Following Baxter

by Barbara Kerley

So I tried to figure it out:

  I’d just noticed the glowing red button a couple of hours ago. But even if I did point it out to the detective, I’d have to convince him it meant she’d teleported herself.

  And then, of course, he’d ask us to prove it.

  But if we tried to show him teleportation was real, all we could show him was the hat disappearing. We couldn’t show him the hat landing on the other end because me and TJ couldn’t see the password-protected coordinates, so we wouldn’t know where we’d sent it. Plus, Baxter was sick, and he wasn’t being very magical, which meant the Baxter part of teleportation wasn’t working right now.

  Besides, all the glowing and vibrating and popping and screaming might just make the detective think the teleporter was a hat-destroying Weapon of Mass Destruction. He might lock up the lab completely, and I didn’t think that would help us find her.

  I looked at TJ. He just shrugged. He didn’t know, either.

  But Professor Reese was missing, and everything felt too complicated, so I thought maybe I’d try a little bit, one more time. I took a deep breath. “Well, remember I started telling you yesterday about Baxter being magical—”

  “Unbelievable!” Detective Jacobs turned and charged toward his car.

  “Hey,” TJ called after him. “Do you think I could ride in the police car with the siren going?”

  Detective Jacobs barked out a laugh as he opened his car door. He climbed in and slammed the door closed.

  TJ winced. “I didn’t think so,” he said as the detective drove away. Then he turned to me. “What do we do now?”

  “I don’t know.” My shoulders slumped, and suddenly I sat down in the grass and buried my face against Baxter’s side. For the first time, I realized I wasn’t jealous of Megan and her million lessons anymore.

  I only had this, but this was all I wanted.

  I loved Professor Reese, and I loved having her live next door. But even more than that, I needed her.

  If I was a loser at school, that meant I was only good at two things—being a lab assistant and taking care of Baxter. If we couldn’t find Professor Reese, I wouldn’t have the lab anymore.

  And since our landlord had a NO DOG POLICY, there was one other thing I was too scared to think about.

  If we couldn’t find Professor Reese, I wouldn’t have Baxter, either.

  21

  For Emergencies Only!

  Me, TJ, and Baxter slumped in the yard, trying to figure out what to do. “Maybe we should ask Mom and Dad to help us,” TJ said.

  He had a point. But when I told him all the reasons why I didn’t think we could convince the detective, I realized that we probably couldn’t convince Mom and Dad, either. “And if we teleport the hat to try and prove it, and Mom sees the teleporter vibrating like crazy and then the big POP, there’s no way she’s going to let us back in the lab—she’ll say it’s too dangerous.”

  “Yeah.” TJ nodded.

  “Besides, if the detective can’t find Professor Reese, and we can’t find her, then I don’t know what Mom and Dad could do,” I said. “Then we won’t be able to get into the lab anymore, and we still won’t have found her.”

  I didn’t know if that was the right answer or not. I patted Baxter’s ribs and thought some more. “I still feel like we can figure out where she is.”

  “Maybe . . .” TJ said. “I just wish she had a cell phone. Then she could call us.”

  “Me too.” I lay back in the grass, and Baxter plunked down next to me.

  Suddenly, I sat up. “Wait a minute! We could teleport a phone to her! ’Cause even though we don’t know where we’re sending it, it will land where she is!”

  “Yeah!” TJ said. Then he frowned. “But we don’t have a cell phone.”

  “Yes, we do!” I jumped up. “I’ll be right back!”

  I ran to our house and opened the front door. I could hear Mom in the kitchen, starting to cook. I sneaky quiet opened the drawer in the living room where she kept the cell phone she made me or TJ take to school when we had a field trip, in case there was an emergency.

  I slipped it into my pocket and ran back outside. But when I showed it to TJ, his eyes got big.

  “Jordie, we’re not supposed to play with it! It’s for emergencies only!”

  “This is an emergency!”

  I ran into Professor Reese’s house and down to the lab. TJ and Baxter followed me.

