“Very amateur,” Ruben commented.
“It’s true, I’m not very good. It’s a difficult job for someone with my kind of speech imprisonment … impediment. That’s why I hire myself out as an actor, to make ends meet.”
“Doesn’t your manner of speech also affect your acting ability?” Victoria asked.
“Yes, I’m not a very good actor either.”
“Well, if you aren’t Dr. Kaboom, maybe you can tell us where we can find him,” Jory said. “Do you have a phone number? An address? Anything?”
“I’m afraid not. He visited me in prison … in person, in my dressing room, and gave me very strict instructions about wearing the disguise. He handed me the spinach … the speeches he wanted me to deliver, and told me to make an appearance at the school now and then so that I would be visible, but not to be too available.”
“But why?” Edie persisted. “Why all the secrecy? Why can’t he just represent himself? I mean, is he some sort of monster?”
“He’s an alien from another planet, isn’t he,” Margo whispered. “You can tell us. I know they’re here. I’ve seen moving lights in the night sky.…”
Victoria put a hand firmly on Margo’s shoulder. “Airplanes, Margo. Airplanes.”
“He’s not a monster or an alien. He’s a very short man, slender, blue eyes, and balding, with a light brown mustache, though he actually has kind of a baby face. He’s mild mannered, has a high voice, and is quite forgettable—you know, the kind of person who blends into the background. Of course, he could’ve been wearing a disguise when I met him.”
Edie diligently wrote down everything Winston said. “Do you think you’re going to see him again? And if so, when?”
“I don’t know. He never announces when he’s going to visit; he just shows up suddenly and disappears quickly. I have no idea how he gets here; he always finds me in my dressing room. I might see him if he thinks Dr. Kaboom needs to make an appearance somewhere, but I really have no idea. Now if you don’t mind, I need to walk PJ. When he jumps around like that, it’s not always because he’s excited. Sometimes he has to go to the ballroom … the math room … the …”
“We get it,” Jory said. “Just take him.”
Winston left the students more confused than when they had first arrived at the theater. “Does Dr. Kaboom even exist?” Aliya asked, frustrated.
“Well, somebody created the school. Somebody is behind all these crazy inventions,” Taliya reasoned.
“I don’t think we’re going to find anything else here,” Victoria said, glancing around.
“Yeah, we should go,” Ruben agreed. “I have something to do this afternoon.”
Edie knew it was his ballet class, but she chose not to say anything. They made their way back to the lobby, and people started to peel off. Ruben left for his class, and Aliya and Taliya had to get back to Horsemouth for a music lesson. Nobody had seen Sam leave, but Jory got a text saying that Sam’s mom had come to pick him up only five minutes earlier. Leo had an eye doctor appointment. That left Edie, Victoria, Margo, and Jory.
“If you girls aren’t busy, do you want to come to my house?” Jory suggested.
“Whoa, is this some kind of triple date?” Margo said.
“Uh, no. I hadn’t really thought of it that way. We just need to think about our next move. Plus my mom makes terrific snacks.”
Victoria shrugged. “Sure, I just have to let my mom know.” The girls all pulled out their phones. Once everyone’s parents had been informed, the teens headed to the bus stop, taking a short detour to get some ice cream.
RESEARCH
Jory lived in an unremarkable single-story house on the corner of two quiet streets. On the outside there was nothing fancy about it, but once you entered and went downstairs into the basement, you would discover the most fun basement in all of Horsemouth. It was a teenager’s paradise, complete with a Ping-Pong table, two pinball machines, all sorts of exercise equipment, a huge television hooked up to three different game platforms and a surround-sound stereo system, and a bar stocked with peculiar sodas that Jory’s mother bought from a specialty soft-drink shop. But the best thing about the room was that it was private.
The teens sat on the two sofas listening to selections from Jory’s music library, which consisted mainly of movie sound tracks. They weren’t talking; they were thinking. Often somebody would start to say something, then change his or her mind and stop midsentence, falling back into silence. Victoria still held the disguise, turning it over in her hands, frowning.
