The Case of the Old Man in the Mailbox Read online

  Chapter 11

  Have You Seen This Man?

  The next morning, Scooter was back to his normal arrival time at the bus stop. In fact, he was waiting, impatient with excitement, as AJ and me approached. I could tell he was excited because whenever Scooter gets excited (which is pretty rare), he gets “happy feet”—his feet never touch the ground at the same time. He looks like a four-year-old who needs to use the bathroom.

  “Hey, Scooty-wooty, do you need to use the potty?” I joked as we joined him at the bus stop.

  “Ha, ha. Shut up and listen,” Scooter said abruptly, pulling an envelope out of his backpack. He held it up so we could see it but not read what was written on it.

  “So after you guys left last night, my dad came home, and he was a little irritated because he had gotten yet another piece of mail addressed to our friend Mr. Mathisen.” He brought the envelope down so we could read the outside of it. It was a phone bill addressed to Stanley Mathisen with Scooter’s address on it. It was still sealed.

  “You mean you haven’t opened it yet?” I asked. “It might hold more clues about who this guy really is. Maybe he calls some of the same people all the time, and that could tell us how he spends all his spare time.”

  “I don’t think I should open this, Ty; it’s not my mail.”

  “Let me get this straight: You think it’s wrong to open an old man’s mail, but it’s OK to break into his house?” I asked, amused at the double standard.

  “Well, technically, I did not break into his house; he was sleeping on my property! Anyway, I just don’t feel right about opening this guy’s mail now that I know he’s just trying to live his life and not bother my family.”

  “Then why the Happy Feet?” AJ joked. “Why are you so excited about a stupid letter if we can’t even open it?”

  “Look in the address window. Do you see what color paper is inside?” Scooter asked with a smirk and that twinkle in his eye.

  “Pink,” AJ answered. “What does that mean?”

  “Well pink usually means you are late paying a bill. So it appears that Mr. Mathisen is behind on his phone bill payments.”

  I tried to chime in and keep Scooter from drawing out the conversation, “And this gets you excited because…?”

  “Because this gives us another ‘in’ with Mathisen. If we don’t hear from him in a couple days, then maybe we suggest to him that we could deliver his mail directly to his front porch for him. You know, another way that we can build his trust. He should definitely go for it; it eliminates his risk of being seen at our mailbox again.”

  “That’s a decent idea. Not one worth dancing around like you have to use the bathroom, but still pretty decent,” I teased. “So are we back to waiting for Mathisen to reply to our letter again?” I looked up to see our bus heading down the street towards us.

  “That is still the plan,” Scooter replied.

  “That’s what I thought you’d say,” AJ muttered as the three of us piled on the bus.

  AJ and me are similar in that neither of us have ever been very good at waiting. What we didn’t know at the time was that we wouldn’t have to wait for long.

  School went by without much excitement, except for the fact that I was on fire during the lunchtime basketball game. I only missed one shot the entire time! This made the second half of the school day fly by because all I could do was replay all those beautiful shots over and over in my head. It is games like that which make a guy keep coming back to the basketball court. You never know, it could happen again!

  After school, we tossed the football around in Scooter’s backyard for a while and then decided that if we ever wanted Mathisen to come out of hiding, we should probably not be around to spook him. So we went inside the Parks’ garage and watched as Scooter went back to work on an invention he’d been tinkering with a few days before all this excitement started.

  He was building a long-distance light switch. I thought the idea was brilliant. It would be really useful. I mean, don’t you just hate it when you get in bed with a good book and get all comfortable and then you decide it’s time to go to sleep, but the light is still on and the switch is all the way across the room? When that happens to me, I end up throwing any article of clothing that happens to be near me at the light switch in hopes that I’ll hit the switch just right and it will turn off. Well, that rarely works, and I always have a bunch of clothes scattered on the floor in the morning. Scooter’s contraption was going to have much better results.

  He took an old remote-control car he had gotten many Christmases ago and removed the gears attached to the rear tires. The remote control still worked, so even though the gear was not in the car anymore, if he pushed the lever down on the remote control, the gear would start spinning. His plan was to attach the gear to the light switch panel and tie a string to the gear and to the light switch itself. Then, when he pushed the remote control lever, the gear would start spinning, the string would wind up on the gear, and it would pull the light switch down. Poof! No more lights!

  We were testing this new invention out on the light switch in the garage so that if Scooter needed any tools to “tweak” things, they would be nearby.