  I tore a sheet of paper off Professor Reese’s notebook and wrote, “Call Jordie and TJ!” And I added our home phone number in case she couldn’t remember it.

  We opened up the lid to the teleporter and put the phone and the note in. Then I thought, Wait!

  I hurried up the stairs. Baxter hurried with me.

  “Where are you going?” TJ asked.

  “She might be hungry. And thirsty,” I yelled as I ran into the kitchen and grabbed a big bottle of water from the cupboard and two apples off the counter. “And bored!” I added as I grabbed a crossword she hadn’t finished and a pen from the kitchen table.

  Me and Baxter ran back downstairs, and I dumped it all in the teleporter, too. “Ready?”

  TJ nodded.

  So we clicked the teleporter closed, and all the equipment sprang to life—the buzzing and vibrating and then the big POP! Then I gave Baxter a big kiss, and me and TJ ran home.

  Mom was still in the kitchen making dinner. I put my finger up to my lips to shush TJ, and we crowded around the phone in the living room, waiting for it to ring.

  We waited.

  And waited.

  TJ slapped his forehead. “We could call her.”

  “Right!”

  So TJ dialed the cell phone number, and I stuck my ear beside his so I could hear her answer, too.

  But there wasn’t any sound of the phone ringing on the other end. There was only static.

  TJ’s eyes got big. “We broke the phone!” he whispered. “Mom’s going to kill us!”

  “It’s probably some electromagnetic thing.” At least I hoped so because I didn’t know how many allowances it would take to buy a new one. “Professor Reese will fix it.”

  He shook his head. “If we find her.”

  I grabbed his arm. “When we find her.” And I decided what to do. “We are going to keep looking until Professor Reese’s daughter gets here on Sunday. And if we haven’t found Professor Reese by then, we’ll tell her. ’Cause she’ll believe us even though we can’t prove it.”

  “Yeah! She’s probably used to her mom doing crazy stuff!” TJ looked happy for the first time all afternoon. “OK!” He headed for his room.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To work on my short. It’s almost dinnertime.” Which TJ kept track of no matter what we were in the middle of because he’s always hungry.

  I suddenly realized I was starving, and my half of Baxter was probably hungry, too. I poked my head into the kitchen and told Mom that I had to feed Baxter because Professor Reese wasn’t home yet. “It’s a great opportunity to be dependable.” Then I hurried over.

  Baxter didn’t meet me at the back door. I had to go all the way down to the lab to find him.

  As soon as he saw me, Baxter ran over, reared up on his hind legs, and plopped his big front paws on my shoulders. We were eye to eye, then, and Baxter started to whine.

  Maybe my half of Baxter was hungry, but it seemed like Professor Reese’s half was trying to tell me something. “It’s OK, Baxter.” I nodded. “I’m listening.”

  He nodded back.

  Baxter dropped his front paws back to the floor and ran over to the map of Portland. He parked himself down right in front of it. His crazy silver eyebrows went up and down as he looked at me and then the map and then me again. His black lips hung open, panting.

  I walked over to the map and leaned in for a better look. “What are you trying to tell me?”

  22

  King of the Bounce

  I studied the map, stuck all over with green pins where we’d tho
ught the hat would be, and red ones where we’d found it—always too far north or south or east or west. . . . Never where we could find it ourselves. We always had to follow Baxter.

  He whined.

  Professor Reese said sometimes it was good to look at things from a different angle. I lay down on the floor and stared up at the map. I stood beside it, pressing my head against the wall to look at it sideways. I put my face so close I could only focus on a tiny spot at a time. Professor Reese was right—there didn’t seem to be any pattern to the pins at all.

  I took a step back, then another. Then another and another until I was halfway across the room and could take in the whole map—and all the pins—in a single glance.

  And suddenly it was like I was floating above the city, seeing the streets all lined up, crisscrossed like the grid on our waffle iron. Floating above the city, the pins didn’t seem like the street corners where I followed Baxter as he galloped ahead. They seemed like little polka dots.