“I don’t understand how anyone could be fooled by this cheap thing. I mean, just look at it.” She popped the wig on her head and placed the nose and glasses over her face. “This is the dumbest disguise in the world.”
The others turned to glance at Victoria, but their glances turned to shocked, disbelieving stares. “What? What is it?” Victoria said nervously.
“Victoria, you look exactly like Dr. Kaboom, except for the teeth,” Edie said slowly. “I mean, exactly.”
“Oh, come on.…”
“I’m serious! Look.”
Edie led Victoria to the mirror that hung behind the bar. Victoria gasped, staggering back slightly. She really did look just like Dr. Kaboom, except for the teeth.
“Wait a minute,” said Margo, who had joined them at the mirror. Removing the false teeth from her pocket, she rinsed them off in the sink and handed them to Victoria. Victoria slid them into her mouth. Now the effect was complete.
“Hey, you know what?” Jory said finally. “That disguise reminds me of … it’s like a Phony Face.”
“What’s a Phony Face?” Victoria said through the teeth.
“Yes! That’s it!” Jory said, excitedly. “I knew that disguise reminded me of something when we first saw it in the theater!” Jory ran to a cabinet in the back of the room and threw open the doors, revealing several large boxes. Pulling one out, he set it on the floor and removed the lid. “They’re called Phony Faces. They were advertised on the backs of comic books during the nineteen sixties and seventies. You were supposed to be able to put them on and be totally unrecognizable to your friends and family. Here, I’ll show you the ad.” Jory pulled a comic from the box and brought it to the sofa. “I collect comic books.”
“All of those boxes are filled with comic books?” Margo asked. “That is so cool!”
“I didn’t know anyone else read comics,” Jory said.
“Are you kidding? I love comics. My dad gave me his collection. He’s got hundreds.…”
“Come on, come on, we can be rabid fans later. Right now we’re trying to solve a mystery!” Edie reminded them.
“Yes, yes,” Jory said. He turned the comic over to the back cover, which had a collection of very small ads under the banner “LOOK WHAT’S NEW FROM ACKERBLOOM INDUSTRIES!”
“Here it is,” Jory said, pointing to one of the ads. It was a picture of a nose and glasses with a mustache and odd-looking teeth attached.
FINALLY, THE ULTIMATE DISGUISE!
Phony Face alters your appearance so no one can recognize you! Fool your family and friends as you walk among them completely unnoticed! Every Phony Face is different!
Buy all twelve!!! Mix and match!!!!
“Whoever wrote that sure likes to use exclamation points,” Edie commented.
“They’re trying to fool kids into buying it by making it seem exciting. There were twelve different styles of beards, twelve styles of mustaches, glasses, teeth, and wigs, and you could match them up however you wanted. Anyway, my dad told me he bought a Phony Face when he was a kid but that it was just a piece of garbage. He threw it away the same day he got it.”
“But this one … this one works,” Margo said, holding up the Phony Face. “Maybe Ackerbloom Industries improved the technology.”
“I don’t know about that. Ackerbloom Industries went out of business years ago,” Jory said. “I found out after I sent away for some rocket boots and my letter was returned to me b
y the post office.”
“You know,” Victoria said slowly, still examining the back of the comic, “there are a lot of ads for items that resemble things at school. Look at this.” She held out the comic and pointed to the ad in the top right corner. “ ‘Hypno-specs. Hypnotize your friends into believing they’re anything you want them to believe.’ Or this one: ‘Living Balls. You would swear they were alive! Be the first kid on your block to have a ball for a pet!’ ‘Book in a Bite.’ ‘Love Potion.’ We’ve seen all of these inventions.”
Edie turned to Jory. “Do you have a computer down here? I think we should do some research on Ackerbloom Industries.”
The computer was hooked up to the television, which was convenient because everybody had a good view of the huge screen. Jory typed “Ackerbloom Industries” into the search engine and instantly a list of related items appeared: Ackerbloom Industries lawsuit, Ackerbloom Industries scandal, Ackerbloom Industries bankruptcy.
Jory clicked on the first site, which brought up a description of the company. They all read silently for several minutes.
