Finally, Something Mysterious

by Doug Cornett

  A long moment passed. Janice stood with the mouthpiece of her tuba hovering near her lips as she stared at the ducks, and I crouched behind her, close enough to toss a paper airplane by her ear.

  She stared at the ducks. I stared at her staring at the ducks. And then I, too, was staring at the ducks.

  And then things seemed to happen in slow motion. Janice expelled three heavy breaths, then bobbed her head four times with exaggerated intensity, like a rock drummer counting off a beat, before sliding backward on one foot while kicking up her opposite leg in the air. At the same instant, a low booming rumble poured out of her tuba, reverberating off the enormous trees all around us and startling me into a crouch. From there, behind the trunk of a thick tree, I watched the strangest performance I’d ever seen.

  Janice moved like a robot ballerina, her legs twisting and planting, twisting and planting. Each of her steps sent up a sloshing gulp from the swampy mud, and occasionally her whole body would twirl, tuba and all, like an Olympic figure skater. Sometimes, one knee would shoot up in one direction while the other fanned out away from it. Somehow she kept her balance. But it was more than just that. She was making a mockery of the laws of physics, all while blowing out a clear and resounding tune from her enormous tuba. In fact, I recognized the song: “We Are the Champions.”

  Entranced by the moonlight serenade, I forgot to blink or even breathe. I had a fleeting idea of pulling out my phone and recording everything, but I didn’t want to risk the movement, and anyway it would be too dark for the camera to pick anything up without the flash on. At the end of the song, Janice leapt into a scissors kick, then dropped to one knee, allowing the final note to ring out. When my trance broke in the still-echoing quiet that followed, I had to resist the urge to clap. I’d blow my cover, of course, but the ducks weren’t going to give her applause, and neither was the blood-red moon looking down on us.

  I stayed very still as Janice stood, caught her breath for a minute or two, then launched back into the same routine, from the beginning. It was as flawless and mesmerizing as the first time. And so was the next time she did it. And the next time. And the time after that. For what must have been fifteen minutes, I watched as she practiced her movements again and again.

  Finally, out of breath and apparently satisfied, she bent down, zipped her tuba into her case, and threw it over her shoulders as she stood up. She walked her scooter back toward the forest road. Before kicking off, she slowly turned and regarded the pile of duckies one last time. Now that the glow of the scooter’s headlight was no longer upon them, they were easy to miss. But I knew they were there, just radiating mystery, and so did Janice.

  Without warning, Janice whipped around and looked in my direction. I ducked my head as fast as I could. Had she seen me? Was she going to call out my name, demand to know why I was spying on her? To my relief, a few seconds later the whirring sound of her scooter filled the woods again, and I saw her move back down the forest road toward Munchaus Avenue, and toward another “ordinary” summer night in Bellwood.

  By the time I made it to the forest road, the scooter’s headlight was a thin point of light way in the distance. I didn’t care. I knew where she was going, and it was the same place I was headed. Back to bed.

  Somehow I wasn’t scared on my walk out of the Bell Woods to my house, even though the black silhouettes of the trees seemed to lean in toward me, reaching out spindly fingers into the smeary sky. I guess I was just too excited. There was a real mystery to solve in Bellwood, and it kept getting weirder and weirder—and better and better.

  When I could no longer see the scooter light ahead of me, I pulled my phone out. I texted Shanks and Peephole.

  U guys up? Cuz I’ve got a story you’re not gonna believe!

  “Bratwurst, bratwurst. How come you’re so yummy?” My dad two-stepped his way into the living room, singing off-key. “Bratwurst, bratwurst. Bonanza in my tummy!” He had been singing variations of this song every day for the last week.

  I looked up from my notebook and blinked at him. I was a little groggy from missing so much sleep the night before, but I was also electrified by the new developments in the case of the duckies. I pictured Janice, swaying and kicking and sliding through a mud patch in the middle of the Bell Woods, serenading the duckies—and me—under a blood-red moon. Part of me wondered if I’d dreamed up the whole thing.

