The Case of the Old Man in the Mailbox Read online

  Chapter 4

  Vanishing Act

  It took a little convincing to get my sister to take my turn at doing the dishes after supper. I reminded her that I knew about her secret crush on Bobby Jenkins from Math class, and she decided that doing dishes was a small price to pay in order to keep it secret. I was out my front door by 7:30, and AJ and me were on Scooter’s back porch in our ninja uniforms by 7:50.

  We didn’t know the first thing about karate or any real martial arts stuff, but we were wearing all the black clothes we owned and we figured that was good enough to make us at least half-ninja. We had our walkie-talkie volume set very low, just loud enough to hear Scooter barking instructions from his perch in his bedroom window above us.

  “All right, fellas,” he said, “remember, we don’t want to cause Mr. Mathisen any harm; we just want to corner him so we can ask him some questions.”

  “So what should we say to try and get him to stop running away from us?” I whispered back.

  “I would just yell out his name, and that ought to freeze him in his tracks, if only for a moment.” Scooter replied.

  “Alright, Scoot, let’s go to radio silence for a while.”

  “Ten-four,” he said, and then the radio went silent.

  AJ and me sat in near silence on the lawn chairs on the back porch for what seemed like a couple hours, but it was probably closer to forty-five minutes. The wind rushing though the treetops almost lulled me to sleep. Only an occasional distant dog barking kept me from dozing off completely.

  Scooter came back on the radio. “What do you guys think? Should we call it a night and try again Saturday?”

  AJ would have none of it. “No way! My parents said I could be out until 11 p.m., and I am not going home a second before that.”

  I knew my mom was a little more “involved in the parenting process” than AJ’s parents were (eleven o’clock is pushing it with her, even on a Friday), especially since my dad was currently out to sea with the Navy. But I didn’t want to be the one to crash the party, so I kept my mouth shut.

  “All right, fine by me,” Scooter whispered back on the radio, “I’ll stay as long as you guys do.” He chuckled into the walkie-talkie. Of course he would stay as long as we would. The difference is he would be sitting comfortably in his bedroom while we had to be perfectly quiet sitting in the dark with a chilly breeze that still hadn’t figured out it was supposed to be spring already. Plus, I could have sworn there was a screw that was working its way loose from my lawn chair and burrowing into my left leg.

  Suddenly jingle bells started ringing. In the stillness of the night, the chorus of jingle bells was much louder than I thought it would be. This experiment might wake up the whole neighborhood!

  AJ flicked on the back porch light. Now the whole backyard was aglow with light. I grabbed the walkie-talkie and jumped up. More bells were clanging now. AJ and me could clearly see a man on his knees in the far left corner near the blackberry bushes. He was having a heck of a time trying to untangle himself from the yarn.

  We sprinted across the lawn. Scooter screamed over the radio, “He’s over by the blackberries!”

  “I know! We can see him!” I huffed as we neared the treeline.

  More bells jingled as Mathisen struggled toward the dense woods. He had only fifteen feet to go. If he got that far, we knew we would never find him again.

  When we got to the woods, AJ and me encountered the first flaw in our plan. Although the light lit up the backyard fairly well and allowed us to see a six-foot man clambering through the woods, it did not help much at seeing all the yarn we had laid out for our boobytrap.

  As I jumped over the first piece of yarn, I landed squarely on the next. I crashed to the ground. My flailing arms caught AJ’s ankle, and he toppled headfirst in front of me. The bells really jingled now. As we untangled ourselves, Scooter came back on the radio, “He just went behind that big madrone tree. He is out of my line of sight!”

  AJ and me scanned the woods. The old man was nowhere to be seen. I started in the direction we had last seen the man, but AJ grabbed me by the shirt and stopped me. “Hold still and listen.”

  As we stood and listened in the silence, we realized just that—it was silent. After about ten more seconds of listening, I got back on the walkie-talkie. “Scooter, do you see any more movement?”

  Scooter replied, “No, nothing. For all I know, he’s standing right behind that tree. I haven’t taken my eyes off it since he ducked behind it.”

  “Which tree is that?”

  “It’s at your ten o’clock, Tyler. The tree is about twenty inches wide and about ten feet from the edge of the thicker woods.”

  I turned a little to my left and immediately knew which tree he was talking about because all the other trees were way too skinny for a person to hide behind. Even that one would have been tough, but I thought if Mathisen turned sideways, he might fit. But from our vantage point, we could see the backside of the tree, and there was no old man in sight.

  AJ and me slowly high-stepped our way to the tree, trying not to kick any more jingle bells. When we reached the tree, our conclusion was the same: still no old man. I radioed back to Scooter as I put my hand on the tree. “It was this tree, right?”

  Scooter replied, frustration in his voice, “Yes! That is where I last saw him. He went behind that tree and didn’t come out.”

  “Well, two seconds later, the bells stopped ringing,” I said. “There is no way he could have made it back into the dense woods without making any more noise.”

  “Or without us seeing him,” AJ added.

  AJ and me stood there puzzled for a minute until Scooter appeared at the back porch with a high-beam flashlight. Scooter “jingled” his way over to us through the maze of yarn and bells and immediately turned on the flashlight, shining it straight up into the trees.

  “Well, we know he could not have made it back to the dense woods. And if he had gotten over to those blackberry bushes, he would be making all kinds of other noise, so he must have climbed a tree,” he reasoned.

  We nodded in agreement and followed the flashlight beam with our eyes as Scooter scanned the branches above us. After about five minutes of seeing nothing, we gave up.

  AJ was the first to speak up. “I don’t know about you guys, but this is freaking me out!”

  “It’s as if he vanished into thin air,” I said.

  Scooter was trying to keep a cool head. “Once again, things just don’t add up. How could some old guy just disappear?”

  No one offered an answer or explanation, probably because any answer we could give wouldn’t explain much. All I knew was this Mathisen guy had just reached a new all-time high for Mysterious.