“So. Ackerbloom Industries was a toy company started in the nineteen fifties in upstate New York that advertised novelty items and oddball inventions on the backs of comic books,” Edie summarized. “I can’t believe people really bought this stuff. They must’ve been pretty gullible.”
“Hit that link right there,” Victoria directed Jory, and he did. A second article opened, showing a picture of a short, balding man with a magnificently curled mustache and beard being led away in handcuffs by police. “George Ackerbloom Arrested for Fraud,” the headline read. The teens scanned the story, which took a while because it was longer than the first.
“I wish I could just take this article in pill form,” Edie whined. “My eyes are getting tired.”
“Oh my,” Margo said, still reading. “A kid was killed.”
The story outlined the events that took place thirty-five years earlier, when a ten-year-old boy tried to fly across a lake in an Invisiblimp, a product of Ackerbloom Industries. The Invisiblimp ad on the back of the comic promised that the individual would soar like an eagle in complete secrecy as the blimp blended into any background. Apparently, the dirigible, made of cardboard and plastic, didn’t soar like anything; it sank like a stone. As it happened, the boy had been riding it over a lake when he fell. Unable to untangle himself from the soggy cardboard and plastic, he had drowned. The parents sued Ackerbloom Industries, and George Ackerbloom was charged with criminally negligent manslaughter, reckless endangerment, and fraud. The manslaughter charge didn’t stick, but the endangerment and fraud charges did. He was sentenced to twenty-two years in a federal penitentiary.
“This is so sad,” remarked Margo after they had finished reading.
“Wait a minute, it can’t be …,” Edie said, staring at the photo.
“What can’t be?” Margo said.
“That woman next to Ackerbloom, in the photo …”
“It’s his wife,” Victoria said, reading the caption beneath the picture. “ ‘George Ackerbloom with lawyer Harold Rosenblatt and wife Ann-Marie.’ ”
“That’s just it, I know her! That woman works at our school! Her name is Marianne Marblecook and she’s Dr. Kaboom’s secretary!”
“Wow, what a weird coincidence,” Margo murmured.
“Are you sure?” said Jory, peering at the picture.
“Of course I’m sure. And by the way, she has mental problems. First of all, she’s a hoarder. She was such an extreme case that she was institutionalized for it, about twelve years ago. I’m not sure how she got out, because she’s still pretty kooky. Case in point, she tried to pretend she was her own identical twin, called Mrs. Cookmarble, as part of her ploy to keep me from seeing Dr. Kaboom. It was pretty ridiculous. And now that I think of it, I read an article about her that said she developed her condition after suffering a shock caused by a highly publicized scandal that ruined her family. The name didn’t mean anything to me at the time, but that article probably mentioned Ackerbloom Industries.”
“Who’s that?” Margo rose from the couch and pointed at someone barely visible behind Ann-Marie Ackerbloom. “It looks like she’s shielding a little boy from the cameras.”
“I bet it’s her son,” Victoria said, also rising to get a better look.
“Well, if the mother went into an insane asylum, I wonder what happened to the son?” Jory mused. There was a short pause, when suddenly Victoria’s eyes widened.
“Jory, is there any paper down here?” Jory nodded, handing her a pad of yellow paper from behind the bar. Victoria immediately began writing various letters of the alphabet as though they were equations.
“This is no time for algebra,” Edie chided. “We need to stay focused here.”
“Not algebra, word puzzles,” Victoria corrected.
“This is no time for word puzzles either.”
“This is exactly the time for word puzzles,” Victoria said, holding up the paper. “Look at this.”
On the paper Victoria had written:
ANN-MARIE = MARIANNE
MARBLECOOK = COOKMARBLE
“See? They’re anagrams. All the letters from one name are used in the other.”
“That was pretty obvious to just about everyone,” Edie said. “But you have to give the poor woman a break. An insane mind doesn’t always come up with the best anagrams.”
“No, but a clever mind can,” Victoria said. “Look at this.”
The others huddled around her watching as she wrote:
MARBLECOOK = ACKERBLOOM
“Another anagram! Wow, good job, Victoria,” said Margo, patting her on the back.