  We messed around in the garage for about an hour, and then I headed home for supper. We had tuna fish casserole. Oh, it’s better than you might think—especially when mom puts crushed potato chips or chow mien noodles on top. Really, anything crunchy usually does the trick. My dad even tried it once with corn flakes (without the milk, of course).

  We were just finishing dinner when the house phone rang. Sis answered but quickly gave the phone to me; it was Scooter on the line.

  “Hey, Tyler, what are you up to? Are you eating dinner?”

  “No, just finished. What’s up?”

  “Be outside in five minutes; we’re headed to the grocery store!”

  “Why? What’s going on, Scoot?” I asked, but the line went dead: he had already hung up.

  I grabbed my jacket. “Uh, Mom, I gotta go to the grocery store with Scooter. I’ll be back soon.”

  “Uh, OK…” She gave me a puzzled look. “Do I bother to ask why?”

  She had learned it typically wasn’t a good idea to ask “why” when it involved Scooter. If Scooter was involved, then a “just trust me” usually worked fine. Scooter enjoyed being vague on purpose—and it could be aggravating sometimes—but he had earned the right to be, because he always provided a good reason after the fact.

  “I honestly have no clue why,” I answered.

  “I figured as much. Just don’t be stupid, and be home by nine.”

  “Nine, mom?” I was taken aback. “We’re just going to the grocery store; it shouldn’t take that long!”

  “You are only planning on going to the store. We’ll see what happens. As long as you’re being safe, I don’t really care; just be home by nine o’clock.”

  “OK, Mom,” I replied as I ran out the door.

  I was expecting to see the Parks’ maroon minivan pulling into the driveway when I got outside, but instead a bright red Camaro with a sorry excuse for a muffler was rumbling down the street and slowing in front of my house. I recognized the car right away. It belonged to Jimmy Langsworth, Scooter’s next-door neighbor.

  Jimmy was a senior in high school, and he spent every waking moment he wasn’t in school working on that car. Tinkering under the hood, washing and waxing the body, and polishing the rims were all part of his obsession—I mean, hobby. I imagined that Scooter must have needed to go to the grocery store for something, ran into Jimmy working on his car in the driveway, and mentioned he needed a lift into town. Jimmy, of course, said yes. He was not one to miss any opportunity to drive around and show off his ride.

  As I walked toward the Camaro, AJ came flying out of the shadows on his bicycle and flew past the car and into my driveway, where he jumped off the bike while it was still moving and ran to meet me at Jimmy’s car.

  When I opened the door, I noticed that Scooter w
as already in the back seat. I looked toward Jimmy, and he stuck his chin forward and gave me the silent nod hello. Jimmy was never much of a conversationalist. Since the much taller AJ was also coming, I knew my place was in the back seat with Scooter so AJ could ride shotgun with those long legs of his.

  Once we pulled away from the house and Jimmy’s muffler stopped screaming at the neighborhood dogs, AJ spoke up. “So why all the mystery, Scoot? Why are we headed to the grocery store, of all places?”

  “Well, this is all based on a really big hunch, but this trip should prove to be worth it.” He was grinning from ear to ear and loving the fact that he knew what was going on and we didn’t. He shot a quick glance toward Jimmy in the driver’s seat and then went on, “I will fill you in completely when we get there.”

  I took that as my cue to be quiet, and so did AJ. So for the remaining ten-minute ride, we just listened to the hip-hop bellowing from the Camaro’s stereo. Jimmy was more than happy to turn it up and show off the limits of his speakers.

  The Camaro pulled up to the entrance of the Bag ‘N’ Save, and AJ grunted a “Thank you” as he opened the door and pulled himself out of the front seat and into the crosswalk in front of the store. Scooter and me piled out of the back seat to join him.

  On the other side of the parking lot were several high-schoolers leaning against their fancy cars. Jimmy said he was going to head over to show off his Camaro while we did our thing in the grocery store. Scooter said that would be great and that we would just walk over there when we were finished.

  After Jimmy drove off, Scooter began his story. “So after dinner, my dad was sitting down reading the paper like he always does. And you know how he likes to read the obituaries out loud?”

  “Yeah, sort of twisted,” I snorted, amused.

  “Yes, it is. But it can be funny sometimes. Anyway, he starts reading about this elderly guy named ‘Pete’ who had a fatal heart attack at the downtown Bag ‘N’ Save. He fell down right in the middle of the produce section. Apparently, this ‘Pete’ guy is in the grocery store almost every day and hangs out for a couple of hours. He knows everybody in the place, and he even tries to help out sometimes—straightening up shelves and stuff like that.

