Minerva Clark Gives Up the Ghost

by Karen Karbo

  Morgan let me borrow his mountain bike. I caught him just as he was walking out the door with poor Ned, corgi and babe magnet. “Say ‘hey’ to Jeannette for me!” I called as I swooshed down the driveway. Out of the corner of my eye I could see him frowning after me.

  If anyone would know about Louise, and whether she was capable of setting a fire, it would be Cryptkeeper Ron. It was because of her that he’d put Corbett Street Grocery on his tour of haunted Portland.

  As I coasted down through the neighborhoods, I tried hard to remember going on the Halloween tour. It had been more than two years ago. Practically another lifetime. We’d bombed around town in a bus painted black, with a waving ghost painted on the side.

  We stopped at an apartment house, a boarded-up factory that made Styrofoam heads for wigs and hats, and at a cemetery that should have been way scary, but it was across the street from a burger joint broadcasting the World Series, and as we tromped around the gravestones you could hear guys hollering, “Hey, Ump! One more eye and you’d be a Cyclops!”

  The grand finale was a maze of the narrow tunnels that ran beneath a local tavern, where in times of yore sailors were shanghaied, drugged and kidnapped, and stuck on an oceangoing ship, where they were forced to work as crew members. Cryptkeeper Ron said that even some stragglers touring the tunnels had gone missing, but that his lawyers told him never to mention that. Har! I was in fifth grade, and even I’d known it was a joke. I remember touching one of the tunnel walls. It was wet, even though there was no water anywhere that I could see. That frightened me more than any talk of shanghaied sailors.

  My brothers liked the tour because they thought I had more fun than I did. Afterward, we went out for dessert and I ate chocolate mousse for the first time.

  I had not expected Cryptkeeper Ron to be strolling around his dealership in the midday sun, hands in his pockets, just like any salesman on the job. Despite the balloons and banners announcing a sale, no one was interested in buying a car today. You could fry many things on the hoods of those shiny new cars.

  “What can I do for you today, little lady? Daddy promise you a new car when you get your license?”

  I wore a pair of baggy plaid shorts, a white tank top, and my red-and-blue Chucks with the white skulls on the ankles. My curly/wavy hair snarled around my head from the bike ride, and my cuticles were raw from the previous day’s gnaw-fest.

  Did I really look like a girl whose “Daddy” would buy her a car when she turned sixteen? Did I look fifteen and a half? It was the five-eight talking. People saw tall and they thought older.

  “He always says he wants to get me a Volvo, but I really like …” I glanced around the lot. What kind of cars were these anyway? Then I glimpsed the huge white letters across the front of the showroom—Hyundai. How did you pronounce this car? “… I’ve always wanted a Hunday.” I tried to iron the question mark out of the end of that sentence. Yes, that’s right. I’ve always wanted a Hunday.

  “Can’t blame you there. Nope, no ma’am and no sir.”

  Cryptkeeper Ron—for that is the only way I could think of him—showed me a purple Hyundai with leather upholstery, power steering, antilock brakes, and a bunch of other stuff. He mentioned crash-dummy tests and statistics and warranties. He was eager for me to call Daddy and drag him down here pronto so we could go over some figures.

  This was not turning out the way I wanted it to.

  “Actually, to be totally honest? The real reason I want a Hunday is because I am a huge fan of your haunted Portland tour.”

  He grinned and hung his thumbs inside his waistband. “You like my tour, eh?”

  “My brothers took me when I was in fifth grade. I thought it was so awesome.”

  “Really now. You should get them to take you again. I’ve added a few new locales. An old warehouse in the Pearl, got a ghost in the freight elevator.”

  “Freight elevator! That reminds me of my favorite ghost—in the walk-in freezer at that grocery store.”

  “Oh yes, that presence is a strong one,” said Cryptkeeper Ron. He tipped back on his heels and nodded.

  “A strong one. Does that mean, like, an extra-bad ghost?” I asked.

  “It means her vibrations are very easy to detect,” said Cryptkeeper Ron. His gaze wandered around the lot. He pulled a handkerchief out of his back pocket and blotted his forehead. He was hot and losing interest.

