Case File 13 #2

by J. Scott Savage

  “What’s he done now?” a voice shouted from inside the house. “If it’s the police, tell them to throw him in jail and toss away the key.”

  So many things about Cody began to make sense. No wonder he was always prowling around the neighborhood. Who’d want to live with people like this? “He didn’t take our bikes and he didn’t . . . rough us up,” Nick said.

  “At least not lately,” Carter mumbled, and Nick shot him a warning look.

  “We just haven’t seen him at school and we wanted to make sure he’s okay. We’re kind of his friends,” Nick said. It wasn’t totally a lie, either. As much of a pain as Cody was, Nick had sort of gotten used to him. He thought Carter and Angelo might feel the same way, although they’d never actually discussed it.

  “Friends?” the old man asked, as though he’d never heard the word before. He narrowed his eyes. “Since when does that troublemaker have friends?”

  “If it’s the school,” the voice from the inside of the house shrilled, “tell them we haven’t seen him!”

  “He isn’t a troublemaker anymore. He’s changed,” Angelo said. “Have you even called the police to report that he’s missing?”

  The old man tugged at one of his long red whiskers and scowled at Angelo’s glasses. “Who are you supposed to be? Some kind of motion picture star?”

  Angelo’s face went red.

  “No. I ain’t called the police and I ain’t going to,” the old man said. “I’d imagine they’re as glad to be rid of him as I am. Once a troublemaker, always a troublemaker. Probably went back to live with his father. Two of ’em deserve each other.” With that, he yanked up his pants again, walked into the house, and slammed the door behind him.

  “Wow,” Nick said as the kids turned and walked back to the street. “Can you believe those two?”

  “I can’t believe they haven’t noticed how different he is,” Dana said.

  Angelo scratched his head. “It explains why the police haven’t come looking for him.”

  “I have to get home,” Tiffany said. “My parents are still mad that I lost my phone. They’re saying they might not get me another one till after Christmas.”

  “I’ve gotta go too,” Dana said. “My cousins are coming for Thanksgiving and I’m supposed to help clean the house.”

  Angie kicked a rock into the gutter. “I’m sorry I suggested we go to the school,” she said quietly.

  Nick shrugged. “It isn’t your fault. We’d have gone with or without you.”

  Angie snorted. “A bunch of chickens like you three? I don’t think so.”

  Normally Nick enjoyed a good argument with Angie. But right now his heart just wasn’t in it.

  “Well, see you around,” Angie said.

  “See you.” They had the next three days off school for fall break, and there didn’t seem to be much else they could do about the body snatching.

  “Want to go play some Left 4 Dead 2?” Angelo asked.

  “I guess,” Nick said as the three of them walked down the street.

  “Let’s go to your house,” Carter said hopefully. “Maybe your mom’s baking something.”

  The next three hours were a blur of chopping, shooting, and exploding the infected zombie creatures. But even that didn’t cheer Nick up.

  “Are you trying to get us killed?” Carter asked when Nick’s inattention caused them to be overrun by the bloodthirsty hordes for the third time in an hour.

  Nick sighed and dropped his controller. “Sorry,” he muttered. “My heart just isn’t in it. I keep thinking about Cody spending Thanksgiving getting shock treatments or locked in a cold cell or something.”

  “Well look who’s here,” Nick’s dad called out in a cheerful voice as he came through the front door that evening. “It’s Nick the Nerd and his sidekicks the Smarticle Particle and the Mouth from the South.”

  “Hi, Dad,” Nick said. His father was taking off Wednesday to give himself a five-day weekend and was looking forward to trying out his new P40 WarHawk remote-controlled plane.

  “Have you eaten me out of house and home yet?” Dad asked, kicking off his shoes and dropping into a recliner.

  “Only house,” Carter said. “I plan on coming by Thursday after we get back from my grandma’s to finish the home part.”

  Nick looked from the video game to his dad, and finally made the decision he’d been considering for the last two days.

  Angelo seemed to sense what Nick was thinking and shook his head. “Not a good idea,” he whispered.

