Finally, Something Mysterious

by Doug Cornett

  Not everybody cooked bratwurst, of course. There were also booths featuring “notwurst” (the vegetarian version of the German sausage), sauerkraut, pretzels, funnel cakes, onion rings, ice cream, cookies, and elephant ears. Now, I’m no historian, but I’m pretty sure the French Revolution did not feature onion rings and elephant ears.

  The Triple B wasn’t just about stuffing your face, though. The playing field was home to all kinds of activities, games, and performances. I surveyed the scene around us. A man with white face paint and big red shoes (I hesitate to call him a clown because his curly blue wig was at his side and he was wearing a Metallica T-shirt) practiced making balloon wiener dogs. A woman with a top hat wobbled uneasily on six-foot-high stilts, bowing up and down with great formality. A cat with glitter in her fur ignored the repeated requests of her owner to do a flip, and as we passed by, the cat gave me a pleading look. An old man wearing lederhosen burped loudly and swung a chain of bratwurst links over his head like a lasso. A lady on a unicycle wobbled past. She was playing the Star Wars theme on a set of bagpipes, but she wasn’t particularly good at it, or at unicycling. She nearly slammed into a table of sausage-themed jewelry, but she swerved at the last second, letting out a frantic wail from her bagpipes that sounded like a startled goat.

  When we found our table, my parents and I got to work setting up. My mom propped up a hand-drawn sign that read TEAM MARCONI, with a cartoon bratwurst giving a thumbs-up. It was then that we all turned to see Mr. Babbage approach the table next to ours and start unloading his own cooking equipment. He was right next to us! I studied my parents, who were studying Mr. Babbage. They were grinning politely once again, but there was a kind of fascination and awe in their eyes, like the crowd outside the lion’s cage at the zoo.

  Babbage was wearing a very dapper outfit, as usual, but he looked especially gussied up for today’s event. His black hair was expertly slicked to the side, his eyebrows arched upward like a camel’s humps, and he wore a salmon-pink button-down shirt tucked into neatly pressed black slacks. His shoes were white and polished to a shine. He looked like the Emperor of Bratwurst. I tried to mentally compare him to the prom picture from my dad’s yearbook, but the other Babbage seemed light-years away. Funny how time works.

  I glanced down at my phone and saw that it was 9:55 a.m. In five minutes I was set to meet Shanks at the statue of Wolfgang Munchaus. “Ahem,” I said, drawing my parents’ attention back to me. “If there’s nothing else you guys need, is it okay if I wander around and find Shanks and Peephole?” I could have added, to set up a sting operation to expose the ducky mastermind, but I thought it best to leave that part out.

  “You know how this works,” my mom said, turning to me. “The judges will come around and sample everyone’s dish, and then they’ll select five finalists to go onstage and present their bratwurst to Chief Taster Pocus.”

  Aside from being on the town council, the judges were all ordinary members of our community. Mrs. Schonfeld taught science in the high school, and her husband was an artist who made paintings of natural disasters. Mr. Bloom was a doctor. Mrs. Cavendish was an instructor at the driving school. The longest-serving judge was Mr. Quill, who sat in the park and ate croissants, getting flakes and crumbs all over his beard, muttering mild curses at the nearby birds. (This probably wasn’t his day job, but I’d never seen him do anything else.)

  The chief taster, on the other hand, was like the nine U.S. Supreme Court justices all wrapped in a single person. The “CT” was elected and held the office for a four-year term, and during the campaign before every election, candidates had to prove the prowess of their taste buds by performing various feats of flavor identification. Mr. Pocus was in his third term, which meant he’d been the CT my entire life. His taste buds were famous in Bellwood. The other 364 days of the year he was Mr. Pocus, terror of the elementary school. But on the day of the Bonanza, he was strictly Chief Taster Pocus, and nobody was more important. That was especially true for the Marconis this year. I thought about the Conquistador and the fate of Honest Hardware. I crossed my fingers and hoped that Pocus was in a smiling mood.

  “If we make it through,” my mom continued, “the final round begins at noon. Make sure you’re back!” She insisted on a fist bump, and my dad gave me a two-fingered salute, then made me stick a name tag on my shirt that read TEAM MARCONI.

