Everyone screamed. Only my friends and I, and Ms. Juniper, stayed calm.
Sam jogged to the back of one of the teepees. I followed as she got down on her knees and scraped around in the dirt. Very carefully, she pinched at a tiny spot of ground. Then she lifted her fingers, still pinched together. She smiled.
I leaned down and squinted at Sam’s fingers. Then I saw it. “Fishing line!” I said.
Sam nodded. “This is how some of these hauntings are happening,” she said.
“What about the voice?” I asked.
Sam got up and took my hand. “Come on,” she said.
We hurried down to the rest of the History Club. “Ms. Juniper,” Sam called out. “Get one of the security guards.”
“Why?” the teacher asked.
“Sam solved the crimes,” I said. “Uh, I think.”
Ms. Juniper, a park guard, and Ranger Harrison gathered around me and the rest of the field-trip mystery solvers.
Sam got right to it. “All right, everybody. I know who’s been causing all the trouble,” she said.
Egg raised his hand. “It’s those protestors,” he said. “Right? They have the motive. Plus, it makes sense they’d pretend to be Lakota spirits, since they speak for some of the Lakota nation.”
“That does make sense,” Sam said, “but they don’t have the opportunity.”
“That’s right,” I said. “They couldn’t have gotten into Ranger Harrison’s house.”
“Or the studio,” Gum pointed out. “You all saw how the security team reacted when they went inside.”
“They didn’t pay,” the park guard said.
“Only one person has motive and opportunity,” Sam said. “The caretaker.”
Ranger Harrison and the park guard looked shocked.
“Think about it,” Sam said. She started pacing, like an old-time detective. Sam loved all those old movies. “The caretaker has a set of keys that opens every door in the park.”
“That’s true,” the park guard said.
“But what motive does he have?” Egg said.
“He’s a grump,” Sam said. “You saw how he looked at us, and how he talked to us. He doesn’t like kids. He wants us out of here. And he doesn’t want any more groups showing up, either.”
That got me thinking about kids.
There was one kid at the park who wasn’t here with a class trip. She’d never be going anywhere.
“This makes sense,” the park guard said. He reached for his walkie-talkie. “I’ll give the order to arrest the caretaker at once.”
“Wait!” I said. “It wasn’t the caretaker.”
Sam looked at me, her eyes wide.
“Then who do you think it was, Cat?” Egg said.
I didn’t answer right away. I looked over his shoulder and saw a girl peeking out from behind a teepee.
“There’s one person who has the best motive of all,” I said, looking right at the girl. She looked back at me. Now I knew what I’d seen in her eyes before, at the gift shop. “Homesickness.”