by Doug Cornett
“How come you wanted them back so bad?” Shanks asked.
Darrel Sullivan sighed again. “Because as far as Dunning Toy Company knows, those ducks have been delivered. I signed and filed the paperwork that said so. Like I said, I really need this job. I had no idea how the ducks ended up in Babbage’s yard. I figured maybe I could steal them back and deliver them to that warehouse in Hudson after all. Sure, they’d be a few days late, but nobody would know the difference.”
“So you’re saying that you have no idea how the duckies ended up in the middle of the Bell Woods?”
“Huh? Bell Woods?” Portnoy’s eyebrows folded down with confusion.
Darrel Sullivan held out his wrists together. “I’ve told you everything. Now, are you going to take me downtown, Officer Portnoy, or what?”
“ATTENTION, BONANZA GUESTS!”
A voice boomed out over the loudspeakers from every corner of the festival.
“THE JUDGES HAVE SELECTED THE FIVE FINALISTS FOR THIS YEAR’S BRATWURST COOK-OFF….”
I gripped Shanks’s shoulder, wide-eyed with anticipation. Everyone around us froze and listened for the names. Even Portnoy and Darrel Sullivan tilted their heads toward the speakers.
“WOULD THE FOLLOWING TEAMS PLEASE REPORT TO THE STAGE FOR THE FINAL TASTE-OFF: TEAM BABBAGE…TEAM PHILLY RICH…TEAM MURF…TEAM MARCONI…”
Shanks and I went for a high five, missed, then looked around to see if anyone was watching.
“…AND TEAM PORTNOY. THE TASTE-OFF WILL BEGIN IN FIFTEEN MINUTES.”
All of us turned to Portnoy in surprise. Apparently, he’d managed to perfect that spicy bratwurst recipe after all. He seemed more stunned than any of us. In fact, for a moment I thought he might topple right over from shock. But then his face regained its composure and he looked down at Darrel Sullivan.
“Well, Mr. Sullivan, it looks like a deputy might be taking you downtown instead of me.” He took his walkie-talkie from his belt and grumbled a message into it, then turned to level a stern gaze at Shanks and me.
“Say, where is your friend Pebble, anyway?” he asked.
“Peephole’s at the hospital with his brand-new little sister,” I said.
“Well, congratulations to him. Chunk, that’s some fine detective work. And Macaroni…looks like I’ll be seeing you in the finals. Best of luck.”
Ding ding. A text from my dad.
Game time, bud! Meet us at the stage. We need you!
This was the craziest Bellwood Bratwurst Bonanza I’d ever been to. The Marconi family had made it into the finals of the cook-off, and the One and Onlys had only one suspect left.
My dad was right. It was game time.
The big stage for the cook-off finals was set up on the playing field. Shanks and I joined a river of Bellwoodians flowing toward the main event. The faces around us were bright with anticipation, and the air sang with excited voices. I glimpsed my parents at one of the five tables onstage, busily setting up their dish. My dad cocked his head and peered out over the crowd. I knew he was looking for me, so I waved my arm at him like a wild man. He didn’t see me.
“Hurry up and get on that stage,” Shanks said. “You’ve got a Bonanza to win!”
“What about the investigation? We’re so close. We only have one suspect left!”
“I know, but this is the finals. We’ll confront Janice afterward. Go!”
A clump of brown mustard–colored bodies holding instruments next to the stage caught my attention. “There she is!” I yelped, barely able to control all of the energy coursing through my body.
“Paul!” My mom had caught sight of me and was calling to me from the stage. “Can you believe it? We’re in the finals! Come on up! We need you!”
I looked back at Janice. She was standing a few feet away from the rest of the band, her eyes closed, her shoulders rising and falling with her breathing. She seemed to be psyching herself up for the victory song.
