Читать книгу Pioneer Poltergeist - H. Mel Malton - Страница 5

You’ve been there barely two hours, and there’s trouble already?” Alan’s mother said. “That’s got to be a record.” Her voice came through sounding high and hollow, as if she were speaking down a tube. Alan was using the supervisor’s cell phone, a tiny one like a silver chocolate bar. “Are you okay?” she went on. “Do you want to come home?”

“Mom, we’re fine. Really,” Alan said. “It’s no big deal. Mrs. Tench made me call.”

They were sitting in the staff lounge, up in the park’s main complex. There was a museum there, and a cafeteria, as well as the Pioneer Village offices.

“Is that your mother? Let me speak to her,” the supervisor said, making a “hand-it-over” gesture.

“Mrs. Nearing? Mabel Tench here. I thought Alan should tell you what’s going on before you heard it somewhere else, but it’s really only a tiny spot of bother. No need to worry.”

Alan, Ziggy and Josée looked sideways at each other. There were two police officers in the main office with the door shut right now, talking to the directors, and it sounded like they weren’t agreeing. A tiny spot of bother? Not that tiny.

“Well, yes, they did find an old gun buried in the manure pile, dear, but the police have it now, and I expect that’s the last we’ll hear of it. Someone being careless, I expect. Or teenagers. It’s almost always young people, isn’t it?” There was a pause, then Mrs. Tench laughed and shook her head. “Oh, no, I didn’t mean these three. They’re not the sort of young people I’m talking about. As a matter of fact, they’re doing wonderfully, and I do hope you’ll let them stay. No, no, we’re not closing the park. Heavens, what a thought! The police will be gone shortly, and we’ll all be getting back to normal.” After another minute or so, she handed the phone back to Alan. “She wants a word, dear,” she said and went to listen at the office door.

“So, I take it you want to stay,” Mary-Anne Nearing said. Alan didn’t need to look at the others to see what they thought. It was obvious. This was a brand new case for the unofficial Alan Nearing Detective agency, and they were a team.

“Yes, Mom. It’s great here.”

“But Mrs. Tench said you were shovelling manure as your first assignment. You liked that?”

“Like you always say, a little work won’t hurt us, right?” He heard her sigh—the kind of noise that meant “okay, but watch it”, and he knew he’d won.

“We can stay, Mrs. Tench,” he said, handing the phone back to her. The supervisor had just hurried back over to them, and moments later, the police and the three directors emerged from the office. One of the officers was Constable Mills, of the local Laingford detachment. They knew her already, from the missing violin incident earlier in the summer. She came right over to them.

“Hi, you guys,” she said. “Remember me? This is déjà vu, eh?”

“Yeah, but this time it’s a gun that shows up instead of a violin disappearing,” Alan said.

The officer grinned. “And you’re involved again. Interesting.”

“Pure chance, though,” Ziggy put in. “Like last time. Coincidence.”

Constable Mills gave him a sideways look.

“Right,” she said, “and that last case magically solved itself, I seem to recall. But listen, we don’t want you three messing around with this one. A gun is serious business. If you see anything funny around the park, I want you to call me right away, okay?”

“What do you mean, something funny?” said Alan. “Do you know whose gun it is? Is there a plot to kidnap tourists? Should we look for clues?”

“Whoa! Slow down. Those are our questions, not yours. And we’ll be doing the investigating here, which is our job, understand?” She waited until all three of them nodded and mumbled yes, then she went on, leaning down towards them and talking in a private voice. “The thing is,” she said, “the directors don’t want to close the park, and we don’t want to make them, but we still have to ask questions and figure out where that gun came from. And the first people to interrogate are the ones who found it. That’s you. So, tell me how it happened.”

Again, they described how they’d found the gun in the manure pile, how they’d called Josée over, and then how all three of them had run to find Sheldon, who was working nearby. Alan was getting tired of telling it. First there’d been Sheldon, then Mrs. Tench, then one of the directors, then his mother. It was hard to tell it again without adding stuff. Constable Mills wrote it all down then asked them all to sign it at the bottom.

“That’s the second statement I’ve had to get from you three,” she said. “We’ll be needing to start a file on you guys soon.”

“Excellent. You’ll want our fingerprints, then, yes?” Josée said. That was supposed to happen last time, but then it hadn’t, and they’d been kind of disappointed. Alan particularly wanted to get a look at the inside of the police headquarters, where the lock-up was. For research purposes. If he was going to be a private investigator one day, these were things he should know about.

