Claudia and the Clue in the Photograph Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Acknowledgment

  About the Author

  Also Available

  Copyright

  “Claudia, please!” Janine put down her fork. “I would prefer not to be recorded for posterity in the act of chewing a mouthful of Shredded Wheat.”

  “It’s not for posterity,” I said, still peering at my older sister through the viewfinder of the camera, “whatever that is. It’s for Mr. Geist’s class.” Janine is always using words I don’t know, but I don’t let it bother me.

  “Claudia, please put that camera down and eat your breakfast,” said my mother, passing me a plate with two pieces of raisin toast on it.

  “But Mom, Mr. Geist says we have to learn to ‘catch the moment.’ It’s what all the best photographers do.” I turned to focus on her through the viewfinder. She looked a little peeved.

  “That may be so,” said my father. “But the Kishi family at breakfast is one moment you’re not going to catch. Besides, you’re going to get jelly on my camera if you’re not careful.” He reached out for the camera. I put the lens cap back on and handed it to him. He turned it over in his hands. “What a great piece of equipment,” he said. He squinted through the viewfinder. “This Minolta and I go way, way back.”

  “I know,” I said, “and I really appreciate your lending it to me. I’ve been super careful with it.” I had, too. My dad’s old Minolta doesn’t have the most up-to-date features, but it is a terrific camera. “Mr. Geist says it’s a classic,” I told my dad.

  Mr. Geist was my photography teacher. He was one of the best teachers I’d ever had at SMS. (That’s Stoneybrook Middle School, which is in Stoneybrook, Connecticut, the town where I live.) Taking photography with Mr. Geist made going to summer school not just bearable, but totally great. At first, when my parents insisted I take math over again this summer, I was very bummed out. But then we made a deal. If I had to take math, I would also be allowed to take another course, just for fun. At the time, I didn’t know just how much fun photography would be. But the fact is that Mr. Geist had opened up a new world for me, and lately I couldn’t think about anything but photography.

  You’ve probably already figured out that my name is Claudia Kishi, and that I have an older sister named Janine who is incredibly smart. (She’s a genius, in fact.) And you might have guessed that my family is pretty close, because of the way we were all sitting down to breakfast together. And maybe you’ve also realized that I can become totally wrapped up in things like photography. Well, you’re right on all counts, especially the last one.

  I’ve loved art for as long as I can remember. Other kids would do a little crayoning and then move on to playing with dolls or riding bikes. Me? I moved from crayoning to finger-painting to papier-mâché and then back to crayoning. For me, there’s nothing like the feeling you get from creating something, something that’s yours alone. And now, this summer, I had discovered a whole new way to create.

  First I’d learned how to use a camera — a real camera, not the automatic kind you take snapshots with. And while I hate math, somehow I had no problem figuring out exposures and shutter speeds. Then I’d learned about the elements of a good picture. Mr. Geist had taught me how to consider composition, textures, forms, and tones so that I could produce not just snapshots, but pieces of art that would really have an effect on the viewer. And finally, I had learned how to make magic.

  That’s right, magic.

  Have you ever worked in a darkroom? If you have, you know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, you’ll just have to take my word for it. What happens in that lightless place is pure magic. I’ll never forget the first time I put a plain white piece of paper into a tray of developer and saw the image form itself in front of my eyes. I felt like a wizard!

  My dad, who used to do a lot of photography himself, had noticed how excited I was about my class. “Tell you what,” he’d said, one night after supper. “How about if we make you a temporary darkroom in the bathroom between your room and Janine’s?” He’d rounded up all the equipment — some borrowed, some rented, some bought — and helped me set up my very own wizard’s den.

  I’d been spending every spare minute in there ever since.

  Well, maybe not every minute. As always, I’m also spending plenty of time on one of my other loves, baby-sitting. I belong to this cool club called the BSC, or Baby-sitters Club. My best pal Stacey McGill is in it, too, and so are a bunch of my other good friends. We all have different interests, but one thing we have in common is that we adore kids. That’s why the club (it’s actually more of a business) works so well. But more about that later.