It had to be her. There were no other suspects. Not only did Pocus not have anything to do with the ducks, he was convinced they were a love letter from beyond the grave from his deceased wife. Bella had lied to us only because she’d gone fishing instead of going to work. She was innocent of any ducky nonsense. And Darrel Sullivan had confessed to spilling the duckies in Schuylerville Lake, then breaking into the storage shed to get them back, but he said he didn’t put the duckies in Babbage’s yard. And somebody else took the duckies from the police and dumped them in the Bell Woods swamp.
Yes, I admitted to myself, Janice was at Babbage’s the morning the ducks arrived. She was at the police shed the day we investigated the break-in. She was at the swamp when I discovered the duckies there. She had been at all the wrong places at just the right time. Why? What was her game? To get in Babbage’s head?
I couldn’t take it any longer. I had to find out right then and there. “Just a minute,” I mouthed to my mom, then turned to face the band.
“What are you doing?” Shanks said. “You’re going to confront Janice now?” This time it was her turn to keep up with me as I marched toward a suspect.
We planted ourselves firmly in front of Janice. My entire body was tight with tension, my fingers tingling with nerves. But this had to happen. The One and Onlys were going to solve this case.
“Janice,” I said as evenly as I could manage. “We’ve got to ask you a question.”
She opened her eyes slowly and looked at us. She seemed a little surprised, but she was more than a little pale. And sweaty. She looked like she was about to cry. Or scream, maybe? Actually, she looked like she was about to puke.
“Are you okay?” That wasn’t the question I had planned on asking her, but it seemed the most appropriate.
She blew out a deep breath and her eyes got wide, and I braced myself for a barf shower. Instead, she stumbled a little. Shanks lunged and caught her before she fell, and my old babysitter reached out and put a hand on my shoulder to steady herself.
“It’s all right,” Shanks said. “We’ve got you.”
“Sorry,” Janice said faintly, “I suddenly don’t feel so well.”
We carefully helped her to a sitting position on the grass, and I sat down next to her.
“I’ll go get you some water,” Shanks said, then dashed away.
For a second, I wondered if this was a trick of some kind. If she was the ducky thief, maybe this was an attempt to distract us, and then she’d take off, just like Darrel Sullivan. One look at her face, which was beginning to turn the same shade of green as her eyes, told me that she wasn’t faking it.
“I’m so nervous about our performance,” Janice said, tilting her head in the direction of the band. “Mr. Mundo, the band director, wants me to play a giant tuba instead of my regular tuba.”
“What’s the difference?” Shanks asked.
“It’s bigger,” Janice said. “And it’s completely different to play. Mr. Mundo said it actually belonged to Wolfgang Munchaus, too. Apparently, the Bellwood Historical Society decided to let us play it at the last minute.”
“That sounds like a huge honor,” I offered.
“As if I wasn’t already nervous enough,” Janice said, rolling her eyes. “Plus, I think I may have eaten something funny. Did you try one of Darrel Sullivan’s lobster rolls?”
“I don’t think that was lobster,” Shanks said, back at my side with a bottle of water.
Janice stuck her tongue out. “I don’t think that was food.”
Shanks and I watched silently as she took small swigs of water, dabbing the sweat from her forehead with the sleeve of her band uniform. Finally, her face stopped looking so green.
“I’m so embarrassed,” she said. “It’s not just the lobster. See, I’ve got this stage-fright thing. It can make me a little light-headed. And I’ve been worrying about this moment al
l week. Pretty silly for a performer, huh? But the victory song is the crowning moment of the Bonanza.”
“It’s not silly at all,” Shanks said. From the look on her face, she was as stymied as I was. Should we hammer our suspect with questions or comfort her? “Do you know how to play the song?”
Janice smiled. “Back and forth, up and down. I’ve been practicing all week long. Pretty much drove my parents insane. And in the middle of the night, when I couldn’t sleep, I’d sneak out and practice some more. You’d think I’d be pretty confident right now, but I’ve got this giant tuba to deal with. And there are so many people here.” She waved her bottle of water at the ocean of spectators.
“Did you say you ‘sneak out’?” I asked.
Janice looked at me with a mischievous grin. “Want to hear something ridiculous? I couldn’t play in the house because I’d wake my parents up, so I went out to the middle of Bell Woods so nobody would hear me.”
