Minerva Clark Gets a Clue (17 page)

What was that noise? What had I done to deserve a death threat? Because that's what this was. Someone telling me to stop following them or else? But who? Who would send a death threat to a seventh grader? Jordan? Toc? The identity stealer of Jordan? The murderer of Dwight? Was it only a joke perpetrated by Reggie? Or even Hannah or Julia? What
was
that noise?

Only Jupiter, bored because we'd stopped ferret surfing before he was ready. He'd knocked my baby-blue corduroy book bag off the coffee table, where I'd left it. The flap had opened when it hit the floor, and the dang creature was crawling around inside. Jupiter loved nothing more than getting into a bag full of stuff. I felt a twitch of longing for the girl I was only a few weeks before, who loved nothing more than playing with her ferret.

I wanted Mark Clark to come home. I wanted Quills and Morgan to come home. I wanted them to come home so I wouldn't be alone, but I did not want them to come home and find this rebus. If they knew I'd received
a death threat, they wouldn't let me out of their sight, much less out of the house.

And death threat rebus or no death threat rebus, there were a few things I still needed to do.

THE HIGHTOWER SCHOLARSHIP OFFICE ADDRESS
was right on their Web site. It was easy enough to get there after school on Friday. Morgan didn't have any classes on Friday, so he was the BIC that day; I found him in the garage fussing around with the front wheel of his mountain bike. I told him I was going to the library to work on a report, and he said, “Great.” Then he heaved the bike up by its handlebars and gave the wheel a big spin. I felt deeply bad that I was getting so good at telling white lies, but I told myself this was the last time. Morgan didn't even tell me to be careful crossing the street. Sometimes I don't think Morgan is qualified to be the BIC, but whatever.

I made Reggie go with me. I was too freaked out by
my death threat rebus to go by myself. During the bus ride I filled him in on the new information I'd gleaned from Pansy Burrows, that it looked as if Jordan and Dwight might be in on the checking account number scheme together. Or anyway, Jordan knew more than we thought she did, and that she was maybe not even an eighty percent good person, maybe more like sixty-six percent.

“I'm thinking maybe she didn't even save up for her car. Or, she did save up, but it wasn't, like, from a job or anything. It was stolen money.” I told him about her necklace, the small gold J filled with diamonds.

“This is so
awesome
,” said Reggie. He ripped open a pack of Shock Tarts with his teeth and dumped about half in his mouth. Reggie brought his skateboard with him everywhere he went, and he had it slung across his lap like a TV tray table. “I can't believe your cousin is a real crook.”

“Well, we're not totally sure. But we're kind of giving up trying to solve the mystery. That's why we're going to the Hightower office.”

I sighed and looked out the window. A mom jogging with a baby stroller huffed past us. I hated to say that the death threat rebus scared me enough to stop snooping around, but it had. I knew I was supposed to think, “No one will ever scare me away from finding out the truth!”
like all the one hundred percent good sleuths did, but I really did want to make it to my eighth-grade graduation. I'd also reached a dead end. If it wasn't Toc, and it wasn't Pansy Burrows, I had no clue who it was. It was someone I didn't know and couldn't seem to get to, either.

I'd tried to call the Hightower office, but no one ever answered. If I could set the record straight maybe then Jordan's problems would be all her own, and I could go back to minding my own business, and not be a Nosy Parker. I would do a super fine job on my Boston Tea Party report. I would get through the rest of the school year without talking to Hannah, who was turning out to be meaner than Cruella Deville. I would pay more attention to Jupiter. I would take Junior Lifeguard over the summer, and maybe learn to play the guitar.

But for now, all I wanted was the people who gave out the Hightower to know once and for all that Jordan deserved the scholarship. I could tell them what happened the day she was pulled over. Part of me also knew that I didn't want to find out any more bad things she might be into. No matter what else she'd done, she had had her identity stolen, she'd been framed—

“Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Wait a minute!” I said, sitting up straight. A few people looked up from their paperbacks.

