The Unforgettable Guinevere St. Clair Read online

“You’ve tried to stand up to those boys you call Creepers. You’re trying to find Wilbur.” I gave him a quick look, but he kept going. “You stick by your mother and wouldn’t let a gnat harm your sister. And what do you know of that Micah?”

  “That he’s the kindest boy I know.”

  “Exactly,” my father said. “And you can thank Gaysie Cutter for that.”

  CHAPTER 28

  WAITING TO GET DOWN THE street to Micah’s again was a torturous twenty-four hours. I stewed about our Gaysie conversation. I knew from the minute I met her that Gaysie was bad, but . . . was she also good? Could a murderer still do all those nice things my father talked about?

  It was the return letter from Georgia Piehl that pushed me over the edge. It sat plain among the red-and-green Christmas cards, in a long white envelope. When I touched it, it was still cold from sitting in the mailbox. It smelled gloriously of fresh paper and answers to questions.

  I waited to read it by tucking the letter into the middle of my newly-won-back Huckleberry Finn book as Bitty and I ran all the way down Lanark Lane to Micah’s. It was my finest hour of self-control. After all, inside was the likely key to my investigation. Were we able to get any usable prints off the Blue Mistress? Were they Gaysie Cutter’s? And if they were, would I be one giant step closer to having my direct link?

  Wearing a pink bandanna and pirate eye patch, Micah was in the front yard, building a snowman. He waved excitedly when he saw us just as Jimmy handcrafted a snowball and bombed it all over my face.

  “Cod face!” I yelled, ice and snow stinging my skin and half blinding me. “I was going to show you something, but now I won’t.”

  “It’s about the case!” Bitty said, trying to wipe snow off my eyelids.

  “What case?” Jimmy asked.

  “Our case!” I said bitterly, spitting icicles out of my mouth. I pulled out the letter and waved it around. “From Georgia Piehl.”

  “The fingerprint lady?” Micah asked.

  “The prosecuting attorney!” I said hotly.

  “Let’s go get some hot chocolate first,” Micah said. “And you can meet my grandma—”

  “Oh, Grandma,” Jimmy groaned. We entered Gaysie’s kitchen. I gulped, wiping snow off my eyelids and wondering if Gaysie would mention my previous break-in now that no cops were around.

  “Hello there!” Gaysie said, standing in front of the stove, a picture of domesticity. It reminded me of late summer, when Wilbur would come to drink coffee with Gaysie and the kitchen was roasting, but cozy.

  “She’s wearing an apron,” I whispered to Micah.

  “Take off those wet boots and sit,” Gaysie said, casting a sidelong glance at me. “I prefer we not run through the kitchen in this house with wet boots on.”

  I gulped.

  “Put your mittens on the wood stove. Hot chocolate?”

  I nodded uneasily. She was unusually amiable today.

  I’m not anyone’s dishrag! I remembered her yelling once when Jimmy left his dishes in the sink.

  But the greatest shock was when Gaysie turned around. Under her apron, her clothes were all wrong. They were ironed or something. Even her face looked different, with some poorly applied blush, her hair shorter and sprayed stiff.

  “Guinevere and Elizabeth,” she said, setting down steaming cups of cocoa, complemented with sprigs of something green floating on top. “Rosemary,” she announced. “Girls, I’d like you to meet my mother, Mrs. Delacroix.”

  At that moment, a woman swept into the kitchen. She was petite with short, platinum-blond hair and a bleach-white smile, but I suspected possible veneers. Her light eyes were juxtaposed between pencil-thin brows and thickly coated black eyelashes. She looked nothing like Gaysie. With a tilt of her head she swished into the room, wearing tight white spandex, carrying with her an overpowering scent of an English garden. I sneezed.

  “Bless you, darlin’,” the woman said. Gaysie smiled pleasantly, but her jaw was perceptibly tighter.

  “I’m Mrs. Delacroix, but you can call me Candy. I’m Micah’s grandmother.” Candy patted Micah’s pink bandanna atop his head and snapped his pirate eye patch before turning to me and holding out her ring-adorned hands. She motioned me closer. I held my breath, waiting for, The better to eat you with, my dear.

