Amanda Lester and the Orange Crystal Crisis

by Paula Berinstein

  When Amanda read Holmes’s plan she was dismayed to find that it was pretty good. She’d meant to rewrite it, but considering that there was the mystery of the missing item to solve, homework from her other classes to do, and Editta to worry about, she decided to let it stand. She could change it later. She dreaded telling him, though, because he’d just grin at her again with that I-told-you-so expression, and OMG, he might even wink again. Maybe if she texted him she wouldn’t have to see that incessant smile and that condescending wink quite so soon.

  She pulled her phone out and wrote, “Plan OK.”

  The answer came instantly: “. You’re okay, Lestrade.”

  No one but Nick ever called her that, and she hadn’t liked that. She would set him straight right now. She texted back, “It’s Lester.”

  Another instant response: “Yes, and it’s Scapulus.”

  She felt herself go red. There was no way she was going to admit that his reply had served her right.

  8

  Blackpool

  The next morning, Thursday, the girls met Simon outside the Fires and Explosions classroom. He ushered them down the hall and into a huddle, then carefully passed each of them a tiny device. He even gave one to Ivy so she could experiment. It was possible that he’d need to fine-tune the hearing aids, and her input could save him a lot of time.

  The devices looked like tiny megaphones. The idea was that they would boost the sound coming in on certain frequencies but not others. So, for example, if someone was playing a tuba in the hall, Simon, Amanda, and Amphora would hear it normally, but if a person was talking, the kids would hear them more loudly than usual. Whether loud would translate into clear remained to be seen. Simon had made only one device per person, so they would have to make do with one boosted ear and one normal one.

  “Don’t put them in now,” said Simon. “We don’t want anyone seeing.”

  “Too late,” said Amphora, who had already installed hers. “Hm, you’re pretty loud, Simon.” She jiggled the device.

  “That’s one drawback of these,” he said, turning his around in his fingers. “There’s no adjustment for distance, so voices close to you might be a bit overpowering.” He leaned over to Amphora and said, right in her ear, “Like this.”

  “Ouch!” she said. “Cut that out.”

  Simon grinned. He loved getting her goat.

  “Maybe wear them with an earplug in that ear or something?” said Amanda.

  “Hm,” said Simon. “Interesting idea. Say, how about cotton? There are plenty of cotton balls in the lab.”

  “Yes, let’s try that,” said Ivy.

  “Are you going to give one to Editta?” asked Amanda.

  “Sure, why not?” said Simon. “She’s crazy, but she can still be useful.”

  “She’s not crazy,” said Amphora.

  “Yeah, she is,” said Simon. “She believes in bad mogambo.” He put his fingers on either side of his head and made pretend horns, then wiggled them.

  Just then Professor Pole appeared and said, “Good morning, everyone. Ready for some fireworks?” The kids stashed their listening devices and followed him into the room, where there was a nice empty seat waiting for Editta, who was nowhere to be seen.

  After class there wasn’t much time until Crime Lab, but the kids were dying to try out the devices, so they stuck them in their ears as surreptitiously as possible and ventured out into the hall. Amanda could hear some students talking low about twenty feet away, and their conversation was as clear as could be.

  “I can’t wait to blow up the Sphinx,” Gareth Gubb was saying.

  “I’m going to explode all those tall buildings in Dubai,” said Trevor Gravespoon.

  “And Hong Kong,” said Arthur Modulo.

  Wow, this thing works really well. Simon is a genius. Amanda turned the other way and listened. There were two girls way at the end of the hall, whispering. This time she had to strain her ears a little. She could hear some words but not others.

  “Professor . . . in the lab . . . broke it,” said a third-year named Polly Pogo.

  “Worried . . . never mind . . . he’s so cute,” said the other third-year girl, Apple Moon.

  Amanda wondered who was so cute. Surely they weren’t talking about Professor Stegelmeyer, who was so not cute it wasn’t funny. Nah, they were probably talking about one of the older boys, like Carlos Fapp or Harry Sheriff. All the girls had crushes on them. Except her, of course. She didn’t have time for such folderol.

