The Case of Dunc's Doll

by Gary Paulsen

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  THE VOYAGE OF THE FROG, Gary Paulsen

  CHOCOLATE FEVER, Robert Kimmel Smith

  JELLY BELLY, Robert Kimmel Smith

  MOSTLY MICHAEL, Robert Kimmel Smith

  THE WAR WITH GRANDPA, Robert Kimmel Smith

  HOW TO EAT FRIED WORMS, Thomas Rockwell

  HOW TO FIGHT A GIRL, Thomas Rockwell

  HOW TO GET FABULOUSLY RICH, Thomas Rockwell

  UPCHUCK SUMMER, Joel L. Schwartz

  YEARLING BOOKS/YOUNG YEARLINGS/YEARLING CLASSICS are designed especially to entertain and enlighten young people. Patricia Reilly Giff, consultant to this series, received her bachelor’s degree from Mary-mount College and a master’s degree in history from St. John’s University. She holds a Professional Diploma in Reading and a Doctorate of Humane Letters from Hofstra University. She was a teacher and reading consultant for many years, and is the author of numerous books for young readers.

  For a complete listing of all Yearling titles,

  write to Dell Readers Service,

  P.O. Box 1045, South Holland, IL 60473.

  Published by

  Dell Publishing

  a division of

  Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

  666 Fifth Avenue

  New York, New York 10103

  Copyright © 1992 by Gary Paulsen

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law.

  The trademark Yearling® is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

  The trademark Dell® is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-80412-9

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Yearling Books You Will Enjoy

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  • 1

  Duncan—Dunc-Culpepper and Amos Binder were sitting on the bench in Dunc’s garage. Dunc’s bike crank was loose, and he was taking it apart and tightening it, greasing the bearings carefully as he fit them back into the clean housing, sitting in new grease. He put each steel ball in separately, gently.

  Amos was frustrated. “Come on—you’ll be all day with that. I want to get down to the mall. We haven’t tried that new video game—Splatter Space Defense. It’s in high-definition color, and you can actually see pieces of the aliens flying off if you hit them right.”

  Dunc stopped, looked up. “A job worth doing is worth doing right. It might be ten years before I have to take this crank apart again.”

  “Ten years?” Amos snorted and picked at a scab on his chin. “I’ve never taken the crank off my bike.”

  Dunc looked at Amos’s bike, leaning against the wall. It looked like a car had been parked on it for a week. “I can see that.”

  “In ten years,” Amos said, “I’ll have a car, and Melissa and I will be happily married, and you can come over and teach my kids how to take their cranks apart. But for now, let’s get going. You want to spend your whole life in a garage?”

  But Dunc didn’t hurry, and he didn’t pay any attention to Amos’s pushing. They’d been best friends for as long as he could remember, and for at least that long Amos had been pushing at him. “How did you cut your chin?”

  “It happened last night. I was home alone, or thought I was, reading in the tub, and the phone rang. I was certain it was Melissa’s ring—it had that sound. You know, that kind of ring she has, followed by another ring?”

  Dunc nodded. Amos had been waiting for a call from Melissa as long as he had known Amos. Melissa didn’t show any sign that Amos was alive. It was like, Dunc thought, like he was invisible. Like she could read a book through him.

  “Well, you know I like to get it on that all-important second ring. So I cleared the tub still wet and naked and hit the hallway and hung a left trying to get to the phone in the front hall.” Amos shook his head. “Man, I had it all—my balance was working right, I was in good stride, had some form, and I think I would have made it.”

  “What happened?” Dunc put the last ball bearing back into the crank and fit the shaft through the hole. Carefully.

  “Mother came home. She’d been doing Welcome Wagon and had three Welcoming ladies with her. They were all by the hall phone.”

  “Bad,” Dunc said, shaking his head, trying not to smile. “Bad style—you naked and all.”

  Amos nodded. “I tried thinking of an excuse, but I was moving too fast. I did manage a grab at the phone—it was just instinct—and that threw me off, and I hung a foot on the doorjamb. That’s”—he took a breath—“when things started to go bad.”

  “Not until then?”

  Amos shrugged. “Well, I was a little embarrassed, but I still hadn’t been injured.”

  “So how did it go bad?”

  “I lost it. I was still going at a full run, and I went down. I was so wet I was slippery and I kind of scooted across the carpet on my stomach. Like a dead fish. I hit a dining-room chair headfirst and caught my head between two rungs on the bottom.”

  “How did you get out?”

  “Mother had to grease my hair.” Amos sighed. “All in all I had a pretty bad night. You ever try to get dressed with a chair stuck on your head?”

  Dunc shook his head and finished tightening the crank. “No—there, it’s done. Let’s get going—you going to mess around all day?”

  • 2

  Pioneer Mall was on the way toward town. Dunc’s home was on the outskirts in a development, and it took the two boys just fifteen minutes to bike to the mall.

  Out in front there was a large signboard, and they always had something different on the sign—some activity or message.

  This time it read:

  “Happy Birthday Carl and

  may you have forty more.”

