by Doug Cornett
But nobody called Shanks “Gloria,” not even Shanks herself. Shanks was a Shanks, if there ever was one.
Me? I was just Paul. To be honest, I was a little jealous of Peephole and Shanks. I’d secretly always wanted a cool nickname, but nothing ever came up. I guess every group needs a person with no nickname, just to keep it grounded.
Portnoy turned his attention back to me and cleared his throat with a guttural noise that sounded like a heavy-duty vacuum cleaner trying to work through a massive clog of dog hair. “I can appreciate that you want a keepsake from this little spectacle, but the ducks are officially evidence now. They belong in the storage shed next to the police department.” His face fell a little when he said that, as if he had realized that he would actually have to gather all these ducks up by hand and transport them to the police station. He gazed down at me. “Paul”—he struggled for the right words—“they’re not real.”
He smiled and patted the top of my head, which made me feel like a toddler. I wondered how clueless he thought I was.
“I figured that much out,” I said patiently. “I thought it would be cool to keep one.”
“I don’t have any problem with you taking one, Paul, but if I gave you a rubber ducky, then I’d have to give one to your friends, Pebble and Chunk, and everyone else out here, and then there wouldn’t be any evidence left. Would there?” His face softened, and he patted my head again. “They’re just ordinary old duckies, son. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a crowd to control.”
With that, he began to shoo the onlookers away from Babbage’s yard, waving the air in front of him like he was walking into a flock of pigeons. I started making my way toward Shanks, but a voice called to me from behind.
“Paul Marconi? Is that you?”
I whirled around to see Janice Wagner, my neighbor from across the street. Janice was a sophomore in high school, and she used to babysit me when I was small. She was a great babysitter, really funny and willing to play any stupid game I came up with, and she had a trampoline in her backyard that she let me jump on once or twice, even though my parents said I wasn’t supposed to. She was cool like that, but we hadn’t spoken for a couple of years.
“Oh my gosh,” she said, clasping a hand to her mouth and trying to stifle a giggle. Her short black hair bounced around her narrow face, and her pine-tree-green eyes looked at me in disbelief. “You’re not a little kid anymore!”
I grinned, and then felt embarrassed at how big I was grinning, so I clasped a hand over my mouth. “Nope, I’m not,” I mumbled, which sounded weird, so I said, “Yes, I’m not,” which sounded even weirder.
Sometimes talking can be hard.
Janice had one foot up on a motorized scooter, and she was wearing an enormous black bag on her back. It sort of made her look like a human-sized snail with a huge shell.
She noticed me noticing the bag. “My tuba,” she explained, with a thumb point over her shoulder. “A few of us band geeks have been selected to play the victory song when they announce the Bellwood Bratwurst Bonanza winner this weekend. It’s sort of a big deal. I was just on my way to practice when I saw all these ducks….”
“That is a big deal,” I agreed, because it really was. The Bellwood Bratwurst Bonanza—or Triple B, for short—was the biggest party of the year in our little town. For Bellwoodians, it was like New Year’s Eve in Times Square times a thousand, with sausages.
“It’s an honor just to be a part of it.” A curly-haired kid with freckles who was holding a trombone inserted himself into our conversation. It was Chad Foster, who was my age but happened to be the best trombone player in Bellwood. Once, on a dare, Chad ate seven cafeteria cupcakes in five minutes, then passed out during gym class. It was hard for me to take him seriously after that.
“It should be a great Triple B this year,” he continued. “One for the history books. Your parents are always contenders, Marconi. But there’s no denying that Babbage here is at the top of his game. Can anybody dethrone him? It would take a herculean effort, that’s for sure.” He put a thoughtful finger on his chin. When not practicing the trombone, he spent most of his free time watching sports on TV, which is why he sounded like an announcer at a football game. “Going to be a close one this year, a real barn burner. I’ll bet you dollars to donuts that this Triple B will be the most competitive in history. At this point, it’s anybody’s Bonanza!”
Peephole and Shanks appeared at my side and nodded hellos to Janice and Chad. Janice and Chad nodded back. We must have looked like a bunch of bobblehead dolls, standing around in silence as the crowd bustled past us.
