Meddling Kids

by Edgar Cantero

  “I am,” Kerri said. “We’re allowed to take off our lab coats on the Sabbath.” She waited for a reaction, then clarified. “Kidding. But I am a biologist; I got my BA two years ago. Not too glossy grades—the place where I did the internship sucked. And I had a falling-out with this guy who was supposed to tutor me during my senior year. You know, we were keeping it professional, but then we met at this crazy afterparty and we slept together, but we agreed it was nothing serious, so I slept with other guys, and he said it was okay, but then it wasn’t, and you know…Old story, right?”

  Andy debated between saying “right” or just shrugging, and did neither.

  “So you’re not doing any biology work now.”

  “Well, no, not at the moment. I applied for some PhD programs, but I wasn’t lucky, and that bastard would not even give me a fake recommendation. And my GRE wasn’t dazzling either because…well, I can’t even remember taking it. So, anyway, I’m taking some time to put my shit together now. You know, ’cause a biologist’s got to eat. But soon I’ll start applying to colleges again, show my résumé around, get back on track.”

  She idly inspected the half-full glass in her hand.

  “Any time now.”

  And she gulped down the rest of the drink.

  —

  The second place was fuller, dirtier, and louder, but Andy hardly gave any attention to these circumstances, except for the time Kerri tried to pull her onto the dance floor and she refused and stayed on the sofa, pretending to enjoy a rum and Coke while watching Kerri bounce and shake to Zulu electronica, orange hair splashing around like a Hawaiian volcano. And every time a guy approached her and spoke inaudible words at her, Andy would stiff her back up for a second, trying to mentally push the message in his direction: That’s Dr. Kerri to you, and no, she doesn’t want anything.

  Then they sat together again and continued talking, and Kerri’s white laughter glowed under the UV lights.

  “That was Mr. Magnus!” she went. “He was stealing his own boats for insurance fraud! Who would ever suspect him?”

  “No, the boats were spring of ’seventy-seven!” Andy insisted. “Captain Al took us scuba diving in Crab Cove! The time we went kayaking it was about the sheep-smuggling case.”

  Kerri contemplated the memory. “Shit, you’re right! The werewolf and his sheep-smuggling network!”

  “Can you believe we were scared of that guy?”

  “God, the lowlifes we’ve encountered. Who the fuck smuggles sheep?”

  “No one now. They know better since we busted them.”

  “Seriously, we made the crime rate around Blyton Hills drop like ninety percent. Pity we didn’t spend summer here in New York; the Bronx would look like Sesame Street by now.”

  They waited for laughter to remit, and Andy considered it convenient to force another sip of rum into her body, bite her lip, and bring up another file.

  “Deboën Mansion and the Sleepy Lake monster.”

  “Our last case,” Kerri said, after a quasi-unnoticeable pause. “God, someone should compile a casebook with all of these. ‘The Archives of the Blyton Summer Detective Club.’ Kids might like it.”

  “You never would’ve read it,” Andy scoffed. “And by the way, what happened to you? Little Miss Not Ready to Confront the Sheep-Smuggling Werewolf Yet, Let’s Spend Another Week in the Library? And now you take over a dance floor all by yourself? And what happened to your glasses?”

  “Okay, okay,” Kerri placated her, resting a brown suede boot on the seat opposite as she leaned back and articulated her defense. “One, contact lenses. And two…Well, college changed me.”

  “But college was supposed to be a bookworm paradise!”

  “God, you beautiful naive thing.” She drank, with Andy rendered helpless by that line. Then she added, slapping her knee, “What can I say? I changed.”

  “We all did,” Andy agreed.

  For a minute, silence somehow nudged itself into the deafening dance beat.

  “I should have called you after Peter,” Andy said.

  Kerri took a very obvious pause this time. Then she raised the bottle. “Fuck it. World’s for the living.”

  And she finished off her drink, while Andy struggled to find meaning in that abstruse carpe diem.

  —

  The third place they hit felt even more crammed than the club, not much tidier, and surprisingly quiet. It was Kerri’s apartment.

  As soon as Kerri unlocked the door, a bluish dash of a dog poured over them like a roomful of Marx Brothers.