“Great job!” exclaimed Jory. “That can’t be a coincidence. It practically proves Dr. Kaboom’s secretary and this Ann-Marie Ackerbloom are the same person! Brilliant!”
“Thanks, but I’m not finished.” Victoria wrote another equation.
KABOOM + X = ACKERBLOOM
“Did you notice that all the letters of ‘KABOOM’ are contained within ‘ACKERBLOOM’? If you solve for X, the missing letters are ‘C,’ ‘E,’ ‘R,’ and ‘L.’ Let’s look at those extra letters. What could they spell? Well, seeing how we’re trying to figure out who Dr. Kaboom really is, let’s examine his full name a little more carefully.”
“It’s Marcel, Marcel Kaboom,” Edie said.
“Actually, it’s Marcel S. Kaboom,” Margo said brightly. “But we don’t know what the ‘S’ stands for.”
“It doesn’t stand for anything. Look, the ‘C,’ ‘E,’ ‘R,’ and ‘L’ are all in the name MARCEL.” Victoria wrote:
MARCEL S KABOOM = ACKERBLOOM + X
“Now if you solve for X …”
Jory sighed. “This is getting awfully math-y.”
“Don’t worry, we’re almost done,” Victoria assured him.
“When you cross out all the letters that are the same on each side of the equation, you’re left with three extra ones on the left: ‘S,’ ‘A,’ and ‘M.’ ”
“Sam.” Edie shrugged. “So?”
“So think about it, Edie. We happen to know a Sam, a Sam who nobody really knows anything about, a Sam who is always in costume, a Sam who has bright blue eyes just like the Great Gumballini said Dr. Kaboom had.…”
Edie’s eyes widened. She took the pen from Victoria and slowly wrote on the paper:
MARCEL S. KABOOM =
SAM ACKERBLOOM = SAM BLACKMOORE
“Exactly,” confirmed Victoria. “And he’s been spying on us since school started.… Margo, are you okay?”
Margo’s face had turned a bright shade of pink. Finding out that the object of her secret affections was a grown man made her feel a little sick. She was so glad she hadn’t confided in anyone about it. “No, I’m fine, it’s just a little warm in here.”
“Well, get ready, because things are going to get hotter,” Edie said, picking up the paper that contained Victoria’s equations and scratching her chin thoughtfull
y. “This is going to be a very interesting interview.”
SAM’S STORY
On Sunday all the journalism students except Sam met at the playground in Horsemouth Park, where Edie, Jory, Victoria, and Margo filled in the others on their discoveries. Victoria led them through the anagrams that indicated the likely relationship between Marcel S. Kaboom and Sam Blackmoore.
“That explains why there wasn’t a file for Sam in the file room,” Edie said, twirling on one of the swings. “I didn’t even notice it at the time, there were so many to read, but now that I think of it, I never read his. I guess there were only fifty-four files.”
“It also explains why his disguises are so good,” Margo added from the swing next to Edie’s. “He’s been using those Phony Faces.”
“And also why he doesn’t take the bus,” Leo said. “He’s an adult. He probably drives his own car.” Leo had taken a seat in the sand and was idly digging a hole with a discarded plastic shovel.
“No wonder he wanted to do the word games and puzzles for the Daily Dynamite,” said Aliya from the high side of the seesaw.
“Word games and puzzles are his specialty!” said Taliya from the low side of the seesaw, rising as her sister sank.
“It’s probably why he didn’t chase the magician,” Ruben mused from the merry-go-round, grabbing a bar on the large metal disk and running as fast as he could in a circle before jumping on. “Winston Leroux might have recognized him. Sam’s eyes are pretty blue … whoaaaa!” he added, throwing back his head as he spun around.
“I feel so stupid,” Victoria said, pumping her legs on the third swing. “How could I not see he was an adult? How could I be fooled so easily?”
Jory stood on top of the jungle gym, a position that would have made the others nervous if they had not already seen him in many more-precarious places. “Well, first of all, you weren’t looking for it,” he answered, ticking off his fingers. “Second, he looks our age. He’s short and has a high voice; Winston said so. He also said Dr. Kaboom had a baby face, which probably means he can’t grow a beard.”
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