Anastasia, Absolutely Read online

  8

  Anastasia was back in the chair at her father's desk, but now she was feeling scared.

  Her mother was there, on the couch, looking worried.

  Sam was there, beside his mother, on the couch, looking wide-eyed and excited.

  The only Krupnik who hadn't changed demeanor at all was Sleuth. Sleuth was once again curled up on the floor, asleep, imitating a mop.

  The reason that Anastasia was scared, her mother was worried, and Sam was excited was that the rest of the room was filled with police officers. They had holstered guns attached to their belts; Sam eyed the weapons with interest.

  Embarrassed, miserable, and frightened, Anastasia had told her story over and over again. One of the police officers—he seemed to be the head guy, and had introduced himself as Detective McElwain—had taken a lot of notes.

  None of them even smiled when she said "dog poop." Neither did her mother. Only Sam giggled a little each time the contents of the bag were mentioned.

  Finally, when there was a pause, Mrs. Krupnik spoke up. Anastasia could tell that her mother, in additon to being worried, was also angry.

  "Detective McElwain," Katherine Krupnik said, "my daughter made a very foolish blunder. She's embarrassed about it, and I don't blame her. She should have told us, and we would have called the post office immediately to explain and apologize.

  "But frankly," she went on firmly, "I don't understand why the police are involved. It was an accident, but it was surely not a crime."

  "Mom," Anastasia whispered miserably, "it was tampering with the mail. It says right on the mailbox that it's a federal crime."

  "Nonsense," her mother replied. "It may be that some mail was damaged." She turned to the detective. "Was any mail damaged? Did the plastic bag break inside the mailbox?"

  He shook his head. "The bag didn't break, ma'am." He talked the way detectives talked on TV, Anastasia observed, saying things very carefully so that they would be completely clear. She would have found the observation more interesting if she hadn't been so nervous.

  "But you certainly didn't purposely damage anything, Anastasia," her mother went on. "You didn't tamper with the mail. I feel really terrible that you've spent the past few days thinking you had committed a crime.

  "And," she went on, obviously warming to the task now, "I do not understand why you people are making such a—well, I don't want to say federal case—but such a big deal out of a bag of dog poop."

  Sam giggled.

  Detective McElwain smiled for the first time. "You're absolutely right, Mrs. Krupnik," he said. "And I'm sorry we've upset you and your daughter. Let me ask you this. Do you read the Boston Globe?"

  Mrs. Krupnik shook her head. "We subscribe to the New York Times. We used to get the Globe, but my husband is a crossword puzzle nut, and he prefers the puzzle in the Times."

  "It was a New York Times bag that I used for the dog poop," Anastasia pointed out. "They're bright blue."

  "We know that, ma'am," the detective said. Anastasia felt a little stupid, because of course they had known that; they were all too familiar with what she had dropped into the mailbox. But she found it a little surprising that he called her "ma'am." No one had ever called her that before.

  "Well, if you people had been reading the Globe, this would be clearer to you," the detective said. He turned to the other police officers. "You guys can go on," he told them. "I'll finish up here."

  Sam watched, wide-eyed, as the other uniformed men left the room. One of them patted him on the head and grinned. Another leaned over and scratched Sleuth.

  When they had gone, Detective McElwain put his notebook away and sat down in the stuffed chair next to the fireplace.

  "There's been a little about this in the Globe and the Herald," he explained, "although we've kept most of it out. Someone has been putting explosive devices into mailboxes around Boston and the suburbs."

  "What's that?" Sam asked. "What's explosive devices?"

  "Bombs," Anastasia told him.

  "Bombs?" Sam asked eagerly. "Cool!" Sam loved bombs. He and his pals played bomb the castle, using blocks, at nursery school, although their teacher, Mrs. Bennett, didn't like it much.

  "Fortunately," the detective went on, "they're homemade and badly made—real amateur things, with faulty timers and inaccurate wiring. And they haven't worked. But he—that is, we assume it's a he; statistically it's been shown that the perpetrator of an explosive device is rarely if ever a female; we were surprised to hear a female's voice on the phone saying she was confessing—"

  Anastasia cringed a little, realizing what they thought when she called the post office and said that she had put something awful into a mailbox.

