“I was going to check in with you when I got home, but all your lights were out,” Louise tells Gert. “Everything go hunky-dory last night?”
Our neighbor raises one of her penciled, black-as-a-funeral eyebrows up to her bone-colored hair and slowly repeats the way she does when she wants to make a point, which is almost always, “Did . . . everything . . . go . . . hunky . . . dory . . . last . . . night?” She looks right at me and sneer-laughs. “Far from it.”
Damnation!
Did she see us?
I was so keen on working on #3 on my TO-DO list that I forgot all about doing what Modern Detection calls “reconnaissance” before we took off last night to do our snooping.
I desperately need to beat to the punch everybody else in the parish who’s been trying to catch whoever nicked the money out of the Pagan Baby collection box up at church a few weeks ago. When I get my hands on whoever perpetrated that crime, I’m not going to rat them out. I’m going to tell them that I won’t reveal their identity if they give me the money. I’m not gonna keep it. I’m gonna shove it under the bushes that grow against the side of the church, and then after Sunday Mass with so many witnesses gossiping about each other on St. Kate’s steps, I’ll wander over to where I hid it, pretend to be tying my sneaker, and pull out that stash of cash and yell, Oh, my goodness! Look what I found in these bushes! Because the way I see it, them Pagan Baby gals getting their moo-la-la back might go a long way in getting President Gert Klement off the Finley sisters’ backs, and what the heck, who knows? Returning the money to its rightful owners could even win me some brownie points from our mother and the Almighty might cut me some much-needed slack, too.
The Mutual Admiration Society hasn’t found any clues yet, but word around the neighborhood is that Skip Abernathy might be the no-goodnik thief that everyone’s been looking for. That’s why hours before the murder happened over at the cemetery, as soon as I saw the lights go out in Gert Klement’s house, Birdie and me snuck out to our garage, loaded up our Radio Flyer wagon—besides bringing library books home in it, we take the coaster on all our snooping missions, except for the cemetery ones, because it’s too hard to shove it over the black iron fence without all the tools and Birdie’s snacks falling out—and under the cover of darkness we made our way over to the Abernathys’.
10:35 p.m. The Finley sisters were preparing to spy on our suspect at 7119 N. Keefe Ave.
I was, anyway. After all the brouhaha Birdie caused on the night pom-pom-waving Mrs. Tate was in her rumpus room pumping away for Mr. Horace Mertz, I didn’t trust my sister to remember to keep her mouth shut, so I made her be the lookout.
FACT: If it turns out that Skip Abernathy really is the one stealing from little kids whose lives are already so cruddy because they are forced to listen to missionaries hour after hour, day after day, trying to convert them to Catholicism under the scorching sun in the Congo just so they can get shinier hair, blow their noses, and have no b.o., he should be very ashamed of himself. Not for thieving, of course. It would be two-faced of me to condemn him on that count, because hardly a week goes by that I don’t ignore the Thou Shalt Not Steal Commandment.
PROOF: I’m a light-fingered Louie during the day and an even better cat burglar at night. (Secret God’s work, that’s what I’m doing. I don’t remember the exact words, but He told somebody in olden times something like, “It’s easier for a camel to get into Heaven than it is for a rich person.” So even though our neighbors and the store owners don’t deserve it, me sneakily lightening their load of worldly goods is greasing the hinges on the Pearly Gates for them.)