”
I turned and looked at him standing by the door, his hands thrust deep in his trench-coat pockets. He’d been checking me check out the damage. There was something about the tone of his voice. He was lying. Or something.
I opened one of the freezer’s thick glass doors. Cans of soda and plastic bottles of sports drinks sat in their neat rows. This is where the ghost was supposed to live. Even though the electricity hadn’t been on since the fire, the air inside was cold.
“So does the ghost still live here?” I asked.
“Kikimora. She’s a Kikimora. We don’t know.”
“She has a name?” I asked.
“Her name is actually Louise,” he said. “I thought they mentioned that on the tour. A Kikimora is a type of ghost, an entity that inhabits a house and is usually pretty happy and helpful unless someone tries to get rid of her.”
“Huh,” I said.
“You think I’m a dork,” Angus said suddenly.
At that moment, a man appeared in the doorway. He carried a clipboard. The light was behind him, so I couldn’t see the expression on his face. He was shorter than me, dressed all businessman in a suit and tie, even though it had to have been about a hundred degrees out.
“What’s going on here?” he said. His voice was the deep voice of a boss, but it was flat, sort of robotic sounding.
“Deputy Chief Huntington! How are you this fine day?” Angus stuck his hand out for a big grown-up handshake. He released his lopsided grin, phony polite. “This is my good friend Minerva. She’s into fires. Interested in fires, I mean. I was just showing her what happened.”
“Interested in fires?” said Chief Huntington.
“I don’t, actually,” said Deputy Chief Huntington. “Your folks know you’re poking around here?”
“Come on, Minerva,” said Angus suddenly. He stalked out without answering, his trench coat billowing behind him, Zorro-like, geeky but dramatic.
“Are you investigating the arson?” I asked Deputy Chief Huntington. I think he had a glass eye or a dead eye or something, because one eye looked at you hard, as if he were performing an X-ray, and the other seemed to be staring off over your shoulder.
“Why do you think it was arson?” He looked at me with his one X-ray eye. Since he was just my height, his ears were eye level. They were the largest ears I think I’d ever seen.
“Angus said it was,” I said, feeling suddenly as if I didn’t have the entire story. “It’s not?”
“An accident, the best we can tell,” said the deputy chief. He stood beneath the hole in the ceiling, poked at something in the wall with his pen, and jotted some notes on his clipboard. “Just double-checking a few things, then we’re signing off on it. We have no reason to think it’s arson.” He made another note, then looked at me as if he thought I was lying about something. “Do we?”
I found Angus a block away, sitting on the curb eating an egg-salad sandwich. The other half of the sandwich sat beside him in its plastic triangle.
“Robotective back there gives me the creeps,” he said. “Have a seat.”
“What’s the deal?” I said. “I thought you said it was arson. The deputy chief says it was an accident.”
“Did you notice his voice? He sounds like Hal from 2001: A Space Odyssey. You ever see 2001: A Space Odyssey? Awesome flick.”