Because we weren’t on one of our regularly scheduled missions, but on one of Birdie’s regularly unscheduled missions, I didn’t have the chance to grab our coaster wagon that’s got the soda crate in it for my sister to stand on so she can see into our neighbors’ windows, so I ended up having to piggyback her. Once we got squared away, we peered through a crack in the curtains on the Tates’ wide-open window the music was booming out of and . . . lo and behold! Holy Mrs. Nancy Tate wasn’t humming along to Birdie’s most favorite song in all the world while she was pumping the pedal on her Singer machine the way I thought she’d be. Holy Mrs. Nancy Tate was humming along with “Rockin’ Robin” and pumping something else! She was shimmying around her wood-paneled rumpus room in a white pleated Washington High School cheerleader skirt for a traveling vacuum cleaner salesman. His back was to me, but I knew who it was. One of his uprights was standing next to the chair he was sprawled out in, and he was holding in his hand the same drink he always orders at Lonnigan’s Bar whenever he comes into town. Vodka on the rocks + a Hoover machine = Mr. Horace Mertz.
Everything was going along peachy keen—Mrs. Tate was giving us real blackmailing eyefuls—until it got to the part in the song that my sister just goes absolutely crazy for. The part when the rockin’ robins start flapping their wings and singin’, “Go, bird, go.” I was so impressed by that old cheerleader’s splits that I forgot all about paying attention to you-know-who, and by the time that I did, Birdie was singing really loudly along with the song and I couldn’t slap my hands over her mouth the way I normally would’ve because I was using my arms to hold her up.
When it hit Mrs. Tate that she wasn’t performing a solo anymore, she dropped the red pom-poms she was using to cover up her long boobies, ripped open the curtains we were peeking through, hollered something at us that should get her kicked out of the Legion of Decency, and then you know what that half-naked rah-rah gal had the gall to do? She sicced her wiener dog on the Finley sisters! Slid Oscar straight through the rumpus room window!
Of course, animal lover Birdie, who was still wailing away at the top of her lungs, wanted to stay and pet the pooch instead of hightailing it out of there before we got our faces chewed off by that vicious little foot-long, so praise be to whoever is the patron saint of genius ideas for finally delivering the answer to the problem I’d been having of getting her to scram from life-threatening situations, because it worked like a charm that night and on many more snooping missions since.
Even if my partner in crime is being stubborn, scared, or overly friendly with a dangerous guard dog or greaser, all I have to do to get her moving toward a safe location is to remind my little candy worshipper that I, her one and only, the sister who loves her like no other, will reward her with a yummy Hershey’s kiss if she beats me in a race to wherever I tell her to run to. (I’m ten times faster, of course, but I let her win. She wouldn’t play along if she didn’t get something out of the deal. She’s weird and a loonatic, not some chump.) So this morning, the start of the day that our Magic 8 Ball told me would change the Finley sisters’ entire lives, the beautiful Indian summer morning that I’m hoping to start investigating our very first murder case from the back porch of our house, I pluck my sister’s flapping hand out of the air, press it down on my shorts pocket that’s bulging with chocolate kisses, and tell her the same thing I told her in the backyard of the Tates’ house the night we needed to escape from the jaws of the wiener dog. “Race ya to the back porch! One for the money, two for the show, three to get ready, and—”
Sure enough, just like I was almost positive she would, the kid with a sweet tooth a mile long sings the words from her favorite song in all the world over her shoulder as she shoves past me and runs out of our bedroom door, “Go, Bird, go!”
3
LIKE A NECK TO COUNT DRACULA
After Birdie and me scramble down the stairs, skid across the green linoleum kitchen floor, and burst through the squeaky back screen door that Daddy kept meaning to oil, my sister throws her arms in the air and announces with a gloating smile, “I win!”
When I drop the first-place chocolate kiss candy into her hand that she’s waving two inches from my face, I want to, but I resist the temptation to tell her for the millionth time that she’s really gotta work on being a better winner, and I get busy doing what I came out here to do in the first place.
I lean the top part of me over our peeling porch railing, swivel my head as far as it will go to the left and the right, and what to my wandering eyes should appear but . . . a big fat zero. What the heck? Where’s the fuzz searching the cemetery for clues under the red and orange leaves, carting off a stiff through the tombstones, or holding back a pack of slobbering bloodhounds near Phantom Woods?
Wait just a cotton-pickin’ minute.