Minerva Clark Gives Up the Ghost (3 page)

Morgan wore his trademark earflap hat, even though it was the dead middle of a humid Portland summer.
It was almost never hot in our city, but when the heat finally showed up, it became the guest that wouldn't leave. Even in the middle of the night it could be eighty-five degrees. People said that's because we live in a valley, something to do with the hot air getting stuck.

Ned slept curled between them, snoring into his paws. The room was stuffy and smelled of clean dog—Ned had just had a bath—cheese pizza, and chlorine. Kevin was a champion swimmer, which meant he always smelled of chlorine. He swam the butterfly, the most show-offy stroke there is.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey,” said Morgan, glancing up at me.

“I can't believe you still have that hat on. It's eight hundred degrees in here,” I said. Between the boys and the dog, there was nowhere for me to sit.

“It's my good-luck hat,” said Morgan.

“Hey, babe,” said Kevin. I liked how he called me babe, even though it sort of sounded like something he'd practiced at home in the mirror, winking and pointing at himself with finger guns.

“You can't hide from me, suckah!” Kevin's thumbs jigged around the controller as he blasted away. On the screen, the cartoon bad guys threw up their hands and screamed before they exploded. I stood in the doorway for a long minute. He never looked away from the screen.

I'll tell you one thing: I'm never going to be one of
those girls who watches her boyfriend play video games and calls that hanging out. It is more boring than weeding the yard. It is more boring than a parental lecture. It is even more boring than when boys
talk
about playing video games. How is that possible?

I turned around and ran up the stairs to my bedroom on the third floor.

My ferret, Jupiter, used to sleep in a cage behind the grand piano in the living room downstairs, but after Ned arrived, we bought him a fancy new ferret tower, with four levels connected by ramps and tubes, and moved him to my bedroom. Ned liked to stand in front of Jupiter's cage, madly wagging his stump of a tail. We couldn't tell if that meant he wanted Jupiter to be his friend or his snack.

I opened Jupiter's cage, scooped him up from where he was conked out in his hammock, and tossed him onto my bed. Jupiter doesn't mind being airborne. He throws his little white legs out wide like a flying squirrel. As usual, he behaved as if he'd never been out of his cage until that very second. He performed his mad inchworm dance until he fell off the bed, bumped into a chair leg, pulled one of my flip-flops under the bed, scampered back out and attacked a wadded-up piece of paper, hurled himself into the air for no good reason, fell backward, dove into one of my shoes, and then was distracted by a CD that had fallen on the floor and that he tried to drag under my dresser.

I plopped down on my bed and watched Jupiter for a while. I crossed my legs and thought about my second conversation with Angus Paine. I'd waited until Mrs. Dagnitz had walked all the way across the supermarket parking lot and disappeared into the market before calling him back. It was too easy. I just had to hit the button that dialed the number of the last incoming call. Tip tap, just like that, and the strange boy was on the line.

I told him I'd love to help him figure out who had burned down his family's grocery store.

“All right,” he said. He sounded distant, much less warm and friendly than when he'd called me only the hour before. He was annoyed, distracted. I'd say he was playing video games, but I couldn't hear any noise in the background.

“When do you want to meet?” I said.

Pause.

“Whatever works for you,” he said.

“Are you still there? Hello?” I said loudly. I knew he hadn't hung up, but his behavior truly bugged. Hadn't
he
called
me
?

“Let's make it two o'clock tomorrow then,” he said. “At the grocery.”

Is it considered hanging up on somebody if you don't say good-bye? If it is, then Angus Paine had hung up on me. As I snapped my phone shut, I realized I hadn't asked for directions to Corbett Street
Grocery. But then again, he hadn't offered to give me the address either. Did he think that just because his family's grocery was on Cryptkeeper Ron's Tour of Haunted Portland that I would automatically know where it was? Or maybe between the time Angus Paine first called me and the time I'd called him back, he'd found someone else to help him. Or maybe he'd just decided to forget it.

