Minerva Clark Gives Up the Ghost

by Karen Karbo

  Detective Huntington had made a note of Daniel’s name, then clicked the end of his pen and returned it to his shirt pocket. He hadn’t written down a word I’d said.

  “Why aren’t you writing that down?” I asked.

  He folded his hands in front of him and looked at me.

  “She’s not a suspect, is she?” asked Mrs. Dagnitz. Suddenly, I felt a rush of something other than pure loathing for my mother. She was not addicted to detective shows. She watched the cooking channel and American Idol, which made her a little slow.

  “Let’s just say she’s a person of interest,” said Detective Huntington. “The caller didn’t just place Minerva at the scene, they said they saw her start the fire.”

  Detective Huntington placed his mug on the mantel and said he would be in touch. He would most definitely be in touch, and we should most definitely not plan on going anywhere. As Mrs. Dagnitz walked him to the door, the heels of her little sandals slapping against the hardwood floor, she told him that actually soon we were headed to New York, where I would be part of an exciting world neurological conference. Certainly he’d read the nice profile of me in the paper? I was a special girl, a very special girl, a sensitive girl with special powers. Had he read the nice article about me in the paper? Did he know who Minerva Clark was? And, that, well, her father was an attorney?

  I stood in the middle of the living room scratching my shin with the bottom of my foot, watching Mrs. Dagnitz say too much. Like always she started out okay—although bells went off in my head at her use of the word “we.” Mark Clark was taking me to New York, not Mrs. Dagnitz—but then, she never knew when to hit the brakes. Did she really need to say I was special twice? Did she really need to remind Robotective that Charlie was a lawyer? Well, maybe that wasn’t such a bad idea. It was never a bad idea just to remind people who wouldn’t mind seeing your life ruined that you have an attorney in the family.

  Robotective appeared to listen to her, but otherwise said nothing. He looked over at me briefly before the door shut behind him and said, “I hope your tickets to New York are refundable, because I don’t think you’re going anywhere.”

  The minute the front door closed, Quills appeared. He’d been lurking in the computer room.

  “What was that all about?” he said, cracking his knuckles, one after the other.

  “Michael, don’t do that,” said Mrs. Dagnitz.

  We stood in the entryway. Mrs. Dagnitz rubbed the crease between her eyebrows, looked over my shoulder, and frowned. “Is there a reason for that?”

  I turned and saw her studying our lifesize cardboard James Bond in his tuxedo. I think it was the James Bond before the brand-new James Bond.

  “Other than it’s just one cool item?” asked Quills. For some reason he could get away with being borderline snotty and I couldn’t. Unfair unfair unfair.

  “There will never be a better James Bond than Sean Connery,” sighed Mrs. Dagnitz. Then she pointed her blue gaze at me. “So, are you going to tell me about setting the school on fire?”

  I felt like I needed a lawyer with her. “I don’t know about setting the school on fire,” I said carefully. “This is the first I’ve heard about it.”

  Mrs. Dagnitz sighed. “Is this because I’ve remarried? Is that what all this is about?”

  “Huh?”

  I glanced at Quills. He was cracking the fingers of his other hand and biting his lips. Quills could play the most smoking Led Zeppelin tunes of anyone I knew, but he was hopeless when it came to dealing with our mother. I wished Mark Clark was there, but he’d had to go back to work that day.

  “I didn’t set any fire, and nothing has anything to do with you being remarried,” I said.

  “Surely you don’t think I believe you,” said Mrs. Dagnitz. “I know you think I’m just some stupid middle-aged lady who doesn’t have a clue, but I do know that you’ve turned into quite the little fib-teller.”

  “I am not a fib-teller,” I said. Not exactly true. I was a fib-teller. Everyone was a fib-teller. Didn’t Mrs. Dagnitz just tell Robotective that I was a sensitive girl? I wasn’t a sensitive girl with special powers. It was a little fib told so that Robotective might go easy on me. Realizing this, I tried to stop-and-be-calm, like we were taught to do in the conflict management section of health class last year. I took a deep breath. “I’m telling you the truth.”

