Read Online Magic Nation Thing by Zilpha Keatley Snyder - Free Book Online

Daphne. It will just have to wait till I get back. Tree should be here in a few minutes. Tell her I had an urgent call from a possible witness.”
    Tree did arrive soon, in fact while Abby was still spooning up soupy oatmeal. (Dorcas’s oatmeal was usually thick and lumpy except when she was in a hurry. Then it was apt to be more like oatmeal soup.) It wasn’t particularly appetizing, but even so, when Abby invited Tree to have some, she said she would. Glancing at her watch, Tree said she thought there was time enough for a quick bowl of something nutritious, which she was really going to need because it looked as if she would be having another very busy day.
    Abby sat across the table, watching Tree eat soupy oatmeal and being grateful that Tree hadn’t even mentioned the mess Abby and Paige had made of her first surveillance assignment, when all at once she found herself saying, “Why would a person set fire to his own building?”
    Tree looked up quickly and stared at Abby for a moment before she asked, “What person are you referring to, Abbykins?”
    Even though Abby had more or less asked for it, Tree’s question came as a shock. Now she’d have to come up with an answer that would get Tree thinking in a particular direction without admitting what she thought she knew and how she knew it. It wasn’t going to be easy.
    Abby shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know. I was just wondering.”
    “But why? Why would you wonder about something like that?” Tree’s eyes narrowed. “It wasn’t one of those hunches your mother says you have, was it?”
    “No. Not a hunch, at least not exactly. And anyway, why would a person burn their own building?”
    Tree shrugged. “Well, it’s been known to happen. Particularly if the building is in bad shape and the fire insurance is worth more than what the owner has invested in it.”
    “Oh yeah,” Abby said excitedly. “I didn’t think about that.”
    “Well, I sort of did.” Tree’s smile looked uncertain. “But Dorcas didn’t really agree with me. She said this Mr. Barker seemed like such a law-abiding person. And she was impressed by the fact that he looked up our agency and asked us to investigate, even though the insurance company was already doing its own investigation.”
    “Yeah,” Abby admitted reluctantly. “I guess he wouldn’t have done that if he had anything to hide.”
    Tree shrugged again. She was grinning as she said, “Yes, that’s what you might think, or else it might be what Mr. Barker wanted everyone to think. But you know what, Abbykins? I was there in the office when he came in to talk to Dorcas, and I got the feeling that maybe what he was really thinking was that an agency run by a couple of women wouldn’t be much of a threat.”
    Tree glanced at her watch again and hurried off to open the office, leaving Abby to think over what had just been said. And the more she thought about it, the more convinced she became that Tree was right when she’d said this Barker guy had probably picked the O’Malley agency just because he was the kind of dude who didn’t think women detectives could possibly be smart enough to mess up his plans. Particularly youngish women like Tree—and yeah, okay, like Dorcas too. Tree probably knew what she was talking about. After all, a person who looked like Tree Torrelli would have had a lot of experience in sorting out whether the men she met were telling her the truth about what they were thinking—or not.
    So Abby went into the office, and when Tree looked up questioningly, Abby sighed and said, “Okay. So I guess I did have this kind of hunch about that fat Barker guy. Like, I had this feeling that he was the one who set the fire. Only I thought it was a dumb hunch because I didn’t see why somebody would burn down his own building. But that was what the hunch was about.”
    Tree listened carefully, and when Abby stopped talking, she asked when Abby had had the hunch and what it had been like. But when Abby