Minerva Clark Gives Up the Ghost (17 page)

I had no alternative but to wait until it was dark. I had to be sure Detective Huntington was off the clock, and not wandering around the grocery to see if I'd show up. It didn't take much to figure out that if Robotective was determined to blame me for the Holy Family fire, he might also tag me for the Corbett Street Grocery fire. He could arrest me for every unsolved arson in the city, for all I knew. There would be a new profile in the paper—Minerva Clark, girl detective–turned–serial arsonist.

Mrs. Dagnitz and Rolando were meeting some old friends for Indonesian food and a gamelan concert, so Mark Clark was free to bring home burritos, greasy chips, and chunky guacamole from our favorite divey Mexican place. Quills was at work, and Morgan was in class. We put their foil-wrapped burritos in the fridge, for them to heat up when they got home. We opened the dining room windows and put on a CD of Weird
Al Yankovic alternative polkas. Mark Clark and I were the only ones who could stand Weird Al, so we always waited until it was just the two of us to listen.

During dinner our dad, Charlie, called from Cincinnati and asked about Detective Huntington's visit. Unlike Mrs. Dagnitz, whose default setting was hysteria, Charlie was always as calm as a baby nurse. He did not appear to think I needed representation and immediate hair-straightening for a pending court appearance. He said he knew I didn't do it, without even having to ask.

I could tell Mark Clark would spend the entire night playing Everquest, because before he disappeared into the computer room he did some Speed Parenting. “You should get to bed early tonight since tomorrow is Mom's reception and you'll be staying up late. Did you take your vitamins today? Did you feed the dog? Does Jupiter have water? Try not to worry too much about what's going on, it'll all work out. Good night!”

When I left around ten o'clock, with Jupiter tucked in my backpack, I walked right out the front door.

I usually wasn't allowed to ride my bike after dark, and by the time I got to the grocery, I believed this was a ridiculous rule, especially in the summer. All across our city people were hanging out on their porches, sitting in cafés and at bus stops, throwing backyard parties that spilled out onto front lawns, and of course, pedaling around on their bikes.

Southwest Corbett Street was so lively—front doors thrown open to catch some cool air, a couple of kids playing Frisbee beneath the streetlight, a block party—I thought I should have waited until midnight, but the end of the street where the darkened grocery huddled beneath a flickering streetlight was quiet.

As I tugged on the padlock, I thought about the different kinds of anxious I'd been in this place. The first time I was jittery seeing up close the weird sort of damage only a fire could do. The second time I was startled and shaken by my run-in with Wade Leeds. The third time I was plain old scared to death by the antics of a “ghost.”

I pulled a flashlight from my backpack. This time, I wasn't afraid to be here, or afraid of what I might find. I was afraid of how I would feel once I found it.

I crunched through the debris in my red-and-blue Chucks, the ones with the skulls on the ankles, shined my light on the singed Lucky Charms box, the half-burned potato chip bags, a snarl of metal chairs in one corner, and the empty deli case. When I reached the metal shelf with its row of retro toasters, I put down my backpack and fetched Jupiter.

I petted him a bit, just to make sure he was awake and alert. I needed him to be extra nosy and interested in anything small and shiny he could spirit away. Ferrets aren't afraid of heights. I set Jupiter on the end of the shelf, hoping he would nose around the toasters
and not leap to the floor and disappear into the charred rubble.

He trotted to the first toaster and tried to stick his head inside one of the bread slots, but it was too narrow. He sniffed around the bottom, circled it twice, then moved on to the second one. I followed his movements with the yellowish beam of my flashlight. The toasters gleamed and Jupiter's fur looked clean and white. The rest of the store was dark, except where the streetlight shone in a window. It was sort of glam, as if it were a performance, spotlight on Jupiter.

The second toaster, like the first, had bread slots. These were wide enough for Jupiter to crawl into. He disappeared for a moment, then popped back out. He skipped the third toaster and went straight to the fourth toaster, one of the smaller, triangular-shaped ones with little feet, and side doors that pressed the bread against the toasting coils.

