Finally, Something Mysterious

by Doug Cornett

  The results of our first investigation were inconclusive, but we all resolved to bring our lunch from home from then on. And thus the One and Onlys were born. Since then, we’d investigated several puzzling things, like the Case of the Missing TV Remote, the Case of the Class Hamster’s Lost Tail, and the Case of Why Is Mr. Pocus Such a Butthead?

  I was the hound dog of our team, the one who sniffed out the mysteries, because I had a nose for unusual things. Shanks was the muscle, completely unafraid of anything or anyone. Peephole had his photographic memory, but aside from that, he was mostly along for the ride because…what else was he going to do? He was a little sensitive about his value to our team. I mean, he wanted to be useful, but most of the time he was preoccupied by trying not to hurl. Let’s be honest…Peephole wasn’t exactly the bravest of sleuths. But the three of us had each other’s backs, and that was the most important thing.

  But soon Peephole wouldn’t be a One and Only anymore. He was going to be a big brother, and considering the eleven-year age difference, a really big brother. And that meant that he’d have to babysit and help more around the house. And that meant that he probably wouldn’t have time to run around town, solving mysteries with Shanks and me. He was going to have to be responsible. And guess what? It scared him.

  To be honest, it sort of scared me, too. If Peephole was too busy to solve mysteries with us, would Shanks and I still do it? Soon Peephole was going to be a big brother and we were all going to be middle schoolers. Would we be too old to be detectives?

  I carefully placed Mister E on the top of our lean-to, like a tiny little guard. Then we mounted our bikes and pedaled through the woods and out into the tall grass near the abandoned drive-in. There was a white pickup truck parked at the edge of the field, and a man and a woman in yellow hard hats got out. As we rode past, the woman knelt down and began hammering a wooden stake with a pink ribbon into the ground. A box filled with stakes was at her side.

  “What was that about?” I asked my friends when we reached the road, my bike squeaking with every pump of my legs.

  “Who knows?” Peephole called over his shoulder. “But I forgot to mention something about Mr. Babbage’s yard.”

  “What?” Shanks and I said at the same time.

  “Up in the tree right in the middle of the yard. There were some ducks up there. But I saw something else stuck in the branches.”

  “What?” we said again, this time less patiently.

  “A fish. A real one.”

  I never knew whether it was a coincidence or not, but the town of Bellwood was actually shaped just like a bell. And what formed most of the border of that bell? Woods! And what did we call those woods? The Bell Woods! If you were to float up in a hot-air balloon or ride in a helicopter or climb the water tower—the tallest structure in town—and look down at Bellwood, you’d think, So that’s why they named it that. (Actually, it might also remind you of the shape of Darth Vader’s helmet, but the town of Darthvadershelmetwood doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.) Bellwood was widest at its south end, which was defined by Highway 43 stretching across the county in both directions. Mr. Babbage lived at the southwestern corner of the bell, right next to our headquarters.

  The Bell Woods lay on top of our bell-shaped town like a blanket. That meant that we Bellwoodians were sort of protected from the outside world. It also meant that we were isolated, which explained why we were all so weird. Actually, the One and Onlys seemed to be the only people in Bellwood who recognized and celebrated how strange the town was. (Ever notice how the people who insist that they’re normal are usually the oddest ones?)

  Inside the bell was our town: schools, churches, stores, houses. Honest Hardware, our family business going back for generations, was right downtown. Peephole lived in the middle of the bell, too, just a couple of blocks from Bellwood Elementary. Shanks lived up on the upper west side of town, and my house wasn’t too far from hers in the upper right—northeast—corner of the bell, on Munchaus Avenue. My house was the last on the block before it dead-ended into the Bell Woods, though there was an entrance to an old forest service road that used to snake all the way through the woods but was now mostly overgrown. My backyard was fringed with the trees that formed the unofficial border of the town. At the bottom of the bell, south of Highway 43, was a lot of open space that was still technically part of Bellwood; when we were smaller, the One and Onlys used to call this area the Magical Realm of Moo-Landia. Out there? Mostly cows.