  “Is this like the truth you told just the other day? When you said you’d been at your friend Chelsea’s house, when really you were doing God knows what with Kevin?” said Mrs. Dagnitz. She’d sidled up closer to me.

  I twirled a lock of hair. When had I lied about being with Chelsea when I’d really been with Kevin? Think, Minerva, think. The only time I’d ever hung out with Kevin anywhere else but here at Casa Clark was when he’d just returned from fly-fishing in Montana and his mother invited me over to dinner. She’d made barbecued chicken and coleslaw with purple cabbage, then Mark Clark had picked me up and we’d stopped on the way home for Baskin-Robbins ice cream.

  “I never lied about that,” I said.

  “Minerva, please. Stop now while you’re ahead.”

  “I’m not lying,” I said.

  “The day we were late for the appointment with Dr. Lozano? And you came speeding up on that … whatever that thing was, that scooter? I held my tongue. I didn’t even want to know where you got that thing. Are you a thief, too?”

  “That day,” I said. “I wasn’t with Kevin. I was with Angus Paine.” The words were on their way out of my mouth and I knew I’d made a monster mistake. It was like the time I helped my friend Hannah clean her goldfish bowl. I kept watch over Romeo and Juliet, swimming around in the bathroom sink, their temporary home, while Hannah scrubbed out the bowl in the kitchen. After she was finished, and had replaced the rocks and the pink plastic seaweed, and Romeo and Juliet were ready to be returned to their bowl, she’d called out “Done!” and for reasons I will never understand, I hit the stopper and the plug opened.

  The instant Angus’s name left my lips, I felt that same sick way I had watching poor Romeo and Juliet swirl down the drain to their deaths.

  “Angus Paine, Angus Paine. Would that be the same Angus Paine you promised me you’d have nothing to do with?”

  “I didn’t promise, I said ‘fine,’ and I never said I was with Kevin that day. You said I was with Kevin,” I said.

  “Do not, do not insult me by splitting hairs about your lies, Minerva Clark.” She wagged her finger in my face. Then she fluffed her bangs and cleared her throat. She was now leaving the planet of the purely POed and winging her way to the land of the long-suffering. I could tell. I’d been reading her signs for almost fourteen years. “All right,” she said. “I suppose we should get your father on the phone. You’re going to need good representation.”

  “Mom, I’m not going to need representation. I didn’t do anything.”

  “And you’re also going to need something decent to wear in court. I know you resisted getting your hair straightened, but to a jury you’ll look more trustworthy if you have nice smooth hair. I’ve read studies.”

  “Oh, for God’s sakes, Mom!” Quills blurted out. “Are you on crack? Min’s not going to court, and she’s not straightening her hair. Morgan was walking the dog last night and saw her sitting on the slide talking on her cell, just like she said.”

  “Don’t you start, too,” she said, turning on her heel. She collected her giant purse from the end of the sofa and started toward the door. “You know the testimony of a family member doesn’t mean a thing.”

  I felt like I was under house arrest, like I already had one of those electronic cuffs around my ankle. Quills poured us each a bowl of Cap’n Crunch. He’d hidden the box in his room so Mrs. Dagnitz wouldn’t see it. Quills asked about Angus Paine, and over two bowls of illegal cereal I told him the whole saga. I didn’t like being called a liar—even though technically Mrs. Dagnitz was right, I had told her I was at Chelsea’s house when I wasn’t—and so I
made sure I told the exact truth about this mystery as I knew it.

  I told Quills how Angus Paine had read the story about me in the paper and called to see if I could find out who’d set the fire at his family grocery store. I told him how strange Angus was, how he could be both cold and distracted, then almost too warm and friendly, how he forgot to mention things that most people would find important but that he did not. I told him about my two suspects who didn’t pan out—wheelchair-using Paisley O’Toole, who was too nice for her own good, and the verging-on-hysterical Wade Leeds, who lived in his car.

