Minerva Clark Gives Up the Ghost

by Karen Karbo

  “Don’t worry about it. They’ll arrest him and at the very most release him into the custody of his parents. He’s not going anywhere.”

  I must have looked doubtful, because he reached over and wiggled my knee. “Don’t worry. It’s fine. It’s over.”

  “Why haven’t we heard anything from the detective, then?”

  “He’s probably loaded with paperwork, or he just hasn’t gotten to it yet. He’s got other cases, don’t forget. And anyway …” He checked the time on his computer. “It looks like it’s time we started getting ready for the reception.”

  “Oh joy,” I said. But the truth is, I was excited. I was looking forward to wearing my adorable brown halter dress and ordering a 7Up with a cherry in it.

  The Wedding Reception of the Century was held at a historic building in an industrial area not far from Casa Clark. It used to be a ballroom or a movie palace or something. Portland is loaded with old-time buildings that are redone by forward-thinking architects who spend millions of dollars renovating the building to its original splendor in an environmentally responsible way. I know all this because Morgan and Rolando yakked about it on the way to the party.

  Kevin and I sat in the backseat with our pinkies touching, but not holding hands. He looked hot in his coat and tie, and he said I looked hot in my halter dress and strappy high-heeled sandals. I stared out the window as we drove, trying to imagine when we would see each other all dressed up like this again. Next year at my middle school graduation? Would we even still be boyfriend and girlfriend by then? It seemed like light-years away. Not that I know exactly how long a light-year is.

  I must make a full confession. I had forgotten about Kevin. After the night I tried to tell him about being assaulted with the scalding slab of vegetarian lasagna, and he was too wrapped up in World of Warcraft and MiniVanDamme, I forgot about him. Or not forgot about him, exactly—set him aside. I knew from years of watching Mark Clark obsessively play his video games that I could catch up with Kevin again in a few days and he would be right where I’d left him, the big news being that MiniVanDamme was now level forty and had earned his epic weapon.

  We arrived at the historic building just as the Purpley Time was settling in. People were milling around outside, tugging at their ties and gulping their drinks. Inside, the air-conditioning was broken, a motor burned out or something.

  Poor Mrs. Dagnitz. Yes, I felt bad for her. Her blond hair was stuck to her head. The bridge of her nose was shiny with perspiration. She ran around making sure no one was dying of the heat. Since most of her friends were in tip-top shape, no one looked as if they were going to have a heart attack, but no one touched any of the beautiful food my mom had spent weeks agonizing over. There was supposed to be dancing, but the band played cringe-worthy soft-rock hits to an empty dance floor while everyone gathered at the bar ordering all those hot-weather drinks that are the adult cousins of the Slurpee. Things hadn’t turned out the way she’d planned, and now she was trying to make the best of it. Rolando stood near the open door holding a drink, laughing with some other men. He didn’t seem to mind at all.

  Morgan stood listening, looking glummer than usual. Quills sat at a nearby table with a small plate of food in front of him. He was about the only person eating anything at the whole party. I pulled up a chair.

  “Want an egg roll?” he asked.

  “Don’t chew with your mouth full,” I said.

  “Don’t talk with your mouth open,” he countered. Ha ha. Another old family joke.

  I chewed on some ice from my drink. “What’s wrong with Morgan?” I asked.

  “He’s got that girlfriend—would-be girlfriend, I should say. That chick who works at Roasted on Fremont. He asked her to come tonight and she said she had something else going on.”

  “Do you think she was lying?” I asked. Since knowing Angus Paine, it occurred to me that people probably lied a lot more than anyone ever imagined.

  “Love is lies, baby sister.” Suddenly, Quills shoved his plate away, grabbed a cocktail napkin, and pulled a felt-tip pen from his back pocket. “That’s good. Love is lies, baby sister.” He then started jotting down some new lyrics for his band, Humongous Bag of Cashews. Here is a secret about Quills: He writes all his lyrics on tiny napkins. He thinks that when he becomes world famous, it will sound better in Rolling Stone magazine if it says he dashed off his lyrics on cocktail napkins instead of on a PC.

