Minerva Clark Goes to the Dogs

  MINERVA

  CLARK

  goes to the dogs

  by KAREN KARBO

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Karen Karbo

  For Fiona,

  again and always

  1

  I defy you to find a more disgusting chore than cleaning out the refrigerator at my house. My three older brothers believe in leftovers, except when it comes to eating them.

  Cleaning out the fridge was my job, even though I don’t believe in leftovers at all. I took out the Tupper-ware containing mysterious fuzz-covered blobs, white take-out cartons half full of rotting Who Knows What, and plastic bags of mushy fruit and set them on the counter.

  I wished I could become a superhero for three minutes, so that I could pick the fridge up, fly it to the closest Dumpster, and empty out the entire thing. But no. Mark Clark, my oldest older brother, who’s been basically in charge of things since my parents got divorced, had to peek inside all the containers before deciding what stayed and what went, even though in the end it all went. What a system.

  I sighed. I took my cell out of my back pocket, checked to see if I’d missed any calls. At first I thought my summer would rock because my parents weren’t around—my mom had moved to Santa Fe to teach yoga with her weird boyfriend, Rolando, and my dad, Charlie, was always out of town on business—but Mark Clark was turning out to be worse than any parent. He had attacks of guilt where he thought I was going to be scarred for life, so he gave me extra chores and extra rules and signed me up for special classes that were supposed to help me get into a good college, which would prove I was not scarred at all.

  At the bottom of one of the vegetable crisper drawers, in the way back, I found a plastic bag of radishes that had been in there so long the frilly green tops had turned into a gooey pale brown liquid. I picked up the top of the plastic bag with two fingers, dragged it out, and flung it into the garbage. Some of the rotted radish top goop got on my hands.

  “Disgusting!” I shrieked to the empty kitchen.

  It was late in the morning. The brothers were all out. Maybe it was the sweet/sour smell that got worse the closer I got to the back of the fridge, or maybe I was PMSing, but tears started in my eyes. It was the first time I’d cried since the electric shock that changed my life, where for reasons even the doctors could not explain, my self-consciousness and self-loathing had been jolted clean out of my head. Or else the electricity had somehow rewired my brain, so that I came to feel that while no, I wasn’t perfect, I was fine just the way I was. They kept saying it was a mystery, the way the brain worked. My friend Hannah said the shock had turned me into the Queen of Self-Esteem. Whatever.

  The moral of the story is, even if you are the Queen of Self-Esteem, life can still suck. I know I know I know. Life is unfair. My brothers tell me that all the time. But only the month before, I’d solved a real murder case and helped crack a major identity theft ring, and now here I was stuck doing boring summer chores, just like any stupid kid. But I’ve found out the hard way that just because you solve one mystery, that doesn’t mean the cops or newspaper writers or whoever will automatically call your cell and ask for your help.

  Quills, my second-oldest older brother, always says people are afraid to color outside the lines, and an example of this is grown-ups refusing to see how handy it would be to have a thirteen-year-old on your case squad or working for your detective agency. The people being investigated would get one look at my braces and girl-raised-by-wolves hair and high-tops and think I was just a dorky kid who couldn’t possibly know a thing. I could wander through the world like a distracted teen and be sleuthing the whole time. I could ask questions that would seem dumb or rude coming from an adult, and no one would suspect a thing.

  But no one was interested.

  It’s not like I haven’t been trying.

  I called 911 with information about a suspicious-looking character in our neighborhood who wore a knit ski cap and parka in ninety-degree weather and went up and down the street on garbage day, picking through the recycle bins for bottles. I also called about the house next door that got TPed by boys I recognized from my school, Holy Family. I was pretty sure the paper had been stolen from the school’s supply closet, since they’d done it once before. I called about a tricycle I saw in a tree at the end of the block. How did it get there? And wasn’t some rug rat crying his eyes out because it was missing?

