Bounced

by Ted Staunton

  There was more clapping as we waded to shore. Marty Raymond puffed and swore under his breath all the way, his sopping safari shirt clinging to a good-sized beer gut. “They didn’t tell me there’s a deep spot.”

  CHAPTER 10

  Backfire Bounce

  CC and Zal followed us, with Marty Raymond’s soggy planter hat. He slapped it on his head before easing the caiman out of the net and holding it up again, trophy-style, and showing it to the crowd. Cameras were clicking.

  A man behind a big video camera leaned in. A dark-haired woman with a microphone stepped up to Marty Raymond. “Think we’ll make six o’clock?” he asked her.

  “Probably,” she laughed. “Eleven and tomorrow morning for sure. It’s a great story.”

  That was when I understood what he’d been waiting for earlier: news photographers and crews from the TV stations.

  Marty Raymond started talking into the microphone about how the caiman was probably a pet somebody had left here when it got too big.

  “Hey, we’re going to be on TV,” CC whispered happily.

  “Great,” Zal groaned. “So much for secretly skipping school.”

  We all looked at each other.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I said.

  It was too late. A video camera swooped in, and another lady with a microphone said to us, “Great work, guys. Was it scary?”

  We all shrugged and tried to look away. It was hard to know what to say.

  “But you’re all trained to do this, aren’t you? That’s quite amazing.”

  All I could think was that if I didn’t act like me, maybe no one would believe it was me.

  I said, “Oh yeah, we do this lots. It took five years to learn.”

  “Five years?” The lady was amazed. “You must have been very young.”

  “Hey,” I said, nodding at CC. “She stuffed her first squirrel in grade three.” I pointed at Zal. “This guy’s hands are faster than snakes.”

  “Wow,” said the lady. “That’s truly impressive. What are your names?”

  “Nicole Storm,” CC said promptly. I’d told her my mystery idea.

  “Arturo Rocinante,” said Zal.

  “Like the Yankees shortstop?” The lady knew her baseball. Zal nodded.

  She turned to me. I said, “Lamar Del Ray.”

  Marty Raymond’s head snapped around.

  “Are your parents here, kids?” the reporter asked. “We have to get their permission to air your interviews.”

  “Well, no,” I said. “They’re all at the detective agency solving some jewel and bank robberies.”

  She nodded. “I’ll get back to you about reaching them.” She and the cameraman turned away.

  “Whew,” CC said. “Good thinking. We might be safe.”

  We all did high-fives but I knew I wasn’t going to be safe until I got home and dealt with my soaking wet clothes.

  “Let’s go,” I said. We took off our life jackets.

  Marty Raymond was saying, “… Luckily we’re opening a new outlet in this neighbourhood and I just happened by yesterday …”

  We headed for our backpacks. As we hoisted them, Marty Raymond said something to the reporter and hurried over to us, still holding the caiman. It had a dribble of algae hanging from its snout. Otherwise it looked quite calm.

  “Thanks, pardners,” he said. “Great get. This is gonna launch Gator Aid with flying colours on Saturday. You can email me that video? Wanta run it on continuous loop in the store window. Great publicity.”

  “Lucky for you someone dumped their pet,” CC said.

  Marty Raymond winked. In a lower voice he said, “Maybe lucky for me there was a pond close by that a, uh, Gator Aider could slip one of his little buddies like Chester here into for a day or so.” He nodded at the caiman in his hands.

  “You mean—” Zal said.

  “Tricks of the trade,” Marty Raymond smiled. “We all gotta eat. Now listen, come on down on Saturday, we’ll do it up right. Now, I know those weren’t your real names. Thank you—”

  “CC.”

  “Zal.”

  “And you’re Duncan,” he said to me. He looked as if he was about to say something else, but he didn’t.

  I nodded.

  Solemnly he said, “Thank you, CC, Zal and Duncan.”

  Solemnly we all said, “You’re welcome.” It’s easy to be solemn when a caiman is being held close to your face, even if it does look calm.

  Marty Raymond must have caught on because he laughed and lifted Chester away. “Hey, you guys, it’s been a slice. See you Saturday, I hope. And drop in any time.”

