Minerva Clark Gives Up the Ghost (20 page)

“You know where I live?” I heard the fear in my own voice. Dummy! I shouldn't have said a word.

Angus laughed. “I know everything, Minerva Clark.”

“So you were stalking me.”

“Research. It's called research. I'd hate to see your ferret fry, though. I really do want a ferret. Maybe I'll sneak in that basement window you have that doesn't lock and save him before I torch the place.”

“You really are crazy,” I said. “Thanks for saving Jupiter, though.” Just as I leaned sideways to remove my shoe, I heard the sound of male voices.

“Hey! What's going on here?” It was Kevin, standing on the sidewalk. Rolando was right behind him.

“HELP!” I hollered. “He's strangling me.”

Kevin tore Angus Paine off me with swim-champion strength. He dragged him out onto the sidewalk, threw him onto his stomach, and dug his knee into his back. Angus wasn't afraid, but irritated. “All right, all right,” he said. “No need to get violent.”

Rolando called the cops at 911. Kevin pulled off his tie with one hand and secured Angus's hands behind his back. I was too dazed to tell him how impressed I was. Where'd he learn how to do that?

I rubbed my throat. Now my knees shook, my legs trembled, my hands fluttered. Rolando fussed. He wanted to call the paramedics, too, but I wouldn't let
him. The police showed up in three minutes flat, cuffed Angus, and stuck him in the backseat. Angus looked at us and sighed, “You're really overreacting here, folks.”

As we watched the black and white drive away, I turned to Rolando to thank him and noticed that—guess what?—my stepdad had cut his hair.

That night, after the wedding reception, we sat around the picnic table in the backyard in our dress-up clothes, drinking pomegranate-juice iced tea—my mom's favorite—as I told my family the whole story. It felt weirdly like a holiday. Maybe it was the drama. Everyone was eager to put together the pieces. Rolando wondered whether Angus Paine had set the fire at the grocery just to have a mystery to solve, or he had some other reason.

“Another reason?” asked Mark Clark. “I'd say there's another reason—the kid's mental.”

They got in a big discussion over the existence of ghosts, specifically Louise, the Kikimora. Someone went in the kitchen and retrieved a bag of pork rinds that must have been hidden somewhere.

Quills, who'd been on Cryptkeeper Ron's Tour of
Haunted Portland more than any of us, and considered himself an amateur expert, said he knew for a fact that Cryptkeeper Ron had his ghosts certified by a world-renowned professor of paranormal activity. Then they all talked about whether a professor of paranormal activity—whoever that might be—was a big crackpot anyway. Mark Clark said he thought it was all a ruse. Morgan said he didn't know whether he believed in that particular ghost, but he believed there were spirits at work in the world. I thought about my interaction with Louise, not the corny part with the animatronic toasters, engineered by Angus Paine, but the first day at the grocery when we opened the freezer door, and the air was still chilled even though the refrigeration unit had been off for days. Was that Louise? I still couldn't decide. Maybe it was like that in life—there were things about which you would never, could never, make up your mind.

Mrs. Dagnitz looked wrung out. She sat in a patio chair with Ned at her feet. She petted his soft fur with her toes. She didn't say anything. She kept pressing her fingers to her temples. I wondered whether she was freaking out about everything that had happened and wondering whether she should move back to Portland, where she could breathe down my neck every second of every day.

She called me over to her and grabbed my hand. “Honey, could you go inside—in my purse, there's a
white bottle, it's my headache medicine. Could you bring it?”

The itty-bitty fancy purse she'd brought to the reception was on the kitchen counter. Nothing in there but a lipstick and her wallet. Slung around the back of one of the dining room chairs was her giant walking-around everyday purse, the one a small child could hide in with no problem. I stuck my hand in, felt around for a medicine bottle, and instead hit upon … an MP3 player?

My mother has an iPod?

I sat down at the dining room table and turned the pink metallic thing over and over in my hand. I couldn't help it. I had to have a listen. I expected some woo-woo yoga-y music, gamelan music, or bamboo flutes played by Incan mystics, or chanting monks or that Irish lady with the floaty voice. I thought the most extreme thing I would hear would be the Beatles.

Instead … well, I'm embarrassed to tell you some of the stuff my mom had on her iPod. Rap music. Heavy metal. A whole sound track from some skateboard movie. A really dirty song by a group Mark Clark will not even permit Quills to listen to in the house, in case I might accidentally hear some of the lyrics through his headphones.

As I listened to song after song, I realized I had never really known my mom. To me, she was this over-exercised, pastel-wearing control freak, but here she had Green Day—Green Day! My favorite band!—on
her iPod. And not just the new stuff that everyone loved, but early punk Green Day that I thought no one knew about but me.

Wait until I told Reggie. I texted him there and then.