  “I thought that of all the ghosts, that one seemed the most real because, like, there’s nothing obviously creepy or moody about a grocery store. Not like an old church, or those tunnels. Those are kind of obvious ghostly haunts.”

  “Obvious?” said Cryptkeeper Ron. “What are you saying? There are stops on the tour that are too obvious?”

  “No …,” I said lamely.

  Cryptkeeper Ron was sure prickly. I didn’t remember his comb-over in fifth grade. I could see his pink scalp shining with sweat beneath gauzy threads of graying blond hair.

  “Not many folks like the Corbett Grocery. Feel it’s too tame. Not spooky enough. In fact, I’ve thought about dumping ’em, but they’ve been part of the tour since day one. Kinda don’t have the heart. Know what I mean? They’re good people, Nat and Nat.”

  “That means you must know my friend Angus.”

  “Him!” Cryptkeeper Ron snorted, then caught himself up. He was a businessman after all. He couldn’t just go around randomly rolling his eyes. “He was a cute little kid. Really a smart little guy. He was just a ball to have around. When he was a little kid. So!” He clapped his hands, obviously finished with the conversation. “Let’s see what we can do to get you into a nice little Excel. What did you say your name was?”

  “Minerva Clark.” I put out my hand.

  He took my hand and shook it, staring hard at me all the while. Then he snapped his fingers and wagged his finger at me. “I know you. How do I know you? Your folks bought from me before?”

  Was this more salesman patter? How would I know how he knew me? “Does one of your kids go to Holy Family? That’s where I go and—”

  “The newspaper. You’re that kid who thinks she’s the new Magnum P.I.”

  “Who?”

  “Get outta here,” he said. He tucked his head and made that shooing gesture usually saved for bad cats hogging the furniture.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Get lost! Shoo. I don’t want you on my property. I don’t know why you’re here, or what you’re quote unquote investigating, but I don’t want you around.”

  “I’m really just interested in the ghost at Corbett Street Grocery.”

  “There is no ghost at Corbett Street Grocery, all rightie? Now scat!”

  Cryptkeeper Ron lies.

  9

  I rode home in the afternoon heat, trying to figure out what had gone wrong in my conversation with Cryptkeeper Ron. Since my accident, I’d been able to read people pretty well. But I’d read Ron Freary all wrong. Like with a complicated algebra equation I’d forgotten to factor in something, in this case the newspaper profile. The same story that encouraged Angus Paine to ask me to help him solve his mystery made Cryptkeeper Ron suspicious.

  I was deep in pondering as I swerved into our driveway, past Mrs. Dagnitz’s white Pathfinder. The back door of Casa Clark was wide open. I could smell the rotten fish smell outside. Outside. This wasn’t good.

  In the kitchen, Mrs. Dagnitz was saying, “Something must be dead in one of the cupboards. This can’t simply be the fish after all this time. It was fresh fish!”

  Weird Rolando was moving things out of the broom closet—Ned’s big bag of dog food, the mop, broom, and dustpan—and not finding anything. His hair was in a bun today. “Nothing in here, Buttercup.”

  I turned toward the dishwasher to hide my full-strength eye roll. Unloading the dishwater was one of my chores. As I pulled open the top rack, I noticed that the tiny ponds of water pooled in the bottom of the upside-down coffee cups and glasses was yellowish green. I had never seen an actual swamp, except on o
ne of Mark Clark’s video games, but that’s what came to mind.

  When I pulled the bottom rack out, I saw an entire lake of swamp-colored water in the bottom of the dishwasher. When I leaned down to pull out a bowl, I got a big whiff of fish smell.

  “Ugh! Check this out,” I said.

  Mrs. Dagnitz and Weird Rolando gathered around the dishwasher and peered inside.

  “Oh God!” said Mrs. Dagnitz. “Something’s plugged. The thing’s not draining. Are those the dishes from when we had the fish? They are! Why didn’t we wash them sooner? What are they doing still sitting in there?”

  “Maybe we can get a plumber out before the end of the day,” said Weird Rolando.

  “I doubt it,” said Mrs. Dagnitz. “This is just great. I cannot cook in this kitchen. I simply cannot cook in this kitchen. I knew I should have listened to my inner voice and booked a private room at Blue Hour.”

