Harper Madigan: Junior High Private Eye (5 page)

“Ah, the auditorium,” Austin says, hugging his notebook to his chest and taking a deep breath, as if he can figure out what happened just by smell. “The scene of the crime.”

There are about a dozen kids practicing their jazz hands on stage. An MP3 player is plugged into one of the speakers, spitting out blasts of fast, catchy music. Two stagehands are going over the script with Oliver, who thankfully has his back to the door and doesn’t see us come in. More importantly, he doesn’t see
me
.

Sitting in a metal fold-up chair, watching it all with her arms crossed over her chest, is Danigail. Nobody goes anywhere near her. A few girls glare as they pass by, keeping their distance but still giving her a nasty look. I watch the smile on Danigail’s face falter, hurt, but then she covers up the pain with a curl of her lip and vengeful disdain. She makes like she’s going to get up and go after them, and the girls pick up the pace to get away from her. As Danigail flops back down in her seat she catches a glimpse of me, and I motion for her to come over.

“How’s the investigation going? Don’t tell me I’m off the hook already.”

Austin frowns. “Now, when you say ’off the hook,’ is that a confession of guilt?” He tilts his head, tapping his notebook with his pen.

“It’s just an expression. And anyway, just because I’m
on the hook
doesn’t mean I did it.” Danigail turns towards me, jerking a thumb at Austin as if he isn’t in the room. “Is this guy for real? This is seriously the kind of company you’re keeping now, Harper?”

“I could ask you the same thing. We just talked to Alexis.”

“You mean track star, gets better grades than me, wouldn’t hurt a fly Alexis?” Danigail gives me a pointed look.

“How sure are you about that last one?”

“She was Veronica’s understudy,” Austin adds. “She had
motive
.”

Danigail rolls her eyes. “Her and everybody else. Name one person Veronica hasn’t rubbed the wrong way in the last six months,
especially
anyone involved in this play.”

Austin touches the end of the pen to his mouth, suddenly deep in thought, like he was actually going through the list of everyone he’d ever met and deciding whether or not they could have wanted to sabotage Veronica.

“The way I hear it,” I tell her, “you and Alexis have been keeping secrets. You want me to get you off the hook, you’d better spill it.”

Danigail scowls and chews the end of her fingernail. Then she brightens, a smile sliding across her mouth. “I’ll tell you everything I know, but only on one condition.”

“This isn’t a game, DG. If you want me to figure this out, then I need all the facts.”

“And you’ll get them,” she says. “But first? You have to talk to Ollie.”

My blood runs cold and my stomach drops like someone just pulled the floor out from under me.

Austin looks from me to her and back again.

“Some things are more important than the facts,” Danigail whispers. “Like friendship. And anyway, he was the first one on the scene after Veronica fell.”

“And from what you’ve told me, he thinks you’re guilty.”

She swallows. “You said you needed all the facts. That means talking to him.”

“He was first on the scene,” Austin says. “We have to investigate.”

“I don’t—”

“Hey, Ollie!” Danigail shouts before I can stop her. Oliver turns his head and she waves her hands, motioning for him to come over. He sees me, his face going a little pale as he wheels himself over to us, but mostly his expression is warm, like he might actually be
happy
to see me. “Wow,” Oliver says. “If it isn’t Harper Madigan. I was beginning to wonder if you even still went to this school, it’s been so long.” His eyes dart to the floor, then to my face, a half smile tugging at his mouth. He holds out his hand to me, hesitating at first, like he can’t decide what the right gesture is.

I haven’t seen him since the accident. I saw him once in the hospital, but he wasn’t awake, so it doesn’t count. I poked my head into his room, my legs shaking so bad I could hardly put one foot in front of the other. Oliver was just lying there in his hospital bed, looking half dead, and even though his hands twitched a little in his sleep, his legs didn’t move, not even once.

He’d wanted to be a dancer on Broadway, and he’d been good, too. He could have made it, and then I had to go and get him involved in my stupid plans.

He looked bad then, in the hospital. And he might be in a wheelchair now, but at least he’s smiling, which is more than I can say for me.

“I ran into your dad at the grocery store a couple weeks ago, when I was there with my mom. He said you were doing okay, but… it’s good to see you in person,” he says, his voice choking up a little.

