The Case of the Old Man in the Mailbox Page 17

  Chapter 17

  Grounded

  After crawling out of the blackberries, I grabbed my backpack off the back porch and walked around the side of the house and into the driveway. Only half the police cars were still there, and Scooter’s dad was now home. His red sedan was parked in the driveway, and it hadn’t been there earlier.

  As I walked down the street towards my house, I couldn’t help but think about Scooter and his dumb idea to try and keep this from the police and solve things without them. Scooter and his tunnel vision! He almost always had good ideas—and I felt like this detective gig was one of the best—but if he wasn’t willing to see how dangerous this case had become… well, then he wasn’t as smart as I always gave him credit for. Maybe he could create some gadget to knock sense into people, and then he could use it on himself!

  As I reached the bus stop, I remembered that I hadn’t checked in at home before heading to Scooter’s house. I was sure I would hear about that shortly. I glanced two houses down on my left—AJ’s house. No cars were parked in the driveway. Well, if AJ came to his senses soon and abandoned Scooter’s reckless idea like I had, then he could get home before his parents did. But I guessed it wouldn’t matter anyway; AJ never seemed to have any household drama, even if Scooter and me both did. I walked up to my door. Time to face the music.

  “Where have you been?” My mother’s voice was a mix of anger and worry. She had seen me walking up the driveway and pounced the second I opened the door. She was standing with hands on her hips in the entryway.

  “I was over at Scooter’s, Mom,” I said, backpedaling up against the front door.

  “Please tell me you did not get in the way of any of those police swarming his house!”

  Thanks for giving me the benefit of the doubt, Mom, I thought. “No, Mom. Apparently, someone broke in while we were at school and Mrs. Parks was out grocery shopping.”

  The fear and anger in her eyes did not subside, but at least her body language softened. “Tyler, I’m very glad you’re safe, but you need to think next time. You know that I like you to check in before you disappear to the neighbors’ house. You should have known that would be especially important on a day like today—when there are police all over the neighborhood.”

  “You’re right, Mom. I’m sorry.”

  “I’m sure you are sorry, but I don’t know if you completely understand how serious I am about this. The police came by here asking questions about seeing any strangers in the neighborhood. I had to call Mrs. Parks to find out where you were.

  “She told me all about the break-in. She also told me that you boys showed up, hung around for a while, and then went outside to play. Did it never occur to you that ‘Gee, my mom might be worried about me, and I should probably let her know I’m OK?’” She actually wanted me to answer. “Well, did it?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “But what?” she interrupted.

  “I-I-I don’t know. I—”

  “You don’t know. You thought about letting me know you were fine, but you don’t know why you didn’t. Well, I’ll tell you why. You were only thinking about having fun, Tyler. That’s all you were thinking. Well, I hope you had all your fun, because you’re grounded for the weekend. No TV, no computer games, no telephone, no playing outside with Scooter or AJ. Maybe next time you will respect my wishes.”

  “That’s not fair, Mom. All I did was not check in!”

  “Not fair? So you don’t think it’s a big deal not to check in, huh? You still don’t get it, Tyler. Well, maybe after a weekend stuck in the house you will understand.”

  “Fine!” I shouted as I marched up the stairs to my room. I slammed the door and flopped down face-first on my bed. I laid there with my face buried in the pillow, letting my anger ooze out into the pillowcase. I finally needed air, so I flipped over and stared at the ceiling. But I was still so mad! I couldn’t believe it: grounded for the whole weekend! For what? For not checking in? Didn’t Mom trust me? This was just so unfair.

  Staring at the ceiling, I got bored pretty fast, so out of curiosity, I decided to find out about more about this necklace we found. I imagined Scooter probably had already researched all this stuff, but since I couldn’t talk on the phone, I would have to find answers myself.

  I jumped on my computer, brought up a search engine, and typed in “TRUBE,” “Necklace,” and “Stolen.” I got lots of search results, but the first one gave me all the answers I needed. It was an article from an online newspaper called the B.C. Bugler.

  Apparently, the necklace that was sitting on a table below Scooter’s backyard was stolen from the private collection of Mr. Francois Budir, residing in Port Coquitlam just outside of Vancouver, British Columbia. The necklace from the “TRUBE” collection was reportedly worth $250,000, and Mr. Budir was offering a reward for any information leading to the safe return of his necklace. The reward itself was $5,000! The burglary was just the latest in a long string of burglaries of this very high-end jewelry line in the Vancouver area. Apparently, some crook had a thing for TRUBE jewelry.

  I sat back in my computer chair. Wow! I could think of a lot of things I would love to buy with $5,000. Well, at least a third of it, anyway. I began to daydream about all that money until I heard a knock at the door.

  “Come in,” I yelled, making sure the visitor heard the anger in my voice.

  My mother started talking as she opened the door. “AJ just called, and I told him you couldn’t talk because you were grounded all weeken—hey, I told you no computer!”

  “No, you said, ‘No computer games!’ I was just doing research, Mom!”

  “Tyler, you are always trying to get away with things based on some technicality. Why don’t you just obey me? You know whenever you’re grounded, you are not allowed on the computer. Why would this time be any different?

  “Now, not only are you grounded from all the things I mentioned before, but you will stay in your room all weekend, except to sit at the dining room table for meals.” With that, she shut the door.

  Whatever anger had left me earlier was back and had brought reinforcements. I fumed in my chair for a good half hour until dinner was ready. Then, I tried to make dinner as uncomfortable as possible for my unreasonable mother.

