“Is there something going on with your Mom?” Ziggy asked later, digging his fork into his second piece of pie.
“I don’t know. Maybe she’s coming down with a cold or something, “Alan said.
His mother had nodded vaguely in agreement when they had asked if Ziggy and Josée could stay for supper, but she hadn’t been her usual, interested self, and she’d left half her pie.
“Have another piece if you want, you three,” she’d said. “And can you clean up for me, please?” Then she’d disappeared into the study.
They’d filled her in on all the activities of the day, but left some things out. She seemed to have forgotten about the gun, until Alan reminded her, and the three had already agreed not to mention Constable Mills’s making them deputies. They turned the paint fight into a kind of “nothing to do with us” thing, and Ziggy did a great impression of Ivor Smith, but she was only half listening. They didn’t mention the ghost either, but that was a no-brainer, as Mary-Anne Nearing was not the sort of person to believe in ghost stories.
“Maybe she’s worried about Candace—maybe she’s in trouble,” Josée said. Alan’s older sister, who was a serious violin student, was spending the month of August at a music camp in Banff, Alberta.
“Well, I know Mom misses her,” Alan said, “but even though she’s almost sixteen, Candace isn’t the type to mess up, I don’t think. She’ll probably come back with a bunch of trophies and awards.”
“Anyway, I was surprised that she didn’t ask more questions about today, that’s all,” Ziggy said.
“Which is probably a good thing,” Alan said. “After all, there are a couple of mysteries around the Village that we need to keep an eye on. We should start a case file.”
“What, so we can give it to Constable Mills when things start to get weird over there?” said Ziggy.
“Exactly. I mean, there are some weird things already, but nothing definite yet. But she’s relying on us, so we better do the thing right. Be right back.” Alan left the table and went up to his room to get something to write with. He thought for a moment about using the investigation notebook he’d started at the beginning of the summer, when the violin had disappeared and he and his friends had helped find it, but there were private notes in there—things that Constable Mills didn’t know about, and it was probably better to start a fresh one so he could just hand it over when they’d solved the case. He rummaged around in his desk and came up with a fresh notebook that he hadn’t started to write in yet, grabbed a couple of pens and came back down. Ziggy and Josée had cleared away most of the dinner dishes, and they stacked the dishwasher first before they began.
“If we were living in pioneer days,” Josée said, “we’d have to heat the water on the woodstove first, then do all this by hand. And they didn’t have dishwashing liquid then, either.”
“I would’ve just had a dog,” Ziggy said. “Put the dishes on the floor, and let him do the work.”
“Eww. Remind me not to come to your house for dinner when you’re a grown-up,” said Josée.
When they were ready, they sat around the coffee table in the living room (Ziggy brought a third slice of pie with him, in case he got hungry), and Alan opened up the new notebook.
Picasso, the family cat, was very interested in Ziggy’s pie, and was winding herself around and around his legs.
“Sorry, Picasso,” Ziggy said. “You don’t get to do the dishes yet. Maybe when I’m finished.”
Alan had written “The Alan Nearing Detective Agency: Case Notes” on the front cover, and Josée, who was good at art, drew a magnifying glass to go along with it.
On the opening page, he wrote “Case #2”. It was satisfying to be at number two already. Below that, he wrote Investigating officers: Alan Nearing, Ziggy Breuer and Josée Lejeune and they all signed their names to make it official. Below that was written Location: Kuskawa Pioneer Village Park and the date.
“Now, what are the weird things? Let’s write them down first,” Alan said. They agreed that at the top of the list was the handgun they’d found.
1. Gun found in a manure pile by Alan and Ziggy. Police called in.
“What kind of gun was it?” Josée asked. “Did anybody hear them say?”
“No, but I bet we could look it up on the net and find out. We all got a pretty good look at it, right?”
He wrote, in a column opposite the first entry, Questions, then Find out what kind of gun? and Who left it there?
“Remember that Constable Mills said the police would be asking those kind of questions, though, right?” Ziggy said, and Alan reluctantly wrote Police business in brackets.
“I know what else,” he said, and wrote Search animal pen for clues.
“Aren’t the police doing that tonight?” Josée said.
“Sure, but maybe they’ll miss something. And when they’re done there, it won’t be locked any more, so we’ll be able to get in there and check it out.”
For Number 2, they wrote Ziggy’s poltergeist—face or something seen in attic window of inn. Attic is locked—nobody goes there.
“Shouldn’t we tell Constable Mills about that right away?” Josée said.
“I’d rather not,” Ziggy said. “I mean, it was weird, and I’m sure I didn’t imagine it, but I guess it could have been a flash of lightning reflected in the window or something. I’d feel like an idiot telling her about it until we were sure.”
“I agree,” Alan said. In the questions column, he put Keep an eye on the attic window, then told the others about finding the dust below the trapdoor.
“That could have been anything,” Ziggy said. “But still, put down . . . ummm, debris found. Inconclusive.”
“Good one,” Alan said, and wrote it in.
“I found out some things about people, when you guys were picking apples,” Josée said. “Remember you asked me to because Madame Creasor liked talking? Well, she does.”
“What did she tell you?” Alan said. “Wait—let me start a ‘suspects’ column.”
“How can we have suspects when we don’t even know what the crime is?” Ziggy said.
“In my ‘How to be an Effective Operative’ handbook, they say that absolutely everybody is a suspect until you’ve ruled them out,” he said. “Anyway, it’s useful to have a list of people.”
They listed everybody they’d met that day, starting with Mrs. Tench. “Surely she can’t be a suspect—she runs the place,” Ziggy said.
“Well, actually, she’s the staff supervisor. The directors run the place, and we haven’t met them yet. Anyway, in books and movies, it’s often people in power who end up being the criminal mastermind,” Alan said.
“Just don’t let her get hold of the notebook by mistake, then,” Josée said. “We’d be fired for sure.”
Next to Mrs. Tench, they wrote her job title, and Ziggy suggested they include the fact that she was giving out coupons for free ice cream. “Maybe she’s not supposed to do that,” he said.
“I’m hoping she does it all the time,” Alan said, but wrote it down.
Next to Sheldon (they didn’t know his last name), they had a lot of information. He was the maintenance guy, he had keys to everything (“Mrs. Tench probably does, too,” Josée pointed out), he was jealous