I take a step back as if he just bit me, not welcomed me with open arms. Austin raises an eyebrow.

“I knew you’d come around eventually,” Oliver says.

I swallow down a lump in my throat. My heart’s pounding and every instinct I’ve got is telling me to bolt. But I can’t because if I run, Danigail might get blamed for a crime she didn’t commit. If I run, it means I’m a worse person than I thought. It’s one thing to have avoided this reunion with Oliver all this time, but it’s another to not even look him in the eyes when he’s sitting right in front of me, looking like the forgiving type. At least when he looks at me. He glances over at Danigail and there’s hurt and betrayal curling his lip just a tiny bit, but it’s there. He can forgive me, but not her?

“You were the first one on the scene after it happened?” I ask. Everyone is standing around, gaping at me like I’m a monkey in a zoo. I elbow Austin. “Hard to take notes with your notebook closed up like that.”

He swallows and scrambles to get his notebook open to a blank page, forgetting to uncap his pen at first and getting confused when it doesn’t write anything.

I shoot a glare at Danigail, jerking my chin and motioning for her to get going. Reluctantly, she sighs and says, “I got some stuff I have to do. You’ll be okay, right, Ollie?”

“When am I not okay?” Oliver snaps.

Danigail holds her hands up in a “peace” gesture and backs away. It didn’t used to be like that when I knew them. When Danigail was a straight A student and Oliver was practicing his dance moves.

“So,” I say, getting back to the investigation. “You were the first on the scene?”

He nods. “I’ve been working night and day on this musical.”

“You wrote it?” Austin says, his tongue sticking out of his mouth a little as he takes notes.

“Every word. Well, except for, you know.” Oliver takes a deep breath, holds it, and then lets out a long, frustrated sigh. He grits his teeth. “Veronica made some
suggestions
.”

“You didn’t like those,” I say.

“If Alexis had taken the part, I wouldn’t have had to deal with Veronica.”

“I hear she’s a real diva.”

“With a capital D,” Austin adds.

“
Phelps
. I’m asking the questions here.”

“It wasn’t a question.”

“Well, I—” He’s right. As annoying as that is. “I’ll do the commenting. Got it?”

He glares at me and writes something in his notebook, pressing so hard I can hear his pen digging into the paper.

I turn back to Oliver. “Veronica. You and her, you don’t get along.”

“She wants to run the show.” Oliver runs his hand through his hair. “We get into arguments sometimes.” He glances over his shoulder, making sure Danigail is out of hearing range. “Veronica’s always thinking she knows best. She wants to make changes to
everything
, pretty much on a daily basis. It’s like she’s nobody if she’s not getting attention. She’s not a writer—she’s hardly even an actress—but she’s constantly tweaking her lines, the lyrics, the musical score.” He rubs his forehead with his thumbs. “It’s been…
interesting
. Let’s just say that if I never have to work with her again, I won’t be shedding any tears over it.”

“And Danigail?”

“How many guys have an overprotective
little
sister? A few weeks ago, Veronica was giving me a hard time. Really getting on my case. She actually shoved my chair. Then Danigail disappears and the fire alarm goes off. Doesn’t take a genius to do the math there, and who asked her to do that, anyway? Veronica’s a pain, but I can handle her. I never needed Danigail getting all in her face about it. Making threats. And now… acting on them.”

So there it is. He thinks she did it. I can’t help the way my mouth droops or the disappointment that sits heavy in my chest. “She wouldn’t, Oliver. You should know that.”

“I don’t know
anything
about what she’d do or not. She’s changed, Harper. You don’t know her anymore. Don’t think for even a minute that you do. Not after what happened.”

“Which was?” Austin asks, flipping pages in his notebook to get to a new section.

“There was an incident,” I say.

“An accident,” Oliver corrects. “A random twist of fate that left me paralyzed and stuck in this chair. It changed my life forever, and it changed Danigail, too. She took it hard. Not just this”—he gestures to himself—“but you leaving really hurt her. You guys have been friends forever. Had been, I mean.”

“The detective with the dark past,” Austin mutters, scribbling like mad in his notebook. “This is the good stuff.”

I glare at him, my teeth clenched. “It’s none of your business—that means
stop writing it down
!”