  Then I summoned up my courage and told him about how I believed that Louise, the unhappy household ghost who lived in the walk-in freezer, was responsible for the fire. I said it was not uncommon for ghosts, especially Kikimoras, to go ballistic when their immediate environment was upset, and how Nat and Nat, Angus’s parents, had been redoing a section of their grocery to make room for Paisley’s new dessert counter.

  “I know it probably sounds woo-woo stupid, but Quills, I saw Louise freaking out with my own eyes. I was at the grocery and Angus’s mom has this collection of antique toasters that escaped the fire. Suddenly the levers of the toasters all started going up and down. All of them at the same time. And then the freezer door—the door to Louise’s house, I guess you’d say—swung open …”

  Quills drank the leftover milk in his cereal bowl, licked his lips, and said, “I’m not saying I don’t believe in ghosts. It’s like how I’m not totally convinced all of human life isn’t just one long test-tube experiment being performed by God. I mean, who knows, right? But that said, you do know that it’s a piece of cake for someone to do what you’re talking about.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, like, remember when Mark Clark was deep into his haunted house phase? Nah, you must have been too little. He’d figured out a way to make a rocking chair rock, and he also stuck eyes in a skull and could make those click back and forth. It’s some animatronic thing. You should ask him.”

  “So, what are you saying, maybe the whole thing was staged?”

  “Just tossing it out there as a possibility.”

  I cleared the table and loaded the dishwasher, being extra careful not to allow one plate, bowl, or drinking glass to touch anything other than the plastic prongs that held them in place on the washer racks. It took forever, but I didn’t mind. I knew when it was time to chillax, and this was one of those times. I would not leave the house, for fear that somehow I would be accused of returning to the scene of the crime, as arsonists were known to do. I would play with Jupiter and work on my rebuses and IM Reggie. I would think about Quills’s just-tossed-out-there possibility. I would ponder it. I would take the possibility to the next level, which is that someone had rigged up those toasters on purpose.

  I’d been squeezing out the sponge. I stopped in mid-squeeze. I was a pure one hundred percent idiot. Why hadn’t I done this before? I tossed the sponge in the sink and dashed to the computer room, where I Googled “Angus Paine.”

  What I found made all the horrible sense in the world.

  11

  Of the thirty-seven hits for Angus Paine, there were six for an Australian high-jumping champion named Angus Paine and an Angus Paine who sold fancy motor homes. Also roaming the test-tube experiment known as Earth is an Angus Paine who grows daffodils beloved by the queen of Sweden.

  My Angus Paine, it turns out, was a boy who lived—small world!—in Portland, Oregon, a kid just a bit older than me, whose full name was Caleb Angus Paine-Presinger, who used to go by Caleb Presinger until he suffered an electric shock while trying to build an electric chair for his haunted house and became the laughingstock of the nation for about a week and a half.

  There were a few news stories about my Angus Paine, and his name change was mentioned by someone who kept a blog devoted to the art and science of creating a truly scary haunted house. The blogger told how there had been a small story in the local paper (The Oregonian! The same paper that had profiled me!), and then the national news services had got ahold of it and made Caleb Presinger sound like some zany preteen mad scientist. A few late-night comedians had made some jokes about this dumb kid who’d received the shock of his life, and people had e-mailed them back and forth like mad for a few days. Caleb Angus Paine-Presinger became known as the Geek Idiot Who Tried to Build His Own Electric Chair, and that’s when he decided to change his name.

  I slumped back in the chair and pressed my fingers against my eyes. For a few seconds I watched the colors swirling behind my lids. Once I’d heard Weird Rolando say he couldn’t get his head around something and I’d had no idea what he was talking about. Some of those old-time hippie expressions are baffling. What does it really mean to get your groove on? Does anyone really know? But now I got it. My head could get around Angus Paine the Hedger and Angus Paine the Moody Freak Flirt Monster and maybe even Angus Paine the Cruel Prankster, who’d rigged up his mother’s antique toaster collection to scare me, but I could not get my head around the fact that Angus Paine was the one other person besides me in the known world who’d suffered an electric shock and then a personality change.