  “Good luck, guys,” I said, and turned to go, shifting my backpack of duckies from one shoulder to the other. “And good luck to us,” I muttered to myself, because the One and Onlys were about to launch the dumbest (or most brilliant plan) ever concocted.

  The bronze statue of Wolfgang Munchaus stood in front of the steps of the elementary school, grinning proudly out over the crowd of the 87th annual Bellwood Bratwurst Bonanza, a map in his left hand and a bratwurst in his right. I leaned against the base of the statue and surveyed the scene while I waited for Shanks. She was already five minutes late to our rendezvous.

  The woman on stilts tromped up and down the aisles of booths, tipping her top hat at everybody. Kids were coming up to her and asking how come she was so tall, and one particularly little girl poked her foot to make sure she was real. A woman was trying to teach a man how to hula-hoop, and her movements were fluid and easy, like a thin plume of smoke, like she had been born hula-hooping. The man kept nodding and saying, “I got it, I got it,” but the way the hoop kept on falling to his ankles proved he did not get it.

  The glittery cat had a small crowd around it. It wasn’t doing flips, exactly, but it was doing some kind of roly-poly movement that kind of resembled a flip. Maybe it was just trying to get all the glitter out of its hair. The cat’s owner was clapping and cheering far more enthusiastically than any of the observers.

  Suddenly, Shanks appeared at my side. She was holding a bouquet of electric-blue cotton candy. Wispy tufts of it were stuck to her upper lip, and it almost looked like she’d grown a sky-colored mustache.

  “That’s why you’re late?” I asked, pointing to the cloud of sugar fluff.

  She shrugged her shoulders. “Long line. Besides, I need brain snacks. We’ve got some serious detecting to do today.” Her face momentarily disappeared behind the cotton candy, then reemerged with an even thicker blue mustache. She looked like a cross between Portnoy and a Smurf. “I just wish Peephole was here,” she sighed. “Paul…are you worried about Trillium, too?”

  “Yeah. But it feels like there’s nothing we can do for them.”

  A distant growl caught my attention, and I turned my head to see a single line of trucks, like a giant metal centipede, scuttling its way through Bellwood. I knew exactly where they were headed: to the drive-in field. The ominous rumble represented the arrival of the Conquistador.

  “We can do one thing for Peephole: solve the case,” Shanks said. “You got the duckies?”

  I took the backpack off my shoulder and opened it. The tiny little rubber eyes looked up at me like they were excited to help in our ruse. From a side pocket I took out two black markers.

  “Let’s go over the plan one more time,” I said, passing Shanks a marker and an armful of duckies. “First, we tag all of our little yellow friends here with the word ‘Confess’ in bold letters, and then we scatter them all over the Triple B.”

  “Yeah!” Shanks chuckled, rubbing her hands together with delight. “And then we make a few special duckies for our suspects: Pocus, Bella Tuff, Janice, and Darrel Sullivan. We’ll write, ‘We know you did it! Your days of ducky mischief are over! Confess to the statue of Wolfgang Munchaus, you dastardly criminal mastermind!’ ”

  I looked down at the little ducky in my hand. “I don’t think that’s all going to fit on here. How about we write, ‘We know. Confess to Munchaus!’?”

  “Okay, fine. But we gotta be extra-stealthy when we slip them the duckies. They can’t see it was us!”

  “Exactly. It’ll be just like the tellta
le heart in that horror story your parents read to you. We’ll set up our original ducky, Mister E, at Wolfgang’s feet,” I pointed to the bronze statue above us. “And then we’ll wait. Eventually, whoever of our suspects is the true ducky thief will be driven mad by the sight of the duckies everywhere they turn, and soon they’ll be so overwhelmed with guilt that they’ll pour out their confession to us right here.”

  “And that’s when we tackle them!” Shanks hooted, jabbing a fist into the air in front of her.

  “What is it with you and tackling?” I asked.

  “Sorry. Just excited for this.”

