Magic Nation Thing (7 page)

When morning finally came Abby was bleary-eyed from lack of sleep and still undecided about what she would do and who she would or wouldn’t tell about the matchbook. But then fate, or just Dorcas’s crazy schedule, took matters out of her hands, at least temporarily. Just as Abby reached the kitchen, the phone rang and Dorcas went to answer it, and a minute later she was throwing on her coat and rushing out of the house.

“There’s oatmeal on the stove,” she called to Abby over her shoulder. “And I haven’t forgotten about talking to Daphne. It will just have to wait till I get back. Tree should be here in a few minutes. Tell her I had an urgent call from a possible witness.”

Tree did arrive soon, in fact while Abby was still spooning up soupy oatmeal. (Dorcas’s oatmeal was usually thick and lumpy except when she was in a hurry. Then it was apt to be more like oatmeal soup.) It wasn’t particularly appetizing, but even so, when Abby invited Tree to have some, she said she would. Glancing at her watch, Tree said she thought there was time enough for a quick bowl of something nutritious, which she was really going to need because it looked as if she would be having another very busy day.

Abby sat across the table, watching Tree eat soupy oatmeal and being grateful that Tree hadn’t even mentioned the mess Abby and Paige had made of her first surveillance assignment, when all at once she found herself saying, “Why would a person set fire to his own building?”

Tree looked up quickly and stared at Abby for a moment before she asked, “What person are you referring to, Abbykins?”

Even though Abby had more or less asked for it, Tree’s question came as a shock. Now she’d have to come up with an answer that would get Tree thinking in a particular direction without admitting what she thought she knew and how she knew it. It wasn’t going to be easy.

Abby shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know. I was just wondering.”

“But why? Why would you wonder about something like that?” Tree’s eyes narrowed. “It wasn’t one of those hunches your mother says you have, was it?”

“No. Not a hunch, at least not exactly. And anyway, why would a person burn their own building?”

Tree shrugged. “Well, it’s been known to happen. Particularly if the building is in bad shape and the fire insurance is worth more than what the owner has invested in it.”

“Oh yeah,” Abby said excitedly. “I didn’t think about that.”

“Well, I sort of did.” Tree’s smile looked uncertain. “But Dorcas didn’t really agree with me. She said this Mr. Barker seemed like such a law-abiding person. And she was impressed by the fact that he looked up our agency and asked us to investigate, even though the insurance company was already doing its own investigation.”

“Yeah,” Abby admitted reluctantly. “I guess he wouldn’t have done that if he had anything to hide.”

Tree shrugged again. She was grinning as she said, “Yes, that’s what you might think, or else it might be what Mr. Barker
wanted
everyone to think. But you know what, Abbykins? I was there in the office when he came in to talk to Dorcas, and I got the feeling that maybe what he was really thinking was that an agency run by a couple of women wouldn’t be much of a threat.”

Tree glanced at her watch again and hurried off to open the office, leaving Abby to think over what had just been said. And the more she thought about it, the more convinced she became that Tree was right when she’d said this Barker guy had probably picked the O’Malley agency just because he was the kind of dude who didn’t think women detectives could possibly be smart enough to mess up his plans. Particularly youngish women like Tree—and yeah, okay, like Dorcas too. Tree probably knew what she was talking about. After all, a person who looked like Tree Torrelli would have had a lot of experience in sorting out whether the men she met were telling her the truth about what they were thinking—or not.

So Abby went into the office, and when Tree looked up questioningly, Abby sighed and said, “Okay. So I guess I did have this kind of hunch about that fat Barker guy. Like, I had this feeling that he was the one who set the fire. Only I thought it was a dumb hunch because I didn’t see why somebody would burn down his own building. But that was what the hunch was about.”

Tree listened carefully, and when Abby stopped talking, she asked when Abby had had the hunch and what it had been like. But when Abby shook her head and said she’d rather not talk about it anymore, Tree didn’t push it. However, she must have taken what Abby had said pretty seriously, because she closed up the office, went to the insurance company’s office, and got them to get a search warrant to check out Mr. Barker’s house and car, which they hadn’t done before because Mr. Barker had an alibi—a friend who insisted they were together at the time the fire started.

