Owl's Outstanding Donuts

by Robin Yardi

  Advance praise for Owl’s Outstanding Donuts

  “Readers of all ages will be cheering—and hooting!—for Mattie and her friends as they track down the culprits in this brilliant, high-stakes mystery with heart. Owl’s Outstanding Donuts is, well, simply outstanding!”

  —Kristen Kittscher, author of The Wig in the Window

  “With an owl who likes strawberry iced doughnuts, an environmental crime, and a family business at stake, Robin Yardi has crafted a sweet mystery about the power of friendship and facing one’s fears.”

  —Jacqueline K. Ogburn, author of The Unicorn in the Barn

  Praise for Robin Yardi’s The Midnight War of Mateo Martinez

  “A magnificent novel that defines what it is to be an older brother, a friend, and, yes, even a knight.”

  —Kirkus Reviews (starred)

  “An entertaining story of sibling loyalty, friendship struggles, and the sometimes vexing passage into adolescence.”

  —Publisher’s Weekly

  “A fun, action-filled tale whose protagonist has a distinct and sincere young voice.”

  —School Library Journal

  Text copyright © 2019 by Robin Yardi

  All rights reserved. International copyright secured. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the prior written permission of Lerner Publishing Group, Inc., except for the inclusion of brief quotations in an acknowledged review.

  Carolrhoda Books®

  An imprint of Lerner Publishing Group, Inc.

  241 First Avenue North

  Minneapolis, MN 55401 USA

  For reading levels and more information, look up this title at www.lernerbooks.com.

  Jacket illustration by Kelsey King.

  Design & chapter-opener donuts by Emily Harris.

  Main body text set in Bembo Std regular 12.5/17.

  Typeface provided by Monotype Typography.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Yardi, Robin, author.

  Title: Owl’s Outstanding Donuts / Robin Yardi.

  Description: Minneapolis : Carolrhoda Books, [2019] | Summary: Warned by an owl, ten-year-old Mattie discovers that someone is secretly polluting the land near her aunt’s Big Sur donut shop and sets out to stop them.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018038402 (print) | LCCN 2018043387 (ebook) | ISBN 9781541561090 (eb pdf) | ISBN 9781541533059 (th : alk. paper)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Bakers and bakeries—Fiction. | Doughnuts—Fiction. | Pollution—Fiction. | Owls—Fiction. | Grief—Fiction. | Orphans—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.1.Y37 (ebook) | LCC PZ7.1.Y37 Owl 2019 (print) | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018038402

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  1-44873-35724-4/19/2019

  For my sisters

  The Strawberry Iced Classic

  A sour cream cake donut with strawberry-infused pink icing & sprinkles

  Ordinarily, Alfred wouldn’t have let anything interrupt his midnight donut break, but something about that late August night was decidedly out of the ordinary.

  So Alfred stopped eating.

  He licked at the pink icing smeared across his beak and swiveled his head a full 270 degrees, taking in the scene from his favored roost in the scraggly redwood tree.

  The sea shushed against the shore below the bluff. That was nothing out of the ordinary. The antique sign for Owl’s Outstanding Donuts, perched atop a pole next to Highway One, had been dark since 9:59 p.m. Very ordinary. Molly Waters, the proprietor of the Big Sur donut shop, was extremely punctual. Alfred had watched her lock up, toss a bag of day-old donuts into the dumpster—his Strawberry Iced Classic among them—and walk the path to the shiny trailer she shared with her niece, all in the usual way. But the large white truck was back, parked across the highway. The same white truck Alfred had seen on two previous nights. And that, Alfred decided, was not ordinary at all.

  What on Earth are they doing? Alfred thought, blinking his gold eyes. Two shadowy figures hovered behind the truck’s tailgate. Fiddling with something. Knobs? A hose? Human doodads were confusing enough up close, never mind at such a distance.

  Then a sudden clank echoed up and down the road, followed by a steady, sloppy gurgling.

  The noise was almost certainly coming from the truck . . . or from near the truck. And with his delicious strawberry dumpster donut set aside, Alfred could detect an odor. Something unpleasant. Something that should not be dumped into a ditch near a pristine riverbed.

