by Bob Balaban
4
FOLLOW THE YELLOW BRICK ROAD
“MAYBE YOU’LL LIKE being on the swimming team,” Sam says. “You never know until you try it.”
“Fat chance,” I mutter.
Sam and Lucille and I are on our way to my house after school. My mom is making us dinner tonight. We’re also going to do our homework, learn ten vocabulary words, and watch a scary movie if there’s time left over.
We take the shortcut past Devil’s Hill and double back around Crater Lake, the deepest body of water in southern Illinois. It was formed when a giant meteor crashed to earth at the end of the Cretaceous period, over sixty-five million years ago, wiping out most of the planet’s dinosaur population.
At that point, according to my mom, a few of my distant dinosaur ancestors mutated and swam to safety at the bottom of lake. Many millions of years later, my Mom’s mom, a mutant dinosaur named Nana Wallabird, crawled out of the bottom of the lake and onto dry land, and married Grampa, a human. And that’s how I eventually became scaly old me.
“Give it a chance,” Sam says. “Being on a team can be a fun and rewarding experience.” He pulls his collar up around his neck as a few wispy flakes of snow begin to whirl around our heads.
“If you think being on a team is so wonderful, why don’t you join one?” I ask.
“I’ve been on the chess team for years,” Sam answers.
“They just call it a team,” I say. “Everyone knows it’s really a club, Sam. Come on. And for your information, there are eight zillion good reasons I don’t want to be on the swimming team, starting with they make you go into the deep end and I could drown.”
“You’re taller than the deep end, Charlie,” Sam chides. “I strongly doubt that you would drown.”
“A person could drown in five inches of water if they hit their head on the side of the pool and got knocked unconscious,” I reply. “It happens every day.”
We veer left at the fork at Willow Hollow Road and turn right onto Maple Drive. Only six more blocks to 442 Lonesome Lane. I can smell my mom’s delicious cooking from here.
“Let me get this straight,” Sam begins. “Muchnick made you join the swimming team because he thinks you stole his sourdough bread?”
“In a nutshell, yes,” I reply.
“That doesn’t make any sense!” Lucille exclaims.
“Since when did Principal Muchnick ever make any sense?” I say. “Doc Craverly thinks that if I join a team I’ll feel more productive and improve my self-image and stop stealing stuff.” I duck to avoid getting hit in the head by a branch.
“But you’re not a thief,” Sam reasons. “You are so innocent it hurts.”
“Tell it to Craverly, Sam,” I say. “Quick. Before I drown.”
“All we have to do is apprehend the real thief,” Sam explains. “And when we do, everybody will know you didn’t do anything bad, and you won’t have to be on the swimming team. Kaboom.”
“How come you’re so sure there weren’t three thieves?” Lucille asks. “One for each crime.”
“Intuition,” Sam answers. “Pure and simple. There hasn’t been a robbery in our neighborhood for as long as I can remember. And now suddenly three different people decide to turn criminal all in one morning?” Sam shakes his head. “Doesn’t make sense. The one-perp theory is much more likely.” Sam abruptly makes a left turn onto Cedar Street.
“Where are you going, Sam?” Lucille asks. “Charlie’s house is that way.” She points in the other direction.
“We’re going to Mr. Dieterly’s fish store to search for clues,” Sam says. “While they’re still fresh.”
We link arms and march into town together. I am so tall I have to stoop down to reach. I don’t mind. Clearing my good name and getting me off the swimming team is my idea of a great way to spend an afternoon. Soon we reach Dieterly’s Delectable Denizens of the Deep, site of this morning’s infamous Salmon Robbery.
Joe Jefferson, daytime anchor for W-H-A-T, the local news channel, spots us and rushes over with his crew to do an impromptu interview. He smooths his already perfectly arranged wavy brown hair. While one assistant applies powder to his forehead, the other brushes away invisible pieces of lint from his broad shoulders.
“Tell the audience at home, kids, do you have any idea who might have committed this dreadful crime?” Joe Jefferson intones in his deep and professionally phony announcer voice. “What about you, young . . . uh. Young . . . uh . . .” He is staring at me intently, trying to figure out what to call me. He pokes his microphone in what passes for my face. “Who do you think did it?”
