Riley Mack Stirs Up More Trouble

by Chris Grabenstein

  Five minutes later, a lawn tractor came chugging over the rise.

  “And we have a winner,” said Jake as the man in the green coveralls climbed off his riding mower.

  “Busted!” said Mongo.

  “Um, Riley?” said Briana.

  “Just a sec. I want to hear this.” He leaned forward and picked up snatches of Mr. Paxton’s tirade.

  “This is your fault. . . . What kind of head groundskeeper . . . ? How much fertilizer . . . ? Pesticides . . . this is inexcusable . . .”

  “Riley?” Briana whispered tensely.

  “What?”

  “We got the wrong guy!”

  “Huh?”

  “I know that man in the green coveralls. It’s Mr. Sowicky!”

  “And?”

  “He’s the guy who taught my parents all about organic gardening. He’s an eco-freak. No way did he kill those fish with chemicals.”

  26

  THIS IS ABSOLUTELY, UNBELIEVABLY PERFECT, thought Prescott Paxton as he stood atop the ninth hole.

  He motioned to Chief Brown.

  “You want me to arrest Mr. Green Jeans?” the burly police officer asked eagerly. “Slap the hippy-dippy groundskeeper in handcuffs?”

  “No. Not yet. Tell me, was it your son Gavin’s idea to haul the fish out of the creek and fling them into this water hazard?”

  The chief rubbed his cheeks and thought about his answer.

  “Well, uh, maybe . . . I’ll have to ask.”

  “If it was, kindly inform Gavin that he and his friends have earned my respect as well as a hefty bonus.”

  Chief Brown beamed when he heard Paxton use the word bonus.

  “Well, Prescott, to tell you the truth, I more or less gave Gavin the idea.”

  “I see. And was it also your idea to call Mr. Kleinman from the Environmental Protection Agency?”

  The chief narrowed his eyes and rubbed his cheeks some more. “You happy to see Kleinman taking water samples?”

  “Delighted.”

  “Well, I figured you might be,” said Chief Brown, hiking up his baggy khakis. “So I gave Kleinman a call. Told him something was, you know, fishy up here.”

  “Nyes. Excuse me. I must have a word with my head groundskeeper.”

  “I’ve got the cuffs standing by.”

  “Splendid. Mr. Sowicky?”

  Pretending to be furious, Paxton stomped down the lush green slope from the hole to the water hazard where the ponytailed tree hugger stood shaking his head and staring down at all the foul-smelling dead fish.

  “Mr. Sowicky? What goes on here?”

  “I don’t know, man.”

  “I do,” said Kleinman. He was shaking some sort of stoppered test tube. “I ran a quick field test. Your nitrogen levels in this water are off the chart!”

  “What did you do, Stuart?” Paxton demanded indignantly.

  “I-I-I . . .”

  “I’ll tell you what he did,” said Kleinman. “He used all sorts of toxic fertilizers and pesticides on this grass to make it artificially green!”

  “No, man,” said the groundskeeper.

  “If you did this thinking you could impress me and the board by greening up the fairways in time for opening day, you were sorely mistaken.”

  “No, I swear . . .”

  “I suppose I’m partially to blame,” said Paxton with a sad shake of his head. “Giving you free rein. Allowing you to handle the groundskeeping chores as you saw fit. Not providing adequate supervision.”

  “Mr. Paxton, I—”

  Paxton shot up his hand. “Not another word. Frankly, Stuart, I have heard enough of your lies. Yes, you have given us a lush and beautiful lawn, but at what cost?”

  He gestured sadly toward the dead fish floating belly-up in the little pond.

  “Mr. Sowicky?”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “You are fired!”

  “B-b-but—”

  “Mr. Kleinman?”

  “Yes, Prescott?”

  “You might want to send a team downhill from here. It will probably prove prudent to investigate the entirety of this watershed area. I dread to think what might have happened farther downhill in that ravine.”

  “The creek!” gasped the EPA geek. “Schuyler’s Pond!”

  “Nyes. Fortunately, Xylodyne Dynamics recently purchased all that acreage. I don’t think my company will sue my country club. However, we should clean up the environment. If not for ourselves, for the children.”

