by Karen Karbo
“It was not Wade Leeds,” I said. I told him about the whole weird event, finding him looking in the attic for the file box, and him sobbing, and seeing all the stuff in his car.
“That Explorer belonged to Grams,” said Angus.
“Who wasn’t his grandma, but his mother, FYI,” I said.
“Really? Weird.”
“And no will. I asked him.”
“Maybe he was lying,” said Angus. “He wasn’t lying,” I said.
We sat there for a few minutes. I felt myself dozing off again. Suddenly, I heard the squeaky springs on the couch again and got a whiff of Angus’s Old Spice. He’d moved over closer to me on the couch. He put his hand gently on the back of my head, where it rested against the cushion. I stared into his chocolate M&M’s eyes, and then he moved in for a kiss.
I had now been officially kissed by two boys, and I was only going into eighth grade, and I did not have straight swingy hair or a closet full of Juicy Couture. Not bad, huh? We opened our eyes, and I said, “I have a boyfriend, you know.”
“I know,” he said.
“You do? Did I ever tell you?”
“How could you not have a bf? You’re so incredibly awesome.”
“Well, thanks,” I said. “You’re incredibly awesome, too.” It only seemed polite to say that back, even though I didn’t quite mean it the way Angus did. I meant it more like the old-fashioned meaning of “awesome,” as in “I’m in awe at how weird you are.”
“Look,” he said, playing with my hair, “it’s okay if you think we’ve reached a dead end here.”
“It is?” Only moments ago, he’d basically said I was a quitter.
“Of course. I totally trust your expertise. But would you do me one favor?”
“What?”
“Stop by the grocery on your way home and just have one last look around. I at least want to think I tried to help Nat and Nat.”
“How do I get in?”
He laughed. That chipped front tooth. “That padlock doesn’t need a key. It only looks locked. Just pull down on it.”
I left Angus’s air-conditioned raspberry-colored hippie house, passing his mom, still on her knees in the garden. She didn’t see me go. I walked back down Southwest Corbett Avenue, just the way I’d come. I headed for the grocery. Of course I did. Angus Paine had kissed me. I wasn’t into Angus Paine, but I still liked knowing he was into me. He thought I was incredibly awesome. I picked a daisy from someone’s raggedy parking-strip garden and stuck it behind my ear. La la la. It fell out immediately, then I stepped on it.
I moseyed along. My feet were sweating so much inside my Chucks, I feared you could smell them from the outside. Maybe Mrs. Dagnitz was right about venturing into the world of shoes, or at least the world of sandals. I should have asked Angus for a cool drink of water before I left. I thought about Jupiter, snoozing in the cool basement at home. I hoped he had enough water. It’s very easy for ferrets to die of dehydration. I texted Kevin and told him that Angus Paine was a freak who wore Old Spice. He told me about taking Harvey and Otis to get tacos for lunch and finding a Band-Aid in his enchilada. All of a sudden, I was so glad to have Kevin as my boyfriend.
I called Mark Clark on his cell and weirdly, I was not on the verge of getting GOT until Christmas. He’d gone to lunch and to run some errands with Mr. and Mrs. Dagnitz and they’d just walked in the door. He thanked me for cleaning up the TP without him having to ask.
“Are you all right?” I asked. “You sound wiped.”
“I am wiped.” One of the errands had involved going to four different stores to find him a suitable suit for the Wedding Reception of the Century, as Quills called it, now only three days away.
“Suitable suit, ha ha ha,” I said.
“Shut up, Minerva,” said Mark Clark.
At the grocery, I gave the padlock a tug, just as Angus had instructed, and the shackle slid open easy as you please. I closed the charred door behind me. I didn’t know what I was supposed to be looking for here. I found a piece of wood in a corner and poked through some of the debris. Aside from some half-burned potato-chip bags, I couldn’t identify much of anything. I walked around the empty deli case and stepped over some scorched floorboards. How nice it would be to find an arson note: “I burned down this grocery because they stopped selling my favorite kind of red licorice. Signed, Lunatic Down the Block.”
I sighed, planted myself in the middle of the store for a long minute, and looked around just because I couldn’t think of anything else to do.
