Maisie Ardilla, P.I.

Rain on Acornmouth.

It came down the way it always comes down here ~~ like the sky owed somebody money and was paying it back one cold drop at a time. I sat in my office and let it run down the window in long gray ropes. A detective learns to let the rain finish its sentence.

The office is a hollow in a sycamore on the wrong side of town. A desk. A lamp I pulled off somebody's porch, buzzing its pink light. A filing cabinet that used to be a cigar box. A paperweight, holding down the only file in this town worth the dust it collected. And next to the lamp, my magnifying glass. I don't need it to read a one-page file. I bring it everywhere just the same.

The Acornmouth Free Chestnut. Missing.

You want to understand this town, you gotta understand this: a no-good flying squirrel named Reginald Glidewell owns every nut in town. Every last one. Keeps 'em in a vault and rents them back to you by the hour, a grifter in a fancy suit charging you to look at your own teeth. He owns the echo off the quarry wall ~~ a nickel a holler. Owns the shade under the old oak tree, rented by the half-hour, no refunds on cloudy days. Last Tuesday he patented the word free and started suing folks for saying it.

but there was exactly one nut in town Glidewell didn't own. The Acornmouth Free Chestnut. The last free chestnut, the people's chestnut, out on the town square where anybody could touch it and nobody could keep it. Folks called it the Free Chestnut, on account of its being the one thing in this town a body could have for nothing. And after, Reginald owned the word free ~~ I figured he'd lay claim to it too. He just couldn't get his greedy little paws on the nut.

This morning it was gone.

Down the hall, Margaret stopped typing. She's a millipede, and my secretary, and she's been quitting for six years. She types her resignation on the slow days. She's up to forty pages. It's very good. I'm in it.

When Madge goes quiet, trouble's already found my door. She opened it, stepped in, waving her many feet.

"Maisie," she said. "There's a frog out there. She's crying."

I put on my hat and dropped the magnifying glass in my coat. Some mornings you just know you'll want a closer look at something.

Some cases start with a corpse. The good ones start with a mother.

She came in with fog ~~ and the fog came in too fast, the way it always does in this town. She'd been crying so long the rain looked dry by comparison. She sat in the chair across my desk, folded her hands, and told me her name. It wasn't a name. It was the sound a kazoo makes when you step on it. I wrote down what I could. In my business the truth and the spelling rarely keep the same hours.

"Detective Ardilla," she said. "They're going to drain my pond."

"Lots of ponds get drained. Why's yours special?"

"Because my babies are in it. All ten. And the man draining says I'm the one who took the chestnut, and I ~~ " something went small and hard in her. "I didn't take it," she said. "Bet."

I didn't know what bet meant. I wrote that down too.

She told me what she wanted, which was her name cleared. She didn't tell me everything. They never do ~~ the ones with ten kids and a pond on a rich man's map, least of all. Somewhere out in the bay the foghorn blowed.

Glidewell. It had to be Glidewell. You don't visit a rich creep like Reginald Glidewell. You're received.

I found him at the ribbon-cutting for his latest scam ~~ Glidewell Gardens, a billboard of a lawn so green and so empty it looked like a place feelings went to be put down. He wore a cravat. He had three honorary doctorates and a phony accent. He'd built himself out of the better parts of four countries.

"Detective Ardilla." He said it like a compliment he was lending me. "You've come about the little pond."

"I've come about the chestnut."

"The chestnut. The pond." He waved a paw ~~ gently, always gently. "Two leaves, one branch, Detective. This town is a mess. Weeds. Mud. Standing water where the mosquitoes hold their conventions. Nuts lying around loose where anybody might walk off with them." A small, sorrowful smile. "I'm only trying to put things in order. And when I've got it ~~ when the last loose thing in this town is finally mine ~~ you'll see. Everything in its place. Everything the way it ought to be. Everything mine."

Behind him a tiny bulldozer idled at the lip of the pond. Ten small voices had gone very quiet under the water.

I met a lot of crooks. The ones who scare me are the ones who figure they're doing you a favor.

I was halfway down the steps of Glidewell Gardens when I saw the badger. Goes by the name of Digger. Diggs for short. Glidewell's top goon.

He came out the service side of the billboard with a roll of paper under one arm and his hat pulled low, moving the way muscle moves when it's carrying something it shouldn't ~~ quick, and trying hard not to be seen. Reginald's people take the high road, which is the air. The rest of us take the hard road, which is everything in between. This mook took the hard road too, stayin' in the shadows, keepin' low. That told me he had something on him worth more than his dignity.

So I followed it.