  “Well, after he died, they pulled out his wallet to see what ‘Pete’s’ full name is, and he had no ID, just some cash and a used bus ticket to San Francisco. So the newspaper is looking for help identifying this guy and locating family. And get this—here is the description they gave: ‘A white male about 5’ 10”, in his 60’s, wearing a blue windbreaker, with no jewelry except for a silver key attached to a purple shoelace, which normally hangs around his neck but was not on his person when he died.’”

  AJ spoke up, “So I don’t get it! What does that newspaper article have to do with us?”

  Scooter, in his usual cryptic fashion, said, “I think we may be able to help the newspaper out.”

  “Uh, Scoot, you are not suggesting that this old guy at the grocery store is Mr. Mathisen, are you?” I asked.

  “I am,” Scooter said, getting more excited every second. (His “happy feet” started again.)

  “Think about it, guys! He hangs around a grocery store all day. Wouldn’t you, rather than being cooped up in that shelter all the time? He was wearing a blue windbreaker when he died. Didn’t we see Mr. Mathisen wearing a blue jacket?”

  “We saw a glimpse of him from across the yard through the lens of a video camera,” I said. “I don’t think you can definitely say that was a blue windbreaker. Besides, this is Washington! At least half the state owns a blue windbreaker!”

  “Well, what about the key around his neck?” Scooter countered. “Remember how the shelter door locked by itself when it closed? I bet you Mr. Mathisen keeps that key around his neck all the time to make sure he never loses it…

  “It wasn’t on him when he died… and that’s why he was using the spare key that we found to get in the other day!”

  “Well, maybe,” I replied. “It’s a theory, at best.”

  “But the guy’s name is Pete!” AJ chimed in. “Er, well, it was Pete… ’cause he’s dead. Well, I guess it still would be Pete. Or would it? I don’t know!”

  “What’s your point?” I interrupted. I didn’t want AJ to lose an argument with himself!

  “The point is that Mathisen’s first name started with an S. Steven or Sammy or something.”

  “Sammy? Really? You think an old guy’s name is Sammy?” I laughed.

  “He’s actually pretty close,” Scooter defended. “His name is Stanley. Stanley P. Mathisen. And I bet you Jimmy’s gas money that the P stands for Peter!”

  “So what’s your big plan, Scoot? What do you expect to find inside that is going to prove your little theory? Ask the little old checkout lady if her friend Pete ever smelled a lot like blackberries?” I chuckled as I turned to walk inside.

  “Actually, I plan on showing her this picture.”

  I stopped in my tracks as he pulled a picture frame out of his pocket. I looked down at the picture he was holding out—it was the picture Scooter and me had seen on the bookcase in the underground shelter.

  “Did you—No! You didn’t!” I stammered.

  “Did he what?” AJ asked, trying to figure out what was in Scooter’s hand. (Scooter was facing me, so AJ couldn’t see the picture.)

  “I cannot believe you went back down there by yourself! What if Mathisen was in there?”

  “I knocked first!” he said.

  “Knocked where?” AJ begged again.

  Scooter went on ignoring AJ. “Besides, I had a hunch, remember?”

  “So I heard,” I muttered.

  “C’mon, guys, throw me a bone here! What did Scooter do?” AJ pushed us apart in order to catch a glimpse of what Scooter was holding.

  Finally Scooter ended AJ’s misery. “When Tyler and I were in the shelter, we saw this picture on the bookcase.” He handed the picture frame to AJ. “We believe it’s a picture of Mathisen at some wedding, perhaps his sister’s.

  “Anyway, when I heard about this old guy having a heart attack at the grocery store, I thought we could ask someone at the store if they recognize him. So tonight I got the key, went down to the shelter, and borrowed this picture. I would have just used the picture that Mr. Hull sent Tyler, but my printer is just black and white, so it wouldn’t have been the best quality. So I went down and got this one instead.”

  “Yeah, by yourself!” I complained. OK, I admit I was probably jealous that I missed out on the fun of going down that ladder again more than I was worried about Scooter’s safety.

  “Well, he did what he did, but we’re already here, so let’s go ask!” AJ said excitedly as he turned toward the sliding glass doors of the grocery store.

  As Scooter and me began to follow him, Scooter instructed us, “Now when we get inside, I will do all the talking. No one else, OK? I’ve been thinking this through, and we definitely don’t want them asking questions after we ask ours.”

