Cold Cereal

by Adam Rex

  “No, silly,” Emily said with a full mouth. “It was only pecking your forehead to get at the little pile of birdseed I put there.”

  Erno frowned. “You…”

  Emily giggled, and Erno tried not to smile.

  “If you weren’t two minutes older, I’d beat you up.”

  “You could never beat me up,” said Emily. “I know seven pressure points on the human body that will make a person fall asleep. I know two others that I think will cure rabies, but I haven’t been able to test them.”

  Erno got to his feet. “Really?” he said. “You should have used them on Carla Owens. Why didn’t you try them on the Goodco people?”

  Emily looked anxious. “Most of the Goodco people were wearing those thick suits. It wouldn’t have worked. And … besides. I can’t think of stuff like that when…”

  She trailed off, but Erno understood. They were like members of a boy band: Emily was the smart one; Erno was the brave one. And the cute one, of course. He changed the subject.

  “Is that Puftees?” he asked, pointing at her bowl. “I can’t believe you’re eating a Goodco cereal after all they’ve done!”

  “It’s all Biggs has for breakfast! Seriously, go check! He wasn’t kidding when he told that pink-suit guy that he liked them.”

  Erno looked around. “Where is Biggs, anyway?”

  “Out back,” Emily answered. “And when he left, he took a razor with him.”

  “Okay.”

  “A razor,” she repeated.

  Erno rolled his eyes. “Oh, what, the Bigfoot thing? He just has to shave! His face!”

  “Maybe, but when he took a new razor from the hall closet, I got a peek inside.”

  “So?”

  “So go look.”

  Erno stepped over to the foyer, scattering birds as he did so, and cracked the closet door. Then he opened it wide. “It’s just a … a … whole lot of razors,” he said. He surveyed each shelf. There were assorted toiletries, spare towels, a vacuum, and about fifty bags of disposable razors. It really was a lot of razors.

  “I guess that is a little weird,” he added.

  They couldn’t go to the authorities—that much they agreed on. The chief of police was a direct descendant of Jack T. Harmliss, one of Goodco’s founders, and his wife was vice president of Crunch Development. Every kid in Goodborough learned this in school. And most of the police force were probably Freemen as well—members of a 175-year-old secret club that included every rich and important person in town.

  Come morning Emily wanted instead to go back to their house. She was certain Mr. Wilson would be looking for them there. So she sulked when she was outvoted, despite clearly being smart enough to understand what a bad idea it was.

  “I think we should get some word to Scott,” said Erno. “Let him know we’re okay.” He’d been avoiding Denton and Louis and Roger these past couple of weeks, so he imagined that Scott might be the only person to notice if the Utz kids went missing, much less care.

  “Oh, sure,” Emily snarled. “We can’t go to our house because it’s being watched. We can’t go to the police because they’re Freemen. But we should totally pay Scott a visit—they’ll never find us there. We can ask his mom how work’s going at Goodco.”

  “Goodco people might know who your friends are,” Biggs agreed.

  “And if they do, then Scott might be in trouble, and it’s our fault. Shouldn’t we check?”

  Biggs looked glum. “Dangerous,” he said.

  “Probably not. I don’t think they’re that on the ball. If they’d been watching us that closely, they’d know where Mr. Wilson was.”

  Biggs scratched his chin.

  “You didn’t hear what that doctor woman said,” Erno continued. “They thought Mr. Wilson was taking care of the whole thing. They trusted him to just bring us in to Goodco himself.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” said Emily, her cheeks growing pink. “Dad never would have gone along with it. He must not have known.”

  On the subject of their foster father, and on this alone, Erno could claim to be the smart one. It wasn’t nearly as satisfying as he thought it would be. “Mr. Wilson was the one who gave you the pink chemical. The IntelliJuice, or whatever.”

  “ThinkDrink. And he thought it was ear medicine.”

  Erno studied Emily for a moment, then nodded. “Yeah. You’re probably right. You’re always right. But… I still want to check on Scott. He’s either safe—in which case we should let him know we’re safe—or he’s not, and he needs our help.”

