by Ellis Weiner
“But it’s true!” Dean D. Dean barked.
He made a move toward Abigail, but immediately the Templeton twins dodged and weaved and dashed over to the far side of the porch. The siren grew louder.
“You can stay if you want,” Dan D. Dean said, slapping himself all over until he found what he was looking for: the keys to the black SUV, in his pants pocket. “I’m leaving.”
“But we didn’t DO anything!” Dean D. Dean protested. “Except, okay, we borrowed the dog—”
“Dean! We have to go.”
“NO.” Dean D. Dean glared at his brother and said, “It can still work. Where is the, uh, costume?”
“In the house.”
“Get it!”
The siren was getting louder. As Dan hurried into the house, Dean D. Dean sneered at the Templeton twins,
YOU THINK YOU’VE WON. BUT YOU HAVEN’T.
Dan emerged carrying a paper bag. He offered a hand to help his brother hobble down the porch steps, but Dean swatted it away and said, “Start the car.” Dan ran to the black SUV, threw the paper bag in the backseat, got in the driver’s seat, and started the engine. Dean limped as quickly as he could to the car, flung himself into the passenger seat and, with an angry look at the Templeton twins, slammed the door shut. The black SUV drove off with a squeal and a roar.
As the twins wriggled and prodded their way out of the ropes, John called, “Okay, Manny!”
Out of the bushes on the side of the house, Manny Mann appeared, carrying the boom box. He was beaming. “That was the coolest thing I have ever done,” the nanny said. “We are finished with those guys.”
The boys traded a high five. But then John noticed that Abigail looked . . . vexed. Do you know what “vexed” means? It means “troubled” or “bothered.” It so happens that I know what it means without having to look it up. Aren’t you impressed? Oh, please, you are so.
“I don’t think we are finished,” she said. “You heard Dean. He said, ‘It can still work.’ They’re going to do something terrible.
I HAVE KIND OF A SENSE OF FOREBODING.
Manny Mann said, “Huh?” But John, who was used to Abigail having an excellent vocabulary and had learned many words from her, knew that “a sense of foreboding” meant a feeling that something bad was going to happen.
I think this is a fine place to end this chapter. With a sense of foreboding.
FOR FURTHER STUDY
Match the topic in column A with the correct description in column B. A
B
This chapter
Very exciting
The present chapter
Very exciting
Chapter Thirteen
Very exciting
The current chapter
Very exciting!
True, False, or Hey, Wait a Minute: John was very clever in figuring out how to hide an entire police car in the bushes. TFHWAM
Without looking at it in this sentence, spell “foreboding.”
As the twins and their nanny walked toward Manny’s car (which he had simply driven around the block and parked up the street, before replacing John in the bushes), John reached toward the boom box and pushed a button. The little door swung open and John popped out the cassette (with POLICE CAR WITH SIREN APPROACHING written on it). “We’d better get this back to the sound control board at the theater before anyone notices it’s missing,” he said.
“We have time,” Abigail said. “Let’s drop Cassie off at home first.”
Everyone agreed that was a good idea. Do I need to inform you that, as they drove, Cassie immediately leaped onto Manny’s lap and sat between him and the steering wheel, and availed herself of the opportunity to paint unusual patterns with her nose on the driver’s window as she excitedly looked outside? I decline to do so.
Abigail, meanwhile, brooded in the backseat. Finally she announced, “None of this makes sense.”
“None of what?” Manny asked.
“None of anything! Look, we’re pretty sure it was Dean D. Dean who broke into our back door and stole Cassie, right?” John nodded. Abigail continued, “So why did he bring her back? Plus, who is Steve Stevenson? How come he told that student about the sabotage, but didn’t come in and tell everyone else? And why was the sabotage so easy to find and easy to fix?”
John added, “Also, why did Dean D. Dean seem to know so much about Papa’s invention, but when he was asked specific questions he obviously didn’t know anything about it? If Dean D. Dean wanted to kidnap us, why didn’t he and Dan just do it? Why did he send us that beach ball and keep telling us his address?”
