Spoon Creek Mystery

By Meredith Ironside

Twelve-year-old Abigail Smiley is grounded for two weeksall because she sold her aunts old book for thirty dollars and the key to an old mansion in the forest.

When Drew Miller, her one and only crush, offers a rusty old key to the Nightingale house in exchange for her aunts book, Abigail is immediately suspicious. Everyone in the small town of Spoon Creek already knows the story. Two days before she died, Miss Nightingale removed nine rare antique silver dollars from her bank deposit box. No one has seen them since. When Drew tells Abigail about the five thousand dollar finders fee, Abigail is suddenly fascinated. A big cash reward could save her aunt from bankruptcy. Officially ungrounded on Halloween night, Abby is faced with a dilemma. Should she sneak out and use the key to try to earn the reward money or should she obey her aunts orders to stay home?

What Abby doesn't know is that the key she keeps in a dish on her dresser may not only lead her to a potential reward, but also to more trouble than she ever could have imagined.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: May 29, 2009
• ISBN: 9780595635481

Meredith Ironside

Meredith Ironside is a writer and public school teacher. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her family.

Book preview

Prologue

I’m writing this book to tell what happened to me a year ago last week, when I got my name in the newspaper. I was twelve years old at the time. What happened was that I helped find nine hundred thousand dollars that Miss Nightingale left to Ivy Snell in her will. It had gotten lost, and nobody could find it. The money was in the form of really rare antique silver dollars.

There were nine of them, each one worth a hundred grand just by itself. I mean, each of them was worth one dollar when they were first issued by the mint, but by the time Miss Nightingale got around to leaving them to Ivy, there were only about twenty of them left in the entire world, and so they were worth a whole lot more than that.

The only reason I got involved was because there was a five thousand dollar reward for finding the money. It wasn’t because I’m one of those people that’s always helping people, or good at finding things. Basically, Winnie was having money troubles, and I wanted to help her out. But even in spite of that, I probably wouldn’t have gotten involved if it weren’t for Drew Miller giving me a key to the Nightingale house in return for a book my aunt was trying to sell, but now I’m getting ahead of myself. It all happened a year ago, like I said. It started two weeks before Halloween.

Chapter One

My name is Abigail Jacqueline Smiley. The first thing you need to know about me is that I really don’t smile all that much. The second thing is that I’m usually in a bad mood, even though I’m really a good person at heart.

I live in Spoon Creek, which is a small town in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, and I don’t recommend visiting it. There’s no movie theater, only three restaurants, and nothing interesting to look at. Plus I’ve always thought Spoon Creek was a really dumb name for a town. Because what do spoons have to do with creeks?

My aunt Winnifred owns the This and That Shop on Tumble Street, on the edge of the business district. That’s also where we live, in an apartment attached to the back of our shop. The This and That is a secondhand store. My aunt thinks of it as junktique, which is a phony word that someone just made up. It means things that aren’t old enough to be antiques but are really old anyway.

The first thing in the chain of events that led to my finding the money was that my last pair of jeans got holes in the knees because I slipped and fell when carrying a box of junk from my aunt’s car into the store. My aunt deals with a lot of worthless stuff—crumby old shoes, clowny wigs, musty books with titles like Life in a Putty Knife Factory, mugs with corny sayings printed on the sides. You know, like, God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, or, Sexy Grandma. She gets the stuff from people who don’t want it anymore, and then she cleans it all up and sells it. Or tries to. Anyway, I fell down because the sidewalk was slippery.

It had rained that morning and everything was wet. My sneakers were wearing out on the bottoms and they had no grip. My feet went out from under me and down I went in this undignified sprawl all over the sidewalk. I dropped the box and everything fell out. Some of it broke, notably a stupid glass that no one but a wino would drink out of. It was the dumbest thing I’d done in awhile. Winnie made it worse by coming out and yelling at me to be more careful. Then I noticed that the knees of my jeans had ripped out, and it was a major problem because it was my last pair. I mean, I had a couple of other pairs of pants, but no other jeans. Now, some girls at school, like Courtney Church and Debbie Whiteside, wear jeans with holes in them on purpose and make it seem like some fashion statement. But to tell you the truth, it’s not my style. First of all, you have to be very slim and beautiful for that to work, and I’m not. Plus my aunt would never let me go around like that anyway. So tearing the knees out of my jeans made my usual bad mood even worse.

