Minerva Clark Gives Up the Ghost Read Online Free

chlorine. Kevin was a champion swimmer, which meant he always smelled of chlorine. He swam the butterfly, the most show-offy stroke there is.
    â€œHey,” I said.
    â€œHey,” said Morgan, glancing up at me.
    â€œI can’t believe you still have that hat on. It’s eight hundred degrees in here,” I said. Between the boys and the dog, there was nowhere for me to sit.
    â€œIt’s my good-luck hat,” said Morgan.
    â€œHey, babe,” said Kevin. I liked how he called me babe, even though it sort of sounded like something he’d practiced at home in the mirror, winking and pointing at himself with finger guns.
    â€œYou can’t hide from me, suckah!” Kevin’s thumbs jigged around the controller as he blasted away. On the screen, the cartoon bad guys threw up their hands and screamed before they exploded. I stood in the doorway for a long minute. He never looked away from the screen.
    I’ll tell you one thing: I’m never going to be one ofthose girls who watches her boyfriend play video games and calls that hanging out. It is more boring than weeding the yard. It is more boring than a parental lecture. It is even more boring than when boys
talk
about playing video games. How is that possible?
    I turned around and ran up the stairs to my bedroom on the third floor.
    My ferret, Jupiter, used to sleep in a cage behind the grand piano in the living room downstairs, but after Ned arrived, we bought him a fancy new ferret tower, with four levels connected by ramps and tubes, and moved him to my bedroom. Ned liked to stand in front of Jupiter’s cage, madly wagging his stump of a tail. We couldn’t tell if that meant he wanted Jupiter to be his friend or his snack.
    I opened Jupiter’s cage, scooped him up from where he was conked out in his hammock, and tossed him onto my bed. Jupiter doesn’t mind being airborne. He throws his little white legs out wide like a flying squirrel. As usual, he behaved as if he’d never been out of his cage until that very second. He performed his mad inchworm dance until he fell off the bed, bumped into a chair leg, pulled one of my flip-flops under the bed, scampered back out and attacked a wadded-up piece of paper, hurled himself into the air for no good reason, fell backward, dove into one of my shoes, and then was distracted by a CD that had fallen on the floor and that he tried to drag under my dresser.
    I plopped down on my bed and watched Jupiter for a while. I crossed my legs and thought about my second conversation with Angus Paine. I’d waited until Mrs. Dagnitz had walked all the way across the supermarket parking lot and disappeared into the market before calling him back. It was too easy. I just had to hit the button that dialed the number of the last incoming call. Tip tap, just like that, and the strange boy was on the line.
    I told him I’d love to help him figure out who had burned down his family’s grocery store.
    â€œAll right,” he said. He sounded distant, much less warm and friendly than when he’d called me only the hour before. He was annoyed, distracted. I’d say he was playing video games, but I couldn’t hear any noise in the background.
    â€œWhen do you want to meet?” I said.
    Pause.
    â€œWhatever works for you,” he said.
    â€œAre you still there? Hello?” I said loudly. I knew he hadn’t hung up, but his behavior truly bugged. Hadn’t
he
called
me
?
    â€œLet’s make it two o’clock tomorrow then,” he said. “At the grocery.”
    Is it considered hanging up on somebody if you don’t say good-bye? If it is, then Angus Paine had hung up on me. As I snapped my phone shut, I realized I hadn’t asked for directions to Corbett StreetGrocery. But then again, he hadn’t offered to give me the address either. Did he think that just because his family’s grocery was on Cryptkeeper Ron’s Tour of Haunted Portland