The aanda detective agen.., p.1
The A&A Detective Agency, page 1
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Text © 2024 K. H. Saxton
Cover illustration © 2024 Júlia Sardà
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CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter 1: The Northbrook Witch Trials
Chapter 2: Sources and Suspects
Chapter 3: Grave Matters
Chapter 4: The Old Shipwright’s Church
Chapter 5: Fate at the Festival
Chapter 6: The Best-Laid Schemes
Chapter 7: D.I.S.H.
Chapter 8: Evidence Entombed
Chapter 9: On the Scent
Chapter 10: Kindred Spirits
Chapter 11: Running Off Course
Chapter 12: The Hangman’s Way
Chapter 13: The Brief Case of the Briefcase
Chapter 14: Veritas Vincit
Epilogue
Binary Code Guide
Morse Code Guide
Acknowledgments
About the Author
For my parents and my brother
PROLOGUE
30 Days Until Halloween
On the night of the first frost, which glazed over Northbrook unusually early that autumn, the head investigators of the A&A Detective Agency held an emergency meeting. They often conducted business in Alex Foster’s tree house, but the evening was crisp and cool—just right for a fire—so instead, the detectives struck up a lively blaze in the Fosters’ firepit, a safe distance from the russet oak tree, which was just starting to drop its leaves.
The matter of the meeting was a very serious question indeed: Given the demands of middle school and their current lack of satisfying cases, should the A&A Detective Agency take a temporary break?
It wasn’t that school was hard, exactly, but there was a lot more homework—enough that even an efficient detective couldn’t finish it all on the morning bus ride. And then they each had their extracurricular commitments.
Alex Foster worked on his digital art projects several afternoons a week at the Fairfleet Museum of Art, and he had just been named captain of the robotics team at Northbrook Middle School. He was beginning to suspect—much to his chagrin—that the earnest nerds who had voted for him might, in fact, be fellow nerds.
Asha Singh, meanwhile, volunteered at the Fairfleet Museum of Natural History. She had also discovered a new passion for running cross-country. It felt, at first, a little bit like dying, and then, after a while, a little bit like flying. She loved every lung-aching moment of it.
In comparison, helping the old ladies of Northbrook figure out why their grandchildren hadn’t texted them back just didn’t have the same appeal. Their caseload was as stagnant as the greenish water in the kiddie pool that Alex still hadn’t cleaned out from summer vacation.
Alex and Asha stared into the fire as blossoms of orange and gold licked over the logs. Agatha Christie, their basset hound puppy—Aggie for short—was curled up on the ground by Asha’s feet, her oversized ears spread out wide like fuzzy wings. The crackling of the fire momentarily roused her, and she let out a deep dog-sigh that captured the weight of the decision the young sleuths now faced. They cared deeply about the A&A Detective Agency, but it seemed that there were no more mysteries of merit in Northbrook.
They could hardly have been more wrong.
That same evening, President Geoffrey Addison of Waverly College was fuming in his office. It was a stately, handsome room. The books that lined the walls were uniform and leather bound, and the dark wooden desk was polished to a mirror gleam. A stern portrait of Reverend Ignatius Waverly hung above the door. The lead-paned windows were as old and distinguished as Waverly Hall itself—or they had been, at any rate. The window to the left of the president’s desk had been smashed by a rock, a chunk of gray slate, which now lay on the carpet surrounded by shards of rippled glass.
Attached to the offending rock was a message. President Addison didn’t need to read it to know what it said. It was the third such note that had been anonymously dropped off at his office, though it was the first to drop in through a centuries-old window. He read the message anyway:
Repent ye, cowards, and beware!
Hannah Grimthorpe rests not at
peace in her grave. All lies must be
exposed and all wrongs set right ere
All Hallows’ Eve!
— The Witch of Waverly College
President Addison glared at the lines of looping script. Then he sat down at his desk and began to type a strongly worded email to Dr. John Wright, the new chairman of the Fairfleet Institute. If someone was sniffing around the history of Hannah Grimthorpe, the Fairfleet Institute was bound to be involved somehow. While Waverly College generally afforded the world-famous museums a certain degree of independence, President Addison was more than willing to pull rank when he needed the Institute directors to fall in line. He had the sneaking suspicion that these sorts of shenanigans would never have made it to his desk—or through his window—under the experienced leadership of Dr. Alistair Fairfleet.
President Addison had no patience at all for shenanigans. He liked to think that he ran a tight ship, and he had helped Waverly College weather a storm or two in his time. These Grimthorpe notes added just another wrinkle to a brow already deeply creased with years of administrative annoyances. It never occurred to the president that he ought to be more than annoyed—that there might, perhaps, be a serious threat afoot. Surely the note-writing stone thrower was just a misguided undergraduate hoping to shake things up before the Fairfleet Institute’s famous annual Halloween Gala.
He could hardly have been more wrong.
