Minerva Clark Goes to the Dogs

by Karen Karbo

  Then, on one site we found something: What to do if your bird has “craw-emptying problems.”

  “Give it a few drops of Maalox and massage craw gently.”

  “What’s Maalox?” I said.

  “Medicine for an upset stomach,” said Quills.

  As I was leaning on Mark Clark’s shoulder, peering at the screen, I felt my eyes ease shut. I felt like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, stumbling around the poppy field. So tired, all of a sudden. I sat down on the futon on the other side of the computer. Unlike my bedroom on the third floor, which would be hot and stuffy, the computer room was on the east side of the house, and had windows that would allow a nice breeze.

  I closed my eyes, listened while Mark Clark and Quills talked about whether we had any of this Maalox in the house, or whether Pepto-Bismol would do. It seemed they’d forgotten how the bird got here, and were now involved completely in how to get it to cough up the diamond. That was good. I felt the weight of all my mystery solving drift off me.

  I heard Mark Clark and Quills leave the room … kitchen cupboards opening and closing … laughter … fridge opening and closing … talking … Jupiter’s cage door opening and closing … Quills saying “You hold him” … Mark Clark saying “There we go, there we go…”

  Then, suddenly, something made me open my eyes, a strange feeling that I wasn’t alone.

  Before me in the blue light of the computer screen stood Frank. He was wearing his security guard uniform. Around his waist he wore a thick leather belt, with one of those big black sticks hanging off one side. I felt my throat close. He also had a gun, big and black, stuck in a holster on his hip.

  I shot up from the futon, wide awake. “Mark!” I yelled.

  “What are you doing here?” I said loudly. I shouted Mark’s name again.

  “I really didn’t think you’d be this much trouble, Suzanne,” sighed Frank. “You seemed like a really nice girl.”

  “How did you find my house?” I croaked.

  “You put it down on the application at the humane society,” he said, glancing around the room. “I just want my bird.”

  “Yeah, well, I want my ferret. Where’s my ferret?”

  Mark Clark appeared at the doorway, then Quills behind him. The room was bathed in computer screen light. We Clarks are not small people. My brothers are both six feet. But so was Frank.

  Mark Clark said, “What the …” and Quills yelled, “What’s going on here?” Suddenly, there seemed to be a lot of us in that small, dark room.

  With his tufts of crayon yellow hair and black T-shirt that says IT’S NOT REVENGE, IT’S PUNISHMENT, and weight-lifter’s biceps, Quills looks like the bigger threat. Frank stepped toward him. He put his hand on his belt.

  What Frank couldn’t know, of course, is that Mark Clark, the dictionary definition of computer geek, spent most of seventh grade suspended from school. In sixth grade he was a chubby boy with braces and glasses who got beat up every day at the bus stop. Then over the summer, Mark Clark grew three inches. The braces came off and he switched his Coke bottle glasses for contact lenses. He didn’t fully come into his self-confidence until first period, on the first day of seventh grade, when one of his old nemeses started in and Mark Clark hauled him over his desk by his collar and popped him in the nose. He then spent most of seventh grade beating up everyone who’d ever made fun of him.

  I’m saying all this because the point is, most people think they know how to take someone down. They’ve seen it in the movies, but they’ve never done it themselves. It’s not about breaking chairs over each other’s heads and turning the other guy into a punching bag. If done right, it never lasts long.

  Mark Clark strode past Quills, grabbed Frank by the collar, pulled his arm back, and smashed him smack in the middle of his forehead with his fist. Frank fell into a heap.

  Quills swore and leaped back into the hallway. Mark Clark shouted, “Get the hell out of my house!” but Frank had managed to roll onto his side and slide his gun from its holster. He pointed it straight at Mark Clark.

  “Come on, man!” said Quills, throwing his hands in the air.

  “You have your little sister to thank for this,” said Frank.

  “Minerva, go call the police,” said Mark Clark.

  But I had an even better idea.