  My dad liked to say, “What’s the only kind of pie you don’t want for dessert? A cow pie!”

  I didn’t know what a cow pie was, so I looked it up.

  Gross, Dad.

  But Moo-Landia wasn’t only cows. There was also the Shamtraw estate, which was the biggest house in Bellwood because Old Man Shamtraw was the richest person in Bellwood. He had a first name, I’m sure, but nobody referred to him as anything other than Old Man Shamtraw. He lived in this huge mansion on the other side of Highway 43, and because it was pretty secluded down there, not many people knew what the house was like. There were all kinds of rumors about what Shamtraw did all alone in his mansion. One rumor said that under the estate was a series of interconnecting tunnels with hidden rooms full of priceless objects like vases from the Ming Dynasty, and that he would pass the days by tipping them off the shelves, one by one. Another rumor said that he was a vampire who had spent centuries gathering wealth while secretly sucking the blood of Bellwood’s unsuspecting citizens.

  My mom once told me that Old Man Shamtraw was “eccentric.” I asked her what that meant, and she said it meant that he was bonkers. How come she didn’t just call him bonkers? Because, she explained, he was rich. After all, he owned a lot of the land in Bellwood, including the field where the old drive-in was. I guess if you’re bonkers and rich, you get to be eccentric.

  Last summer, the One and Onlys spent many days across the highway, crouched in the bushes outside the Shamtraw estate, spying with binoculars to see if he really was a vampire. What can I say? We were foolish kids then, and this was the most promising mystery Bellwood had to offer. Of course, we didn’t see any vampiric activity, but we did see a lot of yard-maintenance workers. Finally, after a week or so, Shamtraw himself came out and asked us what the heck we found so interesting about his front gate. We didn’t have a good answer for him, but we did learn an important lesson: if we were going to be world-class detectives, we needed to hone our covert-surveillance skills. He politely told us to buzz off, and when he skulked back to his mansion, he gave the impression of a ghost who was annoyed that he still had to do all that haunting.

  You couldn’t blame us for investigating. Like I said, we knew that Bellwood was brimming with strange things—you just had to know where to look.

  Like the annual Bellwood Bratwurst Bonanza. The Triple B was a cooking competition in July that everybody looked forward to each year. The challenge was to make an original dish that featured the German sausage as the centerpiece. Why bratwurst? Well, that’s a story that goes way back in the history of our town. Legend has it that one of the early mayors of Bellwood, a German-American fellow named Wolfgang Munchaus, was nuts about pigs. And by that I mean that he liked to eat them. A lot. It was said that Munchaus raised a whole farm of pigs so that he would always have plenty of bacon, ham, pork, sausage, jowl, hock, spare ribs, and, of course, bratwurst to eat.

  As the story goes, Bellwood fell on hard times. The road that used to pass through town was moved, and so visitors stopped visiting, passersby stopped passing by, and shoppers stopped shopping. Munchaus found himself in danger of becoming the mayor of a ghost town. So he came up with a brilliant idea: he would throw a huge festival that would attract visitors far and wide. And the main event at the festival would be—you guessed it—a bratwurst contest!

  Munchaus’s plan worked. The festival was a huge success. Munchaus himself judged the bratwurst contes
t and, in a slightly controversial decision, awarded his own recipes first place, second place, and third place. It was a good day for Mayor Munchaus, and for Bellwood. The Bonanza continued to draw crowds year after year, and eventually people started moving to Bellwood, and the town found itself back on its feet. Over the decades, some of the guidelines had changed (now, for instance, you could enter other sausages into the cook-off), but the spirit of togetherness and celebration remained.

  If you won the Triple B, you earned the respect and admiration of the entire town. And you got a trophy of a little golden (plastic) bratwurst. Oh, and a T-shirt that said I’M THE WIENER! I always thought the T-shirt was like something you should have to wear if you lost.

