IT’S THE weirdest moment of my life. I’m looking at a grown woman who’s been a girl—and probably a dead one—in my head all summer.
Also, she’s caught me red-handed. There’s no doubt about that. But she doesn’t make a move to call the police. She just looks at me and I can tell words are slowly forming in her brain, too.
I hold up my hands, surrendering, like in an old western movie. My right hand clenching the clue, my left hand wrapped around the letter opener.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” she utters.
I shake my head slowly. “No, I’m pretty much not.” We search each other’s eyes. Then I ask, “You’re her, right?”
“Yeah,” she says slowly. “Yes, I am.” The corners of her mouth curl up slightly.
“This was your room.”
“Uh-huh.” She sits down on the bed and reaches out to me. “Let me see it.”
I hand her the letter and watch as she reads it through. “I’d almost forgotten about this.” Her eyes turn to me. “And my ring!” she says with real delight. I pull the mood ring off my finger and hold it out. She takes it (like it’s a sacred artifact), slips it on her ring finger, and lets out a burst of laughter. “It doesn’t fit anymore. Of course it doesn’t.”
“I knew it was a kid’s ring. Right when we found it.”
As she gazes at the ring, I realize this is not just Girl Detective from my dream, with the waving hair and the blazing blue eyes. This version of her, the current one, looks familiar. Not dream familiar, real-life familiar. But where have I seen her before? Who is this G.D.?
She notices me staring. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
“I don’t know. Don’t I know you? I mean, now. In real life?”
“Hmmm. I don’t think so,” she says. “Are you a reader? Do you go to the local library?”
“All the time.” And then it hits me. “You’re the mystery writer! The lady on the poster! You’re having a signing—”
“Today. I had a book signing today. At the library. That’s why I’m here.” With everything going on, I completely forgot about the book signing at the library. Then she adds, “But I also came to visit my mom.”
It takes a second for this to sink in. Mrs. Hale wasn’t always old. She was probably my mom’s age when Girl Detective was twelve. The timeline fits. Of course it does. I just couldn’t see it until now. “Mrs. Hale’s your mom?”
Girl Detective smiles. “And you got past her to find the final clue. Good job, Nancy Drew. What’s your name?”
“Birdie. Birdie Adams.”
“Nice to meet you, Birdie Adams. I’m Emily McAllister.”
I so badly want to call her Girl Detective but instead I say, “Nice to meet you, Ms. McAllister.”
“Oh, call me Emily. Everybody does. And besides, I think you’ve earned the right.”
That feels kind of weird because she’s a grown-up but I say, “Okay.”
“You couldn’t have found the first clue,” she says, “because I mailed that to Detective Paulson at the police station. So … you found … the box?”
I nod.
“Which was the second clue.”
“I thought it had to be the second clue,” I say. “Because how could anybody find it otherwise.”
“How did you find it?” she asks. “You must be some detective.”
“I’m a terrible detective!”
Girl Detective, I mean Emily, grins at me. “As it turns out, so was I. Nobody killed Ruthie. Nobody killed anybody.” She pauses. “Does it make me a bad person that I was a little disappointed when I realized that?”
Mrs. Hale is surprised to see us walking down the stairs together. “When did you get home, Emily?”
“Not long ago,” Emily says. “I was showing Birdie something upstairs.” What an excellent liar. I love this woman already!
If Rose and Ally could see themselves—their gaping mouths and surprised eyes—they would bust up laughing. As we walk into the living room, I look at my friends and announce, “Meet Girl Detective!”
“Who’s Girl Detective?” Emily asks as we sit down, joining them.
“It’s a long story,” I say, and Rose, Ally, and I start telling them of our adventure. Of finding the clue box on the island and finding the next clue in the Gillans’ mailbox. Of going to Smith and Sons and seeking out Mr. Smith in the nursing home in Decatur.
“And then I found this,” I say and pull the black-and-white photo from my back pocket. I feel embarrassed that it’s crumpled but I hand it to Emily anyway.
She takes the picture and shows it to Mrs. Hale. “Look, Mom! Remember when the house looked like that?”
Mrs. Hale puts on her glasses and examines the photo closely. “Where did you get this?” she asks me.
I smile at Emily knowingly.
“That book was still there?” she says. “After all this time!”
“In the secret room. In a stack under the Anne of Green Gables train.”
“I can’t believe it.”
“What is she talking about, Emily?” Mrs. Hale asks, confused.
Emily gives me an admiring look. “You really are some detective.”
“She was obsessed,” Ally says.
“Completely,” adds Rose.
“Yeah,” I say, “but we followed the clues to here. To the final clue. I had to get to the end. Even though we already knew that Ruthie Delgado’s alive—”
“Well, you don’t know she’s still alive,” Emily says. “It’s been forty years.”
“But we do!” Rose says. “We called her.”
“You did?”
The three of us nod together in our lineup on the sofa.
“She thought we were crazy,” I say.
“She thought you were crazy,” Ally corrects.
“Well, yeah,” I say. “But it was her. No doubt. Lives in Michigan now.”
“Really,” Emily says. “Ruthie Delgado lives…”
I focus on her like a real detective would and ask, “So what really happened?”
She turns serious and says, “If anyone deserves to know the truth, it’s you three.” She looks at her mother. “Mom, may I have a cup of tea?”
“Here, have mine,” Mrs. Hale says and slides over her teacup. “I want to hear every bit of this.”
“Okay.” Emily McAllister opens with a storyteller’s grin. “It was a dark and stormy night.”
“Really?” I ask. “Isn’t that an old Victorian novel cliché?”