“So this is pretty weird,” Janice said, looking out over the ducks on Babbage’s lawn.
“Weird and awesome,” Shanks said, beaming. “Anybody have any clue where they came from?”
“Nope.” Chad shuffled his feet. “But he seems pretty happy about it.” He pointed his trombone across the lawn to the tall wooden fence that separated Babbage’s yard from his neighbor’s. There was a face peeking over the fence, smiling at the mess with wicked amusement. It was a leering, twisted little face.
“Oh, no. It’s him,” Peephole groaned.
The scowl above the fence belonged to Mr. Pocus. Apparently, Mr. Babbage and the cruelest teacher in Bellwood were neighbors.
“They don’t get much meaner than that,” Chad said. “I heard that once, a long time ago, Pocus was so awful to a student that the kid flipped out, ran out of the classroom, and moved to Antarctica that night.”
“Antarctica is really far away,” Peephole said. “Lucky kid.”
“There’s no way that happened,” I protested. “You don’t just up and move to Antarctica, no matter how big of a jerk your teacher is.”
“Paul’s right,” Janice said. At last, the voice of reason. “He didn’t move to Antarctica that night. He stayed in bed for a month and refused to go back to school. And then he moved to Antarctica.”
“You can refuse to go to school?” Peephole asked, surprised. “I wish I had known that when Pocus was my teacher.” He glared across the lawn at Pocus with a mix of anger and fear, as if Pocus might notice him at any moment and call him up to the board.
“At least that’s what I heard,” Janice said. “The kid was a few years older than me. Oh! Byron! Maybe you’d know!” Janice reached out and grabbed the arm of an impossibly tall teenager walking by. The kid had long fiery red hair, and he leaned over our circle like a streetlight. “Did you have Mr. Pocus? Did you hear about the kid whose life he ruined?”
Byron tugged at his thick bun of red hair, as if he was already bored with the conversation. “I don’t know,” he said, his eyes flicking to Pocus’s face peering over the fence. “You can’t waste your time on grumps like him. Life’s too short.”
“How come you looked at me when you said ‘short’?” Shanks said accusingly.
“You’re Byron Willis,” Peephole interjected, looking up at him. It was rare for Peephole to look up at anybody. “You’re the chief of the Bellwood Junior Firefighters.”
“That’s right,” Byron said.
“You’re tall,” Peephole added.
“Yep,” Byron said. “So are you.”
“Thanks,” Peephole said.
“Brilliant conversation,” Shanks muttered under her breath.
Again a few seconds of silence settled on our circle, which was finally broken by Portnoy’s gruff voice announcing there was “nothing to see here.”
With that, we joined the gawkers of Bellwood as they dispersed to their cars and their homes and their ordinary old summer day.
But I knew better. These weren’t ordinary old duckies, and this was not an ordinary old day in Bellwood.
“What should we call him?” Shanks held a little ducky in the palm of her hand. She’d swiped it from Babbage’s yard when no one was looking.
“How about ‘Mister E’?” I suggested, snatching the ducky from her.
“I wouldn’t touch that thing,” Peephole said. “We don’t know where it came from. For all we know, Mr. Babbage’s dog could have licked it. Do you know how many germs are in a dog’s mouth? Do you know that my aunt Minnie’s pug eats its own poo?”
“First of all, that’s disgusting,” I said. “Second, this is a clue, and detectives can’t be scared of clues. Now, where did you come from, Mister E?”
I turned the ducky over and it answered me. Sort of. DUNNING TOY COMPANY was stamped on the bottom. I showed Peephole and Shanks.
“That doesn’t tell us very much,” Peephole said.
“But it’s a lead,” Shanks added optimistically.