  Detective McElwain smiled sympathetically, seeing her face. "He's getting better at it, though," he went on. "It has the possibility of turning into a major disaster. The timer worked on the last one, and it actually ignited. It singed some of the mailbox contents before it went out. But it didn't actually explode, thank goodness.

  "The reason it didn't," he explained, "is because very shortly before it ignited, someone dropped a bag of—please excuse my language, ma'am—dog doo-doo on it."

  "I have to go down to the police station tonight, after dinner!" Anastasia said excitedly to Meredith over the telephone. In the kitchen, her mother was finishing dinner preparations and, at the same time, explaining the day's events to Anastasia's father, who had just arrived home. Every now and then she could hear him say, "She what?" It had seemed a good idea to stay clear of the kitchen for a while. So she had come into the study to call her friends.

  "How come? Why do you have to go to the police station if you didn't commit a crime?" Meredith asked.

  "Because the bomb was on top of a batch of mail, but underneath my bag of dog poop. So that means—"

  "Oh, I get it," Meredith said.

  "Right! I was the next person after the bomber to use that mailbox. They think I might actually have seen him."

  "Or her," Meredith pointed out.

  "Statistically, it's been shown that a female is rarely if ever the perpetrator of an explosive device," Anastasia explained.

  "What?"

  "Women don't do bombs."

  "Oh. Did you see him?" Meredith asked.

  "No," Anastasia said, a little sadly. "There wasn't anybody around. It was real early in the morning, and the only people I saw were other dog people walking their dogs. But the detective wants me to come to the station anyway, to be interviewed some more, and maybe to look at some pictures."

  "They'll hypnotize you," Meredith said, "to make you remember. You'll be able to tell them the license number of the car after they hypnotize you."

  "What car?"

  "Any car. And you'll remember your past lives, too."

  Anastasia thought about that. She wasn't certain she wanted to be hypnotized. She had heard about a guy who was hypnotized and thought he was eating an orange, but really it was an onion, and he munched his way right through it and had onion breath for two days afterward.

  Anastasia didn't think the police would do an onion-orange thing, but she thought she'd rather not be hypnotized unless it was absolutely necessary in order to catch the Mailbox Bomber.

  "And watch out for a good cop/bad cop routine," Meredith warned.

  "Yeah, I know about that," Anastasia said.

  After telling Meredith good-bye and hanging up, she was preparing to dial Daphne when her father called her from the kitchen.

  "Hey, sport," he said, when she appeared in the doorway. He was seated at the kitchen table, and her mother was standing at the stove, stirring something in a big kettle. "I'll take you down to the police station tonight. Mom can stay here with Sam and Sleuth."

  "You're not mad?"

  Her father came across the room and hugged her. Anastasia loved the feel of his beard against her cheek, even though he knocked her glasses sideways. "Listen," he said, after he'd given her a big kiss, "don't ever feel you can't tell Mom an
d me what's going on."

  "I felt so dumb," Anastasia explained. "And scared."

  "But that's exactly when you should tell us," her mother pointed out. "It's terrible to feel dumb, and to feel scared, but it's worse to feel dumb and scared and alone!"

  Anastasia nodded. "Yeah," she acknowledged, "you're right."

  Sam looked up from where he was sitting on the floor next to Sleuth, running a small toy car over the dog's back, lifting his ears one at a time to make shaggy tunnels, while the dog slept. "I know something worse," he announced. "Here's what's worse: if you feel dumb, and scared, and alone, and cold, and hungry, and have a stomachache, and a broken leg, and there's a robber in the basement, and a lion is coming through the door, and—"

  "—and you have a deadline on book illustrations and you're not finished on time because you can't seem to get the dog's face right, " Mrs. Krupnik said.

  "—and you flunked an English exam because you never got around to doing the reading," Anastasia suggested.

  "—and, let's see," their father said, joining in, "how about if you completely forgot that it was Tuesday, and you didn't show up for a very important Harvard faculty meeting?"