  She ran down the hall and caught up with Ivy and Amphora. “Did you try it?”

  “Yes,” said Amphora. “It works pretty well. I heard Prudence talking about her stubbed toe from really far away.”

  “Mine is a bit strong,” said Ivy, fiddling with the device in her ear. “But I’m going to try the cotton.”

  “Mine was great,” said Amanda. “At least if you’re within maybe twenty or thirty feet. After that it gets a bit spotty.”

  “What’s spotty?” said Simon, joining the group. “Is this something about Professor Tumble’s scars and bruises?” Amanda was sure he knew perfectly well it wasn’t but couldn’t resist the opportunity to be gross.

  “No,” said Amphora. “We were talking about the listening devices.”

  “Oh, right,” said Simon. “How are they working?” He looked at each of the girls—even Amphora.

  “Really well,” said Amanda, declining to tell Simon about Apple’s crush on Carlos, or was it Harry?

  “Mine’s a bit loud,” said Ivy.

  “Right,” said Simon. “Well, let’s see what happens when you damp it.”

  “Why would she put water on it?” said Amphora with a disgusted look on her face.

  “Not dampen,” said Simon. “Damp. It means to weaken an effect. So if I damp a noise, it isn’t as loud.”

  “That’s dumb,” said Amphora. “It sounds like you’re wetting it.”

  “Hey, I didn’t invent the language,” said Simon, holding up his palms.

  “Well, you don’t have to use it,” said Amphora.

  Simon gave her a look. “What is wrong with you?”

  “Would you two cut it out?” said Ivy. “We have important work to do.”

  “Anyway,” said Amanda, “I think these are going to work out pretty well. Thanks, Simon.”

  “Yes, thank you, Simon,” said Ivy.

  Amphora hesitated, then after about ten seconds said, “Yeah. Me too.”

  The cotton did prove helpful, and the kids listened as much as they could over the next day or so but didn’t hear anything earth shattering. They did, however, learn a lot about which kinds of shoes made you look the tallest, which skateboards were hot, and a little too much about Olive Tweedy’s skin problems, as well as how Professors Also and Pargeter were feeling about the gremlins (a little uneasy, to be honest; their designs were becoming more and more outlandish, and the two women were concerned that it would be too easy to observe the details). Mostly, though, they heard about the upcoming field trip, which was to take place on Saturday.

  This would be the first field trip Amanda’s class had taken and excitement was running high. Blackpool was legendary and the kids figured they’d get to run wild. There were now about forty of them in the class, so they would fit nicely on one bus, even counting Professors Sidebotham, Buck, and Ducey, who would be “escorting” them. Amanda thought that was a chicken way of saying “chaperoning,” which was what they were really doing.

  On the appointed day they all went to the south door, where a dirty, smelly old school bus awaited them. The kids didn’t care if it was old and battered except to wonder if its appearance and condition would be on any tests. They were now so accustomed to having to examine everything they saw in so much detail that they were becoming a bit OCD. Perhaps the tendency would pass, though, Amanda thought, in much the same way that medical students lose their hypochondria once they’re actually practicing. She certainly hoped so. Some of the kids were becoming h
yperactive.

  There was much stomping and confusion as they boarded the bus. It seemed that there were no assigned seats, so there was a lot of jockeying for position. Some kids lucked out and others didn’t. Amanda, for example, got to sit with Ivy and Nigel, but Simon was stuck with Gordon Bramble, who was most unhappy to have been separated from David Wiffle, who in turn had to sit next to Editta, who, uncharacteristically, failed to count even one thing, freaking out her friends. Holmes ended up next to Amphora, who seemed over the moon about her good fortune and kept giving him goo-goo eyes.