The doors were both open. Jupiter peeked in, grabbed on to something that struck his fancy, yanked it out, and immediately began dragging it off, searching for a place to hide his treasure.

I had to stand on my tiptoes to grab him off the shelf. It occurred to me that I could have gone upstairs to Grams Lucille's old apartment and borrowed the red ladder, if it was still there. But this was better. Just like the ferrets employed by telecommunications experts to pull the cables through the narrow tunnels beneath the
cathedral where Prince Charles married Lady Diana, making it so the whole world could watch the wedding on TV, Jupiter enjoyed a job well done. I took the object he found from between his teeth, petted his head, and returned him to the backpack.

I studied the servo for a second. It was a square silver box with some wires on one end and a propeller-looking thing on the other. I exhaled loudly. Now what?

“Now that's what I call a sigh,” a voice said from behind me.

It was Angus Paine.

“Oh look! It's Caleb Presinger!” I shined the flashlight straight into his chocolate M&M's–colored eyes. I held my arm against my side to steady my hand. I was not about to let him see me shake.

“Took you long enough to figure that out.” He broke out his lopsided grin as if this situation were nothing but normal. “Don't you, like, Google everyone, first chance you get?”

“So you want to tell me about this?” I held up the servo, then pushed it into my side pocket. I didn't want him to rush me and grab it out of my hand.

“Can't see what you're holding with the light in my eyes.” He shielded his eyes with his hand and took a step forward. The rubble crunched beneath his step.

“You don't need to see it. It's Louise. Or the servo
you used to make me think it was Louise. Actually one of the servos. I'm sure all the toasters have one.”

“I feel bad about that. You looked really scared when you ran out of here. I didn't mean to scare you.”

So I hadn't left him sitting at home watching the Discovery Channel in his narrow raspberry-colored house after all. I thought back to his kiss, the way I'd swung down his shady block, picked the daisy and tried to tuck it behind my ear. He'd followed me. He'd followed me here, then hidden somewhere, watching my reaction to his nasty little trick.

“Are you stalking me?” I blurted out.

“No, I wouldn't say that.” He stuck his hands in his pockets, kicked at something with the toe of his back low-tops. Still smiling. Caleb/Angus wasn't humiliated at all. He didn't act wrongly accused, or have a raft of excuses for what he'd done. Maybe this was how his self-esteem showed up. He felt free to do anything he pleased, no matter how it affected anyone else.

“Then what is going on, Angus, or whoever you are? You never wanted me to solve the mystery of who torched this place, did you?”

“I did, sort of. I still think it was arson. But the truth is, I just wanted to hang out with you.”

“You didn't think of just calling up and saying, ‘Hey, I'm the other kid that got electrocuted, I'd love to hang out'?”

“We weren't electrocuted, Min,” he laughed. “That means—”

“I know, I know, electric shock, whatever.” I let my guard down half an inch. Maybe he wasn't going to attack me after all.

“You mean, if I would have just called and said, ‘Hey, Minerva Clark, let's hang out,' you would have said yes?”

“Yes. I don't know.”

“Oh come on. Be honest,” he said. “You never would have had anything to do with me if I hadn't had a mystery to dangle in front of your nose. Look at me. And look at you.”

I considered this. Was I really out of his league?

“Could you turn the flashlight off?” he asked.

“No, but we can go outside.” I shouldered my backpack and stomped past him, making myself as tall and straight as the tallest tree in our yard. I noticed he waited until I was out of the building until he followed. He turned and snapped the padlock shut.

“So is that lock even broken?”

“Nah,” he said. “I just left it half open so you could get in.”

He sat on the curb beneath the flickering streetlight. His hair was brown in the sad light, not the copper-penny color I knew it to be. Across the street I could hear the late-night news blaring through an open window, and the scent of some night-blooming flower filled
the air. “Sit next to me,” he said, patting the narrow concrete strip beside him.

“Are you totally insane?” I said, a little louder than I meant to.

“Well, I do have some problems, yes. One of them is having fallen so hard for you, Minerva Clark, goddess of all that stuff I quoted to you the other day. It was dumb of me to set up the toaster thing, really dumb. But you were going through suspects so fast, I had to do something to keep you around. I really thought I'd have you going on Wade Leeds for a while. Talk about totally insane.”

