Duck Boy

by Bill Bunn

  “Young man,” Aunt Shannon said firmly, “I need to see that file. I want to help your case.”

  “I’m sorry,” Larry replied, “tell me what you know, and let me put the pieces of the puzzle together. That’s my job.”

  “Very funny,” Aunt Shannon replied dryly. “What do you think will happen if I read the file? Are you worried I’ll solve the case before you do? I’m an old lady. I’m certainly not going to hurt anyone, am I?”

  Larry shrugged. “You might.”

  Aunt Shannon rolled her eyes. “Besides, you haven’t got a case.” Aunt Shannon paused. Larry rolled his eyes. “You have no motive, no method, no idea what happened to her, do you?” Larry’s polite smile flattened into an unhappy line as she spoke. Aunt Shannon continued. “You can’t be any worse off than you already are. I’m just a little old lady, Detective. Humor me. Besides, there’s nothing in that file that Steve couldn’t tell me.” Steve grinned widely at Larry and nodded.

  “All right, all right. I haven’t got the time to banter about it all day. I’ll be right back.” Larry crossed the room and retrieved the file from a row of filing cabinets and returned to the desk. “Have a seat.” Aunt Shannon sat in his desk chair. “Steve, you can borrow that chair there.” Larry Garner pointed to a chair next to his desk. Steve nodded and pulled the chair close to Aunt Shannon. “I only have one rule about this file. If you break my rule, you’ll never see this file again: do not, under any circumstances, remove this file or any part of it from this building. If you do, I will charge you with theft and obstruction of justice and anything else I can conjure up. You can view it at my desk, and when you are finished, leave it here.” He pulled a coat from a rack beside the window and turned to leave.

  “Hey, Clueless.” Steve and Aunt Shannon turned to see a square-jawed police officer standing across from Larry’s desk. The police officer turned to Aunt Shannon and Steve and pointed at Larry. “You know why we call him Clueless, don’t you?”

  She forced a smile. “I have no idea.”

  “Clueless hasn’t cracked a case here in three years,” said the officer, smirking. “He’s good at writing parking tickets, though.”

  Larry attempted to ignore the comments. “I’m making a call or two and I’ll be back in an hour or so,” he announced.

  “Take your time,” Aunt Shannon retorted.

  “Going to have tea with another suspect, eh?” said the burly officer.

  “It’s a concept I like to call work,” snapped Larry. “I’m not sure you’ve heard of it.”

  “Ooh, that hurt, Larry.”

  Larry turned to Steve and Aunt Shannon. “See you two later.”

  “See you,” Aunt Shannon replied. As soon as Larry left, Aunt Shannon whirled around to face the desk and opened the thick file.

  The detective who had insulted Larry grinned at Steve and his great aunt and returned to his own desk.

  The file held several pictures of the living room furniture where Mrs. Best had been sitting the night she disappeared.

  “These pictures were taken after the coffee mess was cleaned up, eh?” Aunt Shannon asked.

  “Yeah, I guess so,” Steve answered noncommittally.

  Aunt Shannon shot him an exasperated look.

  “What?” Steve felt defensive, although he knew what her look was asking of him. He held out his hand for a picture, and she placed one into his hand. He felt a dull ache, one that had taken a holiday for the past few hours, return with a vengeance. He glanced at the picture quickly and returned it to her.

  “Yup. I cleaned it up right away,” Steve replied.

  “There was coffee all the way around the front of the chair, wasn’t there?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And the book was lying face down in the middle of the coffee?”

  “Yup.”

  “Which way were the words facing?”

  Steve hesitated briefly, expecting a trap. “What do you mean?”

  “When the book was on the floor, if you sat in the chair and picked up the book, would the words be right side up or upside down?”

  “I don’t know…Um…Let’s see.” Steve thought back to that night. Everything was clear as a photograph in his mind. “I guess if you were sitting in the chair and you lifted her book out of the coffee, the words would have been right side up.”

  “Good.” Aunt Shannon, nodding absently. “Were there other coffee stains in the house?”

  “Nope. Just the puddle in front of Mom’s chair.”