  The same operator always seemed to answer the phone when I called. She had a deep musical voice like those old-timey blues singer ladies that my dad sometimes listened to. The last time I called (about the tricycle in the tree) she said, “Minerva Clark, you are a kick in the pants, girl, but you need to use the regular number and stop dialing 911.”

  I asked, “Kick in the pants how exactly?”

  “You be good now,” said the operator. Then I heard the click in my ear.

  I was trying to figure out whether I’d get in trouble for using a dish towel to sop up the dead radish goop at the back of the crisper drawer when my cell rang. I held my breath, said a little prayer to whatever saint oversees the boyfriend-girlfriend situation, and flipped open the phone without checking the number. I wanted it to be Kevin, who I met while I was solving my last mystery. Kevin. He was taller than me. He had crunchy shiny swimmer’s hair and blue eyes and dark eyebrows. A hottie extraordinaire. Extraordinaire is French for extraordinary.

  I’d invited Kevin to the last dance of the year. We slow-danced every slow dance, and he told me he liked my wild hair, that surfer girls on the island of Maui had hair just like mine. Then, the day after school got out he left on vacation with his parents, which is where he was right now. At the dance, he bought me a Dr Pepper from the snack table using his own money. I didn’t let myself think about it too much—I thought about it all the time! I could hardly think of anything else!—but I wondered if he would be my boyfriend, if he wasn’t in Montana fly-fishing.

  But the call wasn’t from Kevin. It was someone who normally never called me, except once in the sixth grade, when she was having a slumber party and wanted to make sure I got the point that I hadn’t been invited.

  “Minerva, I didn’t know who else to call. I need some help, like right now. I thought about how, since you’re so good at solving mysteries and everything, maybe you could help me. I lost a ring and I need to find it immediately. I am so in trouble. My dad wants to kill me. I hate it when my dad wants to kill me.”

  The voice was familiar, but it was hard to tell who it was because she was sniffling and hiccupping, gulping down air as if they weren’t making any more of it. “Who is this?” I asked.

  “It’s Chelsea. De Guzman? From your class?” She sounded irritated that she had to identify herself, like rich people sometimes do when you ask them normal questions. “I’ve got to get the ring back tonight, or sooner. As soon as possible. I am so busted. I am in so much trouble.” She tried to catch her breath.

  “Okay,” I said. I closed the crisper drawer. Someone would go to the grocery store soon and toss a new bag of carrots in there and no one would ever see the dead radish goop puddle in the back. I grabbed a can of Mountain Dew, closed the refrigerator door, and sat right down there on the kitchen floor to listen to Chelsea’s story.

  The day after school got out, Chelsea went to London with her mom and dad. Chelsea is a
n only child and her mom is one of those moms who always has perfect hair and fingernails and helps out at school, and her dad is Louis de Guzman Fine Jewelry. If you live here in Portland, you know his name, but I think he also has shops in fancy places like Beverly Hills. The de Guzmans live in one of those giant mansions on Knott Avenue that take up an entire block and have pillars and balconies and a Japanese gardener out front pinching off the tiny dead azalea flowers, one by one.

  Chelsea and her parents were at the airport with their matching luggage, loopy tired from the eight-hundred-hour flight from London. It was a little after 10:00 A.M They’d been flying all night. Chelsea wanted a cappuccino. Chelsea was the kind of girl who drank cappuccino and got manicures and wore ankle bracelets. I don’t like coffee just yet, although somewhere along the way kids start drinking coffee. In my opinion this, and not taking out the garbage without being asked, is the first sign of being a grown-up.

  Chelsea said she would die if she did not have a cappuccino, but her parents just wanted to get home. Chelsea begged, and they gave in, but said that she needed to be down in the baggage claim area at 10:30 sharp, or else they were going home without her. Chelsea was a well-known dawdler.

  She got in line at a small coffee place on the main concourse called Coffee People. She said the line was all the way out the door. She said she must have waited an hour, standing there staring into the fingerprint-smeared glass case of scones and muffins. But of course she couldn’t have waited an hour, because her parents had given her about twenty minutes.

