Joe Sherlock Kid Detective 1 : The Haunted Toolshed (7 page)

Close Encounter

If being dragged backward through the mud on your butt were an Olympic sport, I would surely win a gold medal.

I raise my arms up like I’m being robbed and slip out of the backpack’s straps. I look back for an instant and see Hailey’s backpack being carried off into the darkness by a short, burly man wearing a big fur coat.

Wild with panic, I sprint for my life.

I crash through thorny bushes. I hurdle neatly trimmed hedges. I scamper through Mr. Alessandri’s army of lawn gnomes. Not bad for a lame duck!

The next thing I know, my right foot knocks the head off a cement garden bunny and I’m belly surfing. I scramble across Mrs. Egan’s shadowy lawn and nearly knock myself silly when I whack my head on a low-hanging bird feeder. I almost suffer a severe panic attack when I become entangled in someone’s garden hose. Worst of all, I can smell boiling cabbage again.

Midway through my mad dash down the obstacle course that is Baker Street, I see the mysterious van again. This time I notice that there is a large painting of a ferocious lion on the side of

the van. Before I can figure out

exactly what that means, I am spotted. “Hey, kid!” Mr. Deep Voice shouts. But I keep moving.

If dogs don’t like me, I can only image what a van full of ferocious lions will think of me.

By the time I reach my front porch, I am completely out of steam. I flop onto my back, gasping.

I begin to relax. I am safe. I will not need an ambulance.

As the night’s disturbing events begin to flutter through my mind, the screen door swings open and almost smashes my head down into my neck.

“AAAGHGH!” I scream, curling up in a ball and grabbing my head.

“What the . . . Dad, is that you?” Hailey gasps.

The porch light snaps on and I am blinded.

“Oh, it’s just you,” she says, clearly disap-pointed. “Whoa, you look like something even a cat wouldn’t drag in.”

“Thanks,” I sputter, checking my flattened skull for missing pieces.

“I’ve been calling you and calling you. Why haven’t you answered?” she asks.

I suddenly realize that during all the 81

running, jumping, dragging, and head smashing, I’ve lost my dad’s cell phone. “I don’t have it.”

“It’s probably in the backpack,” she says, looking around.

“I lost that, too,” I say.

“And my walkie-talkie?” she asks.

I look down at my belt. The walkie-talkie is gone also. “You may want to try the area around Mrs. Egan’s bird feeder,” I moan.

“What kind of detective loses more things than he finds?” she says, crossing her arms.

“The three of you have a good point,” I groan as my blurry vision turns my little sister into triplets.

“What if that fresh pair of underwear ends up in the wrong hands?” she asks, just trying to irritate me. “Well, the cops are on their way here to find out what happened to Hot Skunk, so if you don’t want to get blamed for everything, you better find him fast.”

“The police?” I blurt out, leaping to my feet and waiting for my eyes to stop spinning in their sockets. “Dad’s not lost; he’s just misplaced,” I say, pushing my way into the house.

Jessie sighs behind me. “This family’s getting weirder by the minute.”

Spilling the Beans

Just as I thought, the location of my dad turns out to be not much of a mystery after all.

Two minutes into my search, I try the backyard. I hear him before I see him. He’s snoring somewhere in the backyard like a gas-powered chain saw. I find him sleeping underneath the cushion on one of our reclining patio chairs.

I return to the house and start digging through our kitchen’s many junk drawers for a flashlight. I find six flashlights, but none of them work. Then I remember my Inspector Wink-Wink battery-operated night-lights.

I return to the backyard and quietly check my dad’s hands for mud or dirt that could link him to the Ashers’ property. He’s clean.

Whew! That’s a relief. I feel a little tug of guilt for even suspecting him in the first place.

The relief I feel at solving this mini-mystery makes me realize how much the mystery at the Ashers’ house has shaken my confidence. Even worse, it’s almost nine o’clock. As any good detective knows, almost all mysteries that can be solved are solved within the first few hours. My case is getting cold. And so is my dad; his hands feel like a pair of frozen dinners.

I get Jessie off the phone to help with my dad. Not surprisingly, she’s annoyed at the interruption.

“Nice night- light, Detective Dimwit,” she says. “Are you wearing matching diapers?” My sister is just a laugh a minute.

We certainly can’t lift him. And we can’t seem to wake him, either. So Jessie and I roll my dad back into the house on the patio chair’s two creaking wooden wheels.