  Sam jumped up suddenly with a horrifed look. "I know the really worst!" he wailed. "The really, really worst! How about if you were on the floor lying next to a dog and you thought your face was next to the dog's face, but it wasn't, you had the wrong end, and how about if the dog farted!"

  They all agreed that Sam's problem was absolutely the really, really worst; and then they had dinner.

  Detective McElwain met Anastasia and her father at the station and took them into a small room with a table and several chairs. Another detective, a young woman who introduced herself as Joan Sweeney, joined them.

  Good cop/bad cop, Anastasia thought, and wondered which was which.

  Anastasia figured that Joan Sweeney was probably the hypnotist. She looked around carefully but didn't spot any onions or oranges.

  "Now all we want to do here," Detective McElwain said, "is walk through it very carefully once again and have your daughter try to describe everyone she saw that morning.

  "We know that the explosive device was placed in the mailbox very shortly before Anastasia made her, ah, deposit, because we've identified the time that the mail underneath was put in. A woman who lives in the neighborhood mailed a birthday card to her mother at six-twenty-five. She was wearing a Walkman and noticed that her mother's favorite song was just starting to be played as she mailed the card, and she thought about the coincidence. We've confirmed the time of that song with the radio station.

  "That birthday card—partially burned—was found under the bomb. So the device was placed between six-twenty-five and whatever time Anastasia was there."

  "Six thirty-two," Anastasia said. "I told you already. I looked at my watch right after I mailed my mom's envelope. Or I mean thought I mailed it. Because I was wondering whether I had time to go back to bed, and I decided I didn't."

  Joan Sweeney turned a page in her notebook. "Let's go back to before you got to the mailbox, Anastasia. Which way did you approach the corner ? Want to look at a map to refresh your memory?"

  Anastasia laughed. "Nope. It's my neighborhood, remember? I turned onto Winchester Street at the corner of Forest Lane—"

  "Wait a minute. Did you see anybody at all on Forest Lane?"

  Anastasia thought hard. "No," she said, finally. "Not really. A guy came out of his house and went into his garage, after I passed. That was all, though. He was carrying a briefcase. I could show you which house, if you want."

  Joan Sweeney made a note. "Then you turned onto Winchester? Going south, toward Chestnut?"

  "Right."

  "Any people there?"

  "Yeah, a few. Let me think. A woman wearing a bathrobe came out and picked up her newspaper. Then another woman came past me, walking real fast—"

  "Walking away from the corner with the mailbox?"

  "Yeah. She had weights in her hands. She was wearing a gray and white jogging suit, and she stopped, and tried to advise me what to name the dog."

  "Excuse me?" Joan Sweeney looked up from the notebook.

  "Well, see, I had just gotten my dog, and he didn't have a name yet, and this woman wanted to give suggestions."

  "I see. Okay, moving along now, toward Chestnut—"

  "Wait." Detective McElwain interrupted. "Have you named him yet?"

  "Yeah. Sleuth. We named him Sleuth because it has an oooo sound, and his name used to be Louie, and also because he investigates everything."

  The detective grinned broadly. "Great name," he said enthusiastically. "I wish I'd thought of it for my dog. I have a retriever named Fetchit."

  "That reminds me!" Anastasia said. "There was a man that morning, walking two golden retrievers. But I don't see how he could have had a bomb. It was taking both his hands to keep the dogs organized on their leashes so that they didn't get tangled.

  "And let's see ... there was a guy delivering papers. But he had his hands full, too. And some joggers. Two joggers: they both said 'hi'; and there was a woman with a tall, skinny dog on a red leash. She smiled at me, and I think she said 'Cute dog' or 'Nice dog' when she looked at Sleuthie."

  Joan Sweeney was writing it all down. "That all?" she asked. "Nobody else?"

  Anastasia shook her head. "Nobody else. And most of those people are out there every morning. I didn't go the same way again after I, you know, after I made the mistake with the mailbox, but even when I walk the dog a different way, I see a lot of those same people."

  "Well, that's a help, anyway, Anastasia. We appreciate it." She closed the notebook. "You have anything else, Bill?" She looked over at Detective McElwain.