Then, to top it all off, the big pumpkin got sold right in front of my eyes. That was later when I was all cleaned up, wearing a skirt I don’t like and minding the store for Winnie. She had gone off on an errand. See, the Hammond and Snell grocery is across the street from our shop, and I can clearly see everyone who comes in and out of it when I’m sitting at the counter minding the store for my aunt. She doesn’t usually make me mind the counter by myself for very long. She doesn’t trust me to do it right. However, Spoon Creek is a small town where everyone knows everybody else, so when I mind the store once in awhile, for about an hour, it kind of somehow works.

Anyway, Mr. Hammond always has a lot of pumpkins for sale around Halloween, and always has a whole lot of them on display outside next to the door. And every year he has one really extremely huge one, as big as an armchair, sitting out in front, mostly for show. Well, every year, all through elementary school, I used to imagine what it would be like to buy the big pumpkin and take it home. I would imagine how I would spend hours pulling out all the guck inside, then I’d get inside of it myself and get my aunt to take a picture of me in there. But we could never afford to spend money on a huge pumpkin that weighs a hundred pounds. A pumpkin that big costs a lot more than a normal-sized one.

Well, by last year I was already too big to get inside a pumpkin, but I still wanted the big display pumpkin at Hammond and Snell in a weird way, maybe because I’d always had a habit of wanting it, like a tradition. So it really bugged me when someone bought the big pumpkin right in front of my eyes after I’d just ripped my jeans, and not only that, but the person who bought it was Allison Quinney. I mean, not Allison Quinney herself, but her dad.

Allison Quinney is the kind of girl you just want to hate. She’s one of those rich girls with long blond hair and clear skin and great clothes. Girls like that never have anything bad happen to them, like sneezing during a test or being told that their shirt is coming unbuttoned. And to make it worse, Allison is really nice, and so you can’t even hate her. I mean really nice, not even phony.

I just sat there watching her dad and Mr. Hammond’s son Bob. Allison’s dad even looks good, for a dad. He has that kind of hair that’s black with white hairs all through it that my aunt calls salt and pepper. He has the kind of body where you can’t even tell he’s someone’s dad from a distance, and he didn’t even huff or puff or grunt while helping Bob get the big pumpkin into the back of his van, and it put me in a foul mood. My mood got even worse when I saw Allison come out of the store in an outfit that looked brand new even though I knew it wasn’t. That’s another thing about girls like Allison. Everything they have on looks new, even if they’ve had it for three years. She stood there laughing and joking with her dad and Mr. Hammond, and I just wanted to break something. However, I’d already broken enough things that day, so I figured I’d better not.

And then the final straw. Drew Miller came out of the store. Drew’s the closest thing I’ve had to a crush in the last couple of years. It’s not that he’s so hot or anything. He’s average. I mean, average looking. But he’s got this sense of humor that’s not like anybody else, and he tries really hard to make me laugh. I’m not the only girl he jokes around with, but still.

Drew saw the big pumpkin in the back of Allison’s dad’s van, and he made this face like oh my god. I could see it all the way from across the street. Then I had to watch Allison and Drew joking around about how huge it was. And I had to watch Allison laughing at whatever he said. Then I noticed the big U-Haul van parked a little way down the street.

I should have noticed it right away, but I guess I didn’t want to, because it meant that this was finally it; Drew’s family was moving out of town. He’d been telling people for weeks he was moving to Canada, but nobody believed it. Now he’d be gone, and I’d never see him again. And the last memory of him I’d have would be of him flirting with Allison.

I got up and went to the window and closed the curtains. We do that sometimes on summer days when the sun is really bright and the shop gets too hot. It wasn’t summer, and it wasn’t hot—in fact the weather report kept saying it was going to snow—but I figured as long as the Open sign was still in the window, Winnie wouldn’t care. And it might save my sanity from any more blows, because I wouldn’t see Allison and Drew talking to each other and laughing their heads off. I started wondering where Winnie was. It seemed like she was taking forever. And then the door opened, with a jingling of these bells on strings that are attached to it, and Drew walked in.

You’re still open, right? was the first thing he said.

I guess, I said, and smiled like we were saying very witty and funny things to each other, even though we weren’t. My heart was pounding for no reason at all.

I just came to say good-bye. When he said that my heart pounded harder than I ever dreamed it could pound, and I started seeing double. Anyway, the room seemed like it was kind of turning around under my feet like on one of those merry-go-round things you play with in playgrounds when you’re really little, that everyone gets hurt on.

Where are you going? Actually, I knew. It was hard to sound normal, because of my heart-pounding problem.

Didn’t you hear? he said. I’m moving. My folks are.