  Mrs. Dagnitz needed some yoga in the worst way. I stood there with a fish-juice-coated bowl in my hands. “But Mom, even if we would have run the dishwasher a day earlier, it still wouldn’t have drained properly.”

  Mark Clark, known from now on as Mr. Terrible Timing, picked that moment to walk through the door singing some cringe-worthy disco song he’d obviously just been playing in his car. You could tell by the bounce in his step that he expected to come home to a homemade cake and a nice lasagna baking in the oven. Even though it was eight thousand degrees, and the only dinner that made any sense was Otter Pops.

  Mrs. Dagnitz wheeled around and said, “Mark! Tell me you’re running the dishwasher every day. You’ve got to run it every day, especially in the summer. It’s not hygienic. I don’t want to get a phone call that you’re all dead out here from salmonella.”

  “We run it when it’s full. To, you know, conserve water.”

  “Great,” said Mrs. Dagnitz. “That’s just great.”

  Mark Clark and I traded looks.

  “Let me see what I can do,” said Mark Clark. Back through the door he went.

  “What should I do with the dishes?” I asked.

  “Well, obviously we can’t eat off of them, can we?” Mrs. Dagnitz cried. Weird Rolando slid behind her and started rubbing her shoulders. “It’ll be okay, Buttercup.”

  Mark Clark returned with a coil of green garden hose. He kept it in the trunk of his car in case he ever ran out of gas and needed to borrow some from another car. It wasn’t exactly legal, but he only ever siphoned enough to get to the next gas station.

  He uncoiled the hose and stuck one end in fish-juice lake. Then he leaned over the sink and started sucking on the other end.

  “What are you doing!” shrieked our mother.

  The kitchen now smelled like old fish and gasoline. My stomach tossed and turned. I held my nose. Mark Clark stuck his finger inside his mouth, pressed the top of the hose closed, then pulled the hose from his mouth and pointed the end into the sink. When he pulled his finger away, a stream of old fish water splashed down the drain.

  At the same time, Mark Clark spit into the sink. He’d managed to swallow some of the old fish water.

  “This is completely unacceptable. Where is your father? Does he know this sort of thing goes on?”

  “St. Louis,” I said.

  “Or are you just doing this to spite me? To prove what a wretched mother I am for making the choices I did?”

  “Or no, Cincinnati, I think. Last week he was in St. Louis.”

  “Don’t do this to me,” Mrs. Dagnitz sobbed.

  Now she was crying. I watched Mark Clark patiently siphon the entire lake of old fish water into the sink. Moments after he gave the sink a quick once-over with the Comet, the old-fish smell faded. Now the kitchen just smelled like gasoline.

  At least Mrs. Dagnitz could start cooking. She didn’t ask anybody to help. She was in one hundred percent martyr mode. You could probably see her pain and suffering from outer space. Weird Rolando and Mark Clark fetched some tools from the junk drawer and poked around the inside of the dishwasher and decided that, yes, a plumber needed to be called.

  The plumber showed up just about the time …

  … Mark Clark ran to the guest bathroom to puke his guts out. It was the combination of heat, old fish dishwasher water, and gasoline that did him in. Of all of us, Mark Clark’s stomach is the most sensitive.

  Quills got off work early—it was a slow day for photocopying and Kinko’s sent him home—and hopped up and down with glee at the sight of the plumber, with his frizzy white hair and trademark sagging dirty jeans, sprawled beside the dishwasher, which he’d had to pull from beneath the counter.

  “Cool! Innards. I loooovvvvvve innards!” Quills said, tugging on his spiky yellow hair.

  Mrs. Dagnitz moved around the kitchen with her oven mitts, her nose literally in the air. She pretended as if he wasn’t there.

  “Hey, it doesn’t smell like fish anymore!” Quills crowed.

  “Michael, could you set the table, please?”

  I couldn’t help but giggle. Nobody called Quills Michael. Even his name tag from Kinko’s said Quills.