  Bitty, who would usually be clinging to the back of my coat, stood bravely beside me. I smiled inside. Perhaps an unintended consequence of knowing dear old Gaysie had been toughening Bitty up. When we were within arm’s length, Candy reached past me and touched Bitty’s cheek. Her breath reminded me of stale cigarettes, and her red lipstick bled into the cracks around her lips, like Dracula.

  “Who wouldn’t know this face?” she murmured. “I’m so glad Micah’s bringing home friends,” she said, eyeing Micah’s leg warmers and outerwear. “Darlin’, what in the world are you wearing? Is that a shawl?”

  “He can wear what he wants,” Gaysie said, stealing a pointed glance up and down her mother’s white spandex and plunging neckline.

  I danced a little impatiently, the letter practically burning a hole through my hand.

  Gaysie handed Candy a knife and a green pepper. “Would you please?”

  Candy smiled at me, the knife in her right hand. “So. You’re the girl who’s friends with these boys.”

  I nodded.

  “Men. Full of tricks and lies. I’ve known my share. My last husband—well! I could tell you stories.”

  “Mother,” Gaysie said dryly. “You forget who this child belongs to.”

  “Oh, that’s right!” Candy said, beginning to slice the green pepper with hard, choppy strokes. “The daughter of Jed St. Clair. I always said that man could sell ice to an Eskimo.” She smiled. “You should be proud of your daddy. Jed actually made something of himself. People round here are content to be ignorant their whole lives. My Gaysie was so smart, she went off to college too, but . . . ,” she said, her knife pausing. “Never finished.”

  “Had the farm to run,” Gaysie said.

  “I guess you do the best you can,” Candy said. “Unfortunate that your Wilbur chose to disappear just when winter was coming.” I watched Gaysie carefully. She gave nothing away.

  “Well, it was so good to meet you,” I lied, stepping away and taking Bitty’s hand.

  “Oh, cupcake, the pleasure was truly mine.” Candy bowed toward me as I pulled Bitty out of the kitchen.

  Micah wriggled out of his grandmother’s grasp, and Jimmy followed after us, jumping up and hitting the doorframe on his way out.

  I heard Candy say, “I have a theory that that boy is actually a monkey!”

  We were down the driveway when I remembered I had forgotten my new hat.

  I raced back to the door, thinking I could do a fireman-crawl across the kitchen floor to get it undetected. Instead, I stood unmoving at the sound of Gaysie’s voice.

  “Mother.” Her voice was low and enunciated, a tone that sent shivers of fear clear through me. The room went still. “My boy loves his shawl. He knitted it himself, and if you ever, and I mean ever, speak to Micah that way again. If you ever so much as hint at his worth in such a way, I swear upon the feet of our Holy Father.” I peeked through the doorframe and saw Gaysie bent down toward her mother’s ear. “You will not step back into this house.” In her hands was the cutting knife. “Ever.”

  I left my hat on the floor, running fast to the playground, and climbed way up high into the rocket slide, where Bitty, Micah, and Jimmy sat waiting for me.

  “Your mother is going to kill your grandmother,” I said to Micah.

  “Ah, that’s old news,” Jimmy said.

  From off the main road came the Creepers. They slowed at the playground, not getting off their bikes. Jimmy put his fingers to his lips. The Creepers, not seeing us up in the slide, threw some rocks at the school before heading around the side.

  “Ready?” I whispered, exhaling. I pulled open the letter, tiny bits of envelope scattering in the wind.

  Bitty and Micah
squeezed in closer to me, while Jimmy folded his arms. I began to read aloud.

  Dear Guinevere,

  My name is Maggie Cho. I write on Ms. Piehl’s behalf as she is very busy getting ready for trial. Ms. Piehl says to tell you how delighted she was to receive your letter and how much she’s missed your imagination.

  Your questions are intriguing. I assume you are getting ready for a mock trial of your own or some sort of reenactment for school? You used the term “crime scene,” and I’m curious what kind of scene you are re-creating. Nothing too bloody and scary, I hope!

  “Crime scene!” Micah exclaimed. “What the heck did you say?” I read on.

  I received the fingerprint sample you sent, and here’s what I can tell you:

  Fingerprint evidence is extremely unreliable. Oftentimes the judge will not even allow it into the courtroom. That being said, you are right, fingerprint samples should be taken as soon as possible before destroyed or contaminated.

