The Case of the Graveyard Ghost (3 page)

Drake glanced at Nell. He removed his detective kit and notebook from his backpack and shoved a pencil behind his ear. (A scientist is always prepared. Even in the gloomiest of weather. Even in the most irregular of situations.) “Lead the way, Ms. Pendleton.”

They followed Mary into a large room where a few dozen club members milled about. A banner overhead read:
ANNUAL BUDDING BOTANISTS JUNIOR
ROSE CLUB COMPETITION! PRIZES GALORE!
Bouquets of roses were displayed on tables.

They smelled . . . absolutely heavenly.

They looked . . . absolutely disgusting.

“Great Scott!” cried Drake.

“This is dreadful!” cried Nell.

“Yes.” Mary nodded, wiping away a tear. “Perfectly dreadful. See this bouquet?” She pointed at a bouquet on the table beside her. The label read:

EXHIBIT #19

S
PECIES
: A
NGEL
G
LORY

“This is my entry. Yesterday the blossoms were a stunning, pure white. Today, well”—gasp!—“they’re the color of . . . the color of . . . dare I say . . .
swamp slime!
”

And indeed, she was right.

All around the room, the roses were the nastiest of colors—mold, barf, dirt, snot, slug, grasshopper gut—if such colors really could be called colors at all.

Drake flipped open his lab notebook. “When was this first discovered?” he asked.

“At eight o’clock this morning, when everyone arrived to set up for the show,” replied Mary. “Yesterday we cut our bouquets in the greenhouse and stored them overnight in the walk-in refrigerator. When we went to fetch them this morning, well, naturally, we were all stunned. I imagine the judge will have a most difficult time of it.”

“When is the judging?” asked Nell.

Mary glanced at her watch. “Dearie me. In just an hour and a half.”

“Hey, Mary!” someone hollered from behind them.

It was Tess O’Brien, another classmate. Tess was an earthy sort of person—at one with the universe, aligned with the planets, and all that.

She always wore shorts and sandals, even when the weather was gloomy. Today her fingernails were a mite crusty around the edges, and she smelled a little like not-so-fresh air. “Peace be with you,” she sighed, giving Mary a down-to-earth hug. “Sorry your roses look like swamp slime.”

“Thank you, Tess, why, thank you indeed,” Mary replied, stepping back and smoothing her dress. “Sorry about your roses, as well.”

Tess sighed again. “Must’ve been the water.”

“That’s what we’re here to find out,” said Drake. “Have you noticed anything unusual?”

Tess shook her head. “Nothing. I was the first one here because I always wake up with the sunrise. Of course, the roses were already ruined. I called Mary right away. Like I said. Must’ve been the water.”

After questioning Tess and Mary, Drake and Nell set to work. They pulled on surgical gloves.

Snap!

They took out magnifying glasses. They examined the roses. They jotted notes. Drew charts. Took water samples. Pushed buttons on their calculators. Then, just as they completed a search of the premises, their archenemy appeared.

That’s right. Frisco walked through the door.

“E
gads!” exclaimed Drake, his glasses slipping down his nose. “What’s
he
doing here?”

“Someone else must have hired him,” said Mary. “After all, we’re not the only ones from our class who are in the Budding Botanists Junior Rose Club. There’s Peter Underwood, who won last year, and, of course, Sloane Westcott. Her mother makes her.”

And as they watched, horrified, Frisco declared to all, “I’m here to save the day.”

Everyone gathered around him, clapping and exclaiming.

Peter Underwood approached Frisco, and while neither Drake nor Nell could hear what they said, they shook hands while Frisco handed him a business card. Behind them, Sloane Westcott stamped her foot and said, “What about me?” So he handed her a business card as well.

Then Frisco whipped out his magnifying glass and began examining a bouquet of slime-colored roses.

“Quick, Scientist Nell,” exclaimed Drake, pushing up his glasses. “We have no time to lose! We must find the solution before Frisco saves the day!”

“Check!”

Without wasting another second, they threw on their rain gear and hustled out the door.

“To the lab!” cried Drake as he climbed on his bike.

“For further analysis!” cried Nell as she climbed on hers.

“Peace, my people,” said Tess, giving the peace sign.

“Oh, do be careful,” cried Mary as she waved good-bye with her white hankie.

The lab was quite comfy, just the thing after pedaling through mud puddles and gloom. Once inside, Drake pulled a book off the shelf and joined Nell at the lab table. Together they found the right section: “Irregular Situations: What to Do When Your Roses Look Like Swamp Slime and Your Archenemy Vows to Save the Day.”

After they read the section, they shared their observations. They jotted. They sharpened pencils. They scratched their heads. They thought very hard. And through all this head-scratching and hard-thinking, they developed a hypothesis. (All good scientists know that a hypothesis is merely their best guess as to what is happening.) “We must test our hypothesis,” said Nell firmly.

