Duck Boy (12 page)

“What’s the matter? You sound upset.”

Steve would have been surprised at Uncle Edward’s awareness, had he not been
so distressed about Aunt Shannon’s disappearance. “She just disappeared, Uncle
Edward. I don’t know what to do.”

There was a long pause on the other end of the phone. “Who disappeared,
Steve?”

“Aunt Shannon!”

“Aunt Shannon disappears from time to time. There’s nothing unusual about
that.”

“She didn’t just take off, Uncle Edward. She really disappeared. She
vanished. She was trying that alchemy stuff, and she ended up going somewhere—I
don’t know where.” Steve excitedly related the past few moments to Uncle Edward.

“That sounds odd,” Uncle Edward’s voice stiffened. He sniffed loudly into
the receiver, and his voice turned cold. “I told her to quit monkeying with
that junk.” His voice warmed. “Oh, Shannon. What have you done?”

“I’m stuck here with the car. Now that Aunt Shannon’s gone, I have no way of
getting home with the car. Can you take a bus or a taxi down here to pick it
up?”

“Oh heavens, no,” Uncle Edward exclaimed. “I don’t have a driver’s license.
Shannon always does the driving.”

“She’s gone, Uncle Edward!” Steve nearly shrieked. “The same thing happened
to her as to my mom.”

“I’m sure she’s fine. I hope she’s fine. Oh dear. Well, Hmm.” Uncle Edward
sniffled. “You’d better drive it home. Oh dear. You do have the keys, don’t
you?”

Steve scanned the coffee table beside where Aunt Shannon had been sitting. A
glinting heap of metal sparkled on the floor under the reading lamp, next to
the two research notebooks. “Yes, I do,” he admitted, “but I don’t have a
driver’s license.”

“Drive carefully, then. Shannon loves that old heap.”

“I said I don’t have my driver’s license.”

“Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Steve, I can’t come to get you.” His voice
raised in its intensity and pitch.

“Uncle Edward?” Steve asked after a few seconds of silence.

“Oh dear. Well then, you’d better drive.”

“What happens if I get caught?”

“Tell the officer you have an emergency,” Uncle Edward snapped. “Oh,
Shannon,” he repeated mournfully, and began to sob as he slammed the phone
down.

I could always take the bus, thought Steve.

No, wait. I left my money at Aunt Shannon’s house. No wallet, no money, no
bus pass. No bus.

He walked towards the chair and scooped the car keys off of the floor. Then
he took careful mental notes of the room and its arrangement in case he needed
to recreate it all again. He collected the pictures that had whirled their way
all around the room and shoved them back into Aunt Shannon’s purse. The two
notebooks he stuffed into his backpack, on top of his socks and underwear.

Then, standing by the front door, he took a deep breath and let it out
slowly. He looked around once more, opened the front door, closed and locked
it, and plunged into the frozen night, taking Aunt Shannon’s purse and the
photographs with him. With his free hand, he opened the driver’s side door and
looked back at the house.

He wedged himself between the steering wheel and the driver’s seat. He
rested his forehead on the top of the steering wheel as he fished for the seat
adjustment, first with his right hand, and then his left. Left again.

“There,” he announced to himself. He swung his feet in and pushed the
driver’s seat back, and released the adjustment.

“The brakes. Gas pedal. Shifter.” He grasped the steering wheel with both
hands. “I can do this, I think.” After his review, he stepped out of the car to
study the evening’s surroundings. Satisfied that no one had noticed him, he
hopped back into the driver’s seat and turned the key in the ignition. The
engine roared then howled as he held the ignition key forward too long. When he
released the key, the howling stopped and the engine chugged calmly.

“Sorry.” He sat for a moment or two, took a deep breath and shifted the
transmission into ‘D.’ “Here we go.” With a lurch, and some wild swerving, he
was off.

Uncle Edward sat inside the house reading a book when Steve galumphed over
the curb and part of the lawn, pulling into the driveway.

“Hello,” Steve said. He dropped the keys on the kitchen counter, with Aunt
Shannon’s purse.

Uncle Edward was reading a book entitled
Hamster Breeding
for Amateurs
, but he frowned, and his eyes were red as if he might have
been crying. “I told her she could get hurt playing around with that
hocus-pocus. Would she listen to me? Not a chance.” His eyes never left the
page, as if his eyes were caged by the words.