Where are you moving to? I played dumb, because I didn’t want Drew to know I knew all kinds of things about him, like his birthday, and how many kids are in his family, and you know. His mother’s maiden name.

Minnesota, he said. I’d heard it was Canada, but I couldn’t say that, because I was trying to act like I didn’t know he was moving in the first place.

That’s messed up, I said. It sounded lame. Drew was standing with his hands jammed down in the pockets of his jacket. He didn’t look at me, but was kind of looking over my shoulder at something.

Did you sell that book yet? I should have known. He didn’t come in to say good-bye to me, really. He just wanted to make one more stab at buying this book my aunt thinks is worth fifty dollars, although it isn’t. It’s My Ugly Life, by Eddie Fishface Malone, a famous gangster from back in the 1930s. He wrote it in prison, and it has a picture of Fishface on the front, with a kind of gangster type hat on, and one of those pinstripe suits. He has a scar on his cheek, of course. Winnie thought the thing was worth fifty dollars, at the very least, because it was signed by Fishface himself, inside on the first page. Winnie was always saying it was a valuable collector’s item because of that. Fishface signed the book for someone named Al. It says Al—stay on the straight and narrow, and don’t take no wooden nickels. Eddie. Nobody wanted it. Except Drew Miller.

Drew used to come in from time to time and would always buy weird things. Once he bought an old Mad Magazine with pages missing out of it, and another time a lunch pail with pictures of people from a TV show called Lost in Space from back in the ’60s. He’s into gangsters from the past, and he’d tried to buy My Ugly Life from us a bunch of times, but my aunt wouldn’t take any less than fifty dollars for it (really, she thought it was worth two hundred), and Drew never had fifty dollars all at once. One time he came in with forty dollars he got for his birthday, and tried to bargain Winnie down, but she wouldn’t budge. I didn’t think she’d ever sell the thing, truth be known.

You can see we still have it, I said. Nobody wants it but you. I’d sell it to you if I could, but you know how it is. Fifty dollars. You argued with her yourself.

Man! Drew slammed his fist on the counter, but he was smiling. Nobody else is gonna appreciate it, he said. It’ll just sit there getting older and moldier. Nobody’ll ever buy it, ’cause nobody’ll ever want it, and it’ll just go to waste. What a shame. A total waste of a book signed by Fishface Malone.

I have to say, I felt like just taking the dumb thing down from the shelf and giving it to him, right then and there as a good-bye present. He was right about no one ever buying it. And, after all, I knew I’d probably never see him again. But I knew Winnie would skin me alive me if I did that.

Hey, wait a minute. Drew said that real slow, like he was thinking. He had his hand way down in the pocket of his jacket, like he was feeling to see if he had any change. Then he got this key out of his pocket, and put it on the counter. This key and thirty dollars. It’s my last offer.

Why would I want that rusty old key? Actually, it wasn’t rusty. In fact, it was bright and shiny and looked like someone had just had it made.

This is the key to the old Nightingale house, Drew said. He lowered his voice almost to a whisper when he said it.

The Nightingale house is an old mansion out in the forest. The reason it’s out in the forest is because that edge of the forest wasn’t there when it was first built. It was more like the edge of town. Since then the town moved in a different direction and a bunch of trees grew around the Nightingale house. At least, that’s what Patrick Crabbe, my aunt’s boyfriend, says. Anyway, Miss Nightingale lived in the house all her life until she died a few months before the day I’m talking about. She was a hundred and one years old when she died. She didn’t care that the forest grew up around her house because she liked trees. She never got married to anyone, and was the richest person in Spoon Creek, and probably the richest person in the county when she died. Anyway, I just gasped when I saw the key.

Where did you get that? I said. Are you supposed to have it?

Drew looked back over his shoulder at the door, like he thought someone might suddenly barge in on us. Then he lowered his voice even more and whispered, No. I got it from Salem. He won it from Prescott in a bet. Salem Church is from a family with too many kids. His dad is a kind of handyman around town, and is the only grown man I’ve ever known called Jimmy. Prescott Phelps is a kid that’s always making bets.

Where did Prescott get it?

That French guy. You know the one I mean.

No.

You know. He used to rent a room from Prescott’s family and went to the college. The college is in Wilsonville, the nearest town that’s bigger than Spoon Creek. Sometimes the college students rent places in Spoon Creek, or live with families here. Anyhow, he used to walk Miss Nightingale’s dog. Then I remembered the Frenchman he was talking about. I never knew his name. He looked about twenty, with an earring, and I used to