CHAPTER ONE:

IN WHICH A NEW BUSINESS IS FOUNDED

DO YOU HAVE A MYSTERY THAT NEEDS SOLVING?

Finkel Investigation Agency Solving Consequential Crimes Only (FIASCCO) is here to help!

Our team of experienced detectives can solve all/most mysteries, including theft, missing pets, and other matters requiring detecting skill and general awesomeness.

For more information, talk to Lara Finkel ASAP.

NOTE: FIASCCO cannot help find murderers. If you or someone you know has been murdered, please call a grown-up.

Lara looked over her flyer with a great big frown. It really was too bad she couldn’t come up with a name that spelled out FIASCO instead of FIASCCO. She was an excellent speller, in addition to being an excellent investigator. She didn’t want anyone to get the wrong idea about that. But it was too late now to change the name. Her parents had not been pleased with her printing so many copies of her flyer using the family printer, and they’d clearly stated that there would be no second edition. So Lara would just have to live with FIASCCO.

Her mother had also insisted that Lara add in the part about not solving murders. At first she’d resisted. After all, Georgia Ketteridge, Girl Super-Detective, would never turn down a murder case if she were lucky enough to find one. But given Lara’s unfortunate tendency to get nauseous whenever she saw even a drop of blood, maybe Ima had a point.

Okay, so Lara wouldn’t be solving murder cases straight off. So what? She felt completely, totally, 100 percent certain that detective work was going to be her thing. Her cousin Aviva had math, and her sister, Caroline, had art, and her brother Benny had science-y things. Now, Lara would have detecting. Which just so happened to be way cooler thanany of those other things. After having read all four books in the Georgia Ketteridge series, Lara knew she could solve a real-life mystery. If only one would come to her.

It’ll come, Lara told herself. The flyers were just step one.

With her mission in mind, Lara gathered up the stack of flyers and headed for the door. It was still only theearly afternoon, leaving plenty of time to redecorate the neighborhood in blazing-yellow flyers—not Lara’s favorite color, but good for getting attention. Hopefully.

For a moment Lara considered enlisting Caroline’s help in the matter. As annoying as her little sister could be—very!—Caroline usually made things more fun. She should get Caroline. Yet something inside her rebelled at the idea. Maybe Caroline was her very favorite sibling, separated by a mere fifteen months, but did that mean they had to do absolutely everything together?

No, Lara decided. It did not.

Lara paused when she reached the kitchen. Based on the too-loud talk and enticing vanilla scent, she deduced two things. First, her sister and cousin were in there. Second, they were baking cupcakes. Without her.

Stupid show-off Aviva and her stupid show-off cupcakes. As if it weren’t enough that her cousin moved in last year and immediately became the smartest kid in Lara’s grade. Apparently, she also had to bake cupcakes several times a week. They were good cupcakes, too. Lara supposed that was one reason why her sister and brothers failed to recognize the fact that Aviva was actually annoying.

Lara couldn’t help it. She marched into the kitchen.

“Hello, Lara,” her cousin said, not looking up from her mixing bowl. “We’ve already put the cupcakes in the oven. But you can still decorate them with us if you want.”

“Pretty please? It will be fun,” Caroline said. She spoke using a computer voice that came out of her tablet. That was how Caroline talked. She’d type things into an app, and then a voice from her tablet—a snotty-sounding British lady—would speak her words out loud.

“No,” Lara said firmly. Detective business required her full attention.

She was about to leave Caroline and Aviva for good when her older brother, Noah, walked in.

“Hello annoying sisters,” he said. “And not-at-all annoying cousin who makes excellent baked goods.”

Lara stuck her tongue out at him and straightened her stack of flyers.

“I helped with the cupcakes. Do you want to reconsider?”

“In that case, I take it back until I’ve got my cupcakes. At least for you, Lina-Lin.” Noah gave his cheekiest smile. His eyes fell on Lara’s stack of flyers. “Huh. What do you have there, Lara?”

Noah snatched a flyer without asking. As he read, Lara twirled a piece of hair. It’s not like she needed Noah’s permission for anything. Of course she didn’t. Still, she cared what her brother thought. A lot.