  Back to that Friday morning, when my family kept me from “catching the moment.” I’d barely finished my toast when my mother glanced at her watch and gave a little yelp. “It’s late!” she said. “I’ve got to run.” She gave us each a quick kiss and, grabbing an overstuffed briefcase, headed out to her job as head librarian at the Stoneybrook Public Library. Soon after that my dad took off for his job, which has something to do with stocks and bonds and money. (I’ve never quite understood what he does, but apparently he’s very good at it.)

  Janine took one last sip of juice and picked up her backpack.

  “Ready to crunch those numbers?” I asked, grinning. This summer, Janine had signed up for a work-study program that’s part of this supersonic academic fast track she’s on. She’s still in high school, but she takes a lot of college classes. For summer school, she was taking what she called a “light” schedule. Light for an Einstein like her, maybe.

  Janine’s work-study program involved helping one of her professors with some research. When I first heard that, I thought she might be doing something halfway interesting, like teaching rats how to go through a maze. But no, all she was doing was sitting in front of a computer for hours at a time, typing in numbers. According to Janine, it was “utterly fascinating.” I’d rather watch bread get stale, myself.

  “I wish you wouldn’t use that vulgar expression,” said Janine, sniffing. “I’m not ‘crunching’ anything. I’m performing quantitative data analysis.”

  Yikes. “Whatever,” I said. “Have a blast.” I waved good-bye to her, and then ran upstairs for a final outfit-check.

  Most people just wear cut-offs and T-shirts to summer school. Not me. I consider getting dressed to be as much of a creative act as painting on a canvas or sculpting with clay. I plan my outfits with care, and I make a point of never wearing exactly the same thing twice. Not that I have closets and closets full of clothes, or anything. It’s just that I like to combine what I do have in new and interesting ways.

  I stood in front of my full-length mirror and looked. Staring back at me was a medium-height Japanese-American girl with almond-shaped eyes and long, black hair held back by a pink, star-shaped barrette. She wore a silky pink tank top with a man’s white shirt tied casually over it, white jeans, and flip-flops decorated with more pink stars.

  I gave my reflection the thumbs-up sign. “Okay, Kishi, I think you’re ready,” I said to myself. “Except for one thing.” I turned and checked beneath the pillow on my bed. “Provisions!” I cried, when I’d found what I was looking for. I stuck the Milky W
ay bar into my knapsack.

  I have something to confess. I’m a junk food fiend.

  Yes, it’s true. You might not be able to tell by looking at me, but I practically live on foods that contain long lists of ingredients I can’t pronounce. Tortilla chips, potato chips, corn chips, pretzels. Milky Ways, M&M’s, PayDays, and Twizzlers. I love them, I love them, I love them. But my parents seem to have this bizarre idea that all that stuff is bad for me and that I should be eating carrots and beets instead. Right.

  To humor my parents, I eat carrots and beets at the family table, but I’ll never give up my junk food. It’s stashed all over my room. I’m never far from a chocolate bar: that’s my motto.

  My poor, misguided parents also disapprove of my habit of reading Nancy Drew books — “junk food for the mind,” as my mother calls them. I keep telling her that if she ever read one of them, she’d understand why I like them so much, but she just shakes her head, smiles, and hands me a paperback copy of some impossible-to-read “classic” like The Scarlet Pimple, or whatever it’s called. I always accept the book, stick it on my shelf, and then pull a Nancy Drew mystery from behind my night table and read to my heart’s content.

  Anyway, that morning I had no time for reading of any kind. I had to scramble if I was going to be in my seat by the time my math teacher, Mr. Davies, handed out that day’s quiz.

  I won’t bore you with the details of my math class, except to mention that Mr. Davies was wearing a gorgeous red tie that looked as though it might have been made of tie-dyed silk. I made a few notes reminding myself to experiment with tie-dyeing fine fabrics, raced through the quiz, and then headed downstairs to the photo lab.