  The fingerprints you sent me aren’t exemplar prints, meaning you didn’t deliberately take them from your suspect like a school would, to hire teachers. Exemplar are easiest to see and label because the suspect is giving you a full set and carefully rolling a finger from one ridge to the other. What you sent are latent prints.

  In forensic science, latent prints are left behind accidentally, and you’re lucky to get a full print of even one finger. You sent partials. A full print would hold up far better in your court scene.

  “Is she for real?” Jimmy asked.

  Latent prints are left from touching something with sweat, skin oil, ink, paint, dirt, or blood. But there is great room for error when making comparisons because the fingerprint was taken under uncontrolled conditions. The grooves and ridges of a print contain much less clarity.

  I liked the drama you added by sending the partial print in blood. That was something we could pick up in the lab.

  We all gasped. I lowered the letter and thought back to the last day we had seen Wilbur alive. A very clear picture of Gaysie sitting in the rocking chair came to mind. The blood on her clothes, the wet laundry Micah had been made to hang after she killed the floatie—with a knife! The hair on my arms stood straight up.

  “Blood! What’s she talking about—blood!” Micah cried.

  I began bouncing up and down. A bloody print was a lead, wasn’t it? Now, if I could get that blood tested, we would even have DNA. . . .

  I skipped ahead, reading to myself while Jimmy calmed Micah down.

  Congratulations. Your suspect’s prints from the tractor did not match the prints on the milking pail you provided. However, they were in the national database and we were able to make a match.

  I almost dropped the letter.

  “Gwyn?” Jimmy asked.

  My entire body stopped working for a moment. My blood felt as cold as ice.

  The fingerprints on the tractor were not Gaysie Cutter’s. Ms. Cho wrote that my suspect was someone else. His name: Jedidiah St. Clair.

  It couldn’t be.

  I had pulled a thread, and the whole thing was unraveling in the worst possible way.

  “What’s it say?” Jimmy demanded.

  “I . . .” I shook my head.

  “Blood!” Micah wailed. “Gwyn, what did you do?”

  “Nothing! You were with me, remember?”

  “You were the one that climbed on the tractor, Gwyn. Why didn’t you tell me there was blood, Gwyn? Gwyn! Oh . . .”

  Bitty began to cry as the tension between us escalated.

  “It was dark. . . .” I stood and decided right then and there to come out with my theory, even if I didn’t have the evidence I needed. Even if the letter pointed to my own father, I knew it wasn’t him. “There was blood on Gaysie the day Wilbur disappeared and she was in the rocking chair!” I burst out.

  “She cut her finger off,” Jimmy said. “Of course there was blood. She’d been working . . .”

  “Why was there blood on the steering wheel if she was lifting it from the bottom?”

  “Wilbur wouldn’t let her drive the tractor! He wouldn’t let anyone on the Blue Mistress!” Micah looked stunned. Yes, it was a terrible, sickening feeling to be suspicious of someone you loved more than anything in the world.

  “It’s okay, Micah,” Bitty said, patting his arm, looking scared.

  “Well, what did the letter say about the prints?” Jimmy asked.

  “They couldn’t match our print,” I said weakly. “My experiment didn’t work.” Had Georgia Piehl ever been in such a mess? Compromised? Forced to recuse herself?

  “That’s it?” Jimmy asked, his eyes narrowing.

  I nodded and shoved the letter into my pocket, hoping they would never ask me about it again. There was a national database of fingerprints. My father had prints in the system because he was a dentist. He had worked in hospitals. But how and why had they gotten onto the tractor’s steering wheel? He didn’t even know how to start a tractor . . . did he? Then again, he’d grown up in Crow. Why wouldn’t he know how to drive a tractor? His prints had to be a mistake, a coincidence of some sort. My father was not involved. He was not a killer—he liked Wilbur! But by all accounts, so had Gaysie.

  “I don’t believe you,” Jimmy said, making a grab for the letter.

  “Stop it!”

  “Show me!” Jimmy made another grab, and this time he ripped half of it from my hands, tearing the letter clear across the middle.

  “Oh, Jimmy,” Micah said.

  Furiously, I tore my half—the part with the true evidence—into a hundred pieces.

  “There!” I shouted. “Now there’s no evidence to convict anyone!”

