The World's Greatest Detective Page 8

  He tried to cross the room to get a better look at them, but Ivy held him back. “You don’t want to go that way,” she said. “More traps. Percival got stuck in that one last week, and it took forever to get him out of it. He’s awfully squirmy.”

  Toby stopped and stared up at the ceiling, where a perilous-looking contraption made out of silver netting looked ready to fall on him. “What kind of place is this?”

  For the first time since Toby had met her, Ivy came very close to smiling. “I call it the Investigatorium,” she said. “What do you think?”

  “It’s amazing,” said Toby. He hated to admit it, but it was the truth. “Where did you get all of this?”

  “In the city, mostly. Doyle’s Detection Goods, Secondhand Sleuthery, those sorts of places. Some of the old gowns are Mother’s, and Doctor Piper gave me Egbert as a loan.”

  “Egbert?” Toby looked around to see if there was another detective lurking in a corner somewhere.

  “Egbert’s the skeleton,” Ivy explained. “I told Doctor Piper I wanted to study anatomy, and she said I could borrow him. It was awful smuggling him up the servants’ stairs, though. Percival kept trying to chew on his femurs.”

  Cautiously, Toby walked along the edge of the room, keeping his eyes peeled for traps. The sunlight glinted off a wicked-looking knife on the bookshelf; not even Uncle Gabriel owned anything quite that dangerous. He took a step back from it. “Do your parents know you have this?”

  Toby hadn’t meant to make a joke, but Ivy laughed anyway. “Of course not,” she said. “They don’t even know the Investigatorium exists. Hardly anyone ever comes up to the third floor, and Mother believes children should have their privacy. She thinks I borrowed those gowns to play dress-up.” Ivy shook her head. “Mother is a very nice person, but she’d make a horrible detective. Father’s just the same, and so is Lillie. One of the maids tried to clean this room once, though. That’s why I had to set traps.”

  “They definitely work.” Toby rubbed his ankle where the wire had caught him. He couldn’t even imagine what it was like to live in a house so big that whole chunks of it went unexplored for years at a time. And he couldn’t understand why Ivy seemed so angry. If Toby had a whole Investigatorium to himself, he’d be in heaven. “I wish you hadn’t trapped me by accident,” he said.

  “Oh, it wasn’t an accident.” Ivy sat down on the couch, in the middle of the pile of magazines. “I had three good reasons for trapping you. Would you like to hear them?”

  Toby nodded. He was a detective, after all, and detectives were curious by nature.

  “Good,” said Ivy. “Reason one: you were following me. I don’t like being followed.”

  “You follow me all the time,” Toby pointed out.

  Ivy ignored him. “Reason two: I wanted to test your detective skills. You’re all right for a beginner, I suppose, but you’ve still got a lot to learn.”

  This didn’t seem entirely fair to Toby. “You only sent me a lesson on how to build traps, not how to avoid them.”

  “Oh.” Ivy frowned. “Well, here’s your lesson: if you see a trap, don’t step in it.”

  Inspector Webster wasn’t turning out to be anything like Toby had expected. “Thanks, I guess,” he said. “What’s reason three?”

  “Reason three,” said Ivy, “is that I want to find out what you’re doing here. It doesn’t make any sense. When I asked Mr. Abernathy if I could enter his silly old contest, he laughed at me and said it wasn’t for children. Now I’m stuck here all weekend, watching other detectives solve a murder while I have to be quiet and fetch coffee and pick flowers for everyone Percival crashes into. But Mr. Abernathy let you into the contest, and you’re my student! You haven’t even gotten to level three of the correspondence course!” She leaned forward to give Toby an extra-powerful stare, making the couch springs squeak under her. “If you can be the world’s greatest detective, why can’t I?”

  “So that’s why you’re so angry all the time!” Toby said. “I wondered.” He didn’t think Ivy really needed the prize money, but still, he couldn’t blame her for being upset. He hated feeling left out.

  “I’m not angry all the time,” Ivy grumbled. “I’m angry right now.” She sighed and flopped onto the couch, letting a Sphinx Monthly Reader slide onto her face. “Usually, I’m delightful.”