Suddenly, there was an odd sound—a cross between a squeak and a click. Squweeker. Squweeker-squweeker-squweeker. It sounded like a cartoon mouse jumping on a trampoline, or no, that wasn’t quite it …
The first noise was joined by a second one. Now it was a duet. Sqweeker-squweeker-squweeker. The sound was coming from inside. More squeaky clicks joined by what sounded like a wind-up monkey banging his tiny cymbals together. What was going on?
I spun around. Out of the corner of my eye I glimpsed something moving atop the shelf that held the antique toaster collection.
The levers on the ends of the toasters were going up and down, up and down, all by themselves.
The chrome-plated doors of the older toasters fell open, then slammed shut, making that strange cymbal noise. What the heck? A thought appeared that I couldn’t shake—where were Mrs. Potts and Lumiere, the teapot and the candelabra from Beauty and the Beast?
I didn’t think to get scared until the handle of the walk-in freezer clicked down and the freezer door slowly opened.
How could I have forgotten the ghost?
8
When I walked in the back door, Mrs. Dagnitz was standing in the middle of the kitchen with her hands on her hips, saying, “Why does it still smell like fish in here?” She had that crease between her forehead. Everyone was in their normal places. Mark Clark was in front of the computer. Quills was in the basement practicing his bass. Morgan was in his room reading.
She was talking to Quills, Mrs. Dagnitz was. He’d come upstairs for a Mountain Dew. He was tapping out a rhythm on the top of the can with two fingers, still listening to some inner tune. For a split second, I felt a little bad for Mrs. Dagnitz. Really, no one listened to her. When you’re a mom who follows your yoga instructor to another state, no one listens to you.
She was right. The entire bottom floor of Casa Clark reeked. I’d noticed it the second I’d opened the door. The smell was gross enough to interrupt my nonstop freak-out at having survived a paranormal experience. That’s what it was called, right? When you caught a ghost acting up? I’d already called Reggie from the bus. Wasn’t there, or wasn’t picking up. Then I’d tried to call Kevin. Wasn’t there, or wasn’t picking up. Then I’d tried to call Angus. Went straight to voice mail.
All the way home on the bus my thoughts had ricocheted around my head. I had seen all those toaster levers sliding up and down with my own eyes. I had seen the freezer door swinging open with my own eyes. I had been alone in the grocery.
I chewed my cuticles, as nasty a habit as nail-biting, but I didn’t care.
It had to have been Louise, the ghost in the walk-in, the Kikimora. Except it couldn’t be Louise, the Kikimora. No person with half a brain believed in ghosts. It was like believing in unicorns, the Loch Ness monster, Big Foot, special personal angels who watched over you. I calmed down thinking of all the lame woo-woo things that did not exist, ghosts included.
Then how did you explain the toasters pretending to be toasting and ejecting their invisible pieces of toast? How did you explain the door of the walk-in freezer opening all on its own? The door had been shut firmly—I’d heard the smart click of the handle as clearly as Mrs. Dagnitz’s voice complaining about the fish smell.
“That halibut was fresh,” she said. “It shouldn’t smell like this. Minerva, don’t you smell it?”
“It’s disgusting,” I said, pinching my nose shut with my fingers.
Quills shrugged and too
k his opportunity to slink back down into the basement.
I was happy to help Mrs. Dagnitz throw open the windows and reclean the counters with Windex, grateful not to be in trouble for having missed family yoga that morning.
“Don’t go easy on the stuff,” she said over my shoulder. “We have got to get that smell out of here before I do something I regret.”
“Like order a bag of McDonald’s fries? They cover every smell in the world. They’ve done wonders for the inside of Quills’s car.”
Mrs. Dagnitz laughed. “Really? I just might have to try that.”
I knew she never would. Mickey D’s excellent fries had nothing in common with broccoli or pomegranate juice or any other antioxidant food. Still, she didn’t get all horrified over my admitting I had firsthand knowledge of McDonald’s, and after I was finished scrubbing the counters, she let me go.
Before heading up to my room I trotted down to the basement and plucked Jupiter from where he snoozed in his hammock on the third floor of Ferret Tower. I cradled him in the crook of my arm like a baby doll. He blinked and trembled a little, his usual behavior before he’s fully awake and eager to hide your shoes. The moment I let Jupiter loose in my room, he did his mad ferret inchworm dance straight under a pile of dirty clothes.