They were driving past a park. Abigail asked Manny to pull over and suggested that they walk Cassie while they pondered these mysteries. And so Manny parked the car in a little lot near a small playground. The twins and their nanny got out. Abigail clipped the leash on Cassie and, lost in thought, slapped it into John’s hand. “Let’s split this up,” she said. “I’ll think about what we don’t know.” And she wandered off toward the playground.
“And I’ll think about what we do know,” John said. He handed the leash to Manny and he, too, started walking and thinking.
About a minute later the twins converged on the seesaw in the playground. It was as though they had planned to all along—which, of course they had not. Without saying a word the twins each took a seat and began seesawing up and down. Had you been there, all you would have heard for about five minutes was the repetitive squeak of the seesaw (which sounded roughly like “EEEK-ee . . . EH! EEEK-ee . . . EH!”), and the slight breeze in the trees. Even Manny and Cassie were silent as they meandered around in, respectively, a brooding and ridiculous manner.
Finally Abigail stopped the seesaw’s motion and said, “The real mystery is Steve Stevenson. We’ve never met him. And we’ve never met anyone else who’s met him, except for that student.”
John nodded. “The only person who has met Steve Stevenson is someone who doesn’t work on the show. That’s just weird.”
“Plus, Dean D. Dean didn’t really kidnap Cassie yesterday. He just wanted us to think she was missing, and then he brought her back.”
“On the same day that the lens was sabotaged.”
“And then today, he really did kidnap her, but he kept telling us where she was. He didn’t call Papa or the Academy and say, ‘Give me what I want or we’ll do something to this dog.’ It was just us he was interested in. Why?”
John shrugged. “Something makes us special to Dean D. Dean. Maybe we have something he wants. Maybe he thinks we know something that nobody else knows.”
“But what?” Abigail said. “We’re hardly ever at the theater! Dean D. Dean has probably been there more times than we have.” She paused and added, “Although we’ve never seen Dan there, have we?” She suddenly looked away. “Wait a minute . . . ”
John’s eyes went wide. “Abby! I know what we know that no one else knows!”
Abigail looked up at him and said, “So do I!”
The Templeton twins said at exactly the same time, “We know who Dan is!”
“No one’s ever seen Dan at the Academy,” John said. “Just Dean. Those people probably don’t even know that Dean has a twin. But we do!”
“Okay, that’s true,” Abigail said. “But why does that matter? What does Dan have to do with anything?”
“Well . . . when Dean took Cassie yesterday, he knew that when we saw she was missing, we would worry. And call Papa or the police.”
“Or stay home and wait for some phone call from whoever took her. Or drive around looking for her.”
“Yeah, but . . . so what?” John frowned. “Why does it help them if we’re stuck at home or driving around? Because—”
“Because then we couldn’t go to the theater!” Abigail interrupted—somewhat rudely, in my opinion, but I suppose we should forgive her, considering the excitement of the moment. “We would have wanted to go right after school to watch them get ready for the dress rehearsal.”
“So we wouldn’t be there, and maybe recognize Dan if he was sneaking around!”
Abigail’s expression was one of amazement and wonder. “Dan did the sabotage in the lighting booth.”
“But wait.” John frowned. “Why wouldn’t they just have Dan do the sabotage during the day? While we’re at school? Dean and Dan would know that we’d be at school from eight in the morning until three. That’s plenty of time for Dan to do whatever he wanted.”
Abigail looked stymied for a second, and then all at once grew animated. “Because! Remember what Roger Prince said when they scheduled the dress rehearsal? The Dance Department had the stage all day yesterday until four-thirty. The Deans probably figured it was too risky to try anything with all the dance people there. They probably waited until four-thirty, when the Dance people left and the musical people took over and things got confused for a while.”