While the detectives were deliberating and the president was fuming, a shadow was creeping through Northbrook’s historic Willow Grove Cemetery. The half-moon cast a dim glow over the headstones. An owl, perched in the branches of a twisted old willow tree, watched everything that happened below with her enormous, orange-rimmed eyes.
The shadowy figure moved past the oldest gravestones in the cemetery—those worn with age and covered in gray-green moss—and stopped in front of the largest of the marble bone houses: the Fairfleet Mausoleum. The mausoleum’s iron door was framed by twin pillars, and a carved raven sat just at the peak of the sloping roof. The owl in the willow tree didn’t think much of this stone bird. She didn’t know that the tomb belonged to the Fairfleets, or who the Fairfleets were for that matter. But even the owl thought that it must mean something to be dead inside of the marble vault instead of dead and buried underground like all the rest.
The figure below began fiddling with the padlock on the door of the mausoleum. When the lock yielded, the shadow slipped into the vault, and the owl was alone once more. Still, she waited and watched. A rustling of leaves made her think of the tasty voles who lived under the cemetery hedges. She was hungry, but she was patient.
A fox crossed the graveyard and the willow tree dropped five of its leaves before the shadow emerged. Deciding that it was time for voles, the owl let out a low, trilling hoot. The sound startled the interloper, who dropped the padlock in the long grass before they could secure the door once more. As they bent down to search for the lock, a gate clanged somewhere across the lot, and the intruder thought better of it, stopping their search and melting into the darkness between the tombs.
Before departing, however, the shadow slid past one of the timeworn graves at the far edge of the cemetery—a low, flat stone that read, faintly, GRIMTHORPE. The figure laid a single white lily on the gravestone and slipped out between the willows, as silent as the clouds that passed in front of the moon.
The owl followed the shadow’s retreat with quiet disdain, then ruffled her feathers and took to the sky. The chill autumn wind bore her aloft. Her hearing was very sharp; she could hear the voles skittering beneath the hedges, a lone rabbit thumping in its warren, earthworms breaking down the fallen leaves. The natural cycles of life and death were humming along in the cemetery, and the owl understood the order of things. By contrast, she found the habits of humans inconsistent and hard to interpret, especially when it came to the treatment of their dead.
The owl, at least, was not wrong.
CHAPTER 1
THE NORTHBROOK WITCH TRIALS
29 Days Until Halloween
Alex never expected school lunch to be exciting, but on Monday, the second of October, it was downright disappointing. He had decided years ago that “HOT” lunch was an acronym for “Hostile Or Toxic.” Unfortunately, he had woken up too late that morning to pack hi s own lunch, so he was stuck with a slab of cardboard-crust pizza and a limp-looking salad. Asha never woke up too late to pack lunch. Sometimes she brought leftovers from home that were highly prized on the trading floors of the A&A Lunch Exchange. Today, though, she was content with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a bag of cheddar popcorn, and an apple.
Alex picked up his pizza and let it fall back onto his tray with a thud. Edible pizza did not thud. He was in a foul mood to begin with, and the rubbery cheese on his slice wasn’t helping matters.
“How is it even possible that she got the highest grade in the class on that test?”
Asha raised an eyebrow, prepared to give her best friend the tough honesty that he needed. “You can’t be sure that Lainey got the highest grade in the class. You just know she got a higher grade than you.”
They both snuck a glance across the cafeteria to where Lainey Addison—petite, blond, and fashionably dressed—was sitting with her usual clique. The other girls all laughed loudly at something Lainey said. At this distance, there was no way of knowing if it had actually been funny. Asha didn’t have direct cause to dislike Lainey and her followers, but she was wary of them nonetheless.
“Elaine Addison.” Alex scowled.
“You know she hates it when people use her full name,” Asha replied, punctuating the point with a crisp bite of apple.
Alex ignored the correction. Of course he knew. “I bet she cheats. Her grandfather is the president of Waverly College. Maybe she paid off Ms. Nelson.”
Asha did not dignify this last remark with a response. Lainey Addison did not need to pay off anyone to give Alex and Asha a run for their money at the top of the class.
“Can you come with me to the Museum of Natural History after practice today?” Asha asked, firmly changing the subject. Dr. Wright had asked to see both of them that afternoon, and she was anxious to know why.
“Yes!” Alex’s expression brightened. “Do you think he found another artifact that needs to be repatriated?” He was referring, of course, to the Nabataean Zodiac. The ancient stone wheel had been sent back to Jordan at the end of the summer after Asha and Alex discovered that it had been stolen by a corrupt Fairfleet archaeologist in the 1920s.
“I could have told you about something like that without dragging you to the museum.” What Asha was too nervous to fully consider, let alone say aloud, was that Dr. Wright might have a new case for the A&A Detective Agency. “Let’s meet up at my house first so that we can pick up Aggie.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
Asha nodded as she polished off her popcorn. “Hurry up and eat. I don’t want to be late for history.”
