Meddling Kids

by Edgar Cantero

  The amber Vega roared through dirt roads, spraying waves of high-definition gravel.

  It wasn’t necessary to follow any scrap metal harvester; Kerri knew where to go. After the Blyton Hills gold mine was abandoned in the early 1960s, following a brief grace period during which tin had become the main product, the same California company that owned the mines converted the smelting furnace south of town into a chemical plant. This new works extended the life span of the town’s industrial economy and gave rise to a small residential neighborhood for qualified employees, about a mile southeast of the town proper. In the 1980s the plant was shut down too, and the residential area around it was quickly abandoned, its population of retired workers yielding their housing to the increasing demand of shelter for the homeless and privacy for the troubled youth.

  South of this area, the bad neighborhood began.

  To get rid of the vast amount of toxic waste and scrap metal the plant had generated, a junkyard had to be laid and a new furnace set up to burn the residue. The incinerator had worked at full capacity for two years—enough to dye the sky the color of iron rust—and then it was shut down as well. The junkyard was still open, its business merely consisting in hoping for all the incombustible trash to just evaporate so that planetary exploitation could resume. A long-retired employee was posted in a watchtower atop four steel columns, waiting for that to happen.

  That is where Kerri parked: a few yards short of the watchtower, at the foot of which, basking in a flimsy shaft of winter sun in a frayed hammock, wrapped in a wool blanket with a baseball cap over his eyes and an unlabeled bottle of twelve-year-old battery acid by his side, lay the old man they were looking for.

  Two pairs of sneakers and some suede boots trod the yellow dirt, car doors clacking behind.

  The man’s dusty lips quivered to produce a sentence.

  “Fuck off.”

  No more steps were heard.

  Except for paw pads, and some panting, and the brush of a wet snout against the man’s fingertips, which finally made him look. A microquake shook a fly off his cap as he faced the Weimaraner licking the dirt off his knuckles.

  “I know this dog.”

  The man sat up, removed his cap and his blanket, and stared at the color festival—swirling orange and amber and black. The slits of his eyes squinted further to identify the long-legged woman before him.

  “Kerri.”

  A smile dawned like a postwar sun.

  “Holy shit, Nate! And Andy! Oh, shit!” he chuckled, then pulled up some seriousness and asked, “It’s okay to swear in front of you now, right?”

  “Fuck yeah,” Kerri assured him, still insecure herself.

  They hugged. Kerri was startled to feel the minimal body under the Salvation Army clothes.

  “Come upstairs!” he said after hugging everyone, waving at the dog. “I’m out of lemonade, but I’ll find you something.”

  They followed him up a long flight of rotten iron stairs that threatened to infect them with tetanus by skin contact, Kerri watching Al’s back all the way up. There were very few things he had not lost in thirteen years; his wide frame was one.

  The single room on top of the tower was warm, by virtue of a single gas heater in a corner near a mattress on the floor. A table turned workbench sat in the middle of the room; an airplane engine lay where other people would have chosen to place a bowl of wax fruit. Tim, smelling the mattress on the floor, decided it was some other animal’s bed and left it alone. Al searched a cabinet in the area that had inexplicably landed the role of a kitchen.

  “What can I offer you? I have instant coffee…Damn, but no milk.”

  “We’re fine,” Kerri said.

  “No, wait, I just remembered, you’re twenty-one already, right?” He produced and laid on the table a bottle of whiskey and four glasses that had definitely never seen one another before. “Sit down, sit down, put that anywhere and take that chair. Shit, look at that. The Blyton Summer Detective Club knocking on my door!” The kids could feel his eyes feeding off their youth. “And where’s Peter? Don’t tell me that big jock has let you come all the way here without him watching your back; where is he?”

  And there, of all places, he actually stopped for an answer.

  In a matter of seconds, Kerri’s brain had produced a thousand plausible stories. Some of them were even good. Peter got married and he’s tied up with the twins. He’s shooting in Paris with Juliette Binoche. He’s on his last year in the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. But no sooner had the fiction department in her head spread out all these stories for her to choose from than she discarded them all. She would have to tell Al the truth. For one reason, she argued to her flustered imagination: because the Captain Al we need right now is one who can take the truth, not one who must be fed lies.

