by Karen Karbo
Paisley talked on about the old neighborhood, and about the kinds of trouble she and Maureen used to get into. She talked about Maureen’s kids, and about how she was the first person outside the family to hold Angus when he was born. She wouldn’t let me leave without giving me a cookie and some raspberry seltzer water to take with me. She wanted to give me a half dozen cookies, but Butterfly Tattoo stepped in and said no.
I hopped back on Angus’s Go-Ped and sped through downtown to Corbett Street Grocery. I carried my cookie and seltzer water in a small white paper bag, folded over at the top. Although it seemed like Paisley wasn’t much of a businesswoman, giving away the profits to undercover do-it-yourself girl detectives, I knew she hadn’t set the fire at the grocery. This gave me a bad case of swirled-around feelings. Paisley was cool, and so it was good she wasn’t an arsonist. But if it wasn’t Paisley who set the fire, who was it? And what would Angus say when I told him? I was relieved to find out he’d been telling the truth about Paisley’s renting a small space at the grocery instead of taking it over completely. This didn’t seem like a big deal, but it proved he wasn’t a hedger, a person who was always trying to find a way not to tell the truth, without having to tell an outright lie.
I was about twenty minutes late and Angus still wasn’t there. I leaned the Go-Ped against someone’s garden wall and sat on the curb across from the grocery. I waited. I ate the snickerdoodle and drank the raspberry seltzer. There was a huge pink rose shrub on the parking strip filled with bumblebees, and they cruised me until I couldn’t stand it. It was the cookie or my kiwi-scented hair conditioner. I wiped my hands on my legs, and just as I was about to walk across the street to the grocery, Robotective Huntington cruised by in a dark blue Dadmobile. He slowed the car, turned to look hard at me through his mirrored shades, then drove on.
I crossed behind the street, and as I got closer to the charred front door, I noticed that the door was ajar. I pushed it open with one finger. “Angus?” I called out into the gloom. Everything looked just as it had before—the piles of burned junk, the flap of soggy ceiling.
The whole place still smelled burned. It hurt your nose to smell it. I wondered if it would always smell that way in the heat, even after Angus’s parents, Nat and Nat, had the grocery rebuilt, or however you fixed a half-burned building. Debris crunched underfoot as I walked toward the back of the store, past the tall shelf with the row of shiny antique toasters. I stopped and stared up at them. One looked like a little drawer set on end, with the handle on top. Another one was sleek and square and looked like one of the messenger droids from Star Wars. I counted ten of them—who knew toast had such a history?
Then I heard footsteps overhead. I hadn’t forgotten there was an apartment upstairs, but I’d let it drift to the back of my mind. It was easier to think about how, whether the fire was ruled an arson or an accident, Angus’s family would be able to rebuild, and how all that was lost was a lot of snack food, meats and cheeses in the deli case, and newspapers piled in the wire stand beside the door. The footsteps upstairs made me think of the lady Angus said everyone called Grams, and how she had burned to death up there. They made me realize that if this was an arson and not an accident, the arsonist was also a murderer.
“Angus?” I called out, louder than necessary. It was Angus upstairs walking around, right? Not the murderer/arsonist, or even creepy Robotective Huntington, with the flat voice and strange off-kilter eyes. For a split second, I remembered the ghost. What did Angus call her? Louise. But she lived in the freezer, didn’t she?
“Uh, NO, Minerva,” I said aloud to the empty store. I believed in ghosts, but only as a joke. The same way I still said I believed in the tooth fairy, just for laughs. Or this was my official position.
At the rear of the store, across from the walk-in freezer I glimpsed the bottom steps of a narrow wooden staircase. The steps were painted red. It didn’t look as if the fire had reached them. Before I could give it a thought, I marched over and took them two at a time, to the second floor.
The door at the top of the stairs had been burned off its hinges. The fire had done more damage up here than downstairs in the grocery. Everything was black or ashy gray—walls, floor, piles of what must have been furniture and books. Holes in the walls, the floor. A huge hole in the ceiling, through which I could see the white afternoon sky. The only snap of color was a red metal ladder standing in the corner. Balanced upon the ladder was a person who was neither Angus nor Deputy Chief Huntington, but a guy poking around what looked to be an attic space. A guy in his twenties, cussing to himself, mad as spit.
