5
Vaughnathan Valona
At a desk in Accounting, Miss Melba asked the manager, Roberta Ripper-Gee, if she’d seen Detective Valona. Ms. Ripper-Gee had a head the size of a grown male lion’s and a mane of frosted tawny hair. “I saw him in the Garden Center. Or maybe in Automotive, or maybe in, uh, well—” She stuck.
“What was he wearing, Roberta?”
“That’s hard to say—he’s always changing. Maybe a sailor suit and an old pair of brogans. Maybe a baseball costume like your nephew’s here.”
“It’s a uniform, not a costume,” Joel-Brock said. After picking up Josie and some fresh clothes for him, he recollected, Miss Melba had put his uniform through her washer at least twice. It sure smelled better now.
Ms. Ripper-Gee said, “Oh! Mr. Valona was wearing tweed and riding an escalator up from the lounge to Sporting Goods.”
An escalator? Did Big Box Bonanzas have an escalator? The building consisted of a single story on a huge slab. Shoppers either walked inside it or rode in electric carts with bulb-horns to warn others of their approach. Miss Melba thanked Ms. Ripper-Gee for this lead and tugged Joel-Brock away—from Accounting to a farther office, Product Recalls, to yet another department, Warranty Nullification, and on to another, Dunning for Dollars.
Joel-Brock sensed that this store was a much bigger thing than a mere link in a chain of such stores. On its outskirts and in its under-depths, he sensed, lay a complex of rooms, tunnels, galleries, dungeons, etc., that spread out beneath Georgia and possibly the entire United States. It unfurled like the roots, threads, and fruiting bodies of a continent-spanning, upside-down fairy ring of mushrooms. And if there was one “food” Joel-Brock hated, which his daddy loved, it was mushrooms.
In the Dunning for Dollars floor space, Miss Melba dragged him into a passage that twisted back into the main store. In this tunnel, they could see out, but customers and new hires could not see in. In fact, for most people, this corridor did not exist. Joel-Brock and Miss Melba moved through it like ghosts—until he let go of her hand and planted his heels, and she too halted. The tunnel through which they’d whisked had glassy flickering sides, and the people beyond it carried on their activities heedless of them, like fish in an aquarium. “I’m having a qualm,” the boy said.
“A qualm?”
“Yes ma’am.” His misgiving had grown from a hunch stemming from guesses about the gobbymawlers and also from a vision that had struck him, one that sprang from an odd sense of the layout of Big Box Bonanzas and its hidden branches into the world below. “I don’t know, it’s all awfully hinky.”
“And what does hinky mean, pray tell?”
“I hear that word on TV cop shows. It means a kind of off-ness—you know, all sorts of fishy stuff. And I’m not just qualmified, I’m scared. This whole place is starting to heebie-jeebie me.”
“Well, do you want to talk to Valona or not?”
When Joel-Brock squeaked, “yes,” Miss Melba seized him again, hung a right in the flickering tunnel, and pulled him into a trunk line that took them to Sporting Goods. There they popped out like Star Trek adventurers materializing after a beam-down, but without terrifying anyone into heart attacks, if only because no one had seen them. Then they strolled past fishing rods, hunting gear, and baseball costumes—uniforms—trying to get their bearings. A hissing sound, like a basketball with a major valve leak, struck their ears: “Pssssssst, pssssssst, pssssssst!”
Joel-Brock nudged Miss Melba and nodded upwards. A small adult face peered down from the top of a ten-foot-tall shelving unit. This unit held golfing items of every kind—some of doubtful usefulness, including bobble-head dolls of Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson.
“Vaughnathan?” Miss Melba ventured.
The face overhead peered farther over the shelf edge. “Who else?” said the small mouth on this small face. “I wish you’d chosen a better time, Melba.”
“A better time?”
“You’ve interfered with a sting. It’s like you scared off the last ivorybill a single second before I could take its picture.”
“Ivorybill?” Joel-Brock said.
“A rare, if not extinct, variety of woodpecker,” the doll-like man said. “Don’t they teach you anything in school nowadays?”
Joel-Brock winced in apology.
“I guess they’re too busy prepping you for tests that maim your spirits, run off our best teachers, and soothe the consciences of pea-brained superintendents.” The man had a lilting voice that could not have been sweeter if he had sung these words. Neither Joel-Brock nor Miss Melba replied. The man’s high perch and cool displeasure at their arrival had stunned them to silence. Indeed, Miss Melba would have preferred a rattler’s bite to the dignified anger of Vaughnathan Valona—for, as Joel-Brock deduced, this small man bore that very name.
Mr. Valona somersaulted to the shelf below him and shinnied down the big unit’s other shelves to the floor. He wore a silk-lined tweed waistcoat, a tan linen-weave shirt, and tweed knickers. Although full-grown, with a head of bright flaxen hair, semicircles under his blue eyes, and a thin golden mustache, Mr. Valona stood not an inch taller than Joel-Brock, who this past year had keenly felt his own lack of height. If Miss Melba had taken them both in tow, anyone seeing the three together would have mistaken them for a foster mother and her wards on a back-to-school shopping trip.
“What,” Mr. Valona said, “brings you here with such exquisitely rotten timing?”
