The Case of the Old Man in the Mailbox Read online

Enigma Squad

  The Case of the Old Man in the Mailbox

  By Brian Jacobs

  Excite Kids Press • Seattle, WA

  Copyright © 2010 by Brian C. Jacobs

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or

  portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address

  Excite Kids Press, PO Box 2222, Poulsbo WA 98370

  www.EnigmaSquad.com

  First Excite Kids Press trade paperback printing October 2010

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  ISBN 9781936672073

  For my Mackenzie Ruth,

  who continues to show me that children still love to read.

  Chapter 1

  Return to Sender

  Hello. My name is Tyler Pate, and I want to tell you a story, partially because I love telling stories, but mostly because the police need me to document everything that happened these past two weeks. Mom and Dad say my buddies and me are lucky to be alive. I think they’re just overreacting and we weren’t really in any danger. You know how parents are. Actually, I think this could be a whole lot of fun for Scooter, AJ, and me, or maybe even a great business opportunity. Either way, it’s been a pretty exciting couple of weeks for the Enigma Squad.

  “What kind of a name is that?” you may ask. Well, a pretty cool one, I’d say. But I’ll get into that a little bit later. Anyway, I haven’t heard any better suggestions, so the name sticks for now.

  You know, I think what makes this story so cool is that Scooter, AJ, and me are just three ordinary kids who happened to be in the right place at the right time, but let me start the story at the beginning. I don’t want to get ahead of myself. First, let me tell you a little bit about the three of us.

  AJ Seeva lives two doors down from me in the Westridge housing development here in Silverdale, Washington. I have no clue what the A and J stand for and he won’t tell me. He says it doesn’t stand for anything, but I think he’s just embarrassed. It probably stands for some girly name that would ruin his image. And let me tell you, AJ has “the image.” He’s tall, good-looking, plays practically every sport our Junior High offers, and is well liked by everyone who knows him. I think he could probably go out with any girl he wanted to if he wasn’t so sure he was going to marry my older sister, Tamara. There is only one small problem with that dream of his: my sister is two years older than him, and she would never date anyone who was my friend. Unfortunately she has never told him that directly, and he isn’t exactly catching on very fast. Which brings me to the last thing I need to tell you about AJ: there’s a lot he doesn’t catch on to. Need I say more?

  Scooter, on the other hand, is AJ’s opposite. He lives in our neighborhood, too, but on a nearby dead-end street. He also likes to play a little soccer, but those things are about all he and AJ have in common. Scooter’s real name is Sean Parks, but only his parents can get away with calling him Sean. Everyone else gets a long lecture on Christian names and nicknames and surnames and the Roman Empire and how his Great-grand-something-or-other changed ships in the mid-Atlantic and Sean is spelled wrong and I don’t even remember what else. After five minutes of his ranting and raving, all I learned is someone in his family must be Italian and that he REALLY wants to be referred to as Scooter. As you can imagine, I’ve only asked him about it once.

  Except for freaking out over his name, Scooter is very mild-mannered. Nothing seems to get him stirred up, except maybe a complex math problem. Besides being a straight-A student and the skinniest guy in the universe—I mean it; he is the only guy I know who can hide behind a flagpole—Scooter’s an inventing wiz. He comes up with the coolest, craziest ideas for gadgets—and then actually makes them work! Anyway, for a guy who spends half his life tinkering in the garage, he’s pretty wiry. He’s not the athlete that AJ is, but when we played on our junior-high soccer team, Scooter was the one who darted around pestering our opponents. Maybe that’s why he likes to be called Scooter—he never seems to run; he just kind of scoots around and steals the ball from the other team while they wonder “where did that geek just come from?”

  Anyway, I think that the three of us have agreed that AJ is really the athletic one, and Scooter is the smart one, and I’m the… well, I’m just me. It’s hard to explain what that means other than the fact that I’m not really good at anything. I don’t say that to put myself down; I just mean that I’m average at everything. Seriously. AJ is tall, Scooter is short, I am right in the middle. Scooter is a genius, AJ is… not, and I’m an A-/B+ student. AJ speaks before he thinks. Scooter thinks before he speaks. Me? Well, I guess I do both at the same time. When we get in a bind, Scooter takes too long to find the right words, AJ will almost always find a way to say the wrong words, and so I’ve learned to think on my feet and talk us out of any jam we get into. Hey! I guess there is one thing I’m really good at: “sweet talking.” Though my dad would probably say my gift is just “talking.”

  So I’m a middle-of-the-road kind of guy, and I think that’s why AJ and Scooter hang out with me—I’m just a freaky compilation of parts of both of them, and so there are parts of me that they both can relate to. My other theory is that they don’t have a choice since I live practically next door, but I’ve chosen to ignore that one for fear of crying myself to sleep at night. Oh, one more thing. As you might be able to tell, I do have a knack for sarcasm. This comes naturally when you have an older sister who is in love with herself. So I will do my best to stick to the facts and not give any sarcastic remarks, but I am not making any promises. Anyway, I better get started.

  It all began a couple Wednesdays ago when AJ, Scooter, and me were over at Scooter’s house. Come to think of it, we’re always over at Scooter’s house. Scooter has a really high-tech computer that his dad built from scratch, and his mom is always baking us goodies, so where else would we go? Well, on this particular day we were watching wrestling on TV. Scooter was sitting on the couch while AJ and me were demonstrating the new moves we were learning on the living room rug.

  I was just about to attempt a pile driver on AJ’s head when Scooter’s dad marched through the front door waving a couple of letters in his hand.

  “You know, I am sick and tired of these stupid letters coming to my house,” he huffed.

  “What’s the matter, Dad? More junk mail?” Scooter asked.