  “Hey! Look who wants to go to the bathroom!” she greeted. “I was talking about me, actually. Make way!”

  She sneaked through a side door while Andy stared at the excited blue-gray hunting dog clambering up her leg.

  “This…Is this Roger?”

  “You’ve been out of the loop too long,” Kerri said offscreen. “That is Roger’s son Tim.”

  Tim, 3 according to the Hollis family’s records, reacts to his name by standing down, as alert as his drooping ears manage to indicate, then seems to order himself “at ease” and lets his mouth open and his tongue unfold, panting proudly.

  Even to Andy’s trained eye, Tim was the spitting image of Roger, the son of George and grandson of Sean. Sean, of Blyton Summer Detective Club fame, had died years ago in Portland, but he had been already a grandfather in the time he used to accompany the children in their adventures—the one grown-up on the team, founder of a lineage. All of them the same shade of blue gray, somewhat undersized for their breed standards, and maddeningly energetic.

  “They all come through the male line?”

  “Nope. George was a female, remember?”

  A toilet flushed, and Tim tracked down his leash, ready to offer it to Kerri as she exited the coffin bathroom.

  “My mom spoils them too much. I adopted Tim the last time I was home in Portland to teach him some discipline.” She attached the leash to his collar. “Gotta pop downstairs. Make yourself comfortable. There’s a bottle of vodka somewhere.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You won’t be. That toaster is the only heating you get. Be right back.”

  Kerri and Tim left, and Andy glanced over Kerri’s austere apartment, pondering the thinness of the line between glancing and snooping. Probably opening drawers marked the boundary, but there was only one and it was open already. Kerri’s garments lay scattered on the floor, pouring out of a yawning red travel bag. She checked the single bookshelf, unbelievingly: only a dozen books, most of them fiction. Not one pocket encyclopedia, not even a bird spotter’s guide. The walls in Kerri’s bedroom in Blyton Hills (the most awesome place in the universe) were fully dressed with bookshelves and butterfly display cases and maps of other continents. The cool ones: Africa, Oceania.

  Reverently, she pulled down one of the book spines, an illustrated edition of Wyndham’s The Chrysalids—the same one Andy had read as a child in Blyton Hills, per Kerri’s recommendation. She opened it.

  A familiar piece of paper fluttered down onto her lap. She picked up the newspaper clipping delicately and smoothed it on the book’s cover. It had been almost three years from the last time Andy had read the article, and yet her memory misquoted hardly a couple of words.

  TEEN SLEUTHS UNMASK SLEEPY LAKE MONSTER

  Nancy Hardy/Blyton Hills.—The reign of terror of the “Sleepy Lake Creature”—the elusive figure that has been scaring herdsmen and campers by the upper Zoinx River—was put to an end last weekend by some unlikely heroes, namely four children and a dog.

  Peter Manner (13), Kerri Hollis (12), Andrea “Andy” Rodriguez (12), and Nate Rogers (11), along with their hunting dog, Sean, are credited with the capture of Thomas X. Wickley, from California, who was reenacting an old Indian legend as part of a convoluted scheme for burglary at the historic Deboën Mansion.

  A Legend Rekindled

  This is not the first time that the so-called Blyton Summer Detective Club has taken on a case that had
local authorities baffled. As frequent vacationers in Blyton Hills, the half-and-half Oregonian-Californian bunch is famous in town for its crazy adventures, which often end in the arrest of evildoers!

  Recent sightings of a “monster” around Sleepy Lake had been a hot topic in Blyton Hills this summer. “Rumors of lake creatures are as old as they are typical of any large water mass,” says Deputy Sheriff W. Wilson, of the Pennaquick County Police. “I myself grew up hearing the old Walla Walla tales of ancient underwater spirits that crawl up the misty shores at night. But when hunters start finding alien tracks in the mud, you know something is amiss.”

  “We just had to go and see those for ourselves!” young Nate boasts excitedly, a little daredevil who makes up in courage what he lacks in size. However, when they first visited the lake, they found more than tracks: they encountered the creature itself, and it had them fleeing away! “He gave us a heck of a scare!”