  In her hostess frenzy, Mrs. Dagnitz decided Kevin was the most handsome teenage boy there. He was practically the only teenage boy there, but I was not about to argue. When she found out Kevin was a swimmer, she dragged him around to introduce him to some of her friends who were on a ladies’ swim team. I bet they didn’t swim the butterfly, the most show-offy stroke there is, or maybe they did. Middle-aged moms do all kinds of things these days to embarrass their teenage daughters, why not the butterfly? The good thing about Kevin is that he is polite. Oh, and he knows how to fold a lot of cool origami animals and boxes. And he’s nice to me, except when he’s playing video games. Is that good enough for a boyfriend? I don’t know.

  I was not about to follow them around listening to them compare times for the hundred-meter whatnot, so I took my 7Up and went outside, where it was a few degrees cooler. It was dark by now. Inside, the band was playing a song about sailing away. I sat on a low stone wall, set my drink beside me, and tied up my hair in a knot on top of my head. Much better. A trio of men talking about the best way to fertilize your lawn wandered back inside, leaving me alone.

  It happened in an instant.

  I heard the high buzz of a scooter, turned to look, and suddenly there was Angus Paine, leaping off his Go-Ped. It continued on, riderless, for a few yards, then crashed over. I didn’t have time to say a word. He marched toward me, grabbed my arm, and hauled me backward over the wall. My glass of 7Up flew into the air, shattering when it hit the sidewalk. My hair fell out of its knot and one of my shoes came off.

  Angus hauled me around the side of the building and into the bushes, where he clamped his hand around my throat.

  “What in the hell was that stunt? Sending that detective my way? You really upset my parents.” His voice was high with hysteria. Had I never noticed that he looked like a hyena with his snappy pupil-less eyes and chipped tooth?

  “Let go of me,” I said. I grabbed his forearms, but couldn’t pull them away from me.

  “Answer my question, then I’ll let you go,” he said.

  “Liar,” I said. I knew this would only make it worse, but it made me mad. He just let any old thing roll out of his hyena mouth and called it the truth. I was sick of it.

  “It’s your own fault you’re in this predicament, Minerva,” he said.

  “I could say the same thing to you. Maybe if you weren’t an arsonist, Robotective wouldn’t have been forced to hunt you down.” I was surprised it was so easy to talk, since I was being strangled. We were between two huge bushes—the kind with small dark leaves and tiny white flowers that look like bells and bloom in the spring. He’d shoved me against the wall. I was afraid he was going to start banging my head against the stone if I didn’t get out of there. But how? Keep talking, I thought, keep talking. Keep him distracted. “I’m really just curious why you did all this. Was it really just because you wanted to go to New York with Dr. Lozano?”

  “I deserved to go. I’m extraordinary. Everyone says so. Even Dr. Lozano, before you started sucking up to her and took my spot.”

  “I think she picked me instead of you because you’re a lunatic who does stuff like this,” I said.

  He tightened his grip around my throat. “Don’t make it worse for yourself, Minerva. Why do chicks always do that? Make it worse for themselves.”

  “So are you going to kill me? If Dr. L. didn’t want to take you to New York because you were an arsonist, she surely wouldn’t want to take you if you were a murderer. But, wait, you are a murderer. Grams Lucille, remember her?”

  “I will give you
one more chance,” he said, shaking me. “Call Huntington and confess to the Holy Family fire, and after New York I’ll tell him it was me and they’ll let you go.”

  “I’ll get right on that,” I said.

  “I thought I knew you,” he said. Was he starting to cry? “I thought you were cool.”

  “I am cool,” I said. So cool, in fact, that I’d figured out how to get myself out of this. In the first mystery I’d ever solved, Tiffani, my old babysitter, used her shoe as a weapon. She wore those high-heeled wooden mules. My shoes didn’t have that much heft, but if I could reach down, slip off the remaining one, and smash it over Angus’s head, the surprise might cause him to let me go and I could make a run for it.

  “This isn’t over, you know. Nat and Nat have a good lawyer. They’ll get me out of this, and then when you least expect it, you might smell some smoke in your own room, in that ugly house up there in that fancy neighborhood.”

