Claudia and the Clue in the Photograph

by Ann M. Martin

  As soon as I pulled the film out of the tank I could see that Mary Anne’s pictures had come out very well. The images were clear and the contrast (the difference between blacks and whites) was good. But before I could make a contact sheet and take a closer look, I had to wait for the negatives to dry.

  I cleaned up my equipment and put everything away, still singing along to the radio. Then I unplugged the radio and brought it back into my room, so I could listen to it while I did my math homework. I sat down at my desk, pulled out my negative file, and took a longing glance at the contact sheet of my portrait series. I still wanted to work on that project, but it would have to wait. When I’m involved in a mystery, it’s hard for me to think about anything else until the mystery is solved.

  A few hours later — long after my mom had stopped in to tell me it was time for bed — I snuck back into the darkroom and checked to see if the film was dry. It was, so I made a contact print as quickly and as quietly as I could. Then I went straight to bed. I was totally exhausted, and I knew there was no point in looking over Mary Anne’s pictures until I’d had a good night’s sleep.

  I woke up early the next morning and sat right down at my desk with the contact print and my loupe. Here’s what I saw: first there were a whole bunch of shots of Buddy, Suzi, Charlotte, and Becca fooling around. There were also a few pictures of the kids taking pictures. With a red grease pencil, I circled some of the best shots, thinking they’d look great in Dawn’s album.

  Then, finally, I found what I had been looking for. The pictures of me taking pictures of the bank. Mary Anne must have thought I looked pretty funny, because she took quite a few pictures: me, squatting to frame a low shot; me, squinting as I focused; me, turning the camera practically upside-down to snap a shot of the carvings next to one of the pillars. But guess what? None of the shots showed anything suspicious at all. Mr. Zibreski was in a couple of them, but he wasn’t doing anything different from what he’d been doing in the other pictures. Same for the lady with the baby carriage.

  I put down my loupe and sighed. No new clues. Not one.

  “Claudia!” called my mother from downstairs. “Time to get going!”

  “Coming!” I called. But I couldn’t resist. I picked up the loupe and took one more look. Then I saw something. Something important. In three of the pictures, where I was standing alone in front of the bank, there were windows behind me. And one of the windows looked different from the others. I squinted and screwed my eye into the loupe for a better look. It was unmistakable! One of the windows was lit up.

  I sat back and thought. Why would one of the rooms in the bank be lit up — on a Sunday, when the bank was closed? Of course, it was possible that somebody had left the light on accidentally. But it seemed much more likely to me that somebody had been inside the bank at the time those pictures were taken. Somebody who was involved in the bank robbery.

  “Claudia!” my mom called again.

  “I’ll be right down,” I yelled. Then I reached for the phone and called Mary Anne.

  “Hello?” she said sleepily.

  “Mary Anne, it’s me, Claud. I think I found a clue in one of your pictures.”

  “Really?” She sounded alert now.

  “Can you meet me at the bank at one o’clock?” I asked. “I’ll head down there right after school. I’ll bring the pictures for you to see. There’s something I want to check out.”

  “I’ll be there,” said Mary Anne.

  After I hung up, I grabbed a few things from my desk: the contact sheet, the loupe, and a roll of quarters I’d been meaning to bring down to the bank. I threw them into my knapsack and headed downstairs for breakfast.

  * * *

  At one o’clock sharp, I met Mary Anne in front of the bank. “Check it out,” I said, showing her the contact sheet.

  “What is it?” she asked. “I don’t see anything funny. Unless you count that picture of Buddy making a face.”

  I pointed to the three pictures I’d found that morning. “See how this window is lit up?” I asked.

  “Whoa!” she said. “What do you think it means?”

  “I don’t know for sure,” I said. I turned to look at the bank. “We’ll have to go inside to figure out which room that window is in. I brought this roll of quarters, so we have an excuse to go in.” I started toward the main door of the bank.

  “Hold on,” whispered Mary Anne, grabbing my arm. “Look!”