  “The mug was lying on the floor between the chair and the coffee table?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Don’t guess,” Aunt Shannon said sharply. “This is terribly important.”

  “Um, yeah,” Steve mumbled.

  “Perfect, just perfect,” Aunt Shannon purred to herself.

  “What’s so perfect?”

  “All the signs suggest that your mother was sitting in the chair when she disappeared.”

  “How do you know?”

  “The mug was between the coffee table and the chair which means she was holding it in her left hand. Right?” Steve nodded. “And that’s the hand she always used to drink her coffee.”

  “Yup.”

  “If she was holding her cup in her left hand when she dropped it, she would probably have been sitting in her chair. That’s the reasonable explanation.” Aunt Shannon paused. “Even her book fell into the coffee as if she had been sitting in her chair.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Aunt Shannon lifted the case file off the desk and held it in her hands like a book. “If I’m reading this and I drop it here, how would it land?”

  “Either face up, with the words up, or face down with the words…” His brow grew heavy with thought. “Right, I see what you’re saying. They way I found the book means she was likely sitting in the chair when she dropped it.”

  “Right,” Aunt Shannon exclaimed triumphantly.

  “But so what!” Steve countered. “So she sat in the chair. That’s pretty obvious.”

  “When she dropped the coffee, she was sitting in the chair and the coffee fell around the front of the chair in a wide puddle. She would have likely stepped in the coffee and tracked it around the floor.”

  “I see. So you’re saying she was sitting in the chair with her coffee and her book, and she dropped her coffee, and she didn’t get up.” Steve looked at the ceiling for a moment. “She was sitting in the chair and she vanished right in the chair?” he asked.

  “I think she was sitting in her chair, probably with her Benu stone, when she did something that caused her to zap into another time or space—something like that. She disappeared right out of her chair. She probably surprised herself, dropped her coffee and poof! She was gone.”

  “Hmm,” Steve mused.

  “It’s just a good guess.”

  “Let me tell you another guess.” He held up a report from the same file. “It makes sense, for ‘normal’ people.” He tapped the report with a finger. “She sets the scene up for a big disappearance and she takes off—she just leaves. That’s what the police say happened. If you read the file you’d see that a few people thought they saw her in Montreal. That’s a theory, too.”

  “Yes, that’s a theory,” Aunt Shannon admitted. “She did always want to start a singing career. But all the evidence seems to indicate that she was sitting in her chair when she disappeared.” Steve didn’t look up from the floor. “Steve, you’re an important witness to your mother’s character. You lived with her for twelve years before she disappeared. So let me ask you something. Was she the kind of person who would leave you the way you think she did?”

  “Well…Um…” Silence.

  “Steve?”

  “Not really, no.”

  “She isn’t that kind of woman, Steve. She’s not that sort of mother, is she? She would never leave you. She wouldn’t have left your dad either. I know that for certain. She loves you very much. She’s just had a we
e accident, that’s all.” Aunt Shannon closed the file on the desk. “I think we should drop by the house and look for more clues.” Steve nodded without saying anything. “You do remember where the house key is hidden?” Again, Steve nodded. “Well then, let’s go.”

  Aunt Shannon riffled through the entire file’s contents carefully and reorganized it. When she was done, she left it exactly where Larry had commanded and headed to the car. The afternoon sun had dropped below the horizon, leaving a frozen twilight to grow into night.

  The house looked dark and cold as Steve and his great aunt pulled up in front. A light layer of new snow dusted the yard and roof of the house. A tight lump grew in his throat as he gazed up the walk.

  “Let’s go,” Aunt Shannon suggested. “There’s no use dawdling.” Steve found the hidden key and opened the front door. The door swung open to a stifling silence.

  “In we go,” she said cheerfully. Aunt Shannon led the way inside to the living room. She turned on a couple of lights.

  “Do you remember how it was that night she disappeared?” Aunt Shannon asked. She peered at Steve. “I want to set it up exactly the way it was.”

  “Yeah, sure,” Steve responded. Steve shuffled into the kitchen and got a mug out of a cupboard. He sauntered back to the living room and turned toward Aunt Shannon as he set the cup down on the floor beside his mother’s chair. “This is where the mug was, except it was broken.”