“How are we going to help her, Uncle Edward?”

“We’re not going to help her,” Uncle Edward retorted. “We’re not getting
mixed up in that stuff. She got herself into this trouble, and she can get
herself out.”

“Do you know what happened to her?”

“I have no clue,” Uncle Edward responded. “And I don’t want to find out,
either.”

“What…Um… So we won’t do anything?”

“Right,” Uncle Edward snapped. “Don’t try to change things. When you try to
change things, accidents like this happen.”

“I put Aunt Shannon’s purse and keys and stuff on the kitchen counter,”
Steve announced.

“Fine,” Uncle Edward grunted. Steve returned to the kitchen and plucked the
photos from Aunt Shannon’s purse. He stacked both the notebooks together, with
the pictures, and carried them with his backpack to his bedroom.

He flopped on the bed, dropping the photos and notebooks on the bed beside
him.

He replayed the events in his mind. Retrieving Richard. Finding a
dictionary. Lying on his bed. The scream. The bright light, colors shifting.
Gone.

Replay. Replay. And again.

“What am I missing?” he asked himself. He slapped the palm of his hand on
his forehead. “She disappeared. The light.” Steve sputtered. “The light was
just like when the clock turned into the lock. All the paper in the living room
looked like it had been blown around… just like when the clock turned into a
lock.” He picked up the book from the nightstand and flipped the cover open and
closed as he thought. “Aunt Shannon disappeared with the same kind of power we
used to turn a clock into a lock.” He thought for a minute more as he flipped
the book cover open and closed. “Yeah. That’s for certain… it was the same
thing.” Steve examined the book his hands were playing with. He thought about
his mother’s notebook lying on the floor in front of the chair after Aunt
Shannon disappeared. “Holy Moses,” he yelled, and sat up on the edge of the
bed.

Richard was gone.

Steve sat straight up as he concentrated on his insight, driving his fists
into his temples. A careful review again, looking in his memories to see if
Richard remained after the incident. “No,” he said to himself, with a shake of
his head. Her Benu stone went with her. He finished flipping the book’s cover
and sat it down on his lap.

What else was missing?

Suddenly, an electric jolt shot through his mind and jumped out of his
mouth. “The dictionary!” Steve yowled.

“Are you all right, Steve?” Uncle Edward hollered down the hall.

“Sorry. I’m great… I’m all right,” Steve responded, toning down his
excitement in the hope that Uncle Edward wouldn’t suspect anything. The Benu
stone and the dictionary—both of them gone. Steve lay back down and lifted the
book from his lap and put it over his head, like a hat.

“I wonder what it means?” he asked himself.

He imagined the two things—Richard and the dictionary—and began to picture
them.

“Yes,” He muttered to himself. “The dictionary and a Benu stone. That’s what
did it.” His eyes sprang open. “The big dictionary was missing, too,” he
exclaimed.

The same thing happened to Mom.

A burning warmth tingled through his chest with the thought. “The
dictionary. Maybe the dictionary and a Benu stone are another short circuit,
like the lock-clock thing. Maybe it’s just like touching the positive and
negative on a battery at the same time.”

“Young man. Do you need assistance?” Uncle Edward trumpeted down the hall.

“Fine. I’m good,” Steve replied.

“I need a Benu stone and a dictionary,” he said to himself. The book he had
been holding was about alchemy, and Steve found the table of contents and
scanned it for chapters about the Benu stone. Nothing. “I guess the other
question is whether or not it kills. But there weren’t any ashes or anything.
Plus, the lock-clock power doesn’t kill. So maybe.”

He leapt to his feet, and grabbing his backpack, let it dangle upside down
over the bed to dump the underwear and socks into a pile. Then he slid the
pictures and notebooks collection inside, and his iPod, just in case.

“My experiment kit,” he said to himself.

As he stood there, the phone rang. It rang and rang.

“You’d better get that,” Uncle Edward shouted down the hall, as another ring
jangled the air.

They don’t have voicemail, I bet.

“Steve, answer the phone!” Steve trotted to the phone.

“Hello, Steve speaking.”

“Ah, hello. Shannon Pankratz-Bacon, please?”

“Um,” Steve paused awkwardly as he tried to come up with an answer. “Um, I’m
sorry, she’s not here.”

Not here, he thought, that’s an understatement.

