Meddling Kids

by Edgar Cantero

  “Tim, what’s up?”

  Andy coerced her mortified legs to stand up, cocked the shotgun, and cautiously approached the door.

  “ ‘…but each transference shall cost the Avatar dearly, for once it stains one Vessel it can never pour itself out completely, and every Vessel shall remain polluted after the Avatar reaches its Source.’ ”

  Tim shut up as Andy yanked the door open and held the gun at the threshold.

  No one. Still, Tim kept barking at the empty corridor.

  “Uh. Andy…” Kerri called from her corner.

  She noticed it a second later. A single sheet of paper hung taped on the outside of the open door, fluttering in the breeze. Albeit missing the envelope, the handwriting on the note was familiar.

  And it simply read “GOOD-BYE.”

  There was uncertainty about which event happened next.

  The first of the two disputing occurrences was the canary fluttering in its cage.

  The second was the gentle clatter of some lids on their pots in the laboratory, followed by the jingling of glassware and the drumming of books, the marimbaing of brass and copper and iron birdcages, and then the deep, grave, intestinal grumble of Deboën Isle shrugging a murder of crows off its trees.

  “We’re leaving!” Andy announced.

  Nate barely had time to grab the grimoire before the girls took him along with the birdcage and their bags and blundered down the last flight of stairs into the hallway. Books were lemminging off the shelves, portraits and furniture shuddering at the fury of the house stirring itself awake.

  “The hole in the east wing!” Kerri commandeered the party, compass in hand, covering it from the dust raining from the roof beams. “That way!”

  They ran to the end of a corridor, Andy’s shoulder first, inspired by sheer faith to hit a door and not a solid wall. She crashed inside, landing onto a sun-kissed carpet. White sky shone through the charred skeleton of the roof like a divine power through a rose window.

  Kerri leaped over Andy and clambered up a pile of debris to peep through a gash on the wall.

  “Through here! Tim, come! You come with me!”

  The dog blissfully jumped into her arms, then reconsidered when he saw the almost vertical drop on the other side of the hole, but Kerri didn’t give him a chance to cower: she hugged him tightly and plunged forward, and they avalanched down a steep pile of rubble to the ground, where they rolled to their feet and ran toward the sound of the approaching motorboat.

  “A motorboat?!” Andy shouted in disbelief as she slid down with the cage and the bags. “Who the fuck—”

  “Who cares?!” Nate cried, scurrying out himself, hugging the grimoire to his chest, trying to climb safely down and failing miserably, but happily, as he tumbled to safe ground.

  The motorboat didn’t even dock; Joey Krantz swerved at the shore and let Kerri jump from the pier to the front seat. Tim came right after, barking an introduction in midair and landing on Joey’s lap.

  “Quick, everybody on board!” Kerri called. “Nate! Move!”

  Andy stopped by the pier, caught Nate once again frozen in front of the mansion, staring back at the dormer window to the attic they’d just escaped.

  She followed his line of sight. She saw the magnificent mansion, long and boastfully tall, the ivy snaking up the façade and framing the round window on the central dormer. The tremor had passed. Nothing moved up there. Nothing shuddered. Not the ivy leaves, nor the window frame, nor the black-cloaked crow-figure standing in the attic they had just left not sixty seconds ago.

  “No way,” she muttered to herself.

  A horn blared.

  “Nate! Andrea! Come on board!” Joey shouted.

  Andy popped out of the trance, grabbed Nate, glanced back at the figure she expected to have vanished in the lapse and saw it still standing there, as impertinent as only human-born things can be. Then they boarded the boat just as Joey was pumping the throttle and veering back to the mainland.

  The house drifted away, hid back under the isle trees. The tectonic plates had settled. The waters were beginning to, disturbed only by the path knifed by the motorboat that ferried the detectives back to the mainland.

  Andy shifted on the pile of backpacks and distressed animals and faced Joey. “What are you doing here?!”

  “I called him!” Kerri explained. “I asked him to stand guard on the lakeshore in case we had to escape this way.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me this?”

  “Because I knew you wouldn’t approve, Andy! We are going to need help—all we can get!”