  “Was your mom’s chair at this angle that night?”

  Steve shrugged. “Sure.”

  Aunt Shannon reached into her purse and pulled out a handful of snapshots and studied them. She had taken the pictures from Larry’s file.

  “That’s not exactly where it was, Steve,” Aunt Shannon corrected with a gentle edge in her voice. “It should be at more of an angle and about a foot closer to the window—like this.” She pushed the chair towards the window and angled it. She glanced again at the pictures. “That’s better, see?” She turned a picture towards him. Steve recognized the pictures immediately.

  “We weren’t supposed to take anything from the file, Aunty,” Steve moaned. “Detective Garner is going to notice what you took.”

  “We need these photos for our experiments, Steve,” Aunt Shannon explained with a smile. “Besides, I’ll tell him it was I who took the pictures. He won’t blame you. Do you think he’s going to throw an old lady in the slammer? Come on. Help me set this scene up.” Steve sighed and began to help.

  Aunt Shannon seemed pleased. “Here are a couple of pictures. You set up the coffee table and the bookshelf the way they were, and I’ll get settled into the chair. Pretend I’m your mom, and arrange things exactly as you remember them.” The two of them set up the room as close as they could to the pictures and what Steve could remember. Steve flopped onto the couch and stretched out.

  “I want to sit as she would have that night.” She settled into the chair. “Now, how did she usually sit in this chair?”

  “She usually sat with her legs crossed and her notebook in her lap.”

  Aunt Shannon slowly, gingerly crossed her legs and set the notebook in her lap. “How do I look?”

  “That’s pretty close,” Steve confirmed.

  “Could you get me Richard, Steve? He’s on the floor next to my purse.” Steve retrieved the festively wrapped box of ashes and set it on the coffee table beside her. “Thank you. I think I’m ready.” Aunt Shannon lifted her glasses and slid them into place. “That’s better. Now let me see.” She flipped through Susan’s notebook until she found the last coffee-stained scribbles. Steve slouched and dropped into the couch behind him.

  His aunt seemed to fall into a trance as she studied the book. “Oh, right,” she said under her breath. “I forgot to look that word up before I came here. `Extravasation.’ What word could that be?” she asked herself. “I haven’t seen that one before.” She looked up at Steve from over top of her reading glasses. “Steve, dear, could you get me a dictionary? I need to look up a word. And get your backpack. You were going to get it, weren’t you? I’m just going to see if I can understand where your mom was working and then we’ll go. I’ll probably be just a few minutes.”

  Steve sighed, rolled off the couch and walked to the bookshelf to pull the big dictionary from its corner. But the dictionary wasn’t in its usual place. He headed to his bedroom to get his own dictionary. Aunt Shannon was deep in thought, but held out a hand when he returned to the living room.

  “Thank you, Steve,” she said absently.

  “Do you need anything else?” he asked.

  “Not that I can think of, Deary,” Aunt Shannon replied absently as she paged through the dictionary. “Now where is it…c…d…e … ex…ext. There we go.”

  “All right. I’m going to get my backpack,” Steve declared.

  “You go right ahead, Deary.”

  Steve ducked into his room. His backpack was sitting on the bed, right where he had left it. Turning his back to the bed, he flopped backward onto it and stared at the ceiling. The room felt like a solid block of ice.

  Aunt Shannon screamed, “Steeeeeeeeeve.” A bright bluish-white radiance overwhelmed the room through the open door. A red glow and finally a bright white. Steve jumped from his bed and sprinted into the living room.

  Paper swirled frantically around the room, pushed by some kind of wind. Two notebooks lay on the floor in front of his mother’s chair. One was Aunt Shannon’s research notes. The other was his mom’s notebook, lying on the floor in a crumpled heap, like it had so long ago. The room smelled like earthy soil on a spring day. Paper wafted slowly to the floor. Aunt Shannon was gone.

