Friday morning at early recess Vince and I stopped by Tony Adrian’s locker to check on the traps we’d set earlier that week. Tony was there waiting for us, looking more nervous and fidgety than usual.
“There’s more in there. I can tell already,” he said. “I can feel it.”
Vince and I exchanged a glance. “Let’s have a look,” Vince said.
Tony put in his locker combination and then stepped aside. Vince opened the locker door and I peered inside.
Tony was right: there were more of the small droppings piled in the bottom of the locker. They were sitting right in the middle of our trap.
But the trap was empty.
“Is that even possible?” I said.
Vince shook his head. “I don’t see how. There’s no way an animal could get in here, take a deuce, and then leave without being caught in that trap. No way.”
“What could that mean, then? Is it an invisible rat?”
“Unless we’re dealing with the Joe Blanton of rodents here, I don’t see how it’s possible that an animal left these at all.”
“Which means someone else—a kid—is putting them here?”
We both looked at Tony. He held up his impossibly clean hands and said, “Hey, don’t look at me. I’d rather get ten cavities filled than even look at that stuff.”
“Maybe it’s a prank, like someone knows Tony is a clean freak. No offense,” Vince said.
Tony shrugged, accepting that he was in fact a neat freak.
“Maybe,” I said, “but that doesn’t explain why so many other kids have complained to us about the same problem. And they’re kids from all different grades so it seems to be totally random.”
Vince shook his head. It was hard to stump Vince, so this really was somewhat of a mystery. “What about the Beagle?”
I nodded. “Yeah, let’s do that.”
Luckily we had come prepared. Vince took out a pair of plastic gloves and a plastic sandwich baggie. He carefully put some of the droppings into the bag, and then we double-bagged them and threw those bags into a brown paper bag. Hey, we weren’t taking any chances. Vince disposed of his gloves and wandered off to find a bathroom to wash his hands.
“We’ll figure this out eventually,” I said. “And we’ll make sure to send the Hutt by later to finish the cleaning.”
Tony nodded his head.
At lunch that day Jonah came back to the East Wing bathroom. This time he seemed much calmer than he had on his first visit. But he still insisted on running in place while in my office. I didn’t argue. I figured there was really no point with health psychos like Jonah.
“So I guess I probably don’t need your help anymore,” he said.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Well, Dr. George apparently, you know, he was, like, brought in to clean up our school since it’s been, like, falling apart, and one of the first things he did was to get our school a proper menu. I went to see him, and he was horrified at what we were being served. He called it a tragedy and said that America was tubby enough already or something like that. Anyway, thanks, Mac, but yesterday the lunch was great. We had boiled chicken, steamed broccoli, and plain brown rice.”
I thought that lunch sounded way worse than what they had been serving, but even beyond that was the fact that George had now stolen a customer from me. I didn’t like this at all. He was going to bleed me dry of my paying customers if he kept this up.
“So can I, like, get a refund, then?” Jonah asked while still jogging in place.
“Definitely,” I said as I put the Tom Petty cashbox on my desk. I hated giving out refunds, but it was the right thing to do. I mean, technically someone else had solved his problem before I could.
I counted out his money and then made some notes in my Books before handing the cash to him.
“Sorry I couldn’t be more help,” I said.
He shrugged. “It’s all the same to me. I’m just happy I’m not going to be fed Type Two on a plate anymore.”
I wasn’t sure exactly what he meant by that, but if he was happy with everything, then I guess I had to be, too. Except I wasn’t. At this rate we were going to lose money this month instead of making record profits like it had looked like we would at the beginning of the week.
Near the end of lunch we closed the office so Vince and I could take the sample from Tony’s locker to the Beagle for analysis. The Beagle still owed me a favor for when I’d helped him obtain uranium for some science project he was doing earlier in the year. Don’t even ask how I got that uranium. If I told you, I might have to kill you.