Out of habit, I took my rebus notebook from my desk drawer—a composition notebook with a purple-and-white marble cover. I sat down in front of my computer and IMed Reggie, who you can find online pretty much around the clock, especially since he’d been dumped by his first real girlfriend, Amanda the Panda, a ballet dancer one grade ahead of us.
Ferretluver: Hey Reg. Here’s a rebus for you: Noon lazy.
BorntobeBored: D’oh. Lazy afternoon. You’re losing your touch, Minerva C.
Ferretluver: Yeah well, I’m a little distracted these days.
BorntobeBored: Breaking up with the tool?
Ferretluver: You mean Kevin? Just cuz you got kicked to the curb by the Panda that’s no reason to be Regzilla.
BorntobeBored: Been tortured by more wedding shopping?
Ferretluver: It’s just a reception. They already got married.
BorntobeBored: Whatevah.
Ferretluver: So I gotta ghost question.
BorntobeBored: Mwahhahahaha.
Ferretluver: Do you think a ghost could set a fire?
BorntobeBored: Duh.
Ferretluver: Duh? Like this happens all the time?
BorntobeBored: Just saw a cool TV show on a haunted jail, where a guy who died in one of the cells used to set the beds on fire. Every prisoner they ever stuck in there burned to a crisp while he slept. Which turned THEM into ghosts. So now the jail cell is doubly haunted.
Ferretluver: Riiiiiiight. Thank you. Drive through, please.
BorntobeBored: I’m not being The Exaggerator!
The Exaggerator was Reg’s superhero identity—he said if he ever was called upon to rid the world of evil, he wouldn’t lift a sword, but would force the evildoers to surrender by exaggerating everything he said until they begged for mercy.
We joked about that for a while. Then he said that in his humble opinion an unexplained fire was actually a ghost temper tantrum. He said that really old places like Ireland have a lot of cranky temper-tantrum-throwing ghosts, and that every pub and church had a story about a fire being set in it. Then he logged off to watch a documentary about King Tut.
Kevin popped on for a while and IMed me about his cousin visiting from Vacaville, California, and about his new World of Warcraft character. We had been boyfriend and girlfriend for two weeks. Some of my friends had one boyfriend in the morning, but another one by the afternoon. By comparison, Kevin and I were like an old married couple. His new character was a gnome rogue, MiniVanDamme, specializing in assassination and leather-working. I wondered if IMing him about MiniVanDamme was the same as watching him play WoW, something I vowed I would never, ever do.
While I was IMing with Kevin, Angus called my cell and I let it go to voice mail.
His message said, “You must be tired—you’ve been running through my head all day long.” This was a well-known lame-o flirt line, but I couldn’t tell by Angus’s tone of voice whether he was using it for real or not.
For some reason I couldn’t name, I decided I didn’t want to talk to Angus just yet. Even though I’d tried to call him the second after I’d torn out of the grocery—the toaster levers hopping up and down behind me, the door to the walk-in freezer swung open wide—now that I’d calmed down, something told me to wait, to collect my thoughts, to figure out a few things.
I couldn’t get the idea of a ghost temper tantrum out of my head. I didn’t know much about ghosts, but it stood to reason that if they were so difficult that they refused to move on to the higher plane, they would be prone toward pitching hysterical fits. I Googled “Kikimora,” half hoping my search would return the name of a band or an anime character, but there it was: “Kikimora is a female house spirit in Slavic mythology.”
Angus was telling the truth.
The average Kikimora is a small humpbacked woman in a tattered dress. She usually lives behind the stove or in the basement (or in a walk-in freezer!!), and minds her own business as long as her home is not disturbed. If someone fails to keep her home tidy or if it is disturbed in any way, she grows enraged. Reading this, I could feel the blood thrumming inside my head. I tried to remember my conversation with Paisley. Had she said they were rearranging anything in the grocery to make way for her pastry counter? The grocery wasn’t large, so Nat and Nat must have moved some stuff around.
Then I read this: “Once angered, the Kikimora will come out of her hiding place and spin. If a person witnesses a Kikimora spinning, they will soon die.”