  Summer Detectives on the Job

  For Peter, the oldest of the gang and a natural-born leader, the mystery had just begun. “We found footprints in the forest that seemed to lead straight into the mines upriver. That was odd: What business does a lake creature have in an abandoned gold mine?”

  It was at that point when the kids contacted their old ally, Captain Al Urich, a retired air force veteran living in Blyton Hills.

  “I have had the pleasure to work with the Blyton Summer Detective Club before and I do my best to assist them whenever they require a grown-up’s point of view, or simply someone with a driver’s license,” Captain Urich joked.

  Together, the children and Captain Urich searched the woods around Sleepy Lake and the abandoned mines. “I hope to become a biologist someday, so I was eager for a closer look at that creature,” says Kerri, the brains of the team. But the clues pointed to something bigger than a prowling monster: “We went to the library and learned that the mines were connected to the old Deboën Mansion. All our findings pointed to that house.”

  The House on the Lake

  Built during the Gold Rush years by a merchant-turned-prospector on a tiny islet in Sleepy Lake, Deboën Mansion has been shunned for years by townsfolk who still resent the family’s alleged ties with piracy and witchcraft. Rumors of a haunting have persisted since 1949, when a fire destroyed part of the building and forced the bankrupt family to sell the property and relocate in town. Ms. Dunia Deboën, last of her bloodline and the police’s main suspect in the case, refused to comment on this story.

  Nevertheless, when the teen detectives finally dared investigate the house, they were in deep water. “Weather capsized our boat and we ended up stranded on the isle,” recounts Andy, who despite being a girl was never afraid to take refuge in the haunted house. “It looked like we were up for a night of frights!”

  However, not only did the four friends overcome the thrills of that eventful night, but they also managed to set an ingenious trap for the fraudster himself. When police reached the isle the next morning, they found the missing children and dog guarding their astounding catch—the Sleepy Lake creature unmasked!

  “Wickley had heard rumors about Deboën’s lost gold hidden below the mansion, and he took advantage of the creature myth to scare off people while he searched for the riches,” Peter explained, recapping a new entry in the exploits of the Blyton Summer Detective Club. Criminals of Blyton Hills beware—the children are coming back for Christmas!

  Andy, her mouth filled with a sweet aftertaste, put the clipping back inside the book and the book back on the shelf, reassured. That was all she wanted to find.

  Plus Tim. Tim was a welcome extra. Things were all going according to plan.

  Tim and Kerri returned soon enough, the former going straight to the toaster Andy had turned on, the latter snatching the bottle of vodka.

  “Shit, it’s cold,” she mumbled, crashing on the bed as gently as the Hindenburg in the very narrow gap between Andy and the wall. “Go ahead, take your shoes off. Let’s do a pajama party like the old times. We’ll build a pillow fort and ask the Magic Eight Ball who will we marry.”

  “We never did that,” Andy complained, undoing her boots. “You wouldn’t do it; it’s too unscientific. Instead you tried to explain genetics to me to determine who we should marry to spawn superdetectives.”

  “Hey, it works with dogs. Right, Tim?”

  Tim sneezed in a very dignified Sherlock Holmes fashion. Kerri was sitting up against the wall, after she’d toed her suede boots off into oblivion. She took a big gulp of vodka and watched as Andy maneuvered out of her jacket.

  “You know,” she said, “sometimes it crossed my mind that next time I’d see you, you would be a boy.”

  Andy gazed at her, not completely off-balance. She replied, seriously, “Sometimes it crossed my mind there’d be no next time.”

  “Fuck,” Kerri countered, Andy’s line gone seemingly ignored. “Sorry. That was inappropriate.” She would have added, It’s the alcohol speaking, but she knew better than blaming the voluntary ingestion of bottled faux pas for her mistakes.

  “It’s okay.”

  “It’s because you always wanted us to call you Andy and hang out with the boys. And you liked it when people took you for a boy.”

  “I know.”

  “And now, you know, I’ve been outside, met people…I talked to this guy once, a really handsome boy who had made the change, and I thought…” She paused, eyebrows arcing up a little farther in helplessness. “Am I sounding ignorant?”

