CHAPTER 4
The place to start, apparently, was the It’s-Froze-Yo! self-serve yogurt shop up the street. Tesla led Nick, Silas, and DeMarco there, then stood looking inside as customers filled their bowls with nice, healthy, fruit-based frozen yogurts…which they promptly buried under gummy worms, crumbled candy bars, and chocolate sauce.
“Sorry, Tesla,” Silas said, “but I’m not really in the mood for dessert right now.”
“We’re not here for dessert,” Tesla said. “Take a peek across the street.” The boys all turned to look.
Directly across from It’s-Froze-Yo! was a wine shop and an art gallery. And above them: the Treasure Trove, Barry Dobek’s antiques store. It was a bright, warm summer day, and the store’s windows were open. Beyond them, Nick could see lampshades and chandeliers and slow-spinning fans hanging from the ceiling.
A lanky, gray-haired man with a pair of glasses pushed up onto the top of his head appeared near one of the open windows, gesturing at something Nick couldn’t see, while a pop-eyed woman beside him nodded excitedly.
“Silas,” Tesla said, “describe Dobek.”
She was still staring into the frozen yogurt store. In fact, some of the customers had begun to notice her and were staring back.
“I don’t need to describe Dobek,” Silas said. “Just turn around and you’ll see him.”
He started to lift an arm toward the man with the glasses.
Tesla grabbed the arm and pushed it down.
“Don’t point,” she growled. “And turn around, would you? I said take a peek, not stare until Dobek notices you.”
The boys turned toward It’s-Froze-Yo!—and found themselves facing a family of four that was trying to enjoy some yogurt while being watched like a bunch of monkeys at the zoo.
Nick looked over their heads and pretended he was giving serious consideration to the list of the day’s flavors posted on the wall.
“Silas, does Dobek know who you are?” Tesla said.
“Yeah. I go with my dad to the estate sales sometimes, so I’ve met him.”
“Which means there’s a good chance he knows DeMarco’s a friend of yours, since you two are like a couple of conjoined twins.”
“I guess so,” Silas said.
“Hey!” DeMarco protested.
“Can we go stare at something else, please?” said Nick. A bitter-looking teenage girl behind the cash register had started shooting him nasty looks.
“Dobek doesn’t know me and Nick, though,” Tesla mused, ignoring her brother. “That gives us an opportunity.”
“What opportunity?” Nick said, his voice quavering.
The register girl was stomping toward them.
“Ooo,” Silas said when he noticed her. “What crawled up her nose?”
“Us,” Nick said.
The girl jerked open the store’s front door, leaned out, and snarled, “Do you want some of this frozen glop, or are you just going to stand there freaking out the people who do?”
Tesla gave her a smile. “No glop for us, thanks.”
She took Nick by the arm and began dragging him away, headed for the nearest street corner.
“My brother and I are going antiquing,” she said.
“I think you need to slow down, Tez,” Nick said as he and his sister crossed the street.
“Slow down?” Tesla jerked her head at an SUV that was inching toward them, the driver obviously begrudging them the four seconds it would take to get from one side of Main Street to the other. “Does this look like a good time to slow down?”
“I’m not talking about how fast you’re walking. I’m talking about how you’re running off to play detective.”
Tesla stopped and whirled to face her brother. Fortunately, they were out of the street by then.
“I’m not ‘running off to play detective.’ I’m just trying to help a friend. If someone doesn’t get that comic book back, Silas’s family is going to lose their store. No store, no money. No money, no food. The Kuskies might have to move to Alaska to work on fishing boats or sell their kidneys to sick billionaires or something.”
“Sell their kidneys to sick billionaires? Don’t you think that’s laying it on a bit thick?”
“Maybe. But tell me this: if we don’t find that comic book, who will?”
“How about the people whose job it is? The police.”
“Half Moon Bay’s finest? Remind me, Nick, what was Sgt. Feiffer doing the last time we saw him?”
Nick rubbed his chin. “Let me see. He waaaaaaas…oh. Now I remember.”
They’d last crossed paths with Sgt. Feiffer three days before. He was chasing an unlicensed dog that was chasing the Newtmobile.
Not only could Half Moon Bay not afford a police force anymore, it couldn’t afford an animal control officer, either.
“And the time before that?” Tesla said.
Nick thought it over.
Five days before, they’d seen Sgt. Feiffer giving a ticket to a very unhappy-looking ice-cream truck driver who’d been selling his popsicles and orange Push Ups too close to a fire hydrant.