“YES! Dean kidnapped Cassie to keep us away from the theater until Dan sabotaged the stuff in the lighting booth. Then, once he was done, Dean brought Cassie back.”
The twins got off the seesaw at exactly the same moment and commenced to walk around again. Abigail said, “Okay, but why did he bring her back? Why didn’t Dean just keep Cassie? Especially since he was going to kidnap her again today.”
“Well . . . if he had kept Cassie,” John said, in an I’m-figuring-something-out-as-I-go tone of voice, “we would have spent all day yesterday, and all last night, and all this morning and this afternoon trying to get her back. We would have brought Papa and other grown-ups—and even the police. He didn’t want that. So he kept telling us where she was, over and over. He knew we would go to his house, but he didn’t want us to go there until this afternoon. It’s like he was waiting for something . . . ”
“I’ve got it!” Abigail cried. They stopped walking. “Dan did the silly sabotage yesterday. And he made the sabotage easy to find, and easy to fix, on purpose. So everyone would think, ‘Okay, we found the sabotage and we fixed it.’ And it worked! They’ve all stopped looking for problems.”
“But then today,” John said, “they took Cassie, got us to their house, and were going to keep us in the basement—for the same reason. So we couldn’t be at the theater—”
“—while he went there again.”
Abigail squinted, remembering something. “Dan kept saying, ‘I have an errand to run.’ He was waiting until we were trapped in the house, and then he was going to go to the theater to—”
They looked at each other. And at exactly the same time they both said, “To steal the lens.”
“That’s what Dean D. Dean meant when he said, ‘It can still work,’ ” Abigail said. “We don’t have time to take Cassie home. We have to get to the theater right now!”
The twins ran after Manny, and then everyone, including Cassie the you-know-what dog, piled into the car and set off for the TAPAS campus and the theater.
I think we can all agree that we have reached an extremely exciting moment in this story. But if you found yourself thinking, “Um, excuse me. The Dean brothers can’t just breeze into the theater and steal this big piece of equipment, while the stage is swarming with cast and crew getting ready for Opening Night, and while Dean D. Dean has a bad foot and can barely walk,” then you are as—well, almost as—intelligent as I.
Because, in fact, the twins’ theory was wrong. The Deans were not planning on stealing the device.
FOR FURTHER STUDY
Weren’t you impressed with how the Narrator described the sound of the seesaw?
Which do you prefer to think about—things you know, or things you don’t know? Present your answer in the form of a short skit about Christopher Columbus.
What did Abigail mean when she said, “What?”
At the twins’ urging, Manny drove about as fast as a person could drive through a quiet neighborhood and with a dog in his lap. They reached their destination about an hour before the show was to start. People were already milling about out front of the theater, buying tickets or enjoying the early evening before going in. The twins were about to get out of the car when John said, “Wait. We can’t leave Cassie in here.”
“I’ll take her,” Manny said. “You guys go.”
The twins maneuvered their way through the crowds outside and milling around in the lobby. No one had been admitted to the theater itself, but the ushers at the doors recognized the twins and let them in.
The first thing the twins did upon entering the empty auditorium was to see if the young woman in charge of the sound was at the control board in the last row. To their disappointment, she was. So after the twins greeted her, Abigail motioned for her to join her in the aisle and said, “Can you explain something to me?”
“Sure,” the young woman said, and left the console to stand beside Abigail, who pointed at the big loudspeakers mounted high on the walls on either side of the stage and asked, “Do those ever fall off?” While she spoke, John tiptoed over to the sound console and silently replaced the police siren tape in its storage slot. By the time he rejoined his sister, the sound director had laughed and said, “I hope not! No, they’re bolted into the wall.”
Abigail thanked her and the twins hurried down the aisle, up onto the stage, and into the wings area behind the curtain. “We have to find Papa now,” John said.
“Wait,” Abigail said. “Steve Stevenson knew what Dan was planning to do yesterday. Maybe he knows something about what Dan is planning to do today. Let’s see if we can find him.”