  Amanda, Simon, and Amphora weren’t wearing their listening devices for two reasons: one, they didn’t think there was much possibility of getting valuable intelligence since there were only three teachers with them, and two, the fact that they were at such close quarters would probably make for crossed signals anyway. But Ivy’s hearing was as acute as always, and she overheard plenty. Despite the presence of Professors Sidebotham, Buck, and Ducey, there was a lot of gossip about teachers, none of it very interesting except for a rumor that Professor McTavish’s parakeet, Angela, had learned to say “Voldemort.” Ivy also heard Gordon trying to impress Editta with the amount of weight he could lift (“I could lift two of you without breaking a sweat”) and Binnie Belasco telling Clive Ng that she was absolutely fascinated by rocks and would love to go prospecting with him sometime. Ivy kept up a running commentary imparting all of this to Amanda, who was pretty skeptical about ninety percent of what she was hearing.

  About a half hour into the journey Professor Sidebotham jerked the kids out of whatever reveries they were enjoying by saying, “Class, we’re going to do an exercise now.” The students, of course, responded with much moaning and groaning, so she said, “The next person who complains will attend detention for a week,” which shut them up abruptly. Then she said, “I want you to examine as many substances on this bus as you can and text me what you find. Go!”

  The bus devolved into complete chaos. Kids were looking at seats, the floor, ceilings, and in a couple of cases, each other. They were finding all kinds of stuff, like bits of soil and plant matter, fibers, oil and grease, bits of fingernails, hair (especially Nigel’s), pollen, and grape juice. Gordon swore that he had found some lizard skin, but Wiffle told him it was just dead leaves. Simon wondered if Professor Stegelmeyer would want them to analyze everything and captured as much as he could in evidence bags just in case. Holmes was texting madly, which led Amanda to imagine that he’d found more than anyone else, but she decided that was just her antipathy talking. Ivy was at a bit of a disadvantage with all the visual stuff, but her senses of smell and touch were running at full blast, and she too was texting a lot. At one point, Amphora decided that Simon was looking at her too closely and told him to stop. He said he wasn’t, and she said, “Well, you’re supposed to be,” which confused him so much that he got dizzy and had to sit down.

  Then the two of them got into a heated debate about how to look at a scene. Simon said you were supposed to make multiple passes with your eyes, concentrating on different things each time, while Amphora said no, you’re supposed to notice everything at once. Simon said it’s impossible to do that and you’ll miss things, while Amphora said that his way was like making a bunch of little trips to the store and why not get all the shopping done in one fell swoop. Simon then asked what a fell swoop was anyway, and Amphora responded by declaring that a fell swoop referred to leaping over mountains and fells, but Simon said it probably had to do with felling a tree and watching it topple all at once.

  Upon hearing this, the Wiffle kid inserted himself into the conversation and said that they were both wrong—that “fell” in this case meant evil. Amphora looked up the meaning and discovered that David was actually correct for a change, at which point he smirked and started sending texts. What they said was anyone’s guess. However, despite their having determined the meaning of one fell swoop, the argument wasn’t over. To settle it, the two adversaries decided to conduct experiments to see whose observing technique was more effective, and they seemed to be proceeding apace when all of a sudden the bus lurched and both Nigel and David Wiffle threw up. This led to an unexpected stop after Prudence complained about the smell and said that if they didn’t throw away the dirty paper towels they’d used for cleanup that she, too, would hurl.

  At last, however, they arrived at Blackpool with everyone’s stomach having settled down and Ivy having collected a large amount of money from Simon and Amphora as a penalty for their feuding. As the kids got an eyeful of all the goodies they were about to explore, the bus erupted in a large amount of shrieking and carrying on, which Professor Sidebotham interrupted with an announcement that no recording was to be allowed and they were to work solely from memory. There would be two days of testing after the field trip, so they had better pay close attention. Professors Buck and Ducey each got in a word of welcome cum warning, and the kids were off.

  After about ten minutes, during which Holmes kept running up and saying, “Did you see this?” “Did you see that?” Amanda realized that Ivy was observing sounds no one else was noticing. Not only did this revelation help her attune her own powers of audio observation, it also heightened her visual skills because Ivy was always asking insightful questions. For example, she would say, “I’m hearing a loud whine. What is it?” whereupon Amanda would look for the source of the noise. Once Ivy said, “I’m hearing Japanese,” and Amanda looked and looked until she saw a Japanese child who had lost her parents and helped her find them. Seeing this, Professor Sidebotham practically did a back flip. She was so impressed with what Ivy was doing that she asked her to create yet another special presentation on audio observing when they got back.