  I’d been scribbling down my scattered thoughts on the recent events in Bellwood. If I could make sense of all the clues and suspects, then maybe the One and Onlys could crack the case. When we talked to Babbage, he seemed certain that his neighbor, Mr. Pocus, was responsible for the ducks. The two of them definitely had bad blood, but was that enough to explain everything? There was also Bella Tuff, who told us that the fish in Babbage’s yard had come from Schuylerville Lake. But Peephole didn’t trust her. And, it’s true, she did have a ducky on her desk. But she didn’t have a motive, as far as I could tell. Why would she dump duckies in Babbage’s yard, and then break into the police storage shed, remove them, and dump them once again in a swamp in the Bell Woods?

  In my notebook I wrote THE BREAK-IN and underlined it. Whoever took the duckies from the storage shed was not afraid to break the law—not to mention a padlock. I tapped my pencil against the page, feeling a tiny tug that we had missed something when we were there. But what? There were the big clues of the tire tracks, the broken taillight, and the green paint on the cement pole outside the shed door. Was there something else right under our noses?

  But who, then? Janice? She had led me to the duckies, after all, and she was also there in the storage shed yesterday when we investigated it. But I couldn’t believe that she was involved. I didn’t want to believe it. And yet, how could she explain last night’s mysterious performance?

  I had to fight the urge to tell my parents about the investigation. This was already the most exciting summer I’d ever had, and it felt weird to keep all of it from my mom and dad. But telling them the details of the case would mean admitting that I’d been sneaking around town in the middle of the night. They would get worried, and mad, and they might even ground me. Knowing them, they could do something crazy like call Peephole’s and Shanks’s parents, and then all the One and Onlys would get grounded. I couldn’t risk shutting down the investigation, especially now that the mystery was getting deeper.

  “What are you working on there, Paul?” My dad peered down at me with a particular look that I was very familiar with. He was thinking of a job for me to do.

  “I’m, uh, working on a case,” I said, which was the truth.

  “A case?”

  “I’m going to solve the mystery of the ducks. You know, in Mr. Babbage’s yard.”

  “Ah, yes. Let me quack the case for you, Paul,” he said with a wink, just to make sure I got his pun. “It was just a prank. And speaking of yards…I couldn’t help but notice that our own yard is only partly mowed.”

  “Oh…yeah. I guess I got distracted. I’ll finish it today.”

  My mom, doing yoga in the den, overheard us and called out her agreement with dad’s conclusion. “Crazy teenagers!” she shouted from her downward-dog position.

  My parents thought everything was a prank pulled by crazy teenagers. That spring, for instance, when a thunderstorm knocked out the power for the whole neighborhood, they combed the area with flashlights trying to find the goons responsible for it.

  I wanted to tell my parents about our progress in the case, but another part of me wanted to keep it secret. I guess I wanted the One and Onlys to solve the case all on our own. Also, they’d have a nuclear meltdown if they knew we had been questioned by Officer Portnoy, even if we were completely innocent. Besides, Bella Tuff was on our suspect list, and that would be hard to explain to my dad.

  And that reminded me: “Shouldn’t you be at work, Dad? It’s almost nine.”

  “I’m
taking the morning off,” he explained. “Your mother and I have to work on our recipe for the Triple B. Bella’s doing me a favor and watching the store.”

  With a cringe, I remembered how rude Peephole had been to Bella the day before. But what was she hiding? “So, um…Bella said she missed work on Tuesday.”

  My dad nodded. “That’s right. Her first sick day in ten years. By the way, after you kids left yesterday, she grumbled something about needing to get a lock for her office door. What were you talking to her about, anyway?”

  “Oh, we…uh…” I wracked my brain to come up with a good lie, but nothing came. “We had a couple of questions about a fish and, um, the ducks.”

  “Prank!” my mom called from the den, still stuck on the duckies.

