The Tell-Tale Start (11 page)
Read The Tell-Tale Start Online
Authors: Gordon McAlpine
Mr. Poe in the Great Beyond
Mr.
Shakespeare burst into Mr. Poe’s cubicle. “A pox on you, Poe!”
Mr. Poe looked up from his desk. “Well, good afternoon to you, too, Mr. Shakespeare.”
“I’ll have you know that my afternoon has not been ‘good’ and yours is going to be even worse,” Mr. Shakespeare replied.
Mr. Poe put down the pages he’d found that morning in his in-box. They listed the ordinary fortune-cookie fortunes he’d written this past week. Every one had been rejected by Mr. Shakespeare and his editorial committee.
Mr. Poe was not surprised they’d turned down “Your corpse will wither and rot” or “The conqueror worms are hungry for you.” He had expected such squeamishness.
Nonetheless, he’d been disappointed that they also passed on some of his more optimistic fortunes, such as “Death will come for you soon, cheerfully.” What was objectionable about cheerfulness?
He had planned to take the matter up with Mr. Shakespeare. However, judging from his boss’s current mood, this seemed like the wrong moment.
“Did you send more communications to your nephews?” Mr. Shakespeare cried.
Mr. Poe shrugged. “‘There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.’”
Mr. Shakespeare stamped his foot in rage. Nothing got under his skin like having his own quotes used against him. Nonetheless, he pulled himself together. “Exactly what message did you send down?”
There was no use lying. “‘The farm is a brilliant trap.’”
“Trap?”
Mr. Shakespeare put his hand to his forehead. Then he removed from the pocket of his sixteenth-century doublet a copy of the message that had actually gone through.
“‘Trip’ instead of ‘trap’?” Mr. Poe muttered, worried.
“A typographical error of just one letter and look what you’ve got. What you intended as a warning becomes the opposite.”
“Oh, no,” Mr. Poe whispered, wringing his hands. “One little mistake…” Then he stopped, his expression brightening. “Still, all may not be lost.”
“You also did something with a brochure and a book, true?” Mr. Shakespeare accused.
Mr. Poe nodded. “Thankfully, that should straighten everything out.”
“
What,
exactly, did you do?”
Mr. Poe was proud of his cleverness. “I slipped an old brochure for the Gale Farm and OZitorium between the pages of my classic story ‘The Purloined Letter,’ which I knew the boys would interpret to mean—”
“And in that brochure there was an old photograph of the boys in the arms of their mother and father?”
Mr. Poe nodded.
“And beneath that photo?”
“I inserted a line that could not be misinterpreted.”
“And that line was?” Mr. Shakespeare prodded.
“‘Stay far away!’”
Shakespeare sighed and shook his head. “Another misprint, Mr. Poe.” He sighed. “Ah, who’d imagine two letters could change so much?”
Mr. Poe swallowed hard, worry creeping in again. “So…what did the line in the brochure actually say?”
“‘Stay for a day.’”
“What!”
“There’s nothing we can do.”
“I’ll write another fortune cookie, and this time—”
“You’ll be writing
no more fortune cookies
, Mr. Poe. You’re being demoted.”
“But the boys are misled!”
Mr. Shakespeare shrugged. “‘Fortune brings in some boats that are not steer’d.’”
Shakespeare was quoting Shakespeare again. But that wasn’t really what made Mr. Poe angry. He was furious with
himself.
“Your quote is true enough, Mr. Shakespeare. But tell me what happens to boats that are steered in exactly the wrong direction?”
“They crash on the rocks, Mr. Poe.”
Mr. Poe stood and pushed past Mr. Shakespeare, heading for the exit.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Mr. Shakespeare called.
Mr. Poe didn’t answer. He hadn’t the slightest idea. Still, there had to be
something
he could do….
THE
next morning at breakfast in the Wagon Wheel Diner, Aunt Judith mashed the pile of strawberries and swirls of whipped cream atop her pancakes into a sweet, chunky mass. Uncle Jack did the same, whistling in approval at the sheer heft of the breakfast before him. In the meantime, Allan and Edgar poked holes into the yolks of their poached eggs, watching the yellow run over the slices of wheat toast before they drenched it all in rivulets of Tabasco sauce, which flowed red as blood over the whole thing. Sometimes watching the Poe family eat was like watching a horror movie.