“Yes, but clichés are clichés for a reason,” Emily answers. “The night Ruthie Delgado never showed up to the Allman Brothers concert was the night this really began. And it was a dark and stormy night. But let’s go back.
“Ruthie was a teenager, several years older than me, and maybe the coolest girl in the neighborhood. I watched how she did things and tried to copy her. The way her hair effortlessly floated behind her. The way she walked with such confidence and flair. She was really something.”
“She wasn’t that great,” Mrs. Hale mutters.
“Mom, let me tell the story.”
Mrs. Hale shrugs. “Continue.”
“Okay, so Ruthie never came home from the concert and I was sure I knew what happened. This guy, Martin Smith, kept following her around. I had watched him. A lot. And Ruthie tried to get him to leave her alone but he just kept on bugging her. And it wasn’t normal bugging. There was something scary about Martin. And I could tell Ruthie was scared of him. Then one day, I saw Martin corner Ruthie at the pool and ask her to go to the concert. With him! Ruthie said she was already going to the concert and that she would never go anywhere with Martin. And that she never wanted him to talk to her again. She really told Martin what was what. Even though I could tell she was shaking.”
“That boy was trouble,” Mrs. Hale says. “No two ways about it.”
Emily looks at her mom. “You knew he was trouble, too? I thought I was the only one.”
“Darling, everyone knew,” Mrs. Hale says, her eyebrow lifting.
“Well, that might have changed things,” Emily says, almost to herself, before looking at us again. “Anyway, when Ruthie never came home from the concert—”
“Because she never went to the concert,” I add.
“Exactly. Everybody was so concerned about her, I just knew that it was Martin. So. On a hunch, I snuck into the Delgados’ house and found the unused ticket in Ruthie’s room—”
“You snuck into their house!” Mrs. Hale says.
“Mom, it was a hundred years ago. Relax. And I found the ticket, so I knew Ruthie never even made it to the concert in the first place. And that evening, before the concert, I had seen Martin hanging around her house. And Martin was a butcher. Or at least a butcher’s son. So when we heard that Ruthie was missing the next day, I just put two and two together. There was no doubt in my mind. Martin Smith killed Ruthie Delgado.”
“You thought he killed her?” exclaims Mrs. Hale.
Emily nods. “Of course I did. And I told Detective Paulson everything because it was his job to investigate murders. But he just ignored me and—”
“You went to the police station!”
“Yes, Mother. I went to the police station.” Emily leans toward us and speaks more softly. “She acts like she was paying attention, but none of the parents did back then. We kids did whatever we wanted.”
I try and suppress a grin as Mrs. Hale says loudly, “What did you say?”
Emily continues. “I was just saying that nobody believed me, so I decided to go after Martin Smith myself.”
“You didn’t!” Mrs. Hale says, shaking her head.
“I did! But I realized that by facing the killer alone I might be feeding myself to the lions, so I mailed Detective Paulson the letter and then hid all the other clues. Because I was mad. And he didn’t believe me. And I was going to make Detective Paulson work for it. Even if it meant I was walking into my sure and certain death.”
“Your imagination,” says Mrs. Hale.
“Well, that part worked out,” she says and gestures to the books along the shelf behind her. I look at them and register that she wrote them. All of them. So yes, I guess her imagination really did work out for her. “Anyway, when I couldn’t find Martin, I kind of made a scene at Smith and Sons. I confronted his father, the real butcher, and he got pretty angry at me. Didn’t like the idea of me accusing his son of killing Ruthie Delgado, I guess.”
“Yep, he sure remembers you,” Rose says.
“Well, that is regrettable,” Emily says. “But unavoidable. But then a month later, boy was I surprised when Ruthie showed up. Alive! The rumor was that she ran away with some boy and that her father tracked her down and brought her home. But I had worked so hard on the clues. I had funneled all of my paranoid speculation into them. All of my twelve-year-old brilliance.” She grins. “I thought about digging them up. Collecting them again but I kept putting it off. For some reason, I wanted them to be out there. To have a life. Even though no one would ever find them.” She looks at me. “I wasn’t expecting you.”
“I have a question,” Mrs. Hale says to her daughter.
“What, Mom?”
“Why in the world didn’t you come to me?”
Famous, grown-up author Emily McAllister suddenly looks twelve again. The way we all look when our moms ask us something we just can’t answer. “I don’t know,” she mutters. “I just thought…”
“If you had come to me, I could have told you everything,” Mrs. Hale says. “We all knew that Ruthie ran off with her boyfriend that night. It wasn’t a very happy home, the Delgado house. I felt bad for her when her dad found her and dragged her back.”
“Really?” Emily asks. “You knew all that?”
“Of course I did. I’m your mother.”
While Girl Detective takes this new information in, I can’t help but think about my own mom. For some reason, and I’m not sure why, I haven’t told her about any of this. Nothing about the clues, the box, or the girl from the past who sent them to us. Is this what happens to twelve-year-old girls? We stop telling things to our mothers?
“What happened to Martin Smith?” Ally asks like she’s really interested. “We never found out.”
“Martin died,” Mrs. Hale says flatly.
“He did?” Emily asks. “How?”
“Struck by lightning,” she says. “Anyone want more tea?”
“Yes, please!” Emily says.
Rose’s mouth drops open and her eyes grow bigger than I’ve ever seen them. “Lightning?”
“Lightning.” Mrs. Hale nods. “It happens, you know.”
“Mom. Tea. Please.”
Mrs. Hale lets out a little sigh. “Fine, then.” She rises wearily and heads toward the kitchen. “What I have to do, your poor old mother.” But there’s a smile in her voice. I can tell she’s kidding.
Emily turns to us dryly. “What a drama queen.”