In the wings, Porter Shorter, the stage manager, was consulting papers on a clipboard, wearing a headset and talking into a microphone and seeming to do five different things at once. As the twins arrived, Claire Light hurried up to him. “Porter,” she said. “I have a question for your guy. Steve Stevenson. Where is he?”
Porter Shorter covered the mouthpiece and said to the lighting director, “What are you talking about?”
“Steve Stevenson. Your assistant. Where is he?”
“He is not my assistant. I don’t have an assistant.”
Claire Light looked puzzled. “I heard Steve Stevenson was with you.”
“No, I think he’s with Ron,” Porter said. (The twins knew that “Ron” was Ron Carpenter, the head set designer and chief of the construction crew.)
John looked at Abigail. She was nodding intently. “Come on,” she said.
The twins made their way out of the stage area to the work areas in the back and ended up in the big, warehouselike space where the sets for Act II were kept. Several students were there, giving last-minute touch-ups of paint to the scenery. John asked one of them if Ron Carpenter was around and was directed to a tall man across the floor. The twins went up to Ron Carpenter, who was speaking to an assistant.
“Excuse me,” Abigail said.
The tall man scowled. “Who are you? What are you doing back here?”
“They’re Templeton’s kids,” someone said.
“Oh. Okay.” He smiled at the twins and said, “What’s up? Make it fast.”
“Do you know Steve Stevenson?” Abigail asked.
Ron Carpenter shook his head. “Who is that guy?” he laughed. “No. I’ve never met him.”
Abigail asked, “He’s not your assistant?“
“I wish. I think he’s Claire’s assistant.”
“Thanks!” Abigail said.
She led John back to the wardrobe room, where Emily Garment, a plump, brisk woman who was head of the wardrobe department, was pinning up a costume on one of the actresses. Abigail said, “Excuse me—”
The woman, whose mouth held a line of tiny straight pins between tightly shut lips, shook her head and made a noise that even the twins knew meant, “Not now. I’m busy.”
“I just have to ask you one question. Do you know Steve Stevenson?”
The woman rolled her eyes and grunted, “Mm! Mm mm-mm mm-mm MM mm.”
Abigail turned to John and said, “I think what she means is, ‘No, but everybody ELSE does.’ �
��
The woman nodded her head “yes.”
The twins walked quickly away. Out in the hallway, surrounded by people dashing here and there, John was suddenly aware of a new sound: a faint sort of whispery, rumbly murmur, way off in the distance. And in a second he realized what it was. It was the audience, starting to file into the theater, settling in, greeting each other, and building up their excitement for what was about to come.
Abigail said, “That’s everybody. In all the departments—costumes, and sets, and lighting, and sound. Nobody has ever met Steve Stevenson, but everybody thinks everybody else has met him.”
John said—somewhat impatiently, if you must know—“Come on, we have to find Papa.”
The twins set off to find their father. The Professor was in the stage manager’s office, surrounded by reporters, giving an interview. Photographers lurked around, their cameras chattering and snapping photos. And presiding over everything was Gwendolyn Splendide. She was stunning in a black silk suit over a vivid pink blouse, and absolutely glittering and jingling with jewelry.
“Papa!” Abigail whispered.
The Professor, acutely aware of the fact that he was being watched by reporters and cameras, smiled and said, “Not now, dear. It’s almost curtain time!”
“It’s an emergency!” John whispered more loudly.
“Oh, the delightful TEMPLETON twins,” Gwendolyn Splendide sang. “Aren’t they superb? James and Ahndrea, DO join us.”
John looked at Abigail. Abigail looked at John. They turned and marched out, back into the auditorium (which was by now about three-quarters full, and buzzing), down a side aisle, up onto the stage, and into the wings.
“We have to do it,” John said. He noticed his sister’s attention was fixed on something high above him. He turned and looked. It was the LPHTICUL, hanging in place.
