“DO YOU like the Allman Brothers Band?” I ask my parents at dinner that night.
“The Allman Brothers?” my dad asks, shaking his head and scooping more mashed potatoes onto his plate.
“What’s wrong with the Allman Brothers?” Mom says. “I like them okay.”
Dad shrugs. “Nothing, I guess.”
“Snob,” she says. “Zora, eat.” Zora’s playing with her planes instead of eating her dinner, and the rain is pelting so hard against the kitchen window it almost looks like someone’s spraying it with a garden hose.
“Better put out some candles,” Dad says. “Just in case.”
“We gonna lose ’lectricity?” Zora asks.
“Might,” says Dad. He looks up at the ceiling as if he can see through to the sky.
“Why do you ask?” Mom says. “About the Allman Brothers?”
Other than what I’ve read online, I still don’t know much about the Allman Brothers. When Rose played us one of their weird songs, it only left me wanting to know more. So I decide to take a risk. I pull the concert ticket out of my back pocket and place it on the table. My mom stares at it like it’s a ticket to Mars. “Rex, look at this,” she says to my dad. “Where’d you get this, Birdie?”
“That’s not material,” I say. That’s what lawyers say in a courtroom when they don’t want to answer the question. Smart, right?
“Not material?” asks Mom.
“Correct. Not material.”
She shakes her head. “All right, Perry Mason.”
“Who’s she?” I ask.
“He!” my parents answer in unison.
“Okay, okay. Rose found it.” Rose would call this a Greater-Good lie. The real and whole truth would expose everything, and I don’t think that would serve the greater good at this time. At least not my greater good. I continue. “My question is—what’s interesting or … revealing about this ticket?”
My mom examines it closely. “It’s old.”
Dad leans in. “It’s strange it wasn’t used.”
What?! I pick up the ticket. What did I miss? “How do you know she didn’t use it?”
“Because the whole ticket’s there.” My dad says it slowly like he’s speaking to a five-year-old or an alien from another planet.
I don’t understand. My parents grin at each other. “Explain, please!”
“See that perforation down the middle?” Dad says. “Those little dots are where you can pull it apart.”
I look down at the ticket. “Yeah…?”
“When we went to concerts, back in the Stone Age, the man at the door would rip the ticket in half,” Dad says. “Right along that perforated line.”
“He’d keep half and give you the other half,” Mom adds. “And your half was called … wait for it…”
“… a ticket stub,” they say together, like it’s the secret to the universe. They are so dorky sometimes.
“My sister had ticket stubs taped all over her mirror in her bedroom,” Mom says. “Lisa went to lots of concerts.”
“I bet she did,” Dad says.
They keep joking about Mom’s older sister but I’m not listening anymore. I’m looking at the ticket and realizing that Ruthie Delgado never used it. She never went to the concert.
But why?
* * *
Our local library is less than ten minutes from my house. I’ve been coming here my whole life. Standing at the checkout counter, I wait for Mrs. Thompson, the librarian, and can’t help but read the new poster up on the wall behind the counter.
COME MEET BESTSELLING AUTHOR
AND ATLANTA NATIVE
EMILY MCALLISTER
SIGNING HER NEW MYSTERY NOVEL
I DON’T KNOW WHY SHE SWALLOWED THE FLY
AUGUST 12 AT NOON
In the photo on the poster is Emily McAllister. She’s a white woman with short reddish-blond hair and round black-rimmed glasses, older than my parents (maybe Aunt Lisa’s age), and the kind of person my mom would call quirky.
“I just put that up,” Mrs. Thompson says as she steps out of the back room, closing the door behind her. “Should be quite the event. You and your dad should come.”
“That’d be fun. I’ve never been to a real live book signing with a real live author before.”
“It is fun,” she says and scans a book into the computer. “How’s your summer going, Birdie?”
Hmm. I wonder what she would think if I actually told her. “Fine. Dad and Zora are picking out books.”
It thunders outside and she peeks out at the stormy afternoon. “Good day for it.”
“I was wondering.” I lean onto the counter. “Do you keep any old yearbooks here from any of the local schools? From maybe the 1970s?” I look up at her hopefully.
“That’s a strange question,” Mrs. Thompson answers. “There are many treasures in this library, but none of the yearbook variety. Why do you ask?”
“No reason.”
She cocks her head questioningly, so I change the subject. “Or do you have anything new I should know about?”
Mrs. Thompson reveals the secret smile she reserves for people like me. Book people. “I’m so glad you asked,” she says. “Come with me.”
She leads me to familiar shelves, that special section I’ve wandered for years now. As I follow her down a row of books, my finger lightly brushes across the plastic covered spines, offering a silent hello.
“Try this,” Mrs. Thompson says, pulling a book from the end of the shelf. “A debut. Quite the mystery.”
I take the book from her hand and study the colorful cover. It’s by an author I’ve never heard of before. By now I know that doesn’t matter. She’s taught me that a new author can be a wonderful surprise.
“Let me know what you think,” Mrs. Thompson says, then nods toward the counter. “I’ve got customers.”
As she hurries away, I carry the book to my secret nook at the back of the kid’s section. A mystery. Like I need more of that! I plan to read until Dad and Zora come find me, but today I’m somehow distracted. Through the window, I see someone’s umbrella blow inside out like something out of Mary Poppins. In the shopping center across the street, a man splashes to his car with a newspaper over his head.
I look down at my hand and see the ring on my finger. Girl Detective’s ring. I put it on today hoping that somehow it might bring me closer to solving the mystery. At this point, I can use all the help I can get. Keep following the clues! she wrote.
And I just keep asking myself: To where?