6
Adelaide-Bridget Coe
Hurrah: Mr. Valona wanted to start investigating at once. He would cease trying to catch the golf-ball-thieving writer not merely because Miss Melba and Joel-Brock had thwarted his plan, but also because he now had a more important goal.
But to Joel-Brock’s dismay, before embarking on their adventure, the detective insisted that they return to Electronics. He wanted to watch the TV on which Miss Melba, Augustus, and Joel-Brock had allegedly witnessed his future self swatting home runs and doing interviews.
“But it’s true,” Joel-Brock said. “Don’t you believe us?”
“Of course I do, kidster, but seeing is substantiating.”
“Earlier, though, I couldn’t quite get the FōFumm tuned in to the future.”
“I’ve got a knack for electronics. Effective eavesdropping demands that skill. I also want to equip us for our search and its attendant perils.”
They proceeded to Electronics via the aisles and cut-throughs that anyone could use—not via the ghostly tunnels by which Miss Melba and Joel-Brock had just rocketed to Sporting Goods. As they walked, Miss Melba asked, “Do you really plan to take Joel-Brock with you, Vaughn?”
“Why not? Forgive me—maybe I should say, ‘yNaut’? ”
“You’ll put him in danger—‘attendant perils,’ like you said.”
Mr. Valona laughed. “Which we’ll face together. I need backup, Melba. You don’t plan on coming, do you?”
“Backup? You need an army. And I wouldn’t go even if you could turn my hair battleship-gray again.”
“I’d get a release from the boy’s parents if I could, but . . .” He let this comment trail off. “So I got his permission instead. Besides, it’s time.”
“Past time,” Joel-Brock popped off.
During this walk, a host of new buddypards in khaki uniforms and pancake berets appeared about the store. Had Big Box Bonanzas bumped into all-out hiring mode? Joel-Brock’s mama often griped about how hard it was to get anybody to wait on her. Tonight, however, the store teemed with buddypards and/or gobbymawlers—of the human, not the ghostly, kind.
Joel-Brock nodded at all these workers. “What’s going on?”
“A mustering of bodily forces,” Mr. Valona said, “hinting that Pither Borsmutch has sent most of his spectral troops to Sporangium. These human workers will try to take up the slack.”
“Sporangium?” Joel-Brock said.
“Another country.”
“Another country?” Joel-Brock repeated.
Mr. Valona glanced at Miss Melba. “Is there an echo in here?” He kept striding. “Of course there’s an echo—every crook and nanny of this store shelters a microphone. I should know: I installed them.”
“But what about this other country, Sporangium?”
“Patience. You’ll soon find yourself exploring that fungal paradise.”
Joel-Brock could not think of an earthly place—Siberia, Somalia, Death Valley—that sounded less appealing than Sporangium. Maybe he should run home to Crabapple Circle—where nobody would be waiting for him but the moody Will S Gato. So he kept walking with his new-found companions toward Electronics.
There, Augustus Hudspeth had collared a small, coppery-haired girl in a denim miniskirt and a sleeveless powder-blue jersey. Mushroom-shaped metal earrings dangled from her lobes, and Mr. Hudspeth was shaking her as if to dislodge not just those earrings but also every red-gold hair on her head.
“Good golly,” Miss Melba said, “Augustus has gone bonkers.”
Mr. Hudspeth swung about, bringing the girl with him. Then, seeing Mr. Valona, he shouted, “You should have arrested this riot grrrl!” Then, to Miss Melba: “You’re late getting back. I returned to find this freaky outcast trying to steal the FōFumm on display. I couldn’t believe it!”
Mr. Valona said, “The poor girl would need a wheelbarrow and a block and tackle to steal that set.”
“Let go!” she cried. “I just wanted to see if it works. But it doesn’t.” She wriggled free of her captor. “Ow! I am so going to sue you.”
Augustus Hudspeth said, “Even if it worked, you couldn’t afford it.”
“What did you mean, ‘freaky outcast’?” Mr. Valona asked.
Miss Melba put her arm around the girl, who initially tried to resist this hug but then relaxed a little and accepted it.
Mr. Hudspeth said, “Upper management fired her about two weeks ago.”
“It’s been barely a week!” the girl objected.
“Her name’s Adelaide-Bridget Coe,” Mr. Hudspeth went on. “She sabotaged our people in Shipping for three or four months, daily.”
“Call me Addi. And as far as ‘sabotaging’ goes, I don’t dispute it.’ ”
“Augustus,” Mr. Valona said, “if I didn’t know this young woman before tonight, blame those in Management who never told me about her.”
Mr. Hudspeth said, “Sorry, Vaughn, but I blame you,” and strode away, leaving Joel-Brock to wonder where he went on his impromptu “breaks.”
“You may not know me,” Addi told Mr. Valona, escaping Miss Melba’s hug, “but I greatly admire your work.” Out from the older woman’s wing, she looked smaller, but in fact stood an inch or so taller than Mr. Valona, who was almost exactly Joel-Brock’s height.
