Minerva Clark Gets a Clue (7 page)

There was yellow police tape strung across the glass front door. It said POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS. Inside, you could see the wire postcard racks and a bunch of big cops standing around with their hands on their hips.

“I wonder what's going on over there,” I said.

“Cool—a robbery,” said Quills.

“Or something worse,” said Mark Clark. “They usually don't waste the tape for a simple robbery.”

My oldest older brother was right; it was something worse. Way worse. I don't know how I knew this, I just did. And suddenly I also knew I had to check it out for myself.

Before I even knew I was doing it, I took Jupiter out of where he was snoozing in my hoodie pocket and plopped him in Mark Clark's lap. Some Minerva Clark I did not recognize threw open the door and jumped out of the car, slid between two parked cars at the curb, and ducked right under the police tape, just like it was the most normal thing. I heard the muffled sound of Mark Clark and Quills squawking from inside the car.

Inside Under the Covers some of the policemen were just standing around, conversations coming out of the walkie talkies stuck in their belts. One of them was wearing really strong aftershave. They didn't notice me.

Behind the counter, a guy in a sports coat the color and texture of a granola bar was leaning over Jordan's friend Dwight, the one who'd owned Toob Sock, the black-footed ferret. I peeked around the counter and saw Dwight lying on the floor on his back, rolled half on one hip, as if he'd fallen. I could see only his head poking out from behind where he'd undoubtedly fallen. His head was tilted slightly away from me, as if he were gazing up at the shelves filled with books that lined the back wall of the store.

I stood there and stared, like I had every right to be there. Poor Dwight's Harry Potter glasses were missing, and there was a meaty gash on the left side of his head, deep red blood darker than it ever is on
Law
&
Order
, shining around the wound, matted in his hair. Dwight's eyes were closed, but his mouth was opened just a little. You could see the bottom of his chipped front tooth. I kept thinking,
Why is Dwight lying behind the counter taking a nap
? Weird, huh? Obviously he wasn't sleeping.

He was dead.

I was looking at a dead person.

I had to look away. I had to look at something else. I
stared at the cover of
Bad Hair
. It had a photograph of a boy with thick wavy red hair wearing an orange turtleneck. Then the plastic bucket of glittery sea-blue eyeglass cases caught my eye. I looked a little closer. The more-purple-than-blue one that Jupiter had gnawed on wasn't there. Who would buy an eyeglass case with teeth marks on one end? Or maybe Dwight had just gotten rid of it. I thought about how Dwight hadn't gotten mad, even though Jupiter had wrecked his merchandise. He was amused. He was a nice guy, a good person, and here he was dead on the floor of this quiet bookstore.

Too Much Aftershave yelled, “Hey! What's she doing here!” He was about ten feet tall and had an army haircut, where you could see his skull through the haircut. His scalp glistened with sweat. His red face was crumpled in irritation or anger or both. I stood there and looked right at him. I hadn't cringed when he hollered. I didn't cry, or worry that he was thinking,
Who
is
this double freak show freak?
I wasn't worried at all.

“Miss, this is a crime scene. You can't be here.” A Latino cop with the whitest teeth ever took me by my upper arm.

“I got a phone call about a book,” I lied. “And I'm here to pick it up.”

“You can get it another time,” said White Teeth.

“But I need it for a report,” I said. “It's due tomorrow.” I smiled and shrugged.

“From who?” asked Too Much Aftershave.

“Who what?” I said.

“Who called you? And when?”

“I don't know,” I said. “Someone called saying my book was here. They left the message on my voice mail.”

“It wasn't him, was it?” Too Much Aftershave pointed at Dwight.

“Oh no! It was a girl. A lady.” Along the wall behind the counter was a floor-to-ceiling bookcase. On one shelf there was a row of books with squares of paper held to the spines with rubber bands. On each square there was a name. I guessed these were books on hold.

“That's mine right there,” I pointed in the direction of the books. I had about three seconds to figure out which title looked like something I would order.

“
Bridal Bargains: Secrets to Throwing a Fantastic Wedding on a Realistic Budget
. You getting married or something?” said Too Much Aftershave.