Man, was it hot up there. The windows were wide open over my desk, but the air was dead still, a breeze the last thing on its sluggish mind. I pulled my hair up and tied it in a knot on top of my head, tugged off my khaki pants, kicked them into the back of my closet, and put on some jean shorts. I have a theory that the reason why jeans never go out of style is that you can fish them out of a dirty clothes pile and they are never wrinkled. They can pass for clean longer than any other type of clothing.

I was just about to settle in with my rebus notebook when I heard someone clomping up the stairs to the third floor.

Kevin!

… who was not supposed to be in my bedroom at all, ever.

The second day Kevin was my boyfriend Mark Clark came home from work early and caught us smooching in the TV room. My face was so red I thought I might give myself sunburn. Kevin leaped up when Mark
appeared in the doorway, then got one look at the paid-assassin expression on my brother's face and made up an excuse about having to go home for dinner, even though he was supposed to be having dinner with us.

After Kevin left, Mark Clark demanded to know if our mom had ever talked to me about the birds and the bees. The birds and the bees! Does anyone under the age of ninety even call it that anymore? I could not believe we were having this conversation. From the look on Mark Clark's face, he could not believe we were having it either. Mark Clark was sweating, giant pit stains beneath his arms.

We'd been standing in the kitchen. For some reason I was holding a can of refried beans. I was so traumatized, I cannot remember why I was holding a can of refried beans. I told him I needed to practice the piano and ran into the living room and started pounding on our baby grand. I haven't taken piano lessons in five years. Then Mark Clark came after me and said I wasn't allowed to have Kevin in my room. Never
ever
EVER. A week later, I found the can of beans under the piano bench.

Now Kevin came over and sat on the other edge of my bed. There was nothing weird about it. Why Mark Clark was so hysterical, I don't know. Kevin turned my rebus notebook toward him and took a mechanical pencil out of his pocket. Kevin is the kind of boy who
always has a mechanical pencil (but not a pocket protector). He wrote:

S
B
A
R
G

“That would be ‘Stand up for sbarg,'” I said.

“Ha ha,” said Kevin. “Too easy, huh?”

“Up for grabs,” I said. “I think I already did that one.”

“I just made it up,” he said.

“You probably stole it from me,” I said. I reached over and poked him in his side. He waggled his eyebrows at me. A smooch was most definitely incoming. At the same time, I heard a car door slam outside in the driveway, beneath my window.

It was Mark Clark! It was Mrs. Dagnitz! It was some authority figure capable of getting me GOT—Grounded Off Technology—which meant no television, DVD player, computer, or cell phone. It was the equivalent of being flung back into the Stone Age, and should have been illegal, like selling children into slavery.

I hopped off the bed, trying to be casual instead of hysterical. I could still see Mark Clark saying, “Never
ever
EVER!” This must be evidence that I'm not boy
crazy, because I would much rather pass up a smooch from Kevin than get grounded for the rest of the summer.

“Heyyyy. Come back here,” Kevin said.

“Incoming ferret,” I said. I reached down and scooped up Jupiter from where he was hauling one of my Chuck Taylors around by the shoestring. I tossed him into Kevin's lap.

“Today some dude called me about solving an arson,” I said.

“I thought we were chillaxing here,” said Kevin. More eyebrow waggling. He patted the place on my bed where I had just been sitting. Kevin had very dark eyebrows compared with his hair. He said it was because his family was Black Irish. I don't know what that is. Note to self: Google “Black Irish.”

Pat pat pat. “Come here, babe.”

“Someone burned down his family's grocery store,” I said.

Kevin sighed. I could tell he realized there was going to be no rolling around on my bed today. “They say arson is the toughest crime to solve. I saw a show on it on the Discovery Channel.”

“Tougher than murder?” I asked. I had already solved a murder.

“The evidence is usually destroyed by the fire. What started the fire gets burned up in it. Wicked sketchy, huh?” he said.

“You mean—”

“Let's say you use a rag drenched in gasoline to start a fire. What's the first thing that gets burned to a crisp? The rag. So the cops come in, have a look around, can't find any physical evidence, and close the case. Now come back over here.”

“I don't think you're supposed to be up here,” I said. “My brother might come after you with his dojo.”

Kevin laughed. “Isn't there where you go to take karate lessons?”

