Suzanne Collier’S Little Book of Mysteries and Mayhem

By Paula Diggs

Seven-year-old Suzanne Collier has great insights and a quirky personality that fit perfectly with her dream of wanting to be a detective. Motivated by her desire to solve crimes, Suzanne drives everyone crazy by asking too many questions. But when she stumbles upon her biggest mystery yet, Suzanne begins a quest to understand why people do the things they do.

As Suzanne attempts to solve the case of a dead hobo in an Illinois cornfield, she uncovers clues, helps two friends in need, and hopes she can solve the case before someone else gets hurt. Her next case comes quickly as Suzanne is led to help unravel a highway crime in Michigan where she saves a dogs life and learns the consequences of her thoughtless comments. In her final case, Suzanne exposes evil motives amid a dinosaur dig in Kansas, all while facing big changes as her family prepares to move to Minnesotathe place where Suzanne is certain witches, vampires, and frozen souls reside.

In this young adult novel, a girl turned amateur detective must rely on her skills and face her fears while attempting to solve three mysteries.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Aug 20, 2015
• ISBN: 9781491771419

Paula Diggs

Paula Diggs, M.A. M.S. is an educator, writer, and artist who has lived and studies in the Mid West, England and France. She has earned awards for her art work and published in the Art Therapy Journal. She resides in Southern California with her husband and two dogs, an American Eskomo and Aussie Doodle.

Book preview

Suzanne Collier's Little

Book of Mysteries

and Mayhem

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PAULA DIGGS

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SUZANNE COLLIER’S LITTLE BOOK OF MYSTERIES AND MAYHEM

Copyright © 2015 Paula Diggs.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

ISBN: 978-1-4917-7140-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-7141-9 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015910611

iUniverse rev. date:    08/18/2015

CONTENTS

Part I

New Shooter

Chapter 1   Just Listen to Me

Chapter 2   Spring Has Sprung

Chapter 3   In Which I Solve My First Mystery

Chapter 4   A Sticky Wicket

Chapter 5   Magic Flute

Chapter 6   I’ve Lost My Marbles

Chapter 7   Bad Habits

Chapter 8   Don’t Cry over Spilled Milk

Chapter 9   Nine Lives

Chapter 10   I’m Not a Cook

Chapter 11   Fan Dance

Chapter 12   Home Run

Part II

Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear, Say Your Prayers

Chapter 13   Not a Surprise

Chapter 14   Flutter by

Chapter 15   Or Else

Chapter 16   Navel Gazing

Chapter 17   Cap Size: Small

Chapter 18   Night Lights

Chapter 19   Trouble to Boot

Chapter 20   Lost in the Woods

Chapter 21   Grin and Bear It: Needs and Wants

Chapter 22   Poached Legs Are Toast

Chapter 23   To Build a Fire

Chapter 24   Nowhere to Run

Chapter 25   Castaways

Chapter 26   Step-by-Step, Inch by Inch, Slowly I Turned

Chapter 27   Biting the Hand that Stifles

Chapter 28   Shake, Rattle, and Roll

Chapter 29   All Sewed Up

Chapter 30   Up in the Air

Chapter 31   Roadside Treasure

Chapter 32   Keyed Up

Part III

Dem Bones

Chapter 33   Change Is a Constant

Chapter 34   The Dangerous Web

Chapter 35   Restless Night

Chapter 36   Worse and Worser

Chapter 37   Lamentations

Chapter 38   Wedding Bells

Chapter 39   Against My Will

Chapter 40   Food for Thought

Chapter 41   Seven Deadlies

Chapter 42   High Life

Chapter 43   Not a Ghost of a Chance

Chapter 44   Clear as Mud

Chapter 45   Field Day

Chapter 46   As Long as a Telephone Wire

Chapter 47   Starry, Starry Night

Chapter 48   No Way Out

Chapter 49   All’s Well that Ends

About The Author

PART I

New Shooter

I_New%20Shooter.jpg

CHAPTER ONE

Just Listen to Me

A huge, slobbering Doberman pinscher clamps his jaws on the little dog’s throat. Blood shoots out and splatters all over me. Next, a swarm of bats flies at my eyes. I can’t see. Run and climb a tree to get away. Climb higher and higher—foot slips and I start to fall. Falling and falling down, down, down … Below me a large bug stands on home plate, his bat in position to swing as I fall in front of him. A hand touches my shoulder and grabs me. Help! I cry. Help, help me, please!