  But Nick had made up his mind. Before he could talk himself out of it, he opened his mouth and blurted, “Dad, Sunday night we snuck into Sumina Prep. We thought they were stealing bodies and it turns out they are. There’s this crazy guy who is doing some weird experiments, and a human brain in a jar, and this giant who doesn’t speak much English, and these operating tables with straps to hold people down.”

  Dad blinked. Carefully he loosened his badly tied necktie and folded his arms. His face was so still Nick couldn’t tell what his father was thinking. “Anything else?”

  Nick wiped his eyes, which were suddenly wet. “They kidnapped Cody Gills.”

  “Who do you think he’s talking to?” Carter whispered. He, Nick, and Angelo had been waiting in Nick’s room while Mom and Dad spoke in the kitchen. They’d heard Nick’s dad make several phone calls over the last half hour. But with the door closed, it was impossible to hear what he was saying or who he was saying it to.

  “The police?” Angelo suggested.

  “Probably our parents,” Carter said.

  Nick felt terrible for getting his friends in trouble and he appreciated the fact that they’d both agreed to stick with him. “I’m sorry, guys,” he said.

  “Don’t be sorry.” Angelo patted him on shoulder. “It was the right thing to do. You were just the only one brave enough to do it.”

  Carter folded and unfolded an empty package of Chips Ahoy! cookies. “Couldn’t you have waited until after the holidays though? I hate being grounded on vacation.”

  Nick and Angelo looked at him, and he threw the wrapper toward the trash can, missing by at least a foot. “Okay, that was selfish.”

  Angelo tapped his pen on a page of his monster notebook, not writing anything. “I noticed you didn’t mention the girls.”

  Nick nodded. “No point getting them into trouble too.”

  Footsteps sounded in the hallway and the three boys looked up as the bedroom door swung open. “Come into the living room,” Dad said. “Your mom and I need to talk with you.”

  Nick led his friends out of his room, thinking he’d never felt less like one of the Three Monsterteers. As they shuffled over to the couch, he snuck a peek at his mom. She was sitting with her back board-straight, her mouth a thin white line. This was not going to go well.

  Dad stood with his arms folded across his chest and waited until all three boys met his eyes. “First of all, I want to say that I expected more out of the three of you.”

  “It’s not just the lying about where you were Sunday night or the trespassing,” Mom said sternly. “Although those are bad enough. But waiting this long to tell us about it when one of your friends could be in danger is completely unacceptable.”

  “I thought I could trust you,” Dad said. Nick wilted at the disappointment in his father’s voice and in his eyes.

  “Nick wanted to tell you sooner,” Angelo said. “But I wouldn’t let him.”

  “I wouldn’t either,” Carter said. “And if it helps, I’ve totally lost my appetite. Right before Thanksgiving, too.”

  “Did you find out if Cody is all right?” Nick asked. He didn’t care if he got grounded for a month as long as Cody was found safe.

  Dad rubbed a finger across the skin between his nose and his upper lip. “His grandparents seem to believe he’s with his father because he’s afraid of getting into trouble for breaking into the school.”

  “But that’s not—” Nick began.

  Hi
s father held up a finger. “I’m only repeating what they told me.”

  “Are the police at least looking for him?” Nick asked.

  “At this time they have no reason to believe he is a missing person.”

  “Of course he’s a missing person,” Nick said. He couldn’t believe his dad was buying the garbage Cody’s grandparents were giving. “Didn’t you listen to anything I said about the school? There’s something totally messed up going on there. That guy’s stealing corpses and now he’s got Cody. I know it.”

  Mom stood up and glared at him. “I am this close to throwing every monster comic book, movie, game, and model you own in the trash,” she said, holding her thumb and forefinger less than an inch apart.

  Angelo gasped.

  “The only reason I haven’t,” she continued, “is because I know how much you boys care about them. You’re just lucky the police aren’t charging you with breaking and entering.”

  “Sorry,” Nick muttered. He couldn’t believe his own mom and dad were more concerned about what they had done at the school than they were about a kidnapping.