  “You know where I live?” I heard the fear in my own voice. Dummy! I shouldn’t have said a word.

  Angus laughed. “I know everything, Minerva Clark.”

  “So you were stalking me.”

  “Research. It’s called research. I’d hate to see your ferret fry, though. I really do want a ferret. Maybe I’ll sneak in that basement window you have that doesn’t lock and save him before I torch the place.”

  “You really are crazy,” I said. “Thanks for saving Jupiter, though.” Just as I leaned sideways to remove my shoe, I heard the sound of male voices.

  “Hey! What’s going on here?” It was Kevin, standing on the sidewalk. Rolando was right behind him.

  “HELP!” I hollered. “He’s strangling me.”

  Kevin tore Angus Paine off me with swim-champion strength. He dragged him out onto the sidewalk, threw him onto his stomach, and dug his knee into his back. Angus wasn’t afraid, but irritated. “All right, all right,” he said. “No need to get violent.”

  Rolando called the cops at 911. Kevin pulled off his tie with one hand and secured Angus’s hands behind his back. I was too dazed to tell him how impressed I was. Where’d he learn how to do that?

  I rubbed my throat. Now my knees shook, my legs trembled, my hands fluttered. Rolando fussed. He wanted to call the paramedics, too, but I wouldn’t let him. The police showed up in three minutes flat, cuffed Angus, and stuck him in the backseat. Angus looked at us and sighed, “You’re really overreacting here, folks.”

  As we watched the black and white drive away, I turned to Rolando to thank him and noticed that—guess what?—my stepdad had cut his hair.

  14

  That night, after the wedding reception, we sat around the picnic table in the backyard in our dress-up clothes, drinking pomegranate-juice iced tea—my mom’s favorite—as I told my family the whole story. It felt weirdly like a holiday. Maybe it was the drama. Everyone was eager to put together the pieces. Rolando wondered whether Angus Paine had set the fire at the grocery just to have a mystery to solve, or he had some other reason.

  “Another reason?” asked Mark Clark. “I’d say there’s another reason—the kid’s mental.”

  They got in a big discussion over the existence of ghosts, specifically Louise, the Kikimora. Someone went in the kitchen and retrieved a bag of pork rinds that must have been hidden somewhere.

  Quills, who’d been on Cryptkeeper Ron’s Tour of Haunted Portland more than any of us, and considered himself an amateur expert, said he knew for a fact that Cryptkeeper Ron had his ghosts certified by a world-renowned professor of paranormal activity. Then they all talked about whether a professor of paranormal activity—whoever that might be—was a big crackpot anyway. Mark Clark said he thought it was all a ruse. Morgan said he didn’t know whether he believed in that particular ghost, but he believed there were spirits at work in the world. I thought about my interaction with Louise, not the corny part with the animatronic toasters, engineered by Angus Paine, but the first day at the grocery when we opened the freezer door, and the air was still chilled even though the refrigeration unit had been off for days. Was that Louise? I still couldn’t decide. Maybe it was like that in life—there were things about which you would never, could never, make up your mind.

  Mrs. Dagnitz looked wrung out. She sat in a patio chair with Ned at her feet. She petted his soft fur with her toes. She didn’t say anything. She kept pressing her fingers to her temples. I wondered whether she was freaking out about everything that had happened and wondering whether she should move back to Portland, where she could breathe down my neck every second of every day.

  She called me over to her and grabbed my hand. “Honey, could you go inside—in my purse, there’s a white bottle, it’s my headache medicine. Could you bring it?”

  The itty-bitty fancy purse she’d brought to the reception was on the kitchen counter. Nothing in there but a lipstick and her wallet. Slung around the back of one of the dining room chairs was her giant walking-around everyday purse, the one a small child could hide in with no problem. I stuck my hand in, felt around for a medicine bottle, and instead hit upon … an MP3 player?

  My mother has an iPod?

  I sat down at the dining room table and turned the pink metallic thing over and over in my hand. I couldn’t help it. I had to have a listen. I expected some woo-woo yoga-y music, gamelan music, or bamboo flutes played by Incan mystics, or chanting monks or that Irish lady with the floaty voice. I thought the most extreme thing I would hear would be the Beatles.