  That day’s class with Mr. Geist was excellent, as always. The lecture part was about making portraits, and Mr. Geist showed us a whole bunch of great slides that illustrated the points he was making. Afterward, we had time to do a little work in the darkroom.

  The last bell rang just as we were cleaning up. I raced home, my head full of ideas about how to capture people on film. I had yesterday’s roll of film to develop first. It included some fashion shots of Stacey acting like a model, and I couldn’t wait to see how they’d turned out.

  I walked into the kitchen, thinking hard about my portrait assignment, and nearly bumped into Janine. “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “Professor Woodley doesn’t need me until two today,” she said, “so I came home to have a quick lunch and pick up my notebook.”

  I made us a couple of grilled cheese sandwiches, and we ate together without talking much. I was still thinking about my new ideas, and Janine was poring over columns of figures in her notebook. She barely lifted her head when I cleared my plate and told her I would be in the darkroom for a while.

  I went up to our bathroom and began to assemble all the things I would need for developing my roll of film. First, I set up my clock radio, dialing in my favorite station and making sure the clock was turned so I could see it while the film developed. Keeping track of time is an essential part of working in a darkroom. Then I got out all my chemicals and measuring cups and set them up, along with my thermometer (the temperature of the chemicals is important, too), my developing tank, my bottle opener (to pry the top off the film canister), and my scissors (to cut off the end of the film).

  I know it sounds like a complicated process, but really, developing film is incredibly easy. The most important thing is to have total — and I mean total — darkness while you’re loading the film into a developing tank. You can load film in a lighted room, by using a changing bag, which is a rubberized sack with places to put your hands in. But it’s not easy to fumble around in there with the reels and the bottle opener and all that. I’d rather load film in a lightproof room, and my dad and I had made sure that the bathroom, which doesn’t have any windows, was as lightproof as possible. All I had to do to make it totally dark was shove a towel into the crack at the bottom of the door and turn off the lights.

  Which is what I did. Then, in the pitch-dark, I sat on my stool next to the counter, and felt around for the film and all my equipment. Since I had set things up so carefully, it only took me a few minutes to get the film out of the can and loaded onto the reel. I had just dropped the reel into the developing tank, knowing that as soon as I put on the lid, the tank would be lightproof and I could turn on the lights, when I heard a tapping at the door.

  “Claud?” asked Janine. I heard the doorknob turning.

  “No!” I yelled. “Don’t come in or —”

  Janine pulled the door open and poked her head inside. Light from the hallway flooded into the darkroom. “What did you say?”

  “— or you’ll ruin my film,” I finished, slapping the lid onto the tank as quickly as I could.

  Janine put her hand over her mouth. “Oh, no!” she said. “I’m so sorry, Claud! I didn’t realize —”

  “It’s okay,” I said, even though I was pretty upset. It was easy to see that Janine felt terrible. “I might be able to salvage the negatives.”

  Janine apologized about three hundred times more and then, finally, she left. I shut the door behind her, promising myself to make a DARKROOM IN USE sign for it, and looked at the tank. If I was lucky, there might be a few frames on the roll that hadn’t been destroyed. Stacey would be coming over that afternoon for our BSC meeting, and if I hurried, I might be able to show her some negatives from our “fashion shoot.” I turned up the radio and settled down to work.

  By five-twenty that afternoon, I had not only finished developing the film, but I had also done my math homework. (Yay, Claud!) The negatives were pretty much ruined. There was a gray fog covering almost every shot. With careful work, I might be able to print parts of each picture, but the fact was, it would be easier just to shoot the whole roll over again. I knew Stacey wouldn’t mind posing for me one more time. She had loved playing model.