  I walked to the doorway, grateful for an excuse to dodge my dad’s questions about Bella, and found my mom contorting her body into a pretzel. “It’s because kids don’t know what to do with themselves these days,” she said. “Too much time on their hands!”

  “And what did you guys do when you were that age?” I asked skeptically.

  My mom thought about this. “Not much,” she admitted. “Drove around. Ate French fries. Saw movies at the old drive-in theater. Your father and I used to go there all the time. We had our first date there. Remember, Jerry?”

  “Oh, I remember, Denise.” My dad squeezed by me into the den. He had a faint grin on his face, like he was reliving the best years of his life in his head. “It used to be the thing to do on weekends.”

  “It was the only thing to do,” my mom said, balancing on her head.

  “How long has the drive-in movie theater been abandoned, anyway?” I asked.

  “Looong time,” my mom said.

  “You know”—my dad snapped his fingers—“we used to have a picture of your mom and me at the drive-in when we were young.” He disappeared from the room, and I listened as he opened and closed drawers.

  “Aha!” he called out, and returned holding a dusty high school yearbook.

  “This is from our freshman year,” he said with a wonky grin on his face. He flipped through the pages for a few seconds, then handed the book to me as he beamed with pride. There they were, my mom and dad, standing in front of a red convertible that probably wasn’t even theirs. In the background of the photograph were rows of cars and people milling about. My dad was right, they were much younger in the picture; he had a mesh blue baseball hat on, from which fluffy tufts of brown hair poked out, and my mom’s hair was curly and tall. They both wore great big toothy smiles. It was funny that they’d gotten older but still had the exact same way of smiling. Maybe that never changes, from the time you’re a baby all the way to the retirement home.

  “So why did the drive-in close down?” I asked as I absentmindedly flipped through the pages of the old yearbook.

  My dad shrugged. “Times changed. A big multiplex opened up in Swenson City, and everybody started going there instead. After a while, Mr. Shamtraw must not have wanted to put the money in to keep it open.”

  “But I thought everybody loved the drive-in. Why would they go to Swenson City instead?”

  My mom and dad exchanged a glance. “The drive-in was old, even when we were going to it,” she explained. “It had been around forever. Your grandparents used to go there. And the new theater was bigger. It had comfortable seats. It was shiny.”

  “Shiny?”

  “It was new, and it was convenient,” she said.

  “But what about all the good times people had at the drive-in? Didn’t that mean anything?”

  My dad put a hand on my shoulder. “Of course it meant something. That field will always have a magic feeling about it. But if it’s a question of nostalgia or convenience, people choose convenience. Every time.”

  “That’s stupid,” I said. Again I couldn’t help but feel bad for the drive-in.

  My dad’s sad smile said two things. (1) He agreed with me. He really did. And (2) there wasn’t anything we could do about it.

  Just then I caught my parents giving each other another heavy look. Their eyes met and held for a nanosecond too long to be normal, and I thought I detected a hint of worry in their faces.

  Somehow I knew they wouldn’t tell me what was wrong. I decided to ask a different question, one that I suspected was more to the point.

  “Who is the Conquistador?”

  Alarm flashed on their faces.

  “Where’d you hear about the Conquistador?” my dad asked.

  “I saw a sign at the drive-in field that said he was coming soon.”

  “It’s not a who—it’s a what,” my mom explained. “The Conquistador is a megastore.”

  “A what?”

  “You know, like a Walmart. A giant store that has everything. Groceries, clothes, sporting goods.”

  “Hardware,” my dad added.

  “And they’re building it right here in Bellwood?” I asked. “Where the drive-in used to be?” And where the headquarters of the One and Onlys currently is located, I thought. I remembered the two people in hard hats pounding stakes into the ground.

  “That’s right,” my dad said. “Construction is set to begin this week.”

  “Why does the Conquistador have to be built right there?” I said, aware that my voice had a whiny pitch to it. “I mean, couldn’t they build it somewhere else and keep the field the way it is?”