“How’d you sleep last night, boys?” Aunt Judith asked between bites of strawberry and pancake.
“Sleep was OK,” Edgar answered.
“But our waking hours were better,” Allan added as he dropped onto the table the brochure they’d discovered in the old book. “Have a look at this.”
Aunt Judith picked it up. “It’s like the fax in my purse.”
Allan shook his head. “This is an older version.”
“What’s different?” asked Uncle Jack.
“This picture,” Edgar said, pointing. “It’s us as babies with Mom and Dad.”
“Mal and Irma?” Aunt Judith was intrigued.
Uncle Jack took off his glasses in order to get a better look.
Aunt Judith put on her reading glasses and leaned forward, bringing the brochure to within an inch of her face. “What do you know? It
is
Mal and Irma holding you boys!”
Uncle Jack nodded. “They must have come through here when they took one of their crazy vacations.”
“Oh, they loved these kinds of wacky roadside attractions,” Aunt Judith recalled, smiling. “They’d have surely stopped at that toy-robot museum back in Pennsylvania, or that world’s largest ball of human hair in Missouri, just like you two wanted to do. They’d send us postcards. And they’d buy T-shirts and give them away as joke gifts.”
“They thought those places were funny,” Uncle Jack said.
“They are,” the boys agreed, identical grins on their faces.
Uncle Jack chuckled. “You’ve got their sense of humor.”
Aunt Judith looked at her nephews. “Your mom and dad sure loved you two.”
Edgar and Allan never knew what to say to things like that—things that somehow, mistakenly, made them feel a little undeserving.
So they said nothing.
Edgar took back the brochure, brushing off a spot of powdered sugar.
“What a lovely coincidence,” Aunt Judith said softly. Her expression was a little misty.
The boys didn’t bother reminding her what they thought of coincidence. Instead, they slipped the brochure back into the middle of the old book for safekeeping.
“Did you call the professor to tell him we’re on our way?” Uncle Jack asked her.
“I tried,” she answered as she put her reading glasses back into their case. “But his phone’s been disconnected.”
Uncle Jack looked confused. “That’s strange.”
Aunt Judith shrugged. “He probably forgot to pay the
bill. It happens. Besides, when he called us at home he said to just come to his amusement park and we’d be sure to find him.”
“He doesn’t just work there,” Edgar reminded his uncle. “He lives there too.”
“What an odd duck,” Uncle Jack said.
“Since he’s a professor, it’s probably more accurate to call him an odd ‘doc’ rather than an odd ‘duck,’” Allan observed.
“Finish your breakfasts,” their uncle muttered, and retreated behind his newspaper.
The front page immediately caught the twins’ attention—not a news story, but the printed name of the paper itself, which ought to have read
Instead, it was misprinted:
“A typo that actually spells the word ‘typos’?” the boys wondered aloud.
“Can you believe such carelessness at a metropolitan newspaper?” Aunt Judith asked.
“What’s journalism coming to?” Uncle Jack said, distractedly returning to the sports section.
The boys glanced around the crowded diner. Across the room, a man at the counter was reading from the same morning newspaper, but the front page of
his
copy read
KANSAS CITY POST
.
No typo.
Just the Poes’ newspaper? Surely no mere coincidence.
“‘Typos,’” the boys mused. “Not ‘typo,’ but plural.”
“Well, it’s off to the Gale Farm,” Uncle Jack announced as he refolded the paper, grabbed the check, and began sliding out of the booth. “We’re off to see the Wizard, so to speak.” He chuckled at his own joke.
Aunt Judith slid out after him. “Won’t Roderick be glad to see his boys! It’ll be just a couple hours now.”
Edgar and Allan still hadn’t moved from the booth. Their brains had begun working to process this latest, strangest message:
Typos…
“Let’s go,” Uncle Jack said. “We haven’t come all this way just to sit in a diner.”
“Boys?” Aunt Judith pressed.
As if in a dream, they rose as one and followed their aunt and uncle out of the restaurant, their brains humming in perfect coordination.
Typos
…
Then they stopped.
Might some of the recent mysterious messages have contained typos
?
“Oh no,” they said in unison in the parking lot.
In a flash, they grasped what this latest communiqué meant.
“Wait!” they cried as their aunt and uncle opened the car doors to climb in.