The three of us were reviewing the facts of the case from the safety of our secret headquarters, which was only two blocks from Babbage’s house, in a thin patch of woods on the edge of an overgrown field that had once been a drive-in movie theater. It wasn’t much of a headquarters, just a simple lean-to that we had built the summer before with some sticks and tree branches, but it was tucked away in a part of town that nobody ever seemed to come to. I’d etched ONE AND ONLYS with a knife onto a piece of lumber from my dad’s hardware store and had nailed it to the trunk of the tree that the lean-to was built against. It was where the One and Onlys always met to discuss our cases. It was our lair, our fortress, and nobody else knew about it, not even our parents.
My attention drifted from Mister E to the abandoned drive-in movie screen in the field in front of us. It was huge and had discolored from white to a dingy shade of brown, and there were wild vines growing up the side of it. The theater hadn’t shown a movie for decades, but my dad told me that when he was a kid everybody in Bellwood would go out on Friday and Saturday nights to the drive-in. I sort of felt bad for the lonely old screen, being abandoned like that. But I knew that was stupid.
“So you’re saying that all those duckies shot up from the sewer?” Peephole was doing his best to understand Shanks’s line of logic. “Like, a volcano of bath toys?”
Shanks scrunched up her nose and stuck her lower lip out. Her eyes went a little bit crossed. This was her deep-in-thought face. “I’m saying they could have. You guys saw it, didn’t you—the manhole cover in Mr. Babbage’s backyard?”
I had noticed it, and I knew it meant that the sewer line ran directly below the backyard. But the manhole cover was still in place, which meant that if somehow those duckies came from underground, then someone, or something, had to have put the cover back on.
“Okay,” Peephole continued, “so let’s say they came from the sewer. Then how did they get down there?”
“How does anything get down there?”
“Somebody flushed hundreds of rubber duckies down their toilet?”
Shanks’s mouth curled upward stubbornly. “I didn’t say that it did happen that way. Just that it could have. We have to keep every possibility open until we’re able to rule it out.” The thing about Shanks and Peephole was that, even though they were best friends, they bickered all the time. Usually it was my job to referee their conversations.
“Babbage’s grass was wet, and it hasn’t rained in days,” I said, but I didn’t have to remind them of that. The tinge of smoke in the air was enough to remind us all of the wildfires raging outside of town. “I have a feeling that’s the key to this mystery. If we can figure out why his grass was wet, then we’ll know where the duckies came from.”
Peephole and Shanks contemplated this for a moment.
“Maybe Mr. Babbage put them all there,” Peephole said. He was always suspicious of people. The only few he trusted were his parents, Shanks, and me. That was why he rode his bike to school—he was convinced the bus driver was going to kidnap him and drive him to a work camp in Nebraska.
“An inside job?” Shanks pulled her hair against her face so that it looked like a beard. She did this whenever she was working through a particularly puzzling idea. “Interesting theory.”
“Why would he put hundreds of rubber ducks in his yard, then call the cops?” I asked.
Shanks scratched her head and said, “You know how some people take all their clothes off and run out onto the field during the World Series?”
Peephole and I looked at each other, confused.
“What I’m saying is, people do strange things for attention.”
I was skeptical. “Babbage was spooked. I overheard him telling Officer Portnoy about a nightmare he had right before the ducks appeared. He said it sounded like something…a monster…was trying to get into his house. Did you see the way he was gawking at the ducks? He looked downright terrified.”
Peephole turned pale. “Adults dream about monsters, too?”
“So if Babbage didn’t do it, then somebody put those ducks in his yard for a reason,” I said. “But who? And why?”
“No idea,” Shanks sighed. Then her face became serious. “But maybe whoever did it was there this morning in the crowd. Don’t criminals often return to the scene of the crime?”
“It’s not really a crime scene,” Peephole said in a nasally voice.
“Fine. Maybe whoever did it returned to the scene of the weirdness. So who was there at Babbage’s?”
I wracked my brain to remember. There had been a pretty decent crowd, with a lot of faces peering at the ducks. I hated to admit it, but I had been so distracted by the sea of yellow that I forgot to notice who was there. I had a long way to go to becoming a master detective. But the One and Onlys had a secret weapon: Peephole’s photographic memory. Now his chin was tilted up and his eyes were flicking back and forth, like he was watching a Ping-Pong match in the sky or trying to ward off a sneeze.
