Detectives in Diapers: The Mystery of the Aztec Amulet

by Duane L. Ostler

DETECTIVES IN DIAPERS: THE MYSTERY OF THE AZTEC AMULET

  By Duane L. Ostler

  This book may be reproduced, copied and distributed solely for non-commercial purposes, and only if the book remains in its complete, original form and contains the copyright notice.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE: Flo and Mo

  CHAPTER TWO: The Mysterious Letter

  CHAPTER THREE: A Stroller Ride to the Tool Shed

  CHAPTER FOUR: Attacked by Aztecs!

  CHAPTER FIVE: Uncle Elroy

  CHAPTER SIX: Discovery of a Tunnel

  CHAPTER SEVEN: Captured!

  CHAPTER EIGHT: Flo and Mo Take Charge

  CHAPTER NINE: A Year's Supply of Diapers

  CHAPTER ONE

  Flo and Mo

  It was a typical day in the typical neighborhood of Muddy Heights. Mrs. McGruder, who lived on the corner of Itch Street, let out her twenty-five pound tabby cat, 'Dinky,' for his morning prowl. Mr. Trilp, who lived next door to Mrs. McGruder, hastily called in his Chihuahua 'Brutus' from the backyard to save him from death at the claws of Dinky.

  Mrs. Finster went on her morning jog--thirty laps around her house carrying a fifty pound backpack full of rocks. It was part of her plan to lose 100 pounds while still eating all the chocolate she wanted. (Her wheezing could be heard for a three block radius). Her tidy house sat next to a shabby-looking two story house mid-way down the street.

  On the other side of the shabby two story house, Mr. Rockhart went out to work in his garden. Like always, he was muttering under his breath about every evil under the sun, from aphids to "the lousy neighbors I've got on this lousy street." His angriest muttering was reserved for his most-hated neighbors, the Flitz's in the shabby two-story house next door.

  But in the shabby two story house itself, completely unaware of the muttering and the wheezing that was taking place on either side of her, Mrs. Flitz walked into the nursery. She was carrying her twin babies. First there was Flo, a pudgy, fourteen-month-old girl who had a fat little face with a double chin. And then there was Mo, a pudgier fourteen-month-old boy, who had been born just twenty-five seconds after Flo.

  Mrs. Flitz plopped both babies into their playpen like she was dropping goey cake batter into a mixing bowl. Not that Mrs. Flitz was careless with her babies. Indeed, she loved them dearly. But she had read somewhere that the proper way to put a baby into a playpen was to 'plop' them rather gently, since it was supposed to be good for their spinal development.

  "There you are, sweetie-ums!" she chirped in a rather annoying, high-pitched voice. She looked tenderly at her pudgy offspring. "Time for an hour of bouncing in your playpen, while Mommy balls her eyes out watching her favorite soap opera, 'The Emotional Minefield!'" She smiled a sticky-sweet smile at them, and they cooed adoringly in return. Then she turned and disappeared into the next room where they heard her switch on the TV and grab a box of kleenex that would be entirely used up during the show.

  The babies stopped cooing, and looked at each other. Mo rolled his eyes at Flo. And then he did something that no normal fourteen-month-old baby would ever do. He talked to his sister in his mind, using that unique mental telepathy that sometimes develops between twins. And it was obvious his mental development had far surpassed the normal baby stage.

  "I think she permanently damaged my spinal development on that plop!" he said rather gruffly.

  "But she means well," responded Flo in defense of their mother, through the same mental telepathy.

  "Yes, I suppose so," sighed Mo. "But I wish she hadn't read that dratted article on 'plopping' by Dr. Stringbrain. The man's a looney, but of course Mum lapped it all up. Now we get painfully plopped all day long!"

  "You shouldn't talk that way about mama!" responded Flo rather sharply. "Her brain may be a bit scrambled in many respects, but she is a top-rate Mother, generally speaking."

  "True enough," agreed Mo. "At least she feeds us cookie dough and merangue pie, because of that weird baby nutrition article by Dr. Goofgil. But I sometimes wish she didn't believe EVERYTHING she reads about baby development."

  "Why don't we go see what Dada's up to?" said Flo, in an obvious effort to change the subject. She crawled over to the corner of the playpen and reached behind one of the slats. With a quick twist, she had it lose, as well as the one next to it. She lifted it up and there was just enough space for each of them to crawl under it.

  "One good thing about Mama," said Flo as Mo crawled through the opening, "she never checks the playpen very carefully."

  "Even if she did, she wouldn't find our secret exit," said Mo. "It's so well hidden no one would find it, unless they had an IQ roughly equal to ours."

  "Now don't start on that IQ kick again!" said Flo, a touch of color showing in her pudgy face. "There was an obvious glitch in Dada's computer when we used it to rank our IQ's the other night. That's the only reason you scored one point higher than me!"

  "Not so!" said Mo with a smirk. "I'd say the computer program was perfectly accurate in giving me a brilliant IQ of 152, and setting yours at a slightly less brilliant 151!"

  "Hmmph!" sniffed Flo in disdain. "You realize, of course, that the IQ test itself was created by someone with an IQ of about 100 at best. How could such an obviously flawed program be accurate?"