  “I will,” I called as he hustled back to the TV crews.

  I squelched with every step we took. “What time is it?” CC asked. I reached for my phone and stopped in mid-squelch. Oh no. I pulled my phone out of my soggy pocket and pressed the button. The screen stayed blank. As I stared, Zal said, “Just after two.”

  Barely an hour had gone by. In that time I’d skipped school, seen Lamar Del Ray in Aunt Jenn’s car, caught a caiman, gotten soaked, lied to stay off TV and wrecked my phone. I was thinking it couldn’t get much worse as a silver Toyota whisked by. Lamar Del Ray wasn’t driving it anymore, unless he’d become a red-haired woman. Aunt Jenn. The Toyota did a rolling stop at the park entrance and vanished in the city traffic.

  CHAPTER 11

  Brown Rice Bounce

  When Aunt Jenn got home, I was in the comfy chair pretending to read “The Blue Cross” in volume four of World’s Best. I’d run my clothes and shoes through the dryer in the basement laundry without being caught by Wiley Kendall. I was pretty sure Aunt Jenn hadn’t seen me in the park, and if she had I’d try to brazen it out as they’d say in a story.

  But I was worried just the same. I was even more worried about two other things. One was my phone. Cover off, it was stuffed into the bag of brown rice in the kitchen cabinet. CC and Zal had said that the rice would draw the water out and maybe save it. The other was Lamar Del Ray. How could I find out about him without giving away where I’d been?

  Aunt Jenn came in with a tired smile and a couple of grocery bags. Her green-and-yellow Aurora B golf shirt had a streak of dirt on one shoulder. She wrestled off her workboots and socks and wiggled her toes. The nails were painted bright red. “Now there’s relief.” She padded past me into the kitchenette with the bags.

  I kept my eyes on the book. I heard the tap run, plastic rustle, the clunk of tins and cupboards and the soft thud of the fridge door.

  Aunt Jenn called, “Skeets, it’s the kind of a day when you can’t decide if a shower or a beer comes first.”

  What would Lamar choose, I wanted to say, but that didn’t exactly sound subtle. “Toss a coin,” I said instead. My voice came out sounding as if one of Marty Raymond’s snakes were tightening around my neck.

  Aunt Jenn didn’t seem to notice. “A cool one it is,” she said. I heard footsteps behind me and the snick of a pull tab. “Did you like your lunch today?” Aunt Jenn asked.

  I almost fell out of the chair. I hadn’t had time to eat my lunch, and I’d forgotten to ditch it. Where was my backpack? Before I could move, someone started pounding on the door and yelling. I did fall out of the chair. I felt mist go past my head as beer sprayed across the living room. A few drops darkened my wrinkly shorts. I saw some dried algae there as well.

  “Who is it?” Aunt Jenn spluttered.

  There was more pounding. The yelling had a familiar accent. Mrs. Ludovic burst in the instant Aunt Jenn turned the door handle. “Iss Dungcan, Dungcan,” she cried. “Dungcan iss on TV!”

  She dragged us across the hall. The news was blaring. I wondered if I could somehow get to the balcony and twist the aerial, but it was too late. The picture of Oakwood Park was perfect. The dark-haired lady who’d tried to interview us was yammering into the camera, while behind her, the crowd milled at the pond. Zal, CC and I were smack in the middle of the shot. Next came Marty Raymond getting ready to go in the wat
er, us in the pond, catching the caiman, and Marty Raymond jumping up with it.

  At first, Aunt Jenn looked puzzled as she watched. A smile twitched for a microsecond. That turned to a frown as things happened in the pond. And then, as the cameras closed in tight on Marty Raymond and he started talking, everything changed. Aunt Jenn caught her breath. Her face went pale under her freckles.

  The picture cut to the news anchor, who said, “Wow, no swimming for me. Up next: the Borsalino Bandit strikes again.”

  Aunt Jenn had tuned out; it was tornado time.

  “This is that place at the plaza?” she said. She stomped out of Mrs. Ludovic’s and came back with shoes and car keys. “Right, let’s go.” She grabbed my shoulder and marched me downstairs and out to the car.

