Addison Addley and the Trick of the Eye

by Melody McMillian

  Sam was up next. Poor Sam. He gets nervous at the drop of a hat. Well, at the drop of an egg, in this case. His hands were so sweaty that the egg that was supposed to drop in the bottle slid through his fingers and dropped on the floor instead, just in front of Mrs. Wilson, Tiffany’s mom. She tried to jump aside but landed on the egg instead when it rolled, probably because her feet are so big. Good thing it was hard-boiled instead of soft. Her heel was covered in a crumbly yolk, and that was the end of that trick. And the end of her new shoes, by the sound of her complaints.

  I was the last act before intermission, right after Chris and his magic-hat trick. Since my trick took so little time, I was in charge of getting the props out of the classroom for the second part of the show. Everybody else got to stay in the library and eat cookies. Everyone except for Trent, that is. I’d seen him sneak out. I guess having to watch Tiffany do her genie dance during the intermission was too much even for him.

  Chris started doing his trick. I yawned. It was so boring. He was really slow. All he had to do was say a few words and pull a fake rabbit out of a hat that had a secret compartment in it. Now if it had been a real rabbit, it would have been more exciting. Or maybe a real fish. That would have been even better. He messed up the trick and had to start over. I guess the rabbit was stuck in the secret compartment. If he had used a real fish, it would have just jumped right out of that hat.

  I started daydreaming after he started the trick over again for the third time. My eyes drifted over to the bulletin boards beside me. Since it was the library, there were book reports and projects about authors plastered all over the wall. There was one bulletin board that featured authors from different countries.

  Chris started the trick again, this time shaking the hat to make sure everything was working properly.

  I looked back again at that last bulletin board. There was something there that caught my eye. I closed my eyes so that I could concentrate better. There was definitely something jumping around in my head, wanting to get out. Something big. I closed my eyes even tighter so that whatever it was could make its way to the front of my brain. I thought about the baseball game and the secret signals. I thought about magazines and streets. I thought about the disappearing-egg act. Suddenly the things that were simmering in my brain started to boil over.

  Bit by bit, things bubbled up and became clear. So clear they almost popped right out of my head. I kicked myself. Why hadn’t I seen them before?

  Chris was still saying his magic words. I looked around quickly for Becky. I saw her at the back of the library, biting her nails and tapping her feet. She must have been super-nervous about her ventriloquist act. The last time she did it, it was a disaster.

  I crept back to her.

  “Becky, quick, over here,” I whispered. We didn’t have much time. I needed to see if I was right. We hid behind the magazine stacks.

  “Where did you say you got your dummy from?” I asked.

  “My uncle picked it up at a yard sale. It was really cheap because it’s so old.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s one way of looking at it,” I said. “Where did you keep it before it got cleaned up?”

  “In the garage. Why?”

  I nodded. “I thought so. One last question. Tiffany’s cousin, Trent. He just moved here last month. Do you know where he came from?”

  Becky thought for a minute. “It was from a different province. Quebec, I think.”

  I knew it. I thanked Becky and then ran for the door.

  “Wait! You’re up next!” she cried.

  “I can’t!” I yelled. They’d have to do without me. I had more important things to do. Things like solving the break-ins and keeping my house.

  I got out of the library in time to see him running to the exit at the end of the hallway. It looked like he had something hidden under his bright orange jacket.

  I was glad that I’d had all of that running practice in baseball. I was fast. I’d catch up to him in no time.

  Trent didn’t stand a chance.

  Chapter Eleven

  “Trent!” I yelled as I raced down the hallway. “Wait!”

  Trent looked back once and then pushed open the door. He ran across the yard and out to the corner of the street. He paused for a split second, like he was waiting for someone. That split second almost gave me time to catch up to him. Almost, but not quite.

  “Get back here!” I yelled.

  He took off like the spaceship in my video game. One second he was there, and the next he was gone. I guess all that running in baseball helped him too.

  He ran so fast that I couldn’t catch up to him. He ran down Pine Street, up Oak Street and across Elm Street. When he got finished with the tree streets, he started on the others. I couldn’t see any pattern to where he was going, sort of like I can’t see a pattern to stuff I learn in math. I think he was trying to confuse me. It takes a lot more than that.

  The light was fading fast. Soon it would be dark. We were in my neighborhood now. He headed toward my street and started to slow down. He must have been getting tired. I bet he was glad that I lived on a corner lot, because he decided to cut right across my lawn to get to the street on the other side of it.

  Now I don’t like to brag or anything, but sometimes I do stuff that comes in handy later, even if people don’t appreciate it at the time. All of my hard work in the yard paid off. Just not how I expected it to.

  You can’t say I didn’t try to warn him. “Trent, wait!” I yelled one more time as I saw his orange back disappearing into the almost-dark yard. That was the last thing I saw of him. I heard him loud and clear though.

  “Aaaaaaaaah! Help!” I don’t know which was louder, Trent’s voice or the sound of the stones from the statue crashing down. I guess I should have used better glue to hold them together. The chewed-up gum hadn’t worked too well there either.