He made me out at the corner ~~ a quick glance back, then a little stumble in his step, then he was up a drainpipe and over a gutter and gone, and I was after him.

I can't glide. Never could. A Glidewell opens his coat and lets the wind do the work; the rest of us jump. So I jumped. Off the newsstand awning, up the side of the laundry, hand over hand up a downspout slick with the rain that never quits. He was heavier than me and slower going up, but a badger going through a thing beats a squirrel going around it, and he went through everything ~~ clotheslines, stovepipes, busted right through a rooftop garden. The rooftop gave under me halfway across ~~ this town's built on the cheap.

I lost him in the chimneys and found him again ~~ 'cause if there's one thing badgers ain't, it's quiet. He climbed across a scaffolding and knocked it down behind him so I couldn't follow. I put everything I had left into one jump across the alley ~~ over a long drop of nothing, the wet street a city block straight down, foghorn blowing somewhere like it couldn't bear to watch ~~ and I came down on the far ledge with my claws in the tar paper and the wind knocked clean out of me.

He didn't make the next gap. Too heavy. He pulled up short at the edge, spun around ~~ and that's when the roll slipped out from under his arm.

I had it before it hit the roof. The badger had a long look at me and decided his hide was worth more than a rich man's paperwork. He went down the fire escape and disappeared into the fog.

I sat in the wet and unrolled what I'd caught, and I got out the magnifying glass for clues.

It was a survey. Glidewell Gardens ~~ Drainage Plan. And it was a lie. You don't drain a swamp for a garden in lines like these. A map of ditches on the page, running to one place and pointed at it like fingers closing on a throat ~~ a single square at the waterline of the frog's pond, marked with a small red X and three words in a tidy, rich-squirrel's hand.

Drain by Friday.

Whatever Reginald wanted dead, it lived right there. One square foot of mud. Now I had to go find out what it was.

The X put me on my knees at the pond's edge with the glass out and the cold soaking through my coat. A bulldozer sat parked right next to it. I went over the spot one inch at a time with the magnifying glass, the way you read a ransom note, until I found it ~~ a patch of fresh-turned earth right at the waterline, the dirt packed back down by hand and gone darker for it. And pressed in beside it, clean as a signature, the oval print of a teaspoon. Footprints, too. Frog footprints. And dead center? Something green had cracked the mud and decided to stay.

Nobody buried anything here. Somebody planted it.

So I went and found the only witnesses in town shorter than the evidence.

The tadpoles had seen everything. And worse: they'd been told to keep quiet about it. And there's nothing in nature like ten tadpoles who've been told to keep a secret.

"We don't know anything," said the big one, fast.

"About what?"

"About the nut."

"What nut?"

"The one she didn't bury."

"Greta."

"I said she didn't!"

"but you said bury," piped the other.

"In the dead of night," a small one offered, helpfully, rising at last to the occasion of being a witness. "With malice afterthought."

"Aforethought," I said.

"That too!"

The big one ~~ Greta, I had to assume ~~ climbed onto a lily pad to take command of the situation. "NOBODY," she announced, to the pond, to the town, to history, "pushed the big nut into the mud where it is currently growing. That's all."

The pond was quiet for exactly one second.

"…we had one job," said somebody underwater.

And there it was. The frog hadn't lied to me. She'd just left out the truth.

You don't push a thing into the mud to keep it. You push it into the mud to grow it.

She hadn't stolen the Free Chestnut. She'd planted it ~~ at the waterline of the pond a rich man was all set to drain.

So I went to see the one creature in Acornmouth who'd read the rule book all the way to the end.

The Mayor. A heron. She stood on one leg in the records office, the other leg, she said, was off duty. She'd been mayor ten years and powerless for most of them, on account of Glidewell keeping more lawyers than he kept nuts in his knothole.

"There's nothing I can do about Mr. Glidewell," she said, before I'd asked anything. "However unpleasant his actions may be, he's legally within his rights. He knows and exploits every loophole. He owns the word free now, did you know that? We've had to quit using it in meetings. He fined us 12 acorns."

"What about a tree," I said.

The heron's good leg came down.

She opened a book the size of a matchbox and turned to a page worn soft as a riverbank. "Section twelve," she read. "Subsection five. A tree on public ground belongs to the public. It shall not be cut, pruned, nor hauled off, and the water that feeds it belongs to the tree, now and always." She looked at me over the top of the book. "If there's a tree, a pond cannot be drained. It's the one law in this town he couldn't circumvent. But there's never been a tree next to the pond. Only the plaza with the Acornmouth Free Chestnut ~~ and I'm afraid a chestnut doesn't qualify as a tree." A pause, long as a heron's neck. "A chestnut in the ground, though."