  “No, you never do.”

  “I’ll drop it. I’m drunk.”

  “It’s okay. I saw the world outside my Christian home too. I saw that it’s all right to be the way I am. It’s fine to be a girl and prefer jeans over dresses and mountain bikes over dollhouses.”

  Kerri listened, hugging her knees. “Did we make it hard for you?”

  “No,” said Andy seriously. “You were great.”

  A memory seemed to cross before Andy’s eyes, and she dispelled it together with the bang of hair in front of her face.

  “Though I could have killed Joey Krantz on more than one occasion.”

  Kerri laughed. “Joey. What a dick. He picked on all of us. You know he was actually jealous, right? He called you butch because he would’ve loved to hang with us.”

  “No, he called me butch because I was butch. Some people are like that, they need to state the obvious.”

  “Whatever, fuck him.” Kerri leaped over Andy to claim the outer side of the bed as good hosts do and slithered under the blanket, waving Andy to do the same. “Pull over that quilt. You can take your pants off, but do it at your own risk; it’s like Alaska in the mornings.” They locked eyes for a second. “You’ve been to Alaska, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah, I remember now. I keep your postcard somewhere. Okay, maybe it’s not like Alaska,” she said, reaching out to throw her coat over Tim, who lay curled on his cardboard-carpeted corner. “We slept in worse places, right?”

  Andy looked at the narrow iron bed, the coarse wool blanket, the sinusoidal wave of Kerri’s body in the raglan shirt. “I have.”

  “You still have to tell me what you’ve been up to these years—don’t think I forgot,” Kerri said, tidying her hair up for the night. “How long are you staying, anyway?”

  Andy hadn’t lain down yet. She was leaning on one elbow while her other hand had been forced to relocate on top of Kerri’s hip. It was now wailing for the rest of Andy’s attention like a child calling for Mom from a diving springboard.

  “I’m not staying,” Andy said. “I mean, we’re not staying.”

  “Really? Where are we going?”

  “Blyton Hills.”

  Kerri chuckled. “Blyton? Are you going to kick-sterilize Joey Krantz too?”

  She waited for Andy to laugh, in vain.

  “Are you serious?” she insisted. “Andy, I haven’t been there in years. Uncle Emmet died; Aunt Margo moved to Portland. Why are we going there?”


  Andy didn’t answer right away. In the lapse, she grew aware that the night had become incredibly silent, like big cities hardly ever do. Like there was no big city outside those black windows, and the room, the only piece of universe left, was floating in the void. Only the colorless walls, the piles of clothes, a toaster, a bottle of vodka, an astronaut dog, and Kerri and herself all dressed in bed, cruising through space.

  Whispering seemed only proper.

  “Kerri, don’t you feel like…we left something unfinished up there?”

  The layer of alcohol on Kerri’s eyes blocked any reaction from surfacing. “What do you mean?”

  Andy tried to shift on the narrow bed.

  “Ever since Peter died,” she said, “I’ve been thinking about the last time we were all together up there, all five of us. And…I think I want to go back. I want to go to Deboën Mansion again.”

  “What for?”

  “You know,” Andy said, as if Kerri did know. “Look into the Sleepy Lake case.”

  “But we solved that case,” Kerri said. “It was Mr. Wickley trying to scare off people while he searched for Deboën’s gold.”

  “Actually, no, I talked to him—”

  “What?” The italics just flew out past the alcohol’s guard. “You talked to Wickley? You went to see him in prison?”

  “Yes—I mean—no, I just waited for him to come out, but—”

  “You met with Wickley? Are you insane? He’s a criminal!”

  “Please!” Andy scoffed. For a moment she considered relating the actual meeting, until it dawned on her that no part of that episode would cast her in a good light. “Look, I had to talk to him. I had to talk to someone. We never talk about that case.”

  “What’s there to talk about?” Kerri asked. “We caught the creature, it was a guy in a mask.”

  “No, it wasn’t,” Andy reacted, almost painfully. It had become that obvious in her head. “I mean, there happened to be a guy in a mask there, and we captured him. But there was something else going on in that house, Kerri. Come on, you know it.”