  And when I hurried back to the map and stuck in one more pin in the one place we didn’t have one (Professor Reese’s house), I suddenly saw that the pins weren’t random after all. They were in a pattern.

  A starburst pattern.

  Professor Reese’s house was in the middle, and the other pins shot out from the center like a firework bursting on the Fourth of July. They shot out in tracks ending green-red, green-red, green-red—the green pin where we thought the hat would be, and then, a little farther on, and the red pin where the hat landed.

  For the first time, I didn’t think about us finding the hat, I thought about the hat landing. And I realized I’d always assumed that the teleporter picked up the hat and put it down someplace else.

  But Professor Reese always said that a good scientist challenged assumptions, so what if my assumption wasn’t right?

  “What if the teleporter doesn’t pick up the hat . . .” I said to Baxter.

  He wagged his tail.

  I studied the starburst pattern more closely. “What if the teleporter . . . throws it?”

  He stood up and wagged harder.

  “Like when I throw the superbouncy ball to you . . .”

  He gave a little bark.

  “That’s it!” I shouted. “The hat is never where we think it will be—because the teleporter throws it, and it bounces!”

  He woofed, long and loud.

  “And that’s why you can always find it: you’re King of the Bounce!”

  I wrapped my arms around Baxter and gave him a big hug (and noticed his microchip humming quieter again, which was good because his hearing would be better in a day or two and a loud hum would probably bug him). I was so happy I’d figured out the answer to one of Professor Reese’s questions: that hat was never where we thought it would be because it bounced.

  That still didn’t tell me where Professor Reese was. “But since she teleported herself,” I said to Baxter, “the more we know about teleportation, the better we can find her.”

  After dinner, I whispered my Bounce Theory to TJ while he took more pictures: instead of Caveman getting his brains eaten, he got up, swung his club, and knocked Zombie Cheerleader to the ground.

  Then Dad came over to go with us while we took Baxter on a walk before bed. We couldn’t do a Baxter Slumber Party again because that had been for one night only—Mom was afraid the landlord might stop by unannounced and catch us. But Dad said he’d go with us while we took Baxter for a walk and then sit on Professor Reese’s porch and play guitar for a little while, so I could snuggle Baxter enough to last all night by himself in Professor Reese’s house.

  It felt sort of mysterious walking through the dark neighborhoods, with the yellow glow of lights coming out the windows of the houses and me wondering what everybody was doing in there.

  TJ told Dad all about his LEGO short and how Caveman’s brain was almost eaten but then wasn’t.

  “Wow, that sounds exciting,” Dad said. “So how does it end?”

  “What?” TJ asked.

  “The epic battle,” Dad said. “Is Caveman going to kill Zombie Cheerleader, or is Zombie Cheerleader going to kill Caveman?”

  “Um . . .” TJ said, and then we all stood there quietly while Baxter stopped to sniff a little bush. “I don’t know. I haven’t figured out the ending yet.”

  We walked back and sat on Professor Reese’s porch. Dad played his guitar quietly while TJ blabbed some more. “I don’t want Caveman to die. But it’s really hard to kill a zombie with a club, I think.”

  “Aren’t zombies already dead?” I asked as Baxter flopped over half on the doormat and half on me.

  “Exactly,” TJ said.

  I listened to TJ while I rubbed Baxter’s tummy. Pretty soon Baxter was snoozing and making little boop-barking noises in his sleep. His paws started twitching, and I realized he was dreaming about running. I wondered where he was going in his dream—if he was galloping on the end of his leash, looking for Professor Reese.

  TJ went on and on. “I have one hundred sixty-two pictures, which is twenty point two seconds. I still need to take seventy-eight more to make a thirty-second short. I don’t want to take them until I figure out the ending.” He shook his head. “But I’ve never made a movie before.”

  “Don’t think of it like a movie,” Dad said. “A movie tells a story. You just have to figure out how you want the story to end.”

  “Oh,” TJ said. “OK.”

