Smack Dab in the Middle of Maybe by Jo Watson Hackl

Author:Jo Watson Hackl
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2018-07-10T00:00:00+00:00

It took me an hour to get my opening for clue hunting. On the porch, I practiced six different ways to look pitiful, and Miss V. finally shooed me back inside to rest.

But the living room didn’t look like any kind of clue-hunting place. It looked like a cross between a library and Grandma’s living room, the one she wouldn’t let nobody but the preacher go in.

A flower-patterned couch was in talking distance to the daybed. Doilies were draped across everything, even the bookshelves. Books were everywhere, on tables and on a bookcase stretching across an entire wall. A black baby grand piano stood in one corner. The lid was down, and there was a doily on that, too. The staircase was in another corner. Some old, faded photos on the walls. Lots of plants.

From the roof came the sound of Miss V. swishing tar.

I tiptoed around, looking at every little thing. Not a single painting or carving.

Nothing tanager.

I thumbed through the shelf. There was book after book of poetry, just like Miss V.’d said, each of them with little paw scratch marks on the cover. There were books full of crossword puzzles, and other books, too—Treasure Island and North Toward Home. And dozens of dusty issues of Mississippi Gardener’s Almanac.

I flipped through the books, but no tanager painting was hidden between the pages.

I crossed the hallway and peeked into the kitchen, into the dining room, the bathroom again, even into the bedroom.

No tanagers.

I’d covered all the rooms downstairs.

Outside the windows, there was just an ordinary garden and straight-rowed trees.

I started over, looking closer at the walls. The first thing hanging was a photo of Percy in a bow tie. The second was a photo of a man in paint-spattered clothes.

Suddenly, my ankle didn’t hurt anymore, not even a tiny bit.

That man in the picture might be Mr. Bob.

I got Charlene out of her cage to help me look closer.

Together, we combed the room. Soon as we got near the piano, though, Charlene went just as wild as she did that day in the bathroom of Thelma’s. She flitted from one doily to the next.

She finally landed on the piano lid, her back leg jutted out, stuck in that crocheted doily.

Gently, I eased the lid up to free her leg.

Charlene jumped on my shoulder and the doily slipped to the side. We both stared at what was inside the piano.

Stretched across the piano wires was something made out of metal and wood. I picked it up. Two straight metal rods swung from a thick, carved wood handle.

Why would anybody put that inside a piano?

Maybe it was some kind of tuning instrument.

My finger caught on something sharp.

A tiny tanager was carved into the wood base. It had a star in its mouth, smaller than a corn kernel.

And just below the star, marked so faint that at first I thought it was scratches:

WORTHY #2

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