  My parents, along with pretty much everybody else in Bellwood, had always entered the Triple B, but they never won it. Mr. Babbage, whose yard had been invaded by ducks, was the undisputed champion of the bratwurst cook-off, the LeBron James of German sausage, the Napoleon of encased meats. He’d won it the last five years in a row, and it was generally agreed that his bratwurst dishes were things of unparalleled beauty. The judges, who were members of the town council, always maintained that it was anybody’s Bonanza, that any competitor could win first place, but the moment you saw their faces when they tasted Babbage’s entry, you knew they were going to send him through to the final round—at which point it was up to the chief taster, Mr. Pocus, to choose the winner. Even that old grump couldn’t deny that Babbage’s sausages were divine.

  I’m actually not crazy about bratwurst, which makes me unusual in Bellwood. The year that my parents won second place—bested only by Mr. Babbage’s Brat & Cabbages—we ate tater brats (fried potato and bratwurst) for a week. Finally, I made the mistake of complaining.

  “This isn’t bad,” my dad said. “It’s the wurst.”

  * * *

  This year my parents had something special up their sleeves. I entered the kitchen to find them both hunched over the stove, inspecting the contents of a frying pan. The kitchen smelled like maple syrup.

  My mom was chewing on her thumbnail and squinting with deep concentration. My dad tugged at the hairs of his beard, which hugged his face like the chinstrap of a football helmet. I was never sure why my dad didn’t grow a mustache, too. Whenever anybody asked about his mustache-less beard, he’d reply, “If it was good enough for Honest Abe Lincoln, then it’s good enough for me.”

  How can you argue with that?

  “What’s up?” I said, and they both jumped.

  “Paul!” My mom clutched at her throat. “We’re deep in experimentation here. I really think we’re onto something.”

  “I’m glad you’re home,” my dad said. “I need you to do something for us.” Lately, it seemed like my dad was only ever in one of two places: the kitchen or the family store. Honest Hardware wasn’t a big place—just an open room with some aisles of tools, lawn-care stuff, household items, nuts and bolts—but it had everything most Bellwood residents needed. Like I said, it was a family business: his dad worked there before him, and his dad’s dad had established the store. It was probably expected that I’d take it over someday, but we never really talked much about that.

  A few days earlier, I overheard my parents whispering to each other in the kitchen. I could tell they were talking about the store, and they sounded worried. I could have sworn I heard them repeat the same word over and over again: conquistador. When I came in, they changed the subject immediately. I wondered what it could mean.

  “A job for me? What is it?” I asked, a little concerned about the answer.

  “Clear a space on the mantelpiece. Make it big enough for a trophy.”

  “Jerry,” my mom said. “Don’t get cocky.”

  I was intrigued. “So what’s the plan this year?”

  “Everybody likes pancakes, right?” my mom asked.

  “Sure.”

  “And everybody likes bratwurst.”

  “Well…”

  “So we figured we’d put them together!” She was clearly very excited about this idea.

  I wanted to be on board, but I wasn’t convinced yet.

  My dad ignored my hesitation. “You’ve heard of pigs in a blanket, right? Well, say hello to the future Triple B first-prize dish: Swine in a Sleeping Bag.”

  They both beamed at me with big, toothy grins, obviously expecting some kind of reaction.

  “I’ll go clear off the mantelpiece.”

  “Atta boy!” my dad yelled, then high-fived my mom.

  * * *

  The sound of screeching tires woke me from a deep sleep in the middle of the night. I sat bolt upright in my bed, caught in that startled, foggy space between my dreams and the darkness of my room. Had I dreamed the sound? But then I could hear the hum of a car engine speeding by my house.