“Well, you’re not suspects this time, so it won’t be necessary,” Constable Mills said. “But you are all go-fers at the park, right?” They nodded. “So keep your eyes open. You may hear or see something out of the ordinary that others won’t see, because they’re too busy. If you do, call.” They said they would, and she handed Alan a card with her number on it, then joined the other officer who had been talking to Mrs. Tench, and they left.

“How can we see what’s out of the ordinary?” Josée asked the others. “We only just got here. We don’t know what is ordinary, yet.”

“This is sweet,” Alan said. “We’re like, deputy officers.”

“But she said not to mess around with this one, didn’t she?” Ziggy said.

“She probably has to say that,” Alan said. “But she also said to keep our eyes open, right? We won’t need to snoop. Undercover officers just have to be there. We’ll have to be alert.”

“Be a lert,” Ziggy said. “The world needs more lerts.”

“Idiot,” Josée said.

There would be no more manure shovelling that day, Sheldon said when they got back down to the Pioneer village site.

“I’ll clean ’er out with the MiniCat, later. The cops put a lock on the pen door, so I don’t know where Fred and the girls are gonna sleep tonight.”

“Are the police in there now, doing forensics?” Alan asked, craning his neck to see if he could catch a glimpse of any telltale white suits, the kind that forensics officers wore at TV crime scenes.

“Forensics? Hah,” Sheldon said. “They took that gun away in a plastic bag, but I don’t envy the person who has to scrape ’er off, looking for fingerprints. She was pretty well covered in crap . . . oh, excuse me, ma’am,” he added, with a wink at Josée. “Nah, they just locked the door because they want to come back later when the park’s closed and snoop around in there, when everybody’s gone home.”

Alan looked at the others. Was there a clue in there? Would it be possible to be the ones to find it first? It would save Constable Mills the trouble, wouldn’t it?

“We’re staying open, I’m told,” Sheldon said. “I guess the management couldn’t stand to close down the park early and lose all that tourist money. Don’t know how they got around the cops, but it ain’t my business. Too bad—I could’ve used a maintenance day without people traipsing around asking questions and getting in the way. That fence over there needs painting . . .” he stopped suddenly and stared at them as a broad grin crept across his face.

“I was planning to use the sprayer, but I got a better idea.” He called out to a passing staff member, the candle-making woman from the log homestead. “Hey, Joan. Got any of them sacking aprons handy over there?” A few minutes later, Alan, Ziggy and Josée were lined up in front of a long fence beside the general store, wearing aprons made of scratchy brown feed sacks.

“You’ll be in trouble if you get those costumes covered in paint,” Sheldon said, “so be careful, and no paint fights.” He gave them each a thick, bristly brush, and plunked down three wooden buckets of watery white paint.

“Maintenance, the old-fashioned way,” Sheldon said. “Two coats should do it. Have fun.” He walked away, whistling.

“At least we’re together this time,” Josée said, dipping her brush into one of the buckets and slapping some paint on the fence. “This is more interesting than that girl stuff, and I’d rather be wearing what you guys have on.”

“But you have to be our spy in the women’s quarters,” Alan said. “How can we see anything out of the ordinary, if we’re only going to do stupid outside chores like this? At least you’ll get to do cooking and stuff, and you can look around inside the houses.”

“Look around for what?” Josée asked.

“Well, I’ve been thinking,” Alan said. “You know how Sheldon said that the management didn’t want to close this place, because they’d lose all that money? Maybe there’s a safe, somewhere, where all the tourist money is kept. Maybe someone’s planning a robbery. Maybe they stashed the gun until the perfect opportunity came along to make their move?”

“Who would stash a gun in a pile of . . . poo?” Josée said.

“Sheldon, that’s who,” Alan said. “I’ve had my eye on him from the beginning. There’s something weird about him, I’m sure of it.”

“Shouldn’t we tell Constable Mills, then?” Ziggy said. “What kind of weird?”

“Well, he keeps trying to get rid of us, and he gives us these awful jobs, for example. Maybe he wants to keep us out of the way so we don’t mess up his plans.”

“He wouldn’t make you shovel that stuff, if it was him who put the gun in there, would he?” Josée said. “Come on, you guys. I don’t want to do this whole fence by myself. Not that I couldn’t, you know.”

“Want to race?” Alan said. “Bet I can do more boards than you guys in three minutes.” They spread out, Alan at one end of the fence, Josée at the other, and Ziggy in the middle.

“Okay,” Ziggy said, looking at his watch. “Ready, set, go!” and they all started painting as fast as they could. Josée did win the first round. Alan won the second. By the third round, a couple of park visitors had come over to watch and cheer them on, and some man in a floppy hat was taking photographs.