  Setting the table was my job, but I was getting the cold shoulder because I was the one who had found the lake of old fish water, and because I had pointed out that Charlie was in Cincinnati. Mrs. Dagnitz instructed Michael to use the linens (not the squares of paper towel we normally used for napkins), and to make sure we all had wineglasses. It wouldn’t be a birthday dinner without a proper toast. Little did she know our traditional birthday toast was a song that went “Happy birthday / O happy birthday / Grief, misery, and despair, People dying everywhere! / O happy birthday / O happy birthday.”

  Then Mrs. Dagnitz dragged out a huge wooden salad bowl from the back of some cupboard—I don’t think I’d ever seen it before—and filled it with a salad made of spinach (of course) and some weird lettuce that looked like weeds from the backyard. She pulled the lasagna from the oven, its cheese bubbly hot. Her thin blond hair was lank around her face, drenched with sweat. She looked hotter than anyone else in the room, and for some reason that made me feel guilty.

  “Here’s your problem,” said the plumber. He held up a small piece of curved glass. It was the rim of one of our drinking glasses. “It was wedged in the filter, kept the water from draining out.”

  We stared at the shard of glass that had caused all the trouble. The plumber replaced a few hoses, reset the dishwasher in its square hole beneath the counter, and gave Weird Rolando a bill for two hundred dollars.

  It could have been the amount of the plumber’s bill that was the last straw, but I think it was Mark Clark throwing up that sent Mrs. Dagnitz over the edge. She picked up the piece of glass and held it out to me. “This is your fault.”

  “MY fault?”

  “This is from a broken glass. You were obviously throwing a glass into the dishwasher and it broke.”

  “That was a long time ago,” I said. “I told Mark Clark about it and he said it was an accident and we all have accidents and it was no big deal.”

  “No big deal. That’s easy for him to say, isn’t it? I’ve seen you load the dishwasher. You bang around listening to that iPod and don’t pay the least attention. There’s not a cereal bowl in this house that doesn’t have a chip in it. I know you think that all the nice things you have just fall from the sky for your enjoyment, but this all costs money. I have half a mind to take this bill out of your allowance.” She shook the plumber’s bill in my face.

  “I don’t have an iPod,” I said.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Minerva, do you have to be contrary at every turn?”

  “And I don’t think it’s easy for him to say.”

  “What?” she shrieked.

  We glared at each other. I had that feeling you get on a roller coaster, when the car slowly powers uphill to that first huge drop, and it clanks along slowly, and you’re feeling pent up and nervous because you know what’s coming, and then there’s that long moment when the car pauses at the top, and then
the car tips forward and roars down the track and there’s not one thing you can do but throw your hands into the hair and scream your head off.

  “He’s the one who’s here,” I snapped. “It’s got to be much harder to put up with what a horrible monster I am when you’re on the premises all the time.”

  “Are you saying I’m not here?” said Mrs. Dagnitz, her eyes so wide with disbelief I could see more white than blue.

  Mrs. Dagnitz looked from Weird Rolando, who was grating some Parmesan cheese into a bowl, to Quills, who was at the sink filling a pitcher with water, to Morgan, who had just materialized from upstairs.

  “Hey, the fish odor has dissipated,” said Morgan.

  No one said anything. We could hear Mark Clark behind the bathroom door, down the hall, coughing and moaning.

  “But you’re not here,” I said. Was it really up to me, the almost fourteen-year-old, to point out the obvious?

  “I’m here in spirit!” she wept, shoveling squares of lasagna onto a plate. The steam rose from the glass casserole dish, making her cheeks even pinker. “Ask Rollie. All I think about is my family. You all mean everything to me, everything. You have no idea. I’ve had to make some very difficult decisions, which none of you can come close to appreciating. And then when I make the effort to come back to Portland to throw a party so that all of you can be included in my new life, you snub me.”

  As you know, I live in a house of boys. I live in a house of boys, and Reggie, my best friend, is a boy. If I had three sisters and a best friend who was a girl, I might have burst into tears myself, or thrown my arms around Mrs. Dagnitz and told her not to feel bad. Instead, the Louis Armstrong song that Quills and Mark Clark and Morgan always croon to one another when one of us is holding a personal pity party bubbled up from deep inside me. It’s best if sung extra slowly, with your hand on your heart and your eyes rolled heavenward.