  “Hey! Get back here!” I heard Frank call out after me as I stalked out of the computer room. I was holding my breath. I ran down the hallway and into the dining room, where I unlatched Jupiter’s cage, picked up Oreo gently by his sides. He still fixed me with his Jell-O eye, but I wasn’t afraid of him at all. “Come on, Oreo, be a good boy. Do what you do.

  “I’ve got your stupid bird!” I called out.

  Back down the hallway I went, the bird held out in front of me. I stopped in front of the computer room. “You want your bird? Here’s your bird.”

  Quills stood in the hallway looking alarmed. I could tell he couldn’t figure out what I was doing. Mark Clark turned away from Frank, and in that moment Frank struggled to his feet, blood running down his face. I couldn’t tell whether his nose was broken, or what.

  Before anyone could move a muscle, I pushed open the back door. The screen door wasn’t latched. I bumped it open with my hip, whispered to Oreo, “Fly home, boy,” and tossed him in the air.

  Oreo circled the driveway once, then disappeared into the still summer night. I didn’t know whether he would go back to the pigeon coop at the animal shelter, or on to McCarthy’s coop, hundreds of mile away. I don’t know much about birds. But my scheme worked: Releasing Oreo got rid of Frank, who pushed past my brothers and staggered out of the house and down the driveway. We watched as his white pickup truck roared off.

  Mark Clark called 911, and because he’s not a thirteen-year-old pest itchy to solve a mystery, they sent a squad car right over. The officers were both as wide as they were tall, with buzz cuts and sunburns; that’s what a few days of northwest sun will do to you at the beginning of summer.

  They were concerned mostly with the trespassing portion of the story, and with Frank threatening us with a weapon, and when exactly Mark Clark punched Frank, and whether his weapon had already been pulled, and so on.

  When we backed into the part of the story that featured the black-and-white homing pigeon called Oreo, which I’d taken from the coop behind the Portland Humane Society, after having blown off the door to the electrical closet in the downtown warehouse on which the MADE IN OREGON sign was perched, after having been held hostage with another female in a shed behind the Portland Humane Society, having come in search of said woman’s boyfriend, who only worked at the animal shelter to pick up chicks, according to said woman’s younger brother, who was currently costarring in the new Rodney von Lager movie—they’d heard of that; one of their buddies from the force had been assigned to provide security on the set—they’d closed their notebooks and said that they would need to refer all this to the FBI.

  Something about moving stolen property over state lines.

  After they took off, Mark Clark hugged me close to him and said, “You did not have to do that, you know.”

  “Do what?”

  “Save my neck by sending that nutcase out after the bird.”

  “Well, clearly I did,” I said. “You having a gun pointed at your head and all.”

  Then we didn’t say anything else. Quills made popcorn, with lots of butter and salt, and we all sat together in a row and watched Charlie and the Chocolate Factory for about the tenth time.

  Between cracking jokes about the Oompa Loompas, all of whom were played by the same strange guy, we pieced together what happened: Frank probably checked out the pigeon coop, and when he saw that Oreo was gone, he’d headed straight to the warehouse where he’d held me captive. We figured he knew about the closet because he worked at the building as their security guard. When he’d seen that I’d managed to escape, he came here.

  We wondered if the diamond would ever make it to McCarthy, and how do you
get a bird to regurgitate a diamond anyway? We wondered how many millions the diamond was actually worth. Then the brothers started talking about what they’d do with that much money, and the subject of Harley-Davidson motorcycles came up, and then I fell asleep sitting up, something I almost never do.

  13

  The next morning Mark Clark let me sleep in. The sun was high in the sky when I showed up downstairs, the breakfast dishes still on the table. They’d had Mark Clark’s German pancakes. I could tell from the syrup lakes left on the plates. At my place, a yellow pancake sat untouched, browned just a little at the edges, all the bubbles deflated into buttery folds. Yum. I was starving. The dining room windows were open. Outside, I could hear someone mowing his lawn.