“Easy! Easy up that step, people!” Hailey commands, acting like she’s in charge of us.

“Lift from the knees, not from the back. Get your head in the game, Sherlock. Look alive, Jessie!”

We leave Dad and his rolling patio chair parked in the center of the family room. I tell Hailey that she can’t give him any more pain medication until tomorrow.

“He sounds like he might sleep until Halloween anyway,” Hailey says.

“I’m calling Mom,” Jessie announces, marching out of the room. “She needs to know that I’ve got everything under control.”

Moments later her bedroom door slams shut.

I shake my head. “Boy, I’d like to be a fly in the ointment,” I say.

Hailey laughs. “I think you mean a fly on the wall. Sherlock, you look like you were on the wrong end of an avalanche.”

“You wouldn’t believe the half of it.”

“Step into my office, big brother,” she says, pulling me down the hall to her room.

For some reason, I tell Hailey everything about my case. It just comes pouring out. The farting granny. The vanishing bundt cakes.

The missing mailbox. The runaway eye. The chunky handprints. The burly backpack thief.

Even the giant van with the lions on the side.

“There are two hundred pieces to this puzzle, and none of them seem to fit together,” I grumble.

“Is there anything else?” she asks.

“Isn’t that enough?” I ask. “Oh . . . I also shortened a cement bunny.”

I don’t think she’s really listening. She bites her lip. She nods. She taps her chin a few times. She looks as if she’s trying to figure out whether my head will ever return to its original shape.

“I think I know what you’ve been overlooking,” she finally says.

“You do?” I exclaim, sitting up straight.

Before Hailey can say anything else, Jessie sticks her head into the room and giggles.

“Uh, Sherlock, there’s an Officer Lestrade at the door about Dad. But he also wants to ask you something about a broken garden bunny.”

Hailey’s eyes grow two sizes. “I thought you were kidding.”

Lightning Strikes

“Holy fandango!” Hailey whispers so loud she might as well be yelling. “We forgot about the cops! We’re surrounded! Quick, hide in my hamper!”

I narrow my eyes at Jessie. “Tell Officer Lestrade to have a seat. We’ll be right out.”

Jessie snickers. “Then I’ll call Mom. She’s gonna love this.”

Once the door clicks shut, I turn back to Hailey.

“Well?” I say.

“Well what?” she whispers back.

“C’mon, Hailey! You were just about to tell me what I’ve overlooked.”

“I was?” she replies.

“HAILEY!”

“Okay! Okay!” she says. “Let’s see. . . . Oh, I was going to say that you need to stop looking for connections and figure out what’s not connected.”

“Is that supposed to be helpful?” I ask.

“Yes!” she says, standing up straight and lifting her chin. “You’ve made the mistake of trying to put things together when you should be taking them apart.”

I jump to my feet. “I might go to prison in a few minutes for kicking the head off a lawn ornament! You can’t do any better than that?”

“You may have more than just one mystery on your hands. Don’t you see? There may be lots of strange things going on at Mr. Asher’s house, but that doesn’t mean they’re all connected in some way. Get it? Your mailbox mystery may have nothing to do with the missing cakes. The vanishing eye may not be caused by whoever is haunting Mr. Asher’s toolshed. The men in the weird van—”

“Wait a minute!” I interrupt. “That’s good.

Really good. Gooder than good. That’s the goodest.”

It’s like I’ve gotten an eight-hundred-pound monkey off my back. Hailey has handed me the key that I’ve been missing, and now I’m unlocking all the doors in my head.

“What are you doing?” Hailey asks from behind me.

I yank the cord that lifts her window shades, throw open the window, and lift the screen out of its frame. As I hand Hailey the screen, I pull her chair over to the window.

“Hailey, I think I can help Mr. Asher get to the bottom of things. And I’ve still got eight minutes until the clock strikes nine,” I say, nodding at her Girl Chat Sleepover wall clock. “So stall Officer Lestrade for just five minutes and then tell him to meet me down the street at Mr. Asher’s house.”

“Stall him?” she sputters. “With what?

Dad’s stamp collection?”

“Think of something,” I say as I swing my legs out of her window. “Maybe show him Dad’s toes. If that doesn’t distract him, nothing will.”

“Have you lost your mind, Sherlock?” she asks, running to the open window.

But I’m already long gone.