7
“Hello? Hi there, I—”
The guy’s head snapped around. Like that girl in your class who’s created a whole personality around being scared of spiders and bugs, he shrieked, high and loud. He wore work boots, jean cutoffs, and an old red-and-brown flannel work shirt with the sleeves hacked off. Threads dangled beneath his armpits. He had huge muttonchop sideburns that stuck out from the sides of his face and thick aviator glasses. His face was red and sweaty. “Who are you? What do you want?”
“I’m a friend of Angus’s. I was supposed to meet him—”
“He’s not here! Does he look like he’s here? That little twerp. You just about gave me a heart attack. And after all that’s gone down around here lately, that’s the last thing I need, believe you me.” He poked his head into the attic space and thrust his arms up there, too. He grunted with the effort of reaching, then pulled down a green metal file box. He set the box on the top step of the ladder before climbing down.
“I’m Minerva Clark.” I stepped forward and offered my hand. It was a trick I’d learned—if you want someone to tell you their name, give them yours first.
“Wade. Wade Leeds,” he said, without shaking my hand. He was too busy moving the file box from the ladder to the floor. So this was Wade, the grandson of the lady Angus called Grams, the poor lady who had died up here. I tried not to think about it. I watched Wade kneel beside the box. He struggled to open its tiny latch. The lid creaked open. I peeked over his shoulder. It looked as if it were full of school papers, cards made out of construction paper and glitter. Suddenly, he bent his head and started sobbing.
Can I just say … awkward!
Had I ever seen a grown man cry? I tried to remember whether there was something special you were supposed to do, like CPR, only for a man crying jag.
“I’m sorry about your grandma,” I said to Wade Leeds. I took a step toward him.
Just as abruptly as he’d started weeping, he stopped. He snuffled loudly, blew his nose into his fingers, wiped them on his shirt, and stood up.
“Who you talking about?”
“Uh, your Grams?” I said. Please, I prayed, do NOT make me say, “You know, who burned to death in the fire.”
“You mean my ma? Who was a good woman who never hurt a soul in her entire life? It’s that Angus, he and his snot-nosed friends called her Grams, but she was hardly old. She was forty-seven. Her hair …,” his voice wobbled, “… her hair was prematurely white. That’s all. She was a beautiful woman, a beautiful soul. I bet that twerp didn’t tell you she cooked for the homeless, did he? Every Wednesday night for seventeen years. She painted, too. Watercolors.”
“I’m really sorry,” I said.
“This is all that’s left,” he said, shutting the file box. “This is it. Finito.”
“But maybe … well … isn’t there always a will or something?”
He picked up the box by its skinny wire handle and started toward the door. He stopped once and looked around the place, at the charred walls, the broken windows. He squinted up at the hole in the ceiling. “Ha, yeah, a will. Sure thing. A lady who cooks every week for the homeless has a will. Try debts. Up to her sweet ol’ eyeballs.”
I followed him back down the narrow staircase, through the grocery, and out onto the sidewalk. I waited while he replaced the padlock. “If you’re looking for Angus, I ain’t seen him,” he growled.
“Where were you when the fire broke out?” I blurted out.
He turned and glared at me through his thick glasses. “Not where I shoulda been, which is home making sure Ma got out okay, now, was I?”
Around the corner from the grocery, parked beneath the shade of a huge Hawthorne tree, sat a dusty old Ford Explorer. A faded bumper sticker said, NOBODY DIED WHEN CLINTON LIED. Through the back window I could see a pile of stuff—some clothes and shoes, a box of groceries, some empty two-liter soda bottles, a sleeping bag, and a pillow with a dirty flowered case.
I watched stupidly while Wade Leeds unlocked the car door and stuffed a pile of shirts into the back. He put the green metal file box on the passenger seat next to a shaving kit. The zipper was open. Inside I could see one of those plastic travel boxes you keep soap in, a red-and-white can of shaving cream, a razor, and a hairbrush.