  “Well, I don’t think you have to be angry anymore—unless you’d like to be, of course.” Toby made his way over piles of paper and cartons stamped with mysterious WARNING labels. “I’m only here as my uncle’s assistant. I’m sure Mr. Abernathy never would have let me enter the contest by myself.”

  “Your uncle?” Ivy lifted the magazine from her face. “Gabriel Montrose? But he’s gone abroad!”

  Toby felt as if another one of Ivy’s traps had come crashing down on him. “He hasn’t!” he said frantically. “He’s downstairs! In the Marigold Room! He’s, ah, sitting in a chair! Thinking important thoughts!”

  Ivy was sitting up again now, and this time, she was beaming. “At least you’re deceiving with confidence,” she said. “Good job, Toby. I’m not surprised the others believed you.”

  “I don’t think Mr. Peartree did,” Toby admitted. “Percival had to rescue me. But how did you know about Uncle Gabriel?”

  “Look around you!” said Ivy. “I’m an investigator! It’s my job to know absolutely everything.” She looked a little uncomfortable. “Also,” she said, “when your uncle left your house this morning with his suitcase, I might have been hiding behind a lamppost.”

  “You were spying on me again?” Toby had caught Ivy twice in Detectives’ Row, which meant she’d been there at least three times—and, knowing Ivy, it had probably been a lot more than that. He wished he’d been paying better attention. “Do you spy on all your students?”

  “It’s not spying; it’s investigating. And of course I don’t investigate all my students. They live all over the world!” Ivy stood up and pulled one of the thick notebooks from her bookshelf. Toby’s own name was printed on the front of it. “When I got an application from someone who already lived on Detectives’ Row, though, I had to find out who that someone was. I’d never heard of any detective named Toby Montrose before. When I saw you picking up the mail, I deduced that Toby Montrose had to be you.”

  “But you kept coming back,” said Toby. “Why?”

  Ivy shrugged and flipped through the notebook with Toby’s name on it. “I was curious about my student,” she said, “and Percival likes you. Besides, you’re sort of interesting to watch. You clean your fingernails a lot. Why is that?”

  Toby could feel his cheeks growing warm. “Does it say that in your notes?”

  He reached for the notebook, but Ivy pulled it away. “I’m sorry,” she said. “That’s confidential.”

  “I don’t see how taking notes about people’s fingernails makes you a good detective,” Toby said. Since Ivy was still holding the notebook out of his reach, he pulled a different one from the shelf and started to flip through it, hoping that another of Inspector Webster’s students liked to waltz with his cat or sing in the shower.

  “Put that down!” said Ivy. She’d given up being delightful and gone back to being angry. “Those notes are private!”

  But Toby had already closed the notebook. All of its pages were blank. So were the pages in the next book, and the next after that.

  “Ivy,” he said carefully, “am I your only student?”

  Ivy rolled her shoulders back and clenched her jaw in the way that adults sometimes did when they were starting to find Toby tiresome. “No,” she said. “That’s ridiculous.”

  But her voice was a little higher than it had been, and a little faster, too. Toby looked at her hard. “Are you deceiving me with confidence?”

  Ivy’s jaw clenched tighter. Then, grudgingly, she put her observations of Toby back on the shelf with the rows of empty notebooks. “All right,” she said. “I suppose there’s no point in lying to a fellow detective. I put that
advertisement in the Sphinx almost a year ago, but you’re the only person who’s ever signed up for my course. If you think about it, though, you’re not really my only student; you’re my first student!”

  She said this as though it were an honor, but it didn’t really feel that way to Toby. “Your advertisement said you’ve taught hundreds of successful sleuths!” he said. “You said results were guaranteed!”

  “Oh, Toby, everybody says those things in ads. And you’ve already had results, haven’t you? You knew I wasn’t being truthful just now. That’s a result!”

  “In your lessons, you talked about all the cases you’ve worked on with your assistant.” Toby looked around the Investigatorium. It had impressed him at first with all its dazzling tools and devices, but now he thought it looked more like a child’s playroom than an inspector’s office. He glared at the skeleton in the corner. “Is Egbert your assistant?”

