A WEEK ISN'T LONG to wait for something. Not even for Christmas. Two weeks, however, is a different story. Two weeks is a long way away. In the olden days, they called two weeks a fortnight, a word that suggests that somehow you have to get past the well-guarded fort to arrive at the night you've been dreaming of.
A fortnight.
If you were to order something and had to wait a fortnight, chances are you would soon stop thinking about it and begin fretting over something else. Consequently, when at last it showed up it would be a surprise.
"Oh!" you would say. "Look what came today!"
As if you had had nothing to do with it.
Like a dog burying a bone so later he can "discover" it.
"Hey," he says to himself. "What luck!"
Green pumpkins the size of baseballs had formed in the shadows beneath the vines when my pictures finally arrived from Sparkle Snapshot in St. Louis.
I had forgotten about the wasp portrait. My, but he was an evil-looking fellow. A poison dart with a grudge is what he was—a wriggling, saber-shaped creature with a stinger at the end of his abdomen that could puncture your skin more efficiently than a med tech's hypodermic needle.
I placed that snapshot aside, expecting next to see perhaps the eyeball of a honeybee. Instead, I found myself staring into the face of my father.
You could have knocked me over with dog dander!
I knew it had to be him, even though I'd never met him. I'd seen pictures my mother had kept, and besides, he was wearing the peach-colored Columbus Catfish baseball cap that I had on my head right now. Moreover, he kind of looked like me, or, more accurately, I was beginning to look like him.
There were two snapshots of him in the pack of twenty-four nature portraits, each quite similar, as if taken only seconds apart. He was smiling, but self-consciously so, perhaps uncomfortable with having his picture taken, or possibly, I speculated, uncomfortable in the presence of bees.
I wouldn't blame him. My thumb bears a scar from the attack I endured. It's a fine line less than half an inch long that cuts right through my fingerprint. It's strange to think that a bee can alter your fingerprint for all time.
It's strange to see one's father after so many years.
Surprise!
It soon became apparent that my mother's concept of home-schooling was for me to stay home from school while she did her paperwork and watched TV. Apparently, if any schooling was to take place, I would have to school myself.
Since I'd hit a dead end on my investigation of bees, I decided to concentrate on finding a logical explanation for people from my past appearing at random among my photographs.
Someone at Sparkle Snapshot was deliberately enclosing these pictures for me, or there was supernatural interference taking place during the fortnight's journey to and/or from St. Louis.
Tampering with the U.S. mail is a serious offense, whether performed by the living or the dead.
I mentioned this to Chief Leopard Frog. He seemed unfazed.
"Not everything has a logical explanation," Chief Leopard Frog advised. "Some things just happen."
"The only reason some things have no logical explanation," I argued, "is because we haven't figured out the answers yet."
"You are an optimistic boy," Chief Leopard Frog observed.
I began my investigation with an examination of the negatives.
Negatives are returned to the customer packaged with the positive prints—the snapshots. They are cut into consecutively numbered strips consisting of five images each.
If the mystery pictures had corresponding negatives, I reasoned, that would suggest that the photos came from my camera. If not, then it would mean that somebody—or something—had deliberately mixed the ghost pictures in with my order.
I held the first strip up to the light and squinted.
Negatives for color print film are ruby-colored with darks and lights reversed, so it's a world of distorted perception that takes getting used to.
Still, there she was, in a neat rectangle right next to a giant caterpillar with a single horn, my ex-neighbor, the attractive, flirtatious older teen, Maureen Balderson.
In the next packet, I found Ma Puttering adjacent to a ladybug, its pale spots as big as Chief Leopard Frog's namesake's namesake.
The clincher was in the third packet: two pictures of my ghost father, side by side, sharing a five-image strip of red celluloid with a bumblebee, a sweat bee, and a wasp.
Not only had these images been exposed using my camera, but they had been exposed during the time that I was taking the other pictures.
Where is the logical explanation for that?
"Look at it this way," Chief Leopard Frog suggested. "At least you've ruled out your mother as a suspect."
"I didn't know she was a suspect," I said.
"Good heavens, Spencer," Chief Leopard Frog responded. "She handles every piece of mail coming in and out of Paisley. Of course she was a suspect."