Before he slammed the car door and drove off, he said, “That Angus is bad news, and if you’re a smart girl, you’ll stay away.”
Oooo-oooo-oooo-ahhnn! Thumpa-thumpa-thumpa. Oooo-oooo-oooo-ahhnn! Thumpa-thumpa-thumpa. Before answering the call, I watched Wade Leeds drive slowly to the end of the block. The rear bumper hung down on one side, making the vehicle and Wade Leeds look more pathetic than ever. I sighed and flipped open my phone.
“Where are you?” said Angus. He sounded mad. Mad! When he was the one who was an hour late.
“Huh? I’m here. Where are you?”
“Waiting for you.”
“Where?” I looked up and down the street. Two houses down from the grocery a lady sat on her front porch smoking a cigarette and petting her cat. There was no other human activity that I could see.
“I’m here. At my house. Waiting for you, Minerva, intrepid goddess of warriors and poetry. Did you know Minerva invented music, too? I looked it up online. No wonder you rock.”
“At your house?” I said. What was he talking about? I stared at the mural on the side of the grocery, at the snow-covered volcano spewing out tomatoes, zucchinis, and corn. When we’d talked the night before, I was sure we’d agreed to meet at the grocery.
“I’m a-waitin’ for my wheels, too.”
“Oh, right!” My meeting with Wade Leeds had been so bizarre I’d forgotten all about Angus’s Go-Ped. I dashed back around the corner. It was still propped where I’d left it, against the garden wall across the street. I exhaled. That would have sucked if someone had stolen it.
Angus’s house was six blocks away, straight down the tree-lined street. He lived in one of the old arty hippie houses. It was tall and skinny, and painted the color of a raspberry, with purple-and-cream-colored trim. The front yard was a lush garden of lavender and white roses and a bunch of other flowers I couldn’t name.
A lady wearing faded jeans and a big straw hat knelt in the garden, working a trowel in the dark soil beneath one of the roses.
“Angus is inside,” she said, looking up briefly.
This must be Angus’s mom, I thought. She had the same dark eyes and freckles. I took a step forward, then stopped. “I’m sorry about your grocery,” I said.
Then she smiled, and it was Angus’s smile. “Why thank you. That’s very sweet.”
I steered the Go-Ped up onto the porch and tapped on the door.
Angus opened the door for me to enter. “I called Robotective and told him about that Paisley chick. He’s going to look into it. He didn’t say when or anything. Isn’t there anything else we can do to nail her? We don’t want her to strike again or anything.”
I tripped over the doorstep, dragging the Go-Ped in with me. He didn’t grab it from me, or tell me to leave it on the porch, or anything. As I passed him, I smelled his Old Spice aftershave. For some reason, it made me want to giggle. Angus was an oddball, and I don’t just mean the trench-coat wearing in the dead of summer. There was something else, something I couldn’t put my finger on.
He sauntered into the living room. It was cool and dark. Nat and Nat must have had air-conditioning. The red walls were plastered with black-and-white photographs of people with lots of long hair, big grins, and a lot of beaded necklaces. In some of them I recognized the lady gardening in the front yard. Angus dropped onto the couch. The springs creaked.
I stood in the entryway, still holding his Go-Ped by the handlebars.
“Oh right,” he said. “Just stick that over by the coat-rack thing.”
“Thanks for letting me borrow it,” I said.
“No worries. I’ve got another one,” he said.
“I thought you were so hot to get this one back,” I said.
“I was hot to see you,” he said.
“Uh-huh,” I said. I hoped it sounded cool. Maybe that’s why he struck me as weird. I’d never had someone madly in love with me before. Kevin liked me, but not in a desperate way that caused people to hatch plots and order beheadings, like in long-ago England. Maybe that’s where Angus had found himself. Desperately in love with Minerva Clark, whom he’d contacted one day to help him solve a mystery. Now he found himself in over his head.
“Anyway, the other one’s broken,” he said, and then he laughed. He flipped on the TV, a flat-screen plasma job, sitting in the corner by a spidery tree in a green ceramic pot.