  I was sitting at my desk, looking over the negatives with a loupe (that’s a special kind of magnifying glass) when I glanced at my clock and realized my friends would start arriving any minute for our BSC meeting. I put the negatives away and picked up my camera. While I was working in the darkroom, I’d been thinking over what Mr. Geist had said about creating portraits, and I’d come up with a great idea. See, Mr. Geist had talked about “capturing the essence” of a person on film. A good picture of somebody shouldn’t just show what they look like, he said, it should show what they are like. So my idea was to take a picture of each of my friends as they entered my room, as an exercise in making portraits.

  I would use black-and-white film, so I could develop it myself. Black and white is best for portraits, anyway. All the best photographers use it. I couldn’t wait to see whether my quick shots would capture my friends’ personalities.

  Just as I was taking the lens cap off my camera, I heard the front door slam. Then I heard footsteps thumping up the stairs, and I knew by their sound that Kristy Thomas was about to arrive. Quickly, I aimed the camera at the door to my room, focused, and set the correct exposure for the amount of light. As I peered through the viewfinder, Kristy appeared, framed by the doorway. “Say cheese!” I called out quickly.

  Kristy stopped in her tracks, gave me a huge grin, and shot me the peace sign with both hands. Snap!

  Perfect. The picture would show what Kristy looks like: short, with dark hair and eyes — they’re brown, really — dressed in running shoes, jeans, and a T-shirt (Kristy’s uniform!). But it also definitely captured Kristy’s essence. Confident, outgoing, and full of energy; that’s Kristy. She’s president of the BSC, and with good reason. For one thing, she came up with the idea for the club. And for another, she keeps adding plenty of other great ideas to make the BSC even better.

  The BSC started taking shape one day when Kristy’s mom was trying to find a sitter for Kristy’s younger brother, David Michael. (Kristy also has two older brothers, Charlie and Sam.) At the time, Mrs. Thomas was going it alone as a single mom, since Kristy’s dad had walked ou
t on the family years earlier. Anyway, Kristy watched her mom make call after call without success, and that’s when she came up with the idea for the BSC. She figured parents would love it if they could make one phone call and be guaranteed a responsible sitter. And she was right. Boy, was she right. Our club now meets three times a week, on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, from five-thirty until six. During those times, parents can call to set up sitting jobs. Using our club record book, we can figure out who’s free and schedule the jobs. It’s as simple as that. The club’s been a success right from the start, but Kristy couldn’t leave well enough alone. She had to add more ideas, like the club notebook, in which we each write up every job we go on. This is my favorite thing about the BSC — not! Actually, it drives me crazy, because I’m not the world’s best speller, and I’m sometimes embarrassed by my entries. Still, I have to admit that knowing the details of what’s going on in our clients’ lives makes us all better sitters.

  Another patented Kristy Thomas idea? Kid-Kits. Those are boxes full of toys, stickers, and games we bring along on jobs. I just redecorated mine to look like a pirate ship. Kids love Kid-Kits.

  Kristy knows what kids love, since kids are a big part of her life. Her mom remarried not that long ago, and when she did, Kristy’s family doubled in size. Her stepfather, Watson Brewer, happens to be a millionaire — really! And Kristy moved across town to live in his mansion. He has two kids, Karen and Andrew, from his first marriage. They live at Kristy’s house every other month. Also, Kristy has a new adopted sister, Emily Michelle, who’s Vietnamese. So that mansion is pretty full, especially when you add in Kristy’s grandmother Nannie, who came to live there and help out after Emily Michelle arrived, and all the pets (a puppy, a cat, two goldfish, and two part-time pets, a rat and a hermit crab).

  “How’s Ms. Vice-President today?” asked Kristy, after she’d taken her usual seat in the director’s chair near my desk.

  I’m vice-president of the BSC. I was unanimously elected to that position because of one important thing: I’m the only member who has her own phone, with a private line. Besides answering the phone and arranging jobs during non-meeting times, my only other duty seems to be providing snacks for meetings. (That day I had dug out a box of jawbreakers, a package of Fig Newtons, and some pretzels.)