  It seemed like a Saturday, because Mark Clark had taken the day off work. The FBI was supposed to call, to open an investigation about Frank and McCarthy’s jewel thieving operation. I didn’t really have much hope the FBI would get them. One of the things I’d learned when I solved my last mystery is that you can pretty much accuse anyone of anything, but unless there are enough witnesses to make up a marching band, obvious motive, and boatloads of what they call forensic evidence—fingerprints, hair and fiber samples, stuff like that—they’re bound to walk. The courts are too crowded with cases, and the jails are too crowded with prisoners. In our city, the rumor is, if you steal a car, you get a parking ticket. That’s how it is.

  I ate my pancake, saving the soft middle part for last, and read the comics. I was disappointed. I’d solved the mystery, but hadn’t caught the bad guys. If you don’t catch the bad guys, what’s the point? I thought about Sherlock Holmes and Nancy Drew and then about all the real-life private detectives out there: You never hear about the cases that are left open.

  I took my plate into the kitchen. Mark Clark came in and tousled my hair.

  “We’ve got to find Jupiter,” I said.

  “I made a call to the humane society this morning,” said Mark Clark, “wondering if they had an extra ferret lying around. They said they had a nice fat white one that had just come in.”

  “Jupiter’s not fat!” I said, smiling. “Can we go get him now?”

  “Get dressed,” he said.

  I have one skirt for summer, with tiers of crinkled white cotton. I put it on with a yellow T-shirt and my new turquoise Chuck Taylors. I always got in trouble for not wearing socks, but I was pretty sure I’d be able to get away with it today.

  I stepped in front of the mirror on the back of my door, inspected myself. While on the bus on the way back to the humane society to steal Oreo, I’d wondered whether perhaps the explosion had blown my strange self-acceptance clean out of me. If an electric shock could alter my sense of self, it made perfect sense that the blast from a mis-wired capacitor could alter it yet again. I studied myself in the mirror for a few long minutes, waiting for some feeling of self-hatred or criticism to surge up inside, but there was nothing. I was still the same old new me, with my snarly mass of hair and long arms. If I ever became famous, this hair could become my trademark. I would never straighten it or dye it, like every other famous girl on the planet. Have you noticed that? The moment they become famous, the first thing they do is change themselves so they look like everybody else.

  My legs were as pale as mushrooms. I decided that after we retrieved Jupiter I would sit out in the backyard.

  I skipped downstairs, enjoying the way my skirt went all floaty with each step. I was still staring down at my hem when I stepped out of the back door. Between the driveway and the house, there is a narrow bed of dirt where nothing ever grows. Every year my mom would stick some plant in there and water it to death, and fertilize it, but nothing ever took hold.

  As I passed the bed, I noticed something small and shiny. I bent to pick it up.

  It was a small red gem, a diamond you could have mistaken for a piece of broken glass.

  Mr. de Guzman asked us to bring the diamond to the house. As Mark Clark and I drove up, Chelsea opened the front door to greet us. Winkin’, Blinkin’, and Ned squirted out the door, ran around in delirious doggy circles. Winkin’ or Blinkin’—I could never tell them apart—dashed with his tongue hanging out to the center of the lawn and started digging. Ned trotted up and leaned against my shins, waiting for me to reach down and pet him. I ran my hand up and down his thick white fur with its lone ginger patch over his shoulder. I still could not believe that he wasn’t good enough to be a show dog. To me, he was the best dog ever.

  “Oh my God, this is soooooo amazing!” Chelsea jumped around in her striped halter top and torn jeans, clapping her hands and patting me on the back with both hands. It occurred to me that some people are born to be cheerleaders, and Chelsea de Guzman was one. “Let’s see, let’s see, let’s see.”

  I’d wrapped the diamond in some Kleenex and stuck it in an empty case of dental floss, just like Mrs. de Guzman said she used to do. Chelsea gasped when she saw it. “It’s in there? Eeew!”

  “What do you mean? It’s just dental floss.”

  “I don’t know,” she said, then laughed and skipped inside.

  Mr. de Guzman didn’t seem to think there was anything strange about the dental floss case. He took the case from me and led us all into his study. He had thick gray hair that was cut to curl over his ears in a fashionable way, and white movie star teeth. “You caught me just as I was leaving for my golf game. You golf, Mark?”

  “Not if I can help it,” said Mark Clark.

