Secrets Under the Fog: The Larkspur Cove Mysteries, Four Kid Detective Cases

Book One, Chapter 1: The New Kid and the Old Clock

The windshield wipers had been arguing with the rain for two hundred miles, and the rain was winning.

Wren Okafor-Hale sat in the passenger seat with her red sneakers on the dashboard and her notebook on her knees, and she counted. Not the wipers. She had given up on the wipers somewhere in New Hampshire, at four thousand and something. She was counting moves.

Tucson. Pittsburgh. Raleigh. Dayton. Milwaukee.

Five moves in six years. This would make six towns, if you counted the one she had been born in, which she did, because it had been the first place she had left.

"You're doing it again," said her mother.

"Doing what?"

"Moving your lips. You're counting something." Dr. Abigail Hale took one hand off the steering wheel to push her reading glasses up onto her head, where they joined a second pair she had forgotten were already there. "What is it this time? Cows? Gas stations? Times your mother has missed an exit?"

"Three," Wren said. "Exits. And I wasn't counting those, but I could have."

"Two and a half. The last one was a ramp with ambitions." Mom leaned forward and squinted through the glass. "Look, Bug. Look. We're coming down the hill."

Wren looked. There was not much to see. The road bent down through dark pine trees, and the trees were wet and black and dripping, and beyond them the whole world had turned the color of dishwater. Fog. It sat on everything like a lid.

Then the trees fell away on the right, and for just a moment the fog tore open, and Wren saw the town.

It was built on a hill that ran straight down into the sea, as if the houses had been sliding toward the water for a hundred years and had only just managed to stop. Steep streets. Gray roofs and white roofs and a few red ones. Chimneys. A harbor shaped like a cupped hand, with boats tucked into it, their masts swaying like metronomes. And at the top of it all, rising out of a square of stone, a tower with a clock face glowing white, the only bright thing in the whole wet gray afternoon.

Then the fog closed again and it was gone.

"Larkspur Cove," Mom said, in the voice she used for museum openings. "Population about three thousand two hundred. Founded in seventeen-something. Fishing, boatbuilding, lobsters, and a very famous clock."

"How famous?"

"Famous here."

"So not famous."

"Locally famous is still famous. Ask any clock." Mom grinned at her sideways. "It's called Old Gal. The town clock. Everyone calls it that. It's on top of Town Hall, and it's been ticking since 1902, and the woman who built the works is the same woman whose factory my museum is in. Isn't that wonderful? It's all connected. A whole town ticking along together."

"Noted," said Wren.

She opened Notebook 7. It was a black and white composition notebook with silver duct tape wrapped around the spine, because the spine had given up in Milwaukee. It was the seventh notebook she had filled, or was filling, and the front half was full of normal things: the license plates of every state they had passed, a list of words Mom had mispronounced, a drawing of a moose that had turned out to be a mailbox.

The back half was different. The back half was secret.

She flipped the notebook over and opened it from the other end, so that Mom, if she looked, would only see a page of upside-down scribbles. At the top of the first back page, in her neatest capitals, it said:

THINGS I WILL NOT MISS.

Under that were the pages. One for every town. Tucson: the heat, the scorpion in the bathtub, Kyle Pruitt. Pittsburgh: the hills, the bridge traffic, the girl who said her hair looked like a mushroom. Raleigh: pollen. Just ...