Inez and the First Clue

The Clue Club meets on Wednesdays in the little back room behind the school library, the one with the squeaky radiator and the corkboard nobody else uses. There are no dead bodies in the Clue Club, and no stolen jewels. The mysteries are smaller than that, and somehow harder.

Inez started it in Year 8. This is how.

Her little brother Tomás used to bounce out of bed. He was the kind of seven-year-old who woke the whole house by singing. Then, one autumn, he stopped. Every morning he lay under the covers like a log, and every morning their dad had to call him six times.

“He’s being lazy,” Inez said at breakfast. “He’s doing it on purpose.”

She meant it. She was cross. She was the one who had to wait at the door while he hunted for his other shoe, and she was the one who got a late mark when they missed the bus.

Then one Saturday she found him sitting on the stairs with his reading book, not reading it. Just holding it.

“What’s up?” she asked, and for once she didn’t say it in her cross voice.

It took a while. It came out in bits. There was a new boy in his class who called him names at the coat pegs every morning, right before the bell. So every morning, Tomás’s body knew what was coming, and it didn’t want to get up.

Inez sat down next to him on the stairs. She felt a bit sick. She had called him lazy every day for three weeks.

He wasn’t lazy. He was dreading something.

That was the first clue Inez ever solved, and it changed the way she looked at everyone. The friend who stopped answering messages. The boy in maths who put his head on the desk. The teacher who snapped on a Friday afternoon. Each of them was doing something that looked like a verdict, like proof of what kind of person they were. But each time Inez looked closer, it was a clue.

So she made a little card and pinned it to the corkboard in the back room.

A behavior is a clue, not a verdict.

Then she asked a few friends if they wanted to help solve the clues.

Now there are eleven of them. Each one has a favourite place to look. Bramley checks the body first, sleep and food and noise. Thea looks for the feeling underneath. Orrin spots when someone’s thinking has got tangled. Pella checks who is in and who is out. Ashby notices when someone is carrying guilt or a promise. Then Ressa finds a fairer word, Lessing finds one load that can get smaller, and Imogen finds what fills the tank back up. Sefton quietly turns the questions on himself, and Hamish knows when a load is too heavy for kids to carry alone.

Inez’s job is mostly to say the same thing again whenever someone forgets.

“Before you decide what they are,” she says, “ask what they’re carrying.”

It is not always easy. When someone is rude to you, it can feel like the most natural thing in the world to be cross. Inez still gets cross. She is not a saint, and the others would happily tell you so. But she has noticed that being cross and being curious can happen at the same time. You can feel annoyed and still ask the question.

Tomás is ten now. He sings in the mornings again, mostly very badly. The boy at the coat pegs was moved to another class after Inez and her dad talked to his teacher.

Sometimes, when he’s grumpy, Tomás narrows his eyes at his big sister.

“Are you looking for my clue?”

“Always,” says Inez.

A behavior is a clue, not a verdict. Ask what they are carrying.