Mr. Valona thanked Addi, took out his yNaut, and held it up to the flat-screen set that Mr. Hudspeth had accused Addi of trying to steal.
“Why’d you get hung up on this TV?” he asked her. “You could have switched on any of these. Behold: a UBM, a Duende, a Q-Cumber, a Phiew, a Soma, a Kumquat. I fail to understand your fascination with this ungainly FōFumm.”
Adelaide-Bridget Coe glanced at Joel-Brock, and something curious about her eyes and mouth made him catch his breath. Meanwhile, Mr. Valona jacked his yNaut (a Kumquat Cirkuitries product) into the big flat-screen. The yNaut glowed crimson in his hand, x-raying his finger bones.
The TV set flickered on, showing a game between the Braves and the Nashville Cats at the Cats’ stadium in Smyrna, Tennessee.
An announcer said. “The Bravos and the Kitties are tied 5 to 5, and the toughest toms in Nashville’s order are coming up again.”
“How did you do that?” Addi asked Mr. Valona.
“Which?” Joel-Brock asked. “Turn on the TV or call up the future?” Everyone looked at him as if he had materialized as magically as had the FōFumm’s picture or the unexpected future, and he glanced about for an empty box to crawl into. Then a Nashville Cat homered to right, breaking the tie. “I should never watch,” the boy said. “That always happens.”
Addi said, “I chose this set because I heard it could do just as it’s doing now.” She nodded at the players on its screen. “Look at those uniforms. Must we all become fashion retards—like the gobbymawlers in this sorry place—to live in the future?”
Mr. Valona said, “From whom did you hear of the set’s capabilities?”
“A friend in Shipping, and after the Lollises’ kidnapping, I checked it out. Then that butthead there”—nodding in the direction that Mr. Hudspeth had gone—“showed up, and you saw the rest.” No one spoke, for her words “after the Lollises’ kidnapping” hung before them all like neon-red skywriting.
Joel-Brock blurted, “What do you know about the kidnapping?”
“Who wants to know?”
“Joel-Brock,” Miss Melba said, “the brother of the sweet girl those gobbymawler sprols also grabbed.”
Addi looked at Joel-Brock closely. “No ma’am, I don’t think so.”
“You should think so,” Joel-Brock said. “You visited our house after my family got stolen. You pounded on our door. You looked like a gobbymawler. I thought you’d come to get me too and that bunches of other gobbymawlers would leap out of the bushes to grab me.”
“You were probably inside robbing the place,” Addi said.
“Yeah. I stole this baseball costume. Then I walked to Big Box Bonanzas to turn myself in to its world-famous store detective.”
“You took your time doing it,” Addi said.
Joel-Brock reddened. “I have short legs and I walk slow.”
“Addi, you knew the Lollises had a son,” Miss Melba said. “Shipping records said so. You went to their place to tell him something, didn’t you?”
“Oh.” Addi peered at Joel-Brock even more closely. “Oh. Maybe it is him.”
“I’ve got a question.” Joel-Brock squintied equally hard at Addi. “What did you come to our house dressed like a gobbymawler to tell me?”
“That’s my question too,” Mr. Valona said.
Addi went to Joel-Brock and grasped his hands. “It’s easy to say but lots harder to do something about: I know where those so-called gobbymawlers took your family, and I want to help you free them.”
“Oh, Lord.” Mr. Valona closed his eyes. “Do I need a permission slip for this one, or has she already killed her kin and set up a separate household?”
“Vaughnathan!” Miss Melba said.
*
As it turned out, Adelaide-Bridget Coe—whose last name could have instead been Doe, Noe, Roe, or Poe, etc.—had run away from home at age thirteen. Ever since, she’d lived apart from her biological parents, who, everyone supposed, must have treated her badly. Why else would she have run away?
In any case, Vaughnathan Valona, Joel-Brock, and Addi set off toward Sporting Goods, leaving Melba Berryhill as the lone buddypard in Electronics. As they traveled, Mr. Valona and Joel-Brock asked Addi questions, and Addi answered, or didn’t, as she judged appropriate to their individual “need to know.”
Of course, even before they left Electronics, they had wanted to know where the gobbymawler sprols had taken Joel-Brock’s family. An answer to that question would tell them their destination. Everyone, after all, realized that they must venture underground to bring about this rescue—but where, exactly?
“I’ll tell you once we dive down the rabbit hole,” Addi had said.
Mr. Valona said, “Are you perhaps pretending to know, to trick us into taking you along?”
“No sir. I have a nifty personal code—I refuse to lie.”
“Really?” Joel-Brock said.
“Yes. I loathe liars. So if I say a thing, either that thing is true or I deeply believe it’s true. Don’t you have similar nifty codes?”
“I’m afraid not,” Mr. Valona said. “Not one such nifty code.”
Joel-Brock said nothing.