  “So what happened?” Joey pressed. “Was that an earthquake just now? Is it what tipped your boat last time?”

  Kerri tried to remember every new clue they’d collected, but the pile of loose ends was too big to juggle with; they just fell out of her hands. She flipped her hair and stared at the horizon.

  Andy suddenly noticed the canary expostulating in the most harmonious terms. She opened the cage, realizing they could have freed it ages ago, and the little bird hopped indecisively on the brim of the little door, then tried to flutter out against the wind and lost. It settled in the shelter of the backseat, where the leather was torn and cozy foam stuck out, and it cowered there, tweeting unambiguously angry messages at each team member on the boat: Fuck you! And fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, and especially fuck you!

  And Tim yapped back with immense joy at the new friend he’d made.

  Kerri swapped slides under the microscope, holding her breath at the abusive smell coming from the sample box. Andy was gargoyling over her shoulder, perched on a stool behind her at the front row of the classroom.

  ANDY: So I’m not angry that you called Joey. I mean, I don’t know how I would have reacted if you’d told me, but it’s okay, ’cause I don’t need to green-light every step; no one’s in command. (Pauses; sees Kerri taking notes.) What’s up?

  KERRI: Oxidation of the marrow cells.

  ANDY: Right. (Beat.) But anyway, the key to keeping it this way is being a team and sharing intel. Okay? I’m not pissed off; I’m saying that if we start (treading carefully) com-part-ment-al-iz-ing information, we’re less efficient. (Pause.) What’s up now?

  KERRI: (Leaves the pen on the notepad.) Someone talking to me while I’m trying to concentrate.

  Andy wisely repressed an unnecessary “okay” and shut up. It had been Kerri’s idea to hit the library, just like the old days, but the needs of the present case had vastly outgrown the once rich and always willing resources of the Blyton Hills Elementary book depository. She had now taken it upon herself to analyze the wheezer samples she and Copperseed had frozen using the best sixth-grade equipment available in the chemistry classroom.

  The harsh population drop in Blyton Hills after the closure of the chemical plant was taking its toll on the public budget, and the school was expected to stop operating the following year and start busing the children off to Belden, as it did with high schoolers. Andy had never visited the building before, except for the library. She liked the classrooms better than those in the boarding schools she’d been sent to, but maybe it was just her grown-up eyes, distanced from the mean-looking periodic tables and plant taxonomy posters.

  “Do you remember the Blooms’ house?” Kerri asked, not raising her eyes from the lens.

  She held on for an answer, which didn’t arrive.

  “You may speak now, Andy.”

  “Yeah, I remember,” she answered promptly. “They had that swimming pool we were so jealous of.”

  “Do me a favor: go there and ask Mr. Bloom to let you borrow their pH test pen—that thingy to measure water acidity?”

  “Okay.”

  “And take Tim; I can’t keep him from putting stuff in his mouth all the time.”

  Tim caught the accusation, spat the tadpole back into its aquarium, and came tail-nodding to Andy by the door.

  “Uh…want something to eat?” Andy asked.

  Somewhere behind a cu
rtain of curly orange stalactites covering the microscope, Kerri microsmiled. “A Coke.”

  Andy left and closed the door behind her. Captain Al, Deputy Copperseed, and Joey Krantz were heading her way; she intercepted them.

  “Don’t disturb her; brief me,” she ordered, walking on.

  The three marched beside her, Captain Al reporting first: “Sentinel Hill’s clear. The creatures you met must have sprung up the shaft there. After I heard them and I morsed you a warning, I stood guarding the adit mouth for a while, but nothing popped up.”

  “The air was too pure for them,” Andy guessed, resentful.

  “I just scouted the isle,” Joey said. “I saw nobody.”

  “Why are you wearing a uniform?” she interrupted.

  “Uh…I volunteer for the sheriff’s office.”

  “Right. Did you enter the mansion?”

  “No, the hole you jumped out of is impossible to climb back up without a ladder or any gear; there’s no way in.”

  “Well, somebody was inside. What about the rowboat?”