  Sloop. Slop. Glop.

  Alfred’s wings twitched.

  The mystery truck’s first visit to this particular bend in the road had barely made Alfred blink. During the second visit, Alfred had been too engrossed in that evening’s donut to pay it any attention. But now Alfred was certain that whatever those shadowy figures were up to, whatever that sloopy goop was, something would need to be done. People can’t just dump stinky slop into creeks and get away with it.

  Not in Big Sur, anyway.

  Abandoning the rest of the pink donut to grow hopelessly stale, he spread his smudged wings and swooped toward the silver Airstream travel trailer tucked among a grove of cypress trees. A row of terra cotta pots containing prickly cactuses dotted the roof, so he didn’t relish landing there. But the window box nearest the little girl’s bed made for a more opportune landing spot.

  She was only nine or ten, and even Alfred was unsure of how much use she’d be, but she was a very light sleeper. Which is a useful thing in the right moment. Or in the wrong one.

  The pink peony curtains at the girl’s window were shut tight, but Alfred knew how to remedy that.

  Tap-tap-tap. Alfred rapped his beak against her dusty windowpane.

  Mattie was dreaming about her mother. Mom shaking her awake. Mom telling her to finish an endless breakfast. Holding Mattie’s hand and hurrying her. They were late, and Mom didn’t notice that Mattie was still in pajamas—

  Mattie’s eyes popped open. She wanted to close them again right away. Even late-for-school-wearing-your-pajamas dreams were good if they had her mom in them. Mattie tucked her nose under her down comforter and tried to fall back asleep.

  But something was at her window, tap-tapping her awake and taking Mom away.

  Mattie flung her covers aside and crouched by the window, listening with one ear. Nothing. She snapped the pink curtains open and pressed her nose to the black glass.

  A face with huge golden eyes was peeping through the petunias in the window box.

  Mattie screeched and tumbled backwards. The whole trailer shook as she bumped onto the braided rag-rug below her bed.

  The golden eyes kept blinking through the dark window.

  Mattie’s hazel green eyes blinked back.

  The owl—that’s what Mattie thought it was—hooted a deep, owly whooo, scraped at the window with a curved talon, and spun its head toward the highway. Once, twice, three times, like a broken toy. And for some reason the feathers around the owl’s beak were . . . pink?

  Mattie scrambled back to her bed for a closer look, but by then the owl had disappeared. Trampled flowers in the window box were the only sign that the bird had been there at all. Mattie shoved the window open, squinting out into the dark.

  Past the ferns outside their trailer and across the empty parking lot sat Owl’s Outstanding Donuts. Like everything else on the near side of the highway, Aunt Molly’s shop was quiet and closed up. On the far side of the highway, a wall of redwood trees stood dark and still, the start of a forest that stretched for miles.

&nbs
p; Nothing weird there.

  Who-who-whooo. The owl hooted again. It must have stayed near the trailer, but Mattie still couldn’t see it. But from the corner of her bed, up on her knees, she could see a light flickering on the opposite side of the highway, the only lamppost before the road twisted off into the trees. And just beyond its glow, a truck had pulled off onto the shoulder. Mattie bit down on her bottom lip.

  That’s maybe weird, she thought. If they were having car trouble, why didn’t they just pull into the parking lot?

  A round shadowy someone in a hooded sweatshirt was grappling with the end of what looked like a big floppy hose.

  Mattie noticed a taller someone too . . . standing watch?

  “Well, that’s for sure suspicious,” she mumbled.

  Then one of Aunt Molly’s terra cotta pots flew off the top of the trailer like a cannonball. Mattie watched its little pointy cactus spinning end over end until the pot smashed to bits on the wooden deck outside.

  The crash of clay made Mattie flinch, and the shadowy figures down the road heard it too. The taller one shoved the stubby one, looking left, right, and behind. They jogged around to the cab of the truck and dove inside, slamming the doors behind them. Mattie tried to read the license plate as the truck’s engine revved, but it was too dark outside and the truck was too far away for Mattie to see any numbers. The truck fishtailed in the gravel, pulled onto the road, and squealed out of sight, with its floppy hose trailing like a tail.