“Dad, let me do it. I wanna try,” said a boy behind him.

“You’ll wreck your shirt,” said a woman, who was wearing the exact same loud print shirt as the camera guy, so it was probably the kids’ mom.

“He can wear my apron,” Alan said quickly, untying his and handing it over. A couple of other tourist kids wanted to try the paint race as well, and soon, Alan and his friends were just standing there, grinning at each other.

“Teamwork,” Alan said. He pulled the others aside and spoke quietly. “Now that job’s covered, maybe we can take a break and explore this place a bit.” When they’d arrived in the morning, they had been promised “the Grand Tour”, as Mrs. Tench had called it, but they’d barely seen anything before Sheldon collared the boys to shovel out the animal pen.

“Let’s check out the blacksmith shop,” Ziggy said. “Maybe the guy in there would let us try making something.” Alan looked back at the fence as they sauntered away. There was a line-up of kids waiting to get a turn painting, and the guy with the camera seemed to have taken over organizing everything, so they should be good for maybe a half hour of freedom, at least.

The blacksmith shop was a long, low building a short distance from the general store. It was dark inside, and hot. They stood in the entranceway, peering in, waiting for their eyes to adjust to the gloom. A large, bearded man in a leather apron was just removing a piece of glowing hot metal from the coals of the fire with a huge pair of tongs. He placed it on his anvil—a massive lump of metal like a table with a beak, and started hammering at it. Sparks flew.

There was a thick smell—hot metal and coal, a spicy, machine-y scent that made Alan’s nose twitch. The blacksmith hadn’t noticed them yet, too intent on what he was doing. His arms were bare and sheened with sweat. He looked like he could lift a car up over his head with one hand, no problem.

Ziggy was grinning. “Now this is my idea of a cool summer job,” he said loudly to the others, over the sound of the hammering. “You’d be covered in muscles in no time. I wonder if he needs an apprentice.” The blacksmith looked up, smiled at them, and tipped his head, inviting them in.

“You’ll be the new go-fers, I bet,” he bellowed. “Mabel Tench told me she had some fresh blood coming in today.” He whacked the piece of hot metal once more with his hammer, lifted the tongs up to squint at his work—he was making a horseshoe, Alan decided—then plunged it into a nearby bucket of water, which hissed in a most satisfying way.

“Ivor Smith, at your service,” he said and extended a large, grubby hand, which they all shook. “Smith’s the name, smith’s the occupation, if you take my meaning.”

“Why is he shouting?” Josée whispered to Ziggy.

“I think maybe he’s a little hard of hearing,” Ziggy whispered back. “Comes of whacking metal all day, I guess.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Alan said, in a loud voice. He’d come to the same conclusion. “I’m Alan, and this is Ziggy and Josée.”

“Glad to make your acquaintance, Len,” the blacksmith said. “Likewise, Iggy and Joey.”

“Is there anything we can do to help around here?” Ziggy asked.

“Sorry, what was that?”

“Can we help?” Ziggy said, louder.

“I’m very well, thanks,” Ivor Smith said. “Now where’d my assistant get to? I need some more coal on the fire. She was here a minute ago. Must have slipped away to the biffy.”

“I’ll get it,” Ziggy said. He’d noticed the large bin of coal as they came in. He filled a shovel with the black lumps and turned to ask the smith if that was enough, and where to put it, just as a slim young woman hurried in. She was wearing a leather apron, too.

“Hey,” she said to Ziggy. “What are you doing? Get away from there.”

“I was just getting some more coal . . .” he began.

“That’s my job,” the woman said. “And anyway, visitors aren’t allowed to touch the artifacts.” She strode over to Ziggy, took the shovel away from him and began to do the job herself.

“Très gentille,” Josée muttered, sarcastically.

“They’re not visitors, Ellen,” Ivor Smith said. “They’re staff. These are the new go-fers Mabel told us about. Meet Len, Iggy and Joey.”

“Oh, you’re the new kids, are you?” she said, turning to look at them. She had a very white face and very black hair, as well as several piercings (nose and eyebrow), which glinted in the light from the coal fire. Spooky, Alan thought. She smiled, not very nicely. “Well, you’d better scoot outside double-quick then, because Sheldon’s looking for you.”

“Uh-oh,” Alan said.

“No kidding, uh-oh,” Ellen said. “He’s covered in white paint, and he didn’t look too happy.”

Alan, Ziggy and Josée exchanged frantic looks.

“We are so dead,” Ziggy said. And they ran.