“No, that one over there.” I pointed to the far end of the case.

He leaned over to read the spine. “
Professional Real Estate Development?
”

“Yeah, that's it,” I said. “It's for a report.”

“So you said,” said Too Much Aftershave. He had
pale psycho killer eyes. He turned and glared as he took the piece of paper from around the book. He read the name on the paper.

“What's your report about, Miss … Takimoto?”

“Get her out of here,” said one of the other cops. “We've got the medical examiner on his way.”

I took the book, turned, and walked out of Under the Covers very fast, the way they tell you to walk when there's a fire drill at school. Too Much Aftershave didn't ask if I wanted to pay for the book. As I slipped between the two cars still parked at the curb, I started shaking. Part of it was seeing Dwight dead, but part of it was also that I didn't recognize myself. Who was that girl who acted as if she had every right to be there, who wanted to hang around as long as possible just to … just to … I didn't know what … just to look? It was as if I'd had an out-of-body experience without ever leaving my body.

The BMW was just where I'd left it, stuck behind the yellow hole digger. As I opened the door, Mark Clark shouted, “What was
that
?”

When Mark Clark got mad, the sparkle went out of his big blue eyes. We called it his Paid Assassin Look, and he was throwing his Paid Assassin Look my way as he dumped poor Jupiter back in my lap.

“You're hurting my ferret,” I said. “Be gentle.”

“You don't just jump out of the car in traffic! What's wrong with you?” said Mark Clark.

“There happens to be a dead person in there. Jordan's friend Dwight, the bookstore guy.”

I could see by the looks on my brothers' faces that they were worried, but I hadn't done anything dangerous. What I'd done was just a non-Minerva-type thing to do. I felt my heart beating in my neck. Now I was irritated. “And I didn't jump out of the car in traffic. We're just sitting here.”

“Dead? Like, murdered?” asked Quills. “Cool.”

“It was not cool!” I shouted. “It was awful.”

“Take it easy,” said Mark Clark. The warmth returned to his eyes. He patted my knee. “What's going on with you?”

What
was
going on with me?

That's what we'd come to Dr. Lozano to find out. Dr. Lozano had a tiny gold nose ring and was as short as the shortest girl in my class. She wore blue slacks and a handwoven vest with crocodiles on it. She shook each of our hands, and hers were so thin and small, I looked down to make sure she wasn't short a few fingers. I picked her hand up before she snatched it away and said, “You have the smallest hands on a grown-up I think I've ever seen.”

There was a weird moment when no one said anything, though I could practically feel the words “Don't be rude, Minerva” forming themselves in Mark Clark's big computer genius brain. But then Dr. Lozano laughed, clapped her narrow hands together, and said, “That I do. That I do.”

Have you ever been aware of the moment you have a thought for the very first time in your entire life? At that moment I had this thought: Being a grown-up and being less than five feet tall might be worse than being a five-eight thirteen-year-old. People might not take you very seriously. They might think you look like a doll.

Dr. Lozano led me back into her office, where she showed me some paint splotches and asked me what I thought they were, then asked me to fill in a peg board with yellow pegs. She tested my hand-eye coordination and gave me a questionnaire with about eight hundred questions on it.

She asked me to draw a self-portrait.

I felt myself getting impatient. This was stupid. I was totally fine. All I could think of was seeing Dwight—I mean Dwight's body—lying there on the floor. I could only think of his mouth open that little bit and how he'd been so nice to me that day in the bookstore. Who could have wanted him dead? He didn't seem like the kind of person to have any enemies. And had Jordan heard the
news yet? They were pretty good friends. My mind was doing a push-me pull-you thing, where it wanted to go in two different directions at the same time.

Finally, Dr. Lozano brought in Mark Clark. He must have told Dr. Lozano over the phone that our dad was on a business trip and our mom lived in Santa Fe, because she talked to him just as if he were my parent, which, of course, he pretty much was.

She asked him about my habits, what I ate, how much I back talked. Since the accident, had he noticed anything different about the way I acted? Had I slept all right the night before? Did I repeat myself when I talked? Did I look in the mirror a lot?

