What We Found in the Sofa and How It Saved the World

by Henry Clark

  “It’s not,” said Alf.

  “A little old lady? With an ax? And a detachable jaw?”

  “Oh. Gram.”

  “She’s your grammy?”

  “Hologrammy. Yes. That’s what I call her. She’s a hologram. I modeled her after my father’s mother. He was always scared to death of her.”

  “I can see why,” I said.

  “Oh, I exaggerated some things. She never used an ax. She preferred poisoned daggers. Hologrammy was my early attempt at a security system. She was supposed to scare intruders away. Even from the start, she behaved erratically. Then the part of Guernica that controlled her got damaged.”

  “Lost in a fire?” I said. I had put two and two together: The missing hassock had been in charge of Hologrammy.

  “Why would you say that?” asked Alf suspiciously.

  “I have an overactive imagination.”

  “Well, it was a good guess. It was a fire. And I haven’t seen Hologrammy since. Otherwise, I would have warned you about her. But now something seems to have reactivated her. Maybe the three of you.”

  “Or maybe the doghat,” said Freak.

  “Right,” said Alf. “The doghat. We should get up to the gallery and see what Guernica can tell us about our intruder.”

  Guernica replayed the gate-camera footage for us. The doghat had pole-vaulted over the front gate, collided with a low-hanging tree branch, landed on his head, and driven away. It would have been funny, if it hadn’t been scary.

  On Friday Alf presented us with waiters’ uniforms. For the auction, he wanted us dressed in starchy white shirts, black vests, and black bow ties. We tried them on and Alf drilled us on how to walk around the ballroom with serving trays full of snacks. Shoulders back, no slouching. Always determine if the guests are right-handed or left-handed, then approach them from the opposite side so they can more comfortably reach across themselves to snag their snacks. Once they’ve sucked the cheese cube or the cocktail frank off the toothpick, present them with a smaller tray for discarded toothpicks. Press a button on the underside of the tray to cause the tray to analyze the DNA in the saliva on the toothpick.

  “Really?” said Freak.

  “Really,” confirmed Alf. “If the DNA matches that of Edward Disin, the tray will glow. The moment that happens, you signal me, and I will signal the federal agents.”

  “What if he’s not hungry?” I asked. “What if he doesn’t eat anything off a toothpick?”

  “We will also be serving drinks. A used drinking glass turned upside down on the DNA tray will also register.”

  “Will these be alcoholic drinks?” Freak asked.

  The question caught Alf off guard.

  “Yes,” he said after a pause. “But you don’t have to serve them.”

  “Yeah,” said Freak. “I would prefer that.”

  When I got home that evening, my aunt gave me the photographs I had asked her to get developed. There was an okay picture of me shaking hands with a guy dressed like Benjamin Franklin; and a pretty funny one of Freak looking guilty in front of the Liberty Bell, like he was the one who had put the crack in it; and three completely dark, blurry, useless pictures taken in the basement of Rodmore Chemical that could just as easily have been taken inside one of my socks.

  Our dangerous trip to the heart of Hellsboro had gotten us nothing.

  When I showed the pictures to Freak and Fiona, Freak kicked the wall and Fiona pouted. The three of us agreed: If we had any hopes of stopping Edward Disin, it had to be by getting him arrested at the auction. We certainly had nothing to prove an unearthly portal existed in the basement of his chemical factory.

  Saturday afternoon. The day of the auction. I couldn’t sleep the night before. Freak and I were as hyper as Fiona had been ever since she’d quit her phone, and the three of us followed Alf around like cartwheeling monkeys, trying to make sure everything was perfect—polishing glasses, rearranging chairs, tugging tablecloths back and forth. Alf finally took us outside to help inflate the balloons.

  He’d been correct about there being two colors: one for each.

  Both balloons were on the patio, just outside the ballroom’s French doors. Each was stuffed in its own canvas bag, leaning against its own wicker basket.

  “Hot air balloons,” said Fiona.

  “Of course,” said Alf. “What other kind of balloons would we be using?”