“Check,” said Drake.

And so they did. (With a little help from Mrs. Doyle.)

Afterward, Nell said with a satisfied nod, “Just as we thought.”

“Indeed,” replied Drake. “Our hypothesis is correct.”

They gathered their evidence and hurried back to the Budding Botanists Junior Rose Club, arriving just in the nick of time. All the club members were seated at the front of the room facing Frisco.

“And finally,” Frisco was saying, “my scientific conclusion is, it was the water. Without a doubt, it was definitely the water. I’m sure of it. Positive. No other possible explanation.” And he sat down with a smirk. Peter Underwood shook Frisco’s hand and thanked him for getting to the bottom of the matter. In return, Frisco handed Peter a bill.

“Oh, dear me,” said the judge, rising from his seat. He shuffled through some papers on his clipboard. “Ahem. Well then, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but seeing as the water was bad, this year’s contest is . . . um . . .
cancel
—”

“Hold everything!” cried Drake and Nell. Everyone gasped as they stepped to the front of the room. Drake unzipped his backpack and withdrew a bouquet of roses. They were a stunning pale pink. The color of a morning sunrise. Quite lovely, indeed.

“Ooh,” breathed the audience.

Then Drake withdrew another bouquet of roses from his backpack. This bouquet, however, was not so lovely. In fact, it was downright ugly. It was . . . the color of . . . bird doo.

The audience gasped in horror.
“Eeww!”

“Just this morning,” said Drake in his most professional voice, “these were all beautiful roses.”

“Mrs. Doyle’s roses,” added Nell, “which she generously donated.”

“All in the name of science,” remarked Drake as he began to pace the room. “Earlier, we conducted a thorough examination of the competition roses. Based upon our observations, we suspected something was not right. Not right at all. Allow Scientist Nell to explain.”

“Thank you, Detective Doyle. First of all, we noticed some discoloration along the rose stems. Second, at the site of each discoloration was a tiny hole, as if the stems had been pricked by a pin.” “Most suspicious,” Drake commented, stopping his pacing. He raised his eyebrow at the audience.

“Indeed,” agreed Nell. “We developed a hypothesis and tested it. Worked like a charm. You see the results before you. Bird-doo-doo roses.”

“Yes—quite,” said Mary. “But how
did
you do it?”

“Excellent question, Ms. Pendleton,” Drake responded. “We’re coming to that.”

“Hopefully after I leave,” griped Frisco.

Nell clasped her hands behind her and began to pace. “Ask yourselves this question: If a tree doesn’t have a heart to pump liquid through its system, then how does water travel from its roots all the way to the top of the tree?”

“The answer is, of course, capillary action,” Drake replied. “Instead of veins, plants have capillaries—”

“—which are very tiny tubes,” added Nell.

“You see, water molecules are rather sticky,” said Drake.

“If you spill water on a table,” Nell continued, “water molecules stick together in a puddle. In the same way, water molecules climb up the sides of a capillary tube, sticking together and traveling through the plant. It’s quite remarkable, really.”

“And your point is—?” said Peter Underwood, frowning.

Drake replied calmly, “The perpetrator simply injected dye into the stems, using a hypodermic syringe. Capillary action transported the dye through the roses, changing their blossoms into different colors.”

“But why?” asked Mary. “Why would anyone do something so dreadfully rotten?”

And then there followed a great silence, because, after all, it really was an excellent question. And no one had an excellent answer.

Except one.

Suddenly, Tess O’Brien crumpled to the floor.

“I confess! I confess! It was me! I did it! I did the dirty deed!” She put her face in her hands and sobbed. Oh, sobbed quite terribly.

Everyone gasped, including Drake and Nell.

“But why?” Mary asked again.

For a moment, Tess didn’t answer because she was so busy sobbing. But finally she wiped her eyes and blew her nose on her sleeve. “Because I’m so
horrible
at gardening. Because every year someone
else
wins. Because . . . because . . . well, just
look
at my bouquet! It’s not only slimy, it’s
puny
! I mean, after all, I’m supposed to be
earthy.
People who are earthy should be whizzes at gardening! I couldn’t stand it anymore! I cracked under the pressure!”

“There, there,” murmured Mary, and she put her arm around Tess.

It was quite a hubbub.

In the end, Mary agreed to help Tess by giving her private gardening lessons. In return, Tess would help Mary align her planets. All in all, everyone was quite satisfied.

“Call us, anytime,” said Drake, handing Mary his business card.

“I shall, I shall,” said Mary. “You and Nell have proved ever so brilliant. Cheerio!”

Later that day, Drake wrote in his lab note–book:

Swamp-Slime Rose case solved.
Tess used Super-Soupy
Swampy Slime Juice & Other
Disgusting Dyes, developed
and sold by Frisco.
Received open invitation to all
future garden parties.

Paid in full.