  “That’s how I feel,” said Chelsea. “Daddy makes me go anyway.”

  Mr. de Guzman sat down at his desk and turned on his gooseneck lamp, even though it was broad daylight. I leaned over his shoulder. He smelled like cinnamon and aftershave.

  “I am frankly stunned at what a nuisance this diamond has turned out to be. I was just doing this as a favor to Rodney in exchange for credit at the end of his film. You know, sort of a product endorsement thing.”

  He took out a small round magnifying glass—a jeweler’s loupe—and a pair of tweezers and laid them on the blotter, then dumped out the Kleenex-wrapped gem. He carefully unwrapped it, rolled it around on the blotter with his finger. “The lesson to be learned here …” he said, as he put the loupe to his eye, and plucked up the diamond with his tweezers.

  I thought he was going to say that you should be more careful with such a rare and valuable thing as this.

  “… is that beautiful gems make people do crazy things. We always thought of Frank as one of the family. Who could imagine he’d get up to something like this.” He shook his head. Mr. de Guzman was pretty handsome for a dad.

  “The FBI is going to investigate,” said Mark Clark. “From what Minerva says, Frank and his partner don’t seem like rocket scientists.”

  “I think they’ll be surprised to find it’s much tougher to move these loose gems then people think,” said Mr. de Guzman.

  He put the loupe close to his eye, brought the diamond up to the loupe.

  “Maybe the diamond is cursed,” I said. “Like the Hope diamond.”

  Mr. de Guzman had an easy laugh. He wasn’t as stern as I remembered him to be the day I saw him in his gray suit at parent conferences. “I seriously hope not,” he said.

  He put down the loupe and the tweezers and turned and looked at me. “You’re a pretty unusual girl, aren’t you?” he said.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “I’m probably taller than most girls my age.”

  “This diamond is a fake, Minerva. I’m sorry you went to so much trouble to find it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s cubic zirconium. Probably worth about thirty bucks.”

  “I don’t understand. I found it in the dirt beside our back door. It came straight out of the craw of the pigeon Frank was using to move the diamond.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you. It’s not the diamond I purchased in London.”

  “Daddy, that’s totally impossible,” cried Chelsea. “It has to be the diamond. M
inerva like practically got killed trying to help me. She’s my best friend!” Chelsea slung her arm around my shoulder and hugged me to her. “I like that skirt,” she said.

  “I just don’t know what to tell you,” said Mr. de Guzman. “We do appreciate what you’ve done for us.”

  I sat down on one of the white couches. I stared at the matchy matchy paintings on the wall. I drew Ned up onto my lap.

  “I think I know who’s got the real diamond,” I said.

  “You do?” asked Chelsea, her eyes wide. “Cool.”

  It was cool, because Mr. de Guzman had an expression on his face that said he was all ears, and Mark Clark didn’t attempt to silence me by saying, “I think that’s enough mystery solving for one day, Minerva!” They looked at me, and they waited.

  I thought back to Sylvia’s conversation with Tonio, the one conducted all in Spanish. I realized now that she hadn’t wanted me to understand. I thought back to the small silver packet Tonio had produced there at the shed, with the diamond stuck to the duct tape. The diamond hadn’t looked special, because it wasn’t special. Sylvia had instructed her devoted brother to bring another gem, pried from one of her own pieces of jewelry. By the time Frank would have sent Oreo out to McCarthy and McCarthy would have recovered the diamond from Oreo’s craw, Sylvia and Tonio would be back in Puerto Vallarta. Frank had tried to double-cross Sylvia, but it was Sylvia who’d wound up double-crossing Frank. Even though Tonio and Sylvia hadn’t started out as partners in crime, they’d ended up that way.

  The night before, the patrolmen had given Mark Clark a phone number to call if he thought of anything else. He called the police. Mr. de Guzman smiled and said, “You are an unusual girl.”

  After we left the de Guzmans’ house Mark Clark and I picked up Jupiter at the humane society. He was in a nice cage in the small animal section, with a tag on his cage that said: “I’m lovable, but I like to stick my nose into other people’s business!”