“Jordan may be a crook, but she was still framed. The cop pulled her over for a smashed taillight, but when she picked me up—remember, I was walking home from Tilt—the light wasn't broken. It was totally fine. I remember, because I'd had a chance to read her bumper sticker, ‘Blond if you're Honk.'”

“She's not one of those chicks who parallel parks by feel, is she? 'Cause she could have smashed the light then,” said Reggie, flipping back his bangs.

“I didn't hear anything.”

“So that means someone broke it when you guys were in the bookstore,” said Reggie.

“Maybe Clyde the homeless guy?” I said.

“Or the person who stole her identity, who knew she'd eventually be pulled over for a broken taillight.”

I wondered. Suddenly, I felt the urge to be back on the case. Reggie reached up and pulled the cord to signal our stop.

The Hightower was such a big deal in our state, I expected the office to be a big-deal office, but it was on the top floor of an old green house just off NW 23rd Avenue. We stood outside on the sidewalk, double-checked the address. On the first floor was a nail salon. Through the huge, clean window I could see ladies perched at little tables, getting their fingernails painted.

There was a light on in the second-floor window. A
wooden staircase hugged the side of the house, leading up to the second floor. We stood there for a few long minutes. I cracked my knuckles.

“I think I should go in by myself,” I said.

“'S cool,” said Reggie. I couldn't tell whether he minded or not. He kicked his skateboard from where it'd been resting on his thigh and rolled off down the sidewalk.

“Come back in fifteen minutes!” I shouted after him.

The office was one big room with a lady sitting at a desk and a smaller room behind her. There was a big pinky-beige flowered sofa against one wall, very girly, and black-and-white pictures of women from long ago hanging on one pinky-beige wall. Some of the women wore graduation gowns.

The lady had thick dark, shoulder-length hair and a long nose. Down-turned hazel eyes that looked kind and sad at the same time. I was so surprised that she didn't look like crabby Sister Patrice at school—what I always imagined all ladies in charge of things looked like—that I blurted out, “Are you the one in charge around here?”

She laughed, took off her glasses, looked me up and down. I hadn't bothered changing out of my uniform. It was just me, Minerva Clark, in my blue Holy Family T-shirt, khakis, and tennis shoes, my mess of a head of
hair hanging down on either side of my head. “That depends on what you mean by in charge,” she said. “Have a seat. What can I do for you?”

“I have some information about Jordan Parrish, just, you know, I thought someone should know. Someone in charge of things. She still deserves the Hightower.” Even as these words came out of my mouth, I wondered if she
did
deserve it. I didn't want to think about that now. I just wanted to do what I'd come to do.

“Oh yes,” she said. She folded her hands over her papers. “I'm Emma Larson, by the way.”

“Minerva Clark. Jordan's my cousin.”

“Ah,” said Emma Larson. Like Mark Clark, she was the kind of serious responsible person who could only be called by two names.

I sat on the edge of the girly couch. I rubbed my sweaty palms on my thighs. I had that same old feeling of having a really good idea at home in my bedroom, then realizing how lame it was only after it was too late. And now my mind felt all mixed up by this new realization about Jordan's smashed taillight.

Emma Larson sat. She waited. From the other room came a strange noise, like someone was whispering.

Crap.

“I just wanted to say that I was with Jordan that day she was arrested and that it turned out to be a mistake.
You can even ask my dad. He's a lawyer. I mean, no matter what your criminal background check thingy said, she didn't do anything. She was pulled over for a broken taillight and then it turned out that someone had stolen her identity and—”

“Criminal background check thingy? What do you mean?” asked Emma Larson.

“You know, the final double-check before you give her the money.”

Emma Larson now was looking at me like I was mad. The weird whispering noise coming from the other room was getting louder. Actually, it was less like whispering than like someone going, “Pssst!”

“Last week …” Her voice trailed off as she flipped through a black date book. “We received a phone call actually … on Thursday, the nineteenth, it looks like … It was left with the message service after hours, around six o'clock. A friend of the foundation calling to let us know that Ms. Parrish had been arrested.”

Thursday the nineteenth? That was the day this whole mess had begun.