I look at Lucille, dumbfounded. Sam takes over the role of designated spokesperson for our little group. “We don’t know anything about any robberies. We were out enjoying the beautiful autumn weather, and we just wandered over to buy some fish. For dinner. Because we love fish. Don’t we?”
“Yes, we do.” Lucille jumps right in. “Fish is both healthy and delicious. It’s just about our favorite food.” She smiles. “It’s easily digestible and goes especially well with a green vegetable or any member of the pasta family, and um—”
Lucille stops abruptly because Sam has just given her a brisk kick in the shins.
“You actually appear to be a fish, young uh . . . young . . . uh . . .” Joe Jefferson still cannot think of what to call me. He edges his microphone closer, careful not to get his fingers anywhere near my fangs.
“I’m not really a fish,” I reply. “I’m a mutant amphibious vertebrate.” I find myself feeling rather excited to be making my first TV appearance, but I resist the opportunity to try out a few jokes. Instead I stick to the facts. “It’s a common mistake,” I explain. “Most laymen are unaware of the proper kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species of even the most ordinary of creatures. And I could hardly be considered ordinary.”
Poor Joe Jefferson is left utterly speechless by my explanation. After several uncomfortable moments he manages to pull himself together and looks back at the camera, smiling broadly. “That’s a real first, folks. A fish going to a fish store to buy fish. Don’t remember ever seeing that before.” His smile slowly fades, and his eyes glaze over as he stops talking altogether.
“If you’ll excuse us, we better get going,” Sam says, practically pushing me toward the entrance to the store. “Stop acting like an idiot and get in there, Charlie,” he whispers.
“Nice chatting with you, Mr. Jefferson.” Lucille smiles uncomfortably. She follows close on our heels as an assistant mops up a few uncharacteristic beads of sweat from Mr. Jefferson’s forehead.
“So?” I whisper once we are inside the fish store. “What are we supposed to do now?”
“We look unobtrusive, Charlie,” Lucille whispers in return. “You go distract Mr. Dieterly while Sam and I talk to possible witnesses and dust for fingerprints.”
“That sounds like a good plan,” I reply quietly. “Everybody has fingerprints. Except, of course, people with claws. And there aren’t a lot of those running around these days.” I chuckle softly while Sam and Lucille start nosing around the store.
I am feeling pretty optimistic. My friends are smart. In a few minutes they will probably solve the crime, and then I can relax and forget about drowning once and for all.
I saunter over to the counter, where Mr. Dieterly, a meek-looking little man with glasses and a pencil-thin mustache, is in the process of wrapping up a bunch of jumbo shrimp for my neighbor Mrs. Pagliuso. Mr. Dieterly doesn’t look like the father of the biggest bully in middle school. With the tip of my claw, I spear a number from the ticket machine on the wall, and then I wait in line. Those shrimp sure do look tasty. I concentrate on not drooling all over the counter.
Mrs. Pagliuso watches closely to make sure Mr. Dieterly isn’t throwing in any undersized shrimp. He sees me waiting in line and shakes his head. He gives a lit
tle nod to the back of the store, and Mrs. Dieterly, an imposing-looking woman with arms like the Incredible Hulk, quickly emerges from the office carrying a baseball bat. If you put Craig Dieterly in a dress and a long gray wig and didn’t look too closely, you’d swear it was Mrs. Dieterly. Only not as scary. Let me put it this way: you don’t have to be a genius to see what side of his family Craig Dieterly takes after.
Mrs. Dieterly sidles over to me. “I’ve got my eye on you, so don’t try anything funny,” she says under her breath. “Stay away from the salmon . . . or else.” She waves her bat menacingly.
C’mon, guys, do I really look like someone who would break into a fish store and consume an entire container full of wild Norwegian Salmon? In a heartbeat. But that doesn’t mean I did it.
Lucille drops some loose change on the floor near the smashed window. Sam kneels to help her pick it up. I can see him searching the ground for hairs or fibers or anything else that might belong to the suspect.