I recalled racing here on Angus's Go-Ped after my chat with Paisley O'Toole at her pastry shop. I'd sat on the curb eating my snickerdoodle, cussing Angus out in my head for being late. “So you never planned on meeting me here. You told me to come here so I'd run into Wade.”

He nodded like a waiter who's just been told the meal tastes good. “He'd called my mom the night before and told her he wanted to get some stuff out of Grams's attic. I thought it'd be interesting to see you two connect.”

“But how did you know to call me the minute he drove away?”

“I saw you.”

He
was
a stalker. He'd watched me walk Wade Leeds to his dusty Explorer filled with all his junk, then he'd scampered home so he could be there when I arrived, acting as if he'd been waiting for me. I said nothing.

“And tracking down Paisley!” he crowed. “You really should work for the FBI or somewhere. That blew my mind. Paise is like a total angel. She used to babysit me before she was paralyzed.”

Caleb/Angus wasn't looking at me, which would have required him to turn around. He was talking into the empty night, hanging out with the curb and the parking strip. I stood behind him on the sidewalk, holding my bike, ready to speed off if I had to.

“Let me just ask you one thing,” I said.

“Will you sit next to me then?”

“Sure,” I said.

“What do you wanna know?”

“Did you set the fires?”

“Fires, plural?”

“The one here, and the one at my school?”

He twisted around and looked at me. In the dim light I could see that chipped tooth. “Nope. I may like creating my little schemes, but I'm not into fire.”

“And your mom's hip replacement?”

“I told you
that
?” He chuckled and shook his head—amazed at what? His own ability to make up the most random whoppers? “Nat's a marathon runner. Her hips are fine.”

I turned my bike around and pedaled off without saying a word. My stomach felt like a wrung-out wash-cloth, my lungs like an air mattress that's had all the air pressed out of it. Dots danced before my eyes. It's
amazing how fast you can ride a bike feeling like you're going to faint.

As I turned the corner onto my street and saw Casa Clark, the silly Mexican restaurant house among all the pretty bungalows and Portland colonials, dark except for the light on the third floor—my bedroom light—and the blue light of the screen in the computer room, I felt what the nuns at Holy Family were always on us about: gratitude.

Inside, I don't think Mark Clark had moved an inch while I'd sneaked out of the house aged thirteen and sneaked back in aged thirty-five, or whatever age you are when you realize people can surprise you in ways that will bring you to your knees.

I returned Jupiter to Ferret Tower and made a beeline upstairs, taking the steps two at a time, hitting speed dial for Reggie as I went. He answered before the end of the first ring, then dropped the phone. There were shuffling, scuffling sounds, and Reggie muttering before I heard “Yo!”

“Did I wake you up?” I asked.

“Nada chada baby,” he said. “Whas'up?”

“Liar. You've been asleep since eight thirty.”

“Nine thirty, but don't put that on your MySpace page. I don't want word to get out that I'm a pathetic loser with no social life.”

I lay on my bed and stuck my bare feet up on the wall,
like Mark Clark had asked me a million times not to do. I told him the entire saga of Caleb Presinger/Angus Paine, beginning with the phone call. I knew Reg had heard this part before, but it felt important to start at the beginning. Reg was my best friend, and you know how I know? He let me tell the part he'd already heard. I finished up with the lie Angus had told about his mother's hip replacement. For some reason that lie was the freakiest one of all because there was absolutely no reason for it, other than the pure joy of telling it.

“Man, that is one messed-up dude,” said Reggie.

“Hey, thanks, I think I got that.”

“You do know he's your ghost, right? He set the grocery on fire, and probably the school, too.”

“He's probably trying to frame me then for some reason?” I cleared my throat. My voice was so quiet I thought perhaps I hadn't said this aloud, but had only thought it. I recalled again sitting on the curb in the blazing sun, eating my snickerdoodle, waiting for Angus, who was never going to show up, when Robotective cruised by in his dark blue Dadmobile.