Mark Clark pulled on his goatee, pondering. “She's more … inquisitive?” He told her how I jumped out of the car and ran into Under the Covers and how unlike me that was. “Bolder,” he said.

“Hmmmm,” said Dr. Lozano. She entered this information into her computer.

“This is very interesting,” she said finally. “I've seen this only once before, with Caleb Presinger, a boy a little older than Minerva who was shocked while trying to build an electric chair for a haunted house.” Mark Clark must have made a face, because then she said, “Not a
real
electric chair. It delivered a low-voltage shock. Nothing serious.”

“Unless you were Caleb Presinger,” I said.

Dr. Lozano laughed. “Yes, I suppose you're right.”

“Minerva's cognitive skills are fine, and so are her motor skills. All good news. However, she did score moderately low on the TSSA—the Test of Serious Symptoms of Adolescence—and significantly low on the TPS, which is a major indicator of what we're looking at here.”

“TPS? Isn't that like a television station?” I said. I knew it wasn't. It sounded funny, though.

“The Think Poorly of Self test. I've yet to meet a girl in Minerva's age range who scores lower than a fifty. Minerva scored a two.”

“Meaning what?” asked Mark Clark.

“I'm not sure exactly,” said Dr. Lozano. “I don't think the full effects of her shock are known yet, but from the looks of things, I'd say that Minerva has suffered a loss of the self-consciousness that's so typical in girls her age. Somehow, the shock rewired her sense of self. According to these test results, she now thinks she's perfect just the way she is.”

Mark Clark looked over at me. I gave him my bug-eyed look.

“But how will that manifest itself? How will she be different?”

“Who knows?” said Dr. Lozano. “We so rarely see
girls this age who aren't utterly consumed with how they look or don't look. It's hard to say what will happen.”

What I got out of what Dr. Lozano was saying was that I used to think I was a freak show freak but not anymore.

That doesn't sound like such a big deal, does it?

But it was.

MARK CLARK HAS AN OBNOXIOUS HABIT
of assigning chores the minute you walk in the door. I was sure he would still do this to me even though I was now, according to Dr. Lozano, officially impaired.

When we got home, I ran to my room up on the third floor and cranked up Green Day. I always make sure the music is not so loud that I get told to turn it down, but loud enough so that if anyone wants me they have to come to my room and open the door, instead of just hollering up the stairs. It will always be easier for the person who wants you to take out the trash to do it himself than climb three flights of stairs to tell you to do it. I learned this trick from Quills.

I sat down at my desk, turned on my computer, fished
around in my top drawer for my rebus notebook. All the thoughts in my head were jostling for attention like how the little kindergartners at my school push to be first in line. It's quite possible that in addition to scoring low on all those tests, my brain had been burned to a crisp and I would now be unable to keep one thought straight.

I made a list:

IM Reggie and tell him about Jordan's identity theft and Dwight's murder: Was there a connection?

IM Hannah about going to the water park on Saturday.
Work on my Boston Tea Party report.
Consider dreadlocks.

But just as I typed in Reggie's screen name, I lost the will to IM. There was so much to say, and the truth is, IMing is only good for when you don't really have anything to say.

Yesterday my favorite cousin had gotten arrested by mistake, and today I'd seen my first murder victim. It didn't feel right to write those things. So I called Reggie and told him to meet me, something I hadn't done since about fifth grade, when we were open best friends. Reggie loved conspiracy theories, and I had a feeling I had one on my hands.

I ran downstairs, fetched Jupiter from his cage in the living room behind the baby grand piano no one ever played. Mark Clark was involved in a loud computer battle on EverQuest. I told the back of his head that I was taking Jupiter out for some air. Sometimes I worry that Mark Clark will become so addicted to EQ that Quills will have to be the permanent BIC. A frightening thought.

I met Reggie at the playground of Holy Family, where we went to school (one more year, rah!). Holy Family was K–8, so even though we were in middle school and were too mature for the plastic slide and swinging bridge, we still had to put up with it. We had to put up with lectures from our principal, Mr. French, about not splashing in puddles or spitting rocks, like we even did that stupid stuff anymore.