Smart Cookie Read online

  For my mom—always with me.

  Always in my heart. Love you forever.

  Title Page

  Dedication

  The Greene Family B&B Rules

  Chapter One: Headquarters, the Cookies, and the Storm

  Chapter Two: Just Bad Luck

  Chapter Three: Somewhere Between Dead and Grounded for Life

  Chapter Four: The Big Red Door

  Chapter Five: The Ghost Meter Never Lies

  Chapter Six: Happy Birthday to You

  Chapter Seven: Just Between Us

  Chapter Eight: People Stick to This Place

  Chapter Nine: Who Remembers Forever Ago?

  Chapter Ten: Negative Points to the Pufferfish

  Chapter Eleven: Mr. Death-Be-Everywhere

  Chapter Twelve: No Going Back

  Chapter Thirteen: Totally Unprepared

  Chapter Fourteen: Mix of Blue and Barf Green

  Chapter Fifteen: Dead Guy with a Name

  Chapter Sixteen: Trail of Toothpick and Burger Grease

  Chapter Seventeen: Code Red-Hot Chili Peppers

  Chapter Eighteen: Empty Holes of Things Not Said

  Chapter Nineteen: Trust Me

  Chapter Twenty: Blueberries, Walking Sticks, and the Sun

  Chapter Twenty-One: Mabel the Cheat and the Caramels

  Chapter Twenty-Two: Noseless Smiley Face

  Chapter Twenty-Three: Detour

  Chapter Twenty-Four: No Secrets

  Chapter Twenty-Five: Partner in Crime

  Chapter Twenty-Six: Far from Normal

  Chapter Twenty-Seven: Two Pieces of Raspberry Bubble Gum and a House Key

  Chapter Twenty-Eight: Dripping with Lies

  Chapter Twenty-Nine: Snow Day

  Chapter Thirty: One More Day

  Chapter Thirty-One: The Gnomes

  Chapter Thirty-Two: Dead Mickey’s Kitchen

  Chapter Thirty-Three: Dry Boots in the Snow

  Chapter Thirty-Four: Rule #11

  Chapter Thirty-Five: Maybe

  Chapter Thirty-Six: Two Is a Pair of Socks

  Chapter Thirty-Seven: Gatekeeper and the Cookies

  Chapter Thirty-Eight: Waiting for a Sign

  Chapter Thirty-Nine: Where Are They?

  Chapter Forty: Mr. So and So

  Chapter Forty-One: Red Polish, Silver Glitter, and Pink Roses

  Chapter Forty-Two: Used Up All My Wishes

  Chapter Forty-Three: A Long Minute of Nothing

  Chapter Forty-Four: All of My Secrets

  Chapter Forty-Five: Who’s in Your Herd?

  Chapter Forty-Six: My Dad’s Person

  Chapter Forty-Seven: Holes

  Chapter Forty-Eight: My Plan to Fix Everything

  Chapter Forty-Nine: Piles

  Chapter Fifty: Dear Mom

  Chapter Fifty-One: One Big Fat Lie

  Chapter Fifty-Two: My Life as a Spy

  Chapter Fifty-Three: Watching Over Me

  Macbeth—The Rap

  Resources Consulted

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Sometimes to fix your family, you need to keep a few secrets. Even though secret keeping is not a thing that happens naturally when you live at the Greene Family B&B. So if I’m not tucked in my room under the giant Scrabble tiles that say Frankie Greene Lives Here, I’m in my once-fort-in-the-basement-now-headquarters with Elliot, my ghost-hunting best friend. Headquarters has rules, kind of like Dad’s Greene Family B&B Rules. But here we can be barefoot, keep secrets, and experiment with food coloring. The only official rules are:

  Rule #1: Don’t enter Headquarters unless invited.

  Rule #2: Standing outside Headquarters is not the same as being invited.

  Rule #3: Don’t knock. We know you’re out there.

  Rule #4: Headquarters is and must remain a secret to all nonmembers.

  Elliot wasn’t an original member but joined when he moved next door. The founders were me and Jessica Blaine. That was, of course, before Ms. Jessica Blaine became my friend-turned-not in the fourth grade. I haven’t revoked her membership even though she stopped speaking to me over a year ago. Other members include my puppy, Lucy, my hedgehog, Winston, and Gram. I call them members, but really, they’re more honorary guests—they can visit but can’t call a meeting. Dad knows about Headquarters but is neither a member nor an honorary guest. He says it’s better that way and has offered to feed all Headquarters members. Which I appreciate.