  And:

  “DOLLS, DOLLS, DOLLS—

  antique collections.”

  “Oh great,” Amos said as they pedaled into the parking lot. “Dolls.”

  “I think they’re kind of interesting.” Dunc locked his bike in the rack.

  “You do? You mean dolls?”

  Dunc nodded. “Antique dolls. This collection has dolls that belonged to famous people. There’s one that belonged to Charles Dickens’s daughter.”

  “You mean the guy who wrote A Christmas Carol?”

  Dunc nodded. “Yeah.”

  “He had a family?”

  “Sure—at least, he must have. He had a daughter. They’ve got her doll in here.”

  “Well—I’m going to the video arcade. Are you coming?”

  Dunc nodded, but he didn’t head for the arcade. Once inside the mall he walked toward the end, where the doll collection was on exhibit.

  “Oh, come on,” Amos said. “What if somebody we know sees us?”

  Dunc stopped. “Another way to look at it is—what if Melissa sees us? I just saw her down at the other end of the collection.”

  “You did?” Amos caught up. “She’s probably looking for me—wants to know why I didn’t answer the phone last night.”

  “Don’t tell her,” Dunc said, smiling. “D
on’t tell anybody.”

  But Amos wasn’t listening. He’d seen Melissa.

  Dunc wandered past the dolls. He was looking for the Dickens doll and finally found it at the end of the table. It was in a special glass case with a light on top shining down inside the glass.

  It was a doll of a small man in a black suit, wearing a tie and a hat.

  “It’s called a father doll,” the man behind the counter said. He wore a name tag that said Carruthers. “Are you interested in dolls?”

  Dunc shook his head. “No, not really. Just this one. I read about it in the newspaper and thought it might be nice to see it.”

  “The face is hand painted,” the man said. He was tall and thin and stooped with a soft smile and a pocket full of felt-tip pens. “And the suit is hand stitched, probably by child labor—which is ironic, isn’t it?”

  Dunc frowned. “Why?”

  “Because Dickens worked hard to end child labor and yet bought a doll that was probably made using children.”

  The face on the doll was crude, but considering how it was made, it wasn’t so bad. “How old is it?”

  “I’m not certain—it was probably made in the mid-1850s.”

  Amos had come up. “She was busy with friends,” he said to Dunc’s unasked question. “I didn’t want to bother her.” He looked at the doll. “Ugly, isn’t it?”

  Carruthers laughed. “Well, maybe. But as you can see in the article, many people think it’s lovely.”

  There was a news clipping taped inside the case. Amos read the article while Dunc studied the doll.

  Amos whistled. “It says the doll is worth fifteen thousand dollars. Is that right?”

  Carruthers nodded. “Actually, it’s worth considerably more. That article was written fifteen years ago. The worth of the doll might be nearly thirty thousand by now.”

  “Thirty thousand? And you just show it to people?”

  Carruthers nodded again. “The malls pay me enough to keep the collection going. I travel around and show the dolls, and I have a little pension. It’s a nice way to live.”

  “You don’t sell them?” Dunc asked.

  Carruthers shook his head. “No—I just like to show them. And meet people who are interested in them. There are conventions, and sometimes we trade dolls there. That’s how I got the Dickens doll—I traded a doll that had belonged to Martha Jefferson. She was Thomas Jefferson’s wife.”

  Dunc read the article. Amos had moved around to a position where he could watch the end of the mall where he had seen Melissa.

  “It says here there have been attempts to steal the dolls,” Dunc said. “Does that happen a lot?”

  “No.” Carruthers smiled. “That’s other people’s collections. I’ve never had any trouble at all. I guess I’m just lucky.”

  “So far,” Dunc said.

  Within a few weeks, he would wish he’d never said it.

  • 3

  “I figured out how to get rich,” Amos said. It was a week after they’d been in the mall and seen the dolls. They were back in Dunc’s garage. He was tearing the front end of his bike apart, regreasing the bearings inside the front fork.

  “I’m just going to ask people for money,” Amos said. “They’ll give it to me.”

  Dunc shook his head. “What makes you think that?”

  “Last night my uncle Alfred—the one who picks his feet?—anyway, he was watching one of these television ministers. The guy just looked at the screen and said: ‘I feel like somebody is going to send me a thousand dollars. God is telling you, whoever you are, to send me a thousand dollars.’ ”

  “That’s different.”

  “Why? He’s just asking, isn’t he? Uncle Alfred says people send in millions of dollars to these television ministers and all they do is just ask for it. So that’s what I’ll do. I’ll put an ad in the paper and just ask for money.”

  Dunc had stopped listening. Always neat—sometimes to the point of driving Amos crazy—Dunc had put newspaper under the bike wheel so he wouldn’t spill grease on the garage floor.

  A headline in the paper had caught his eye.

  “ ‘Dolls Stolen,’ ” he read.

  “What?” Amos asked.