  “These are, what?” I asked. “Decorations?”

  “No,” replied Alf. “They’re scarecrows.”

  Alf went to the nearest bag and pulled open the drawstrings. He started pulling out yards and yards of brightly colored nylon fabric.

  “The patio, and the lawn beyond it, is the only open place on the property where a helicopter might land,” he said, indicating with hand gestures that we should help him unpack the fabric and spread it over the ground. “The trees make it impossible anywhere else on the grounds, and the steep pitch of the roof makes it impossible to land on the house itself. We’re going to fill these two balloons with hot air and tether them side by side.”

  “You’re expecting Disin to arrive by helicopter?” Freak asked as we teased the fabric into a large oval shape and spread it out over the grass. “Like Santa Claus at the mall?”

  “I’m expecting him to arrive by automobile. I’m expecting him to try to escape by helicopter. He knows full well this is some kind of trap. But it’s the nature of Compulsive Completist Disorder that he has to be here himself. He has to be planning to have a stealth chopper handy should he need to break and run.”

  “Couldn’t the helicopter drop a rope ladder?”

  “Not with all these overhanging trees. Not with the balloons filling in the empty space.”

  “Couldn’t a helicopter just shoot down the balloons?” I asked.

  “Bullets would pass right through. You’d have to strafe to bring one of these down quickly, and that much gunfire would be too dangerous to anyone on the ground, Edward Disin included. It would also attract too much attention at a time when Disin doesn’t want anyone looking too closely at the town of Cheshire.”

  “Couldn’t he escape by using one of the balloons?” asked Fiona.

  “I hope he tries. Balloons can’t be steered. He’d be a sitting duck if he tried to take one. Not to mention I’ve rigged these so I can release the baskets from a distance by remote control. There are explosive bolts at each connecting clip. Should Edward Disin try to ascend in one, he’ll find himself falling back to earth very quickly.”

  “The balloons are a trap,” I said astutely.

  “They are a contingency plan, should the Feds have difficulty getting handcuffs on him.”

  We helped Alf inflate the first balloon, using ropes to secure its basket to stakes in the ground and then using a large electric fan to fill the nylon part—Alf called it the envelope—with air. When the envelope was half full, we heated the air in it with a propane-powered burner. The hot air caused the envelope to rise.

  After about half an hour, the fully inflated balloon loomed over me like Morgue MacKenzie demanding all my lunch money.

  We walked away from it and looked back so we could see it more clearly. It was a bright, orangey red.

  “I’ve seen this balloon before,” said Fiona.

  We all had. Huge words in old-fashioned lettering appeared on its side. They said STATE FAIR OMAHA.

  “It’s a replica of the balloon seen at the end of the movie The Wizard of Oz,” Alf acknowledged. “I bought it from the owners, who are big Judy Garland fans.” He glanced at his watch. “Let’s get the other one up.”

  The other balloon wasn’t in the conventional shape of a balloon. This became obvious as soon as we spread the envelope out on the ground. The white fabric stretched out in a weird L shape.

  “There are hot air balloons in the shape of Noah’s Ark, the Taj Mahal, and George Washington’s head,” Alf said, starting up the fan. The stark white envelope began to stir. “There’s a famous one of a pig with wing
s.”

  “What is this one in the shape of?” I asked.

  “You’ll see.”

  After a while the envelope rose into the air. It still had some folds and floppy parts that made it hard to see what it was.

  “It’s some kind of chair,” said Freak.

  “It’s a big, puffy throne,” said Fiona.

  “Get some distance,” suggested Alf.

  As we ran out to the side, the hot air in the envelope filled out the remaining kinks and the balloon assumed its finished shape.

  “It’s a toilet,” I announced.

  It was a huge toilet bowl complete with a flush tank and a clearly visible flush lever. It must have been six stories high. The drainpipe was the hole in the bottom that the hot air rose up through. The basket dangled beneath the drainpipe.