  Mattie squished her face against the window’s bug screen, trying to peek at the top of the trailer. Did that owl push the flowerpot? she wondered. Her heart kept flip-flopping against her mom’s old T-shirt.

  Right then, Aunt Molly padded across the trailer floor in her blue bunny pajamas and bare feet, rubbing at her eyes.

  “What on Earth,” said Aunt Molly, “are you doing out of bed?”

  The Banana Slug Bar

  A yeasted donut filled with banana custard and covered with coconut-flavored yellow icing

  Sunday morning light, which is always lazier than Saturday morning light, snuck slantwise through the front window of Owl’s Outstanding Donuts. Mattie slumped in the slippery vinyl booth with her feet up on the bench across from her. The sparkly blue Formica tabletop was so bright it made her blink. The shop’s sloped display case, filled with rows and rows of Aunt Molly’s colorful donuts, was cheery as ever. But Mattie couldn’t get the images of a pink-smudged owl, a flying cactus, and a white truck out of her brain.

  Aunt Molly plunked a plain cake donut and a glass of chocolate soy milk in front of Mattie. “Tired, kid?”

  “No,” said Mattie, covering a yawn.

  “Mm-hmm,” Aunt Molly said, slipping back behind the counter. “Tell me about that dream.”

  Mattie didn’t bother to say that she was sure—well, almost sure—that it was no-way a dream. They’d cleaned up the broken clay pot together early that morning, so she knew that part was real. Aunt Molly had rescued the battered cactus, plopped it into a new pot, and lined it up on top of the trailer with the others. She said maybe a raccoon had knocked it down. But Mattie knew the sound of a raccoon bumping around on top of the trailer.

  That was no raccoon.

  “Well, first there was this owl,” Mattie said. “I think it had been eating one of your strawberry donuts or something, and it knocked on the window by my bed and woke me up, and then there was this weird truck, and I bet the owl wanted me to see it, because . . .”

  Aunt Molly laughed and ducked down to fill a shelf with her Sunday special: Slug Bars. Her voice floated up over the edge of the counter. “The owl was eating a donut, but the truck was weird?”

  Mattie took a bite of her perfect plain donut, swallowed, and had a sip of chocolate milk. “That’s why the owl was pointing it out,” she said before taking another bite. “I think that truck was up to something. Why would it be pulled off the road, anyway? It didn’t have a flat tire. It went zooming away when that pot broke. We should call the county sheriff.”

  Aunt Molly shook her head. “Kiddo, we’re not getting the sheriff’s department all the way down here over a dream.”

  Mattie’s cheeks got hot, and she kept her eyes on the donut in front of her. After her mom’s accident, she may have called the county sheriff’s office a little too much, asking for updates on the hit-and-run investigation. Aunt Molly hadn’t exactly told Mattie she was being a pest—Molly wanted to know what happened too—but after a while she did tell Mattie it had to stop. All the calling.

  So Mattie didn’t push the idea of calling the sheriff’s department any more that morning. Aunt Molly seemed relieved. Then she smiled a little crooked smile. “Your mom used to have funny dreams about animals too, but they never had her hopping out of bed in the middle of the night.”

  Aunt Molly stopped lining up the bars, which looked just like the gooey banana slugs that came creeping through Big Sur every spring.

  Mattie squirmed a little, hearing Aunt Molly mention Mom. Most days, she and Aunt Molly only talked about her at home, just before bed. It was easier that way. So Mattie tried to make what she had seen into a joke, when what she really wanted was to be taken seriously. “No, I swear by all that is holey and sweet. It’s not a story. That hooty owl woke me up, and its beak was all pink with icing, and it looked down the road at the white truck . . .”

  The string of copper bells on the front door tinkled, and a young couple came in, followed by a whole rush of morning customers. Martín, who helped run the shop most days, was in back frying up a new batch of donuts, so Aunt Molly gave Mattie an I’ll-see-about-you-later look and greeted her visitors. Mattie let her shoulders slump and snuck a look at the couple at the front of the line. She had them pegged as tourists even before they ordered the Banana Slug Bars.

