Friday Barnes Girl Detective Read online

  But that was not to be. When she reached the top of the driveway, Friday looked up to take in Highcrest Academy. The two-story stone building had broad columns, making it look more like a museum or a courthouse than a school. Behind the main building Friday could see a long redbrick dormitory. And beyond that were rolling lawns, which surrounded the buildings on all four sides. The grass was so perfectly manicured it looked like a golf course at a Masters tournament. Friday was sure if she tried to set foot on it, an irate greenkeeper would leap out of a bush and insist she take her shoes off. Even the banisters leading up the front steps into the school were made of brass and had been so highly polished Friday could see her own scared face in them. She was not an athletically inclined girl, but at that moment she felt a welling urge to turn and run.

  Then chaos erupted.

  “Aaaagggghhhh!!!” There was a blood-curdling scream from behind her.

  Friday was almost relieved to hear someone other than herself scream. Evidently, she was not the only one overwhelmed to be starting a new school.

  She turned to see an older boy stumble out of the bushes. His face was white and his eyes were wide with shock. “I just … saw it,” panted the boy, struggling to catch his breath. “Down by the swamp. It was half man, half beast. It was horrible.”

  Friday was so astonished by this unexpectedly dramatic announcement that she instinctively took a step back, which was a mistake. If she had been looking she would have seen the Lexus SUV approaching. She couldn’t hear it because the image-conscious driver had bought the hybrid model with an almost silent electric engine. So it came as a complete surprise to Friday when she heard screeching rubber and slipping brakes, and looked to see the SUV right before it slammed into her suitcase, which slammed into her, causing her to stumble and bang her head on an ornamental statue of Socrates.

  Chapter

  6

  Ow!

  Friday kept her eyes tightly closed. In the past she had found that if she kept her eyes closed, pain and blood didn’t seem so bad. It was opening your eyes and taking it all in that made the situation overwhelming. She mentally recited the digits of pi to distract herself. She didn’t want the entire student body’s first impression of her to be lying on the ground crying.

  “Sorry, didn’t see you there,” said a man’s voice. Obviously, the brown cardigan was still working, but a little bit too well. “I’ll be there on Thursday. Don’t let anyone do anything until I arrive.”

  Friday thought this was a slightly odd statement. She had just hit her head on a sandstone representation of an ancient Greek philosopher. Clearly she needed medical attention. Waiting until Thursday would be irresponsible. Then she realized the man was not talking to her; he was talking on his phone, which would also explain how he had come to hit an enormous suitcase in the driveway of the school.

  “Mr. Peterson, there is a five-mile-per-hour speed limit within the school grounds,” chided a woman as she rushed forward to help Friday. “You’ve hit a student!”

  “Technically, he hit a suitcase, which hit a girl, who fell over and hit a statue,” said an airy girl’s voice.

  “Yes, thank you, Melanie, that’s quite enough,” said the nice woman.

  Mr. Peterson put his hand over the mouthpiece of the phone. “Send me the bill for the medical expenses, and if she wants to sue, put her in touch with my lawyer,” he said before taking his hand away from the mouthpiece and resuming his other conversation. “Sorry about that. Some girl just put her suitcase in front of my car. No, no, everything’s fine. It’s just a rental car.”

  Friday opened her eyes. Everything was fuzzy at first. But then things began to swim into focus. There seemed to be hundreds of faces staring down at her. The faces mainly belonged to children, many of whom were sniggering. But there was one adult face in the middle. She was a pretty young woman who looked concerned. “Are you hurt?” the nice lady asked.

  Friday considered this. “I don’t think so,” she said. “I think my suitcase took the brunt of it.” (It was a good thing she had packed so many books.)

  “Your head is bleeding,” said the nice lady.

  “It is?” asked Friday. She touched her forehead, and when she drew her hand away it was covered in cherry-red blood. “Oh dear, I don’t like blood.” Which was an understatement, because Friday promptly fainted.

  Chapter

  7

  The Nice Lady

  Friday awoke sometime later in a lovely sunny room that was full of birds. At least it seemed that way at first. As Friday’s senses returned she was able to distinguish that she was in a beautifully tidy classroom with high bench tables and stools. More spectacularly, all along one wall was an enormous aviary full of the most colorful and exotic birds.

  “Am I dead?” asked Friday optimistically. She hoped heaven would be somewhere this lovely.

  “No,” said the nice lady, who was still beside her. “You’re in the biology classroom.”

  “It’s wonderful,” approved Friday. “Are you a nurse?”

  “Goodness no,” said the nice lady. “I’m Miss Harrow, the biology teacher.”

  “Oh, I’m terribly sorry,” said Friday.

  “Why do you say that?” asked Miss Harrow.

  “Well, there is no way someone as nice as you could become a biology teacher without there having been some dreadful life event that forced you to deviate from a preferable path,” said Friday. “If you were clever at biology you’d be much better off being a research scientist, a pharmacologist, or an evil-genius inventor living under a volcano and thinking up clever ways to take over the world. Or better yet, you could marry someone who was a research scientist, a pharmacologist, or an evil-genius inventor and then you could stay home all day reading novels.”