  You can’t say that Trent wasn’t stubborn. He limped to the gate and disappeared into the backyard. I guess he thought he could jump over the fence into the neighbor’s yard and lose me.

  By now I had almost caught up to him. I could hear Mom’s voice behind me. She must have seen me racing out of the school. I pushed past the open gate just in time to hear Trent scream one last time.

  I guess he didn’t see the big hole in the backyard. Of course he might have been distracted by the mirror that I had hung with fishing line from the old pine tree. I’d wanted the worms to think that the feast that I’d left for them was even bigger than it really was. Most of the holes that I’d dug in the yard were small, but I thought that maybe if I dug just one super-big hole I might get super-big worms coming to it. Worms might like more space. Sort of like how I liked more space to live in. I guess Trent’s foot hadn’t liked that much space though. It got stuck in there, and he went flying into the worm feast of eggshells and banana peels. So did his parcel.

  I quickly stepped over Trent and picked up what he had dropped.

  I didn’t need light to see what it was. Even though I knew better, I could swear that dummy’s eyes were moving.

  Chapter Twelve

  “You did it!” Sam cried as he slapped me on the back. “You figured it out! You solved the crime!”

  Sam had come over right after his breakfast the next morning to congratulate me. His mom had told him the news when he’d woken up.

  I poured more syrup on my super-big stack of pancakes. Mom had made an extra big batch today and had even added some organic chocolate bits. I offered some pancakes to Sam.

  “How did you know it was Trent? How did you know it was the dummy he wanted? How did you figure everything out?” Sam asked in between gulps of juice.

  That Sam. He knew I couldn’t answer three things at once. I guess he was too excited to think.

  “Well, Sam,” I said, “it was actually something you said that started things simmering in my brain.”

  Sam looked puzzled. I took another bite of pancake and leaned back. It was nice taking my time to explain t
hings. My brain had gone from simmering to boiling. Now it could slow down.

  “Well, you see, it was all of that refraction stuff, looking at things from a different angle, from a different point of view,” I explained. “There really are a lot of optical illusions floating around.”

  “I still don’t get it,” Sam confessed.

  Wow. It sure felt different being the smart one. Kind of nice for a change. I wouldn’t want to get used to it though. It was too much work figuring things out and explaining them to everybody. Sometimes it was easier to just play dumb and sit back and listen.

  “Remember when Trent got his signals mixed up at the baseball game?” I asked.

  Sam nodded.

  “Well, I didn’t think anything of it at the time, except that he needed to get his signals straight. Then remember when we ran into him and he dropped that magazine?”

  Sam nodded again. “Yeah—it was a collectors’ magazine with old toys and puppets,” he said.

  “Dummies are puppets,” I said. “I saw a picture of a dummy like Becky’s in that magazine when I flipped through it. I didn’t think anything of it at the time. Except of course that Trent was dumb to be interested in dummies.”

  “So Trent was interested in dummies, specifically Becky’s dummy. But how does that explain anything else?” Sam asked.

  I poured myself a handful of chocolate chips. “We know that Becky’s family keeps all sorts of junk from yard sales. Including the dummy. Trent knew that too. What he didn’t know was that the dummy was hidden in Becky’s closet. She hadn’t wanted her uncle to see it until she finished cleaning it. The first time he tried to ‘borrow’ it from the shed, he must have looked through the shed window and seen the old mannequin heads that Becky’s mom keeps there, and guessed that the dummy was there too.” Becky’s mom likes to make weird art out of anything.

  Mom had filled me in on the details of Trent’s plans that morning after she had talked to Becky’s mom. Now I filled Sam in. It seems that Becky had told Trent that her uncle had only paid fifty dollars for the dummy. Trent had told his friends about it. One of them had just done a school project on ventriloquists. He thought the dummy was worth more. A lot more. Trent did some research and found out just how much more. He said that he was just trying to “borrow” the dummy to get it appraised, but you’d have to be pretty gullible to believe that fishy story.

  Sam scratched his head and then his nose. Then he scratched his chin.

  “So then Trent tried to break into the garage. I still don’t understand how you figured things out. What about the notes?”

  I smiled. That was the good part. “Think about it, Sam. Remember what you said. Sometimes things are completely different, depending on how you look at them. Even words. Sam 11 didn’t have anything to do with you or your birthday. It did have something to do with a specific day though.”

  I let the words sink in. They didn’t have too far to sink with Sam though. He caught on pretty quickly. Like I said before, he’s a smart guy.

  Sam’s face lit up like a firecracker. “French!” he yelled. “Those words are French! Sam 11! The magic fair was on Saturday, May 11. Samedi is French for Saturday! Sam for short.” Sam looked pleased with himself. And relieved.

  I nodded before I gulped down the last of my orange juice. “Yep. I realized it during the magic show. That bulletin board in the library came in handy. I got to thinking about the authors from different countries, and how the same word means different things, depending on how you look at it. Sort of like how Trent’s old baseball signals meant something completely different to his new team. Then I started thinking about those notes. Eight cents means eight cents to us. But to the French, cent means hundred. That dummy was worth eight hundred dollars. Trent must have been writing the notes to his friends in French so that nobody would figure out what he was planning.”