  "And I suppose you could design a better IQ testing program?" sneered Mo.

  "I most certainly could!" cried Flo, emitting an audible baby whimper at the same time she flung her thoughts at her brother. "And that's just what I intend to do--as soon as I finish my master's thesis on black holes in the Andromeda sector!"

  "You and your degrees!" scoffed Mo. "Just how many internet correspondence PhD degrees do you intend to get? You've already got five! Each under a different assumed name, of course."

  Flo just sniffed in return, not bothering to reply. They had crawled across the room to the door of their father's home office. The door was slightly open, so they pushed their way in. They could hear their father on the telephone as they entered.

  "Yes, Mrs. Sluft, I'm quite positive," he was saying. "Your husband's in Kansas City. I've definitely traced him there. Another day or two, and I'll have an address for him."

  Flo stopped crawling immediately upon hearing this statement, and Mo plowed into her, knocking her over.

  "Did you hear that?" Flo fairly yelled her thoughts at her brother, her argument over IQs clearly forgotten.

  "Kansas City!" cried Mo in return, shaking his head sadly, which caused his baby double chins to wobble from side to side like big balloons. "How could he possibly have come up with THAT?"

  "Especially after all those clues we put on his desk and in his emails that the man is clearly in L.A.!" cried Flo. She looked at her brother sadly. "Dada's such a dear, but sometimes he's so ... so ..."

  "I know," said Mo, mercifully preventing his sister from saying what was in both of their minds. "Without our help, he wouldn't last a week! Poor man."

  Mo was referring to their father's profession of course, as a self-employed detective. Before Flo and Mo had arrived on the scene and started helping him with his cases (without his knowing it, of course), he hadn't been very successful. In fact, he'd been on the verge of going broke!

  But all of that had changed five months ago, when Flo and Mo had started using their unique mental powers to give him 'clues' to solve his cases. He was now known by other detectives in town as the 'come-back kid,' and most of them were still trying to figure out how he had changed so quickly from stupidity to brilliance.

  Flo wiped a tear from her eyes. "Drat
these baby tears," she said curtly. "Every time something upsetting happens like this, I can't seem to help crying! I wish my baby body could somehow catch up with my superior mind!"

  "I heartily agree," said Mo. "It's embarrassing that I can do advanced calculus in my head, but I can't control my own bowels! So Mama has to change me every two or three hours."

  Flo wrinkled up her nose. "I think you're overdue right now," she said in a nasal voice. She was clearly trying to avoid breathing the air too close to him.

  Before Mo could reply, a voice boomed out above them. "Hello, my little pumpkin faces!" Their father scooped both of them up in his arms. "How many of your toes have you sucked today? Or did you find some nifty dead bugs under the couch and eat them instead?"

  Flo and Mo giggled. In spite of their low opinion of their father's mental capacity, it was obvious they loved him dearly. They especially enjoyed the nonsense he often said to them about their lives as babies--or at least what he THOUGHT was their lives as babies.

  If their father had known the truth about Mo and Flo, he would have been so shocked they'd have needed to carry him to the hospital.

  Dada suddenly wrinkled up his nose. "Mo, I think you need a change." He quickly put both babies down.

  "Told you so," said Flo triumphantly.

  "I've about got the Sluft case wrapped up!" said Dada, turning back to his desk. "Imagine the coot leaving his wife and not sending her any money for ten whole months! But now we've got him--he's in Kansas City! By the end of the week, she'll give him a call and tell him to get her some money or face the law! Won't he be surprised!"

  Flo and Mo shook their heads sadly. Just last night they had confirmed on the internet that Mr. Sluft was in fact in a seedy apartment in L.A. The only one about to be surprised in the case was Dada!

  Mo and Flo did most of their detective work at night while their parents were asleep. They would break out of their crib and crawl into their father's office, where they would log onto the internet and read through his files. Then they would plant careful 'clues' for their father to find the next day, making sure they put them out in a way that made him think he had come up with the idea himself. They would then recover from their all night work sessions by sleeping all day, just like normal babies. Most of the time their clues worked. But once in awhile there was a backfire, like this one.

  "And with the Sluft case over, it'll be another successful case wrapped up by your genius father!" cried Mr. Flitz, getting carried away and starting to dance around the room like a drunken butterfly. "Just like I wrapped up the bank robbery last month!" He stopped in his dance to stare wonderingly at a picture, hanging on his wall. It was a front page newspaper story of how he had solved the mysterious disappearance of a million dollars from the local bank. Little did he know that it was Mo and Flo that actually discovered the robbers to be the night cleaning crew, who had hidden the money in a toilet in the men's room that was marked 'Out of Order.' Their plan had been to remove the money from the toilet little by little when they went home from cleaning the bank each night. The babies had passed this information on to their father who had used it to catch the robbers--which had instantly turned him into a celebrity.

  Suddenly, the doorbell rang. "That's probably a new client!" cried Mr. Flitz happily, striding toward the door. "Coming to give me an even bigger case than the bank robbery!"

  As it turned out, that was one of the few things he ever said that was dead right.