I leaped up from my desk, knocking my chair over, sprinted to the end of the third-floor hall, and took the fire pole straight down into the kitchen, startling Mark Clark, who was starting the dishwasher.
“You haven’t done that in a while,” said Mark Clark.
“What?” I cried. I wondered if watching old toasters toast ghostly slices of bread was somehow the same as spinning.
“Taken the pole. You said you were too old for it.”
“I took it just a couple days ago,” I said. Who cares when I last took the pole! I was possibly on the verge of death. It didn’t say how the person witnessing the spinning Kikimora died. Did their blood turn to sand? Did they spontaneously combust? Were they hit by a truck?
Mark Clark pressed the Start button and the dishwasher started making its swooshy-swishy cleaning sound. “When you were a baby, you had this portable crib, and if you had trouble sleeping, we’d roll you in here and start up the dishwasher, even if there weren’t any dishes in it. You’d fall asleep in a second.”
“How cute of me!” I said. I was panting. I collected my hair, tied it in a big knot on top of my head, and then pulled it out again.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“It still smells like fish in here,” I said. “Why does it still smell like fish?” I sounded like Mrs. Dagnitz, obsessing about the fish odor. Maybe this was my mother’s problem—she’d seen a Kikimora spinning there among the ancient Indian pueblos of Santa Fe and was on edge from awaiting her death. Morgan was right. I should be nicer.
I tried to catch my breath, told myself that it would be all right, that I had not seen Louise spinning, nor had I seen Louise at all. And if worse came to worst, and I had seen her spinning, ideally I would die before Saturday, which would mean I wouldn’t have to go to Mrs. Dagnitz’s wedding reception.
Mark Clark and I got ourselves Otter Pops, then watched a movie on his monitor. The computer room was the coolest place in the house because it had what is called a cross breeze. The movie was PG-13. There was some smooching and some jokes that I didn’t get that made Mark Clark grimace and go, “Aw no,” then reach over and cover my ears with his palms. I’d forgotten all about Jupiter, rummaging around upstairs in my room. I did not want to go back up there b
y myself, but if I asked Mark Clark to come with, he’d wonder why, and I wasn’t into having a don’t-be-silly-there’s-no-such-thing-as-ghosts lecture.
Lucky for me, when I raced back upstairs, Jupiter was curled up inside a bucket hat I’d left on the floor, sound asleep.
In the morning, after I’d eaten a bowl of muesli (yuck!) and a container of strawberry yogurt, I called Mrs. Dagnitz and asked her if she needed me to do anything for Mark Clark’s birthday, which we were celebrating that night. Did she want me to clean the dining room? Bake Mark Clark’s favorite yellow cake with mocha frosting?
“Does the kitchen still smell like fish?” she asked.
The kitchen did still smell like fish. The entire bottom floor still smelled like fish. When Quills had come home the previous night from listening to some music somewhere, he’d said, “Gawd, did Shamu die in here or something?”
“Kinda,” I said.
“I don’t think I can possibly cook in that kitchen with this heat and that fish smell,” said Mrs. Dagnitz. “That halibut was—”
“Fresh. I know,” I said. “We practically caught it ourselves. I’ll Windex the counters again. Should I scrub the floor, too?”
To my ears I sounded like a total poseur, but my tactic worked. Mrs. Dagnitz said I didn’t need to do that. It was so thoughtful of me to offer to help, but she had it all under control and I should go out and enjoy my summer and realize that these were the best years of my life. She asked if I was going to see that lovely friend Chelsea, and I lied and said of course, that Chelsea and I were practically inseparable and that today we were going to practice new hairdos and paint our nails and go to the mall and shop for accessories.
“Just make sure you’re home by, say, five o’clock.”
“I’ll call you from my cell when I’m leaving Chelsea’s,” I said.
Sometimes I was such a good daughter.
Cryptkeeper Ron’s real name was Ron Freary. He owned a car dealership near the mall that sold—well, I wasn’t sure what kind of cars they were. It took no sleuthing at all to find this information. Watch late-night television for more than ten minutes and you will be assaulted by a “Come to Ron Freary’s for a Scary Good Deal” commercial. Quills always joked that the scary thing about Ron Freary was not his deals, but the cornflake-sized pieces of dandruff clinging to the shoulders of his sports coat.