  I shook my head. That dummy probably had more brains than Trent did. “That note must have fallen out of Trent’s pocket the next week when he tried to sneak into Becky’s garage,” I explained. “He met his friends there, but the dummy was still in Becky’s closet, and the garage was locked. They tried to pry to the lock open but it wouldn’t work. Then Trent wrote down the date of the magic fair and gave it to his friends. He knew the dummy would be there for sure. He was planning on sneaking it out to them.”

  I threw my dishes in the sink. “But Becky’s dog got that note and ripped it apart. Becky found the first part about eight cents. We found the second part about Sam 11. Becky’s mom found the third part about coin and pin, right before the dog tried to bury it.”

  Sam cut in. “But what do coin and pin have to do with it?”

  Sam almost had it. I tried to be patient, but I knew the creek was waiting. I picked up my fishing pole and headed out the door. Sam followed.

  “Think about it, Sam,” I urged as we walked to the creek. I pointed to the street sign as we rounded the corner.

  Suddenly Sam knew. “Pin! That’s Pine in French. Our school is on the corner of Pine Street. Coin is corner! Those were the directions to the magic fair!”

  Sam slapped me on the back. “What a way to figure it out! What a way to solve it! What a way to think!” he gushed as we arrived at the creek.

  Yeah, I guess it was a good way to think. Too much thinking for my liking though. Now it was time to fish. Like I said before, fishing and thinking don’t go together. I was sure I could fit in a little gloating though. Gloating doesn’t take up a whole lot of energy. Just as long as I kept the gloating to myself.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The next day after school, I found Mom out in the front yard. She hadn’t said much about the open house the day before. I figured she didn’t want to look too excited about it for my sake. She probably felt sorry for me.

  Mom was just finishing throwing the stones from the fallen statue into the old wheelbarrow. I guess she wanted me to take them back to the creek.

  “I’ll take those back after supper,” I said as I helped her push the old wheelbarrow to the shed.

  “Back would be good,” she said as she wiped her hands on her jeans. “The backyard, that is. I think these stones would make a great rock garden.”

  Why Mom would want to make a rock garden out of these old stones was a mystery to me. She wouldn’t be able to see it from the new townhouse.

  “Here,” she said as she tossed me a package.

  I thought it might be gum by the shape of it. I opened it up. It was a bunch of flower seeds. Why would I want some dumb flower seeds? I scratched my head and then my nose. I was beginning to feel like Sam.

  “No use letting all of those perfectly good holes in the backyard go to waste,” she said. “Now these seeds have someplace to go.”

  We headed toward the house. “One more thing,” she added as we went inside. “You didn’t get to do your invisible-ink trick at the magic fair. Here’s your note. I found it upstairs.”

  It was nice of Mom to think about me. She probably thought I had put a lot of work into it when really it had only taken about thirty seconds. Well, maybe forty if you count the time I had to spend cleaning up the lemon juice after I’d accidentally spilled it in the sugar bowl. I’d been mixing up a bit of lemonade while I was writing the note. No sense wasting perfectly good lemon juice on paper alone.

  Mom handed me the note and the iron, which she’d just unplugged.

  I felt stupid doing the trick for just one person, but I shrugged and started anyway. I guess Mom was hard up for entertainment.

  “Sometimes things seem different, depending on how you look at them,” I said. “You probably see a plain piece of paper. I, however, see something else. Concentrate hard and letters will appear right before your very own eyes.”

  I ran the iron over the paper and waited for the words Optical Illusion to appear. I hoped I had spelled them right.

  The two words slowly came into view. They weren’t the words I was watching for, or even the words I was waiting for,
but they sure were the words that I’d been wishing for all along.

  I rubbed my eyes to make sure they weren’t playing tricks on me and then I read the words out loud.

  “Welcome home.”

  I looked up at Mom. “This isn’t my note,” I said. “What’s going on?”

  “You’re not the only one who can write invisible notes, you know.” She laughed and looked out the window at the hockey-stick fence. “You’ve made quite a mess around here, but you got me thinking.”

  I guess some people would call it a mess. I called it a masterpiece. “I was just trying to make the house look better. I wanted you to look at it from a different angle,” I said.

  “That’s just it,” she pointed out. “I did look at it from a different angle. From a different point of view. Yours.”

  I held my breath and stopped chewing my gum.

  “You went to all of this effort,” she continued. “It’s obvious how much this place means to you. I never realized it until now, after seeing the place through your eyes. And now that the break-ins have been solved, the street feels safe again.”

  I started chewing.

  “I think we should just stay here,” she said as she dumped her organic rice into the pot.

  I started breathing.

  “Besides,” she added, “how could I possibly see the stars at night with all of the lights in the new development? And how could we fit all our outdoor things into that little townhouse? And it would cost more in gas for me to get to work. I’m going to be putting in some extra hours at the downtown office. And just think about all of those horrible stop lights.” She rolled her eyes and shook her head.

  Right, Mom. Hadn’t I told her all of that stuff before? I was so happy that I didn’t even point that out. I guess some people take a while to let things sink in, the way it takes a while for water to sink into a wormhole.