  “Cap, I’m sorry,” she said. “Peter’s dead.”

  Andy and Nate watched the smile on Captain Al transition to incomprehension, then to incredulity, then to sadness. As smoothly as flowers closing up at night, almost too slow for the naked eye, Captain Al’s smile withered and died.

  “No.” His voice quivered. “No no no no no. Why did he die?”

  “Don’t tell him the truth,” Peter begged, startling Nate by his side. “Please. Nate. Don’t tell him the truth.”

  Nate didn’t even flinch. He stood still, barely registering Peter through the corner of his eye, measuring the opportunity window before him. He spoke before anyone else could phrase an answer.

  “Car crash.” He noted the girls’ stare, but neither disagreed. “Wasn’t his fault. I’m sorry, Al.”

  Al took a seat. He was the first to sit down, after all.

  Distant mountains of metal against a yellow sky mourned behind the dirty windows.

  “Man, it’s wrong,” he stammered from the ruins. “It’s all so wrong.”

  “Captain,” Andy called, “we need your help.”

  Al refocused on her like he stood far, far away. His hand poured some whiskey into one of the glasses and he drank it up.

  “What can I do for you?” he asked. It was not a courtesy formula; it was actually a baffled question.

  “We’re on a case, Al.”

  “Are you now?” he tragichuckled. The guests waited as he poured himself another glass and gulped it down. “Villains of Blyton Hills beware, the Blyton Summer Detective Club is back in business. What is it this time? Ghost train on the old railway? Stolen goods from the history museum?” Each new example came to him with more difficulty. “A…ciphered message dropped by a dark-coated man on the run?”

  “Al, what happened to you?” Kerri begged. “What…I mean, your house?”

  “They took my house, Kerri,” he said, a couple decibels too loud. “Couldn’t keep it on my vet pension. The money I put on the sheep at the co-op, I lost. They killed them.”

  “But…” Kerri searched for a grown-up’s word to dispel disaster. “What about insurance?”

  “No insurance; the co-op went bankrupt. What little we had left, we spent fighting the corporation lawyers.”

  He drowned the building momentum in the rest of the drink, and the pathos ceased.

  When he spoke again, the words were slower, darker. “Blyton Hills needs your help, kids. (Looking up, two-thirds joking.) Shit, we’re beyond salvation. It all went sideways after you left.”

  The girls fell silent. Tim lay down, feeling the depression in the atmosphere. The curtains at the end of the conversation were about to fall.

  Nate lingered onstage: “What corporation?”

  “RH, from California,” Al said. “The one that used to own the chemical plant.”

  “And the gold mines,” Kerri recalled.

  Andy spotted the last chance to wedge in and seized it: “Al, we’re reopening the Sleepy Lake case. Remember it? You took us to the mines.”

  Al nodded, or his head wobbled. His eyes weren’t closed, but not manifestly open either.

  “Remember we came to you after we enco
untered a monster in the woods? And then you came with us the next day, and we didn’t see the creature, but we found its tracks leading into the abandoned gold mine?”

  “Remember the slaughtered deer?” tried Nate.

  “I remember a dead deer, yes,” the old man mumbled from under his cap.

  “Not just dead, Captain; it was torn open. And the birds had stopped singing.”

  An eye glistened audibly. Al raised his head.

  “Had they?”

  “Yes.” Nate checked Kerri and Andy. “Don’t you remember? When we returned to the lake with him, we tried to find the deer again. I remember Peter saying, ‘Listen,’ and we listened, and then you said”—he pointed at Kerri—“ ‘Where are the birds?’ ”

  Al rose up and reached for the cabinet. He retrieved a cookie tin. Kerri was about to refuse politely when she realized there were no cookies inside. The first item she recognized was a page from the Pennaquick Telegraph.

  Al picked up his reading glasses from the sink and scanned through the page.

