Are you out of your mind?” yelped Freak. “That was an eleven-thousand-dollar crayon!”
“That was actually a forty-seven-cent crayon,” said Alf. He reached inside his jacket and pulled out a thin silver box. I recognized it from old movies as a cigarette case. He popped the lid open and waved the case in front of us, as if offering us the contents.
“Crayon?” he inquired.
Lined up inside the case were half a dozen dark green crayons. They were unused, with uniformly cone-shaped points. They all had paper wrappers labeled ZUCCHINI.
“All fakes,” Alf confirmed. “I had them made up two years ago, before I found the genuine article. It took me two years of searching to find the real thing. I did not wish to leave a trail, so I could not use the Internet. I finally found what may be the last genuine zucchini crayon in existence in a yard sale in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, with the help of a private investigator.”
“You hired a private eye to track down a crayon?” Freak said, taking one of the fake crayons from the case and sticking it in his mouth like he was about to start puffing away on it. Alf snapped the case shut.
“Opal Austin may be the best PI in existence. I highly recommend her. The real crayon is right here.” Alf pulled open the top drawer of the desk and withdrew a slender wooden box. He opened the lid, and there, nestled in a crayon-shaped incision in a slab of gray foam rubber, was yet another zucchini crayon. It looked exactly like all the others.
“At first I was going to try to lure Disin here with one of the fakes. Then I realized he would send a crayon expert on ahead, to determine if it was real or not.”
“A crayon expert?”
“Equipped with a portable wax chromatograph and an analytic ceroscope. He would have known it was a fake within thirty seconds. So I persevered until I found one of the original 1944 Victory Garden crayons. I put one of the fakes in the sofa. I couldn’t risk your accidentally breaking the original, or scribbling with it, or dividing it three ways.”
“Or smoking it,” said Freak, blowing an imaginary smoke ring.
“So you were right, the other day,” Alf continued. “The sofa was my recruiting officer.”
“I noticed it had a dueling scar,” I said.
“Yes, and a bloodstain.” Alf shook his head. “With Halloween coming up, it decided to go out as a pirate. There was no dissuading it.”
“You could have stood at the gate and offered us candy,” said Freak. “That probably would have gotten us in here just as easily.”
“You know it would not have. None of you is that trusting. I would not have been interested in you if you were. If I must have children around me, they should be bright children. You did exactly as I had hoped you would, creating a trail for Edward Disin to follow without making him overly suspicious. The moment you typed the words zucchini crayon into a search engine, you made him aware of your existence. His eye opened and it looked at you. As soon as you posted the auction, you had his full attention. I couldn’t have done it better myself.”
“So well, in fact, that I’d like to offer the three of you a job.”
Alf sat on the edge of the desk and looked at each of us in turn. He seemed thoroughly delighted with himself.
“What kind of a job?” asked Freak.
“Nothing too strenuous. And only for a week or so. There are no benefits, but the pay is quite generous. I’ll let you have whatever the genuine zucchini crayon fetches at auction, to divide among the three of you equally, or in whatever proportions you see fit.”
“I canceled the auction the moment I got home last night,” said Fiona. “You told me to.”
“Yes. And now you are going to send e-mails to everybody who bid on your auction, inviting them to a live auction here at Underhill House. The crayon will be the featured item at that auction, in addition to a selection of historically important coloring books, one of which belonged to the young Jackson Pollock. The auction will be held here at eight o’clock on the evening of October twenty-third. Refreshments will be served.”
“Who is Jackson Pollock?” Freak asked.
“Famous American artist. Opal Austin ran across the coloring book at a swap meet. She phoned me and I bought it on spec for fifty cents. Remind me to show it to you. The man was completely incapable of coloring within the lines.”
Alf looked at Fiona as if he expected her to say something. She didn’t. She just blinked rapidly, the way she does when she’s learning something new in science class.
“I’ve already written out everything you need to put in the e-mail.” Alf handed Fiona a flash drive. “I’ve also included the e-mail addresses of several toy museums and well-known toy collectors who should also be notified. The more people who attend the auction, the more convincing it will look. Also, the more people who bid, the higher the final selling price will be, and consequently the higher your paycheck.”
“What happens at the auction?” Freak wanted to know.
“People bid. The auction ends. Edward Disin is the winner.”
“You’re sure about that?”
“Absolutely. He pays in cash, as he always does, and as soon as we have his money, I signal US Treasury agents who have been waiting in the wings. They come forward and arrest him. They cart him away, the Disin Corporation is without its head, the company falters, and, with any luck, it doesn’t proceed with… certain projects.”
“Won’t he know it’s a trap?”