  The rain beats against the windows as I grab a handful of cookies to bring down for my emergency meeting with Elliot. This morning, I texted him a Code Red–Hot Chili Peppers after I spent the night awake devising a plan and watching Winston burrow in a sock, eat two yogurt treats, and dig a hole in his shavings. I need Elliot’s help.

  The cookies are still melty-chips warm.

  “These taste great,” Dad says as he walks into the kitchen and bites into a gooey cookie from the top of the pile. His hair is brushed, his no-stain white button-down shirt is tucked in, he’s got on a belt, and he’s not wearing his Middlebury College sweatshirt, so I know guests will be checking in today.

  “Thanks.” Earlier, I made my famous oatmeal-chocolate-chip goodness. It’s my day in the cookie rotation. Gram and I swap days. Check-in is at 4:00 p.m., so the cookies need to be done for the guests by 4:00. That’s B&B Rule #5, right between Rule #4: Don’t oversleep or forget to wake up on time, and Rule #6: Shoes. Shoes. Shoes. (As in, always wear them.) That one’s directed right at me. I’m a barefooter, Dad says, just like Mom.

  Thunder roars, followed by a bright bolt of lightning.

  Dad and I share a look.

  He grabs a second cookie to make me feel like the world is a safe and happy place. Then he fills the vase with wildflowers—Mom’s favorite.

  Another crack of thunder rattles the kitchen door.

  He pretends it’s nothing, but I know it’s not.

  “I need to fix the leaky sink in the Yahtzee Room while the Norberts are on a bike ride in town.” The Yahtzee Room is peppered with dice and numbers and phrases like full house and two of a kind. It’s next to the Checkers and Chess Rooms, and a floor above Monopoly, Connect 4, and Clue. Don’t get why anyone wants to stay where Professor Plum killed Mr. Boddy in the library with a candlestick, but Dad says it’s our most popular room. Something about everyone secretly wanting to be a detective. There’s also Rubik’s Cube, Candy Land, and the Game of Life, which is Gram’s room. She says she’s lived the most, so she belongs there.

  A bright burst of lightning flares at the window. I gulp a big breath and count to twenty. Slowly.

  “Let’s leave around four thirty today,” Dad says as he pops the rest of the cookie into his mouth.

  I nod.

  It’s Mom’s birthday. Every year we have a picnic together to celebrate.

  At Weinstein’s Cemetery.

  Mom died in a thunder and lightning storm on her way home from work. She had stayed late to help Professor Kindling with his speech on bats and sonar and something called echolocation. Police said the driver who rear-ended Mom’s car had skidded on the wet road, and that was it. She was gone.

  No one’s fault, just bad weather.

  Bad luck.

  Bad timing.

  I was four. I remember only small chunks of stuff. The smell of vanilla. Her swirly, cursive capital F for Francine. And her charm bracelet with lots of puffy hearts that clanked like cowbells when she baked in the kitchen.

  I run downstairs and pop open Headquarters’ cardboard door.

  Elliot’s already waiting for me on the neon-green carpet, his shaggy hair flopped in front of his dark chocolate eyes. “When did you get down here?” I ask, handing him the cookies.

&
nbsp; He looks at his wristwatch/stopwatch/compass. “Approximately eight minutes ago. So what’s the Code Red–Hot Chili Peppers emergency?”

  “Sarah Rosen’s dad is getting married.”

  His expression remains unimpressed as he stuffs the entire cookie into his mouth.

  “That really seems more like a Code Sweet Green Kiwi,” he says.

  “Well, it’s not. Not even a Code Hot-and-Sour Pickle.” I pull back my hair and hope all the rebel strands find their way into my ponytail holder.

  Elliot shakes his head.

  “I’m serious,” I say. “Sarah Rosen’s dad getting married means I’m the last remaining student in the entire Dennisville Middle School without a family for the Winter Family Festival Parade.”

  “Well, um, I hate to state the obvious, but you have a family. Your B&B is even called the Greene Family B&B.”

  I say nothing.

  Elliot continues. “I think your dad and gram would be surprised to learn after all these years that they’re not your family. What will they call the B&B?”