"Is a tree the morning it sprouts."

"It's a tree," she agreed, "the morning it sprouts."

And the whole crooked setup turned around and showed me its ugly face.

Reginald's goons worked out where the chestnut went. He wasn't draining that pond for Glidewell Gardens. He was draining it to starve the sprout ~~ pull the water out from under it before it could grow tall enough for folks to notice it's a tree, and protected, and blow his whole plan to pieces over a frog with a teaspoon and a grudge. The theft rap on the mother was just frosting. Run her and the tadpoles out of town, drain the pond, and who's left to point at the small green thing in the mud?

It's an old story. The big ones don't take what's yours. They make it a crime it was ever yours to start with.

So it came down to time. It was Glidewell's dozer, and the morning that sprout meant to wake up a tree. Drain by Friday, the man wrote. It was Friday.

I'd like to tell you I won it with my fists. I won it with a heron, a book, and the last clean jump I had in me.

The engine was already turning over when I hit the top of the quarry road ~~ Diggs, the badger, up in the seat, the same low character from the rooftops, running the blade down toward the waterline. Glidewell, standin' there in his fancy cravat, clipboard in hand. The water started going out of the pond and the mud started showing. Down at the bottom of it the sprout was already wilting in the sun, the green practically draining out of it the same way the water drained out from under its feet. And ten small voices crying from a pond on its way to bein' a puddle.

I took the quarry road in three jumps and the slope in one long dirty slide, and I put myself between the raised blade and the sprout with nothing in my two paws but a book the size of a matchbox, held open to the only page that mattered.

The blade stopped a whisker short of my hat. Diggs looked down at me. I looked up at a pound of cold steel and did the only detecting left to do, which was stall.

"You wanna read this before you drop that," I said. "Or you want to be the one explaining to a judge downtown why you didn't."

Diggs hung there, the blade trembling over both of us, a hired badger doing arithmetic he was never paid to do. He turned to Glidewell, who waved him on.

Then the Mayor came down out of the grey on both wings.

Ten years standing on one leg, and it turned out the other one was for this. Landed at the lip of the mud on both legs ~~ which in a heron means she is all the way done fooling around ~~ and she read Section twelve, subsection five, out loud, all the way through ~~ to Diggs and Reginald and the tadpoles and anybody in Acornmouth with the ears to hear it. The water that feeds it belongs to the tree, now and always. And the law being the law, somebody had to let the water back in.

It came back muddy and slow. The sprout took a long drink. It quit wilting. It stood right back up.

Green, stubborn, already taller than the law being read over its head ~~ it stood there being, without one inch of doubt, however small, a chestnut tree.

There was nothing about it Reginald could buy. Nothing to corner, drain, or stash away with the rest of the nuts he'd lifted.

Diggs had bailed outta the dozer the second the heron spread her wings, and his boot caught the lever on the way down ~~ which, lucky for the sprout, threw the thing into reverse, and sent it the other way entirely: backwards off across the lot on business of its own, slow as a bad mood, nobody at the controls. It backed clean through Reginald's golf course, flattening the little flags one green at a time, dragged the sand trap out into a long beige comma, and folded a marching band's bass drum under its treads with a sound like the end of a joke. Then it found the Glidewell Gardens billboard and went straight through it, that big green empty lawn swallowing its own bulldozer whole. It clipped the bandstand. Took a corner off the town fountain and wore the spout home like a hat. And finally it fetched up against a big maple Reginald didn't own ~~ not for lack of wanting; the squirrel wanted everything ~~ and tried, so help me, to climb it: reared up with both treads clawing at nothing, hung there a second like it had a point to make, and went over backwards, treads still turning, the way a thing keeps arguing after it's already lost. Up in the maple's knothole, the five squirrel orphans who lived there leaned out and cheered every second of it, having, by a mile, the best afternoon of their short and tragic lives.

The Mayor watched it the whole way down. Then she took out a little pad and started adding.

"Bandstand," she said. "Fountain. Those belong to the town." She licked her pencil. "The golf course and billboard's your own loss. But you'll pay the rest to Acornmouth city council by Friday, Mr. Glidewell." A heron can smile without moving a feather. "Funny thing. You finally owe this town more than you ever managed to take out of it. And two weeks' community service" ~~ she looked up at the orphans, who were now demanding an encore ~~ "for orphan trauma. The poor dears."

For the first time since I'd known him, Reginald Glidewell didn't have a line. He watched his own machine flatten his own dream, watched a heron he'd kept powerless ten years stand on both legs and write him a bill, and the smart remark didn't come.

"It'll all be mine," he just said ~~ and stopped. Tried again. "I'll have it in order. Every last thing in its place. You'll see."