  “That isn’t the case,” said Miss Harrow. “I’m just good at biology and I like working with children.”

  “But no one likes working with children,” argued Friday. “They’re unhygienic and disrespectful, and they have a limited resource of information on which to draw their small talk.”

  “You’re a child,” Miss Harrow pointed out.

  “Which is how I know,” said Friday. “I spend all day surrounded by them.”

  “Anyway, one of the parents is a plastic surgeon,” continued Miss Harrow, “so he put eight stitches in your forehead and diagnosed you with a mild concussion.”

  “I was treated by a plastic surgeon for a bump on the head?” asked Friday.

  “The school will just add the bill to Mr. Peterson’s account,” Miss Harrow assured her, “so don’t worry about that.”

  “Oh, I wasn’t planning on starting my first day by initiating legal proceedings,” said Friday. “I like to go unnoticed, and serving people with court summonses can really irritate them. I know—I learned that the hard way when I sued my kindergarten teacher for sending me to the naughty corner.”

  “Why did she send you to the naughty corner?” asked Miss Harrow curiously.

  “For refusing to participate in finger painting,” said Friday. “I argued that one of the primary features that distinguishes man from animals is that we are able to use tools; therefore, to finger-paint is devolutionary.”

  “I can see how that would rub a kindergarten teacher the wrong way,” said Miss Harrow sympathetically. “How’s your head?”

  Friday tentatively dabbed her forehead and found that it did not hurt. In fact she couldn’t feel it at all. She hoped this was due to a local anesthetic and not to unilateral nerve damage. “It seems fine,” she said.

  “Well, if you’re feeling up to it, you’d better get along to your room. Otherwise your roommate will have hogged all the drawer space and hidden your things in a bush down by the swamp.”

  “Is that sort of thing common?” asked Friday.

  “Tremendously so,” said Miss Harrow. “The school has to keep two gardeners on duty first day back, purely for retrieving property from boggy bushes. You see, most of the students here aren’
t used to having to squeeze their possessions into just twelve square yards of floor space with one built-in wardrobe and a bookcase. That’s why students are always so keen to get here as soon as the gates open. The bedroom turf war is a bitter, cruelty-ridden saga that will never end, not without some sort of UN intervention.”

  Friday was beginning to worry about her books. It was one thing to throw someone’s clothing into a swamp—clothes could be washed—but books were another matter. Mud and books did not mix well. Or, rather, they mixed too well and formed impenetrable bonds, involving pages swelling, ink running, and covers hardening.

  “I’d better be off,” said Friday, sliding off the chair. She then slid onto the floor, because apparently all the blood she had lost in the accident had been from her head. But she found the cool linoleum pressed against her face reviving and so, with the aid of the kind Miss Harrow, she was on her feet again, this time more slowly. Friday made it to the door, only tripping once on a loose panel in the floor when a voice bellowed out from above. “Friday Barnes, please report to the Headmaster’s office.”

  Friday was still fairly brain-addled from her head injury. “Did you hear that,” she asked Miss Harrow, “or has a bruise in my brain tissue caused me to start having auditory hallucinations?”

  “No, you heard it,” said Miss Harrow reassuringly. “It’s just the school’s public address system. There are speakers in every room. You’d better hurry along to the Headmaster’s office. He doesn’t approve of tardiness. Not in others anyway.”

  “I’m not going to get in trouble for banging my head, am I?” worried Friday. She was pretty sure she was the victim in this situation.

  “Oh no, of course not,” said Miss Harrow. “At least I don’t think so.”

  Chapter

  8

  The Headmaster’s Office

  When she arrived at the Headmaster’s office Friday found she had company. There was already another girl sitting on the hard wooden bench outside. Friday dropped her backpack and slumped down at the far end of the long seat. She was in no mood to make chitchat. Her brain had data to analyze. Unfortunately, the other girl on the bench did not appreciate the necessity of silence to Friday’s thought process. She sobbed loudly.

  Friday looked across at her. The girl was pretty, blond, and—what is the polite way to put this?—not fat but not thin either. She looked like the type of girl who spent very little time being unhappy. Normally, the sun would shine on her and she would good-naturedly shine back. But something had clearly upset her now. The girl’s pouting lower lip quivered, and her eyes brimmed with tears. Friday judged that if she did not say precisely the right thing, this girl would soon be sobbing on her shoulder.

  It is widely considered that the best thing to say to an upset person is something reassuring, but actually, if you don’t want to be cried on, the opposite is true. Young girls in trouble are desperately keen to have a good cry. They will seize the first opportunity to grab hold of someone and cry all over them. So Friday had the good sense to try the opposite tactic.

  “Man up!” ordered Friday. “There will be no crying here today. Do you understand me?”

  The girl’s lip quivered more. But then she gave a hearty sniff and seemed to compose herself just a fraction. “Okay,” she said, with only the tiniest of sobs.

  “I’ve had a difficult day, so I’d appreciate it if you didn’t—” began Friday, but she never got to complete her sentence. The other girl scooched across the length of the bench, grabbed Friday’s forearm, and looked pleadingly into her eyes.