“Can I wash my hands or something?” They were sticky from the snickerdoodle, and I wanted a minute to figure out how to break the news to him that our number one suspect was no suspect at all. He directed me to the kitchen, at the back of the house. After I washed my hands, I searched around for a towel and spied a stack of orange-striped ones folded in a pile atop a metal rack in the mudroom. I grabbed one, and as I dried my hands, I noticed there was a mangled-looking bag of Only Ferrets ferret food in one corner.
“Do you have a ferret?” I asked as I came back into the living room. He pressed the Mute on the remote.
“No, but I’d like one. We babysat a friend’s ferret for a week while they went on vacation. They are such cool little creatures.”
“Listen, we’ve got to talk. I don’t think Paisley set the fire,” I said.
“Just because we don’t have any evidence yet? That’s typical of arson, isn’t it? The evidence gets burned up in the fire.”
“Have you ever met Paisley?” I asked.
His gaze shifted to the TV screen. A science program was on. A man with a British accent was talking about coral reefs. “Don’t think so. Maybe.”
“She said she’s a good friend of your aunt Maureen’s.”
Angus stared at the screen and pulled on his bottom lip. I figured out what his eyes reminded me of—chocolate M&M’s. “They’re all dying off, the coral reefs. It’s because the ocean has heated up. All’s it takes is, like, one degree, and there go all the coral. They bake to death.”
“Paisley said she was the first person outside your family to hold you after you were born.”
“Really?” The lopsided grin, the chipped front tooth. “Did it rock her world?”
“Like you need to ask?” I could play this game, too. I sat down on the other end of the couch. It was cushy and cool on my legs. I could have curled up and taken a nap.
“I might have met her,” he said. “After she’d held me as a baby and all, but I gotta tell you, all my aunt Maureen’s friends look alike.”
“You’d remember Paisley. She’s in a wheelchair.” I remembered Paisley’s curled pink hands, her perfect polished nails.
I let this information soak in. On the television, purple sea fans waved drowsily at us from their tropical ocean home.
“Yeah, so?” said Angus.
“So,” I said, “I’m not sure she could have set a fire, even if she’d wanted to. And I doubt she wanted to, since your mom and dad were giving her the space in the grocery for free.”
“Just because someone has a disability doesn’t mean they’re incapable of arson,” he said. His tone was that of a stern grandpa.
“What are you talking about?” I said.
“It’s not cool to discrim
inate against people like that,” he said.
“Wait, you’re the one who made fun of Detective Huntington’s Eye of Doom.”
“I’m mocking. That’s different from discriminating.”
Suddenly, the room didn’t feel as cool as it had when I’d walked in. The air smelled stale. Talking to Angus was like trying to stand on an air mattress in a swimming pool. Just when you thought you had your balance, over you’d go into the drink. I thought about what Wade had said about Angus being bad news.
“She could have been faking it,” he said.
“The wheelchair? She was not faking the wheelchair.” This was truly beginning to bug me. I flipped open my phone to check the time. “Look …,” I said. “It’s not Paisley, all right?”
“You’re not giving up, are you?” he asked suddenly. I didn’t think Angus was a mind reader, but he did always seem to say just what I was thinking two seconds before I was able to formulate the thought. Was I giving up? “That newspaper story about you made it sound like you weren’t a quitter. You’re not a quitter, are you?”
“I don’t know,” I said. I couldn’t think of one reason why I shouldn’t quit. Other than that I wanted a mystery to solve. Mrs. Dagnitz was probably home by now, pitching a fit about Morgan and me skipping out on her dumb yoga class. I’d been to a yoga class once, with one of Mark Clark’s girlfriends, and it had made me all noodle-y and lazy. Why it didn’t have this effect on my mother was probably a better mystery to be solving than this one.
“What about Wade Leeds?” I asked. I so totally did not think it was Wade Leeds—He Who Lived in His Car—but the idea of going back out into the afternoon heat and trying to figure out what bus would get me home, where I would get GOT for sure, made me want to pretend I thought it was him, just so I wouldn’t have to move. I felt my eyes drift close.
“Wade. That weird dude. I never thought of him!” said Angus. “I bet it was him. He’s a total freak.” Angus was so enthusiastic I opened my eyes and glanced over at him. He was joking, right?