Half Moon Bay couldn’t pay for meter officers anymore either.
“All right,” he said. “You win.”
Even if Sgt. Feiffer had been a brilliant detective—and Nick had no way of knowing if he was—he’d probably be too busy cornering rabid chipmunks and ticketing double-parked cars to track down a comic-book thief.
“So we go into Dobek’s antiques store,” Nick said, “and then what?”
“I have no idea,” Tesla said, starting toward the Treasure Trove again.
After a few quick steps, she turned and flashed her brother a grin.
“Maybe I am going too fast,” she said.
Yet she didn’t slow down.
Mr. Kuskie had been right when he’d said the Treasure Trove didn’t sell the kinds of things you’d find at Hero Worship, Incorporated. To catch Barry Dobek’s eye, it seemed, something had to be not just old but musty and dusty and dark and dull.
The Treasure Trove was filled with furniture mostly, though there were also some “vintage” (a.k.a. moth-eaten) clothes and display cases stocked with costume jewelry and cuff links and spectacles and shaving kits and other stuff that generally made Tesla feel like she needed a nap. The one kid-friendly thing in the place was a barrel of candy. Except the candy was salt-water taffy the color of slugs, and Tesla wouldn’t have paid a penny for the whole barrel, let alone the quarter per piece that Dobek was charging.
Dobek seemed as drab and lifeless as his store. He was a tall, thin, gray man with a long, bony face and white hair he swept straight back into a pompadour. He was dressed casually, in jeans and a denim shirt, yet the clothes looked so spotless and stiff—so unlived in—he may as well have been in a freshly pressed business suit. His glasses were still pushed up on top of his head, as if they weren’t glasses at all but a strange kind of hat worn purely for decoration.
At first, he ignored Tesla and Nick as they moved slowly up and down the aisles. He obviously preferred to focus on the adults in the store, which made a certain sense. How many kids are going to shell out $1,000 for an eighteenth-century buffet deux corps? (Tesla had no idea what an “eighteenth-century buffet deux corps” was until she saw the words written on the price tag. To her, it just looked like a dinged-up old cabinet.)
Eventually, a couple to whom Dobek had been trying to sell a “petite English oak barley-twist drop-leaf wine table” (whatever that was) beat a hasty retreat, and Nick and Tesla were the only customers left in the store.
“He’s looking at us,” Nick whispered as he and Tesla pretended to examine a collection of antique chamber pots.
Tesla tried to steal a casual look at Dobek.
He was near the front of the store, looking back at her in a way that didn’t seem casual at all. It seemed pretty serious, in fact.
Dobek was frowning and furrowing his bushy white eyebrows.
Tesla turned her back to him again.
“Just act natural,” she said under her breath.
“How should I know what ‘natural’ is in a place like this?”
“Do what the grown-ups did. Stare at boring old junk, nod like you know what you’re looking at, and if Dobek asks if you need any help, say, ‘Just looking.’ ”
Nick tried staring at boring old junk and nodding like he knew what he was looking at.
“He’s still watching us,” he muttered after all of five seconds. “What are we doing in here, anyway?”
“Watching and waiting,” Tesla said.
“Watching and waiting for what?”
“I have no idea, remember?”
Nick threw his sister a glare.
“You know, Tez,” he said, “sometimes your plans leave something to be desired. Like a plan.”
Tesla just smiled and shrugged, though she was starting to worry that they were indeed wasting their time. If hanging out around the Treasure Trove didn’t result in any leads, she wasn’t sure what to do next. Yet she was determined to continue the hunt for the missing comic. And not just for the sake of Silas and his dad and Hero Worship, Incorporated.
Nick needed a distraction. It had been fun messing around in Uncle Newt’s basement lab—Nick and Tesla had always loved gadgets and gizmos and science. But day by day, Tesla had watched her brother’s excitement fade and his worry grow.
Why hadn’t their parents called? And what were they really doing in Uzbekistan—if that was truly where they were?
Tesla was as much in the dark as her brother. So she would give him different questions to wrestle with instead.
Who’d taken Stupefying Comics #6?
How had they known where it was hidden?
Why were there no signs of a break-in?
And why was Barry Dobek suddenly looming over them with a scowl on his face?
Tesla jumped.
That last question had caught her by surprise. Her brother, too.
“Justlookingjustlooking!” Nick blurted out.
Dobek leaned in toward him.
“Oh, I know you are,” he sneered. “I know what you’re looking for, too…and you’re not going to get it!”