  So it was agreed. Emily thought she might even be able to use Scott’s computer to research Goodco. The tree house was a remarkable piece of work, but it didn’t have any conveniences that had been invented after 1970.

  Emily was already blindfolded and waiting at the front door when Biggs and Erno joined her. “We’ll be back before dark,” Biggs said loudly, which was odd because he so rarely raised his voice, much less spoke when he didn’t absolutely have to. Then he gathered them up for another life-affirming drop to the ground, and ten minutes later they were at the car.

  While he lay like luggage in the back of the Citroën, Erno thought about Mr. Wilson’s new riddle. Particularly that last line:

  P.P.S. Don’t show this to Emily.

  At this point Erno was inclined to do the exact opposite of anything Mr. Wilson asked of him, but he remembered the look Emily got each time the man was mentioned. What would it do to her to know he was still toying with them like this? It seemed now like his sister had always been running a maze, wending her way toward the rumor of some warm and nourishing reward while Mr. Wilson took careful notes from above. It turned Erno’s stomach to think of it.

  So why was he even considering the riddle? He could feel it in his pocket, as awkward as a two-dollar bill.

  The car stopped, and Erno sat up as best he could. They were parked at the end of the street, having all agreed that they should watch and wait a bit before barreling up to Scott’s front door. Goodco had a fleet of white vans, so they looked for this first.

  “Not that they’d use a white van if they were being sneaky,” said Emily. “Sneaky would be a lime-green Volkswagen. Nobody would suspect the assassins in the lime-green Volkswagen.” She was right. Neither of the kids had seen many movies or TV shows, but bad guys always seemed to drive white vans or black town cars. They probably all shopped at the same evil dealership. Even Agent SuperCar’s enemies drove around in white vans. White vans that turned into robot polar bears, but still.

  “Biggs,” said Erno. “Do you have any scrap paper in here?”

  Biggs did. Every time he parked his car someone put a flyer for carpet cleaning on it, and he had a small collection of these in the glove box.

  Emily twisted around to face him. “What do you need that for?”

  “I thought I ought to write out some message to Scott, in case we have to leave in a hurry. I thought maybe I could write it out in a code or something, so the Goodco people won’t know what it means.”

  “A code,” Emily smiled. “Sounds like something Dad would do.”

  Erno forced himself to smile back.

  After ten minutes Erno had scribbled all over four flyers for carpet cleaning, one for a weight-loss program, and yet another for tax services—that last one got him thinking. He started over.

  “Emily, am I using the word conspired right?”

  “‘Conspired,’” said Emily. “Worked together to bring about a particular result.”

  “Thanks.”

  Another few minutes and he finally had a draft he felt comfortable leaving on Scott’s doorstep. If it came to that. He’d enjoyed it: crafting a clue of his own instead of tripping over someone else’s two or three times a month. He was still admiring his handiwork when Emily’s crisp whisper brought him back to the here and now.

  “Look,” she was telling Biggs. “There he is again.”

  “What is it?” asked Erno.

  “There’s
a guy. In that black car with the Pennsylvania plates. It’s been here longer than we have, only I didn’t notice there was someone sitting inside it until just a second ago.”

  Erno squinted at the back of the black car, the black town car, and saw the driver’s head turn.

  “I think he’s watching Scott’s house too,” said Emily, back to a whisper.

  Biggs looked like he was trying to make himself small, which was like watching someone fold an origami crane out of a refrigerator carton. The three of them stared at the man in the car, and the man in the car stared at the house.

  Silence.

  “Nobody’s doing anything,” said Erno after a long stretch of nobody doing anything.

  “What do you want us to do?”

  “I dunno. We could go ask him why he’s here. We could question him about Goodco. Biggs could roll his car over.”

  “Those are all terrible ideas.”

  “Never rolled over anything bigger than a Jeep,” said Biggs.

  “Wait! Look.”

  The shiny black door of the town car opened, and a man in a black suit and dark sunglasses stepped out. He was lean, not so tall, and he clenched a plume of bloodred roses in his fist.

