The Case of the Old Man in the Mailbox Read online

  Chapter 7

  What Time Is It?

  Scooter’s mom had fixed one of my favorite meals for supper—teriyaki chicken and rice. I don’t think she knew it was one of my favorites when she cooked it, but I wanted to make sure she knew afterward. “Thanks again for supper, Mrs. P; it really hit the spot! I think teriyaki chicken is one of my favorites!”

  “Yes, I know, Tyler. You have said so three times in the last ten minutes,” she laughed. “In fact, the best way for you to say ‘thank you’ is for you three boys to clear the table and get the dishes done.”

  A couple groans from AJ and Scooter were accompanied by a kick in the shins under the table from AJ.

  “Owwww,” I said.

  “What did you say, Tyler?”

  “Uh, nothing, Mrs. P. I said it would be my… er… our pleasure.”

  AJ tried to kick me again, but I had spread my legs and instead he just rammed his bare foot into the crossbar of my chair. I had to smile when I saw him grimace from the pain he caused himself.

  The dishes didn’t seem to take long at all to finish. I think partially because there were three of us working together (well, really only two because AJ mostly stood around complaining) and also because I was so distracted by my own thoughts. What was behind that steel door? Was it some sort of shelter for Mr. Mathisen? Why was it locked? Did he make the shelter? Did he find it? How long had it been there? Did Mathisen have the key? Did he have a spare stashed somewhere?

  My thoughts were interrupted by Scooter. “Hey, Tyler! Are you coming or not?”

  I crawled out of my fuzzy world of questions and back to the world that held the answers. I looked up at Scooter. “Huh?”

  Scooter motioned with his eyes that they were headed upstairs and said, “We have to finalize our plans for this weekend, let’s go!”

  Scooter was either speaking in code so his parents wouldn’t ask any questions, or I had been inside my own head for a long time and had missed a ton of the conversation.

  “Uh, OK, I’m coming,” I said as I wandered up the stairs a few steps behind Scooter and AJ.

  I reached the top of the stairs and turned left into Scooter’s room. “So, guys, we don’t actually have plans for this weekend, do we? That was just a—”

  “Code for ‘get your butt upstairs’?” Scooter interrupted. “Yeah. Though what I was thinking we should do could very well end up taking some of our weekend.”

  Scooter then went on to explain the plan, which he and AJ had been whispering about while I was daydreaming in the dishsoap.

  The way Scooter figured it, the old man was already pretty skittish from our previous encounters. But all three of us felt if we could just get his attention for a moment and explain who we were and that we meant no harm, he might actually listen.

  The problem was, how could we get his attention? AJ suggested that we just tape a note to the steel door, and when he came back to the shelter, he could read it. But Scooter pointed out that Mr. Mathisen might think it was a trap and never set foot down that ladder again. And besides, if he always came home in the dark, he might not even see the note.

  So Scooter suggested that we wait until Mr. Mathisen went into the hole and presumably went behind the steel door. We could then sneak over, quietly open the steel lid, and tape a note to the top rung of the ladder. That way, Mr. Mathisen would definitely see the note and would hopefully not feel trapped, because he would know that we knew he was down there and we chose not to disturb him. That was the theory, anyway. The question was, how would we know when he was down there? And that is where Scooter’s plan came into play.

  Since we were pretty sure Mr. Mathisen only snuck into the hole at night, we knew we wouldn’t be able to see him get in there unless we set up another alarm system, but we also didn’t want to scare him away. So Scooter came up with a silent alarm.

  Scooter had an old battery-powered clock radio that we used to take with us when we snuck over to the old drive-in. We would sometimes ride our bikes over into the woods near the theater and watch the movies from the shadows of the trees. We would tune the small radio to the drive-in radio frequency, and that little thing would put out just enough sound for the three of us to hear the movie but not enough to attract attention and get caught. Well, anyway, this little radio was central to Scooter’s plan.

  Scooter set the radio down on the window sill and ran out to the garage. He was back in a few minutes, carrying a large spindle of thin wire. He then had us rush out to the edge of the blackberry bushes with the radio, wires, and a wire cutter. He cut a small piece and attached it to where the positive end of the battery was supposed to fit into the back of the radio. The other end, he attached to the positive end of the battery. He then unrolled about twenty feet of wire and attached it to the negative side of the battery and ran the other end through the blackberries towards the metal plate. In the moonlight, you couldn’t even see the wire; if anything, it just looked like another blackberry branch. I wondered what it would look like in broad daylight, though.

  Then, Scooter cut another twenty-foot piece of wire and attached one end to the negative side of the back of the radio and ran the rest of the wire towards the metal plate. And when he touched the ends of the two twenty-foot wires together, the clock radio lit up with a bright red 12:00. When he pulled the two wires apart, the 12:00 disappeared. I was a little confused about how it worked, but Scooter turned on his “professor voice” and explained the technical details to us.

  “You see, men, the radio needs a complete electrical circuit in order to work. Normally, the positive and negative ends of the battery touch the positive and negative wires in the radio, and the circuit is a complete loop. I have made the loop much bigger by adding this long wire between the negative end of the battery and the negative connection on the radio. When I touch these two wires together, I am completing the loop, and the radio works.”

  He demonstrated again how touching the wires together made the time on the front of the radio start flashing. He resumed in his normal voice, “And when the wires are not touching, I basically have two dead ends instead of a loop.