  Then Professor Ducey managed to step in some gum, and as he stood on one leg to try to get it off his shoe, he lost his balance and went crashing into Professor Buck, who collided with a bench and ended up face down on the ground. Amanda thought from that position he was getting just about the best look at environmental substances possible and tried hard not to laugh, and Ivy kept nudging her to describe every little detail. The plight of the two male professors was funny enough, but when Professor Sidebotham, she of at least seventy years, attempted to help them up, Amanda couldn’t control herself any longer and had to run in the opposite direction and hide her face to keep from being reprimanded. Fortunately, however, none of the professors was badly hurt and the field trip carried on.

  After that, everything went swimmingly. Wiffle and Bramble were making up songs to help them remember what they were seeing, which Amanda had to admit wasn’t a half-bad idea. Editta had finally started to count things. Simon was mentally deconstructing and reconstructing everything he saw, which was also a good way to remember stuff, and Amphora was sketching. Amanda was used to noticing little details on film sets, so her observing was going well, except that with Holmes interrupting her every three seconds she was starting to lose her place. He too had his methods, which Amanda wasn’t quite sure about, but seemed to involve mentally writing Wikipedia entries for the items he saw and cross-referencing them with mental pictures he was snapping and adding to WikiMedia. What really got her, though, was how popular he had become after just a few days. When he wasn’t bugging her, the other kids seemed to seek him out and hang on his every word, which Amanda found so distracting that she started to fear she’d blow the tests. All the kids except Wiffle and Gordon, that is, who kept trying and failing to bait him.

  Then suddenly Ivy yelled out, “Something is wrong!” She pulled on Nigel’s lead and covered him with her body. Amanda was so startled that she froze. Nobody else was paying attention until out of nowhere came two gunshots and Amanda could see a man fall to the ground while another man ran away. The noise startled the other kids and they all yelled and screamed, some of them running toward the scene and others away from it. A couple of security guards began to chase the fleeing man, and within an extremely short time an ambulance pulled up and a couple of paramedics got o
ut and hunched over the victim.

  “OMG, it’s a murder!” yelled Amphora. Simon was rummaging for his camera, Holmes was edging as close to the scene as possible, Editta was staring into space, Wiffle and Gordon fled, and Ivy was attending to Nigel. Realizing what had happened, Amanda found herself next to Holmes, pushing forward to see what she could. As the crowd surged, she felt herself collide with him and was held there for what seemed like forever as everyone strained to get a look. She was so surrounded by tall people that she couldn’t see anything. Finally, realizing that she was too short to see what was going on, Holmes pulled her in front of him and they were both able to see the fallen man lying in a pool of blood with a paramedic compressing his chest. After a minute or so the technician looked at his partner, shook his head, and recorded the time of death. Then he pulled a sheet over the man and stood up.

  Amanda was devastated. This was way worse than finding Legatum’s cook dead in the pantry with her head in a bag of sugar as she had last term. She’d seen this man killed right in front of her eyes. Her heart was pounding and she fought to catch her breath. Holmes turned her around and searched her eyes to see if she was all right. For some reason that caused her to burst into tears and she covered her face in her hands. Then, without warning, she felt herself engulfed in his arms and realized that he was not only patting her back, but hugging her. This liberty so affronted her that she forgot all about crying and screamed, “Stop it!” then disentangled herself and ran back to where Ivy was pulling Nigel’s lead so tight that it looked like he was about to lift up off the ground.

  “Stupid Holmes,” she muttered. “That guy—”

  “What?” said Ivy. “Are you all right? What happened? Was that a murder?”

  “Yes, and yes,” said Amanda. “I’m okay except for what that Holmes did to me, and yes, that guy is dead. They tried to revive him but they couldn’t.”

  “Oh no!” said Ivy, pulling Nigel even tighter, then wrapping him in her arms.

  “Say there,” she heard from behind her. It was a policeman. “You girls. We’d like to talk to you.”