I must have sat listening for a long time. I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was my mother. “Did you find the medicine?”

“Green Day, Mom? You like Green Day?” I was not about to mention all the other stuff.

“Doesn't everyone?”

I wanted to say,
Everyone but people's mothers,
but I couldn't.

It just wasn't true.

Two weeks later Mark Clark and I took what's called the red eye to New York City. It's called the red eye because when you get off the plane, your eyes are red from exhaustion. But I was too excited to be exhausted. My dad, Charlie, performed some magic and upgraded our seats to business class, so we had bigger seats and better food. I even had my own personal television stuck in the back of the seat in front of me, and something called lumbar support. I still did not have an iPod—I sort of thought my mom might get me one after I'd discovered hers, but no dice—but there was so much else to do on the airplane that I didn't mind.

My mom and Rolando stayed in Portland a few extra days, to make sure I wasn't completely traumatized,
then drove back to Santa Fe. They said they liked Portland and its green pines and gaudy rhododendrons, but the soppy heat was too much. It was much drier, and therefore more pleasant, in Santa Fe.

My mom didn't cook any more fish, nor did she force me to go shopping. She let me keep three pairs of the shoes she'd bought, and I went to yoga with her one day. My favorite pose is corpse pose, where you lie flat on your back and close your eyes. We never talked about her lasagna-throwing outburst, or how I sort of basically totally invaded her privacy when I listened to her iPod without asking. We have a truce going, for now.

Dr. Lozano, who did not want to fly on the red eye to New York, was going to meet us at our hotel. It had a minibar. I checked.

She also was able to get us tickets to see
Wicked
and said she knew where to buy the best cute fake purses, plus bootleg CDs and DVDs. I was supposed to pretend she didn't know anything about it, though, because if it got out, it might sully her good reputation. Reggie gave me twenty dollars to buy him a copy of the
Lord of the Rings
trilogy.

Dr. Lozano was shocked to hear about Angus's “behavior.” That's a neutral doctor word for full-on psycho meltdown. Still, she wouldn't tell me anything more about his case.

Angus still would not admit his guilt, even though
Detective Huntington got a warrant and found a notebook beneath his mattress, where he talked about sneaking into the grocery at midnight. He'd hung on the ancient gas line until it broke, filling the store with the gas that exploded when the electric motor from the freezer kicked on. At Holy Family, he'd used part of the ferret food bag to set a trash can on fire, hoping it could be traced back to me.

Angus told the court that was all just something he'd made up, and the weird thing is, he may really believe it. Because Grams Lucille died in the fire at the grocery, they wanted to try Angus as an adult. He was almost fifteen. Detective Huntington said there was a good chance the court would put him away at least that many years.

It's about five hours from Portland to New York by plane. Mark Clark and I talked a lot about why Angus did what he did. Had he really set the first fire just to have a mystery to wave under my nose? Had he used the arson as a Minerva magnet, in the same way Morgan was using Ned as a Jeannette magnet? Or had he set the fire at the grocery purely for entertainment, as Reggie suggested, and then, after Dr. Lozano told him he couldn't come to New York, decided to find me and see if he could mess with my life enough so that I couldn't go either? Was it like, if I can't go, neither can that Minerva Clark? That was how Angus Paine's strange mind worked.

Before we left for the airport, I'd needed to do one
more thing before I closed the case. Angus lied about everything, but I had to double-check one last thing.

I fired up Mark Clark's computer and Googled “Minerva Clark.” Eighteen hits were returned. There was the newspaper story about me, and Chelsea de Guzman's MySpace page. There were some dead Minerva Clarks, pioneer women who helped settle the West, and a girl in West Virginia named Minerva Clark who had recently won a regional spelling bee. There was no ninety-year-old Minerva Clark in Portland who raised potbellied pigs. Just as I thought, there was only one Minerva Clark in our neck of the woods, and that was me.

Minerva Clark Gets a Clue
Minerva Clark Goes to the Dogs

Copyright © 2007 by Karen Karbo

All rights reserved You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages

Published by Bloomsbury U.S.A. Children's Books
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010
Electronic edition published in September 2012
www.bloomsburykids.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Karbo, Karen.
Minerva Clark gives up the ghost : a Minerva Clark mystery / by Karen Karbo.—1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.
Summary: Thirteen-year-old amateur sleuth Minerva Clark is contacted by a boy whose parents' Portland, Oregon, grocery store burned down, but when she agrees to investigate the fire, she does not expect to become an arson suspect herself.
[1. Arson—Fiction. 2. Family life—Portland (Or.)—Fiction. 3. Portland (Or.)—
Fiction. 4. Mystery and detective stories.] I. Title.
PZ7.K132Mj 2007     [Fic]—dc22        2007015091

First U.S. Edition 2007

ISBN: 978-1-58234-679-3 (e-book)