  Mattie could tell a lot about people who came into Owl’s just from their choice of donut and drink. Tourists were their own category. When you were home, you might be a simple, classic cake donut, but on vacation you could be a silly Slug Bar. Mattie and her mom had always ordered Slug Bars when they drove from Monterey to visit Aunt Molly in the summers. Slug Bars and swimming in the river and giggly sleepovers with Mom and Aunt Molly felt like forever ago. The thought of those trips was stranger to Mattie now than an owl with icing on its feathers.

  She’d rather pay attention to the line of customers.

  After Aunt Molly sold a Strawberry Iced Classic and a plain milk to a cute little boy with his parents (who got matching maple bars and coffee, which put them in the happy and relaxed category), one of the shop’s most interesting customers came in. Mattie called him Mr. Slug, because he always wore a yellow checked shirt like he was going to church or something. He had a big belly and a ring of hair like powdered sugar around his bald head. He came in every month or so, pestering Aunt Molly about her recipe for Banana Slug Bars. Had she changed it since taking over from the old owner? What kind of flour did she use now?

  He always bought four Slug Bars, and Aunt Molly always smirk-smiled at him and teased that maybe next time she’d share her recipe. But she never gave up the goods. Mattie knew for a fact that Molly had changed the recipe, just a little, when she took over the shop three years ago. Grandma Lillian and Grandpa Herman had started Owl’s together a long time before that. Almost everything had stayed the same as it was when Mattie was very little, but the new and improved Slug Bars were so good that even Grandma Lillian would have agreed with the change. Still, sometimes Aunt Molly made them the old way, Grandma’s way, when Mattie wanted.

  Aunt Molly said that Mr. Slug was a retired baker. He’d even told her that he’d been a friend of Grandma’s. Still, no way was Molly sharing the recipe. Mattie figured that Mr. Slug must have had a crush on Grandma Lillian and missed her old Slug Bars. It was sweet and a little sad. Something she could understand.

  Next came Mrs. Mantooth, who had bought the land south of the donut shop two years ago and put in the weirdest and fanciest house Mattie had ever seen. It was
half built into the steep hillside, like a cave. Aunt Molly said that Mrs. Mantooth had a swimming pool inside too. She always dressed like she was living in a yoga magazine, but her hands were splotchy with old-person freckles.

  Mattie knew without listening that Mrs. Mantooth would order a glass of ice water with lemon and a single donut hole without sprinkles. Since she was a neighbor—and nobody in the history of time had ever ordered just a single donut hole—Aunt Molly never charged Mrs. Mantooth. That woman wasn’t there for the food anyway. She was there to complain about one of the two things her property shared with the donut shop.

  The well or the driveway.

  That morning, Mrs. Mantooth was complaining about the well. She said she thought it needed a new pump, because the one they had was making a rattling noise. The pump stood on the ground between the donut shop and the riverbank like a friendly robot. It whooshed and clanked as it sucked up water for the well from underneath the river, but Mattie wouldn’t say that it rattled. She took another bite of her plain donut and smirked as Aunt Molly gave Mrs. Mantooth exactly one donut hole for zero dollars.

  No way could they afford a new pump. Mattie didn’t think they needed one either. If Mrs. Mantooth wanted to fill her fancy pool and take a shower at the same time, then she’d have to buy that pump herself—which was something Mattie didn’t think she’d really ever do, because who orders a single donut hole?

  A cheapskate. Big fancy house or not.

  Mrs. Mantooth swooped out in a huff, leaving her ice water on the counter. Mattie watched through the window as she folded the top of the donut bag down over and over before throwing it into the trash.

  She didn’t even eat her donut. Jeez.

  While Mattie watched Mrs. Mantooth march toward her driveway, a big motor home swayed around the bend in the highway. Its wide black tires sent some gravel flying just where that mysterious truck had been parked the night before. Mattie hopped up onto her knees and leaned against the window to get a better view. There was nothing special about that part of the road so far as she could tell. Not at all. Which made the truck from last night seem even more suspicious.