  “There’s a story here about some dolls being stolen—oh, no.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  Dunc pulled the paper out. “It’s that man we met in the mall, that Mr. Carruthers. Somebody broke into his van and stole some of the dolls. The article says the thieves waited until he was away from the van, and they just took four dolls—the ones that were the most valuable.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  “Yeah. Hmmm …” Dunc read some more to himself.

  “What do you mean—‘hmmm’?” Amos said. “I don’t like it when you do that. Last time you made that sound, I wound up losing my eyebrows and couldn’t hear right for two months.”

  “It’s just that they don’t have any leads. It seems a shame. He had to leave town to get to his next show, and he isn’t here to try and find the dolls.”

  “The police will handle it.”

  “They said they didn’t have any leads.”

  Amos shook his head. “We were going to take that bike trip next week, remember? You’re going to get us all messed up in something to do with dolls. I mean dolls.”

  “I didn’t say we were going to get messed up in anything.”

  “I know when you make that sound, that hmmm sound—I know what that means.”

  Dunc read on. “It says there’s a reward. The American Doll Association is putting up a reward.”

  “I like my idea for getting rich better. Let’s just ask for it.”

  “Come on,” Dunc said. “Let’s at least take a look at it. You can’t tell.”

  “But dolls,” Amos said. “Dolls.”

  Dunc put the paper down. “The way I figure it, the first thing we have to do is talk to somebody who knows something about dolls—see what they mean to people.”

  “Dunc, we can’t—”

  “I figure we go and talk to Melissa.”

  Amos stopped. “You say there’s a reward?”

  Dunc nodded.

  “That Mr. Carruthers was kind of a nice guy, wasn’t he?” Amos said. “Well—maybe it won’t hurt to take a look at it.”

  • 4

  “I’ve had it.” Amos stopped his bike. Dead. He watched Dunc pedal away and waited. Finally Dunc stopped and looked back.

  “What’s the matter?” Dunc asked. It was the middle of the afternoon, a beautiful sunny summer day, and they were biking along a country road just leaving the city.

  “This is nuts, that’s what’s the matter,” Amos said. “It’s been three days since you saw that dumb newspaper story, and all we’ve done is run around looking at dolls. You know what this is doing to our reputation?”

  Dunc came back. A car roared by, and he waited for the noise to drop. “Listen—dolls aren’t so bad. You played with G.I. Joe dolls and monster dolls, didn’t you?”

  “That’s when I was young. I was just a kid then. This is different, and you know it.”

  Dunc decided to try another angle. “You got to talk to Melissa, didn’t you?”

  Amos stared at his friend. “You’re kidding, right?”

  Dunc shook his head.

  “She said hi,” Amos said. “And I think she was talking to you when she said it. She looked right through me, and then she talked to you about dolls. Not me. You. For about three minutes. Then she walked away and that was it. For that, you’ve got me riding my bike all over the city for three days looking at dolls.”

  Dunc shrugged. “You know that most of an investigation is work, work, work—almost all for nothing. Until you pop a lead.”

  “And that’s another thing,” Amos said. “You talk like a cop. We’re not cops. We’re a couple of kids—”

  “Who have a chance at a reward,” Dunc finished. “Now, come on—we’re wasting time.”

  He turned and started off
down the country lane again. Amos held back until Dunc was out of sight around a bend, then he shook his head and biked to catch up.

  “Where are we going?” he asked, pedaling alongside Dunc. “I mean, this time?”

  “It’s a rich man on an estate—his name is Wylendale. He collects all sorts of things. Antiques, art, dolls, guns.”

  “Guns?” Amos’s ears perked up. “This guy has guns? We’re going to see somebody who is armed?”

  Dunc laughed. “He has old stuff—old guns. That doesn’t mean he’s bad or anything.” He shrugged, his bike weaving slightly with the gesture. “Of course, it doesn’t mean he isn’t bad either. I got his name from Mrs. Dooley—the last woman we talked to.”

  Amos nodded, remembering. They had been going from one collector to another for the three days that they’d been working on “the case,” as Dunc liked to call it.

  Yesterday they’d gone to see an old woman named Mrs. Dooley. She collected stuffed animals and dolls, and Dunc had talked to her while Amos looked at all the animals.

  “Imagine,” he said, riding closer to Dunc, remembering her house, “a special room for a stuffed elephant. A whole elephant.”

  Dunc nodded. “She said she never killed an animal in her life but was buying them from other collectors so there would be some way to see how they looked when they were extinct.”

  “Right. That’s why she had a stuffed cocker spaniel.”

  “That was her pet. She told me about it. He died when he got old, and she loved him so much, she had him stuffed.”

  “Was she a widow?” Amos asked.

  “I don’t know—why?”

  “She might have her husband stuffed in the basement.”

  “Here we are.” Dunc pulled over to the side of the road. “Wow—look at it.”

  They were facing a large wrought-iron gate with the initial W welded in steel rods into the iron.

  The gate was held locked by a large steel bar that came in from the side and appeared to be controlled by an electrical motor.

  “Friendly, isn’t he?” Amos said.

  “Oh, maybe he just likes his privacy,” Dunc said. “I mean, lots of people have closed gates.”