Minerva Clark Goes to the Dogs (2 page)

“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.

When no one was home, Casa Clark felt enormous. We called it Casa Clark because, unlike every other old wood-shingled bungalow on our street, ours was a stucco box that looks like a Mexican restaurant. It used to be pink, but before my parents got a divorce they painted it light brown. It has three floors and a brass fireman's
pole that went from the third floor straight into the kitchen, which I used to love as a kid, but now is sort of an embarrassment. I don't know why.

I woke Jupiter up from his nap. Jupiter is my ferret. His cage is kept behind the grand piano in the living room. He was dead asleep, snoring inside a black denim pants leg. Jupiter loves nothing more than sleeping inside a pants leg. He has a whole assortment of pants-leg sleeping tubes, and as a result my brothers and I have a whole assortment of cutoffs.

I tried to cuddle Jupiter under my chin, but he threw himself out of my arms and ran across the hall to the dining room. He took three mad laps around our big table, leaped on a chair, then onto the table, where he knocked over a near-empty carton of milk that had been sitting there since breakfast. It spilled onto the open newspaper.

I stared at the empty red and white carton, lying on its side. The sight of the milk-soaked newspaper gave me an idea. I tugged my phone from my back pocket and punched in Chelsea's number, scooped Jupiter up, and dropped him back into his cage. He didn't like this at all. He thought we were going to play, and we were, until the spilled milk gave me an idea.

“Chelsea, it's me, Minerva Clark. The girl who bought your ring, you said she was in line in front of you at the coffee place?”

“Yeah, why?”

“What did she order and how did she pay?”

“What did she order? Coffee. That's why it's called Coffee People. 'Cause people buy coffee there.” She giggled for no reason. Like many girls in our grade, Chelsea had a laugh that sounded practiced.

“Just a cup of coffee? Not a latte or something more complicated?”

“Complicated how?”

“You know.” I started feeling a mood coming on. Was Chelsea being dense on purpose? “Like a half-caf, half-decaf soy macchiato, extra hot.”

“She did, actually. I remember because I started feeling totally tweaked that it took her so long to explain exactly what she wanted. It was already almost ten thirty.”

“How did she pay?”

“With money?”

“Did she use a card? A credit or debit card?”

“Definitely. One of those. There was some something about the receipt. She gave the cashier person the wrong one and they traded. Then she threw it away anyway.”

“You saw her throw it away? You're sure?”

“Positive. I remember being at amazed at how long her hair was. And the only time she was standing with her back to me was when she was at the garbage can, sticking the receipt through the little flap thingy.”

“I thought you said she was in front of you.”

I could practically hear Chelsea roll her eyes. “She
was
. But we were too busy talking about my ring for me to notice, you know?”

“Perfectimento. I know how we can find her. Meet me at the airport in half an hour.”

Chelsea did not want to go to the airport. She was exhausted. Her mom had just dropped her at home, then gone straight back to the hospital. How was she supposed to get to the airport, anyway? Chelsea was a girl full of excuses for why something couldn't happen. Maybe this had to do with being good in algebra, at which yours truly sucked beyond belief.

I told her there was a good chance that the name of the lady who bought her ring was at the airport, and if she wanted to find her, we had to go now. We didn't have a minute to waste. I told her to take MAX, and meet me at the airport in front of Page and Turner Books on the main concourse at 1:00.

Chelsea said she'd never been on MAX, which was completely untrue since I remembered at least three
times our class took MAX downtown on a field trip. MAX stood for Metropolitan Area Express, and was a teenager's best friend. You could get anywhere you needed to go around town on MAX, and it was well lit and completely safe and had no more bad smells than you would encounter on the city bus. Chelsea whined that she didn't know where the closest MAX station was (“My family doesn't really
do
public transportation”), or how much it cost, plus how was she supposed to sneak out of the house?

“Chelsea,” I said, “if you can't figure out how to sneak out of your own house, then I can't help you.”

Then I hung up on her. Chelsea would think up one excuse after another if I didn't just put an end to the conversation by hanging up, a technique I learned from watching detective shows with Quills. He is such a fan of
Law & Order
he taught himself to play the theme song on his bass. The phone calls are very short on that show, in case you haven't noticed.

I changed out of my jean cutoffs and black Green Day T-shirt into a pair of jeans that hadn't been cut off yet and another Green Day T-shirt and slid my feet into my new turquoise Chuck Taylor high-tops, which I'd supposedly got to replace my purple ones, but here is a secret about Chuck Taylors—you never replace the old ones, they are just retired to the back of the closet. I stuck my hair on top of my head, brushed my teeth,
made sure I had my house keys—I am dead meat if I forget my house keys and have to call one of the brothers—grabbed my hoodie, and set out down the hill toward the MAX station.

On the way, I called Mark Clark to let him know I was going over to my friend Chelsea's for a while. Technically I was going to the airport to help my friend Chelsea, but Mark Clark didn't need to know this. He would only worry. Our house rule was: When no one was home I could leave as long as I called the Brother-in-Charge and let him know where I was going. As long as I locked the house up properly and was home at the time I gave, no one asked questions. Or not more than about fifty, anyway.

The sun was a pale gray ball high in the sky behind the dull clouds. Still, it was warm, and all the roses were in bloom. That's how you know summer has arrived in Portland—it's warm and cloudy instead of cool and cloudy. I walked along, swinging my arms, glad to be out of the house. I tried not to feel deprived because I was the only girl my age on the planet who did not have an iPod. I also tried not to think about Kevin. I didn't think it was good for my sleuthing to be obsessed with someone who was only my almost-boyfriend. Anyway, he was coming home next Friday, 168 hours, give or take.

Suddenly, I heard a strangled screech. I looked up to see a hawk with a brown-spotted underside flying low
overhead, with something in its talons—a small opossum or a rat that was cranking its skinny tail round and round in fear.

I slammed my eyes shut and pulled my hoodie up over my head. I couldn't stand the image of that little creature being carried away. I hated hated
hated
birds. Every few years I had a terrible bird experience. My first memory of a bird was in preschool. I got bit on my pointer finger by a duck while trying to feed it a piece of stale French bread. A few years later there was a chicken at some petting zoo that pecked at the back of my hair. Then there was that scary movie called
The Birds
that I watched at my friend Hannah's birthday slumber party one year. I don't know why we were allowed to watch it. It's an old movie from a time long ago when men and women used to dress up every day just to walk around. Birds invade a town and break into homes and peck out people's eyes. If I ever wanted to give myself a good shiver just for something to do, I thought about that stupid movie.