Calm down, Suzanne. It’s all over. No one’s going to hurt you. You’re dreaming. My parents, Daddy Don and Mother, stand by my bed.

No, I tell them, Out there on the street. I can hear them.

It’s only crickets. Go back to sleep. You’re seven years old, a big girl. Stop imagining things. Nothing’s going to hurt you now.

Those bad dreams keep bothering me. Things without heads follow me around. They try to make me eat stuff that smells bad. Spam. Rat poison. It makes me gag. Sometimes I throw up in my bed. Last night was the worst ever.

When I come down for breakfast the next morning, Mother tells me I look like something the cat dragged in. What does that mean? They dragged my cat in when he was half starved. I couldn’t get back to sleep at all. Ideas of dark things jumped around in my head. All night. A claw grabbed me. It held on. I had to stay awake or monsters would get me. I was alone. Really alone. All by myself. No one would help me.

I cried in my sleep all night, Mother. I thought monsters were after me. I could hear their feet. I screamed and screamed, but no sound came out …

Mother takes things in and out of the drawer. One by one. Likes everything nice and tidy.

You should’ve gone back to sleep was all Mother said to me. She didn’t say, Oh, you darling girl, I wish you’d sleep with us. That’s what I really needed her to say. I don’t think they understand that I need to be in their bed where it’s safe. It’s scary to be alone sometimes.

I’ll bet everyone has trouble sleeping once in a while. I know I heard something moving around outside. Maybe because of those terrible things I found out about and what happened to my friend Judy’s family. Mother says it’s only my imagination that makes me have bad dreams. I wonder if it will ever stop. All night I lie there and tell myself new stories, where I find out the answers and solve terrible mysteries and everyone loves me and wants to be my friend since Mother and Daddy Don don’t let me sleep with them. That calms me down so I don’t start screaming and wake up everyone. Sometimes it isn’t real.

A big imagination is part of being me. My name’s Suzanne, Suzanne Collier. Grown-ups always say, What’s your name? How old are you? Mother says you can’t ever ask them how old they are. That’s rude. Bad manners—grown-ups know all about manners. It’s not bad manners if they ask me, How old are you, little girl? I get in trouble if I’m rude, and then I have to go to my room. When that happens I just scream and cry until Mother or Daddy Don feels really sorry and lets me out so they can have some peace and quiet. For once.

I’m seven, going on eight. I know how old Mother is. She’s twenty-nine, and she takes an empty Coke bottle and rolls it on her behind so she won’t get fat since she had my baby sister, Kathleen. Kathleen is one year old and doesn’t talk words yet. I know lots of things. Daddy Don is thirty-one years old. He’s something called a psychologist and always wants to know what I think about something or how I feel. Once he asked me what I want to be when I grow up.

I know I’m a detective now because I try to figure out why things happen. I tell myself stories in my head. Sometimes they’re real. With answers to questions. Detectives find out why. That’s what they do, and what I want to become. A detective. Sometimes it’s horrible. I just watch what happens carefully and think about it. Bad things are out there. I like arithmetic. Numbers always add up. You can figure them out. That’s my best subject. It isn’t easy to be me. I ask too many questions. No one likes that.

My teacher always makes me work in the hardest arithmetic book she can find so that I stay busy and don’t bother others by asking questions. I’m the best reader in my class, but the girls don’t like me. I don’t think the boys do either. No one really likes me or chooses me to play at recess. Kids are lots harder than numbers. Those girls call me nosy because I ask so many questions. Sometimes Miss Fit. But I never had a fit at school. Or maybe because I like to smell things to learn about them. Everyone’s head smells different. Baby Kathleen’s smells like sunshine and cookies.

One time the university president, Mr. Catell, came to our house for dinner. Mother made fried chicken and cheesy party potatoes. I got to help bring the rolls around to people. Daddy Don had a serious face. When I went behind Mr. Catell, I noticed his nice bushy hair, so I took a good smell of his head. It had a strong smell of tobacco smoke and oil. I said to him, You smell just like a bear. That’s a nice friendly thing to say. Winnie the Pooh is a bear.