  I thought back to my first appointment with Dr. Lozano. She had worn a maroon handwoven vest with crocodiles on it, and I remembered thinking how un-doctor-like that was. I was there because there was some concern that my brain had been messed up in some way after my accident. Dr. Lozano had made me draw a self-portrait and take a bunch of tests that measured my self-esteem. I tried to picture her with her gold nose ring and spiky dark hair, sitting behind her desk making a tent with her fingers, telling Mark Clark that she’d seen only one other case like mine, and it was that of a kid named Caleb Presinger, a.k.a. Angus Paine.

  So, what did this mean? That Caleb/Angus had also received a giant dose of self-esteem, and now thought he was perfect just the way he was? I thought about the times we’d hung out. He’d thought he was pretty funny, but every boy I knew thought he was a laff-riot, whether he was or not. The last time I’d talked to Angus on the phone he’d seemed too worried about having insulted me, or whatever. Wasn’t being obsessed about how you came off to other people a sign of insecurity?

  I sat up and stared at the computer screen without seeing anything. I just didn’t know. How could I know? I was no expert. But I knew someone who was.

  Dr. Lozano never answered her phone. She had a special answering service where you could leave your messages that were screened by a live human being. The two other times I’d called her—once when I’d wanted to ask her whether she thought my new self-esteem could wear off, like a magic spell or a temporary tattoo, and once to ask her the exact days we’d be in New York City for the medical conference and whether she thought there’d be time to go to see Wicked, which Chelsea de Guzman said totally rocked—and both times she’d called me back in a few days. I didn’t have a few days, but it was worth a try. I looked up her office number online.

  “Hi, Dr. Lozano, it’s me, Minerva Clark. I’m calling about that boy you told me about named Caleb Presinger, a.k.a. Angus Paine. It turns out I know him. I have a question about what happened to him after he got electrocuted. Oh! And I am sooo excited about our trip to NYC. It’s going to rock, and of course be supereducational, too. Call me.”

  I’d just pressed the End button on my phone and slid it into my back pocket when my wild gorilla ring tone sounded. Oooo-oooo-oooo-ahhnn! It was Dr. Lozano, calling me back.

  “Hi, Minerva, I got your message.”

  “I just had a question about that boy you told me about, Caleb Presinger, who changed his name to Angus Paine.”

  She hesitated. “What was your question?”

  “What happened to him? Was it like with me? Did he score like I did on all those tests? Did his self-consciousness and all that disappear, too?”

  “That’s more than one question.” She laughed, a bit uneasily, I thought.

  I didn’t say anything else. The computer room was on the side
of the house that faced the street my school was on. I looked out the window and tried to see over the pink rhododendrons and down the block. I knew I wouldn’t be able to see the school, but if the fire had been huge enough, maybe they’d blocked off the street. I couldn’t see a thing but a tangle of leathery rhody leaves, and over that, two neighbors standing on the sidewalk talking.

  “How do you know Angus?” asked Dr. Lozano.

  I couldn’t bear to spell it all out. “He tracked me down after that story ran in the newspaper. Did you see it? The one—”

  “Tracked you down?” She sounded worried or something. I couldn’t tell. This entire conversation was putting me into a moody freak mood.

  “He called to say ‘hey,’” I amended.

  “Then you know he’s a patient of mine, just as you are,” said Dr. Lozano.

  “Well, he didn’t exactly say that. He never mentioned it at all, actually. I found out on the Internet.”

  She sighed. “It’s an amazing invention, isn’t it. The Internet.”

  “It is,” I said. Duh.

  “Minerva, look. I can’t tell you anything about Angus. It’s called patient-doctor privilege.”

  “I know. Lawyers have the same thing.”

  “What I can tell you is that Angus did experience a change after his accident, but it wasn’t the same one as you did. Or rather it was, but it manifested itself in a different way. I hope that makes sense, because it’s all I can really say.”

  Manifested? I knew what a manifesto was. Mark Clark’s nerdy friend from work, DeMaio, had one—it involved changing how people paid taxes; I never listened—but I was a little unsure about “manifested.”

  “All right,” I said.

  “And Minerva,” she said suddenly, as if she’d just thought of something, “you’re not involved with Angus, are you?”