The Beagle was this fifth grader who was obsessed with science and especially animal science. He loved animals so much that he was that kid who, back in second grade, would bring in a different pet every week for show-and-tell. He never even had to repeat, he owned so many. And basically in any conversation you ever had with him or to anything at all you could say to him, he’d respond with some crazy pet story. It’s like the only way he knew to communicate—with stories about his pets. Also, one time in third grade I saw him outside walking his pet hamster on a custom miniature leash. I figured if anybody could lead us to the origins of the locker poop, it was the Beagle.
We found him in one of the science labs. I’d heard from Ears, my go-to informant, that the Beagle spent his lunch and recess time in there. He was hunched over one of the black lab tables working furiously on something and saying stuff like, “Yes! Perfect! That’s just what this needed! Ha. Haha. Hahahaha!” and on and on like that.
We approached where he was sitting with his back to us. Then suddenly, without turning around, he said, “I’ve been expecting you.”
Vince and I stopped and looked at each other,
“How did you know we were here?” I asked.
The Beagle spun on his stool and faced us. He was still blocking whatever it was he was working on from our view, and I figured that was probably for the better. Part of me didn’t really even want to know.
“First I heard you come in,” he said. “Then I smelled who you were when you approached.”
He twitched his long nose. He wore thin small glasses, and he had pretty big ears and an oblong head with just a small tuft of hair on top, as if he had problems growing any more hair than that.
“Why were you expecting us?” Vince asked.
“Well, I’ve been hearing things about feces being found in several kids’ lockers, and I figured it would be only a matter of time before you came to me for help. I still owe you a favor after all, do I not?”
I tilted my head toward him. I had to hand it to this kid—he was pretty sharp. I just hoped he knew animals as well as we all thought he did.
“Well, then, have you brought me a sample?” he asked.
“Actually, we did,” I said.
Vince handed him the brown paper bag. The Beagle smiled and opened it and motioned for us to join him at a different lab table across the room. I tried to sneak a peek at whatever it was he had been working on, but he tossed a white sheet over it before joining us at the new lab table.
The Beagle removed the plastic bags and then carefully opened them. He removed the droppings by pouring them gently into a shallow plastic cylinder. Then he removed a pair of tweezers from his pocket and started prodding at the samples.
“Hmm,” he said. “I see. Yes, very interesting.”
“What is it?” I asked.
He didn’t answer me directly but instead kept poking and muttering things to himself like, “Yes, indeed,” and “How about that,” and “Just as I suspected.” Then he turned to face us.
“Well, you’ve definitely got feces from a Cricetus cricetus here. Also some from a Meriones unguiculatus, and even a Cavia porcellus. It’s a veritable pantheon of common captive critter crap you’ve brought me.”
“One more time in words I can understand,” I said. Experts: you have to love how they use their own jargon and technical terms as if we normal people would understand them. It’s like if I understood any of that, then why would I be coming to you for your expertise?
“Well, these originated from three different animals: a hamster, a gerbil, and a guinea pig.”
Now that just didn’t make any sense at all.
“You’re sure?” I asked.
“Definitely. Here, let me show you. . . .” He picked up a sample with his tweezers.
“No, no, that’s okay. I’m sure you know what you’re doing. Thanks a bunch. Consider that favor repaid.”
“Great. Thanks, Mac,” he said.
As Vince and I walked back to our office, we didn’t have much to say for the first several minutes. It was hard to wrap our heads around what the Beagle’s information meant exactly.
“So this is like that one time Joe Blanton struck out twenty-eight batters in six innings while he was still driving to the stadium because he was running late,” Vince finally said.
Normally I’d have laughed right then, but at the moment I was still too confused to offer much more than a nod.
“I guess this means that someone has to be planting the poop in kids’ lockers,” I said. “There’s no way that all three of those animals are just roaming around together and pooping in a pack like some sort of odd gang of misfit lab animals.”
“I know, but who could it be? And why?”
“Well, we did see Mr. Kjelson sneaking around suspiciously after hours with cages of rodents,” I said.
Vince tilted his head and said, “Yeah, that’s true, plus he has access to all of the science lab animals. But what could his motive possibly be?”
We both shook our heads just then, frustrated with the inexplicable nature of our recent discovery.