The Mutual Admiration Society(7)
Even if my partner in crime is being stubborn, scared, or overly friendly with a dangerous guard dog or greaser, all I have to do to get her moving toward a safe location is to remind my little candy worshipper that I, her one and only, the sister who loves her like no other, will reward her with a yummy Hershey’s kiss if she beats me in a race to wherever I tell her to run to. (I’m ten times faster, of course, but I let her win. She wouldn’t play along if she didn’t get something out of the deal. She’s weird and a loonatic, not some chump.) So this morning, the start of the day that our Magic 8 Ball told me would change the Finley sisters’ entire lives, the beautiful Indian summer morning that I’m hoping to start investigating our very first murder case from the back porch of our house, I pluck my sister’s flapping hand out of the air, press it down on my shorts pocket that’s bulging with chocolate kisses, and tell her the same thing I told her in the backyard of the Tates’ house the night we needed to escape from the jaws of the wiener dog. “Race ya to the back porch! One for the money, two for the show, three to get ready, and—”
Sure enough, just like I was almost positive she would, the kid with a sweet tooth a mile long sings the words from her favorite song in all the world over her shoulder as she shoves past me and runs out of our bedroom door, “Go, Bird, go!”
3
LIKE A NECK TO COUNT DRACULA
After Birdie and me scramble down the stairs, skid across the green linoleum kitchen floor, and burst through the squeaky back screen door that Daddy kept meaning to oil, my sister throws her arms in the air and announces with a gloating smile, “I win!”
When I drop the first-place chocolate kiss candy into her hand that she’s waving two inches from my face, I want to, but I resist the temptation to tell her for the millionth time that she’s really gotta work on being a better winner, and I get busy doing what I came out here to do in the first place.
I lean the top part of me over our peeling porch railing, swivel my head as far as it will go to the left and the right, and what to my wandering eyes should appear but . . . a big fat zero. What the heck? Where’s the fuzz searching the cemetery for clues under the red and orange leaves, carting off a stiff through the tombstones, or holding back a pack of slobbering bloodhounds near Phantom Woods?
Wait just a cotton-pickin’ minute.
Is it even humanly possible that not one of our neighbors called the Washington St. station house to report what they heard and saw in the cemetery last night? Am I really the only one who knows about the crime that was perpetrated? Well, while I would just love to believe that, I learned my lesson. I can’t screw up again, not the way I did when I assumed it was half-in-the-bag Mr. Howard Howard ranting over there in the wee hours. So I remind myself again how Modern Detection warns gumshoes to look at all the different answers to problems that pop up during the course of an investigation, not just the ones they go crazy for right off the bat. “An investigator must remain skeptical of easy solutions,” Mr. Lynwood “My friends call me Woody and my enemies call me their worst nightmare” Bellflower, the writer of the detecting book whose words I take very much to heart, warns in Chapter Four.
So from here on out, I, Theresa Marie “Tessie” Finley, hereby do swear that when something mysterious happens during the course of this investigation, I will examine all possibilities before I draw any conclusions and I will not let my emotions get in the way of doing my job again, either. I will ask myself the tough questions in a very coldhearted way, the ones I’d ask Daddy if he was here, or the ones I ask my Magic 8 Ball because he isn’t.
Q. Am I not seeing the police looking for footprints or searching for a body with a knife sticking out of its neck because there wasn’t a murder in the cemetery last night after all?
A. Reply hazy try again later.
Q. Could it be possible that I want to solve a crime that’d give Birdie and me a big reward or a bushel of blackmailing bucks so much that I let my imagination run away with me?
A. Cannot predict now.
Q. Could I have accidentally drifted off last night and dreamt the murder up?
A. Ask again later.
I’m so wrapped up in giving myself the third degree that I jump about a foot when Birdie taps my shoulder and asks me with a chocolaty grin, “Whatcha doin’, Tessie?”
A. Better not tell you now.
“I’m . . . I’m lookin’ around for that great-good-luck something I wanted to show ya,” I say, before I go back to bobble-heading over the porch railing, only this time in a much more desperate way.
But no matter how hard I stare at the cemetery in every direction, all I can see and hear is cemetery caretaker, grave digger, and Birdie’s and my good friend, Mr. McGinty, shouting something about funeral flowers at the hard-of-hearing widow of Mr. Peterman, whose heart attacked him a few days ago in aisle four of Melman’s Hardware when he was testing out a new toilet plunger. When the now ex-foreman over at the Feelin’ Good Cookie factory tried to pull the stuck plunger off the store’s floor, that’s when his ticker punched its time card. (No joke.)
“What kind of great-good-luck thing are you lookin’ around for?” my sister leans in close and asks me. “A four-leaf clover?”
“Nope.”
“A rabbit’s foot?”
“Uh-uh.”
“A—?”