  I followed her gaze, and saw the woman with the baby carriage walking toward us. “It’s her!” I hissed. “Let’s make sure to get a look at that so-called baby this time.”

  We walked toward the carriage, smiling. But the woman turned it sharply and pushed it past us. I thought quickly. Could I distract her for a minute — just long enough to check under that yellow blanket inside the carriage?

  Suddenly, I threw my quarter roll to the ground, and it split open, spilling all the coins.

  “Oh, no!” cried Mary Anne.

  “Oh, dear!” cried the woman with the baby carriage. She and Mary Anne bent to pick up the quarters. Quickly, I stepped forward and reached into the baby carriage. I flipped down the blanket and looked inside.

  There was a baby in there.

  A cute, red-haired, smiling baby, dressed in a little white sleeper with blue stars and moons all over it. As I gazed at the baby, the mother straightened up and glared at me. “Adorable baby,” I said sheepishly.

  The woman covered the baby up again and strode off, pushing the carriage quickly.

  “Protective mom,” I said to Mary Anne, shrugging. “At least we know she’s innocent, though.”

  “You’re right,” said Mary Anne. “And that means —”

  “That means Mr. Zibreski must be the thief!” I said, knowing as I said it that my reasoning was full of holes. “He’s our only suspect now,” I continued, trying to convince myself. I glanced at the bank, checking that window again. Just then, I saw somebody staring out of the window, looking straight at me. “Oh. My. Lord.” I said, under my breath.

  It was Mr. Zibreski himself.

  “Mary Anne!” I said. “He’s staring right at us! Wait! Don’t panic! Just act normal!” I felt frozen into place.

  “Let’s get out of here!” said Mary Anne. She tugged at my arm.

  We ran all the way home, checking over our shoulders at every corner. I was sure I saw him behind us a couple of times. For the rest of that afternoon I watched out my windows, sure that Mr. Zibreski had followed us. Detective work had always seemed fun, before. This time, it seemed dangerous. This time, we were mixed up with somebody who was stalking us while we were stalking him.

  “Sergeant Johnson, please.” It was the next day, Friday, and Mary Anne, Stacey, and I were standing in front of the main desk at the police station.

  The night before, Mary Anne had called me and we’d had a long talk. She was really worried about my safety, if there was “even a possibility” that Mr. Zibreski was following me. “I think we should go to the police again,” she said. “Remember, Sergeant Johnson said to let him know if we found out anything more.”

  “But we still don’t have any proof,” I said.

  “I know,” she answered. “But he might be interested in those pictures that show a light on in the bank. And it just seems to me that it couldn’t hurt to have the police kind of looking out for you — for us. Know what I mean?”

  Mary Anne had been pretty convincing, so as soon as I was done with my summer school classes the next day, I met her and Stacey in front of the station. Of course, I’d brought the most recent pictures with me. (I’d made enlargements of the most interesting ones.) We marched right in.

  “I’ll see if he’s here,” said the officer at the desk. It was a woman this time. She punched a button on the intercom, and spoke into the phone in a whisper, looking at us over her glasses as she talked. I had a feeling she was wondering what business three teenage girls would have with Sergeant Johnson. When she finished speaking, she li
stened for a second, and then, looking surprised, she hung up. “He says he’ll be right out,” she told us. “Please have a seat.”

  The three of us crowded onto a bench. While we waited, I dug the pictures out of my backpack. I flipped through them again, and my heart sank a little. Sergeant Johnson probably wouldn’t think much of them as evidence.

  “What can I do for you girls?” Sergeant Johnson was standing in front of us, smiling.

  I gulped. “You said to come back if we had any new evidence,” I said. “Well, I don’t know if these are evidence or not …” I held out the pictures, and Sergeant Johnson took them and leafed through them. “See, there’s this light on in the window,” I said, standing up and pointing to the picture he was looking at. “And the same man is in some of these shots. We found out that his name is Mr. Zi —”

  “Why don’t we go somewhere else to talk,” Sergeant Johnson said abruptly, handing the pictures back to me. “Somewhere a little more private.” He led us past the desk, telling the woman officer, “We’ll be using interview room four.”