The sprout, I noticed, didn't agree.

He left the way his kind always leaves, which is up. He ran up the side of the nearest maple and opened his coat for the wind, and he paused a half-beat too long at the top ~~ looked down at the pond, the tadpoles, the small green thing he couldn't touch ~~ and said, "Enjoy your tree, Detective. There's always something else." Then he caught the wind like the dirty vulture he was and glided off. Not out of town ~~ never out of town. Home: to the finest knothole in the finest oak in Acornmouth, a tree he'd taken for himself years back and called an estate, where a creature like that goes to lick his wounds and pick out the next loose thing nobody's nailed down.

Down at the waterline: ten tadpoles, one tired mother, and one small, legally protected sprout of a tree.

I dropped the glass back in my coat and walked into the rain.

Stepped back into the office and shook my head at Madge. "This town's fulla creeps," I said. "And Glidewell's the worst of 'em."

Madge looked at me. "Forget it, Maisie. It's Acornmouth."

Some cases you close. The good ones close you.

"And that's our show! We'll see you next ti ~~ "

The speaker's voice was interrupted by a small wooden clack as Detective Ardilla's left eyeball ~~ a white bead with a black dot ~~ rolled across the stage. A child somewhere shrieked with joy: "her eye fell off! her eye fell off!"

"Ach, du Scheisse!!" cried Gertrude, a German woman behind the curtain with her hand still inside the Maisie Ardilla puppet. Then, remembering all at once how many children are sitting in front of it ~~ she hastily exited the puppet off stage and added "aaach! ~~ ich meine… aaa ... Hoorah! Children! Kinder! Hoorah! Come back soon, everybody! For more exciting and mysterious adventures with Detective Ardilla! And.. aaa.. " she stalled "it will be so exciting! your eyes will pop out!"

From somewhere in the front rows, clear as a bell: "¡Mamá! ¿Qué significa scheisse?" A mother's hand arrived over the little mouth a half-second too late, and she glared at the puppet stage curtain.

The quirky post-show theme played over the little speaker from Mateo's synthesizer offstage.

And then the imaginary world came apart into the things it was truly made of.

The rain stopped being rain and went back to being a watering can tipped empty and a fistful of dried peas rattling down a length of metal pipe. The fog that had rolled across Acornmouth Bay rolled backwards onto its spool with a squeaky cranking sound, the long bolt of grey translucent muslin winding home. Somebody turned off the glow of the streetlamps, made from repurposed LED bicycle lamps the whole time. The harbor's foghorn turned out to be Jef ~~ Stef's youngest, twelve years old and born right into the quiet ~~ scarlet in the face from blowing across the mouth of an empty bottle, and grinning like he'd gotten away with something. The bulldozer toppled over with the dignity of a cardboard box, which is what it was. And the whole grey city of Acornmouth ~~ the quarry, the pond, the mayor's office, the orphanage ~~ rolled up between two dowels into a painted scroll for the next show. The same skyline Maisie had torn across in the chase, when all that desperate running had really been a squirrel puppet manipulated in front of a cityscape cranked behind her.

It wasn't raining. It had never been raining. It was four in the afternoon on the warm concrete plaza in the center of La Caleta ~~ a parking lot, once, before the cars went away; twelve years of hands had turned it into a square you could be comfortable in, with salvaged awnings strung for shade, planters gone leafy, and soft swept places for the little ones to sit ~~ and only a few dead cars left out on the dirt at the edge of it, long since stripped for their wiring and parts. The south of the island goes dry and pale here, and the cool wet laurisilva forest of Querencia is just a rumor somebody tells you about the north. And the children ~~ actual children, not tadpoles ~~ peeled themselves off the warm ground where they'd sat cross-legged for forty-two minutes without moving once, and were now running about, hollering about the rooftop chase, the desperate tadpoles and the squirrel detective whose eye fell off and yelled "scheisse".

Saga sat back on her heels behind the little stage wiggling green felt tadpole finger puppets who couldn't keep a secret, with their tiny plastic googly eyes. Greta, we had one job, was a line she made up on the spot. And for one long second after improvising the in the dead of night.. with malice afterthought line, she worried she'd tripped up Gertrude, but Gertie caught it and improvised right back like a pro. When the laughter came roaring from the audience in a wave, she'd understood, in her body, that together they'd made things even better.

In the bright afternoon light, Mateo's hand came down warm on the top of her head ~~ the same Mateo who'd been the scheming Reginald Glidewell all afternoon, all oil and cravat and you'll see. He didn't say anything. He didn't need to. The hand said es clásico, and the hand was right.