  “You don’t get it. Sarah and I were the only two who went from a family of three to a family of two. The only two who went from a mom and dad to no mom. The only two who made cards for our grandmothers and aunts on Mother’s Day, the only two who learned how to put our hair into a non-lumpy ponytail by ourselves, the only two whose tights always ripped because we didn’t know the nail-polish trick. Now, in just a few months, it’ll just be me.” A dribble of sadness sneaks into my heart.

  “Okay, even if I get it, which I’m not sure I do because I didn’t even know there was a thing called a lumpy pony or a nail-polish trick, what does this have to do with me?” He picks up a spider from the floor and watches it crawl across his freckled hand.

  “I need your help,” I say, and then pull out my phone and read Elliot the Connection.com profile I wrote at 2:00 a.m. “ ‘I’m a forty-five-year-old dad looking for someone who definitely wants to be a mom to a great kid named Frankie, a hedgehog named Winston, and a beagle puppy named Lucy, and who can also draw a really good unicorn, and bake melt-in-your-mouth cookies. Search radius: twenty miles around Dennisville, Vermont.’ ” I stuff my phone back into my pocket. “Well, what do you think?”

  “Why unicorns and cookies?”

  “I can’t figure out how to make a good unicorn horn and think that’s one of those things a mom would know how to do. And if she can make good cookies, Gram and I can add her to the rotation.”

  Elliot nods. I bite my right pinkie nail. It’s always the sacrificial one. “It’s for his own good. I mean all he does is work and fix stuff.”

  “If you get caught, this would be way worse than Rufus.”

  Rufus was my pet snake. I flushed him down the toilet. I thought he’d like it, and I also thought he could swim. Turns out he couldn’t, but he could clog the toilets of an entire B&B. For two days.

  “I won’t get caught. My plan is to post the ad, interview the Possibles, and then have the one we think is best just kind of run into him. You know, accidentally.”

  “We?”

  Before he can object, I hand him a box covered in newspaper. “Here. Happy birthday.” Gram had rolls and rolls and rolls of This Is Your Day wrapping paper stacked on the couch in her bedroom, but she said she needed it. So I used the horoscope section of today’s paper after reading mine (Sagittarius: Make a decision to change what’s not working. Embrace something new.) and Elliot’s (Aries: Don’t start something you can’t finish.)

  Elliot glances at his horoscope and then rips off the newspaper. The look I had hoped would flash across his round face does. His eyes pop wide, and an oatmeal-cookie-filled-braces smile forms across his skinny lips. “This is total bribery,” Elliot says. “You. Are. The. Best. Friend. Ever.” Elliot’s been obsessed with ghosts and ghost hunters and dead things since his gramps died two years ago.

  He pulls the Ghost-Hunter Super-Charged Laser and the instructions out of the box and starts to read, “ ‘This is the finest tool in ghost hunting. You are ready for your adventures to begin.’ ” He looks up at me.

  I shake my head. “Don’t look at me like that. Just because I gave you this thing doesn’t mean I believe in ghosts or plan to go hunting for them with you.”

  Elliot cocks his head and grins. I know that look. “You search for ghosts with me. I’ll search for a mom with you.”

  “Let’s try my laser out. The rain has stopped,” Elliot says.

  “How could you possibly know that? We’re sitting in Headquarters. In the basement.”

  “Lucy has finally stopped running in circles and baying.”

  I pause for a minute and realize he’s right. Lucy’s curled in a ball just outside the cardboard door. About a month ago, I found her at Maisy’s Florist. Maisy said when she arrived that morning with a bundle of sunflowers, the little gal was curled up in the middle of a boot box. The note attached read Please take care of her. I can’t.

  Maisy already had three cats, a ferret, and a rat named Stan. She said she didn’t have even a drop more space to spare. So I asked Dad if we could keep her. Dad was not a fan at first. “You already have a pet. Remember Winston? Plus, we have lots of guests, Gram, and, for a bit, a snake named Rufus.”

  “Well, the good news is that I already know dogs can swim, so you don’t have to worry about a repeat swim test.”

  A smile crept across his face.

  “And I’m not sure Gram or the guests would be happy to be included in the pet category.”

  “I’m not putting them into the pet category, just the category of people we need to take care of.”

  “I hear beagles can take care of themselves.”