  The three of us exchanged glances as we followed Sergeant Johnson down the corridor. We passed a room full of police officers working at typewriters, and a water cooler where some other officers were standing around, talking. Then, Sergeant Johnson unlocked a door and ushered us into a small, quiet room which was empty except for a big table with several chairs around it.

  I checked out the room. It looked just like one of those rooms in the movies, the ones in which the police question suspects. Sergeant Johnson closed the door behind us, and the noise made me jump a little. Suddenly, I felt my heart beating fast. Were we under suspicion, for some reason? Was Sergeant Johnson going to start interrogating us? I looked over at Mary Anne and noticed that she had turned very, very pale. Stacey seemed to be keeping it together, but I could tell she was nervous by the way she was twirling a lock of hair around her finger.

  “Sit down, sit down,” said Sergeant Johnson. “Make yourselves comfortable.”

  That was kind of hard to do, since the room wasn’t exactly the coziest place I’d ever seen. We each pulled out one of the beat-up looking orange plastic chairs and sat down, but I noticed none of us relaxed. I, for one, was sitting on the edge of my seat. We sat along one side of the table, and Sergeant Johnson took a seat on the other side.

  Sergeant Johnson looked across at us, and he must have seen how tense we were. “It’s okay, I’m not going to bite,” he said. “Now, let’s see those pictures again.” I pushed them across the table. Picking each one up in turn, he examined them closely.

  “Very interesting,” he said, nodding. He scribbled some notes in a little notebook and then slapped it shut. “Now, what were you going to say about Mr. Zibreski?” he asked me. He looked at me intently with those clear blue eyes.

  “Just that we’re still wondering about him, since he shows up in so many of the pictures,” I said hesitantly.

  “We were also wondering about the lady with the baby carriage,” Mary Anne added, her voice just a little shaky, “but now we’re pretty sure she’s innocent.”

  Sergeant Johnson smiled. “You’re probably right about that,” he said. “As for your friend Mr. Zibreski, well —” He leaned closer and lowered his voice. “He is under investigation.” He leaned back.

  “He is?” I asked.

  Sergeant Johnson nodded. “This is just between us, understand?”

  We all bobbed our heads and said, “Yes, sir!”

  “We don’t really have anything on him,” said Sergeant Johnson, “but we’re suspicious, just like you. We searched all the employee offices, including his, but we didn’t find a thing. Then he gave us an alibi that didn’t check out with what your other photos proved about his being at the bank on Sunday. So we searched his apartment, too. Nothing there, either.” Sergeant Johnson scratched his head. “Zibreski’s been completely cooperative, but somehow we think there’s something fishy about him. But there’s no sign of any irregularities in his banking accounts. What we really need is a picture of him carrying something out of the bank that afternoon. A suitcase, for example. Something he could have put all that money into. You don’t have anything like that, do you?”

  I thought for a minute and shook my head.

  “Without that,” said Sergeant Johnson, frowning, “and without a definite time frame for the pictures you took, we really can’t prove a thing.”

  Time frame. Time frame. My thoughts were racing. “We’ll keep trying to find something,” I said.

  “Good, good,” he said, standing up. I stood up, too, and so did Mary Anne and Stacey. I realized that our little meeting had ended.

  Sergeant Johnson saw us to the door and sent us off with a pleasant good-bye. It seemed as though we had a real friend at the police station, and that was reassuring. But as soon as we walked out of the building, I started to feel nervous again about Mr. Zibreski. I looked all around, wondering if he had followed us, and if he knew we were talking to the police about him. Mary Anne and Stacey were glancing over their shoulders, too, so I figured they were thinking the same thing.

  “Maybe he really is dangerous,” said Mary Anne, and I knew she was talking about Mr. Zibreski. “I’d feel safer if we were back at your house, Claud.”

  We raced back to my house, convinced, once again, that Mr. Zibreski was at our heels. I was still thinking over what Sergeant Johnson had said about needing a time frame, and by the time we all pounded up the stairs to my room I’d had an idea. I threw Mary Anne’s pictures down on my desk and then pulled out all of the other bank pictures and added them to the pile. “Let’s look at these again, and see what we can find in each of them that might help us tell time.”