  “Aunt Shannon!” Steve screeched. “That’s a pretty sick joke. Don’t play around like this.” Silence. Steve searched frantically behind furniture. Nothing. Then he broadened his search to include the rest of the house. He even used the pull-down ladder to check the attic. Front door. Her car waited in the dim darkness of the new night. He ran and reran his search pattern around the house. Terror fed a growing frenzy. Finally, he caved into a frightened, heaving heap on the couch and waited in silence. The cold slap of truth stunned him: Aunt Shannon was gone.

  He stared at the chair where Aunt Shannon had been sitting only moments earlier. Jittery nerves on high alert, he half expected that she would jump out from behind something and scare him into the next life. But she didn’t. As the pool of terror subsided, he replayed the scene. “The light,” he said aloud, just to put something besides breath into the air. The light reminded him of the clock’s transformation into the lock. “Maybe this is possible,” he whispered to himself.

  “Ha, ha,” he said aloud, sitting straight up. “Yes. Of course.”

  Maybe Mom never abandoned me. Maybe it was really an accident.

  He slumped back down on the couch.

  I have no way to bring either of them back. I can’t help them.

  “How am I going to get back to Aunt Shannon’s?” he asked himself. He jumped up from the couch and grabbed the phone, dialing Aunt Shannon and Uncle Edward’s number. The phone rang and rang and rang. Finally, the ringing was interrupted by a sound of Uncle Edward fumbling with the phone.

  After a clunky succession of whacks and popping sounds, he heard a voice. “Hello?” It was Uncle Edward.

  “Uncle Edward?”

  “Steve?” Uncle Edward asked. “Is that you?”

  “Yeah, Uncle Edward. It’s me.”

  “What’s the matter? You sound upset.”

  Steve would have been surprised at Uncle Edward’s awareness, had he not been so distressed about Aunt Shannon’s disappearance. “She just disappeared, Uncle Edward. I don’t know what to do.”

  There was a long pause on the other end of the phone. “Who disappeared, Steve?”

  “Aunt Shannon!”

  “Aunt Shannon disappears from time to time. There’s nothing unusual about that.”

  “She didn’t just take off, Uncle Edward. She really disappeared. She vanished. She was tr
ying that alchemy stuff, and she ended up going somewhere—I don’t know where.” Steve excitedly related the past few moments to Uncle Edward.

  “That sounds odd,” Uncle Edward’s voice stiffened. He sniffed loudly into the receiver, and his voice turned cold. “I told her to quit monkeying with that junk.” His voice warmed. “Oh, Shannon. What have you done?”

  “I’m stuck here with the car. Now that Aunt Shannon’s gone, I have no way of getting home with the car. Can you take a bus or a taxi down here to pick it up?”

  “Oh heavens, no,” Uncle Edward exclaimed. “I don’t have a driver’s license. Shannon always does the driving.”

  “She’s gone, Uncle Edward!” Steve nearly shrieked. “The same thing happened to her as to my mom.”

  “I’m sure she’s fine. I hope she’s fine. Oh dear. Well, Hmm.” Uncle Edward sniffled. “You’d better drive it home. Oh dear. You do have the keys, don’t you?”

  Steve scanned the coffee table beside where Aunt Shannon had been sitting. A glinting heap of metal sparkled on the floor under the reading lamp, next to the two research notebooks. “Yes, I do,” he admitted, “but I don’t have a driver’s license.”

  “Drive carefully, then. Shannon loves that old heap.”

  “I said I don’t have my driver’s license.”

  “Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Steve, I can’t come to get you.” His voice raised in its intensity and pitch.

  “Uncle Edward?” Steve asked after a few seconds of silence.

  “Oh dear. Well then, you’d better drive.”

  “What happens if I get caught?”

  “Tell the officer you have an emergency,” Uncle Edward snapped. “Oh, Shannon,” he repeated mournfully, and began to sob as he slammed the phone down.

  I could always take the bus, thought Steve.

  No, wait. I left my money at Aunt Shannon’s house. No wallet, no money, no bus pass. No bus.

  He walked towards the chair and scooped the car keys off of the floor. Then he took careful mental notes of the room and its arrangement in case he needed to recreate it all again. He collected the pictures that had whirled their way all around the room and shoved them back into Aunt Shannon’s purse. The two notebooks he stuffed into his backpack, on top of his socks and underwear.