  Then Dad said it was time for bed. When I gave Baxter a big good-night hug, I could hear the faint hum of the microchip. But it didn’t seem to be bothering him, especially with his ears still not working right. We tucked him into Professor Reese’s house and went home.

  Even though Professor Reese was missing, it had been a good day for me as her lab assistant because I had figured out the answer to one of her questions.

  But I still needed to figure out how Baxter found the hat so far away from the house. Because it wasn’t like at the dog park, when he could see the ball the whole time. We teleported the hat so far, we had to practically run for five minutes to get there. So how did he follow such a long bounce?

  I pulled all my dog books off my bookcase, but none of them had a section on bouncing.

  I wondered about it all night long until I fell asleep.

  In the morning (Saturday = Baxterday), I woke TJ up early. We ate breakfast superfast and then left a note on the kitchen counter (because Mom was still asleep) saying we were going to go feed Baxter and take him on a walk. Then we headed over.

  “But this time, when we walk,” I told TJ and Baxter, “I want a plan.” I nodded.

  They both nodded back.

  I fed Baxter and put in his ear ointment, and then we all went downstairs to the lab. TJ said good morning to Spike (who was still gnawing on his big carrot) and plopped down in the spinny chair. Baxter plopped down on the floor beside him.

  “OK.” I began to pace. “We need to figure out where Professor Reese is.”

  “Right,” TJ said.

  “We just need to think through the whole thing logically.”

  “Right,” TJ said.

  “Where do you think we should start?”

  “I have no idea,” TJ said.

  I didn’t, either. But since teleportation was science, I tried to think about what a scientist might do if they were in a situation like this. “Professor Reese says that when you get new information, it’s good to see how it fits in with what you already know.”

  “Yeah,” TJ said, “but we don’t have any new information.”

  “Sure we do.” I stopped pacing so I could pat Baxter’s head, but carefully so I wouldn’t touch his sore ears. “We know about the bounce now.”

  “So?”

  “So, let’s look at the map again.” I hurried over to it.

  TJ spun in the chair. “What good will that do?”

  “I don’t know yet.” I shrugged. “Come here anyway.”

  So he got up and stood by the map with me, and we look
ed at all the pins and the little slips of paper. I pointed to the green pin for the last time we had teleported the hat. “OK. Those are the last coordinates that we saw her type into the computer: 45.530313, –122.696471.”

  “Yeah, but if that’s where she went, she would have just walked home,” TJ said. “It’s only a few blocks away.”

  “I know.” I sighed.

  We studied the map some more. And suddenly something started flitting around in the back of my mind, but I couldn’t quite catch it . . .

  “Wait a minute! 45.530313,” TJ read again. “Where did we see that number?”

  “Um . . .” I thought back. “You read it out so Professor Reese could set up the teleporter the last time we teleported the hat. And then you read it to me again later so I could write the slip.”

  “Yeah . . .” TJ scrunched his face up. “But didn’t we see it somewhere else? I remember it because of all the threes: five three oh three one three.”

  And then suddenly, the idea flitting in the back of my mind stopped—and I caught hold. “That’s it!”

  I ran upstairs—TJ and Baxter following—through the living room through the dining room into the kitchen, straight to the Baxter Station.

  I grabbed the vet report, which was lying next to the ear ointment.

  Then I turned to TJ and smiled. “I think we just figured it out.”

  23

  TJ, the Genius

  “TJ! You’re a genius!” I said.

  “I am?”

  I handed him the vet report. “Take a look at Baxter’s microchip number.”

  TJ read, “45530313! I knew I saw that number before!” Then he scrunched up his face. “So what does that mean?”

  “Hang on. Let me think—this is new information.”

  TJ rummaged around in his hoodie pocket. He pulled out two sticks of gum and handed one to me. I chewed and paced (and TJ just chewed).

  Baxter watched me pace back and forth, first his left eyebrow going up and then his right. Pretty soon, all the little bits and pieces started fitting together, which I tried to explain to TJ as I thought it through as logically as I could (in a situation like this):