“Don’t worry. These are my own personal notes. I’ll file them separately from my report. Unless of course this figures into the investigation.”

“It doesn’t and it wasn’t an accident,” I add, looking Oliver in the eyes. “Connor Mills didn’t like me making inquiries about him. I was playing detective and I got too close. You wanted to play sidekick, but I was in over my head and I should have done it alone. And, Phelps,” I growl without looking at him, my hands balled into fists, “if you even think about writing that down, I’ll feed that notebook to you, page by delicious page.”

“Got it,” he mumbles. “Switching to memory mode.”

What is he, a robot? “I didn’t need a sidekick,” I tell Oliver. “I should have gone alone.”

“You didn’t know it was a trap,” Oliver says.

He’s right, I didn’t. But still. I can’t say I had no idea Connor Mills might be dangerous. I’m a lot wiser now than I was last summer, a seasoned detective, no longer new to this business. Looking back, it’s easy to see it was a mistake.

Connor sent me a note saying he wanted to meet me at the old barn in the woods, what he calls his headquarters. Like a clubhouse for thugs, and he’s their king. You go behind the school for a little ways and there’s the woods. You go a little farther than that and there’s a trail that leads to the barn. It’s secluded enough as it is, and he wanted to meet after dark—and of course he brought friends. He wanted to teach me a lesson for snooping into his business—the stuff he does on a daily basis that everyone else looks the other way on. Going alone to an old barn in the woods to meet Connor Mills wasn’t my idea of a good time, but I wasn’t going to back down, and Oliver wanted to go with me. He said he’d have my back, but while he was watching out for me, who was watching out for him?

“It was an
accident
,” Oliver says again. “Even Connor didn’t intend for this to happen to me.”

“No, he meant for
me
to fall from that loft. I was his target. It should have been me.”

“He wanted to scare you—not put one of us in a wheelchair. I’m sure he didn’t mean for
this
to happen!”

I’m not sure what Connor Mills would or wouldn’t do, or how far he’d go. Maybe he meant to hurt me, not Oliver, and maybe he didn’t mean for him to hit that old tractor engine hiding under the hay down below the loft. But I’ve been keeping tabs on him ever since—if he thought he was getting rid of me, he was dead wrong—and I’ve never seen him show an ounce of remorse.

“You could have been a dancer,” I say. “Big stage on Broadway, bright lights, the works. And now—”

“And now I
write
those musicals. There’s no guarantee I was going to make it as a performer. I mean, there’s no guarantee now—there never is. And yeah, Harper, it sucks that this happened to me, but I’ve moved on. I’ve found something else, and what have you done?”

“Don’t worry, I’m going to find something on him. One of these days, he’s going to slip up and I’m going to be there to expose him for the criminal he is.” Maybe Connor got away with what happened to Oliver—no proof that he was involved or that it wasn’t an accident, just our word against his, and his mother’s in the PTA so guess who everyone believed—but he’s going to pay eventually. If not for what happened that night in the barn, then for something else.

“Don’t worry?! Harper, I’m not worried about getting back at Connor, I’m worried about
you
!”

This startles me and I take a step back. “You’re the one in the chair, Oliver.”

“I know, and I’m getting on with my life. I’m the one paralyzed from the waist down, but you’re the one who can’t move, the one who can’t get past this. Think about it, Harper. I’m the one who got hurt, but it’s you who can’t let go. It’s you who’s obsessed with revenge.”

His words hit me like a sucker punch to the stomach.

“Face it. You haven’t seen me since it happened. But how often do you see Connor?”

“I’m not hanging out with him—I’m investigating him.” My voice shakes. I hope Danigail’s happy, because this is exactly why I didn’t want to talk to Oliver.

“Wasn’t investigating him what got you in trouble in the first place?” He raises an eyebrow in disbelief. The disappointment on his face stings like lemon juice in a paper cut.

“I’m not letting him get away with it.” I can’t forgive myself for Oliver ending up in that wheelchair because of me, because he was stupid enough to be my friend. Maybe he can move on, but I’m stuck looking for redemption. “Now,” I add, nodding to Austin and his notebook, “we’re here to talk to you about what happened last Friday to Veronica Jones. You were the first on the scene, right?”