  “Huh?” asked Stacey.

  “I know what she means,” said Mary Anne. “Like, if there’s a clock in the background or something,” she explained to Stacey, showing her a picture that featured a clock.

  “Or if the shadows are falling a certain way,” said Stacey, catching on. She picked up another print and showed it to us. “See? This one must have been taken later than the one Mary Anne is holding.”

  “Exactly!” I said. “So, let’s put them all in order.” We settled down to work, spreading out the pictures on the floor and sorting them into piles. Some of them showed the clock. Some showed the lighted window. Some showed Mr. Zibreski walking toward the bank, and others showed him heading away from it. And lots of them showed the woman with the baby carriage, who walked up and down in front of the bank, sat down on a bench for a few shots, and then seemed to leave the area.

  Eventually, we had them arranged in an order that made sense to us. Then I took the pile, straightened the pictures, and flipped through them.

  “It’s like a movie!” squealed Mary Anne.

  “Do it again,” said Stacey, eagerly.

  I flipped through the pictures again, a little slower this time. Since they weren’t all taken from the same spot it wasn’t exactly like a flip book, but you could definitely get an idea of the action. We watched as Mr. Zibreski appeared from the right, crossed paths with the woman with the baby carriage, and disappeared. The light in the bank’s window went on while the woman with the baby carriage paraded in front of the bank, sat down on the bench, and then vanished. Then the light in the window went off, and Mr. Zibreski reappeared and headed to the left. The clock that showed in some of the pictures kept track of the time throughout the whole thing. “Whoa!” said Stacey.

  “Whoa is right,” I said. “This is awesome!”

  “It looks like Mr. Zibreski goes into the bank, turns on that light, stays a while, and then leaves,” said Mary Anne, breathlessly. “This is proof!” She paused. “Isn’t it?”

  “Well, no,” I admitted. “It’s not proof that he robbed the bank. But it does seem to prove that he went inside that day, between one o’clock and one-thirty.”

  “That doesn’t necessarily mean anything,” said Stacey. “He could just be a workaholic, like my da
d.”

  We flipped through the pictures about a hundred more times. Then we did it some more, for the other members of the BSC. (They arrived for our meeting to find the three of us still sitting on the floor.) Everybody was pretty impressed by what we’d done, but we agreed that there was no point in going back to Sergeant Johnson, since the pictures still didn’t show Mr. Zibreski carrying anything. If he’d really stolen that money, he would have had to carry it out of the bank, after all. The bank had been thoroughly searched, and the money wasn’t inside.

  “You’d better hide those,” said Jessi at one point, gesturing at the pictures. “I mean, what if Mr. Zibreski really is following you? He’d love to get his hands on them.”

  Later that night, as I prepared to go to bed, I kept replaying Jessi’s comment in my mind. At first I tried to convince myself that there was no way Mr. Zibreski could really be after me, but the more I thought about it, the more scared I became.

  Here’s what I did before I went to bed: First, I hid the pictures beneath my most-unfavorite clothes (my gym uniform, for one!) in my bottom drawer. Then, I rigged up my own, patent-pending super-alert z-alarm. I ran strings from my bed to the door of my room, and I tied old film canisters all along them so they’d jangle if they were touched. Then I set an old suitcase full of books against the door, figuring that it would make a loud thump if it was knocked over. I put a jar full of marbles next to the suitcase, so if the suitcase fell over it would knock the marbles all over the floor and make walking impossible.

  Guess what? The alarm worked perfectly! But it wasn’t Mr. Zibreski who set it off.

  It was me.

  I got up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night and walked straight into every one of my own traps. First I stubbed my toe — hard! — on the suitcase, and a second later I was slipping and sliding all over the room on those marbles, while the film cans jangled away. I must have looked pretty funny. Someday maybe I’ll laugh about it. Someday, when the bruises have disappeared!