said. “Have you hurt yourself?”
“I tripped on something in the van and fell and twisted my foot or ankle or something,” Candace said, “but Mr. Pratt helped me. I’m fine.” And truly, she looked better than she had in a while, Alan thought. She had her Leonardo di Caprio smile on again.
“Call me Hugh, please,” Mr. Pratt said to her, all the time seeming to keep half an eye on the ladies who had come over, as if he wanted them to see how nice he was being. Is it only me who is noticing this stuff? Alan thought. He felt like a superhero all of a sudden, with special powers that nobody else had. Great. Other guys get bitten by a radioactive spiders and end up being able to climb buildings. Alan Nearing gets buzzed by a bunch of bullies on jet skis, and all he ends up with is a hyperactive sensitive-o-meter.
“Thanks, Hugh,” Candace said. “I think I can walk on it if I go really slowly.” She leaned on his arm and began walking with him towards the door, surrounded by Mrs. Nearing and the other women. Mr. Pratt had left his briefcase and the violin case on the ground beside Alan and his friends. They unloaded the rest of the bags from the back of the van and prepared to carry it all in.
“Excuse me, Mr. Pratt,” Alan called out to the musician, who had his arm wrapped around his sister’s waist. The musician turned his head and raised an eyebrow at him.
“Yes, er, Al?” All four of them had been introduced to him at the train station. Alan hated “Al”, but this wasn’t the time to say so.
“What about your ‘Stradder’? You want to carry it yourself, or is it okay for one of us kids to bring it in?”
Mrs. Nearing frowned at Alan and gave her head a little shake, but Mr. Pratt just smiled.
“Er, that will be fine, buddy,” he said. “Just be very, very careful with it, okay? And bring it straight on in, okay?”
Alan picked up the violin case carefully, like it might explode, and cradled it in his arms. “As if I was going to run away with it or something,” he said to Ziggy and Josée. “It’s not me that has a crush on his stupid violin, it’s Candace. And Mr. Pratt looks like he’s suddenly got a crush on her.”
“Maybe he’ll let her play it, then,” Josée said.
“Yeah, and then she breaks it and has to go to jail. I can see it now. I’d be the brother of a criminal.”
“That would be good for a detective, wouldn’t it?” Ziggy said. “You’d be able to visit her in jail and get to know the real bad guys—how they work, and stuff.”
“You’d only get to meet the bad girls,” Josée said. “She’d be in a youth detention centre, not like where mamère works.” Josée’s mother had just started a kitchen job at the men’s prison down the highway in Wenonah.
“Too bad,” said Alan. “I’d really like to find a way to visit that place. It would be cool to see what happens to the bad guys I’ll be tracking down some day.”
“You’ll be visiting them full-time if you don’t watch where you’re going with that violin,” said Mrs. Nearing, coming up behind them.
Three
A lan and Ziggy and Josée put the luggage down by the door. The virtuoso had deposited Candace on a bench in the entranceway and was swallowed up by a group of adults, who were all shaking his hand. Alan carried the violin case over and handed it directly to Mr. Pratt, who took it with a nod.
“Go on in,” Mrs. Nearing said, and they slipped past the crowd and into a big hallway.
Candace stayed on the bench in a dreamy haze, although Alan privately thought that she was mostly faking the foot thing.
The hallway opened onto a huge living room, crammed with people. There was a floor-to-ceiling stone fireplace and a wall of windows, leading out to a stone patio big enough for a hockey game.
An enormous gas barbecue stood in one corner, by a railing overlooking the lake. To Alan, it looked like a backyard cookout in a movie: too glossy to be real. Everything seemed to be three times its normal size, from the barbecue itself, which was bigger than the whole kitchen counter at home, to the tall stacks of steaks, shrimp, burgers, sausages and vegetable kebabs waiting to be cooked on the grill. No matter how boring the evening might turn out to be, at least the food would be good. Alan’s mouth started watering.
“I’m starving,” he said.
“Me, too,” Ziggy said. They started weaving through the crowd, making for the barbecue.
“What if we meet up with Dylan Weems?” Josée said.
“You won’t—he’s down at the boathouse,” came a girl’s voice from beside them. They turned, and there was Monica Weems, the girl with the red hair from the beach. “My mother said there would be kids my age coming. Hi, Josée.”
”Ça va, Monique?” she said. They both slipped into French, and Alan and Ziggy were lost for a sentence or two.
“Sorry, guys,” Josée said after a moment. “Monica’s in French immersion at her school in Toronto, so we do this sometimes.”
“Makes me feel like a moron,” Ziggy complained.
“It’s not my fault you hate Madame Simard,” she shot back. At their own school, Josée was the French teacher’s pet, according to Ziggy.
“You guys hungry?” Monica said. Good move, Alan thought. Josée and Ziggy were no fun when they got on to that subject.
There was a bar with a friendly bartender, who offered them four kinds of pop, and there was a whole banquet table crowded with salads, breads and desserts. A man in a chef’s hat was in charge of the grill, waving a spatula in the air and occasionally splashing stuff from a bottle onto the cooking meat, which made fragrant flames shoot up into the evening air.
Soon, they all had plates of food. “Let’s go out on the lawn—there’s a place we can eat where there won’t be so many people,” Monica said.
But before they managed to make their way to the end of the patio, someone clinked a glass with a fork to get everybody’s attention, and the crowd went quiet.
Mr. Pratt made his entrance.
“He’s changed his clothes already,” Josée whispered. “Quel show-off.”
“How come you notice these things?” Alan whispered back.
“I’m just observant, that’s all—the way you should be, if you’re planning to open your own detective agency.”
“I’m observant. I just find it hard to look at him. He’s creepy.”
“I’ve met him before,” Monica whispered. “You’re right. Who’s that girl with him?”
“My sister,” Alan said. An adult in front of them turned around and shushed them.
The man who had tinked the glass made a long speech. Alan knew the man must be Monica’s father, Mr. Weems, because she kept making little huffy, embarrassed noises, the longer he went on. Finally