Lucille reaches into her backpack and takes out the fingerprint kit that all Junior Scientists of America in good standing carry with them everywhere. She casually takes a few imprints from the window ledge.
Let them laugh. We Junior Scientists of America know what it means to be prepared. And it’s certainly coming in handy today.
“What can I do for you?” Mr. Dieterly asks when I place my ticket on the counter. I wouldn’t say that he is being polite. Civil would be more like it. I have been so busy watching Sam and Lucille that for a second I forget why I am standing in line. “Your order,” he snaps. “What is it? I don’t have all day.”
“I’d like six soft-shell crabs and a small container of tartar sauce on the side, please.”
Mr. Dieterly is pretty fast. Sam and Lucille are still looking for clues when he finishes assembling my order. Just as he’s about to weigh it, I come out with a sudden, “Those crabs look a little undernourished to me. What do you think?”
“They look perfectly fine to me, kid,” he says gruffly. As he shoves the crabs into a plastic bag, he glances over at his terrifying wife, who moves discreetly closer to where I am standing. But I can’t leave yet. I still need to buy more time for my friends’ sleuthing.
“I don’t know,” I say. “My mom told me to get the biggest ones I could find, and those don’t look all that big. Do you have Alaskan king crab on your menu today? That’s bigger than regular crab, isn’t it?” I can see that Mrs. Dieterly is about to lose her temper, and I would really prefer to avoid getting hit in the head with a baseball bat, so I wrap up my subterfuge with a quick, “On second thought, I think I’ll come back another day if that’s all right with you.” And then I start for the door. “Let’s get going, guys,” I say quietly to Sam and Lucille.
Mrs. Dieterly follows us out and plants herself in the doorway, patting her baseball bat and looking like she wouldn’t think twice about smashing it over my head if we decided to return.
“Did you find what we were looking for?” I ask eagerly once we’re out of earshot
“We have some preliminary findings,” Lucille reports. “But nothing conclusive.” We turn right at the fork onto Willow Hollow Road. We’ll be home in less than ten minutes. I’m starving, but even more than that, I am eager to find out who the real culprit is.
“It’s like this, Charlie,” Sam begins. I can tell Sam is getting nervous because he won’t stop tugging at his nose ring. “When Mr. Dieterly swept up this morning, he must have been in a real hurry to open the store, because he didn’t do a very thorough job. He left behind lots of evidence.”
“That’s good,” I say. “What did you find?”
“Well, the first thing we noticed was the unusual pattern of the stress fractures along the plaster wall surrounding the window.” Lucille bites her lip. “Which, in our opinion, indicates multiple points of impact on entry.”
Sam picks up where Lucille leaves off. “And then of course we observed the lack of consistency to the trajectory of the various bits of broken glass we found on the floor near the window.” Sam’s fake nose ring has come completely undone and looks like it could fall off his nose at any second.
“Which tends to rule out the use of a single blunt instrument,” Lucille adds.
“So how’d he get in?” I ask.
Sam wraps his scarf tightly around his neck. The wind is really starting to pick up. “Our guess is the intruder used a part of his body.”
“The guy probably just kicked in the window, right?” I stumble over a fallen branch and nearly fall flat on what passes for my face.
“Why are you so sure it’s a guy?” Lucille asks. “Girls can be hardened criminals, too, if they want to be.”
“Sure,” Sam answers, “but eighty percent of all breaking and entering is done by males between the ages of seventeen and thirty. Women account for less than twelve percent of violent crime. Chapter five in the Junior Scientists of America Crime-Stoppers textbook.”
“Of course!” Lucille says. “Now I remember.”
“Anyway, the guy didn’t use his feet,” Sam explains. “The evidence suggests a higher point of impact. We think the thief used his hands to break the window. Only . . .” Sam sighs and shrugs his shoulders.
“What is it, Sam?’ I ask.
“Only we couldn’t find any fingerprints.”