  “I didn’t do it,” blubbered the girl. There were definitely teary sobs starting to leak out now. “I’ve been wrongly accused.”

  And that did it. Friday was suddenly able to set her own concerns to the back burner of her mind as she focused on the irresistible challenge this girl had just blubbed to her.

  “Wrongly accused of what?” asked Friday as she scooched closer herself.

  “Stealing the Albert Singh Memorial Carriage Clock from the Headmaster’s desk,” said the girl, at which point she burst into tears, having found Friday to be sufficiently sympathetic to cry all over.

  Friday patted the girl on the shoulder as her eyes leaked and her shoulders heaved. This girl was obviously an expert crier. No doubt she had acquired all sorts of ponies and laptop computers by using just this technique on her own father. The most touching thing about her sniffly blubbering was that it was clearly sincere.

  Friday came to her first conclusion. Either this girl was a brilliant actress, which was unlikely because a brilliant actress would tone it back a bit, or she did not have the meanness of spirit, imagination, or guile requisite to commit such a symbolic crime.

  “Please, please, you must help me,” begged the girl.

  “Why do you think I would be able to do that?” asked Friday in surprise. Her being awarded $50,000 for solving the bank robbery had not been publicized. There was no earthly reason why this girl would know she was secretly a master criminologist.

  “I’ll give you anything,” said the girl, sitting back so that she could look pleadingly into Friday’s eyes.

  “Like what?” asked Friday, her curiosity again piqued.

  “Jewelry?” suggested the girl.

  “I haven’t got time for that sort of trumpery,” said Friday dismissively.

  “Clothes,” suggested the girl, eyeing Friday’s discount-store red sneakers.

  Here she had touched a nerve. Friday looked at the beautiful girl sitting next to her. It wasn’t just that she was better-looking. It was almost as if the girl was an alien life form from another planet. Her physical appearance was so much more aesthetically appealing than her own. “I don’t think your clothes would fit me,” said Friday. This girl was at least six inches taller and thirty pounds heavier.

  “How about money?” suggested the girl. “I’ve got lots of that. I’ve got a trust fund, plus an allowance, plus a lovely old aunt who writes to me and tucks fifty dollars in the envelope, then forgets about it because she’s senile and writes to me again. Sometimes she writes to me three times a day.”

  This sparked Friday’s interest. She realized spending $50,000 to get into the country’s most elite boarding school was all very good, but she would need funds to get by while she was there. “I do like money,” admitted Friday. “How much have you got?”

  “Lots and lots,” said the girl, starting to cheer up.

  “I’ll do it,” said Friday. “I’ll prove your innocence for the fee of five hundred dollars.”

  The girl laughed. “That will be no problem. I’ve got that much tucked in my sock right now.”

  “Oh,” said Friday. “I think I’d prefer it if my payment was made in money that had not spent time in your footwear.” A girl who knew as much about bacteria as she did was ever mindful of hygiene.

  “Of course, of course,” said the girl. “Whatever you like. But you have to do it quickly, because the Headmaster has just called my father. He will be here first thing tomorrow morning to pick me up. You have to prove my innocence before then. Daddy doesn’t like it when I’m expelled.”

  “Do you get expelled often?” asked Friday.

  “Oh yes,” confessed the girl. “I got expelled from my last school for hitchhiking into town to buy chocolate. I would have gotten away with it, too, if the driver who picked me up hadn’t been a kidnapper who decided to hold me for ransom.”

  “I remember that case,” said Friday, impressed to be sitting next to a celebrity in the world of crime, or more precisely, a victim of crime. “I read about it in the papers. You must be Delia Michaels.”

  “That’s right,” said Delia, happy to be recognized.

  “And you were rescued because your captor accidentally ate a peanut and went into anaphylactic shock, so you had to call an ambulance and perform CPR on her until the paramedics arrived,” recalled Friday.

  “Yes, that’s me,” agreed Delia. “I got a bravery medal for it.”

/>   “Hmm,” said Friday, privately concluding that Delia should have been given a silliness medal instead. “So what exactly have you been accused of this time?”

  “Stealing the clock that was presented to the school by Albert Singh,” explained Delia. “He was the first person to climb Mount Everest with the aid of suction shoes.”

  “And why are you the chief suspect?” asked Friday.

  “Last night I was caught sneaking out of the Headmaster’s office after lights-out,” answered Delia.

  “What happened?” asked Friday. “Did someone drug you and leave you in there to frame you for the crime?”

  “Oh no,” said Delia truthfully. “I broke in. I climbed through the window above the door.”

  Friday looked up to see a small ventilation window directly above the door to the Headmaster’s office. “That must have taken significant agility and upper-body strength,” said Friday.

  “Not really,” admitted Delia. “I borrowed a little stepladder from the janitor’s closet. The hard part was falling down on the other side. I should have brought a pillow to land on.”

  “I’m impressed,” said Friday. She had not imagined that Delia had it in her to actually plan a crime. “But it all sounds very incriminating.”