  “Gwyn, what—” Jimmy began.

  I pulled Bitty with me and we slid down the rocket slide—right into the tire of the Creeper of all Creeps, Travis Maynard. His buckteeth were particularly dirty today.

  “Hey, watch it,” he said.

  Bitty and I jumped over the tire, with Micah and Jimmy right behind us.

  “Get out of here, Travis,” Jimmy said.

  “What’s your problem, Quintel?”

  “Micah and I decided it’s time to give it up!” Jimmy said, ignoring him and following after me as I hurried away. “Gaysie didn’t do it, and now you know it’s true too.”

  I turned, hands on my hips.

  “No, we’re not finished yet.”

  “Yes, we are!” Jimmy took a step toward me. “Micah, you’ve got to take a side here.”

  Travis and his Creeper gang were now on the perimeter, lurking like hungry sharks.

  Micah’s eyes were as big as his glasses, wide and worried. “But, Jimmy, we’re the four musketeers. It’s all for one and one for all!”

  “Fight, fight, fight, fight,” Travis began to chant.

  “Don’t you care?” I spat out. “Wilbur was your neighbor and friend! He lived in the backyard and he’s gone and the suspect is right in front of your face and you can’t see it.”

  “Now he really can’t.” Travis Maynard lifted the glasses off Micah’s face from behind and threw them to another Creeper.

  “Give ’em back!” Bitty shouted.

  They laughed, playing keep-away.

  I lunged for the glasses, tackling Travis Maynard to the ground just as he caught the glasses in his hands. I heard glass crunching beneath my stomach. Travis and I rolled apart as we stared at the broken glass. I felt my stomach for mortal wounds.

  “Go!” a Creeper shouted. The cowards were up and running. I picked up Micah’s very crooked frames, the glass in the right lens shattered.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said, holding them out to him. “I was trying to help.”

  He took them sorrowfully, and put them back on his face, squinting. “I know.”

  “But sometimes when you try to help, you ruin things,” Jimmy said.

  I ran away then, only slowing up for Bitty to catch me.

  “Are we all still friends?” Bitty asked, looking up at me.

  “Just r
un,” I said. “It will feel better if we run.” A herd of cows noticed us and began running beside us, inside their fence.

  “Moo!” Bitty yelled delightedly back at them. “Moo!”

  I thought that life would be so much more simple if I were a cow and not a lead investigator on the verge of losing her only case—and her only friends.

  CHAPTER 29

  PERSEVERATION WAS COMMON WITH A brain injury. It meant that Vienna repeated the same things over and over. Imagine having the most annoying parrot in the whole world, and you’d have Vienna living at your house. The only upside was the distraction from Micah and Jimmy being angry with me. In addition, Nana had gotten wind of me breaking Micah’s glasses, and I was working off my debt with chores to help pay for a new pair.

  My aunt Joanna’s questions had guilted Nana into having Vienna for a few overnight visits. We had tried this twice before with Lolly doing double shifts, in New York, and it had been a disaster. But sometimes, my father said, love makes you do a lot of crazy things.

  “This is my room,” Vienna said, standing under the white doorframe of my bedroom as I washed the windows.

  “Actually,” I said, “it’s mine now.”

  “This is my room.”

  You see, Vienna’s brain didn’t know how to get past something she didn’t understand, so she said the same repetitive phrase over and over and over again.

  “This is our room now,” I said. “You get to share with Daddy.”

  “Daddy?”

  “Jed. You get to share with Jed.”

  “Jed! Where’s Jed?”

  “He’ll be home soon. Emergency dental work.”

  “Ohhhh.”

  She stared at me before looking around the bedroom again.

  “Do you want to wash windows? It’s so fun,” I said, thinking of Tom Sawyer’s brilliance. “In fact, it’s a great privilege!”

  “This is my room,” Vienna said, not taking the bait.

  I took her by the arm and led her down the hall to get her mind off it. She walked in small, shuffled steps, leaning on me for support.

  My father had set up his room so Vienna slept in his bed and he slept on a cot next to it. Next to the cot and bedside table was his large pile of reading material. All on the brain, of course. The only decoration he’d bothered to bring from New York was a large Japanese pot that looked broken and glued back together. It was a shiny blue-green, and very unique, unlike anything else I’d ever seen.