  “You can say just how sorry you are tomorrow,” Dad said.

  Nick tensed. “What do you mean?”

  Dad smiled for the first time during their entire conversation and Nick didn’t like the look of it.

  “He means you will have the chance to say you’re sorry in person,” Mom said, “when your father takes you to Sumina Preparatory Academy in the morning to apologize to Mr. Dippel, the Sumina headmaster, face-to-face.”

  Angelo and Carter looked at Nick like he’d just been given a death sentence.

  “As for the two of you,” Mom said, “we have not told your parents.”

  Carter gave a huge sigh of relief. “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Mr. and Mrs. B, you guys are the best.”

  Dad smiled again. “We have not told them because you will tell them yourselves. Between now and tomorrow morning when I pick you up to apologize with Nick.”

  Wednesday morning, the three boys huddled in the backseat of the Braithwaites’ SUV, dreading their return visit to the Sumina building.

  “Did you tell your dad the guy’s crazy?” Carter whispered.

  “He won’t listen. He thinks there’s a rational explanation.” Nick sighed. His dad had no imagination. If there was a zombie apocalypse, his dad would be the first one infected, because he’d be looking for the zippers on the backs of the costumes when the horde attacked.

  When Carter got nervous he ate even more than usual. This morning, he had an entire package of Oreos shoved down the front of his coat, and he was going through the cookies like he had to finish them all before they reached the school. “What if he kidnaps us?” he said, spraying crumbs.

  “That won’t happen,” Angelo said. “He couldn’t afford the publicity if we disappeared too.”

  “That’ll be good to know when those goons of his grab us and take us into his dungeon. When the mad scientist is hooking electrodes to your head you can tell him what bad publicity that is.” Carter shoved four cookies in his mouth at the same time, turning his teeth a disgusting shade of black.

  “Want some music?” Dad asked. “I’ve got Johnny Horton’s Greatest Hits.” He started humming, “Sink the Bismarck.” “La-dee-dee da-dee-dee ’cause the world depends on us.”

  “No thanks,” all three boys said at once.

  “You should ask him if he’s got ‘It’s the End of the World as We Know It,’” Carter said.

  “You know, it’s a funny thing,” Dad said, trying to hum and talk at the same time. “I called a friend of mine in the Diablo Valley Police Department. He said they haven’t had any problems with Sumina Prep. But they did get a 911 call Sunday night from someone claiming to be a girl who goes to your school.”

  Nick held his breath.

  “But when they called her house, it turned out the girl wasn’t anywhere near Diablo Valley that night, so they put it down as a prank call. But you wouldn’t know anything about that since it was just three of you boys out at the school, right?”

  The three friends glanced uncomfortably at each other. “Actually, that Johnny Horton’s sounding pretty good right about now,” Carter said.

  When they pulled up in front of the school, Nick noticed something different right away. “The shutters are open.”

  Dad glanced out his window and squinted at the thick wooden shutters that had been closed tight before. “Wasn’t there a pretty good storm Sunday night? They were probably worried the high winds would break the glass.”

  Nick knew it couldn’t be anything that innocent, but he kept his mouth shut.

  “Quite a place,” Dad said when they got out of the car. He craned his head back to see the top story. “Hard to believe it’s only been here for a little over a year.”

  “That’s not possible,” Nick said. “These stones have to be at least a hundred years old.”

  “Actually closer to nine hundred,” a voice said. Nick turned to see the mad scientist standing casually outside the door to the school. Without his lab coat, and with no electricity sparking from his fingertips, he looked more like a football coach again. But his flour-white skin, pink eyes, and crazy white hair still terrified Nick. He pressed back against his dad.

  “Considering that the oldest surviving building in California is Mission San Juan Capistrano, which was built in 1776, this can’t be nine hundred years old,” Angelo said. Nick was impressed that his friend could even talk. His throat felt like he’d swallowed a handful of sand.