I didn't know. Mojo? Hojo? I thought a dojo was one of those weapons boys always think are so cool.

From downstairs I could hear voices and cupboard doors slamming.

“Uh-oh. The groceries.”

I dashed out of my room, tore to the end of hallway, hopped onto the fireman's pole, and slid down into the kitchen. Luckily I'd put lotion on my legs that morning. The fireman's pole was here when we moved in—don't ask me why the family who lived in this house before us thought they needed one. The advantage of the fireman's pole was that you dropped into the kitchen like a ninja. I hardly ever used it, but once in a while it was one hundred percent handy.

I expected to see Mrs. Dagnitz putting away the groceries with her back mad-mom straight and her mouth a thin-lipped line of pure rage, but instead, there was Weird Rolando, my mom's new husband, folding the
plastic grocery bag and tucking it into the recycling bin. He wore his brown-and-gray hair in a braid. My mother is married to a man whose hair is longer than mine. That should be against the law.

“Sorry about the groceries,” I said to his back. “I told Mrs. Dag … I told my mom I'd put them away, then I sort of spaced it.”

“It happens,” said Weird Rolando. He turned around and flashed me a smile. It was real, not one of those fake ones where the mouth does all the work. I would never tell my brothers this, but I don't mind Weird Rolando. He is the sort of person to take home a lost dog and then make up flyers saying he'd found it. Once upon a time, not long after my mom and dad separated, Rolando was my mother's yoga teacher. My mother lost weight, got very good at standing on her head, then announced she was moving to Santa Fe, and away she went. “It's not a big deal,” he said.

“It is a big deal when I specifically asked you to put them away not ten minutes ago,” said Mrs. Dagnitz, hurrying into the kitchen from the dining room, flinging open the refrigerator, and grabbing the same spinach Rolando had put away seven seconds earlier.

“Sorry,” I said. “I did put the fish away. Isn't that the important one?” I didn't think it would help to make up some excuse. Mrs. Dagnitz had that deep wrinkle between her eyebrows. I remembered how it was with that wrinkle—once it showed up, there was nothing you
could do about it. Like with the stomach flu, you just had to wait until it went away.

“Clearly you haven't heard about what's going on with spinach,” she snapped. “E.coli and God knows what else.”

“I thought that was from not washing it.”

“Are you trying to kill us?”

“My plot is revealed,” I said.

Out of the corner of my eye I thought I saw Weird Rolando,
my stepfather
, smile. He started rubbing Mrs. Dagnitz's shoulders. She rolled her neck around, this way and that. “I'm just so stressed out over this reception,” she said.

“It'll be fine, Buttercup,” said Weird Rolando.

“We should have splurged for the shrimp,” she said. “It's the perfect wedding reception nibble. People love shrimp at a wedding reception, don't they? It's festive, shrimp is. And so pretty.”

“Just breathe, Buttercup,” said Rolando, and he continued pressing his thumbs into her back.

Buttercup
. I looked all around the kitchen—at the bright orange counters that Mrs. Dagnitz had always complained about but that no one else seemed to notice, at the Great Chili Peppers of the World poster hung next to the fridge, at the back door, next to which sat two blue recycling bins, at anything, anything but the two of them.
Buttercup
. Could they see me cringe? Did they even care?

From upstairs, I could hear thumping around. I hoped Kevin was still watching Jupiter, but I bet he'd drifted back down to the TV room. That was all right. I'd rather have him hypnotized by a video game, safely upstairs with Morgan, than in the kitchen having to hear
my stepfather
call my mother
Buttercup
.

I wished I was meeting Angus Paine that very minute. I was getting used to having a mystery to solve. It distracted me from a lot of things, like Mr. and Mrs. Dagnitz standing in the middle of the kitchen, with their eyes closed, breathing loudly.

Eventually Mrs. Dagnitz got over being stressed about the shrimp and started cleaning the spinach. “I could use a little help here,” she said, shaking the water off one small leaf and setting it on a piece of paper towel. Whenever Mrs. Dagnitz was around, we always had spinach salad instead of regular lettuce salad because, according to Mrs. Dagnitz, lettuce was not a real vegetable but only crunchy water.