  The store was fairly deserted now that the get-the-last-ingredient-for-dinner crowd had come and gone. Only two check stands were open. One was manned (or is it womanned?) by a teenage girl named Sarah. It was clear by her perfectly ironed uniform and the multiple stars on her name badge that she was a model employee. I was sure she would know all about “Pete.”

  The other cashier was a woman in her mid-to-late forties with graying blond hair. Her name badge said Gloria and proudly announced she had been serving for twenty-five years. She looked like it, too.

  I figured either of these diligent employees would know who Pete was and could answer Scoot’s questions, but Scooter walked right past the checkouts and ducked down the Breakfast aisle.

  “What’s the matter, Scooter, girl problems?” I joked.

  “Those two cashiers are the sort of people we don’t want to talk to,” he said. “They may have an answer for us, but then they are going to feel obligated to find out why we’re asking, get our names, and tur
n them over to the boss. Those are complications we don’t need.”

  He started walking, but then stopped and explained further. “What we need is to find a stockboy or someone who is going to be annoyed at our questions and will just answer so we will go away.”

  He turned and continued walking toward the back of the store. At the end of the aisle, we spotted an older boy in a rubber apron standing in front of the seafood department. He was spraying down the displays that earlier that evening had held the store’s “Catch of the Day.” He looked to be about high-school age, and the scowl on his face told me he would rather be doing homework than washing away putrid fish smells. Perfect.

  AJ and me hung back while Scooter approached the boy. “Excuse me, dude, er, Sir. I was wondering if you recognize this man here.” He held the picture out to the boy. The boy stopped spraying with the hose and pointed at the frame with a gloved hand.

  “Uh, yeah, that’s Pete. He croaked a couple days ago over in produce. Poor guy, he was probably too upset over losing his Purple Heart.”

  “Purple Heart?” Scooter asked. “Was he a war hero?”

  “Uh, no. He had this really shiny key always hanging around his neck on a fat purple shoelace. I called it his Purple Heart because when he walked in the store, it looked like he was wearing a medal. Anyway, he lost the key a few days ago, and he was pretty upset. The sad thing is, we found the key the day after he died. It was hanging on a hook on one of the bathroom stall doors. Turned it over to the police, but I don’t know what they’re going to do with it.”

  I thought to myself, Scooter’s right. As usual. It now made sense: for the past couple days, Mathisen had to use the backup key hanging from the tree because he lost the primary key at the grocery store.

  “I see,” Scooter replied. “Sounds like you knew him pretty well, then. It must be hard.”

  “Yeah, you could say that. Tragic too, man. He used to come and talk to me all the time, made the work go by faster, you know? Say, where did you get that picture, anyway? Who are you?”

  “Oh, Pete’s my neighbor,” Scooter said, smooth as butter. “He said he was going to be gone for a couple days, and he asked me to feed his fish for him while he was gone. Well, that was a week ago, so I was starting to get worried. Then, I saw the newspaper article saying a guy matching his description had died here, and I just had a hunch it was Pete.”

  Scooter would usually choke up under this sort of pressure, but apparently he had lots of time to rehearse the conversation in his head, so he did fine.

  “Well, I guess I should let the boss know that you guys know who Pete really is.”

  “No, please don’t,” Scooter said. “I don’t want his family to first hear about his death from some grocery store manager. They should hear it from a friend.” He pointed to himself.

  “I will call the family tomorrow and have them call your manager to work out any arrangements and find where they took the body… I mean, Pete.”

  As hoped and predicted, the boy was relieved. “Fine by me, I am just glad someone knew who he really was. I thought the dude had no other friends but us here at the store… Well, tell his family I’m sorry for their loss… or whatever it is you’re supposed to say about these things.”

  He turned his attention back to the hose and started spraying again. Instead of walking back over to us, Scooter turned and walked back down the nearest aisle. I assume he did not want to be seen with us since that would not really fit into the story he had just told the fish-kid. AJ and me walked back down the breakfast aisle and met up with him at the front of the store.

  I think all of us were feeling sort of sad about the fact that Mr. Mathisen had no friends except at the grocery store. And I had sort of hoped our letter to him might begin some sort of friendship between him and us three boys. But none of that was going to happen now. It was clear everyone was having similar thoughts because no one spoke for the entire ride home.

  Jimmy pulled into his driveway and wished us all good luck as we piled out of the Camaro.