  “That space isn’t being used right now. And, well, it is a good location. It’s going to be very hard for our little store to compete with it,” my dad continued, and there was something strange about his voice. He sounded so…defeated.

  “But people will still go to Honest Hardware. They’ve been shopping at our store for generations. Right?”

  My mom forced a smile. “Sure they will. Some of them, at least. The loyal ones.”

  “But everybody in Bellwood shops there. They’ll all be loyal, won’t they?”

  My dad sighed. “You know, yesterday Darrel Sullivan came into the store.”

  “The dude with the white goatee? Yeah, I think I remember seeing him.” I looked back down at the yearbook. I’d flipped to the prom page. The prom king and queen, an awkwardly hugging couple in a matching baby-blue suit and dress, beamed their billboard-sized smiles up at me.

  “Yep,” my dad said. “Darrel’s a decent guy, but he can’t seem to hang on to a job for very long. He’s got a million get-rich-quick schemes, but none of them pan out. In the last couple of years, he’s tried everything from putting on magic shows to breeding rabbits to making furniture. He even tried his hand at giving tennis lessons.”

  “I didn’t know Darrel was an athlete,” my mom said.

  “He’s not,” my dad replied. “Which is why he’s now a truck driver for a toy company. It’s the steadiest job he’s had in a long time. Anyway, he lives right around the corner from the store, on Radford, so he comes in fairly often to pick up whatever random thing he might need for his current job, and yesterday he looked particularly frazzled. His eyes were all bloodshot, like he hadn’t slept all night, and he was sweating buckets. I really wanted to help him out, but I didn’t have what he needed.” He shoved his hands into his pockets helplessly.

  While listening to my dad, I ran my fingers along the glossy pages of the yearbook. On the opposite page from the prom king and queen was a photo collage of other students at the dance: a goofy dude with wavy hair squeezing his date, which was a stuffed dog; a group of girls, their arms around each other, laughing as if they’d just heard the funniest joke ever told; a guy in an immaculate tuxedo with perfectly combed black hair, smiling down at his date, a curly haired girl wearing a T-shirt that read GONE FISHING. My eyes lingered on this last couple. There was something so familiar about them. Was it the self-assured gleam in the guy’s eye? Was it the way the girl’s hair seemed to explode from her head
? And then it hit me.

  I yelped. “Bella Tuff and Mr. Babbage went to prom together!”

  My mom leaned over and squinted at the yearbook. “Would you look at that! I’d forgotten that Lance and Bella dated back in high school. That was about a million years ago.”

  “Nah, only thirty,” my dad said. “But a whole lot has changed since then, hasn’t it?”

  I blinked and leaned in closer. It was hard to believe that Bella and Babbage were ever that young, but sure enough, here was the proof. They both looked so…thin.

  “What was Darrel looking for?” my mom asked.

  “A taillight for his pickup truck,” my dad said dejectedly.

  I was still trying to process this new twist. Bella and Babbage did have a history together. Maybe that’s why Bella seemed so awkward when we brought up the ducks in Babbage’s yard. What if their relationship hadn’t ended well? What if they were bitter enemies? Was this her motive?

  “That’s exactly the kind of thing he could get at the Conquistador,” my dad continued. “The best I could do for him was to sell him a roll of duct tape to patch up the broken glass on the rear of his pickup.”

  My mom put a hand on my dad’s shoulder. “We’ll be okay, Jerry.”

  He smiled back at her. “No, Denise, we’re going to be better than okay. We’re going to be the wieners. Right, Paul?”

  I looked up, startled back to attention. “Wait—what did you say?”

  “We’re going to be the wieners?”

  “No. Before that. About Darrel Sullivan.”

  “Oh, that he had a busted taillight on his truck and the only thing I could do for him was to sell him some duct tape. But let’s not dwell on the sad stuff. After all, we’ve got the Bellwood Bratwurst Bonanza to prepare for! The competition is this Saturday, and today is already Thursday, and so…Hey! Where are you going, Paul?”