But whose shoes left those too-few clues?
“Ohmigoshohmigoshohmigosh.”
“What’s wrong?” Margaret grabs me by the shoulders and shakes me.
“I—I just stepped in …”
“Blood,” says Rebecca.
A mere step behind us, Leigh Ann swallows loudly enough for me to hear her. “Bl-blood?” Her voice is barely a whisper.
“Nobody move!” Margaret orders.
I drop my lightsaber, something I have an unfortunate history of doing in stressful situations. Rebecca gasps, and poor Leigh Ann’s death grip on my arm is cutting off my circulation as she starts to say a Hail Mary.
“Wh-what is it?” I manage to stammer.
Margaret shines her light on our faces and giggles. That’s right—Miss Wrobel is giggling. Margaret will smile frequently, chuckle occasionally. But until this moment, she has never giggled.
“It’s paint! Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you more. I just didn’t want anyone to disturb the evidence.”
“We oughta—” I start.
“Kill you,” Leigh Ann says.
“Twice,” adds Rebecca.
“Is that so?” Margaret says, stifling another giggling fit and crouching down to find the source of the puddle. “Look, here’s the paint can.” She points to it, lying on its side behind the bottom shelf.
“Now, since it is still wet, we have to assume that it must have been very recently knocked over. Maybe the someone we’re looking for was just here and heard us. Let’s survey the crime scene before it’s completely compromised.”
For someone who supposedly doesn’t watch a lot of television, Margaret sure knows all that CSI lingo.
“Crime scene? Compromised?” Rebecca sputters. “You just took a month off my life. Someday I’m gonna need that time.”
Margaret is already busy “surveying.” “See these footprints in the dust? Definitely new.” She lifts the overturned paint can and gives it a good shake. The lid is on, but there is a dent in the top, where paint continues to ooze. “Still quite a bit left. It would be empty if it had been knocked over more than a day ago. Ah, I bet that’s what they were after.” She stretches her neck to get a look at the top shelf. “Cleaning supplies. Whoever it was doing the reaching had to stand on the bottom shelf to reach up to the top. When they did that, their feet must have pushed this can right off the back of the shelf. It landed on that pile of rags, so they never heard it fall.”
“Which could explain why a person who’s obviously a neat freak didn’t pick it up,” I say. “Assuming this was our guy—or girl.”
“Right.” Margaret claps her hands together, shaking off the dust, and turns to Leigh Ann, the “new kid” at St. Veronica’s we got to know during our first case. “Okay, based on what we have observed, what do we know about our suspect?”
“Um, he’s clumsy?”
“And?”
“He’s short. Or she’s short. For a grown-up, anyway. I mean, I’m only five foot six and I can almost reach the top shelf.”
Margaret nods. “Excellent. And?”
Leigh Ann’s face scrunches up. She starts to reach for my flashlight but, after noting its lovely spider-webby coating, turns to me. “Um, Sophie, would you shine that over there, on the floor?” she says, pointing to a spot next to the shelves. She bends over to take a closer look.
“What is it?” I ask.
“Footprints. Kind of small—not much bigger than mine—but they’re smooth. Definitely not sneakers.”
“One more question,” says Margaret. “Right- or left-handed?”
“How is she supposed to tell that from the footprints?” Rebecca asks.
“Which hand did he use to grab the cleaning supplies?”
I raise my hand, excited because I think I know the answer. “Call on me! Call on me!”
Rebecca clunks me on the head with her flashlight. “Suck-up.”
“Go ahead, Sophie, tell them,” Margaret says primly.
I point to the shelves where our suspect has stepped with his or her right foot, and then to a shelf at eye level where a right hand has made a clear imprint in the dust. “Based on the angle of the fingers, he was holding on to this shelf with his right hand … which means that he grabbed the bottle of cleaning stuff with his left.”
Applause from Leigh Ann and Margaret and a hearty Bronx cheer from Becca.
“There’s one big problem with all this,” she scoffs. “How do you know it wasn’t just the janitor coming down here to get cleaning supplies? Isn’t that what he does? He’s probably down here getting stuff off that shelf every day.”
Leigh Ann beams. “I’m starting to get this detective stuff. Think about the janitor for a second, Becca.”
“What about him?”
“How tall is he?”
“I dunno. Pretty tall. Definitely over six feet. So?”
“Soooo, he wouldn’t need to stand on this shelf to reach the top one.”
“Ohhhhhh,” we chorus.
“Now can we get the heck out of here?” pleads Leigh Ann. “It’s going to take a gallon of Cleen and Shinee to get these cobwebs out of my hair.”
As we backtrack through the basement, I give a secret wave at my whiskered friend and whisper, “We’ll be back.”