  I didn’t say a single word, and I made sure everyone noticed I was not talking. Other than the short phrases like “Pass the salt” and “More chicken, please,” no one else did a lot of talking, either. Finally, near the end of dinner, Mom spoke up.

  “I have a wedding to go to tomorrow at noon. It’s about three hours away, so I’ll be leaving bright and early and won’t be returning until late tomorrow afternoon. Tamara, I know you have that huge report to do this weekend, so I assume you will be working on your computer in your room most of tomorrow?”

  “Yeah, Mom, but I wanted to go to a movie with Shelley and Kristin tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Well, I need you to stay here and make sure Tyler does what he’s been told. He is grounded to his room for the weekend. Is it possible for you and your friends to go to the movie in the evening?”

  “Yeah, probably, but we wanted to go to the Matinee so it wouldn’t be so expensive.”

  “Well, I cannot miss this wedding.” She got up and grabbed her purse. “So here is twenty dollars to make up the difference for going to a later movie. Sorry for the inconvenience, but I really appreciate it.”

  “What about popcorn?”

  “Don’t push your luck, Tam.”

  Great, now I would have to deal with Lieutenant Tamara grilling me with questions every time I left my room to use the restroom or get a snack. I excused myself from the table and moped my way back upstairs to my room. I guess the silver lining in being stuck in my room was that I didn’t get stuck doing the dinner dishes.

  When I got back up to my room, I didn’t have a lot of motivation to start the extra homework my teachers always felt they needed to assign over the weekends; after all, I was going to have plenty of
time to do it over the next forty-eight hours. So I decided to work on organizing my baseball cards.

  Now that I knew there was a third of $5,000 reward money coming to me eventually, I had to decide how to spend it. There were a few cards I knew I needed to complete the set I was collecting, but I had to make sure I knew what I was missing. I wouldn’t want to spend any money to get a card I didn’t realize I already had!

  A half hour later, I had thirty or so piles of similar cards stacked all around me as I sat with my legs crossed on my bed. Every baseball card I owned was sitting in some pile on my bed. How was I going to put these back in the box in some semblance of order?

  A loud CRACK broke me away from my thoughts. It sounded like my bedroom window had just broken, but as I looked up, I could see it was still intact. As I watched, a small pebble hit the window. A small pebble, but still a very large noise. I knew it must be AJ or Scooter trying to get my attention by throwing rocks at the window.

  I looked at the piles of cards surrounding me and realized it was going to be hard to get up without disturbing the cards I had so neatly stacked. I tried anyway, and sure enough, as I slowly pushed down on the mattress to hoist my body up and over the cards, I knocked over a couple stacks, and many others toppled over on their own, and they all slid down into the depression in the mattress where I had been sitting. Great.

  Well, I thought, I guess I have plenty of time to fix it. A couple more rocks hit the window by the time I got over to it, and I looked down to see AJ bending over, looking for more rocks. When he looked up and saw me standing there, he gave me a nod hello, and only then did I dare open the window.

  “Dude! Ty, I need your help!”

  “I can’t help: I’ve been banished to my room all weekend!”

  “Yeah, your mom told me you were in trouble when I called. You’re not still mad at us, are you? I’m real sorry if you think we’re being stupid, but now we really need your help!”

  That’s right! I was still mad at those two goons! I was so upset at my mom that I forgot I was upset with AJ and Scooter for trying to be heroes. I quickly decided to help them. (Well, if I was going to be punished for putting myself in danger, I might as well make it worth it, right?) But I wasn’t going to let AJ off the hook quite so quickly.

  “Why should I help you? You guys are the ones who thought we could be the heroes and get the reward. What happened?”

  AJ explained that he and Scooter had left shortly after I did and gone back in the house. Scooter’s dad was still talking to Commander Coleman in the kitchen but all the other police had left.

  So AJ and Scooter went up to Scooter’s room and did their research on the computer and found the same article I had. So they now knew how much the necklace was really worth. They decided they would have to entice the furniture guys to come back out to the neighborhood and catch them red-handed somehow.

  Just as they were getting into the discussion, Scooter’s dad came into the room and announced that he was taking the whole family to a nearby motel for the night and that they would be back sometime in the morning. Scooter, in front of his dad, said, “AJ, I think I left my backpack at your house. You’d better call Tyler; he will know what to do.”

  AJ then explained that he had gone home and called me, but I obviously couldn’t answer the phone. “And so I came over here to talk to you. I have no clue why he said he left his backpack at my house. I found it sitting on the back porch right next to mine when I left. Plus, we were never even at my house! So now I’m really confused!”

  How is that any different than usual? I thought to myself.

  “Well, let me think about it,” I said. “Obviously, Scooter was trying to tell us something. Maybe it will come to me later. So my mom’s actually going to be out of town all day tomorrow, so why don’t you come back here after you see she’s gone and we’ll figure out what we should do next. I’d guess she’ll be outta here by 8:30.”

  “OK, Ty,” AJ said as he started to walk away, but then he turned back. “We’re cool?”

  I smiled. “We’re cool.”

  “Sweet,” he said as he turned and disappeared into the darkness.

  I closed the window and plopped down on the end of the bed. Any stacks of baseball cards that had been still intact went cascading off the bed and landed in piles on both sides. There went their mint condition. Oh well, I had more important things to worry about now.

  I decided for now not to worry about what Scooter was trying to tell me in his cryptic message to AJ and to focus on our three big problems: number one, how to get the furniture company crooks to come back so we could catch them; number two, where could we catch them; and number three, how could we catch them?

  It took me a while to figure it all out. It ended up being a pretty elaborate plan, but in the end, I had a pretty solid idea that would solve all three problems—at least I thought it would.