Authors: Gillian Roberts
He smiled, nodded, stood up straight, and walked off with his parents.
“
Kew
-ell,” Pip said later at the diner. “It’s just like you said—
anybody could kill if they thought it would save their lives.”
“Didn’t think Amanda would provide a laboratory demo for the theory, though, did you?” Mackenzie said.
“I knew being a detective was more exciting than you pretended it was,” Pip said.
“Maybe being a teacher is more exciting than you think.”
Pip was too polite to say what he thought of that idea.
“All right, then,” Sasha said, “if you saved a life, I will forgive you for missing dinner.”
“Pip,” I said, “you’re going to make a great detective someday yourself. You called this one. When I described all those confusing things going on, you were the one who realized they might not have anything to do with the real problem, which, you said, could be a feud. And you were close to the mark.”
He grinned. “As soon as I get my diploma.”
Mackenzie whispered, “Cheryl told him she wouldn’t date a dropout. He says he’s coming back next summer to woo her more, but meanwhile, he’s goin’ home Sunday.”
Which is to say that somethings do work out on their own—
even when the participants are teenagers. My view of adolescents was balanced and brightened. My view of the future also looked a bit less congested and complicated. I hadn’t been fired, and I hadn’t compromised myself, either. I was going to hang on doing just that as long as I could.
I plowed through the diner’s gargantuan servings of meat loaf, mashed potatoes, and ice cream. I enjoyed the conversation 239
A HOLE IN JUAN
that whirled around me, but I barely participated, happy with my soft, amenable foods. Soon I’d be as comfortable as an oversized sofa and about the same width.
“Tell me,” Mackenzie said when I’d finished. “How did you know what was goin’ on up on that roof? All week you showed me things that meant nothin’. Not a piece of those bad poems and meaningless scraps would hold up in court, so what was it really about?”
How to answer? Three drunken lugs grabbing me and my accidentally looking up?
Or realizing the poems were trash, but not meaningless trash.
Or knowing that Nita and Allie should not have been at each other all week long.
Or that Seth was not himself.
Or listening to fragments—that some people weren’t welcome at the party, or filling in the blanks on the note that told somebody to not panic.
Or using pure and simple common sense.
Or . . .
Mackenzie looked grim. “So Freud—who has been discredited, you know—had this theory that men marry their mothers.”
“Oedipus did.”
“We’re talkin’ here in metaphors. Psychologically. So did I?”
“I dress much more conservatively than your mother. And I don’t intend to have eight children. And you need not blind yourself.”
He nodded. “But how did you know to rush out of Sasha’s—
she told me—to get to those kids up on the roof? Only thing I can figure is you’re one, too. Are you?”
“What?”
He raised one eyebrow and looked at me.
“A witch?”
“What else?”
I considered the idea. It had worked like a charm for Gabby GILLIAN ROBERTS
240
Mackenzie and it saved lots of explaining about the three lugs and the rest. About anything you didn’t feel like explaining, in fact. “You think her wedding gift to me was sharing her secrets?”
“Was it?”
I smiled. “Do you think I’d witch and tell?” I tapped my watch. “It’s after midnight. Happy Halloween, the new major holiday. And this year, we’ve got a lot to celebrate.”
“Yeah,” Pip said. “You broke the Case of the Fake Disability, and saved a kid’s life.”
The group of us clicked our glasses of soda, iced tea, and beer respectively and toasted Halloween and sleuthing.
It felt almost like Nick and Nora’s life, if they’d found themselves in a diner eating meat loaf on Halloween.
It felt close enough.
About the Author
GILLIAN ROBERTS won the Anthony Award for Best First Mystery for
Caught Dead in Philadelphia.
She is also the author of
Philly Stakes, I’d Rather Be in Philadelphia, With Friends Like These . . . , How I Spent My Summer Vacation, In the Dead of Summer, The Mummers’
Curse, The Bluest Blood, Adam and Evil, Helen Hath No
Fury, Claire and Present Danger,
and
Till the End of Tom.
Formerly an English teacher in Philadelphia, Gillian Roberts now lives in California. Her website address is
www.GillianRoberts.com
—and she enjoys receiving fan
About the Type
This book was set in Garamond, a typeface originally designed by the Parisian typecutter Claude Garamond (1480–1561). Garamond’s distinguished romans and italics first appeared in
Opera Ciceronis
in 1543–44. The Garamond types are clear, open, and elegant.