  “No, actually, it looks like some of these are important bills,” Mr. Parks answered. “The only problem is that they are addressed to a Mr. Stanley P. Mathisen.”

  “And the address is correct and everything?” I asked.

  “Yes, Tyler, and that is what is so vexing. I have been getting these letters off and on for months, but in the past few days I have received quite a few. I went to the post office, but they said they can’t do much if the mail is being delivered to the address on the letters, there’s no forwarding address for Mr. Mathisen, and the letters are coming from more than one sender.”

  “How many would you say you have gotten total?” Scooter asked, curiosity written all over his face.

  “Well, I’ve collected a whole basket of them on the corner of my desk since the last time I informed the post office. There are a couple of Yellow Express phone bills, though I was sure they’d stopped doing business in this part of the state, a couple of personal letters, a magazine subscription bill, and a whole lot of junk mail. This Mr. Mathisen could have all the credit cards he wanted if he were receiving his mail!”

  Mr. Parks chuckled at his joke. “I just have to find some time to take the important letters to the post office so they can be returned.”

  That got me thinking: it would sure stink to have all those bills that
needed to be paid going to the wrong address. At least the bill collectors will be hunting in the wrong place when that time comes!

  Mr. Parks left the room, rambling on about the Post Office and addresses and the Federal Government and higher-priced stamps and other higher taxes and Social Security and a bunch of other stuff that I wasn’t listening to. He does that sometimes, and AJ and me pretend to listen only when we eat dinner there.

  So on Thursday, the three of us were walking home from school. AJ and me had dropped off our book bags at our respective houses and checked in with our parents, and now the three of us were turning onto the dead-end street where Scooter lived. In the distance we could see a man in a blue windbreaker and black pants hunched over the Parks’ mailbox. He had a full head of silvery hair, and he appeared to be sorting through the mail inside.

  “Hey, Scoot! Your dad’s home pretty early for a school night, isn’t he?” AJ smirked. I’m not quite sure, but I think he was trying to make a joke.

  “No way, AJ,” Scooter said matter-of-factly, “that’s not my dad.”

  “Then someone is messing with your mail; that’s a federal offense!” AJ explained. (I’m not entirely sure how he knew that, but I can guess. He said it like it was a line straight from some TV courtroom drama.)

  “Hey, what are you doing?” AJ yelled as he ran down the street.

  The man slammed the mailbox door and ran towards the back of Scooter’s house with AJ in hot pursuit, while Scooter and me quickly fell behind. The man looked fairly old and didn’t move that quickly, but he had a very long head start on AJ and disappeared behind the house long before AJ even got to Scooter’s mailbox. By the time we got to the backyard, there was no sign of anybody.

  “Well, he probably went into the woods,” Scooter said, out of breath, pointing to the thick trees that lined the north end of his grassy yard. “Unless you’re on a trail, those woods are pretty dark and dense. I’m sure that guy is long gone or well-hidden by now.”

  “What do you suppose he was doing?” I asked.

  “That was probably that Mathisen guy coming to pick up his mail!” AJ laughed.

  “Actually, AJ, you could very well be right,” Scooter said, with his “thinking face” on.

  Whenever he sank into deep thoughts, Scooter would make this face where one side of his mouth would frown while the other side would smile. I would show you what it looks like but I can’t do it. Believe me, I’ve tried.

  “Maybe he is Stanley Mathisen,” Scooter continued. “Maybe he’s a transient and is just using our address as a place that he can receive mail. Maybe he usually grabs his mail right after it gets delivered most days; hence, no one has ever seen him before. And the letters that Dad has at the house are from times when Mr. Mathisen could not get to the mailbox without being seen before someone in my family got there. Today he just happened to pick a bad time, and we showed up while he was looking for his mail.”

  “But what about the phone bills your dad had?” I asked. “How many bums do you know who have a phone?”

  “Yeah, you’re right. That part puzzles me.” Scooter scratched his head.

  Well, if Scooter was puzzled, you can probably imagine how AJ and me felt. We both looked at each other, shrugged our shoulders, and headed for Scooter’s back door. Scooter continued to stare out toward the woods for a few more seconds and then followed us inside for our daily after-school raid of the kitchen.

  When we walked in the back door, I knew immediately what we were going to have for an afternoon snack. The smell wafted throughout the entire downstairs—chocolate chip cookies! In the kitchen, we saw Mrs. Parks putting another batch of freshly baked cookies on aluminum foil on the counter. We each grabbed a hot cookie off the foil almost simultaneously, and to our surprise and Mrs. Parks’ chagrin, half of each cookie stayed on the sheet.

  “Well, aren’t you boys hungry,” she said with a scowl. “I wish you would have waited till they cooled a bit. Now just look at the mess you’re making.”

  Scooter had melted chocolate all over his fingers and chin. “Sorry we messed up the flawless geometry, Mom!” We all laughed; the counter had perfect rows and columns of cookies except for the three gooey messes we’d just made.

  “Hey, Mrs. P, guess who we just saw outside at the mailbox?” AJ said, with his mouth half full of cookie.

  Scooter’s eyes got big, and he gave AJ a quick elbow in the ribs as he interrupted, “Yeah, Mom, we just saw Stanley Mathisen checking our mail!” He let out a huge fake laugh and with his eyes encouraged us to do the same.

  Mrs. Parks frowned. “Now, boys, that’s not very funny. This Stanley fellow is probably in serious trouble unless we get him his mail. How would you feel if people were trying to find you, but couldn’t?”

  Scooter tugged at AJ and me as he started out of the kitchen. “Yeah, you’re right, Mom, that wasn’t very funny.” He looked directly at AJ. “It was definitely the WRONG thing to say. We’re sorry.” And with that we headed around the corner and upstairs to Scooter’s room.