  He turned to the crowd of onlookers.

  “Remember, ladies and gentlemen: None of us really own the land. We merely borrow it from our descendants.”

  Every head was nodding except the silly groundskeeper’s; he looked stunned.

  Too bad.

  The police chief shot out his hand toward Sowicky. “Give me the keys to the tractor, beatnik. We can’t have you driving that thing around town, spreading poison all over the place.”

  “B-b-but—”

  “You want to add some jail time to your EPA fines?”

  “No, I—”

  “Then give me the keys, take a hike, and get the heck off of this golf course! Your boss just fired you.”

  With his head hanging low, his hands jammed into the sagging pockets of his coveralls, the heartbroken groundskeeper shuffled across the fairway toward his maintenance shed.

  Poor, poor man, Mr. Paxton thought as a small, almost imperceptible, grin slid across his lips.

  Stuart Sowicky would shoulder all the blame for this ecological disaster. In front of at least two dozen witnesses, the slow-witted sluggard had been tried, convicted, and sentenced.

  The EPA would clean things up and, if toxic chemicals should happen to leach out of the soil to spoil the water for years to come, well, everybody would know exactly whom to blame: the overeager groundskeeper.

  Meanwhile, Mr. Paxton’s earth-shattering, company-crushing secret would remain safe.

  No one would ever uncover the truth!

  27

  RILEY COULDN’T REMEMBER A TIME when he had felt worse.

  This made back-to-back busts for his “brilliant” schemes. First, he’d cost Briana the middle school talent show crown by being wrong about the roller skates. Now, he’d made the wrong man lose his job. All of a sudden, his Gnat Pack’s troublemaking was causing too much trouble—especially for the people they’d been trying to help.

  “Briana, do you know Mr. Sowicky?”

  “Sort of. He’s come by the house a couple times. Once he brought my parents worms for their compost heap.”

  “Okay. You’re with me.” He turned to the guys. “You three head back to Jake’s basement. We need to regroup.”

  Mongo raised his hand to ask a question.

  “Yes?” said Riley.

  “Don’t we also need a new plan? Because, I’m sorry, this last one, it was fun and all, but it didn’t turn out so good.”

  “I know, Mongo.”

  “So we’re gonna fix it, right?”

  “We better,” said Jamal. “This is our second lame operation in a row. One more strike, and we’re out.”

  Riley sighed. He couldn’t disagree.

  “Look, guys, I need to go apologize to Mr. Sowicky. Then we’ll figure out what we do next. Come on, Bree. Do you know where he keeps his stuff?”

  “He has like a trailer. It’s just through those trees on the other side.”

  Briana and Riley hiked across the fairway while the rest of Riley’s dejected crew headed back to Jake’s house.

  “I feel terrible,” Riley mumbled. “We framed an innocent man!”

  “So, we’ll unframe him,” said Briana.

  “How?”

  “I don’t know, but I’m not worried. You’re like an idea hamster, Riley; your wheels are always spinning. You’ll think of something fantabulous.”

  Riley nodded grimly.

  He would think of a way to save Mr. Sowicky. If not? Well, he’d just have to avoid reflective surfaces fo
r the rest of his life, because he’d never be able to look at himself in a mirror again.

  “There it is,” said Briana.

  They had come into a clearing behind a stand of trees, where they saw two white trailers sitting catty-corner to each other. Both had wooden steps leading up to an attached porch.

  Riley quickly surveyed the scene. The ground here wasn’t as manicured as the rest of the golf course. In fact, the only landscaping around this backstage area was hardpan clay, scraggly weeds, and patches of gravel.

  Riley saw a couple of compost bins made out of recycled root beer barrels and several sacks of something called “Zoo Poopy Doo.” He also noticed a backhoe—with a toothed bucket on a boom at one end, a bulldozer plow at the other—and a rolling generator-floodlights combo parked between the two mobile homes.

  “Which trailer is Mr. Sowicky’s?” Riley asked Briana.

  She did a rapid fire eeny-meeny-miny-moe between the two. On the final -moe her finger ended up pointing to the left.

  “That one!” she declared.

  Riley bounded up the short staircase. He was all set to bang on the thin metal door when he heard loud voices on the other side.