“He was probably wearing gloves,” I say. We turn left onto Maple Drive and take a shortcut through the small deserted wooded section that backs up onto Lonesome Lane. The sky is growing darker by the second. I walk a little faster. “Wouldn’t that have been the logical thing to do?”
“Absolutely,” Lucille says. “Only based on the evidence collected, we don’t think the intruder was wearing gloves.”
“Well, maybe he wiped off his fingerprints.” I am clutching at straws. And not coming up with any.
Lucille nods her head. “That’s what we assumed, until we noticed a broken clock near the door. It got hit by a shard of broken glass and stopped ticking at exactly seven twelve. Mr. Dieterly opens up his store every morning at seven thirty. It says so on the door.”
“We don’t think the thief would have had enough time to grab all that salmon and then go around wiping off his fingerprints without running into Mr. Dieterly,” Sam adds.
“Whoever broke into that store didn’t leave any fingerprints, Charlie,” Lucille says quietly but firmly. “Because they didn’t have any to leave.”
“What are you saying?” I ask.
“Whoever or whatever broke into that store doesn’t appear to be human,” Lucille admits.
“I’m the only nonhuman around here, and we know I certainly didn’t do it.” I wring my claws in frustration. “Because I was with you!”
“What if . . .” Lucille begins. “And this is only a possibility . . . but what if there’s another one of you living in an alternate universe somewhere, Charlie. And you’re not aware of each other. And the one you’re not aware of is a thief.”
“Earth to Lucille,” Sam intones. “Earth to Lucille . . . come in please . . . a flesh-eating virus appears be devouring your brain . . . earth to Lucille . . .”
“Well then you come up with an explanation, Sam Endervelt, because I can’t think of anything else!” Lucille picks up a rock and hurls it at a nearby tree. “Anyway, I only said it was a possibility.”
“There’s got to be a perfectly reasonable explanation,” Sam says. “Only I can’t seem to think of one either.”
“It’s starting to look like I’ll be stuck on the swimming team for the rest of my life.” I shake my head sadly. “How are the police ever going to apprehend someone who doesn’t exist?”
Sam pulls at his nose ring so hard it flies off and lands on the sidewalk. He grabs for it and puts it back into place before you can say “my two best friends are both crazy and I hope it’s only a temporary condition.”
Suddenly the sound of nearby footsteps crashing through the underbrush sends Sam, Lucille, and me jumping about a mile into the air.
“What was that?” Lucille whispers.
“It’s probably a raccoon,” Sam says. “Mr. Arkady says they’re harmless unless you threaten their young.”
“Quiet,” Lucille urges in a hushed tone. She gets down on her knees and presses her ear to the ground. It’s an old Native American trick we learned in Mr. Arkady’s science class last year. Sounds travel faster through a conducting medium such as water or earth. “Get down, everybody. Whatever it is, it’s getting closer.”
I try to join Lucille and Sam, but it’s hard to get my neck low enough to put my earflap to the ground. Plus I get a terrible cramp in my bulging thigh and have to stifle a scream of pain as I leap up and hop around massaging my leg with both claws.
“Whatever it is seems to have stopped,” Lucille announces.
“It probably knows we’re listening,” Sam says.
Getting scared out of your wits when you’re home watching the Mummy light his tana leaves on the television set in your den is one thing. But actually being afraid in your real life is not my cup of tea. And you don’t have to put your earflaps to the ground to hear the unworldly shriek that suddenly emerges from the wooded thicket just ahead of us.
“I would say that was either the hideous cry of a banshee foretelling an imminent death, or a werewolf howling at the rising moon.” Sam points a stubby finger at the faintly glowing moon peeking out through the clouds overhead. “I think I’ll go with werewolf.”
“That’s great. I feel so much better now,” Lucille whispers. “Thanks a lot.”
“Would you mind keeping your overactive imagination to yourself there for a minute, Sam?” I say.
The three of us huddle closely together, too frightened to move, as we wait for the howling to stop. At last we hear something clomping away through the underbrush. The sounds get fainter and fainter until at last we get up the courage to speak. “It was probably a raccoon after all,” Sam suggests weakly.