  “It’s still there at the pier on the mainland; been there for over a decade. Andy, are you sure of what you saw? You guys were inhaling gases, running, climbing—maybe you saw a ghost.”

  “A ghost doesn’t go around leaving notes,” Andy argued. “Someone’s been fucking with us since we arrived; find who he is. And check if RH lost an inspector in the gold mine.”

  “We checked that already—they didn’t.”

  “Then who the fuck was Simon Jaffa?” Andy blurted, drawing out the ID card and slapping it on Joey’s uniform.

  “Hang on.” Copperseed pulled the party to a stop. He read the ID, then questioned Al. “That weasel lawyer who defended Wickley. Wasn’t his name Jaffa?”

  “Wickley?” Andy echoed. “Wickley was defended by a corporate lawyer?”

  “That guy, a corporate lawyer?” sneered the deputy. “He was an ambulance chaser. He took the case after reading your story in the Telegraph.”

  Andy casually peeked through the door to the next classroom. It was time for the next meeting.

  “Are the Blooms still living here?”

  “He is; she left him,” Joey said.

  “Could you please go to their house and borrow the acidity test kit for their pool?” she asked Captain Al. “Kerri needs it for her lab work. And, Deputy, can you check your files, confirm it’s the same Jaffa?”

  “What can I do?” Joey offered.

  “Get Kerri a Coke.”

  “Is that for the lab work too?”

  “Yeah, I guess. Go.”

  She watched the three men march down the hallway, then she knocked on the classroom door, opened it, and ushered Tim inside.

  “Hey, Nate.”

  Nate deminodded, eyes trapped on the half-fossilized book open on the teacher’s table. The blackboard behind him and a second one on wheels he had placed to his right, forming a corner, were covered in mystic symbols and right-to-left script.

  “Don’t worry, I’m keeping my mouth shut,” he said, flipping over a stiff, calcified page.

  “What’s that on the blackboard?”

  “Protective spells. Just in case.”

  Rare evening light that only frequently detained pupils are familiar with seeped through the windows. Andy knew it well.

  “We saw him, Andy,” Nate muttered. “He was standing right there.”

  “It was a guy in a costume, Nate. Same as always.”

  She checked the page Nate was studying: scribbled pieces of younger yellow paper were clipped to the margins of the arcane parchment.

  Andy had a rare inspiration. She delved into her pockets, retrieved the farewell note that the bad guy had left them inside the mansion, and laid it on the open book.

  “Do you think it’s the same handwriting?” she asked.

  Nate examined the brief missive and compared it with the notations in the book. The latter were testimony of a time of valued penmanship, romantically slanted, embellished by experience rather than whim. The capitals in the farewell note were straight, high, and narrow, but overall ordinary.

  “It’s not the same,” he ruled. “But that doesn’t prove anything. The Deboën who wrote these notes is not the same that came back.”

  “One is Damian, one is Daniel?”

  “Not exactly. One was alive; the other was brought back to life. From his essential salts. I’m not sure he can even get a real body.”

  “But we saw a man in the window.”

  “You called it ‘a guy in a costume’ before. I’d rather err on the side of caution and say ‘something in a cloak.’ ”

  The phrase was vague enough for the possibilities to make Andy’s skin crawl.

  “What does your friend in Arkham say?”

  “I can’t talk to him; they rescinded his phone privileges. Apparently he tried to reproduce the Seal of Zur and accidentally set fire to the curtains.”

  Andy nodded appreciatively, pondering that one of the areas the Blyton Summer Detective Club should try to improve in the future was its network of outside consultants.

  “Okay. Get the book,” she ordered, going for the door and fingersnapping the Weimaraner to attention.

  “Why? Where are we going?”

  “To see the second-best expert we have.”

  Nate gathered the book and his own notes and carried them out of the classroom and through the school doors, assured and somewhat satisfied that the big dark book was intimately annoyed by sunlight. The amber Chevy Vega glistened at them like a smiling Rock Hudson—the only four-wheeled vehicle parked in front of the elementary school. Tim jumped into the backseat and Nate rode shotgun. Andy started the engine, skidded onto the road, and turned north for Owl Hill.