  The headmaster gave a wheezy laugh that freaked Nick out. Even standing beside his dad in the middle of the day the guy was seriously eerie. All the more so when you knew he had Cody hidden away somewhere. “This one is too smart for his own good,” he said with a strange accent Nick couldn’t place. All of his s’s sounded like z’s, his w’s and f’s sounded like v’s, and his d’s sounded like t’s. “This castle was built by one of my long dead ancestors. It was rather famous until it fell into disrepair. I had it shipped here and reassembled stone by stone.”

  “That must have cost a small fortune,” Nick’s father said. He held out his hand. “Daniel Braithwaite.” Nick wanted to warn him about the electricity, but managed to bite his tongue.

  “Dr. Franz Dippel.” The pale man shook Mr. Braithwaite’s hand, and Nick was surprised to see there wasn’t so much as a spark. Maybe he could turn the power off and on. “And these must be the miscreants who broke into my school.” He turned his pink eyes on Nick, Carter, and Angelo. “I must say, you gave my students and me quite a scare,” he said with another wheezy laugh.

  “You?” Carter sputtered. “We scared you? When I saw you shocking that body in your lab, my teeth chattered so hard, I sounded like a woodpecker.”

  The headmaster’s eyes narrowed for a moment, his face hardening into an expression that looked much closer to what Nick remembered from Sunday night. The expression disappeared so quickly Nick wondered if his dad had even seen it. When he turned to check, he saw that his father was frowning at Carter. “My son and his friends seem to think they saw something strange happening in your school,” he said. “But that’s not why we’re here, is it boys?”

  “No,” Nick mumbled. “We’re here to say we’re sorry for trespassing in your school.”

  “I’m sorry,” Angelo said. “We shouldn’t have nosed around.”

  “Yeah. I’m sorry too.” Carter rubbed a hand across his jacket and Nick was pretty sure he was checking on his cookies.

  “Well,” Dr. Dippel said with a smile that looked totally fake to Nick, “no harm done.” He reached into the pocket of his suit, which looked like something a man might have worn in Europe in the 1800s, and pulled out a pair of glasses with one broken lens. “Do these belong to one of you?”

  Angelo eased forward. “They’re mine.” Nick could have sworn the doctor smirked as Angelo took his glasses while being careful not to touch the headmaster’s fingers.

  “W
hy don’t you let me take you on a tour of the school?” Dr. Dippel suggested. “Perhaps things will look at little less ‘strange,’ as you say, in the light of day.”

  Nick glanced at Angelo. How could the headmaster let them inside the school knowing what they would see?

  “No way,” Carter whispered. “If we go in, we’ll never come out.”

  “Would you boys like that?” Mr. Braithwaite asked.

  Nick drew a deep breath. This was his chance to show his dad what they’d seen Sunday night. And maybe they could figure out where the headmaster had taken Cody. Unless Carter was right and it was some sort of trap.

  “Let’s go in,” Angelo said.

  “Okay,” Nick agreed.

  “Come, come.” Dr. Dippel held open the front door. As Nick entered the school, he felt like he was walking into a nightmare.

  “Over there,” Nick said, pointing to the first door they had entered Sunday night.

  “Of course,” the headmaster said. “Go anywhere you like.”

  He was sure that the brain would be gone. But it was still on the table. “See,” Nick hissed to his dad.

  Mr. Braithwaite leaned over to look in the jar. “Is this real?” he asked like a kid in a candy shop.

  “Yes, of course,” the headmaster said in his strange accent. “Most schools have only pig or cow brains to study in anatomy class. This was a gift to the academy from a good friend at a large university in London.”

  “That is so-o-o cool,” Mr. Braithwaite said.

  Nick couldn’t believe his dad was that gullible. Didn’t he understand this brain hadn’t come from London, but had been stolen from a cemetery or hospital right in their own hometown? “How do you explain the kids’ books?” he demanded. “Don’t tell me you have little kids learning how to read and studying brains at the same time.” Let him explain his way out of that.

  Dr. Dippel steepled his fingers in front of his face. “I am afraid my students are not from America. In their home country they are very advanced. In English, they must learn, as you say, like the little children.”

  “I want to ask them some questions,” Carter said. “Especially Jake.”