“Hanging out with Baxter.”
The detective’s head shot up, and his eyes narrowed. “Baxter? Who’s that?” He wrote BAXTER in capital letters on his pad and underlined it, twice.
I pointed.
“The dog?”
“Yes. Baxter.” I gave him a soft little scritch on top of the head (Baxter’s, not the detective’s). He likes that.
The detective stabbed at the doorbell a few times.
“The back door is unlocked,” I said.
“Unbelievable.” He stomped around to the back.
Baxter and I hurried after him.
He knocked on the back door and yelled, “Portland Police Department!”
“She’s not h—” I started to say again, but by then he was asking if I had permission to enter the premises (which I did) and if I had noticed any signs of a disturbance (which I hadn’t). “I didn’t go through the whole house, though. Just the middle part.”
“Hmm.” He opened the back door and stuck his head in. “Margery Reese! This is Detective John Jacobs of the Portland Police Department! I’m coming in to do a wellness check!” Then he pushed the door all the way open. “I’m coming in now!”
But me and Baxter didn’t follow him because now the idea of going into the house felt kind of scary. We stood at the doorway, looking into the kitchen at the black-and-white floor checkered like a big chessboard and the white cupboards, thick with paint. “Everything looks normal,” I said. “That’s good, right?”
But instead of answering, he just walked through the dining room and on into the living room.
“I’m coming upstairs now!” I heard him yell.
A few minutes later, he came back into the kitchen. “No one’s home.”
“Did you check the basement?” I asked. “Her lab is down there. . . .”
So he stomped off again.
I hugged Baxter close to me until the detective came back, shaking his head. “The house is empty.”
“She was fine this morning,” I said as he pushed past me, back outside.
He stopped in the driveway and flipped to the first page of his notepad. I hurried over to see what he’d already written:
MARGERY REESE—MISSING ALL DAY—MISSED TWO CLASSES AND DEPARTMENT MEETING
ATYPICAL BEHAVIOR—USUALLY VERY RESPONSIBLE
NO ANSWER ON HER HOME PHONE
“And does she have a cell phone?” he muttered. “Of course not. That would be too easy.”
“She thinks cell phone radiation is bad for the brain,” I started to explain, but then I stopped. I didn’t think he wanted to hear any more of the professor’s theories on brains. He looked like his brain was about to explode.
He now added to the list:
NO SIGN OF FORCED ENTRY OR FOUL PLAY IN HOUSE
He frowned at me again. “So nothing out of the ordinary happened in the past twenty-four hours?”
“Ordinary for Professor Reese or ordinary for everyone else?”
He glared at me and shoved his notepad back in his pocket. Then he handed me a business card with his phone number. “If you think of anything really important, call me.” He stormed off. “And have your parents call me!”
Baxter and I followed him all the way to his car, my stomach curling into a tight little knot. “Hey, you’re going to find her, right? ’Cause my half of Baxter is fine, but Professor Reese’s half is starting to get worried.”
“I’ll do my best!” He yanked open his car door, climbed in, and slammed it closed.
I scratched Baxter’s fuzzy neck as the detective drove away. “Don’t worry. It’ll be OK.”
Baxter looked up at me, raising one eyebrow and then the other. He didn’t quite believe me, and I didn’t quite believe me, either.
I slid the detective’s card into my pocket.
A lot out of the ordinary had happened since Professor Reese moved in, but I didn’t know if I’d bother to call the detective. Because if he didn’t think that a magical dog was really important, I was pretty sure I’d have to find Professor Reese myself.
18Baxter Slumber Party
After the detective left, I sat down in the grass, rubbed Baxter’s tummy, and tried to think the whole thing through. There was plenty of stuff that seemed really important—important enough to tell a police detective looking for a missing professor.
The problem was, even if I did decide to break my promise to Professor Reese not to tell anyone about T-waves and her experiments, I knew the detective wouldn’t believe a word of it, seeing as how he had no interest in a magical dog, even, and this was way more complicated.
And there was no way I could prove any of it, anyway: I didn’t know how to work the teleportation machine because Professor Reese always set everything up. All I could show him was a map with a bunch of pins stuck in it, and I had a feeling that wouldn’t be enough.
Besides, I didn’t know just how missing Professor Reese was—if she was missing like a missing person, or just missing like maybe she’d gotten all caught up in work and was actually sitting in a little room somewhere, staring into a spectrometer and not finishing her sentences. Because it was still light out—it wasn’t even dinnertime yet—and sometimes she worked way later. The detective seemed more annoyed than anything else, so I didn’t know yet how worried I needed Baxter and me to be.
“Come on, Baxter,” I said, standing up and, I realized, waking him up, because I’d been thinking for a while and rubbing his tummy the whole time.
I tucked him back into Professor Reese’s house. “I’ll be back soon, OK?” I nodded.
He nodded back.
Then I ran home.
TJ was at his desk, snapping a picture. “Come look! Zombie Cheerleader just knocked down Caveman. She’s going to try and eat his brains!”
I hurried over. “You won’t believe what just happened!” I told him everything that had happened.
TJ didn’t seem as worried as I was that Professor Reese wasn’t home. “She’s probably working or something.” He was mad he missed the police detective, though. He asked me three times if I had gotten to ride in the police car with the siren going, and I said no the third time, too.
Then Mom came home, carrying a bag
