The Genius Files #4

by Dan Gutman

  “There’s just so much to see and do in Arkansas,” Pep said sarcastically. “How will we ever decide?”

  “How about we let Dad decide for a change?” suggested Mrs. McDonald.

  “Y’know, after what we’ve been through with the RV, I just want to relax,” said Dr. McDonald. “Is there a nice place in Arkansas where we can go and just kick back for a day? Maybe do a little swimming or water sports?”

  “Yes!” shouted Mrs. McDonald, as she looked through the book. “Hot Springs! It’s two and a half hours from here, and west.”

  “Yee-ha!” Dr. McDonald exclaimed. “Ah reckon I’m fit to be tied after falling in the hog wallow!”

  “That doesn’t even mean anything, Dad,” Pep said.

  Everyone was laughing and having a fun old time. The kids would never forget what had happened to Aunt Judy in Memphis, of course. But for the moment, she was not on their minds.

  Mrs. McDonald was punching “Hot Springs, Arkansas” into the GPS when her cell phone rang.

  “Hello?” she said. “Oh, hi! Nice to hear from you. How are you doing? What?! For how long? Are you joking? No, I have no idea. Okay, thanks.”

  When she hung up, she had a worried look on her face.

  “Who was that?” everybody asked.

  “It was Hermy,” Mrs. McDonald told them. “You know, my sister’s new husband, Dr. Herman Warsaw. He said Judy is missing. He hasn’t seen her in a couple of days. Gee, I hope she’s okay.”

  “I thought they were on their honeymoon,” said Dr. McDonald. “Where could she be?”

  Coke and Pep looked at each other. They knew exactly where Aunt Judy was. Or what was left of her, anyway.

  Chapter 6

  TALKING WITH STRANGERS

  In the backseat, Coke and Pep sat stunned and silent. On the inside, the twins both knew the right thing to do—come clean and tell their parents what had happened to Aunt Judy in the RV. But they couldn’t bring themselves to do it.

  How do you break the news to your mother that her sister was a psychopath and pyromaniac who tried to kill you? How do you tell her that her sister blew herself up? It’s impossible. Besides, every time the twins tried to be honest and tell their parents the truth, they didn’t believe it.

  Coke and Pep kept their mouths shut. What happened to Aunt Judy in the RV would be their secret, at least for the time being.

  Awkward silence filled the car as the Ferrari headed west through Arkansas, passing Dagmar State Wildlife Management Area and Wattensaw State Game Area. Unless you were a nature lover, there wasn’t a whole lot to look at outside the window.

  “Hey, let’s play the spy game!” Dr. McDonald blurted out enthusiastically.

  Groans came out of the backseat.

  “Come on, it’ll be fun!” he said. “See if you can find the letters of the alphabet outside the car. I’ll start. Look! The A for ‘Arkansas’ is on that license plate right in front of us.”

  “B,” said Mrs. McDonald. “The sign on that building to the right.”

  “C,” Dr. McDonald said. “On that billboard. How about one of you kids take a turn?”

  “We don’t want to play, Dad,” Pep replied.

  “You kids are no fun at all,” he said.

  The game ended right there. The twins went back to their private thoughts. As the Ferrari cruised west along I-40, signs started to appear for Little Rock, the state capital.

  “I wonder why it’s called Little Rock?” asked Dr. McDonald.

  “They probably have a bunch of little rocks,” Pep guessed.

  “Actually, Little Rock gets its name from a rock formation on the south bank of the Arkansas River,” Coke informed the rest of the family. “It was called ‘la Petite Roche,’ which means ‘the little rock’ in French. I saw that—”

  “Shut up!” Pep shouted at her brother. “Nobody cares!”

  “Don’t tell your brother to shut up,” Dr. McDonald told Pep. “It’s not his fault that he knows a lot of things.”

  “I can’t take it anymore!” Pep shouted. She picked up a magazine and whacked Coke on the shoulder with it.

  “Ow! Knock it off!”

  At this point, Dr. McDonald made an executive decision. Everyone’s nerves suddenly seemed to be on edge. The stress of seeing the RV explode had clearly gotten to Pep. Everybody needed to calm down a little.