All those grown-ups got red faces, and Daddy Don started humming. Mother said, Upstairs! to me. That hurt my feelings. I sat in my room by myself and sang, The bear went over the mountain, the bear went over the mountain, the bear went over the mountain, to see what he could see. No one came to tell me to put my pj’s on when it got dark. No one brought me supper, even though fried chicken is my favorite. I could smell the food downstairs through the heating grate in my floor.

After the guests left, Mother came upstairs and stood at my door. She didn’t say anything. She just stared at me.

Later I heard Daddy Don say, She’s only a child.

Mother told him, I have to teach her a lesson. I study my lessons all the time. It’s better if they yell at you. Sometimes I feel like no one likes me. Not even Mother, and she’s supposed to—I’m her child.

I bite my fingernails when the girls make faces at me. Mary Beth is their leader. She has blonde curls and bows in her hair. She kicked me in the shin once when I told her I could teach her the times tables. She couldn’t learn them. Prime numbers are more fun than times tables anyway. Prime numbers are perfect just by themselves. School isn’t very much fun for me at recess. No one plays with me.

Daddy Don says it will be easier when I go to university. When will that be? Daddy Don teaches at the University of Illinois. He is a professor of psychology. That is a hard thing to be because you study people all the time. People are very hard to understand. His assistant, Philo, is my very best friend. Grown-ups usually don’t make faces, but they never listen; Philo listens to me. He’s twenty-three. My best kid friend is Judy. She’s eleven. She’s a sad, quiet girl because her parents passed away. When you pass away, it’s like you are asleep, but you don’t wake up. Ever. Mother doesn’t want me to think about that all the time or ask so many questions about the dead robin I found because it gives her a headache and she has to lie down. Mother says we should be happy. She likes to smile. Even when Baby Kathleen does number two in her diaper and smells to high heaven. Mother hates to be disturbed when she goes into her room to read. She always shuts her door.

Sometimes I sit outside and sing my little lonely song to her. It goes like this: Mother went into her roooom, Mother went into her roooom, I’m here all alone, Mother, and I need to talk to you. I sing it over and over until she comes out. Then she doesn’t seem happy. Mother doesn’t like to listen to all the ideas I have to tell her. Please stop talking, Suzanne. Don’t talk, please, please, please. That’s what she says to me. Go get something to read, honey.

I’m learning to be a detective, so I guess I should read everything. I’m not supposed to look at newspapers. I get too excited and talk about all the stories that I don’t understand. Mother and Daddy Don hide the newspapers under the kitchen sink. I found this one today and took it out behind the garage at the end of our lot. It’s musty and dark back here, and no one can see me. Bushes. I read every word. Even the want ads. I might want a job as a detective. I know how much everything costs. I like this newspaper. It’s the Champaign-Urbana Free Press, June 8, 1944. Something is happening on beaches in a place called Normandy. Part of a huge war. Seven-year-olds like me shouldn’t read so much. That’s what our fat neighbor, Mrs. Jones, told Mother. Mother doesn’t want me to read about bad things like that terrible man, Hitler. He’s the one who caused the war. People and animals suffer. I can’t stand it. Nice and cool here under the leaves. Grown-ups want you to think everything is nice, and if it isn’t, it’s your fault. I can’t say mean, that’s rude. Hurts people’s feelings.

Mother doesn’t like it when I pretend I’m a witch and scare Baby Kathleen a little so she screams. Real or make believe? is what Mother said to me when I told her the mean man walking by our house was going to hurt somebody. I could see it in his mean, bumpy face and bugged-out eyes. I knew something bad was going to happen. Teachers always think it’s my fault. When Butch pulled my pigtails and made me cry, my teacher wanted to know what I did to Butch. Butch used to be the marble champ at my school.

I got a new agate shooter for practicing my flute for a recital. It was hard to practice that flute. I hated scales. Do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti, do. Does that make any sense? I had to watch out my window when I did them and tried to learn a new song for the recital because that’s what my hero Nancy Drew, the detective, would do. Watch. You have to keep your eyes open all the time. What happened isn’t pretend. I could tell all about it, but it’s very scary. I’m hardly ever scared, but sometimes I get the jimmers all up and down my back and just gasp for breath. I saw something that was a torn shirt. Maybe blood on it. A shoe. That scared me and made my stomach hurt.