  “Maybe he’s dating Scott’s mom,” whispered Emily.

  “Maybe he’s just pretending to date her so he can kill everyone.”

  “He’s probably just a dinner guest.”

  “At eleven in the morning?”

  “It’s Thanksgiving.”

  Erno blinked. “It is?”

  The man in black crossed the street.

  “We have to do something.”

  “Okay.”

  Erno kicked through the tiny rear door of the Citroën and tore off down the sidewalk as the man in black drew up to Scott’s front stoop. Did the assassin hesitate? Did his finger waver at the doorbell as he contemplated his grim business? Erno bounded up to the stoop, slapped away the bouquet of roses (which were certainly hiding a gun, or a knife), and planted himself between the man and Scott’s front door.

  “What the—” The man flinched. He removed his sunglasses, and Erno got a good look at the face of Reggie Dwight as Biggs hustled up the steps with Emily in his arms.

  Have you ever been close to a movie star? We’re so used to seeing them through a screen or a pane of glass that we expect them to always be that way, like zoo animals. Then, suddenly, there’s this giraffe standing in front of you, and you can’t decide whether you should talk to it or run. But when Emily touched the man behind his ear, he fell asleep in a heap on the doorstep and didn’t look so famous anymore.

  “Oh, shoot,” Emily said, looking down. “It’s Scott’s dad.”

  “It’s Reggie Dwight,” Erno corrected. “Wait…”

  “Reggie Dwight is Scott and Polly’s dad,” Emily whispered loudly.

  “He’s … seriously?” said Erno.

  “I was never a hundred percent positive, but it just made sense, you know? I tried to tell you, but you laughed so hard you choked on a cherry pit.”

  “You gotta stop telling me these kinds of things when I’m eating.”

  Reggie Dwight twitched and made a grunty noise.

  “What should we do?”

  “Kids,” said Biggs. “Van.”

  It was at the top of the hill—a white van sliding like a fat specter around the corner.

  And so they rang the doorbell and ran. Erno left his note to Scott tucked inside Reggie’s jacket. It read:

  The accountant’s student came to be

  the chairman of his company.

  We’re high above where friends conspired

  to send him after he retired.

  It was a riddle, sure—a clue like Mr. Wilson would have left. But it wasn’t a game. It had never been a game.

  CHAPTER 19

  The doorbell rang. And a moment later Mom yelped “Oh my goodness—John!” in such a way that Scott thought he ought to go to the front door after all.

  They’d known for only two hours that his father would be coming for Thanksgiving dinner. He’d called from New York, apologized for the last minuteness of it, didn’t seem to even realize that it was an American holiday. The surprise had scarcely begun to fade when Scott joined his mother and discovered the man himself sleeping on their doorstep beside a jumble of stems and rose petals.

  “Help me get him inside,” said Mom. Scott lifted his dad’s head while Mom dragged him by his expensive wing tips.

  “What happened?” asked Polly when they joined her in the living room. “Is he drunk?”

  “Your father doesn’t drink, sweetie.”

  The three of them hoisted him to the lip of the sofa and rolled him onto his stomach. He gave a contented sigh.

  “Tch,” said Mom, examining the back of his suit jacket. “I should have vacuumed.”

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  “I don’t know, baby. Give me a second.”

  “He’s dressed like he’s at a funeral,” said Scott. “That’s flattering.”

  “It’s just how he is—how he’s always been. Either he’s wearing pink with orange feathers onstage or he looks like he’s the CIA. He’s not good with gray areas.”

  John smacked his lips and said, “Look who’s talking.” He opened his eyes cautiously and turned on his side. “What happened?”

  “We were hoping you could tell us.”

  The movement dislodged a folded sheet of paper from the inside of John’s jacket. It read FOR SCOTT ONLY in pencil. “Whoop,” John murmured. “Mail for you.”

  Scott unfolded the riddle and read it.

  “Was about to ring the doorbell,” said John. “Boy came an’ slapped my flowers and then I fell ’sleep.”