“I know,” I said sheepishly.
Her face crinkled in confusion. “You know?”
“I…kinda…um…saw you out there.”
“You did? What were you doing in the woods in the middle of the night?”
“Following you.”
Janice stared at me, her face registering nothing at all.
“I wasn’t planning on following you,” I explained. “I was sitting outside my window because I couldn’t sleep. And then I saw you sneak out of your house with your scooter and zip into the woods. I had to follow.”
Janice’s jaw seemed to tighten a little while she continued to stare at me. I tried to swallow, but my mouth was suddenly bone-dry.
And then she exploded into a laugh. “This town,” she said, shaking her head, “can it get any funnier? Did you see the duckies out there?”
“Actually,” I said, taking the opportunity, “we were going to ask you about them. Did you put them there?”
“Me?” She laughed even harder. “No. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw them. It was the weirdest thing ever! You should ask Officer Portnoy about them. Maybe he’ll tell you why they’re out there.”
“He doesn’t know anything about it,” Shanks said.
Janice’s smile faded a little. “Are you sure? I mean, I was out there practicing on Tuesday night, and there were no duckies. Then, on my way back home, a van sped by me, heading down the forest road into the woods. In fact, it almost ran me over. It slammed on its brakes, and I swerved off the road.”
The screeching noise. That’s what woke me up on Tuesday night. And then I saw Janice sneaking back into her house.
“You think that Officer Portnoy was driving?” I asked.
“The headlights were too bright for me to see the driver,” Janice said. “But I did get a good look at the van when it barreled into the woods. There was a big stripe across the side, and on the back doors it said ‘Bellwood Police.’ ”
“ATTENTION, BONANZA GUESTS!” The loudspeakers attached to the stage startled us all. “THE FINAL COOK-OFF WILL NOW BEGIN!”
“Paul!” Both my parents leaned over the edge of the stage. “Game time!”
I turned back to Janice. “Gotta go. But…thanks for the help on the case.”
Shanks gave Janice a pat on the back. “You’re going to be great up there!”
Janice nodded and stood up. “Good luck, Paul. I hope it’s the Marconis’ Bonanza!”
“What have you been doing?” my mom asked as I settled into my seat at Team Marconi’s table. “I thought your dad and I were going to have to do this on our own.”
“Investigating mysteries,” I answered.
From the elevated stage I peered out over the familiar faces of Bellwood. There was Bella Tuff, grinning at us from the back. There was Byron Willis, and Janice’s parents—even Hal the llama had a spot cleared for him. There were my neighbors, my classmates, my teachers. And there was Shanks, hustling up to the front row to sit with her parents. She spotted me onstage and flashed a thumbs-up.
Part of me was relieved. I had never wanted to believe that Janice Wagner was responsible for all the ducky hijinks, and now I knew that she wasn’t the ducky thief. But she was the last of our suspects. Who did that leave? And what did it mean that Janice had seen a police van going into the woods? I remembered that there was a larger set of footprints at the swamp. Could those have belonged to Portnoy?
I glanced at the table to my right. Portnoy was carefully arranging his spicy bratwurst on a paper plate. His face was about an inch away from the sausage. His mustache was flecked with mayonnaise. Was he really the ducky mastermind?
“I’ve got a mystery for you,” my dad said, pointing to Pocus at the other end of the line of contestant tables. “How is he still going to have room in his belly for our bratwurst by the time he makes it all the way down here?”
It was a good question: Team Marconi’s table was fourth of five finalists. Team Murf, which consisted of Mrs. Murf and her husband (just Murf) was first up, followed by Philly Rich, a photographer for the town newspaper, the Bellwood Noise. After him, it was Portnoy and his spicy bratwurst, then us. The last table was Babbage, the Bratwurst King himself.
“He’s sampling each dish, not actually gobbling it up,” my mom said, putting the final touches on the presentation plate. “Mr. Pocus is a sausage connoisseur. I heard that he hasn’t eaten anything but rice porridge and lukewarm water for the last two weeks, to prepare his taste buds for the event.”