Finally, he spoke. “There were twenty-three people there, including us, Babbage, and Officer Portnoy. Out of the other eighteen, I only recognized seven people. They were Dr. Momani, the dentist; Chad Foster, the trombone player from our class; Darrel Sullivan, the…uh…guy with the bleached-white goatee; Missy What’s-Her-Name, the high school basketball player; Steph Something-or-Other, Missy What’s-Her-Name’s friend, who plays a sport, too, but I’m not sure if it’s basketball or soccer or—”
“Not important,” Shanks interrupted. “Keep going.”
Peephole looked hurt, but he went on with the list. “Byron Willis, the Junior Firefighter; Janice Wagner, who plays tuba in the high school band and who lives right across the street from Paul.”
“Who else?” Shanks was impatient to get through the list.
“A lot of people I didn’t know: a teenage guy with a shaved head and sunglasses; another teenager with big black boots and a green cast on her left arm; a little kid with his pants on backward, which I thought was a mistake, but then I thought, Maybe that’s the style these days for little kids; the little kid’s dad, whose hat was on backward, so maybe it just runs in the family; a big old lady whose face was so wrinkly it almost looked like a mask, holding the hand of a little girl with blond hair and a voice like a squirrel on helium; a short guy with skunk hair; a tall lady with…”
Shanks and I exchanged a glance as Peephole continued his report. We both were thinking the same thing: there was no way we could investigate all those people.
Finally, Peephole’s list came to an end, and he beamed at us with a proud grin.
“You forgot somebody,” I said.
Peephole frowned. “I never forget.”
“Pocus was there, too,” I reminded him. “He was watching from over the fence between his yard and Babbage’s.”
“Oh, yeah,” Peephole admitted. “I guess I blocked him out.”
“Maybe we should be thinking about motive, instead,” Shanks suggested. “Like, who would want to dump duckies all over Babbage’s yard?”
“I don’t know about that, but I do know that Babbage was rattled b
y it. Maybe that’s what the person intended,” I said.
“But who would want to scare poor Babbage?” Peephole asked. “He’s never done anything except make delicious bratwurst dishes year after year.”
“As far as we know,” Shanks said. “Maybe he’s got a dark past that he keeps a secret.”
“Or maybe somebody got tired of losing to him at the Triple B every year,” I suggested.
Shanks pointed at me, a gleam in her eye. “You may be onto something! That’s an angle we should investigate.” She reached out and put her fist in the middle of our circle. “The One and Onlys are on the case!”
Peephole put his fist on top of Shanks’s, and I put mine on top of Peephole’s. Then all three of us opened our hands and made explosion noises.
The One and Onlys was the name we gave ourselves because we were each an only child. The One and Onlys had investigated our first case on the day we all met. It was the start of fourth grade, and the three of us found ourselves at the back of the lunch line. Peephole, who was still “Alexander” then, was in front of me, looking really nervous. Sweating, biting his lip, staring up at the food counter. I recognized him from my class, and so I asked him what was wrong.
“If I tell you, you’ll laugh,” he said sheepishly.
“No, I won’t,” I said. “Promise.”
He shrugged. “I have a fear of school lunches.”
I didn’t laugh. But the short girl with electric-blond hair behind me did. I recognized her from our class, too.
“What do you think will happen?” she asked. “It’ll try to eat you back?”
By the time we got our lunches, every table but one was full, so we had to sit together. As we poked at our food with our plastic sporks, we tried to guess what the main dish was. The lunch lady had called it chicken, but it was definitely not chicken. It was chicken-like, but there was something about it that reminded us of fish and dog food and (weirdly) mulch. Shanks examined the “chicken” with a magnifying glass that she retrieved from her backpack. That’s the moment I knew we were going to be friends. Anybody who brings a magnifying glass to the first day of school obviously shares my love of solving mysteries. Peephole was less interested in the mystery and more concerned that the stench of the lunch might make him sick. That’s Peephole in a nutshell right there. I offered him my backpack to throw up in. The three of us got so distracted that we were late getting back to class.