  “Its registered name is Porcelain Cloud,” Alf said, coming up beside us. “But everybody calls it the Dear John, after the name of the company that originally commissioned it. Dear John, before it went out of business, was a supplier of portable privies to construction sites, county fairs, and balloonist conventions. I was able to get the balloon cheap when they were forced to liquidate their assets. And trust me, you don’t want to be anywhere near a portable privy company when they’re liquidating their assets.”

  The three of us stared upward, our mouths hanging open.

  “Obviously designed by a man,” Fiona finally said, and started to walk away.

  “How do you know?” asked Freak.

  Fiona tossed her head.

  “The seat is up.”

  CHAPTER

  21

  Auction Lots and Lollipops

  Fifty-six people attended the zucchini crayon auction, including the two federal agents who were there to arrest Edward Disin. Freak and Fiona and I were kept hopping, serving everybody drinks and hors d’oeuvres. I kept looking over my shoulder, expecting to see a dangerous man with a small army come bursting through the door.

  “That’s not the way it’s supposed to happen,” Freak reminded me, nervously watching a tall man in a tuxedo we both thought looked like a possible villain. “He’s supposed to be here in disguise.”

  “Any one of these people could be Disin,” Fiona whispered, using the shiny surface of her DNA tray as a rearview mirror to study a large woman standing behind her. “But most of them look so normal!”

  “That’s the scary part.” I shivered. We had already met Edward Disin once. I was in no rush to meet him again, especially if I wasn’t wearing a hazmat suit.

  “Yeah,” agreed Freak. “I’ve never trusted normal.”

  Alf circulated through the ballroom disguised with a beard and a wig and a reasonably convincing false nose. His own father wouldn’t have recognized him. I assumed that was the point.

  The federal agents didn’t want to be there. I could tell. They shook our hands without enthusiasm when Alf introduced us. Ms. Beauceron was a tall blond woman in a stiff-looking gray suit, and she spent most of the time on her cell phone. Mr. North was a beefy-looking, square-jawed guy who kept his mirrored sunglasses on and had hair deliberately moussed to appear windblown. He was chewing a piece of gum, giving it one deliberate chew per minute. I thought maybe he was trying to quit.

  Neither one of the agents smiled as they sat down near the back on either side of the aisle. Alf shrugged. “I have a friend in the Treasury Department. If she hadn’t owed me a favor, I probably would not have been able to convince them to send anybody.”

  “What?” said Freak. “They didn’t believe your story about a crazy billionaire risking his freedom to buy a crayon?”

  “Sarcasm is not your best trait,” Alf replied, and pointed at a guest who was looking around for a place to discard a toothpick. Fiona glided over and presented her DNA tray. The toothpick was not a winner.

  “Check out the guy in the overalls,” Freak whispered.

  Alf told us the guy in the overalls was an artist named Avram Belize who wanted to win the zucchini crayon and then film a documentary of himself drawing a picture with it. He was bent over the glass case of the preview table, intently studying Jackson Pollock’s coloring book.

  “You think he might be Disin?” I asked Freak.

  “I think he might be an escaped lunatic,” said Freak. “Half the people here might be. They want to pay us thousands of dollars for a crayon.”

  I wasn’t sure about thousands of dollars. Some people seemed like they had just come for fun. WaxLips was there. Lips turned out to be a middle-aged woman whose real name was Martha Ellinger. I overheard her saying she knew she didn’t have a chance at winning the crayon, but she was absolutely thrilled to be in a room with so many other crayon collectors.

  There was a tall black woman who stood ramrod straight and never smiled and didn’t look like she had ever been interested in crayons, even when she was a kid. I overheard her give her name as Cicely Shillingham, but Alf whispered, “Alecto,” in my ear when he saw me watching her.

  The guests were divided pretty evenly between museum representatives and well-to-do toy collectors. The museum people, I noticed, ate more.

  By far the most interesting person there was Sheik Geisel al-Rashid, a black-bearded man in full Arabian burnoose and headdress. He had arrived in an armored Hummer with diplomatic plates, which Alf insisted he park on Breeland Road along with the rest of the guests’ cars. The sheik and his driver had walked up the hill to the house just like everybody else.