  We burned rubber pulling out and zoomed down the hill. The Gator Aid SUV was parked in front of the store. Aunt Jenn stopped crossways behind it, hemming it in. “Wait here.” She jumped out, leaving the motor running, and stormed to the shop door, pounding on it when it wouldn’t open. She started yelling the moment Marty Raymond let her in, barging through the doorway and into the place, finger pointing.

  I couldn’t see very well from where I was sitting, but despite my track record for the day, I was smart enough not to get out of the car. I caught fractured glimpses of yellow and green and arms waving behind the fake palm trees and I could hear the sound, if not the words, of Aunt Jenn yelling. Then she was steaming back out to the car. She slammed it into gear and we screeched away across the parking lot.

  “Don’t you ever go near that man or that place again.” Aunt Jenn didn’t look at me as she spat out the words.

  “But, it wasn’t really that danger—”

  “No buts.”

  “The gator was the scared one.” That was only partly true, but whatever it was about Marty Raymond that had convinced me to skip school was making me stand up to Aunt Jenn too.

  “Never mind gators. That man is trouble, you hear? Trouble. Stay away.”

  “Do you know him?”

  “I know enough. I don’t want to know any more, and neither do you. Stay away.”

  Angrily, I blurted, “If you stay away from Lamar Del Ray.”

  “What?”

  “I saw him today, driving your car into the park. And later you drove it out.”

  Aunt Jenn slammed on the brakes, jerking us forward against the seat belts. She turned to me. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I went to the park at lunch and took a walk. Alone.”

  “He was driving your car.”

  Behind us, a horn honked. Aunt Jenn sank back in her seat. The horn honked again. She reached out her window and flipped a finger. “You didn’t see that.” She gunned the car up the hill to home.

  By the time we pulled in, the tornado was over. As we got out of the car, she said, “All right, Skeeter, I owe you an explanation. I wasn’t going to mention it, because I can tell you don’t care for Lamar. I don’t much either. I only deal with him when I have to. But he asked to borrow the car today to go to a job interview somewhere else, thought it would look better if he drove up instead of riding the bus. So I loaned it to him while I went for a walk. Truth to tell, I felt sorry for him ’cause I think they’re going to fire him at Aurora B. Scout’s honour, Skeeter, I am not passing time with Lamar Del Ray.”

  It felt almost as if she was pleading with me. Aunt Jenn playing defence was not something you met up with very often.

  I took one more chance; it seemed to be my day for it: “Can I see Marty Raymond again? With Zal and CC?” If I wasn’t going to be Nick Storm, I didn’t see why Zal and CC should have all the fun. This was the closest I’d ever gotten to a real adventure.

  Her face darkened. At last she said, “I’ll think about it.” We crossed the parking lot. “Straight goods, Skeeter: How’d you pull off skipping school?”

  “I had a friend call the office early and leave a voicemail pretending to be you.” It didn’t seem right to tell the real way, in case I needed to use it again.

  “Fair enough,” she nodded. “Always keep it simple. You ever try it again, mind, especially at Studies Institute, I’ll have your hide. Skipping school is how I came to be driving a delivery truck.”

  “It was not,” I said. “It was breaking rules.”

  “Rules are made to be— Wait a minute, smart guy. Isn’t skipping school breaking rules?”

  She had me there. “Bad rules are made to be broken,” she went on. “No skipping is not a bad rule. We’re not paying a king’s ransom for you to cut class. The road to perdition starts right there.”

  “What’s perdition?”

  “You’re the smart one. Look it up.”

  Up in the apartment, I looked up perdition. You can too, if you’re interested.

  Aunt Jenn showered and rediscovered her open beer. Then, towel around her head, she said, “Now tell me, as I figure out dinner, what was it like wading in there to catch a gator?”

  “Caiman,” I corrected. “It was scary but kind of fun.”

  “I know the combination,” Aunt Jenn nodded. “All too well. How’d you do it?”

  I started to explain as she got out a pot and a frying pan and put them on the stove. Then she held up a finger to interrupt. “I’m doing my world-famous tuna fried rice. Work for you? Then after supper there’s still time to hit the library.” She was pouring brown rice into the saucepan before I could react. I probably don’t need to tell you the rest.