“Um. How are you an experienced detective?” Noah asked.

Lara scowled. Rude!

“I found Benny’s favorite toy car for him last week, after everyone else gave up on it,” she informed her brother. “Plus I figured out the cause of Kugel’s hairball problem. It was the kettle corn he kept sneaking in the middle of the night.”

“So you’re going from hairball investigations to solving actual mysteries?”

A snicker came from Aviva’s corner of the room. Lara forced herself to stay focused. Aviva’s opinions did not matter in the slightest.

“Absolutely,” Lara said. “The Mystery of the Hairball was very difficult to crack. And now Kugel hasn’t had a single hairball in two weeks thanks to me.”

“That is a true miracle.”

“Yes, it is,” Lara said, nobly choosing to ignore Noah’s sarcasm.

Fists clenched, Lara reminded herself that Georgia Ketteridge was graceful even when dealing with annoying people.

“Why are you calling it F-I-A-S-C-C-O?” he asked.

“Because it sounds good. Any new business needs a marketing plan.”

“Sure,” Noah said in his I’m-going-to-tell-you-what-you-want-to-hear-but-I-don’t-really-mean-it voice. Lara despised that voice. “Um, you do know what fiasco means, right?”

Lara snatched the flyer out of Noah’s hands. “Of course I do.”

“Then why did you name your detective agency after it?”

“Well, the idea is that when you have a fiasco, you go to FIASCCO. Get it?”

“Not really,” Noah muttered.

“It does not make sense to me, either,” Aviva said. As if anyone had asked her!

That was quite enough. Noah and Aviva just didn’t understand. Unfortunate, certainly, but it’s not like Lara actually needed help from them. Or anyone else. She straightened her pile of flyers and gave everyone a properly disdainful look. Well, at least she hoped it showed proper disdain.

“I am going to post these around. If anyone you know needs mystery-solving services, I’m here to help,” she said.

And she marched out of the house clutching her flyers.

It took more than an hour, but every house on the block got a FIASCCO flyer. With every paper she placed on a doorstep, hope swelled in Lara’s chest. True, she didn’t know if anyone on the street needed a detective. But surely someone out of all these people would want to hire her.

As she went from door to door, Lara allowed her mind to wander. She had heard—many, many times—that people on the autism spectrum were blessed with extraordinary abilities. But she couldn’t help but think that somehow this particular trait had passed her by.

Once, she’d said as much to Ima, who responded with a sigh. “You’re a fast reader,” her mother pointed out. “And you remember what you read perfectly.”

“Only because I read my books so many times!”

Lara loved books as though they were dear friends. In her experience, they were certainly more reliable than people-friends. But honestly, what kind of a special talent wasreading? Ima didn’t get it at all.

“And you’re good at writing, too,” Ima had continued. “All of your teachers praise your essays.”

There wasn’t much point in saying that writing essays was a rather unimpressive talent. Ima would only protest. Even though it was totally and completely true.

After all, Lara reasoned, they didn’t put essays up next to the great paintings in museums. Nobody had ever written a newspaper article about a particularly skilled essay-writer. Kids at school never told her “Great essay! Can you show me how to do that?” the way people did with Caroline’s drawings.

Detective work was different. Once she succeeded with that, she would be special too.

For a moment, Lara wondered if flyers were perhaps not the preferred method for finding mysteries. In the Georgia Ketteridge books, mysteries just appeared. Georgia’s uncle once fell victim to an attempted robbery. But Lara couldn’t count on that kind of luck.

As she marched back to her house, Lara’s mind burst with thoughts of her detective agency. She felt confident—well, mostly confident—that she could find a mysterybefore school started up again in a few weeks. After that, maybe there would be school-related mysteries for her to solve. And then? Why, she’d practically be an established detective.

She even had her very own detective notebook. True, it was just a black-and-white composition notebook that said “FIASCCO” on the front, but still. It counted.

“What are you doing?” a voice asked.

Lara spun around to find Caroline, who was wearing her special harness and straps. It helped her lug around her tablet without tiring out her arms too much.