  “I’m starved,” he said as he pulled off the highway at the Little Rock exit and crossed the Arkansas River.

  One block off the riverbank was a bustling street with a convention center, the Little Rock River Market, and some restaurants.

  “How about this joint?” Mrs. McDonald said as they approached a place called Flying Fish.

  Dr. McDonald pulled into the parking lot. Flying Fish, needless to say, specializes in seafood. The family slid into a booth and ordered an assortment of catfish, shrimp, oysters, crab, and gumbo for everyone to share.

  “You think they have grits?” Coke asked. “I always wanted to try grits.”

  “Grits sound gross,” Pep said.

  “Well, you don’t listen to them,” Coke told his sister. “You eat them.”

  One wall of the restaurant was an unusual sight—row upon row of wooden plaques, each one with a fish mounted on it. There were more than three hundred of them, and all of them looked the same. Upon closer examination, it was obvious that the fish were made out of rubber. At the top of the wall was a sign: BILLY BASS ADOPTION CENTER.

  “What the heck?” Coke asked.

  “This will be great for Amazing but True!” Mrs. McDonald said as she grabbed her camera.

  Dr. McDonald explained to the kids that, around the turn of the century, millions of people bought these silly novelty gifts called Big Mouth Billy Bass. The head and the tail of the fish would wiggle back and forth while the fish sang songs like “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” and “Take Me to the River.” The fish’s mouth even moved while it sang.

  Don’t believe me? YouTube it. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

  Anyway, Big Mouth Billy Bass was really annoying, and when the fad ended, people were stuck with the silly toys. A lot of the fish ended up in the garbage or at garage sales. Some of them, apparently, ended up at Flying Fish Restaurant in Little Rock, Arkansas.

  “Do you like our little museum?” asked the waitress when she brought the food. “If you donate a Big Mouth Billy Bass to our collection, you get a free catfish basket.”

  Mrs. McDonald took notes for her website. She seemed to have an uncanny knack for stumbling upon the kind of oddball tourist spots that don’t appear in any guidebooks.

  As they were finishing their food, a couple of flannel-shirted, heavyset, bearded truckers slid into the booth next to them. Dr. McDonald and Mrs. McDonald went to pay the check while Coke and Pep eavesdropped on the truckers’ conversation.

  “So I was comin’ in loud and proud, doing the double nickel on I-95 when this meat wagon on my left hit the mix-master,” said the first trucker.

  “What did you do?” asked the other trucker.

  “Well, I backed off the hammer,” he replied. “So this wiggle wagon was in the granny lane and wearing my bumper out. So I put the pedal to the metal and the next thing I know, there’s a bear in the air. And that’s how I ended up here at the Pickle Park.”

  “Looks like you’re gonna need a dragon wagon,” said the first trucker.

  “Reckon so. Catch ya on the flip-flop.”

  Coke and Pep had no idea what the truckers were talking about, but they were mesmerized by them.

  “Pssssst! Hey, kids,” the first trucker suddenly whispered.

  “I’m sorry, but we don’t talk to strangers,” Pep informed him.

  The second trucker winked and carefully peeled off the corner of his beard. Or, I should say, her beard. Because he was a she.

  “Mya!” exclaimed Pep.

  “Bones!” exclaimed Coke. “Nice disguises!”

  “Shhhhh!” whispered Mya. “You’ll blow our cover.”
r />   Now, if you’ve been following The Genius Files books, you know who Bones and Mya are. They are kindly grown-ups who once worked for Dr. Warsaw to start The Genius Files project, but quit when he lost his mind and became determined to kill off all the children. At that point, Bones and Mya made it their mission to help Coke, Pep, and any other Genius Filers who were being pursued by Dr. Warsaw and his evil henchman. They had already saved the twins’ lives several times.

  “What are you doing here?” Pep asked as she hugged them. “And why are you dressed up like truckers?”

  “We heard about the good work you did at Graceland,” said Mya. “The way you took out Evil Elvis was beautiful. It was almost like a work of art.”

  “It was an accident,” Coke told them. “We didn’t mean for that to happen. We were just running away. Trying to stay alive.”