  Sheik Geisel looked at us sternly as he entered and shook his head when I offered to take his hat. His driver wore a black uniform and kept his chauffeur’s cap on and pulled down in front.

  “Either of these guys could be a werewolf,” Freak said to me out of the corner of his mouth.

  We escorted the sheik to the ballroom. He gathered his robes together and went to the display of auction items, lingering over a sketch by an artist named René Magritte showing a man who had crayons for teeth. He then continued on to the zucchini crayon, moving all around the display case to see it from every possible angle.

  “I say, if he breaks the glass, we tackle him.” Freak looked to me for agreement. I nodded. The sheik slipped something that might have been a glass cutter out of one of his sleeves.

  “We need DNA proof!” Fiona hissed.

  “Then we’ll hit him so hard, we’ll knock the snot out of him!” Freak was getting psyched. He tensed like he was listening for the starter’s pistol.

  The crayon was cradled in gray foam rubber in the center of a thin wooden box. The sheik flicked the object in his hand and a magnifying lens popped out of it. He asked Alf if he could see the crayon more closely. Alf hesitated, then slowly unlocked the display case and passed him the wooden box with the crayon inside.

  I fully expected him to take the box and run. I got ready to give chase. Freak, I could tell, was about to spring. But the sheik merely looked the crayon up and down with his magnifier and then handed the box back. Freak stumbled forward as the tension broke.

  I didn’t waste any time before I approached the sheik with a tray full of pigs in a blanket. He looked at the tray, looked at me, and said, “We do not eat pork.”

  “They’re not really pigs,” I explained. “And they’re not really blankets, before you tell me you don’t eat wool. The caterer says they’re all-beef franks.”

  He held up a hand.

  “Nevertheless.”

  I moved away. A minute or two later I returned, having switched trays with Freak.

  “Pizza roll?”

  He looked at the tray and frowned.

  “We are watching our cholesterol.”

  “The ones on this end are low-fat.”

  “Nevertheless.”

  I returned a minute or two later, having exchanged trays with Fiona.

  “Champagne?”

  He looked at me and sighed.

  “We do not drink.”

  “You don’t? Don’t you get awfully thirsty out there in the desert?”


  He studied me with a pained expression.

  “We do not drink alcohol.”

  “Oh. Well. Can I get you a juice box?”

  “Young man,” said the sheik, “upon completing your education, is it your intention to pursue a career in the hospitality industry?”

  I thought about it for a moment. “No,” I said.

  “Good.”

  The sheik held his hand out to his driver. The driver reached into the interior of his jacket, the way I had seen people on TV do when they were going for a gun, and pulled out a little yellow ball on a stick. The sheik stuck it in his mouth and began sucking on it. His driver held out his arm, indicating I should leave. I did.

  Martha Ellinger—WaxLips—plucked a glass from my tray as I passed her, and I started to worry about what might happen to all the innocent people in the room if things got out of hand once we found Disin. Clusters of people were everywhere, chatting, laughing, totally oblivious to the possibility of a power-mad lunatic in their midst. I wanted to lean into their conversations and suggest they practice ducking.

  Fiona and Freak were just as nervous as I was. It was getting late and we still hadn’t found Disin.

  “So far,” said Fiona, “there are only three people I haven’t been able to get DNA samples from. They’ve refused everything I’ve offered them. The woman from the Tate Gallery says she’s on a diet. The sheik’s driver won’t even look at me when I come around with a tray. And the tall guy from the toy museum says he has something called irritable bowel syndrome and if he eats anything, it could seriously disrupt the auction.”

  “I don’t even want to think about what that might mean,” said Freak. “Why does Alf have us testing the women? Does he think Edward Disin is that good of an actor?”

  “Who knows what he’s capable of?” I said. “He made a pretty passable werewolf the last time we saw him.”

  Freak nodded and moved off to offer a woman from the Museum of Modern Art some cocktail shrimp.

  “Sheik Geisel is sucking on a lollipop,” I whispered to Fiona. “We have to watch and see when he’s ready to throw away the stick.”