Caroline’s computer voice always spoke in the same flat tone. Still, Lara could swear that her sister sounded extra whiny.

“Oh, I was just delivering flyers for my new detective agency,” Lara said. Her chest swelled at the wordmy.

“Can I help?”

“No!” Lara said immediately. The look on Caroline’s face made her stomach squirm. “I mean, I’m almost done. So you can’t. Sorry.”

That ought to do it, she thought. Caroline couldn’t possibly stay upset for long. Right?

“Why didn’t you ask me to help?” her sister asked. After she finished typing she looked expectantly at Lara.

Lara knew she should make up some excuse about having forgotten to ask. Caroline would believe her. Probably. But when she opened her mouth to invent something that sounded believable, entirely different words came out. “I didn’t need your help.”

Big mistake. Caroline tapped away at her tablet, her jaw clenched firmly. Lara bounced on her toes while she waited for her sister to finish typing.

“I would be good at being a detective,” Caroline said finally. “I would.”

Lara blinked. She had not considered whether or not her sister would be good at detecting. That wasn’t the point. The whole point of FIASCCO was that she, Lara Finkel, was going to be a detective. Caroline already had her special thing!

Gulping in a deep breath, Lara prepared herself to say something wise and sisterly. Something that would magically make Caroline understand why she absolutely could not be a part of FIASCCO.

Instead, Lara said, “Are you absolutely sure about that? There’s a lot that goes into being a detective, you know.”

The moment the words escaped her mouth Lara realized her mistake. Caroline tore her eyes away from the screen and delivered a glare that made Lara’s ankles shake. It really was remarkable how her eleven-year-old sister could imitate their mother so precisely.

“Just because I can’t talk doesn’t mean that I can’t be a detective, Lara.”

As always, Caroline’s computer voice did not waver. She might as well have been reciting state capitals. Or commenting on the rather large number of trees in Seattle. But Lara knew her sister was capital-U Upset. She knew it from the tightness of Caroline’s jaw and the clenched fist flapping by her side.

“I never said you can’t be a detective.” Lara did her best to imitate the tablet’s calm monotone, but a squeak crept into her voice. “I just said you couldn’t be in FIASCCO.”

Logically, Lara knew that such a distinction was unlikely to satisfy her sister. Yet it was true. If Caroline couldn’t see that, it wasn’t Lara’s problem.

Caroline glared at Lara’s last remaining flyer as thoughit reeked of Kugel’s litter box contents. Her fingers danced across the screen at top speed, and Lara didn’t have to wait very long at all to hear her response.

“Fine. Be that way. By the way, ‘fiasco’ is a stupid name.”

And with that, Caroline closed her tablet shut and marched back toward the house. As Lara watched Caroline disappear behind the bright yellow door, she chewed on the edges of her lip.

For a moment, Lara considered going after her sister and begging for forgiveness. She made it three whole steps before drawing to a stop.

Lara wasn’t going to apologize for starting her own detective agency. After all, it wasn’t like Caroline did absolutely everything with her. Lara thought of the many occasions when she’d walked in on her sister doing something with Aviva. Like baking cupcakes, for example. Caroline hadn’t apologized to Lara for the fact that she apparently preferred to spend time in the company of the world’s most annoying cousin. Why should Lara apologize for FIASCCO?

Feeling satisfied with her decision to not apologize for anything, Lara posted the final FIASCCO flyer on a large tree in the Finkels’ front yard.

Just as she was admiring her work, her father very rudely interrupted. From his place in his parked car, he tapped up against the car window. Lara jumped. “Lara-bear!” he said. “Get in the car. I need you and your sister for some things.”

“What things?” she asked crossly.

“Consider it adventuring of the errands variety,” Dad replied.

That was not promising. Lara groaned, but she marched over and got into her father’s car. When she glanced out the window and spotted her flyer, she couldn’t help but smile. FIASCCO would succeed. She felt sure of it.

A moment later, Caroline entered the car. She did not say anything to Lara. She didn’t even bother keeping her speech app open, but instead started playing Candy Crush.

Fine. It’s not like Lara actually needed her sister.