Abby never found out exactly what Tree said to the insurance people, but that afternoon a fire-damaged bucket was found in the trunk of Barker’s car, and the investigators also found at the back of his closet a pair of his shoes that had incriminating stuff on the soles. And when the police interviewed his friend again, the friend admitted that he’d been bribed to lie about being with Barker that night.

It turned out that the other two fires really had been accidents. One had been caused by a cigarette and the other by some bad wiring, but the two of them happening so close together probably gave Barker the idea that he could torch his own place and everyone would think it had just been one more attack by the neighborhood arsonist.

For the rest of that week, Abby was able to arrange her diary entries into two lists—a Bad News list and a Good News list. She put Mr. Barker’s being arrested for arson under the Good News heading, but the fact that the O’Malley Agency didn’t get, and never was going to get, all the money he’d agreed to pay them went under Bad News. On the other hand, the agency did get quite a bit more publicity, and that, according to Tree, was all to the Good.

Another good development was that although Dorcas did have the talk with Daphne she’d threatened, and both Abby and Paige did get seriously chewed out, that was about as bad as it got. For one reason or another, Dorcas seemed to have forgotten about insisting that Abby stop spending so much time with Paige.

The other Good News item was a very exciting e-mail that came on Friday from Abby’s dad. The e-mail said that Mr. Montgomery, her dad’s boss, had asked him how he would feel about moving back to his old office in San Francisco. That really was Good News in Abby’s book. But from Dorcas’s point of view? Abby wasn’t too sure. When Abby asked her—came right out and asked her how she felt about it—Dorcas said, “I think it’s great. Martin loves San Francisco.”

But lots of people loved San Francisco, and there were all kinds of ways to say
great.
The way Dorcas said it was only great—not GREAT, and certainly not THE GREATEST.

S
O THE ARSON CASE
was solved by… well, by a hunch, but except for Abby and Tree, nobody knew whose hunch it had been. At first Tree had wanted to tell that it had been Abby who had fingered the arsonist, but Abby had begged her not to. They’d had quite a discussion about it the day after Mr. Barker was arrested. Dorcas had left early to follow her latest lead in a missing-person case, and Abby was passing through the office on her way to catch the bus to school.

“Oh good,” Tree said when Abby came in. “I wanted to talk to you.”

“Oh yeah?” Abby said. “What about?”

“About letting people know that you were the one who had the…” Tree paused and then went on. “The
hunch
about who the arsonist was.” Her eyebrows went up when she said the word
hunch,
to show that she knew it had been something a little different from a good guess. Or maybe a lot different.

Abby quickly shook her head. “No. No. Don’t. I don’t want you to.”

“Why not? You ought to get the credit for what happened,” Tree said. “The insurance people are very grateful. They might even pay us some kind of bonus.”

“But I don’t want a bonus.” Abby slid out of her backpack and sat down in one of the client chairs. “I don’t want anybody to know that I had anything to do with it. And if you told the insurance people it was my
hunch
they’d be sure to tell other people, like…”

“Like?” Tree asked, but her smile said she could guess what the answer would be.

“Yeah,” Abby admitted. “Like my mom.”

Tree nodded. “Yes, I suppose they would mention it to Dorcas. But you know, Abbykins, what I don’t understand is why you don’t want your mother to know. I think she’d be delighted. I know she was when you came up with the idea that the Moorehead kid and her father might be at Disneyland.”

Abby cringed. “I know,” she said. She paused, looking at Tree thoughtfully for a moment. “Has my mom ever talked to you about how she thinks that I, well, both of us actually, can do weird things, like suddenly knowing things that we haven’t any way of knowing, and stuff like that?”

Tree shook her head slowly as if she wasn’t sure. “Well, not exactly,” she said. “But she does talk about hunches quite a bit. She seems to have hunches quite often herself, but…”

“Go on,” Abby said. “But what?”

Tree looked a little bit embarrassed. “I’m not saying your mom isn’t a good investigator, because she is. She’s hardworking and fantastically good at picking up on important details and remembering them, which is terribly important in our work. But as far as hunches go…” Tree shrugged. “Most of hers don’t seem to help a lot.”

“I know.” Abby couldn’t help sounding a little triumphant. “She’s always telling me about the great hunches she’s had, but most of them happened a long time ago. Like maybe she had good ones when she was a kid, but she’s pretty much outgrown them now.”

