Magic Nation Thing (11 page)

“Neither can I,” Paige said. “I’m sure somebody is listening in.”

Then Sky’s voice said, “Yeah, you’re right. Woody is, on the phone in the hall.”

Paige and Abby laughed, and Abby said, “And where are you listening in, Skyler Borden?”

“I’m in the library,” Sky said. “And I’m not listening in. I’m just telling on Woody.”

Paige and Abby laughed some more, and then Paige said, “Well, I’m just calling to tell Abby that I have something important to tell her. I have something important to tell her tomorrow on the bus. Got that, Woody?”

T
HE NEXT MORNING, AS
soon as she got on the bus, Paige announced, “My bad. My money wasn’t stolen after all.”

“Hey,” Abby said. “Did you find it?”

Paige looked sheepish. “It was right there in my wallet, wadded up in the coin purse part. I never put paper money in there, but I must have done it while my mind was on something else.”

Abby grinned. “Your mind was on being mad at me for not being able to find out who the counterfeiters were, I guess.”

“Yeah. Well, maybe.” Paige nodded, ready as usual to admit she’d been the one in the wrong. “And besides, I’ve changed my mind about it being counterfeit. After it got wadded up in the coin purse it started looking pretty normal.”

So with only a few days left before winter vacation, both of the hundred-dollar-bill mysteries had fizzled out, nothing else had come up, and Abby thought that with any luck she could start concentrating on getting ready for Squaw. But it wasn’t going to be quite that easy.

Paige’s next idea was that although she and Abby hadn’t been too successful at discovering crimes that needed to be solved, it didn’t necessarily mean they wouldn’t be good at solving one that somebody else was already investigating. Somebody like Dorcas, for instance, or maybe… Tree.

When Paige started asking all sorts of questions about what the O’Malley Agency was working on at the moment, Abby shrugged and said, “Nothing that I know about. Dorcas doesn’t tell me about her cases. At least not any of the important ones.”

“Oh yeah? Then how’d you find out about the Moorehead case, and that arson thing?”

“Just by overhearing my mom talking to people, I guess, mostly on the phone. I don’t listen on purpose. It just happens sometimes.”

“Well, what have you overheard lately?”

Abby shook her head, but because Paige looked so disappointed, she thought some more and said, “Oh yeah. I guess Tree has this one dumb case about some next-door neighbors suing each other because one family’s dog bit the other one’s kid. I heard my mom talking to Tree about it. It’s been going on a long time but neither side will give up.”

“Oh!” Paige’s face lit up. “What is Tree doing on the case?”

Wishing she hadn’t mentioned Tree, Abby said, “Well, the family with the dog say the boy kicked it first, so they hired the agency to find out if the kid has a record of mistreating animals. So I guess all Tree is going to do is check at the kid’s school and with other people in the neighborhood.”

“Oh,” Paige said again, nodding slowly for a moment before her eyes started doing their neon glitter. “Hey. I know. Maybe we could go to the kid’s school and ask the other students if the guy has been mean to any of their pets.”

Abby sighed deeply. “Look,” she said. “After what we did to Tree’s investigation of the arson thing, what I think is, if she found out we were planning to help her again she’d probably leave town.”

Paige stared at Abby for a moment before she shrugged. “Yeah. Guess you’re right.” But then the lights came on again. “Maybe we could keep it a secret. That we were helping, that is. At least until we’d found some important clues that would really help her win her case, and then we could…”

It was then that Abby surprised herself by putting her foot down, something she almost never did where Paige was concerned. At least not very successfully. “No,” she said. “No. I’m not going to.” Something, maybe her tone of voice, must have convinced Paige to stop making plans to get involved. Or perhaps just to stop telling Abby about it.

In the meantime Christmas approached, and for a while the Bordens were busy with a bunch of their relatives from the East Coast. And the O’Malleys were busy too, buying and wrapping presents and planning for a dinner that would be for just the two of them, since Tree was having Christmas with her big Italian family. But then there was a real change. Abby’s dad called on Christmas Day to say he was back in town, staying in a hotel while he looked for an apartment to rent—
and
Dorcas asked him to come to Christmas dinner.