  The lady ahead of her sighed a lot and folded her arms, and kept switching her weight from one hip to the other, all impatient. She had waist-length hair, thick and coarse like a horse’s tail, and she kept swishing it around. “This is so ridiculous,” said the lady to no one in particular. She had an accent, but not like the de Guzmans’ housekeeper, Agata. Maybe the lady was Hispanic? Then she turned and asked Chelsea the time. Chelsea looked at her phone. It was 10:15.

  “She asked to see my ring—you know that flower ring I got at Claire’s? All the popular girls wanted one, remember? That totally adorable one, with the silver band and the little crystals that formed the petals around the bigger pink crystal? Remember? I wore it to the dance.”

  “Not really,” I said. In case you didn’t notice, I was totally into that guy I was slow-dancing with, I wanted to say, but didn’t. “So you showed her the ring.”

  “For only six bucks it was really the cutest ring. Very girly, but it would still look good on someone like you. Wait. That sounds really bad. I didn’t mean it to sound bad.”

  I laughed. “So you showed her the ring.”

  “Are you secretly hating me right now?”

  “Yeah, Chelsea, I’m secretly hating you. Except now you know, so it’s not a secret.” I rolled my eyes, even though there was no one around to appreciate it.

  “Don’t tease me. I’ve had a terrible day.” She sniffled.

  “So the lady in line ahead of you wanted to check out your ring.”

  “She wasn’t a lady exactly. More kind of probably twenty or something. Not old, but not a teenager either. She was wearing this awful awful purple tunic-y thing over jeans with a studded belt on the outside. Anyway, she asked if she could try it on and I said sure, and she tried it on and then she said she’d give me fifty dollars for it.”

  “For your ring from Claire’s?” My tone said: Only a crazy person would offer fifty bucks for one of those cheap, cut-glass rings from Claire’s, world headquarters for the type of cheesy jewelry and hair ornaments girls my age can’t resist.

  “Yeah, I know. What was up with that? I thought she was joking at first, but she wasn’t. She really really loved it. She said she was all into flowers, especially daisies, and she’d been wanting a ring like this just for forever, but could never find one. I thought I was being really smart.”

  “So the girl gave you fifty bucks? Just like that?”

  “Yep. Two twenties and a ten. I could buy five rings with that money. My dad is always hammering me about how you should never let opportunity pass you by and that’s what I thought I was doing, and then when we were in the cab on the way home my dad asked where my ring was. He picked up my hand and saw it wasn’t there and freaked out. He started yelling at me right there in the cab and cussing and that big vein in his forehead stuck out and his face was so red I thought he was going to have a heart attack, like he’s had before, you know my dad had that heart attack? When we were in fourth grade? I didn’t get to sing my solo in the Christmas pageant? Anyway, we’re in the cab and my dad’s screaming at me, and my mom’s screaming at my dad to calm down and then he’s like complaining about chest pains and my mom makes the driver go straight to the hospital.”

  “Is your dad okay?”

  “The doctor said it was anxiety or something. They didn’t tell me. They just said he wasn’t having another heart attack, and it was a good thing for me.”

  “The doctors said that?”

  “No no no,” said Chelsea impatiently. “I’m saying that. I’m just lucky I didn’t give my dad a heart attack over this.” Chelsea had gotten herself worked up again. She cried and hiccupped and sniffled some more. Then I heard her take a long deep breath in an attempt to get herself together.

  “Why was he so mad?” I asked.

  “Probably because I’m always losing stuff. I’m already on my third cell phone.”

  “But you didn’t lose the ring, you sold it.”

  “I said I lost it. I didn’t want him to get even madder. As it is he’s already probably going to ground me off the computer for the rest of the summer. And I know lying’s bad and stuff, and we’re not supposed to do it, ever, but I’m glad I did. Because it turns out I messed up royally. It turns out my dad had replaced the glass stone in the center of my Claire’s ring with a red diamond.”