“He’d be pretty stupid if he didn’t. An auction for something he wants, being held on Hellsboro’s doorstep? He’s going to know that’s no coincidence. But the CCD will compel him to come anyway. Compulsive Completist Disorder becomes stronger the closer its victim gets to the desired object. Right now, Edward Disin can still multitask. As the auction gets nearer, he’ll be able to think of fewer and fewer things other than the zucchini crayon. And his own arrogance, his belief that he can handle any situation on his own, should bring him here by himself. Whether he thinks it’s a trap or not.”
The job sounded too easy to me. “What else do we have to do to earn our pay?” I asked. I was wondering if it might involve sacrificing Fiona to Alf’s sister. I wanted to trust Alf, but I could understand why Fiona might not.
“Clean up the ballroom, for one thing,” said Alf. “It hasn’t been touched in years. I’m hoping to use it for the auction. The floor has to be washed and waxed, the cobwebs dispersed, maybe a little paint here and there. Have any of you ever swept a chimney?”
“I swept out the garage, once,” Freak admitted.
Freak actually swept out his garage on a regular basis. He liked to keep things well organized. He had gotten that way not long after his mother left. I sometimes thought he was hoping if he kept the place neat, she would come back.
“The entire house has to be readied for visitors. And decorated. I’m thinking crepe streamers, trailing off the chandelier. Maybe a Halloween-themed tablecloth on the table with the punch bowl. And the balloons will have to be inflated. During the auction itself, the three of you will be serving hors d’oeuvres.”
“Anybody could do that,” said Freak. “Why us?”
“You said you needed children around,” I added, deciding Freak had a good point. “Why kids?”
Alf gave us a thoughtful look, like maybe he was deciding whether or not to tell us. Then he shrugged.
“Because Edward Disin comes from a culture where people your age are not taken seriously. If you’re around, he’ll be a little less on his guard. Having you here might make the difference between his being too wary to catch and his making the slip that will prove his undoing. It’s as simple as that.” He looked at each of us in turn. “Do we have a deal? Can I expect the three of you back here on Sunday, so we can start getting the place ready? Say, around noon?”
“We get to keep whatever the magic crayon sells for?” asked Freak.
“All right. I’m in.”
“Me, too,” I said.
“Yes,” said Fiona. “So long as it doesn’t get out that I’m part of the team.”
“There is no team,” Freak assured her.
We didn’t speak again until we were walking past the spot where the sofa had once stood, at the side of Breeland Road. There was a rectangle there where the grass was a little less green than the grass around it.
“They’re saying rain for tomorrow night,” I said. “It should be cloudy tomorrow afternoon. Maybe we should plan on going to Rodmore then.”
“Shouldn’t we wait, now, until after the auction?” suggested Fiona.
“Why wait?” I said. I wanted to see the place where my parents had worked. Even if it was abandoned and covered with soot. I wondered what they would have thought about everything that was going on. I was eager to go anywhere, even into Hellsboro, if it meant finding out more about what had happened to them.
“It might be safer after Alf catches Edward Disin,” Fiona argued.
“I see it as two separate things,” I said. “Looking for proof of the portal is a Guernica project. Catching Edward Disin is an Alf project. If we can catch Disin and give the right people proof of the portal, we’ll be able to stop the invasion thing. We have to do both. And the sooner we can get started, the better.”
“I was going to borrow a digital camera from the school newspaper,” Fiona confessed. “To take pictures of the portal, if there is one. But if Disin donated every piece of electronics the school has, I guess that’s not such a good idea.”
“I have one of those cardboard, use-it-once film cameras,” I said. “It’s from last year’s field trip to Philly. There’re still a couple of shots left on it.”
“That would be better,” Freak acknowledged. “Anybody have any idea what a portal looks like? If there is one?”
“In movies, they always look like water going down a toilet. That’s why I’m always surprised when anybody wants to go in one.”
By this time we were in front of Fiona’s house. Her father, Bill, was raking the lawn. He looked up as we approached. “It’s like old times,” he said, “seeing the three of you hanging out together.” He seemed pleased. “Could one of you climb in the well and get the leaves out for me?”
Fiona had a fake wishing well in her front yard. When I was younger, I had thought the well was real, and that it could grant wishes. I had thrown quite a few nickels and dimes into it. I had made quite a few wishes. I had wished I was taller, had a horse, and wasn’t so often the target of bullies. I wished I were really River Man, defender of the weak. I wished both my parents were still alive. I wished I could see them again.
The wishing well was no deeper than the surface of the lawn. I boosted myself over the side and found myself ankle-deep in leaves. I proceeded to shovel them out with my hands. Fiona and Freak stuffed them into a plastic bag as quickly as I could toss them out.
When I bent down for a final handful, I found a nickel. It could easily have been a nickel I had thrown in with one of my earlier wishes. I wondered which wish it might have been, and if my finding the coin meant the wish was still pending. I was about to put the coin in my pocket. Then I looked at it and wished my friends and I would be safe, no matter what happened between us and Alf and Disin and the Rodmore Chemical plant.
I dropped the coin back in the well.