  “Just tell Mr. Paxton to cool his freaking jets,” said the first voice.

  “We finished that particular job last week,” said the second.

  “Yo,” said the first voice, “not for nothin’, but Curly here reminds me that we finished that particular job last week.”

  “So why’s Paxton still bustin’ our chops about it?” said the second voice, the guy named Curly. “Ax him that, Larry.”

  “Yo: Why’s Paxton still bustin’ our chops about this freaking landfill project over here?”

  Both men, Curly and Larry, had what Riley would describe as a street-smart edge to their voices.

  “They sound like mobsters!” Briana whispered in his ear.

  Okay. That, too. With their thick accents, the two men inside the trailer sounded like the hoodlums who worked for Da Boss in every cheesy gangster movie ever made.

  “Ah, fuhgedaboudit!” the man named Larry shouted. “Go tell that nimminy-pimminy Paxton to take a flying leap off a galloping goose. Right. Have a nice day.”

  Riley heard a telephone slammed down so hard, the bell in its base jingled.

  “Wrong trailer,” he whispered to Briana.

  “Definitely.”

  The two of them very quietly tiptoed down the wooden steps. They were on the final tread when they heard the flimsy trailer door swing open behind them.

  “Yo?” said the voice Riley recognized as belonging to Larry. “Youse two lost or somethin’?”

  Riley and Briana whirled around.

  Two men (with bodies much smaller than their thuggish voices had suggested) stood on the makeshift porch. Both were dressed in blue construction-worker coveralls and bright yellow Bob the Builder hard hats.

  The younger one was maybe four foot four in his work boots.

  The older guy looked like a short grumpy pear. His neck was tiny. His stomach wasn’t.

  “Yo?” said the grumpy one. “You heard Larry. Youse two lost?”

  Okay. The grumpy, dumpy one had to be Curly. The younger, dumber one was Larry.

  “Yes, sir, I’m afraid we have lost our way!” said Briana, putting on her best “Mary Had a Little Lamb” innocence act.

  “We’re looking for our uncle,” said Riley. “Mr. Sowicky.”

  “He’s the golf course’s head groundskeeper!” said Briana.

  Curly jabbed a thumb toward the other trailer.

  “He’s next door.”

  “Thank you, ever so much,” said Briana, dipping into a curtsey.

  “Whatever,” said Curly as he and Larry clomped down the steps.

  “’Scuse us,” said Larry. “We got work to do.”

  “Yeah,” added Curly. “Golf course is supposed to open this Saturday. We better go finish the freaking eighteenth hole.”

  As the two construction workers walked away, Riley read the embroidered patches stitched on the backs of their jumpsuits: ACE CONSTRUCTION—A SUBSIDIARY OF XYLODYNE DYNAMICS.

  Xylodyne.

  The men who’d just been complaining about Mr. Paxton worked for Mr. Paxton.

  Interesting, thought Riley.

  And what was all that talk about a “landfill”?

  Suddenly, Riley was extremely glad they’d knocked on the wrong door first!

  28

  “AND SO, SIR, I JUST wanted you to know how sorry I am,” Riley said to the ponytailed groundskeeper, who was taking framed photographs off the walls of his trailer and placing them inside a cardboard box.

  “You’re Riley Mack?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “The Riley Mack?”

  “Um, I guess.”

  “Cool,” said Mr. Sowicky as he stuck out his hand to shake Riley’s. “Always wanted to meet the little dude who helped out Cheyenne.”

  “Who?” said Riley.

  “Cheyenne Woody? Fairview Middle School? A group of girls was picking on her, calling her names. You organized everybody on the playground. Got them to turn the name-calling into a funny song-and-dance routine?”

  Briana knuckle-punched Riley in the arm. “Remember that one? It was like an episode of Glee out there on the monkey bars! Even the mean girls joined in on the chorus. One of your best ever, Riley! Definitely in the top ten.”

  “Legendary stuff, little dude,” said Mr. Sowicky. “Legendary.”

  “Well, they were picking on Cheyenne something fierce.”

  “I know, man. Cheyenne is my niece.”

  “No! Way!” said Briana.