  The clock on my dresser read 12:43 a.m. I swiveled out of bed and stumbled clumsily to the window that overlooked the road. With a little effort, I creaked it open and thrust my head out into the night air, but there was no sign of a car on Munchaus Avenue. I looked to my right in time to see a pair of red taillights disappearing into the entrance to the old overgrown forest road. The lights bounced and jostled, and then the hulking trees of the Bell Woods, outlined in black in the night, enveloped them. And just like that, the stillness of the night returned.

  I tried to remember the last time I’d seen a car drive down that old dirt road. It’d been a long time. I watched the mouth of the road for a minute or two, wondering maybe if the car would come back out once the driver realized that nature had reclaimed the path up ahead, but there was no sign of it. Right as I was about to go back to bed, a small noise from across the street caught my attention. There, gliding from the Wagners’ garage, across the front lawn, and up to their front steps was a dark figure. I squinted to get a better look. By the dull shine of the porch light, I watched as Janice Wagner, my old babysitter, silently opened her front door, cast a sharp glance down the street, and then disappeared into the house. What was she up to, sneaking around at this hour? And had she heard the screeching of the tires, too?

  I listened to the night for a moment longer, but there was only the soft chorus of insects and a slight breeze rustling through the trees. I was struck by the feeling that something was about to happen in Bellwood. Or maybe it had already begun happening. What was coming to our little town? And what did the duckies on Babbage’s lawn, their little yellow bodies floating atop his grass, have to do with it? Were they some kind of message of things to come? Or were they a warning?

  And then the feeling passed, and I was tired again. The urge to sleep was already overtaking me, and I yawned, rubbed my eyes, and slunk back to the comfort of my bed.

  It was Wednesday, and that meant it was time for another round of Paul vs. the Lawn. It wasn’t a fair fight. The lawn was big and wide, with thousands of blades of grass. All I had was an old rusty push mower that we’d owned since way before I was born, maybe before the dawn of humankind. We did have a beautiful, gleaming GrassMaster 3000 riding mower in the garage, but my dad wouldn’t let me use it. He called it the “Cadillac of lawn-maintenance devices” and said that I needed to foster a respect for the lawn before I could fire it up. What did that even mean?

  I wasn’t exactly thrilled about the job, but I didn’t have a choice. My dad expected it to be mowed by the time he got home from the hardware store, and when it came to the lawn, you couldn’t really reason with him. Besides, a little “me-time” to contemplate the mystery of the duckies while I mowed the lawn was just what I needed. In fact, “me-time” was the only kind of time available, because my mom was out running errands. Leaving me alone at the house was a new thing, and my parents still seemed a little uncomfortable with it, but they said that I was getting old enough to take care of myself. I liked the way that sounded: taking care of myself. But something about it also made me a little nervous. What if t
he house caught on fire? What if Ronald ate another action figure? What if I accidentally ate an action figure…and then set the house on fire?

  The mower clanged and wheezed like some medieval torture device as I pushed it through the grass. The dry grass. Of course it was dry: Bellwood, and the whole region, was in the middle of a drought. That’s why the forest fires outside of town were so hard to contain. Mrs. Willis, the chief of the Bellwood Fire Department, and Byron, her teenage son, a Junior Firefighter, had visited our class at the end of the school year and talked about some of the ways they were helping to fight the fires. I think Peephole paid particularly close attention because he was transfixed by Byron, who also had loose, stringy limbs and must have been the tallest kid in high school. If Bellwood had a contest to see who was the lankiest, those two would be the favorites.

  At the time, the forest fires didn’t feel real to me. But now it was kind of scary to think that we were going about our lives, business as usual, while the woods not too far down the road were on fire. The helicopters buzzing by over our heads, going to and from the fires, were getting to be a normal thing, and they were a constant reminder that a strong change in the wind was all it would take for the wildfires to come toward Bellwood, like a monster banging on our walls, wanting to be let in.

  So why was Babbage’s grass wet? Even if he had watered it with a hose or a sprinkler, that didn’t account for the ducks, or the fish in the tree. I had a hunch that the water, the ducks, and the fish all came from the same place, and that Babbage had nothing to do with it. But where?