  “Of course he’s not,” Ivy snapped. Then, in a very small voice, she said, “Percival is my assistant.”

  This was too much for Toby. All this time, he’d been imagining two bold inspectors chasing down clues, cracking codes, and matching wits with the criminal element of Colebridge—not a girl and her dog spying on him from across the street. He’d been counting on Inspector Webster to make him the world’s greatest detective, but Inspector Webster was nothing but a fraud. She’d probably already spent his ten dollars on one of her awful disguises. “No real detective has a dog as an assistant!” he shouted. “Have you ever even solved an actual mystery?”

  “Well,” said Ivy, “not exactly—”

  “Here. You can have this. I don’t want it anymore.” Toby pulled off his junior detective badge and shoved it into Ivy’s hand. “And I want my ten dollars back.” All he really wanted, truthfully, was to get as far away from Ivy as possible before he started to cry. He didn’t have long; his nose was already getting sniffly. He turned his back on Ivy, who was staring down at the badge as though she’d lost her best friend, and ran across the Investigatorium, heading toward the door.

  “Don’t go that way!” Ivy shouted, but it was already too late. With a mechanical whirr, the silver trap had released itself from its moorings and swung down from the ceiling, heading straight for Toby. He froze—which was, of course, exactly the wrong thing to do.

  Then Ivy barreled toward him. She moved so quickly that her shiny shoes screeched on the floorboards and the grass stains on her tights blurred together into one enormous smudge. With both arms outstretched, she tackled Toby. They crashed to the ground, and the trap crashed next to them, barely half a foot away.

  Toby could hardly breathe. This was partly because he’d had the wind knocked out of him when he fell, and partly because Ivy’s elbow was digging into his chest. “I’m sorry,” she said, moving it. “About the traps and the lies and the spying and everything. What I was going to say before is that I might not have solved a real mystery yet, but I’ve read a lot and practiced even more, and I know I’m a good detective. I promise I am. If you stop being my student, I’ll feel just awful about it. I won’t have anything to do except torture Lillie all day, and I’m sure Percival will be completely miserable. Won’t you please forgive me?”

  Toby sat up. “The trouble’s going to find me again,” he said, “and it’s all your fault. I’m not a real detective after all, not even a junior one. I’m not going to win the competition, I’m not going to get ten thousand dollars, Uncle Gabriel is going to lose his job, he’ll send me to the orphanage, and I’ll have to eat gruel for the rest of my life.” He wasn’t entirely sure what gruel was, but he knew it was the kind of food they served in orphanages, and it didn’t sound good.

  Now Ivy was the one with the sniffling nose. “I don’t entirely understand what you’re talking about,” she said, “but I do think you’re a real detective—or you can be one, if you want to be.” She wiped her nose with a grubby handkerchief. “What if I helped you with the competition? We could work together. You could use the Investigatorium, too—the magnifying glasses and Egbert and everything!”

  Toby shook his head. “Forget it,” he said. “I’m not interested.”

  He couldn’t look at Ivy as he left the Investigatorium. He didn’t even glance back over his shoulder as he ran downstairs to the Marigold Room, slammed the door behind him, and lay down on the soft orange carpet. The plump, pillowy face of the fake Uncle Gabriel gazed down at him. The real Uncle Gabriel would have raised his voice to a cheerful boom and asked what in the world was so terrible that Toby was forced to squelch across the floor like a snail, but the real Uncle Gabriel was miles away, and nothing had gone right since Toby had left Detectives’ Row. Most of the things he owned were being sold from the back of a carriage in Slaughter’s Lane. He was a long way from home, he had no idea how he was going to solve Mr. Abernathy’s mystery by himself, and he wished he hadn’t given his junior detective badge back to Ivy. Maybe she wasn’t exactly who she’d pretended to be, but Toby had felt a lot better with that badge on his shirt. Now all he had left was fifty-three cents—and the trouble, of course. It must have let itself into the manor, because Toby was sure no one had invited it. He could see it skulking under his bed, just beyond the orange dust ruffle.