  * * *

  Once the telltale duckies were all tagged, we cast ourselves into the thick of the Triple B crowd to lay our trap. We put duckies along contestant row, where the hopeful Bonanza entrants were eagerly serving their carefully prepared dishes. We put a ducky on the counter of Jojo’s Fried Frog Legs food truck. We dropped two duckies on the ground near the Rodents of the Wild West booth, where you could get your picture taken with Billy the Echidna or Wild Bill Chipmunk. We put a ducky on the Bellwood Fire Department booth, where Byron was recruiting kids for the Junior Firefighters. We put a ducky on the hood of the Bratwurst Mobile, which was parked in the center of the field, with a ring of admirers around it. We scattered duckies around the cute-pet contest, causing a dustup between a pug and a Chihuahua. We put duckies in the Bellwood of the Past tent, sponsored by the Bellwood Historical Society, and we put duckies in the Bellwood of the Future tent, sponsored by the Bellwood Sci-Fi Society. Duckies, duckies, duckies.

  Finally, we were left with our last four duckies, each with “We know. Confess to Munchaus!” scrawled on their backs.

  “Now,” I said, gripping a ducky and sweeping my eyes over the crowd, “we need to find our suspects.”

  “Pocus!” Shanks flung her pointer finger in the direction of a small clump of Bellwoodians gathered at the Pet-a-Llama booth. The booth was exactly what it sounds like—when it was your turn, you got to pet a real-life llama. The llama, whose name was Hal, stood there with a blank expression on his face while people stroked his furry head and back. He had a pink bow tied around his neck and some funny little gold booties on his feet and insanely long eyelashes that swooped upward like a wave. Pocus stood at the end of a long line, his hands folded patiently behind his back.

  “Maybe the llama will bite his hand off,” Shanks suggested.

  “Shanks! That’s a horrible thought,” I scolded, but then I remembered a fractions quiz Mr. Pocus had given back to me. There was a mustard smudge on the top of the page, and he’d drawn an arrow to it and wrote, Your grade. As bad as that was, he was even meaner to Peephole. And then there was Byron Willis, who’d needed to take time off from school after having Pocus as a teacher. “Maybe just a finger or two.”

  Shanks snatched the ducky from my hand and trotted up behind Pocus, careful not to attract any attention. She rocked back and forth on her heels, pretending to casually take in the sights of the Bonanza, then leaned forward and slipped the ducky into Pocus’s sweater vest pocket. With that, she disappeared back into the crowd, popping up at my side a few moments later.

  The two of us watched from a safe distance, wondering when Pocus might discover our bait, but he never reached into his pocket. Finally, he made it to the front of the line. He stepped up next to Hal the llama, stared him in the face, and then gingerly tapped the top of Hal’s head, like he was testing to see if a stove was still hot. Instead of stroking the llama, he just kept his hand there, like it was tired and he was resting it. Then, an odd change occurred in his expression. It reminded me of a wax statue melting in the sun.

  “What’s happening to Pocus’s face?” Shanks asked, her eyes wide with bewilderment.

  The only reason I knew the answer was because I’d seen Pocus make that face before—in the yearbook that my dad showed me from thirty years ago. “He’s…smiling.”

  It was a big-time smile, too. Wide and joyful. And then he leaned in and kissed the llama on the nose.

  “Peephole would never believe what we just saw,” I said, wishing once again that the One and Onlys were in full force. I wondered if he was at the hospital with his sister and mom, and hoped, once again, that everything was okay.

  “I think Pocus might have lost his mind,” Shanks said, her jaw still drooping.

  “I think you might be right, and if he had anything to do with the duckies, we’ll find out soon. But come on—we’ve got three more duckies to hand out, and either an elephant is giving birth or I hear a tuba nearby.”

  It was a tuba. Right around the corner of the elementary school, we found a cluster of kids clad in the official brown mustard–colored regalia of the Bellwood marching band. Chad Foster was there, trombone in hand, along with a short kid carrying a big drum, a slim girl with an accordion strapped to her chest, and Janice Wagner, standing next to an enormous tuba. I did a double take at Janice’s instrument. It seemed to me that either Janice had shrunk or her tuba had gotten bigger. In fact, it was so big that a guy was helping her hold it up. This guy, who had thick-rimmed glasses and a haircut that made his head look like a bucket, seemed to be showing her how to play it. I recognized him as Mr. Mundo, the band teacher.