  Then Lucy licked Dad’s ear.

  Now we have Winston and Lucy.

  Elliot and I take Lucy outside with us. The air is thick, and my bare feet sink into the muddy ground. Lucy digs a hole in the wet dirt by the garden. I reread out loud the profile I wrote for my dad.

  “What kind of mom do you think you’ll get with that?” Elliot asks as he slides his ghost-hunting laser next to the picked-over tomato plants in the garden.

  “Just regular. Not like Gram old or Maggie-up-the-street young. No one with a skirt that’s like casing for sausage. Someone normal. You know, who loves kids. And pets.” I step over the no-longer-blooming lettuce, cucumbers, and squash, and remember Dad added “pull dead things from garden” to my list of to-dos. He said, “People are counting on us, Francine, and weeds don’t say welcome home.”

  Elliot looks up at me, his eyebrows all crunched together. “Kids? Like you want brothers and sisters?”

  “Did I say that in the profile?” A small panic rises from my knees. I didn’t mean lots of kids. I grab my phone and read over the ad. A trail of ants along the dirt stops like it’s waiting for clarification. “It says ‘great kid,’ singular. Not ‘kids,’ plural.” The ants move on. I look over the profile one more time. I did him proud.

  Interests: hiking, climbing, reading, and cooking

  Appearance: athletic (more ex-football guy than round pastry chef), brown hair, 6′1″

  Family: one great eleven-year-old daughter, one pygmy hedgehog, and one beagle

  Occupation: ex-lawyer, owner and chef of the Greene Family B&B—your home away from home

  I inch closer to Elliot, who smells like beef jerky. The ghost-hunting laser’s heat meter hovers at five. It only goes to ten. The one time I watched The Great Ghost Pursuit with Elliot, they found a ghost. A dead lady that couldn’t pass through until she saw her son one last time. The problem was her son died three days after she did. When I asked Elliot how the ghost hunters knew all this, he said, “They just know these things. They’re ghost hunters.”

  I only stopped laughing when I realized he was serious.

  Elliot wipes the hair out of his eyes and steadies the laser as we walk past the tree house where I used to eat bananas and peanut butter sandwiches with Jessica when we were friends. The heat meter on t
he laser starts to rise. “Something’s here. I know it.”

  “You have to stop watching The Great Ghost Pursuit. There aren’t ghosts just lying around waiting to be found.” And by ghosts I mean his gramps, my mom, and Rufus.

  “You’re wrong.”

  I stare at him and his ghost meter. In that place in my heart that is echo-empty, I wish he was right. “Anyway, back to the living. I want the new mom to want a kid. You know, me.”

  Elliot looks up. “And Winston and Lucy.”

  “Of course.” I got Winston a year after Mom died and Dad and I moved from Boston to the Greene Family B&B. He was my sorry-your-mom-is-dead-and-we’re-moving pet. The first week I had Winston, he curled into a quill ball every time I picked him up. But now he smells my natural Nacho Cheese Doritos scent and walks right into my palm. No ball. No pointy quills.

  The heat-meter needle creeps just above the five mark. “There’s a ghost here. I can feel it,” Elliot says.

  “How can you feel a ghost? It’s weightless.” I crack up. Elliot ignores me and continues to follow the meter toward the shed.

  The meter climbs to six.

  Mist from the rain dances above the lawn.

  I zip my hoodie. I look up at the black sky and hope there’s no more lightning. I already know it’s a forty-second sprint/one-minute jog/two-minute walk from the shed to the B&B.

  The needle jerks to six and a smidgen.

  Elliot ignores the sky and winds his way around the large maple tree between the garden and the shed.

  I look at my watch. The one Gram gave me when I started Dennisville Middle School. She had it inscribed Love you, Frankie May Greene. Gram was Mom’s mom. When Mom died, Gram took over.

  In a good way. Mostly. Except she snores and has lots and lots of stuff.

  “So what do you think? Should I send it?” I ask.

  “Well, how are you even going to pay for the ad? It’s not like either of us has a job.”

  “It’s free. I mean not all dating sites are, but this one doesn’t cost anything.”

  Elliot looks up from his laser. “If your dad finds out—”

  “I know, I’ll be somewhere between dead and grounded for life.” I take a big gulp of air. “But it’s worth it,” I whisper.