  “A red diamond? You mean, like a real gem?” This didn’t make any sense to me.

  “He does it all the time when he’s bringing gems into the country. It’s too expensive to hire a company to transport it and you have to insure it and a whole bunch of things that are really expensive, I don’t know, I don’t know why he does it! Sometimes I think it’s just to show how smart he is. While we were in London he bought a red diamond for some important piece of jewelry he’s making for someone, and he took the cut glass out of the center of my ring and replaced it with the diamond. He thought it would be easy to get it home that way. Easier and cheaper.”

  “You sold some lady a ring with a real diamond in it?” My heart was a bongo played by a mad gorilla.

  “Nobody told me he’d made the switch. My mom told me afterward. At the hospital. I didn’t know. They thought if I knew, I’d wreck it. And look, I did wreck it.”

  “How much is this red diamond worth?”

  “I don’t know. Red diamonds are super rare. Millions maybe?”

  “Millions?”

  Chelsea de Guzman was a known drama queen. At the end of last year, when we got to watch Seabiscuit as a reward for not throwing pencils at each other in Mass, Chelsea had to go to the nurse because she was so upset when Seabiscuit broke his leg or tore his tendon or whatever it was that made him lame. I doubted the red diamond—who’d even heard of such a thing?—was worth millions. Still, the whole situation was pretty strange.

  “Didn’t your dad call the police, or airport security, or whatever?”

  “I don’t know. I think my mom called someone. There wasn’t any time. Pretty much the minute he found out the ring was gone his chest pains started. So can you help me? I still have the fifty dollars. If we could just find her, I’ll give her the money back. I’ll give her sixty dollars, even. I just have to get that ring back.”

  “I have to finish this thing I’m doing, then I’ll call you back. In the meantime, you sit down and think if there was anything else special about the girl, besides her long dark hair.”

  Chelsea begged me to give an exact time when I would call her
back. I said as soon as possible. I needed to give this whole thing some thought.

  I had only two shelves to go in the fridge, the top ones where we keep the milk and jars of olives and mayonnaise. I threw out a jar of olive juice that probably hadn’t had olives in it since Christmas, the last time I performed this chore. I wiped down the glass shelves with a sponge.

  It was just plain weird for a stranger to offer to buy a cheap ring right off your finger. Then again, one time a lady in the canned fruits aisle at the grocery store offered to buy my purple Chuck Taylors right off my feet. I said no way, but thank you very much. What was I going to do, walk around in my holey socks? So the main question was: Why did a strange woman want to buy Chelsea’s ring?

  Chelsea and I have known each other since pre-K, but I didn’t know her well. The closest we’d come were friends of friends of friends. These were the things I knew about Chelsea de Guzman: She was the only girl in our class who always wore a skirt on Free Dress Day. She was the only girl who got an A in algebra. Her family had a bunch of money and a bunch of those dogs called corgis, the same kind the Queen of England has. She was commonly thought to be the second-cutest girl in our class, after my friend Hannah. She was someone you always said you liked and thought was sweet and nice, so that she wouldn’t start a mean rumor about you.

  After I finished with the fridge, I closed the door and stared at the notes each brother had left stuck to the door beneath a magnet. The magnets were life-size pictures of creepy things. Beneath a red-legged tarantula was an orange Post-it saying Mark Clark was at work, would be home around five o’clock. Beneath a black beetle was a scrap of notebook paper saying Quills was out auditioning new drummers for Humongous Bag of Cashews, then going to look at a new guitar, would be home before six o’clock. Beneath a caterpillar was a yellow Post-it saying Morgan was doing some yard work for one of his college professors and would be home before donkeys could fly. Har!

  Each note also listed the best number at which to reach each brother. The notes were Mark Clark’s idea. It was the first summer I’d be left alone most of the day. Thirteen is a well-known awkward age, too old for a babysitter and too young to have a summer job.