  “Jesus, Al, you keep all this?” Andy had approached the tin box and picked up another item: a hundred-dollar bill. “This is the counterfeit money from the missing accountant case. And…shit, are these the werewolf’s teeth?”

  “There’s no mention of the deer here,” Al said, reading.

  “Al, they never let us have any of this. The sheriff said it was evidence!”

  “I still have some friends,” he answered briefly.

  “They never mentioned it ’cause the deer had nothing to do with it,” Kerri said. “How would Wickley hunt it and cut it open?”

  “They never mentioned it ’cause it doesn’t fit their version; doesn’t mean it’s not related,” Nate argued.

  “It probably isn’t,” Al commented. “For starters, it’s happened again since.”

  Andy’s attention snapped back from the tin box. “More slaughtered deer? Near Sleepy Lake?”

  “Yes,” Al said, not giving it much importance. “A few years ago. I didn’t see it, but I remember a couple of campers freaking out. Anyway, it’s not the slaughtered ones I worry about.”

  Andy, Kerri, and Nate eyed one another, deciding who was going to inquire further.

  “Most often, the animals are found dead,” Al expanded. “On the lakeshore, just like that. Not eaten or mauled, just dead.”

  “Poisoned,” Andy assumed.

  “Not from the chemical plant; it’s way downriver,” Kerri said. “Maybe…I don’t know, toxic gas leaks from the mine vents? Tunnels run beneath that area. It could also explain the birds fleeing.”

  “Yeah,” Nate added, “like when miners carry a caged canary into the tunnels to ensure the air is breathable.”

  PETER: Hey, I was thinking the same thing.

  NATE: (Whispering.) Shut up.

  “The vents are sealed now,” Al pointed out. “So is the entrance near the lake. The only access left is a drainage ditch opening onto the river, out of Sentinel Hill.”

  “Where we found the footprints,” cued Andy.

  “I’m pretty sure those were Wickley’s too,” said Nate.

  “Who owned the mines back then?” asked Kerri. “RH Corporation?”

  “Yes,” Al answered from the newspaper. “Says here they bought them from the Deboëns in nineteen forty-nine. More like got them for the loose change in their pockets, really. The family was broke.”

  “How come no one suspected RH back in ’seventy-seven?” Kerri wondered. “They seem to be everywhere.”

  “People in town weren’t prejudiced against big faceless corporations back then. They hated the Deboëns best. When rumors of the Sleepy Lake creature rekindled in the sixties and seventies, people blamed it on them. Legend was the lake creature was haunting Deboën Isle, so somehow it was all the Deboëns’ fault. I’m sorry to say the official inquiry didn’t do much better.”

  “Maybe we should check that,” Andy said, distracted from the box of mementos. “The official inquiry. Deputy Wilson might let us look into the case files.”

  “Wilson died in ’eighty-six,” Al commented. “Lung cancer. Copperseed is the new deputy sheriff of Blyton Hills.”

  “Wait, Officer Copperseed?” Nate said. “The one who never listened to us?”

  “The very same. Police presence in town has been stripped down to him and a couple part-time volunteers. Your old pal Joey Krantz is one of them. Anyway, the case file was nothing more than a collection of creature sighting reports. Most were later connected to Wickley.”

  “Most,” Nate underscored.

  “Well, the rumors clearly were there before Wickley arrived; they’re what gave him the idea of the costume. Deputy Wilson at least had the good sense not to believe in hocus-pocus, but when it came down to finding a real suspect, he got the wrong one.”

  “Dunia Deboën,” Andy quoted from memory. “The last in the family. Is she alive?”

  “Oh yeah. She still lives alone in the same house on Owl Hill. A resilient woman. She’s taken a lot of shit from people around here.”

  “We could go see her,” Kerri suggested. “Ask her about RH, how they gained control of the mines. They sound pretty reckless.”

  “If you go to Copperseed with that, you’re bound to find an ally,” Al commented. “He hates RH. Been pressing for sealing the mines and dismantling the plant for years.”

  “Are you guys sure about this?” Nate polled. “This whole ‘evil corporation polluting the lake’ theme, it’s like we’ve gone from Blyton Summer Detective Club to Captain Planet and the Planeteers.”