  Mom glanced at the note. “Is this one of Erno’s family games?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Mom sighed. “Dinner’s in an hour. Scott, you want to take your dad upstairs and help him get cleaned up?”

  Scott did not particularly want to do this, actually, but he recognized it as one of those rhetorical questions.

  “This is where you all live?” asked John as they ascended the stairs. “It’s small.”

  “This is just our Thanksgiving house,” Scott muttered. “We have a house for every day of the year.”

  “What was that?”

  “Nothing.”

  Scott sat on the toilet lid as his father checked himself over in the mirror.

  “I didn’t mean anything … untoward,” said John. “I’m glad to be here. I’ve been wanting to visit, but … it never seemed like the right time.”

  But then you punched the Queen of England, and your schedule cleared right up, thought Scott. He felt like he was always thinking mean thoughts like this. They scared him sometimes.

  “Would you excuse me?”

  Scott left the bathroom and turned into his own adjoining bedroom, and lightly closed the door behind him.

  “That your da?” asked Mick. He was nestled in the bedclothes reading comic books.

  “It’s him,” Scott whispered. “You’ll have to be even more careful until he leaves. Right? I mean, we already know my mom can’t see you, so I probably get it from Dad.”

  “He’s not leavin’,” said Mick. He folded a page of the comic back to mark his place, and Scott winced. This was Abraham SuperLincoln #344, and the first appearance of Penny Arcadian, but he thought better than to try to explain its historical significance to an elf.

  “What do you mean, ‘He’s not leaving’?”

  “Your ma’s about to go off on her jaunt down south, isn’t she?”

  “To Antarctica. Goodco’s sending her. But this woman from the Goodco day care will be looking after us. It’s all set up already.”

  “Don’t think so,” said Mick, and he looked thoughtful. “Didn’t suppose I had any glamour left for a foretellin’. Maybe I don’t, an’ it’s just good ol’-fashioned wisdom. But I think your da will be stayin’ on for a while.”

  Scott
was shaking his head. “No. No, he wouldn’t want to. I… I don’t want him to,” he said. It came out sounding a little like a question.

  Mick shrugged. “He punched the Crown o’ England—he can’t be all bad.”

  Scott frowned and slipped back into the hall, where he almost knocked his father down.

  “Is that Polly’s room?” asked John.

  “No. It’s mine.”

  “I thought I heard you talking to someone.”

  “I was,” Scott said. “To my imaginary friend.” It was a comfortable deception, since he wasn’t entirely sure he was even lying.

  “I had one of those when I was your age. Well, Polly’s age maybe. Maybe younger.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “It was this little gnome or something that I’d see now and again. I’d try to talk to him, but he’d always run away.”

  “You had an imaginary friend who wouldn’t talk to you,” said Scott as they returned to the stairs. “Did you have low self-esteem or something?”

  John snorted. Scott wondered, of course, if his dad’s childhood friend had been only as imaginary as the little man currently ruining his comic book collection. John had grown up in England, after all—he must have had at least as many opportunities to spot the Fay as Scott had here in New Jersey.

  “So … how long are you staying?”

  They descended the stairs before John answered. “Actually, your mother and I want to talk to you kids about that.”

  At dinner Mom asked Scott to say grace, which was ridiculous. They never said grace, except maybe when Grandma Adams visited. To be specific, Mom asked Scott to “say a few words,” so Scott found himself saying more than a few words about the Pilgrims, and how they had to flee from England, and how awful England was back then because there wasn’t any freedom and you couldn’t just punch the queen whenever you felt like it; and now Scott could feel his face get hot and his mouth dry, so when his mom cleared her throat in kind of a serious way he said “Amen” midsentence and started dishing out mashed potatoes.

  The turkey was dry, flavorless. Difficult to finish. And a halfway-decent metaphor for the dinner itself. Scott wouldn’t have minded hearing Polly prattle on as she usually did on every conceivable subject, but she was apparently having one of her well-earned quiet moods. She always had one hand or the other hidden, and Scott knew she’d be clutching her little prince figurine like a rabbit’s foot under the table.