  Janice practiced her movements, and unlike the night I saw her in the woods, she kept the tuba on the ground and twisted around it. Even though she wasn’t able to twirl and hop like I’d seen her do before, I was hypnotized by her playing.

  Chad Foster, who was in our grade, was also practicing his dance steps, but he was a lot less graceful than Janice. In fact, he looked like he was trying to keep his balance during an earthquake. Mr. Mundo glanced over at him and shook his head slowly.

  “Come on, dude,” Shanks said, suddenly appearing at my side though I hadn’t noticed she’d left. She pulled me back into the human traffic of the Triple B.

  “But we didn’t give Janice a telltale ducky,” I complained.

  “I did. I put it on her scooter while you were zoning out,” Shanks said in a slightly annoyed voice.

  We knew that Darrel and Bella were both entering bratwurst dishes in the competition, so we zipped back over to contestant row on the other side of the blacktop. It didn’t take long for us to find them both.

  “They’re right next to each other!” Shanks exclaimed.

  A hand-scrawled sign on Darrel Sullivan’s table announced his bratwurst and “lobster” rolls, and I was very curious about those quotation marks around “lobster.” Darrel was grinning through his bleached white goatee as he handed out samples of his creation.

  At the next table over, Bella served up her “Tuff’s Troutwurst.” I wondered if the fish on those plates had once been friends with Tina Fish, may she rest in peace.

  “What’s the plan?” I asked. “We can’t just walk up and hand them the duckies. Bella knows me too well, and Peephole nearly poked Darrel Sullivan’s eye out, so I don’t think we’re high on his list of favorite people.”

  “So we’ve got to put the duckies on their tables without them noticing us,” Shanks replied.

  We surveyed the situation, and it didn’t look good. Both Darrel and Bella were facing out, so we couldn’t sneak up from the front. Their backs were to the wall of the elementary school, so we couldn’t sneak up behind them, either.

  But then we caught a lucky break. A commotion from a few tables down the line caught everyone’s attention. A man shrieked, a tablecloth came flying off, and a tiny furry thing came scampering up the pathway. Wild Bill Chipmunk, from the Rodents of the Wild West booth, had escaped and was making the most of his freedom run. Several frantic Bellwoodians chased after him, but he was a wily little guy, and he evaded his pursuers by darting this way and that, taking nibbles from every plate he passed. In an impressive leap, he bounded onto Darrel’s table, knocking over the display, then jolted over to Bella’s table, sending her carefu
lly crafted dishes into disarray. Both Bella and Darrel sprang to their feet and joined the chase, bumping into each other when Wild Bill changed course.

  “Now’s our chance!” I squawked, and Shanks and I dashed over to their tables, placing a ducky on each of their chairs while they were distracted by the historical rodent.

  “Back to the statue!” Shanks called.

  We skittered through the Triple B, passing many of our carefully placed telltale duckies along the way. At the steps of the elementary school, we laid our final ducky, Mister E, at the bronze feet of Wolfgang Munchaus.

  The first phase of the One and Onlys’ most brilliant and/or dumbest plan was complete. And now it was time to wait.

  We waited. Leaning against the base of the Wolfgang Munchaus statue, Shanks and I watched the people of Bellwood pass by us like a babbling brook. Any minute, we figured, our guilty suspect would emerge from the crowd and confess everything. I hoped it wasn’t Bella, or Janice, but I wasn’t so sure anymore.

  We waited some more. Any minute, we said.

  Minutes passed. We kept waiting.

  And then I noticed a man watching us. He had a blue baseball hat on and was wearing jeans and a jean jacket. In his hand was one of our rubber duckies, and he glanced down at it, then at us again.

  “Who is that?” I whispered to Shanks.

  “I don’t know, but he’s coming this way.”

  The man approached us cautiously, like we were wild animals and he was on a safari. “Is this where I’m supposed to confess?” he asked.

  “Uh…,” I faltered. Who was this guy? Could it be possible that the ducky thief was somebody who wasn’t even on our radar?