  “I hate that show,” said Andy.

  “It’s not that bad.”

  “Yes, it is. The Latin American kid’s got the shittiest ring. I mean, since when is ‘heart’ an element?”

  “But that’s the point, they wanted a Latin American Planeteer so bad, they had to create a fifth element for him.”

  “Then why did they put two Caucasians, an American and a European? Where do you think white Americans come from—Saturn?”

  “Anyway,” Kerri said, steering the conversation off pop reference territory, “it’s a plausible villain. You can’t expect it to be another Wickley. Because…we’re grown-ups now; four of us against one petty criminal wouldn’t be fair. A shady company with an army of lawyers sounds like a worthy opponent.”

  Andy considered the argument. “Yeah, well, it’s a start.”

  “Yes, but…”

  They turned to Captain Al. He was back in his chair, blank stare drifting off again, idle fingers holding on to an empty glass.

  “It’s not right,” he reprised. “The…the whole case, the way it ended.”

  A couple more phrases eluded him. Then his mind seemed to track back to what it knew for certain.

  “The night you went missing,” he started. “The final night, when you went back to the lake by yourselves…We were searching for you, Deputy Wilson and I, and…(A crooked smirk.) Your aunt Margo was frantic; she always was; she hated these adventures of yours. But I was…” A word fluttered before his eyes, one he hesitated to clasp. “Scared. Wilson and I, we were riding the police motorboat and we were scared. I can’t…And when we found your boat capsized I…for a second, I feared the worst. I knew you all could swim, but it was so dark…not night dark, but veiled dark, and…damn, so quiet. The world is not supposed to be that quiet. Not the deserts, not the bottom of the ocean.

  “And then, hours later, against my gut feeling…morning came. And there you were, waving at us from the pier on Deboën Isle. So we drove there, and we found you outside the big mansion at sunrise, and birds singing, and wind blowing your hair, and there was Wickley tied up in a fishnet on the pier, wriggling in that ridiculous costume, and…(Al looked up at them.) You were smiling. And then while Wilson was cuffing the guy, I took you aside and asked, ‘What happened in there?’ And none of you said anything at first, and then Peter said, ‘We solved the mystery.’ And…that was it.”

  The aud
ience remained silent.

  Andy checked Kerri. Nate checked Peter.

  Tim listened to the captain, compassionately.

  “When Wilson fell ill,” the captain resumed, “I went to visit him often. Talk about the old times. And you were…Hell, you were brought up so often. He was so fond of you. And one of the last days, I was in his room, he was bedridden, and he said, ‘Remember, Al, when the children got lost in the lake and we spent the night searching for them? Remember when we found them? How frightened the poor things were?’ ”

  Al looked up again. Water wavered across his eyes.

  “But you weren’t frightened. You were smiling.”

  Thirteen years later the children stayed still, not breathing.

  And then the moment passed.

  Al rubbed the bridge of his nose.

  “You okay?” Kerri asked.

  “Yes. You must excuse me. I’m an old man and…I’ve usually drunk myself unconscious by this time of day.”

  Tim was already aiming for the exit, having picked up the signs that the scene was over.

  “Okay,” Kerri said. “Take a nap, Captain. We’ll take it from here. Thank you.”

  Al nodded, eyes closed, and didn’t walk them to the door.

  Tim and Nate and Kerri had already started down the stairs when Al called, “Andy.”

  She turned around. The captain put the lid on the cookie tin and pushed it across the table.

  “No way,” Andy said. “These are yours. Your memories.”

  “They were always for you kids,” he explained, with a melancholic look that had taken decades to forge itself. “I was planning to give them to you when you came back the next holiday. But you didn’t come. And I just…forgot about it.” He raised his head and smiled the sorrow away. “But it’s yours. You’re gonna need it. Remember all the good work you did.”

  Andy retraced her steps and took the box. It was heavy. Treasure rattled inside.

  “Thank you, Captain,” she said.

  She was back at the door when he called again. “You still wanna be called Andy, don’t you?”