“That’s just sad,” Addi told them. “If you ask me a question, I’ll tell the truth, if I can, or else I won’t reply at all. I have no obligation to say anything more. I call that the ABC rule of PPP, meaning Personal Privacy Preservation. I’ll always tell you just what ‘you need to know.’”
“But you decide which information we need or don’t need?”
“Of course, sir, for if it relates to me, who else would know better?”
“What if it doesn’t relate to you?” Mr. Valona asked.
“I still wouldn’t answer if you really didn’t need to know.”
Mr. Valona said, “You understand what a person’s refusing to answer can lead to, don’t you, Miss Coe?”
“More courtesy and kindness, I would hope.”
“Often,” Mr. Valona said, “torture.”
“What?” said Addi, scandalized.
“Mobsters, terrorists, and even governments use it to squelch the virtues you’ve just cited,” Mr. Valona told her.
“And you call people ugly names,” Joel-Brock pointed out.
“Only if they deserve it,” Addi shot back. “And I’ll bet you do too.”
When Mr.Valona laughed aloud, Joel-Brock asked him, “Are we really going to take her with us?”
Mr. Valona told Addi that if she indeed wanted to go, she must answer his next question with total honesty.
Addi narrowed her smoky green eyes. “What is it?”
“Augustus says you sabotaged the people in Shipping. He claims that’s what led Management to can you. What did you do, exactly?”
“Ah.” As they entered Sporting Goods, Addi relaxed. “Nothing much: I sent Big Box Bonanzas shipments to the wrong places. An order of lingerie for a fashion show in Atlanta arrived at a convent in Kentucky. Some ice-fishing gear flew to an orphanage in Costa Rica. A disabled widow near the Mojave Desert got a set of water skis. You know, that sort of thing.”
Joel-Brock mulled this confession, but Mr. Valona gave Addi and him backpacks and let them fill them with canteens, casting rods and line, flashlights, beef-jerky packets, Frisbees, Lost-in-the-Woods golf balls, etc. During this spree, Mr. Valona shot photos with his yNaut. These he emailed to the checkers upfront, charging every item to his own buddypard Dock-Me Card. Joel-Brock and Addi, warily stink-eyeing each other, stooped farther and farther over under their backpacks’ increasing weight.
Mr. Valona asked Addi: “Did you enjoy sending merchandise to these slyly off addresses?”
“Of course I did—it was fun.”
Joel-Brock said, “It was lies, despite a personal code that doesn’t let you lie.”
“But I did it for bigger reasons than just mis-sending stuff.”
“Yeah? Like what?”
“Before, I was talking about in my personal relationships. But in Shipping, I was saying something about unfair hiring practices, our putrid pay, or how Big Box Bonanzas makes every town they show up in look like every other place they’ve ever built a store. Besides that—”
“How does sending people’s stuff to the wrong places say all that? My mama held protests outside BBB with signs that said exactly what she meant. She never gave anyone a wrong address. She never just lied.”
Recalling how he’d hated his mama’s outspokenness—or his embarrassment at her complaints about a store he liked—Joel-Brock felt a hot shame, a battle between his fondness for Big Box Bonanzas and his anger that sprols from the store would kidnap his family because Sophia wanted Management to behave better.
“Okay, okay.” Addi shook her head. “I did it because I wanted to get fired. I hated working here, but I needed the money. I still do.”
“So do you want to go with us just for something to do?” Mr. Valona challenged her. “Or do you expect us to pay you for your services?”
“I want to help, to make up for the bad crap I did earlier.”
“The bad crap you took pride in—until Joel-Brock called you on it?”
Addi gazed at the floor.
“Are you acting now? Trying to flimflam us again?”
Joel-Brock felt a twinge of guilt. “Let her come, sir. She’s confused. So am I.”
Maddeningly, Addi kept her lips clamped tight.
“You sure that’s what you want, Master Lollis?”
Joel-Brock nodded.
“Okay, then, kidsters. Follow me to the Garden Center.”
And so they headed toward it—but before they got there, Addi detoured into an alcove selling hairdryers and bought a big, battery-powered hairdryer that Joel-Brock regarded as a truly stupid purchase—why not put an anvil in her backpack? Afterward, though, he detoured into Toys to add to his pack a double handful of cute wind-up pigs, three to each hand. Mr. Valona immediately asked him what he was doing
“We’ll need some distracters, sir—for us, when we’re bored, or for the bad guys if we get into any tight spots.”
“Distracters?” Mr. Valona said.
“Yes sir—distracters.”
At length, they did reach the Garden Center, a department stocked with plants, fertilizers, wheelbarrows, hoses, and so on. There, Joel-Brock realized that Mr. Valona had meant all along for Addi to go with them. Why else give her a backpack and let her load it before she satisfied his curiosity about her motives? Only if he had already made up his mind about Addi would he have done that. But Mr. Valona had also wanted Joel-Brock to want her to go with them, so he’d set up their walking interview to let him voice his doubts about her, but also to forgive her for breaking her own code of behavior, and then to ask her to go with them. Mr. Valona was one smart man.