Abby tried not to be thrilled and excited, but she was, even though she kept reminding herself that it probably didn’t mean anything. Not anything for certain anyway. One minute she’d find herself thinking, Maybe it does, and the next minute, Maybe not. Up and then down. Down and then up. It took another carefully written Good News, Bad News entry in her notebook to slow the teeter-totter down.

Under Good News she wrote:

1.
It happened. Dad really did get transferred back to San Francisco.

2.
We’ll probably get to see him a lot more often. At least I will.

3.
He’s going to be here for Christmas dinner.

But under Bad News she reminded herself of all the times her dad had visited before that hadn’t changed anything. One more thing she did was look up some new recipes of the quick-’n’-easy type and see to it that Dorcas followed them carefully on Christmas morning.

That night at the dinner table, the conversation started out about San Francisco and what a wonderful city it was. “Absolutely the greatest,” her dad said, and
then
added, “I can’t wait to get back home.”

Abby looked up quickly, wondering if “back home” just meant back to the city where he grew up—or maybe something more. But when she caught his eye, he only did his lopsided pirate’s grin and shrugged in an offhand way. A moment later he did it again at Dorcas and she smiled back.

When they were through eating, Abby’s dad said a lot of complimentary things about the food, and then he and Dorcas started teasing each other about some awful cooking disasters they’d had when they were first married. Like the time they’d tried to make a spaghetti dinner for a bunch of friends by pouring some canned sauce over raw spaghetti and putting it in the microwave. “Well, I didn’t lie to you.” Dorcas was still laughing. “I told you I couldn’t cook. And I also remember that you promised we’d watch some cooking programs on TV and learn how together.”

Abby’s dad grinned again and said, “Guilty as charged. Dropped the ball on that one too, didn’t I?”

Abby was intrigued. But then, just as she was sure she was going to learn some important family secrets, they switched over to talking about boring stuff like politics, which was one thing they absolutely agreed on.

But on the whole the evening went pretty well; at least there weren’t any of the usual arguments. Not even the one about how Dorcas could do just as well financially and have a lot less stress if she’d sell the agency and go back to being a legal secretary. That was an argument that Abby had always had mixed feelings about. She could understand why Dorcas wanted to prove she could be a success in a career she had chosen for herself. One at which she had been doing pretty well, at least recently. But Abby’s dad’s argument that there were careers that would leave her more time for other things—and other people—was probably true too.

After dinner they opened their presents. Abby got a lot of great stuff, including some new goggles and mittens from Tree and a great Obermeyer ski outfit from her mom. And from her dad, a digital camera no bigger than a wallet. So it was a good Christmas, even though how Dorcas and Abby’s dad felt about each other didn’t seem to have changed all that much. Not for sure, anyway.

Then school started again, and almost immediately Abby began to feel that Paige was still up to something. Part of it was just a vague feeling that Abby couldn’t quite put her finger on, but the other part was that Paige had again started insisting on visiting Abby instead of the other way around. One time it was because she wanted to go through Abby’s bookshelves again to see if there was anything else she wanted to borrow, but as usual she spent most of the time in the office just watching Dorcas and Tree while she only pretended to be reading one of Abby’s books. And then the very next day, when the only person in the office was a woman from the steno pool, Paige showed up again.

That time she did stay in Abby’s room for a while, talking about favorite books and authors, but then she went down to the kitchen to get a drink of water. At least she said that was where she was going, but when she didn’t come back, Abby found her in the agency office. The steno had gone home, and there Paige was, going through the cabinet in which Tree kept files of the cases she’d been working on. When Abby opened the door, Paige jumped, pushed the file cabinet shut, and gave Abby a guilty smile.

“Okay,” Abby said. “What are you doing?”

“Oh, I was just… I was… I…” Paige stuttered nervously for a minute before she suddenly stuck out her chin and said, “All right. I was looking for Tree’s file on that biting dog-kicking kid case. All I wanted to do was find out where those people lived, and then I was going to call a cab so we could go there and find something you could use to do your Magic Nation thing on. You know, something like a ball that belonged to the kid, or one of the dog’s bones.”

“Look, Paige,” Abby said, “besides being pretty sneaky, you’re not making much sense. The Magic Nation thing wouldn’t help. What it might do, if it does anything, is show me what the person who owns the ball, or bone or whatever, is doing right now, or at least not very long ago. Not what he might have done several months ago, or whenever it was that he got bitten. I heard Mom tell Tree that this case had been going back and forth for ages.”