  Instead … well, I’m embarrassed to tell you some of the stuff my mom had on her iPod. Rap music. Heavy metal. A whole sound track from some skateboard movie. A really dirty song by a group Mark Clark will not even permit Quills to listen to in the house, in case I might accidentally hear some of the lyrics through his headphones.

  As I listened to song after song, I realized I had never really known my mom. To me, she was this over-exercised, pastel-wearing control freak, but here she had Green Day—Green Day! My favorite band!—on her iPod. And not just the new stuff that everyone loved, but early punk Green Day that I thought no one knew about but me.

  Wait until I told Reggie. I texted him there and then.

  I must have sat listening for a long time. I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was my mother. “Did you find the medicine?”

  “Green Day, Mom? You like Green Day?” I was not about to mention all the other stuff.

  “Doesn’t everyone?”

  I wanted to say, Everyone but people’s mothers, but I couldn’t.

  It just wasn’t true.

  Two weeks later Mark Clark and I took what’s called the red eye to New York City. It’s called the red eye because when you get off the plane, your eyes are red from exhaustion. But I was too excited to be exhausted. My dad, Charlie, performed some magic and upgraded our seats to business class, so we had bigger seats and better food. I even had my own personal television stuck in the back of the seat in front of me, and something called lumbar support. I still did not have an iPod—I sort of thought my mom might get me one after I’d discovered hers, but no dice—but there was so much else to do on the airplane that I didn’t mind.

  My mom and Rolando stayed in Portland a few extra days, to make sure I wasn’t completely traumatized, then drove back to Santa Fe. They said they liked Portland and its green pines and gaudy rhododendrons, but the soppy heat was too much. It was much drier, and therefore more pleasant, in Santa Fe.

  My mom didn’t cook any more fish, nor did she force me to go shopping. She let me keep three pairs of the shoes she’d bought, and I went to yoga with her one day. My favorite pose is corpse pose, where you lie flat on your back and close your eyes. We never talked about her lasagna-throwing outburst, or how I sort of basically totally invaded her privacy when I listened to her iPod without asking. We have a truce going, for now.

  Dr. Lozano, who did not want to fly on the red eye to New York, was going to meet us at our hotel. It had a minibar. I checked.

  She also was able to get us
tickets to see Wicked and said she knew where to buy the best cute fake purses, plus bootleg CDs and DVDs. I was supposed to pretend she didn’t know anything about it, though, because if it got out, it might sully her good reputation. Reggie gave me twenty dollars to buy him a copy of the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

  Dr. Lozano was shocked to hear about Angus’s “behavior.” That’s a neutral doctor word for full-on psycho meltdown. Still, she wouldn’t tell me anything more about his case.

  Angus still would not admit his guilt, even though Detective Huntington got a warrant and found a notebook beneath his mattress, where he talked about sneaking into the grocery at midnight. He’d hung on the ancient gas line until it broke, filling the store with the gas that exploded when the electric motor from the freezer kicked on. At Holy Family, he’d used part of the ferret food bag to set a trash can on fire, hoping it could be traced back to me.

  Angus told the court that was all just something he’d made up, and the weird thing is, he may really believe it. Because Grams Lucille died in the fire at the grocery, they wanted to try Angus as an adult. He was almost fifteen. Detective Huntington said there was a good chance the court would put him away at least that many years.

  It’s about five hours from Portland to New York by plane. Mark Clark and I talked a lot about why Angus did what he did. Had he really set the first fire just to have a mystery to wave under my nose? Had he used the arson as a Minerva magnet, in the same way Morgan was using Ned as a Jeannette magnet? Or had he set the fire at the grocery purely for entertainment, as Reggie suggested, and then, after Dr. Lozano told him he couldn’t come to New York, decided to find me and see if he could mess with my life enough so that I couldn’t go either? Was it like, if I can’t go, neither can that Minerva Clark? That was how Angus Paine’s strange mind worked.

  Before we left for the airport, I’d needed to do one more thing before I closed the case. Angus lied about everything, but I had to double-check one last thing.