4
Gobbymawlers vs. Sprols
On Miss Melba’s loveseat, Joel-Brock jerked awake, confused.
“Hope you slept okay, Joel-Brock,” Miss Melba said.
He fisted his eyes and sat up. “I walked half the night, from Crabapple Circle to Big Box Bonanzas.”
“You did that a week ago. Last night you slept here on my loveseat.” Miss Melba touched his forehead. “Holy Moses, punkin, you’re sort of sizzlin’.”
Joel-Brock wondered why he let her call him punkin when he didn’t let her call him babycakes. “I didn’t sleep much, Miss Melba.”
“And why should you sleep? You probably won’t until—” Here she stopped.
“I kept thinking of Mama’s note. Do you still have it?”
“Sure.” Miss Melba tweezered the note from an apron pocket and spread it out on her lap. “I should have gone to the police or DFACS or someone your folks know, but the gobbymawlers said not to, and so did your mama, and—”
“Yes ma’am?”
“Punkin, those gobbymawlers scare me. I didn’t want to push them to a meanness we couldn’t undo. So I didn’t do a thing.”
“Something that needs undoing is the Lollis kidnapping,” Joel-Brock said, “if it can be undone. And if the gollyboogers—”
“—mawlers.”
“—if the gobbymawlers jailed them. So I hope they did—put them in a place they can escape from, I mean.”
Miss Melba sat utterly still, except for stroking his silky hair.
“What are gobbymawlers?’ Joel-Brock asked. “I mean, really.”
Miss Melba faced this expected question: “Most folks call anyone working at Big Box Bonanzas a gobbymawler, anyone wearing khakis and a saucer-shaped cap. I work for BBB, so I’m a gobbymawler, but not the grabby me-first licknickels that most people mean by that tag. Did you think I was?”
“No ma’am.” And he didn’t. How could he possibly?
“Really, Joel-Boy, the licknickels are usually the not-quite-human servants of Mr. Borsmutch, founder of Big Box Bonanzas. The nasty name for them is sprols, and they seem to live in or near the warehouse under our store. I think.” She continued: “I think that—instead of know it—because Ms. Roberta Ripper-Gee says they’re part person, part ghoul, and part fungus and that Pither M. Borsmutch raises them underground.”
Joel-Brock lifted his eyebrows so high that his scalp tautened.
“Rumor runs that they’re nasty things that do what Mr. Borsmutch wants, without him egging them on, but want what they want. One day, rumor also runs, he’ll trade out his human workers for such gobbymawlers, sprols, and when he does, they’ll take over and do everything in BBB: shelf-stocking, checking shoppers out, everything.”
“Miss Melba, that stinks.”
“Sprols do exist. I work with them. So do you. Most are okay—but some, inside or outside the store, become ghoulish things looking for rights to set wrong or wrongs to make even wronger.”
“Do you see them around here . . . on Jarboe Street?”
“Not here, but in neighborhoods ’round our store, drifting like an ashy stink at our loading docks or just outside the Garden Center—haints, what you’d call ghosts. Do you sort of get what I’m saying?”
“No ma’am.”
Miss Melba barked a laugh. “Well, it’s not just around work, punkin. I also know they’re out and about, creeping into our world.”
“So we should lay low on Jarboe Street forever?”
Another hard laugh: “What a fretter you are, my worrywart orphan.”
“I want my family back—but not messed up or killed. I’d also like to kick some gobbymawler butt. Or should I say ‘sprol butt’?”
“You shouldn’t say butt at all,” Miss Melba said. “But I hear you, punkin.”
“What can we do?”
“I got a notion that could maybe help—hire you a private eye.”
“Miss Melba, I don’t know any private eyes.”
“I know two. One works part-time at Big Box Bonanzas.”
“Doing what?’
“Shoplifter spotting.”
“Gee. Could you—?”
“Oh, Lord, I smell bacon char. Yes, I could. But let’s eat first, okay?”
*
That afternoon, Miss Melba drove Joel-Brock back to the store in her sporty hybrid car. It had the body of a 1950s Nash Metropolitan on the frame of a beat-up Jeep. It looked odd on the road, but Joel-Brock liked riding in it for the same reasons that a dog likes to poke its head out a car window—the sun, the wind, the street noise, the smells.
Once in Electronics, Joel-Brock fiddled with the flat-screen to pull in an afternoon Braves game featuring his grown-up self, J.-B. Lollis, and a new rival team, the Nashville Cats. When he had no luck, Miss Melba said, “Go stock shelves with Shel and Kyle until Augustus shows.”
“I just bug ’em, ma’am,” Joel-Brock said. “Besides, they never talk.”
“You know they’re sprols, don’t you? Good sprols.”
“No,” he said, glum that he still had not set off in search of his family. He glared at Miss Melba thinking that she had somehow delayed him, but recalling that when she’d driven him to his house to pick up Josie, he had scared the Chihuahua. Figuring him for a bad guy, she’d hidden under the seat for the ride to Miss Melba’s place.
Tonight, Miss Melba drew back from Joel-Brock’s glare. “What?”
“Take me to see the detective.”
“He doesn’t always come in at the same times. I’m not even sure he’s—”
“What’s his name, Miss Melba?”
“Shoplifter-spotters don’t like their names blabbed around. ‘A nameless detective is an effective detective,’ Vaughn always says.”
“So his name is Vaughn?”
Miss Melba fanned the air, as if to dry her nail polish. “Golly-shoot, I didn’t mean to blab it out like that.”
“Miss Melba, you promised to help.”
“I did, but—”
“Whisper his name—all of his name. Whispering isn’t blabbing.”
“Okay.” Miss Melba approached. “It’s a funny one. It sort of marks him out as . . . different.” She bent down and tickled his ear with her breath: “It’s Vaughnathan Valona. You got that? Vaughnathan Valona.”
Joel-Brock imagined a big-shouldered man with olive skin wearing a charcoal-striped suit and alligator shoes. He’d once seen such a galoot in a crime show on TV, a guy nobody else called by name. Now he knew the detective’s moniker and also that the Lollis family’s kidnapping was almost as good as solved.
“Thanks.” Joel-Brock kissed Miss Melba on the cheek.
Forty minutes late, Augustus Hudspeth lumbered into Electronics. “Why haven’t you all turned on the Braves on ESPS-Tomorrow?”
Joel-Brock said, “I don’t think that channel is ESPS-anything, sir.”
“Yes it is: Extra-Sensorily Perceptive Sportsnews, a channel for seers and tea-leaf readers. Turn it on, boy, and tell me what mischief you two are hatching.”
Joel-Brock turned on the FōFumm. “None, sir. Miss Melba just told me our store detective’s name.”
“Vaughnathan Valona—crafty old Vaughnathan Valona? How is our sneakiest gumshoe doing, anyway? I don’t see him that much anymore.”
Miss Melba said, “A crafty spy tries to go unseen.”
“Not always,” Augustus said. “Often, the obvious presence of a shoplifter spotter deters a thief—Department Store Management 101, Miss Berryhill.”
Miss Melba grabbed Joel-Brock’s arm and dragged him out of Electronics.
“Where are you all going?” Augustus called after them.
“To find the invisible man,” Miss Melba said. “And to hire him to help our future home-run hitter get his family back.”