  There was a knocking noise outside his room; just a few quick raps. As Toby scrambled to his feet, someone slid two small, flat items underneath the door. The first was his junior detective badge, a little crumpled but otherwise as good as ever. And the second was a shabby but very real ten-dollar note.

  When Toby opened the door, he found Ivy and Percival standing on the other side of it, waiting. They looked very professional.

  “Please?” said Ivy.

  Toby sighed. “Okay.”

  CHAPTER 9

  DETECTIVES IN AND OUT

  With his badge pinned back on his shirt and a borrowed notebook under his arm, Toby ran down the hall after Ivy. He hadn’t known her very long, but he was learning quickly that Ivy liked to be in charge, and she didn’t like to be kept waiting. “Why are we hurrying?” he called to her. “The competition hasn’t started yet. We’ve got nothing to do!”

  Ivy turned to face him, but she didn’t stop walking. “If we’re going to solve Mr. Abernathy’s case,” she said, “we’ve got to be at least two steps ahead of all the other detectives, and we might as well start now. Do you know how to make observations?”

  Toby nodded. “I’m pretty good at it, actually.”

  “I thought you might be,” Ivy said. “Mother says I don’t notice much because I’m usually too busy talking, but you obviously don’t have that problem.”

  “We’ll make a good team, then,” said Toby. He’d finally caught up with Ivy, but he wasn’t sure she’d heard him.

  “Anyway,” she said, “the things we observe before the murder takes place might help us figure out what’s happened afterward. We need to know who’s arguing, who’s acting suspicious, who’s wandering through the hedge maze with a particularly sharp knife. If we’re lucky, we could catch the murderer in the act!”

  Toby didn’t think Mr. Abernathy’s mystery was going to be quite that easy to solve. “If the crime hasn’t happened yet,” he said, “how do we know who our suspects are?”

  “Everyone in the household is a suspect,” Ivy said grimly. “That’s what Mr. Abernathy said. Mother, Father, the servants—even silly old Lillie, though I don’t think she’d ever do something as interesting as murdering someone.”

  Toby was surprised. “Don’t you like your sister?”

  “I love her,” said Ivy, “but she’s awfully good.”

  “Is that a bad thing?”

  “The worst,” said Ivy. “She never tears her stockings, she writes little notes thanking Mother and Father for her birthday gifts, she takes music lessons once a week in the city, and I’m beginning to suspect that she actually enjoys them. Do you know what it’s like to live with someone like that?” Ivy sighed. “No one can be perfect all the time, though. She’s
been well behaved for eighteen years straight, so one of these days, she’s bound to do something completely awful.” The thought of it seemed to cheer her up as they wound down a steep back staircase into the servants’ quarters. “Now, we’re not really allowed to be back here, so we’ll have to be careful. Do you remember how to observe suspects without getting caught?”

  Toby thought back to his earliest correspondence course lessons. “Don’t get too close,” he recited. “Don’t draw attention to yourself. If anyone notices you, act like you’re supposed to be there.”

  Ivy nodded. “And stay out of Cook’s way, or she’ll boil your bones for soup stock.”

  The kitchen was a churning, rumbling machine at the back of the house, at least ten degrees warmer and ten times louder than the Websters’ living quarters. It reminded Toby of his uncle Francis’s hotel, with people coming and going, shouting for things and hurrying to retrieve them. The preparations for dinner had started hours ago, from the smell of it. “Mrs. Webster wants that lamb roasted, not stewed!” Cook called across the room. “And mind you don’t put any cream in the soup tonight. That poor Mr. Peartree can’t tolerate it.”

  Toby looked sideways at Ivy, who was already buried in her own notebook. There was a lot to observe, but he didn’t think most of it had anything to do with a murder. Still, he wrote down as much as he could. Cook has a lot of sharp knives, he scribbled. A kitchen maid is pouring a bottle of something into the soup. Wine? Poison? Two footmen passed by, gossiping about a nearby farmer who swore he’d spotted an escaped convict from Chokevine in the pole beans, and Toby wrote this down, too.