  “She was our aunt,” Pep said. “I mean, we hardly knew her, but even so. How could it have happened? She was just a normal person, and then she turned into this . . . monster.”

  “It happens,” Bones told them. “Monsters aren’t born that way. They start out as cute babies, like everybody else. And then, somewhere along the line, they change. Maybe it’s genetic. Maybe it’s their environment. Sometimes perfectly normal people snap and go crazy and we never find out the reason why.”

  “What’s done is done,” Mya said philosophically. “All that matters now is that the monster is dead. Evil Elvis will never hurt you, or anyone else, again.”

  “What did you tell your parents about it?” asked Bones.

  “Nothing,” Coke replied.

  “Good,” Bones said. “It would be best for them not to be involved. They would call the police, and that would just open up a big can of worms.”

  “What are we supposed to do now?” Pep asked. “Dr. Warsaw called on my mom’s cell phone. He said Aunt Judy was missing and he wanted to know if our folks knew where she was.”

  “I’m not worried about Warsaw,” said Mya. “He sent Archie Clone after you, and we know what happened to him. Then he sent Aunt Judy after you, and we know what happened to her. Dr. Warsaw may be mentally unstable, but he isn’t dumb. By now he must realize that playing with you is playing with fire—literally. He’ll probably go crawl back into the little hole where he came from. You’ll never have to worry about him again.”

  “That would be a big relief,” Pep said.

  “You probably won’t be seeing us anymore,” Bones told the twins. “So we got you a little something. Sort of a going-away present.”

  He opened a bag on the table.

  “Oh, you don’t have to give us presents!” Pep said.

  “Is it a Frisbee grenade?” Coke asked hopefully. “We can definitely use another one of those.”

  Bones pulled out a small, thin metal object with five little prongs at the end. It sort of telescoped open, like the antenna of a portable radio. He handed it to the twins.

  “You got us . . . a backscratcher?” asked Pep.

  “It’s not a backscratcher, you dope!” Coke told his sister. “It’s obviously a blowgun disguised as a backscratcher, right? You blow into one end and it shoots out poisoned darts that will paralyze somebody in seconds. That is cool!”

  “Uh, it’s not a blowgun,” Bones said.

  “No?” said Coke. “I know! It’s like one of those stun gun things. You push a little button hidden in the handle and it shoots out sixty thousand volts of electricity. Bzzzzzzt! That’ll give a bad guy something to think about! Thanks! This could really come in handy.”

  “It’s not a stun gun,” Mya said. “It’s a—”

  “How could I have been so dumb?” asked Coke. “I know. You break off a piece of the backscratcher and put it into somebody’s drink, right? It dissolves, and the next thing they know they’re coughing up blood and begging you to give them the antidote. Right?”

  “Wrong.”

  “There’s no antidote for the poison?” Coke asked.

  “There’s no poison, and there’s no antidote,” said Bones. “You must understand, we have no budget for high-tech—”

  “Maybe you can stab somebody with this thing?” Coke asked hopefully.

  “It’s a backscratcher,” insisted Mya, demonstrating it. “That’s all it is. You use it to scratch your back! You know, in those hard-to-reach places. It telescopes. See?”

  “We don’t need a backscratcher!” Coke said, disappointed. “We need something we can use to defend ourselves from the crazy people who are trying to kill us!”

  “Look,” Bones said. “You’ve got to believe me. Nobody is trying to kill you anymore. Relax! Enjoy the rest of your vacation. The coast is clear.”

  The coast may have been clear. It was Arkansas, Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico that the twins were worried about.

  Go to Google Maps (http://maps.google.com).

  Click Get Directions.

  In the A box, type Little Rock AR.

  In the B box, type Bauxite AR.

  Click Get Directions.

  Chapter 7

  RETURN OF AN OLD FRIEND

  Their tummies filled, the McDonald family was on the road again. In fact, Dr. McDonald began to sing, much to everyone’s dismay, Willie Nelson’s signature song “On the Road Again.” As a singer, Dr. McDonald made a good history professor.