The hissing was getting louder and louder. Suddenly, it tipped over into a high scream. A teakettle. The smaller room must be a kitchen. “Do you want some tea?” asked Emma Larson, standing up and going to the kitchen.

“Sure,” I said. I hated tea. Grown-up tea tasted no different than the “tea” Reggie and I used to make out of sticks and leaves in preschool.

All I could think was
Someone called, someone called, someone called
. I couldn't remember who said it was a criminal background check—I wasn't even sure what that was, quite frankly, but the point was, there was no background check. It was a phone call.

Someone deliberately ratted Jordan out. Probably the person who broke her taillight and who gave the cops her name in the first place, the same person who murdered Dwight in broad daylight.

I hopped up from the girly couch and whipped around the side of Emma Larson's desk.

“Would you like peppermint?” she called from the other room. “I know when I first began drinking tea that's what I liked.”

“Sounds great,” I called, too loudly. I read the entry in the black book, but there was no name, no number.

“Or apple-cinnamon?”

“Uh-huh!” I caught sight of the phone; it was just like the one we had at Casa Clark, with the built-in Caller ID. Beneath the screen was a little button labeled CID; hit that and you could scroll back until the dawn of time, to see who called and when.

“So which is it?”

I pressed the button about seven thousand times until I got back to the nineteenth. There were six numbers: Hurd Alan C. Out of Area. An unknown caller had called three times.

Then the jolt of a name I recognized:

Hollingsworth Tiffani.

I grabbed a pen from a mug on the corner of the desk and scribbled the number on my palm. I scampered back to the girly couch just in time for Emma Larson to bring back my cup of boiling water flavored with dirt and sticks. The white mug said A WOMAN'S PLACE IS IN THE HOUSE—AND THE SENATE.

I thanked her, put my lips to the rim, could tell it was scalding, took a sip anyway. “Auh!” I said.

“Be careful,” she said. “Hot.”

What would we talk about now? What was I doing here? Emma Larson looked at me, expecting me to go on. All I wanted to do was get out of there and call the Tiffani Hollingsworth number. It was probably her cell. I tried not to want this. I tried to remember that the whole reason I'd come to the Hightower Scholarship office was to tell someone what I knew so that I wouldn't have to think about it anymore, sort of like taking a lost dog to the pound. I wanted to drop off this half-solved mystery with Emma Larson and let her feed and water it and worry about it. Instead, I was back to obsessing.

“In any case,” said Emma Larson, settling herself back in her chair, “we're still following up on the tip. Nothing's been decided. Your cousin just needs to sit tight for the time being.”

I blew on my tea. Why did people drink this stuff? “Well, I just thought you should know.”

“I'll be sure to look into it,” said Emma Larson. I could tell she never would. “Your cousin is lucky to have someone so concerned about her well-being.”

“Yeah, well. I'm a freak,” I said. I could never drink this whole thing. In the movies, people always made a big production about serving people something to drink, then no one ever finishes drinking whatever it is. Have you noticed? Reggie told me this was stage business, something the actors did with their hands so they weren't just standing there like meatheads delivering their lines. But Emma Larson had the kettle on before I came in, so it couldn't have been stage business. Suddenly, I felt as if my brain was going to explode and spew out of my ears. Tiffani Hollingsworth?
Tiffani Hollingsworth
? Could it really be what it looked like? Jordan said the first person she'd called after the police had hauled her off to jail was Tiffani. Did Tiffani then turn around and call here?

“Thanks for the tea.” I slid the mug onto the edge of the cluttered desk, and walked out before Emma Larson
had a chance to speak. Lucky the office was so small; I was out the door and down the steps in a heartbeat.

The minute I hit the sidewalk I pulled my Emergencies Only cell phone out and punched in the number on my hand. It was already starting to smear from the sweat. Maybe the rat was another Tiffani Hollingsworth. That wasn't such an uncommon name, was it?

I didn't expect the person on the other end of the number to pick up on the first ring.

Yes, it was her. My old best babysitter, my cousin Jordan's best friend.