Miss Melba hugged the detective, introduced him to Joel-Brock, and told him the boy’s entire story since the disappearance of his family. She reeled off his mama’s note from memory, described their goofy interactions with the FōFumm TV, and synopsized their lives since Joel-Brock’s move to Jarboe Street.
“And now you come to me?” Mr. Valona said. He clapped a hand on Joel-Brock’s shoulder. “To hire me?” He seemed tiny kin to Joel-Brock, as if you could buy a sibling in this store as easily as a plug-in nightlight. “If that’s your plan, kidster, you should have hired me the first evening you came to Mr. Borsmutch’s store. Your family’s trail grows colder by the minute.”
“Don’t blame him, Vaughn. I’m the foot-dragger.”
“Yes you are, Melba. But you get some credit for keeping him fed during your ridiculous delay.” He smirked. “Now, how do you propose to pay me? Away from Big Box Bonanzas, I charge three hundred dollars a day—plus expenses.”
“You’re yanking my leg,” Miss Melba said.
“Why do you think I’ve taken a second job with the robber baron of modern-day business bigwigs? I try to redeem its shortcomings by application and wiliness, but still I work beneath my pay grade.” He sighed.
“My daddy always said the only beneath-you job is one you do poorly.”
“Did your daddy ever work for Pither M. Borsmutch, Melba?”
“No. He only dug sewer lines or drove a taxi.”
“I take my hat off to him.” Mr. Valona pantomimed tipping a hat, and Joel-Brock decided that the man liked wearing disguises—for example, his old-style golfing outfit—because they kept him from having to wear the khaki jumpsuits and pancake hats that most of BBB’s buddypards wore. “I’m sure your daddy brought steadiness and wiliness to both those jobs.”
“I don’t know about wiliness,” Miss Melba said.
“I pride myself on my wiliness. I—”
“Like Wile E. Coyote?” Joel-Brock asked.
“No,” Mr. Valona said. “My wiliness usually ends well. To date, I’ve avoided setting myself afire, holding a lit stick of dynamite in my mouth, or falling into a canyon pursued by an anvil.”
As politeness required, Joel-Brock said, “That’s good.”
“Yes it is. Would you care to hear the stratagems I’d planned to deploy to catch a known shoplifter—plans that your arrival totally ruined?”
“Have we got time for that?” Joel-Brock asked.
“No, but engaging me to investigate your family’s kidnapping may make up for the grim irreversibility of your procrastination.” And he told them of his suspicion that a rich writer was “pilfering” golf balls from Sporting Goods. Even in summer, he wore an overcoat with deep pockets, into which he would funnel the balls and tote them out to his limousine.
“Why would a rich writer steal golf balls?” Miss Melba asked.
“This writer steals them because he loses half a dozen every time he plays.”
“How do you know that?” Miss Melba asked.
“I’ve caddied for him. Moreover, this writer steals balls because he’s a confirmed cheater who always writes lower numbers on his scorecards than he shoots. I don’t fault writers as a group—only this particular dirt bag.”
“How did you plan to catch him?” Joel-Brock asked.
Mr. Valona took his yNaut from his waistcoat pocket. “Photographic evidence.”
“That’s our bestselling model!” Miss Melba seized it from him and examined it as if she’d never seen one before. “It’s not only a camera, but also a phone, a text-messaging platform, a compact computer, a TV set, an electronic note pad, a GPS device, an electric razor—with a nose-hair trimmer—and, finally, a cocktail mixer.”
“Right you are,” Mr. Valona said. “A moment ago, I received word on it that this writer I’ve told you about, clad in an overcoat, was heading toward Sporting Goods. Then you all arrived.” Mr. Valona grabbed the yNaut back. “But I’d planned to have more than photographic evidence. This thing also works as an explosive detonator.”
Miss Melba frowned. “What explosives does it . . . detonate?”
Mr. Valona pocketed the device, whirled, and seized a box of a dozen Lost-in-the-Woods golf balls from a shelf. He spun back around as if the box held rubies or chocolate truffles. “Each of these boxes contains one ball full of a colored powder I can detonate with the yNaut. That act blows open the box, stains the shoplifter’s clothes and skin, and thus marks that person, indubitably, as a thief.”
Joel-Brock imagined several shortcomings to this plan, but he still thought it sort of neat. His patience had fled, though, and so he asked, “Sir, how can we hire you if you want such a big fee?”
Mr. Valona put the golf-ball box back on its shelf. “Don’t fret the fee, kidster. I want to help you. But I don’t work for nothing—I’m not a pro bono kind of guy.”
Miss Melba explained: “He’s not taking you on as a charity case.”
“Then how will I pay?”
“Once we find your folks,” Mr. Valona said, “I’ll raise the issue with them.”
“Yes sir. But—”
“But what, worrywart?”
“Suppose you don’t find them?”
Mr. Valona grinned like the Moon. “But I will. We will, together.’”
“But what if we don’t?”
“Yes,” said Miss Melba. “What if you don’t?”
“Then I’ll just put off billing the boy until he’s raking it in as a Major League All-Star with the Atlanta Braves. Does that suit your cockerocity?”
“Vaughnathan!” Miss Melba said.