  The twins stared out the window as Arkansas rolled by. They were both thinking the same thing—what if Bones and Mya were wrong? What if the coast wasn’t clear? What if Mrs. Higgins or those pesky bowler dudes were waiting for them at their next stop, ready to leap out and do some horribly unspeakable thing? Or what if there was a new threat out there waiting to attack them?

  Coke made a mental note to never let down his guard.

  On the first half of their journey, most of the highway signs had an E, for east, after the route number. Now the highway signs ended in a W. The McDonalds were on their way home.

  “Hot Springs, here we come!” Dr. McDonald bellowed as he merged onto I-30 West out of Little Rock. Mrs. McDonald opened her Arkansas guidebook and casually leafed through it. They had only traveled about fourteen miles when they approached exit 123—Bryant/Bauxite.

  “Ben, stop the car!” Mrs. McDonald shouted suddenly.

  He swerved off to the shoulder of the road and slammed on the brakes, nearly causing an accident and frightening the other drivers. The Ferrari screeched to a halt. Books, maps, papers, pens, and anything else that wasn’t held down went flying into the front seat. Had they not been wearing seat belts, the whole family would have gone through the windshield.

  “What’s wrong?” Dr. McDonald asked, his heart racing. “Did I hit something?”

  “This is the exit for Bauxite, Arkansas!” Mrs. McDonald said excitedly.

  “So?” replied the rest of the family.

  “The town is named after bauxite!”

  A moment of silence.

  “What’s bauxite?” asked Pep.

  “It’s an off-white, grayish, brown, yellow, or reddish-brown rock,” Coke informed her. “They make aluminum out of it.”

  He remembered that from a game of Trivial Pursuit he had played years ago.

  “Thank you, Mr. Wikipedia,” Pep said, rolling her eyes.

  “Don’t tell me, let me guess,” Dr. McDonald said. “There’s a museum here—”

  “Yes!” Mrs. McDonald said gleefully. “Bauxite, Arkansas, calls itself the Aluminum Capital of the World! This will be great for Amazing but True. And the town is just a few miles from here!”

  A collective groan could be heard from inside the Ferrari.

  “You know, Mom,” Pep said, choosing her words carefully, “there’s no rule that says we have to go to every capital of the world.”

  “That’s right, Mom,” Coke pointed out. “Maybe we ought to skip this one. It doesn’t sound that interesting.”

  Dr. McDonald kept his mouth shut. He’d decided to let the kids take the heat this time.

  Mrs. McDonald turned to face th
e backseat. Never a good sign.

  “Sixty years from now, you’re going to be old,” she told the kids. “You’re going to think back on all the things you did during your life. You’ll have some regrets. We all do. And if we don’t visit Bauxite, Arkansas, right now, you’re going to regret that you were just a few lousy miles from the Aluminum Capital of the World and couldn’t be bothered to check it out. How will you feel?”

  In their heads, Coke and Pep came up with several snarky comments, along the lines of “We’ll feel great!” In reality, they didn’t say a word. There was no use arguing with Bridget McDonald. There was no use complaining. They would be going to Bauxite, Arkansas—the Aluminum Capital of the World.

  Dr. McDonald grudgingly pulled off at the exit.

  “I hope this place is more interesting than the Duct Tape Capital of the World,” Coke whispered to his sister in the backseat.

  Perhaps you recall, dear reader, that a similar situation occurred in The Genius Files: Never Say Genius. On their way to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the McDonalds stumbled upon the town of Avon, Ohio, where there is an annual duct tape parade, with duct tape sculptures, a duct tape fashion show, and a dancing mascot called Duct Tape Duck.

  Bauxite looked pretty much like any other small town in America. A sign said the population of the town was 432.

  “They should call this place Snoozeville, USA,” Coke grumbled as he looked out the window.

  “The Aluminum Capital of the World?” Pep asked. “It’s not like the houses here are made out of aluminum or anything.”

  Dr. McDonald drove past the local post office and turned south on School Street. After a few blocks, he double-parked in front of the Bauxite Museum—a colonial-style building with five columns in the front.

  “You kids run inside and get tickets,” said Mrs. McDonald. “We’ll find a parking spot.”

  “Yeah, there might be a long line to get in to see the aluminum,” Coke said with a smirk as he got out of the car.