“But yours, on the other hand—” Tree began, and Abby hastily interrupted.

“Most of mine don’t work either. Most of my hunches are no good at all.”

“Well, another thing…” Tree looked uncomfortable. “When I went in to see Mr. Walters—he’s the investigator at the insurance company—to urge him to get the search warrant, I told him I’d talked to someone who thought she’d seen Barker in the area on the night of the fire.”

Abby grinned. “Which is the truth, in a way,” she said. “Isn’t that sort of what I told you?”

Tree looked even more embarrassed. “I know, but I implied that it had been some neighborhood woman. I don’t know why, except I felt that getting the search warrant was urgent, like before Barker had a chance to get rid of the evidence. And I didn’t think they’d take me very seriously if I said…”

“Yeah, if you said it was a kid who saw Barker. And especially if you said that the kid had seen him in a kind of…” Raising her eyebrows, Abby let her voice trail off.

“Vision?” Tree asked.

Abby shook her head hard. “No. Like I told you, it was just a guess.” A disturbing idea occurred to her. “But what if the insurance people or the police want to talk to the person who saw Mr. Barker?”

Tree shook her head. “At this point I don’t think they’ll feel they need to. I told them the person who said she’d seen Barker didn’t want to be identified.” She grinned. “Which is true, right? And besides, when they found all that evidence in Barker’s house and car, he more or less confessed. He admitted that he’d been there that night and might have set the fire accidentally.”

“Some accident.” Abby shrugged into her backpack. At the door she turned long enough to say, “Well, that’s it then. It was
you
who figured out who the arsonist was. Nobody else. Okay?”

Tree grinned, sighed, and said okay.

So that was the end of the arson episode—except where Paige was concerned. Paige was absolutely hung up on the whole thing and how the case had been solved. And of course Paige, like everyone else—almost everyone else, that is—thought Tree had come up with all the clues that had solved the case. For a while it seemed to Abby that she and Paige were never going to talk about anything else besides the arson case—and Tree Torrelli.

The trouble was that Paige was the kind of person who always had to be absolutely fixated on somebody. A year or two before, it had been Leonardo DiCaprio, and right after that it had been Britney Spears. But now she seemed to have forgotten all about singers and movie stars and instead had become totally fascinated by Tree. She talked about her all the time, not only about what a great detective she was, but also, of course, about how totally gorgeous and glamorous she was.

At first Abby went along with Paige’s Tree gush sessions, but before long they began to bother her. A lot. She wasn’t sure just why, except that Tree had been her own private friend ever since she had begun working for Dorcas, and Abby had always known all the things about Tree that Paige was raving about. All the things except what a great detective she was, because she really wasn’t, at least not right at first. But now, to hear Paige talk, a person would think Tree was a world-famous detective and Paige herself was the founding president of the Tree Torrelli Fan Club.

The picture thing was almost the last straw. Paige asked Abby if she had a picture of Tree, and when Abby admitted she did have an old snapshot, Paige insisted on seeing it. And then after she’d seen it, it somehow wound up on her bulletin board, right where she used to keep her favorite picture of Leonardo.

But it was even worse when Paige began to find reasons for visiting the office of the O’Malley Agency—and of course Tree. Like the time Paige started asking about the books Abby owned, and when Abby mentioned that she had three of the Lemony Snicket books, Paige insisted she had to borrow them, like immediately.

“Why?” Abby said. “I don’t mind loaning them to you, but…” She grinned. “But I’ll bet if you told your mother that you wanted to read the Lemony Snicket books, she’d buy you every one of them, like five minutes later.”

“I know,” Paige said. “But then I’d have to wait until they came in the mail, and I want to start reading them right now. So why don’t we take your bus after school and I can just stop by your house and pick them up.”

So Paige used her cell phone to call her mother from the bus stop to ask if she could go home with Abby, just long enough to borrow some books that she “really, really needed,” and her mother said she would check with Abby’s mother and call back. Then after about two minutes Paige’s phone rang, and it was her mother calling to say that Abby’s mother wasn’t in but that she had talked to Ms. Torrelli in the agency office, and it would be all right for Paige to go by to pick up the books she needed. And then she was to wait right there until her mother picked her up on the way to take the boys to their karate lesson.