But Paige didn’t give up. “What’s wrong with seeing what he’s doing right now?” she asked. “Who knows? If we find something that belongs to the kid maybe you’ll see him kicking someone else’s dog. That would prove he’s probably guilty, wouldn’t it?”

“Holy cow,” Abby said. She could just picture herself and Paige being caught snooping around in some strangers’ backyard looking for who knows what. “I think I’m getting a Magic Nation picture right now,” she told Paige. “A picture of both of us in the back of a police car on our way to juvenile hall.”

Paige stared wide-eyed, but then she grinned and shrugged. “Yeah, I guess you’re right. My bad. Let’s talk about something else. Like getting ready for Squaw. I’ve been meaning to ask you if you’d like to have my last year’s ski boots. They don’t fit me anymore, but I think they’d be just the right size for you.”

Abby remembered the great Lange boots, which, when the season ended, had still looked as good as new. So she grinned and said thanks and forgot about being mad, and they started talking about skiing and about maybe starting to snowboard, something they might do if Paige could get her dad to change his mind about wanting them to become expert skiers first because that was the way he’d done it.

“That’s my dad for you,” Paige said. “My way or no way. Don’t you wish he’d let us start snowboarding right away?”

“Yeah, I guess so,” Abby said, “but I still think skiing’s a lot of fun.”

“Well, sure,” Paige said, “but I think snowboarding would be a lot more exciting. I mean…” She paused, waggling her eyebrows. “Remember those snowboarders who kept scaring people off the runs last year?”

“Yeah, I remember.” Abby was puzzled. “So is that why you want to snowboard? You want to scare people off the runs?”

Paige shrugged. “No. Of course not. I’d just like to meet some of the guys who do it.” She waggled her eyebrows again. “Know what I mean?”

Abby knew what Paige meant. The year before, a lot of the snowboarders seemed to be teenage boys. The kind of teenage boys Paige called hunks, which of course meant good-looking—but when Paige said it, it seemed to have something to do with the way they acted too. The way they went around being totally cool. Too cool to notice things such as where they were going or who might be in the way. Abby grinned. “Yeah,” she said. “I know what you mean.”

The last day of school finally came and went, and on a bright sunny Saturday morning, the Bordens’ newest SUV pulled in front of the agency, and Mr. Borden got out to help Abby add her skis to the five pairs that were already on the roof. Abby hugged Dorcas and Tree good-bye and climbed into one of the mid-row seats. Dorcas and Tree were waving from the front steps of the agency, and everyone inside the SUV was waving back, except maybe Woody, who was pretending to be too busy with his Game Boy to notice. The SUV pulled away from the curb, heading for the Bay Bridge and, before the day was over, Squaw Valley.

T
HE TRIP FROM SAN
Francisco to Squaw Valley only took a few hours, but they were hours that always seemed to crawl by because it was just so hard to wait for the days out on the slopes, schussing straight down favorite runs so fast it was almost like flying, and doing bigger jumps and smoother slaloms every day. And for the nights in an attic room way at the top of the Bordens’ cabin, where Abby and Paige would look out into the snowy forest and talk and laugh while the rest of the house grew dark and silent. So, as always was the case when you were waiting for something wonderful to happen, the hours really dragged. Daydreaming helped to pass the time, along with keeping her notebook handy so that she could follow their progress on a map of California.

On this trip the long hours in the car seemed to bother Paige even more than they did Abby; at least she certainly griped about them more. Along with minor complaints about things such as not being allowed to choose where they would stop for lunch, her biggest gripe on this trip was about the way the seats were arranged in the new SUV. In her opinion Woody and Sky’s backseat was way too close to the ones she and Abby sat in. This meant that it was impossible for Abby and Paige to talk about anything private without being overheard, and that they were forced to overhear every word of the frequent arguments about which one of Paige’s brothers had trespassed one fingertip into the other one’s private space. In addition to the arguments about trespassing, there was a lot of other stuff Abby and Paige had to try not to hear. Stuff such as Woody’s constant telling and retelling of favorite little-boy dirty jokes, most of which were about things like barfing or going to the bathroom.