  He took an envelope out of his pocket. "Just this. A few photographs we'd like you to look at. Okay, Anastasia?"

  Anastasia looked at her father. "Sure, go ahead," he said, nodding.

  Anastasia expected mug shots. She expected the kinds of photographs that she saw at the post office sometimes, pictures of grim-looking people with bad hair and no chins, with WANTED printed underneath them. But glancing at the small color photographs, she saw that they were just ordinary Polaroid snapshots of ordinary people. There were six of them, all men, each wearing a U.S. Postal Service uniform. She looked through them quickly to make sure that none was Lowell Watson, who taught Sunday School and had given Sleuth a biscuit.

  "Who are they?" she asked curiously. "I mean, I can see that they're mailmen. But who are they?"

  Detective McElwain laid the snapshots out in a row on the table. "They're all former postal employees," he explained. "We're playing a hunch that the bomber is somebody who's mad at the post office."

  "I have a confession," Myron Krupnik said. "I was mad at the post office myself, after they raised the rates last time."

  "Me too," Joan Sweeney said, nodding. "But you and I didn't make bombs."

  Detective McElwain positioned the photos so that Anastasia could see them clearly. "No, what I mean is someone who got fired, or who didn't get a promotion he wanted. Somebody really disgruntled."

  "Makes sense," Myron Krupnik said, leaning over from his seat to look at the pictures. "Recognize anybody, sweetie?" he asked Anastasia.

  She shook her head slowly, and the detective, obviously disappointed, began to gather the pictures.

  "Wait!" Anastasia said. "Could I see that one again? The second one?" He handed the photo to her, and she adjusted her glasses and frowned. "I think—it's weird, but—

  "Yes!" she exclaimed, remembering suddenly. "I did see this guy! He was right there when I scooped up after Sleuth, just before we got to the mailbox! He gave me a dirty look and I thought it was because he thought the dog was disgusting."

  The detective examined the Polaroid. "What can you tell me about him, aside from the dirty look? Remember what he was wearing?"

  "No, I'm sorry. I can't remember a single thing about him."

  "Jeans, maybe?"


  "No, plaid pants. Dark blue plaid. If you gave me an L.L. Bean catalog, I could show you what plaid. But I can't remember another single thing."

  "Maybe sneakers? Nikes or something?"

  Anastasia shook her head. "No. Pointy shoes. Light brown, with scuff marks. And one light brown lace, one dark brown. But I don't remember anything else."

  Detective McElwain waited.

  "White socks, with a brown stripe around the top," Anastasia said. "And that's all I can think of."

  "M aybe a windbreaker or something? A sweater? Was it cold Thursday morning?"

  "No. I was justwearingasweatshirt jacket, the kind that zips up the front. Oh, wait! I do remember something else!" Anastasia cringed.

  "Dad," she said, "I'm really sorry to tell you this. Prepare yourself for bad news."

  "What?" her father asked, apprehensively.

  "Ready? It's very bad news."

  He sighed. "Ready."

  "The guy was wearing a Harvard sweatshirt," Anastasia told him gently.

  "Oh, great," Myron Krupnik groaned. "I suspected that some of my students would turn out to be criminals, but I was predicting white-collar crimes, like tax evasion. You mean I may have been teaching Shakespeare to a terrorist?"

  Detective McElwain picked up the photograph and looked at the information on the back. "Nah," he said, reassuringly. "He probably got that sweatshirt at the Salvation Army store. Believe me, if he graduated from Harvard, he could've built a better bomb.

  "Listen," he said, standing up, "we're going to bring this guy in for questioning. You can go home now, Anastasia, you and your dad. But we might need to call you back in at some point, okay?"

  Anastasia nodded. She was happy to go home, happy to have helped, happy not to have been hypnotized, arrested, fingerprinted, photographed, tried, or sentenced. She realized she was tired, too. But she wanted very much to answer question eight for Mr. Francisco's class. She would do that and then go right to bed. Sleuth would be at her bedside, woofing to go out, at dawn once again.

  Anastasia Krupnik

  VALUES

  8. Suppose that you happened to be a witness to a serious crime. Would you report the criminal even if it meant your life might be in jeopardy?