Here comes my kitten, Mr. Sir Kit Cat. He likes to sit with me and purr. He can see lots of things with his cat eyes, just like me. So I’ll tell how the mystery started just a few days ago not long after I got my kitty if the bad parts won’t scare you and keep you awake at night. There were five people. Some badly hurt or tricked and missing. Five is a prime. Prime numbers are so beautiful. Just like beautiful birds flying in the sky. Just perfect all by themselves.

CHAPTER TWO

Spring Has Sprung

The birds that sing in the spring, tra-la. Mother stands in the kitchen and sings. Then she says, Spring has sprung, the grass has riz, I wonder where my boyfriend is? She smiles at Daddy Don with her cutesy smile. That’s so annoying.

Right here, ma’am, Daddy Don answers and flicks the towel he’s drying the dishes with on her behind.

Mother puts her hands in front of her face and makes a big O with her mouth. Mother has a nice round behind. Like a big marshmallow. Spring has sprung—that makes no sense at all. All it does is rain, and mud is everywhere. Illinois is a muddy state. I can’t even get my bike out of the garage because the ground is so deeply mud. It’s worse today because I have to wait here inside the house and watch Baby Kathleen while those two parents go off to a reception at the university for Daddy Don’s new book. I read it, and it’s very boring. Psychology. I didn’t read the whole thing, just the first page. There are no people or conversations. All the pictures are just lines. It’s called Essentials of Psychology. No one will want to read it; who likes boring books? It’s not exciting at all. I like books with people and animals. That’s exciting. Some animals are hunters and bite. Mysteries are best when there’s something to figure out. There’s no mystery in psychology, just lots of long, long words.

Our next-door neighbor, Mrs. Jones, can’t come and take care of Baby Kathleen like she was supposed to because her little boy, Bobby, has a kitten that’s missing. Bobby is only four. He’s upset and crying and has hiccups that won’t stop. Mother’s white dress is very pretty. She smells like roses. She won’t let me hug her, not even a little. She doesn’t want to wrinkle. Important is a word she likes to use.

Oh, I don’t know about leaving them. Suzanne isn’t very … she says to Daddy Don.

She’ll do fine, just fine. We won’t be gone long. Mrs. Jones said she’d come over with Bobby as soon as he stops crying. That can’t be long. She’ll stay until we get back, Daddy Don tells her.

Suzanne, listen to me, Mother says.

A worried face. When she uses her tight, stringy voice, I start to itch. Now I’ve scratched myself, and it’s bleeding. I have to lick it off so Mother won’t put alcohol on it that stings. If you swallow your own blood, does your body know how to digest it? Can you eat yourself?

Suzanne! Mother says. This is important. Pay attention. You must take very good care of Baby Kathleen Stay inside. Mrs. Jones will be over soon. It’s too muddy out to play. Don’t go out. Do you hear me?

I sing a song to myself in my sweet little voice. Ring around the rosey.

Stop that; listen to me right now.

Pocket full of posies.

I look out the window. Who’s that walking down our street? Oh, the mean bumpy-faced man with his bad vicious dog. Attacked a little dog right in front of my eyes. A snarling Doberman pinscher. Swings a baseball bat as he walks. Why does he need a bat? He’s not playing baseball. A bat hits something. That’s what a bat is for. What is he going to hit?

Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.

Mother uses her loud voice. "Suzanne, stop it!

Yes, Mother, I’ll do just what you say.

That man stands looking around at the vacant lot. He can’t see me, but I know he will do some bad thing. Just like his dog.

Ring around the rosey, pocket full of posies, ashes, ashes, we all fall down. Yes, Mother, yes, yes, yes.

Take good care of your sister. You are seven years old and know what to do. If you have a problem before Mrs. Jones comes, go over to her house. Take Kathleen with you. Don’t make faces at Baby Kathleen; see, she’s getting upset. Be a good sister. We have to go.

Mother pulls Baby Kathleen’s little hands off her skirt, and Mother and Daddy Don hurry out