Lizzie Maple has got something to say. She’s waiting for me in our living room when I get home from school with a face that says, This Is Important. She follows me into my room, and as soon as my door is closed, she spills it. “I’ve been asking Mummy for months if I could go to the HOMESCHOOLER’S CRAFT FAIR they have at the library on Tuesdays.”
I nod and try to pretend like I know what she’s talking about.
“And she’s finally letting me go!” Lizzie’s practically shaking when she says this, and her smile is so big, it could sprout legs and walk off.
I fall face-first on my bed because Lizzie might as well be talking upside down and backwards about her grandpa’s nose hairs. She sits on my legs and says, “Tomorrow is Tuesday. And Mummy is going to drop me off at the library by myself for the whole day.”
“So?” I say into my pillow.
“Your brain is as thick as mud.” She pulls at my hair. “So, we can go on another adventure tomorrow.”
“I have school,” I remind her. “And besides, I’m all out of adventures.”
“Well, I’m not,” she says. “My adventures are just getting going.” Lizzie gets up and opens the door. “Real detectives don’t give up on a case, you know. I’m just saying.”
I pull my pillow over my head to shut out all the light.
A long while later, when Lizzie’s gone and the apartment is quiet, I take the picture of Grandpa Felix and my dad out of my toolbox and return it to the family album. The faces in the pictures ask, “What are you doing up so late? A girl your age should be in bed by now.” But I tell them all to be quiet and turn the pages quickly.
When I slide the book back onto the shelf, a thin piece of paper sticks out of one of the pages. It’s a page torn out of a magazine, and when I unfold it, a dog’s face stares back at me. The dog gets my attention right away, but not because he looks more like a cow than a dog on account of the fact that he has brown and black spots all over his face. This dog has got one thing that makes me stop: bushy eyebrows. (Not the kind that are all caterpillary like Patsy Cline’s Marge, but eyebrows all the same.)
If ever I was sure about a look on a face, it would be this one. This dog, who I decide should be called Winston, is gazing off to the side somewhere, like he just heard somebody say, Winston, come here, boy! It’s time to play snakes and ladders! Because that’s what dogs with eyebrows do in their spare time.
When I look across the page to see who might be calling him, I see a name typed sideways along the picture in tiny letters that only mice could read: Mortimer Felix Crumb.
“Mortimer?” I say out loud. “Who’s Mortimer?” Winston looks back at me as if he might just know the answer. “Could Grandpa Felix also be a Mortimer?” Winston won’t say for sure, but his eyebrows tell me that if he could get out of that magazine page, he might be able to help track him down.
I fold up the page, take back the picture of Grandpa Felix and my dad, and decide to be a detective once more.
Terrible has got his alien eyeballs on me all morning. I take ant-size bites of my peanut butter toast and chew without making any noise and hope he won’t notice me. “What’s going on?” he says, leaning across the table at me.
I shrug and say, “Nothing.”
He pokes his finger into my shoulder. “It better be nothing.”
“Ow. You can only do that because Mum is at work.” Then I shove the rest of the toast into my mouth and rub my arm.
“Wish I had a sister who was at least half normal,” he says, shaking his head. Like he’s so normal or regular. He pokes my shoulder again, and this time it hurts so much that a piece of chewed-up toast falls out of my mouth.
I’m out the door with my toolbox and jacket before I can swallow the toast all the way down. Instead of going left on Washington Street to school, I go right and walk towards the library.
The Portwaller Public Library is full of homeschoolers. I find Lizzie off by herself, reading a book called Everything You Need to Know about Skateboarding. “Ready for an adventure?” I say.
Lizzie stuffs the book into her backpack and says, “What took you so long?” like she knew I was coming.
I take out the magazine page of Winston and point to Grandpa Felix’s possibly new name. I tell Lizzie about how Grandpa Felix may also be Mortimer.
“Mortimer?” she says. “I guess if I had a name like that, I’d go by Felix, too.”
“We need to do another search.” At a library computer, we type in “Mortimer Crumb” and to my surprise we find one M. Crumb in Portwaller.
“He lives in the same town as we do!” says Lizzie.
I shake my head. “That can’t be right. Why wouldn’t he see us if he lived that close? Maybe that’s not the right M. Crumb.” But I write down his number and address just in case.
Lizzie says, “Come on, let’s find out,” and she leads me to the information desk where there’s a phone on the counter.
“May I help you?” asks the man behind the desk.
“We need to make a local call,” Lizzie tells him.
“Two, actually,” I say.
“Two?” Lizzie whispers. I nod, and she tells the man, “That’s right, two calls.”
The man puts his hand on the phone and looks us over like he’s trying to decide if we’re bad eggs. Then Lizzie puts her arm around my shoulder and says, “Don’t worry, I’m HOMESCHOOLED. I mean, we both are. HOMESCHOOLED.”
The man must decide that we aren’t bad eggs because he takes his hand off the phone and says, “Make it short.”
As Lizzie reads off the phone number, I dial and wait. Halfway through the first ring, I notice the man eyeballing us, so I give him a quick smile and then turn my back to him. Three rings later, a man with a gruff voice says, “What is it?” on the other end of the phone. Not Hello, not Good morning, not Crumb residence, Mr Mortimer Felix speaking. How can I help you? This man says, “What is it?” like the sound of the ring grumped him up. And right away I know this man is my grandpa.
“Hi. Is this Mr Crumb?”
“You called me,” the man says. “Shouldn’t you know who you called?”
Good gravy. “There are more than one or two Crumbs out there,” I say. “So I want to be sure I’ve got the right one. Are you Mr Mortimer Felix Crumb?”
“Depends on who’s asking,” he barks. “I don’t give to charities, if that’s what you’re after. You sound too young to be asking for money. How old are you?”
“I’m nine. Going on ten.”
“Is it him?” Lizzie whispers.
I whisper back, “I think so.”
“Who else are you talking to?” he asks.
“Nobody.”
“I distinctly heard you say ‘I think so,’ so don’t lie to me and say you didn’t,” he says. “I may be up in years, but my wits and hearing are front and centre and I don’t like to be taken advantage of by people calling me up and looking for money.”
I give Lizzie a face that says, I Think He Might Have Been Raised by Wolves.
“You’ve got five seconds to state your business, missy, or I’m hanging up.”
“He called me ‘missy,’” I whisper to Lizzie.
“I heard that.”
“Oh,” I say. “Sorry.”
“Are you one of those prank callers?”
“No. This is no prank.”
“Then what are you selling?” he says.
“What am I selling?” I repeat. I cover the phone with my hand and say to Lizzie, “He thinks I’m selling something.”
She scratches her head. “Tell him you’re selling marshmallows. No, wait. Tell him you’re selling vacuum cleaners.” I shake my head. “No, wait. Life insurance,” she says.
The man on the phone is counting down fast. “Three … two …”
So I blurt out, without really thinking, “Do you have a dead son named Theodore Crumb because if you do, I am your granddaughter. I’m Penelope Rae …”
And before I can even say Crumb, that man, that Grandpa Felix, hangs up on me.