“When will she be back?” the voice asked.

“She’s gone for a while, I’m afraid.”

“Steve?”

“Yeah.”

“I met you Tuesday morning in your great aunt’s kitchen. This is Lindsay.”

“Hi,” he replied. “Hey, you’re an alchemist, right?” Steve demanded, cutting
out the normal pleasantries.

“Yeah. Kind of. Actually, I’m learning some stuff with your aunt.” Silence.
“Could you give her a message for me?”

“Ahh… sure,” Steve replied.

“Could you tell her that she’s being watched again?”

“Pardon me?”

“She was being watched a few months back, by two men, usually. And they’re
watching her house again. They’ve been there all day.”

Steve recalled the pictures Aunt Shannon had removed from the file at the
police station, now in his backpack.

“Do they look like policemen?”

“No. They’re wearing suits. Take a look for yourself.” Steve walked over to
a window with the phone and gazed through a gap between the curtains. A luxury
car, charcoal gray, sat idling on the icy street with the exhaust congregating
in frigid clouds behind it.

“I see them,” Steve agreed. “You’re right, they don’t look like policemen.”

“I wonder what they want?” Lindsay asked.

Steve thought they were related to Mr. Gold and his group. He knew what they
wanted, but he didn’t say anything to Lindsay. “Good question.”

“Where did Shannon go?”

“Ah, I’m not sure,” Steve answered truthfully. “She didn’t say, either.”

“That’s like your aunt,” Lindsay answered.

The phone he was talking on was a rotary-dial antique.

No call display. I can’t call her back.

Another abrupt topic change. “So you know a lot about alchemy? Do you know how
to make your Benu stone?” Steve blurted.

“Um… wow.” Silence. “Sort of,” she replied. “I mean, I know how I’m supposed
to find it, but I haven’t done it yet,” Lindsay answered. “Though you should be
asking your aunt to answer these questions, not me.”

“We should talk about a few things,” Steve suggested.

“Ahh. Maybe. I really just need to talk to Shannon,” Lindsay suggested.
“When will she be home?”

Steve looked around the living room and what he could see of the kitchen for
a clock. Just an artsy clock without a dial or numbers hung against the gold
and red living room wallpaper.

How are you supposed to read that? Um…6 ish.

“Oh. Right. How about seven?” Silence. “I mean, she’ll be home at seven,
yeah seven. And she was hoping to talk to you, I think,” Steve lied.

“All right then. Why don’t I drop by at seven-thirty.”

“Sounds great,” Steve exclaimed. “I’ll see you then.” He hung up the phone.

“Who was that?” Uncle Edward asked from his chair in the living room.

“Lindsay, Aunt Shannon’s friend.”

“Oh. I see.” Uncle Edward didn’t seem to be interested in the details at
all, so Steve spun around to head back to his room. As he turned, the phone
rang again.

“Hello?”

“Hello, is Steve there?” asked a gruff male voice.

“Steve’s speaking.”

“This is Detective Garner.” Without giving Steve a chance to speak, he
jumped into the point of his call. “I’m disappointed by your actions,” he said
roughly. “You took most of the pictures from my file here. That’s illegal, as
well as a breach of my trust. I’m surprised you’d take advantage of your time
at the station like this. I’m going to have to speak to Great Aunt Shannon
about what you’ve done. Put her on the phone, Steve.”

Duck Boy. Duck Boy.

“I wish I could,” Steve said. “I think this is all just a misunderstanding.
It’s not what you think it is.”

“It’s pretty clear what it is from my end. You’re obstructing my
investigation by removing those pictures. You’re supposed to help me, not get
in my way. Will she be home tonight?”

“I don’t think so…”

“You’re playing games with me, Steve. She’s probably there right now. I’m
coming over to pick up those pictures. I’ll be there at seven-thirty. If your
aunt isn’t there, or if you aren’t there, mark my words: removing pictures from
a police file constitutes theft of police property. You took advantage of my
generosity.” The phone line went dead.

“Who was that?” Uncle Edward asked, his voice seeming like an echo.

Steve hesitated briefly, but decided Uncle Edward wouldn’t care one way or
another. “That was Detective Garner, the officer assigned to my mom’s case.”

“Oh, I see.” Sure enough, Uncle Edward didn’t seem interested in what the
call was about. “Steve, can you cook?” Uncle Edward asked suddenly.