“I heard it was two months,” my dad said.
My parents grasped each other’s hands and looked over at Babbage, who seemed as relaxed as possible. He wasn’t even looking up; he was the absolute definition of confidence, sitting back with his feet on the table, scribbling casually into a notebook. I leaned over and could make out what he was drawing: a sketch of a rubber ducky. In its little wing, it held the wiener trophy.
This was the moment some people had spent all year preparing for; others, their whole lives. This moment could make or break a person. This was the Bellwood Bratwurst Bonanza, and it was even more than that to the Marconis. This year, because of the Conquistador, my parents were worried about the family hardware store. If it did close down, a bratwurst food cart could be another way to make money. But for the plan to work, we needed to win this cook-off.
WOCK WOCK WOCK. Everybody glanced up to watch a pair of helicopters rumble by overhead. Each was dangling something below it that looked like a big orange bag.
“They’re called helibuckets,” my dad said, shouting over the noise. “They’re filled with water. When the helicopter gets above the fire, the crew dumps the water on it. Pretty cool, huh? Wouldn’t want to accidentally spill that bucket, would you?”
I shook my head, but I was distracted by the deafening sound of the helicopter. There was something otherworldly about the noise. Something…monstrous. And then I remembered what Babbage had said to Officer Portnoy the day we discovered the duckies. He’d had a dream about a growling beast. And then he woke up to find the duckies on his lawn. His wet lawn.
A hush fell over the crowd. We turned to our right to see Pocus, the chief taster himself, stride confidently to the center of the stage. He stood for a moment and bowed respectfully at each of the finalists, then turned to face the audience.
“The tasting…,” he bellowed in a high, authoritative voice, “will now begin!”
I sprang up from my seat. “I’ll be right back,” I whispered to my parents, and was already scurrying across the stage before they could yank me back to my seat. Luckily, everyone was focused on Pocus, the most important man in Bellwood, and not on me.
“Psst!” I called out as I leaned over the side of the stage. “Janice!”
Janice’s head popped into view below me. She and the rest of the band were watching the finals from the side of the stage.
“What’s up?”
she asked.
“What lake?” I blurted.
“Huh?”
I tried to slow down. “The other day you said that the Bellwood Fire Department was using helicopters to fight the forest fires. And they’re dumping water on the fires, right?”
“That’s right!”
“So do you know what lake they’re getting the water from?”
“Oh.” Janice smiled. “Yeah. Schuylerville Lake. Why?”
“I’ll explain later! Thanks!”
I scuttled back to my seat as an approving murmur rolled through the crowd. Pocus had just approached Team Murf’s table. Somebody in the back yelled out, “Babbage is king!” and a cascade of Shh’s, like a choir of snakes, followed from the people of Bellwood.
I tried to get Shanks’s attention, but she was staring intently as Murf and Mrs. Murf introduced their entry, which was called “Bangers and Hash.” It was a sweet sausage baked into hash browns, topped with fried onions and sprinkled with pickle juice. Pocus lifted the fork to his mouth, closed his eyes, and chewed once, twice, three times. He swallowed. A low rumble of excitement spread through the crowd. Finally, he bowed and thanked the Murfs for the bite and moved on to the next table.
I pulled out my phone and thumbed a quick text to Shanks.
duckies and Tina came from Schuylerville Lake + Babbage’s grass was wet. I think a fire dept helicopter dropped them from sky!
I watched as Shanks’s attention switched from Pocus to her pocket. She pulled out her phone, read my text, then looked up at me. Her eyes got wide, and her mouth formed an “O.” Her thumbs tapped at her phone.
Ding ding.
By accident? Or on purpose?
I sent back three question marks.
Before sampling Philly Rich’s “Frank You Berry Much” blueberry-and-bratwurst ice cream, Pocus took a big swig from a glass of water, gargled noisily for a few seconds, then spit into a bucket that an attendant had hurriedly brought onstage.