  “Way,” said Mr. Sowicky who looked to be fifty-some years old even though he sounded like he was maybe eighteen. And a surfer. “My sister, Cheyenne’s mom, told me the poor kid would come home from school sobbing every day until some illustrious dude named Riley Mack did her a skillfully executed solid. Never forgot the name, man.”

  “So,” said Briana, “you’re not mad at us?”

  “Of course not. Anger is one letter short of danger.”

  “But, we cost you your job,” said Riley.

  “I was going to quit anyway. Something fishy’s going on around here—and I don’t mean the dead trout you dudes tossed into that water hazard.” Mr. Sowicky took another photograph off the wall. “See that dude there?”

  “Yeah,” said Riley, studying the picture of a young man who might’ve been Mr. Sowicky thirty years before, shaking hands with a bald guy in a business suit.

  “That’s me, man. Back in the day. And the bald dude? That’s Mr. Jordan Bowling, my first club president. In the past three decades, I’ve had maybe fifteen different bosses, all of them exceptionally cool. They were the ones who encouraged me to do my job in an eco-friendly fashion, long before it became trendy. The last president, the one before Paxton, he’s the dude who told me about the Zoo Poopy Doo.”

  “I saw the bags out front,” said Riley. “What is it?”

  “Elephant manure from the Louisville Zoo, man. Makes excellent organic fertilizer.”

  “So you never used, like, bad chemicals?” said Briana.

  “Never.”

  “See?” said Briana. “I knew he wasn’t the bad guy!”

  “So, Mr. Sowicky,” said Riley, “do you have any idea what’s killing the fish down in the creek?”

  “Okay, here’s the deal, little dudes. This is like Watergate, only worse.”

  “Huh?” said Riley and Briana together.

  “A cover-up and a conspiracy.”

  “What’s going on?” asked Riley.

  “It’s Paxton, man. That devious and diabolical dude is up to something shady.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, for starters, he had his cronies from Ace Construction tear up all my fairways and greens. Had them bulldoze mountains of dirt all last fall and into the winter and now it’s what?”

  “The middle of June,” said Riley.

>   “Exactly,” said Mr. Sowicky with a slightly crazed look in his eyes. “That’s what I’m saying, man.”

  “Um,” said Briana, “they’re just, you know, renovating the golf course.”

  “Then why’d they put it back together wrong?”

  “Huh?” said Riley.

  “Dude, I have an elevation app in my iPhone!”

  “And?”

  “The greens, the tee boxes, the rough—everything is like three feet higher than it used to be!”

  “Well,” said Briana, “they probably added fresh top soil or something.”

  “Three feet deep?” Mr. Sowicky’s eyes were wide and wild.

  “So, uh, what do you think is going on?” asked Riley.

  “I took pictures, man!”

  “Of what?”

  “The bulldozers and backhoes. Working all through the night. Digging huge honking trenches in the ground, plowing crap in.”

  “What kind of crap?”

  “I was too far away to see exactly what they were dumping in the ditches but it couldn’t have been good or they would have done it in broad daylight, right, man?”

  “Did you use a digital camera?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And did you shoot high-resolution images?”

  “Totally.”

  “Then,” said Riley, “just blow up the pictures on your computer and you’ll see what they were burying.”

  “Awesome idea,” said Mr. Sowicky. “Only one problem. I gave the camera to Mr. Paxton before I downloaded anything.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Because I foolishly put my faith in the integrity of the office of the country club presidency, man.”

  “And what did Mr. Paxton do with your digital camera?”

  “He locked it inside his top desk drawer. Said he’d look into the matter right away. But I saw him the other day and he said he’d been too busy worrying about the grand reopening to even take a peek at my pix. Probably erased them all.”

  “Why would he do that?” asked Briana.

  “Because, here’s the part I failed to realize before I gave the fox the keys to the henhouse: Xylodyne Dynamics, of which Mr. Paxton is like the head honcho, is a multinational, multifaceted corporation.”

  “And?” said Riley.

  “Dude, Xylodyne has its greedy fingers in everything: defense contracting, agriculture, food services, oil, plastics, chemicals, and . . .” Mr. Sowicky looked around the room to make sure there weren’t any spies lurking in the corners. “Waste management, man!”