  AJ finally broke the silence. “So what do we do now? You said you would talk to the family; we don’t even know if he has any family!”

  “Well, I guess we have to go see if we can find one,” Scooter replied.

  “You want to invent a family for this guy? That’s messed up!” AJ exclaimed.

  “No, Stupid. I am saying we go find his real family. I say we head down to his room and see what we might discover about his family. He must have family somewhere; he at least has a sister or something.” He held up the picture once again and pointed at the woman in the wedding dress.

  “Well, I’m up for that!” AJ said. He was excited to see the inside of the bomb shelter for the first time.

  Me? I was not quite as excited. I had already seen it, and now that Mr. Mathisen was dead, the thought of rummaging through some dead guy’s stuff creeped me out and saddened me at the same time.

  It was now 7:30 p.m., so I knew I had an hour and a half before my curfew. AJ and Scooter probably had a little longer. AJ’s parents were out at social functions almost every night of the week and wouldn’t even know when AJ came home. And as I said before, Scooter was not a late-night person, and normally he would put himself to bed long before his parents would force him to.

  The three of us ran down the strip of grass between Jimmy’s house and Scooter’s and then clambered up onto the back porch. The back porch light was on, and it illuminated much of the backyard. But neither the porch light nor the fleeting daylight was really penetrating the woods, and Scooter thought we would need more light to find the key as well as to see once we went down the ladder. He went inside the back door while AJ and me sat down in the two lawn chairs and waited.

  Scooter came out a minute later, wearing a windbreaker and carrying two flashlights. I looked at him as if to ask, “Well, did you say anything to your family?”

  Scooter read my face correctly. He spoke up as we started across the lawn. “They were all sitting down watching TV, so I just hollered ‘I’ll be outside’ and didn’t wait around for questions.”

  AJ grabbed one flashlight and ran off to get the key hanging from the tree while Scooter and me searched for the hidden entrance to the blackberries. When we got to the metal lid, I lifted the lid and Scooter shone the flashlight down in the hole for me to descend the ladder first. Honestly, I knew Mr. Mathisen could not have been there since the time Scooter and me had, but that didn’t keep the hairs on the back of my neck from tingling as if we were walking into some sort of a trap.

  Scooter handed the flashlight down to me and then climbed down as well. While we waited for AJ to show up with the key, I waved the flashlight around the walls to see if there was anything we’d missed the last time we were down in the hole. Nothing. I also shone the light on the floor, which revealed our note in a crumpled ball. So he did find the note! Poor Mr. Mathisen never got a chance to respond to it. Scooter picked it up and sadly stuffed it in his jacket pocket.

  AJ showed up with the key and started descending the ladder until Scooter reminded him to shut the lid so light wouldn’t shine everywhere outside. So AJ went back up, closed the lid, and then climbed back down. AJ tried to hand the key to Scooter, but Scooter insisted that since AJ missed the first visit behind the locked door, he had earned the right to go first this time. AJ didn’t argue and quickly went over, put the key in the door, and pulled the lever down.

  I wish I had brought a video camera. I would have loved to capture the look on AJ’s face as he took in everything he saw inside the shelter. He must have stood in the doorway for two whole minutes, his jaw wide open, his eyes, as big as ever, darting to and fro trying to process everything they were taking in. I think our snickers behind him snapped him out of his daze, and in typical AJ fashion, he made a bee-line straight for the refrigerator.

  “I wonder what this guy liked to eat!” he said as he opened the fridge door.

  “AJ, listen,” Scooter reprimand
ed, “we have a bigger priority right now. We have to find something that will help us locate this guy’s family.”

  We all looked around. It looked like finding anything might actually be a difficult task, because there didn’t seem to be anything “personal” lying around to rummage through.

  AJ decided to continue with his “quest for knowledge” in the fridge, while Scooter decided to dig around the bookshelf and the stack of newspapers next to it. That left me with the small table with the shoebox and sewing kit. The sewing kit was nothing special, so I quickly moved on to the shoebox.

  As I opened the lid, I knew I had hit the jackpot. The box was full of opened mail addressed to Stanley P. Mathisen: a letter from his buddy in Chicago, a couple old phone bills, a letter from the Jungle Furniture Company, a couple credit card applications, and a few other random pieces of junk mail that Mr. Mathisen must have thought were important enough to keep.

  That was all very interesting, but what I found at the bottom of the box would prove to be our biggest lead.