Asha and Alex were in the same history and social studies section, and it was their favorite class by a wide margin. To be sure, they were both interested in the material. “World Civilizations,” the focus of the year, was a broad enough topic to encompass all the ancient battles, famous artwork, and cultural practices that made curious young scholars tick. But there was no denying another important factor in their love of the course: their teacher, Mr. Callum Munro.
Mr. Munro was young, but not too young—about the same age as Minnie Mayflower, who set the standard for what a respectable adult in their thirties ought to be, at least in Alex and Asha’s opinion. He was from Scotland and had spent almost a decade traveling the globe before landing, somehow, in Northbrook. Mr. Munro was a natural storyteller. Every class was sure to have at least one completely fascinating and totally irrelevant tangent about sled dogs in the Yukon or chili pepper eating contests in China. Asha vehemently denied that she was swayed by Mr. Munro’s roguish accent or the way that he could pull off a sweater vest.
As chance would have it, Alex and Asha arrived at their classroom at the exact same moment as Lainey Addison. Alex and Lainey came to an awkward halt facing each other in the doorway.
“No, please, after you,” Alex said with as much contempt as he could muster.
Lainey gave Alex a cursory once-over. “You have a piece of lettuce on your shirt.” She didn’t say it in a particularly mean way, which somehow made it even more embarrassing. Then she waltzed past Alex into the classroom as though he were the bellhop at the entrance to her own private apartment.
Alex glared bitterly after his golden-haired nemesis. He thought about leaving the sad, wilting piece of lettuce right where it was just to spite her. Reading her partner’s thoughts, Asha plucked it off his shirt for him, and they both took their usual seats.
“All right then, class? How is everyone today?” Mr. Munro entered the classroom in high spirits. He was carrying a hefty armful of library books that he let drop on his desk with a satisfying flump. “Today we are beginning a new project!”
Lainey’s hand shot into the air.
“Yes, Lainey.” Mr. Munro had tried calling Lainey “Elaine” once, and only once, at the start of the year.
“How much of our grade will it be worth?”
“A hundred and twenty percent,” Mr. Munro replied without missing a beat.
Asha craned her neck to get a better look at the books on the desk. The one on top featured a picture of King Tutankhamun’s famous gold death mask. “Are we learning about ancient Egypt?”
Mr. Munro laughed. “If you would just give me half a moment to explain …”
Asha pressed her lips together and waited expectantly.
“Right, then.” The Scotsman clapped his hands together. “We’ve been studying the religious traditions and mythologies of ancient civilizations. So, with Halloween right around the corner, I thought we might turn our attention to everyone’s favorite topic: death.”
Mr. Munro paused for dramatic effect. “Each of you will choose a different world culture, research their funeral rites, and present back to the class at the end of the week.”
Now it was Alex’s hand that shot into the air. “Can we pick any culture past or present? Do we need a visual aid? And will we get in trouble if our visual aid is really gory?”
Lainey frowned. “This all sounds very morbid to me.”
“You’re not wrong, Lainey. Thank you for the astute observation.”
Alex let out a brief snort. Mr. Munro turned a stern eye his way.
“As for your question, Alexander—I understand that this topic invites a certain macabre fascination, but I want you to give it the respect it deserves. How we face death reveals a great deal about what we value while we are living. People thought the Neanderthals were thick-skulled brutes until archaeologists discovered ancient flowers in a Neanderthal grave and began to wonder about how and why they laid their dead to rest as they did. The Iliad by Homer—one of the foundational texts of Western literature—concludes not with the end of the Trojan war but with funeral rites for the great hero Hector. Mortality and mourning and all that goes along with them are central to our very humanity.”
Asha watched Alex to see if he was chastened, which he was. Alex met her eye to see if Asha was inspired, which she was. They dove into their research for the day with a healthy balance of gravity and gusto.
While Asha was at cross-country practice that afternoon, Hindu funeral pyres burned along the banks of the Ganges in her mind’s eye. Meanwhile, Mr. Munro, who happened to be the robotics coach, had to call out Alex three times for being off task on his computer researching different kinds of mummies. The project was all the detectives could talk about when they met up at Asha’s house later that afternoon to walk to the Fairfleet Museum of Natural History.
Normally, they would have ridden their bikes, but they wanted to bring Aggie, who was on a strict training regimen. Despite their best efforts, however, Aggie slowed them down by pausing every block or so to sniff an informative fence post or flop in a bed of clover for a good roll-around. Eventually, the potbellied puppy decided that she didn’t want to walk at all, and Alex scooped her up in his arms to carry her the rest of the way.
The sentries of the Museum of Natural History were the skeletal dinosaurs who stood watch in the Hall of Fossils. Asha was a familiar visitor, and they let the detectives pass without incident. Although the museum was closed to the public in the early evening, Asha and Alex heard muffled, angry voices coming from behind the door of Dr. Wright’s office. The door opened, and a sour-faced man with gray hair and a neat mustache strode out. He swept right past Alex, Asha, and Aggie without seeing or acknowledging them.