  CHAPTER 12

  Big Money Bounce

  I think Aunt Jenn worried about me so much because technically I’m an orphan. My parents died when I was six months old, so I don’t remember them. I know we lived up north near Gram and Grandpa and that they got in a snowmobile accident. Aunt Jenn was in Nashville then, with her music friends. Before that, she’d travelled all over the world. She came back and got made my guardian. Then she got a job at B&G Trust and transferred here as soon as she could.

  Aunt Jenn had pictures of my parents, Katy and Bill. One is of Katy holding baby me. I look like a baby. Katy is pretty and blond and she looks like what she was: Aunt Jenn’s younger sister. She was only twenty when she had me.

  There was only one picture of Bill. You can’t see much of him. He’s grinning beside an ice-fishing hut, all bundled up in snow pants and a parka, with the fur-trimmed hood up over his tuque and a big pair of sunglasses against the glare. Bill was from the east coast. He’d gone north to work. Aunt Jenn said he was an only child raised by his grandparents after his fisherperson parents had been lost at sea, and now his grandparents had passed too.

  “The one time I met him,” Aunt Jenn said, “I was up from Nashville at the time. He told me he’d come north to find his Fortune. And he had, in your mom. That’s why he wanted you to have her last name.”

  “What was his?” I asked.

  “Smith. Or was it Jones? Isn’t that awful of me? Skeeter, it’s been a century.”

  I’ve daydreamed about Bill Smith-Jones and Katy. Sometimes we’d be shipwrecked, sometimes lost in the Arctic. Sometimes they’d get tangled up in the stories Aunt Jenn told about herself and her friends: taking a train to the wrong country in Europe, living in the haunted farmhouse with no running water, driving around in the psychedelic pickup truck with the kitchen sinkaphone mounted on the hood, singing backup in a band that almost opened once for the Rolling Stones.

  I hadn’t thought much about them for a while, though when Studies Institute came up, I had kind of wished we’d suddenly learn that Bill Smith-Jones had left me a fortune his fisher parents had found in a shipwreck long ago.

  I’d also wondered about a Nick Storm mystery about an orphan who turns out to be a missing heir, but since Gram worked in a dentist’s office and Grandpa was laid off at the mine again, it wasn’t going to be me. There’d been too much to imagine and I’d given up. Life with Aunt Jenn was the only life I knew and I liked it, even if there hadn’t been much mystery.

  Now that life felt a littl
e shaky: I had more mysteries than it was probably healthy to have. Was Aunt Jenn lying about Lamar Del Ray? What flipped her out about Marty Raymond? And how could we catch the Borsalino Bandit?

  The day after school got out, CC went to summer camp up north for a week. I biked over to Zal’s house to talk about the Bandit.

  “Have something for me when I get back,” CC had ordered. Secretly, I hoped we’d solve the whole thing before then, just to show her.

  Zal was cutting the lawn when I arrived, something I also had to do for Wiley Kendall. While I waited, I goofed around with my own new bouncy ball, a green one with purple swirls. They had them in the plaza variety now.

  When Zal finished, we got lemonade and sat in the cool of the garage, with its smells of gasoline and cut grass from the still-ticking lawn mower. No one could overhear us there.

  Zal had done his research but there still wasn’t much to overhear. The Borsalino Bandit had struck at least nine times that the police could identify. We had the dates for all the robberies. The most recent was the day we caught the caiman. He’d hit different banks: First Savings, Fidelity, Guaranty Mutual, B&G, and all more than once, though never the same branch twice. He was white, medium everything, had a beard, a belly, and wore hats that hid his face from security cameras. A linked story on the Internet said that local sales of men’s wide-brimmed summer hats had gone up thirty per cent thanks to talk about them and the Bandit.

  Exactly what he did when he robbed a bank, the cops weren’t saying. “Afraid of copycats making things more difficult,” Zal explained.

  Still, he’d found a news item from one of the first robberies that said the robber hadn’t shown a gun or anything, just passed a note to a teller demanding money. That didn’t make sense to us.

  “Why would you hand over money if you didn’t have to?” I wondered.

  “Ask your aunt,” Zal reminded me. “She’ll know.”