  “Hey, look there,” Peter said, sticking his perfect face to the window. “Dr. Thewlis’s clinic closed down.”

  Everyone in the car ignored him or pretended to ignore him.

  “Dr. Thewlis? The dentist?” Peter insisted. “He was nice. One of the best doctors I’ve been to.”

  “Simon Jaffa was not RH,” Andy said to entertain on the trip. “He was Wickley’s lawyer.”

  “Really?” Nate frowned, thinking what that implied, but his cache memory was too busy and waved him to leave the pending task on the tray. “Not a very good one, was he? In fact, I always wondered how he got thirteen years for—”

  “Wickley just pleaded guilty,” Andy said. “He told me.”

  Nate looked at her for the first time in this chapter.

  “You talked to Wickley? When? Where?”

  “Before going to New York for Kerri.”

  “Oh. So, how did he look?”

  “Uh…fine, I guess,” she summarized, swerving onto Klondike Street. “Until the moment when he started speaking in tongues while I was squeezing his neck.”

  Nate registered that, then loosened the grip on the grimoire a little as Andy pulled over in front of Mrs. Morris’s house.

  “That was interesting,” Nate judged as they stepped out of the car. “Is there a way to know Wickley’s whereabouts?”

  “Yes. Copperseed can phone Wickley’s parole officer and ask whether he’s failed to touch base in the last forty-eight hours. Why? Do you think he might be the cloaked man?”

  “No, I was just planning to mock your knowledge of the penitentiary system if you knew that.”

  Their pace was naturally slowed down by the narrow garden path and the untamed nature hindering the way. Andy rang the bell. A green light glowed in the bay window.

  “She’s going to love having us back,” Nate predicted.

  Steps approached, latches clacked, a door opened the whole four inches the chain allowed.

  “You again?” Dunia greeted them through the crack.

  “Mrs. Morris, we need your help,” Andy said in her good-cop voice.

  The woman unbolted the chain, let the door open just wide enough for Tim to parade in, his tail semaphoring, Is that fresh tea I smell? Dunia f
ocused on blocking the other two. Andy noticed what she was wearing—something irrelevant, but Andy registered it nonetheless.

  “Your friend Captain Urich’s been asking questions about me,” Dunia said resentfully. “Wanted to make sure I was in town all morning. What’s happening?”

  She referred to the captain by his real name, abstaining from his more widespread nickname, Crazy Al. Honor among outcasts, Andy thought.

  “We’ve been to your old house again,” Nate said.

  “Not my house.”

  “Someone’s living there.”

  Dunia waived her right of reply, ink-black cold-war eyes locked on him. Then she glanced down at the volume in his hands.

  “I plan to return it,” Nate explained, “but first I need to ask you a few questions.”

  “I don’t want that thing in my house!” she exclaimed. “Do you know what happens to people who read this book?”

  “I can’t read it; I’m just going through your father’s notes, and I need help.”

  He’d managed to carry the book inside at this point, with Dunia following. Andy closed the door behind them. As her pupils adjusted to the wallpapered gloom, she spotted something new in the cluttered foyer—a large package sitting next to the door. One torn half of a mailing label read “Banned Books, San Francisco.” She flipped open the lid and pulled out a book with the word “Vampire” on the spine.

  The cover featured a dark-haired temptress leaning over another woman on a canopied bed, red hair cascading over the mattress. Undying Lust. Seventh entry in the Vampire Sorority series.

  Suddenly she noticed the ongoing conversation in the living room had halted. Dunia was watching her from the threshold, a fresh cigarette in her hand.

  “Sorry, I…” Andy then noticed the author’s name hiding in a corner under the displaced bedsheets: Dunia L. Morris. “Oh. This is your latest novel?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Andy flipped it in her hand. “Uh, can I keep it?”

  “Sure,” Dunia sighed.

  (Offering it to her.) “Would you?”

  Dunia put her on hold for a second, cigarette caught between her teeth. She lit it, puffed the first drag out through her nose, then took the book. She led her into the living room to her workstation by the bay window. A green-shaded lamp spotlighted a pile of books, a notepad, and a personal computer. Dunia wielded a black marker.