  “Now, since the metal plate is… well, metal, if I touch both of these wires to different parts of the metal plate it also closes the loop, and the radio still works. So I am just going to put a small piece of paper here around one of the ends of the wire. The paper doesn’t conduct electricity, so the circuit will stay open. But when Mr. Mathisen comes and opens the lid, the paper should fall off. So then when he is inside and closes the lid behind him, the paper will be gone, and the lid will be touching both wires, which will close the circuit again.”

  He finished setting things up at the plate, and we all walked back out of the blackberry bushes. Scooter positioned the radio on the ground and turned the face of the clock towards the house in the direction of his window. “Now when Mr. Mathisen goes inside, the alarm clock time will pop on, and with those glowing red numbers, we should be able to see it from my window!”

  It really was an ingenious plan. I just hoped that Mr. Mathisen wouldn’t somehow find the wires attached to the metal lid and be scared away. The odds were that he wouldn’t be able to see them, with it being so dark outside, but you never know.

  We scrambled back inside to discuss the next step in the plan—the letter. Scooter sat down at his computer to begin typing out what he thought we should put in the letter. It took forever for us to agree on just what to say. We even argued over how to address the letter. AJ thought we should say “Dear Mr. Mathisen,” but Scooter thought it might be intimidating to the old man if he knew that we knew so much about him. Should the letter sound like we were strangers trying to get to know him (and perhaps come across with unclear motives), or should we sound like friends that are just trying to help him out? Anyway, the final letter looked something like this:

  Dear Sir,

  Our names our Scooter, Tyler, and AJ, and we are all junior-high students who live in this neighborhood. I
(Scooter) happen to live in the house that shares these blackberry bushes with you. We understand that you want your privacy and that there is a reason you have never come up to the house to introduce yourself or anything, but we hope that perhaps the four of us could be friends. Just so you know, this is OUR LITTLE SECRET. We have not told our parents about this hole in the ground that we found, and if it is your wish, we will keep it that way. If possible, we would just like to meet you in person and go from there. If this arrangement sounds agreeable to you, then please write at the bottom of this paper how you would like us to proceed and when we should meet, and we will be there. If you do not want to meet us, then please let us know that as well, and we will leave you alone from now on. Either way, please leave your response note at the base of the three fir trees that appear to be growing out of the same stump, which is located near the entrance to your tunnel into the blackberries.

  Your new friends,

  Scooter, Tyler, and AJ

  Scooter pressed the print button while AJ asked the obvious question. “So what if he says he doesn’t want to meet us?”

  “Well, I would bet anything he doesn’t,” I said. “You think he’d actually want to continue to hide down there if he knew that we knew he was down there all the time? He wants to feel safe, and with us knowing he’s down there, he no longer is. But the only way he’ll feel safe again is if he meets us and decides we really are harmless and will keep the secret with him.”

  We had been sitting there a long time writing the letter, and AJ stood up to stretch. He suddenly exclaimed, “Guys, it is 12:25!”

  “It is only 8:55, AJ,” Scooter answered, looking at the clock in the corner of his computer screen. “I know it took a long time to write this letter, but it didn’t take that long!”

  “No, I mean, your alarm clock outside is blinking 12:25! Oops, now 12:26!”

  Scooter and me jumped up from the computer and ran over to the window. Sure enough, although you couldn’t really see the clock radio itself, you could clearly see the glowing red numbers at the base of the blackberry bushes.

  “Whoa, dude, it worked!” Scooter exclaimed. “And it says 12:26, so that means he just went in the hole less than half an hour ago!”

  Scooter grabbed the piece of paper off of the printer, and we all scrambled out of the bedroom. Halfway down the stairs, I stopped everyone in their tracks. “Hey, guys, wait! If your mom sees that AJ and me are still here, she is going to make us head home.”

  “Well, it is almost 9:00. We should probably get home anyway,” AJ added.

  So we all headed back up to Scooter’s room, where AJ and me gathered up our stuff to go home. We then walked back down the stairs and Scooter told his mom he was just “seeing Tyler and AJ out,” and we three walked out the front door.

  We quickly snuck around the right side of the house, the side opposite where the blackberries and metal plate were, and walked straight back into the woods. We then inched our way down the blackberry tunnel toward the hole as slowly and as quietly as we could.

  When we got to the metal plate, I couldn’t help but picture Mr. Mathisen right below where we were crouched. He was probably lying on a sleeping bag, settling down for a good night’s sleep, completely oblivious to what was going on right above him.

  Without making a sound, Scooter motioned for AJ to open the metal plate slowly. AJ did as he was told. I was half expecting a beam of light from a flashlight or candle to come streaming out of the hole as AJ opened the lid, and I even looked away, as if that light would burn any part of me that touched it. But as he opened the lid in silence, there was nothing to see except the same dark hole we had found earlier.

  As Scooter taped our note to the top rung of the ladder, I looked around for the wires that Scooter had taped to the metal plate to make the radio work. After a few seconds of fumbling around in the dark, I found them and detached them from the plate and pulled them a couple feet away from the entrance to the hole. I knew then that the old man had not seen the wires when he climbed into the hole. I was looking for them and could barely find them; he surely wouldn’t have stumbled upon them on accident.

  As Scooter finished, AJ quietly closed the lid to the hole, and we all crawled out the way we had come. Once in the clear, Scooter turned to us. “Now, we wait. You guys head home before you get in trouble. I will go and grab the radio and pull the wires out of the blackberries before I head back inside. We’ll just have to wait until tomorrow to see if there is a note for us.”

  AJ and me headed off to our houses and left Scooter to take on cleanup and lookout duty. Once I got to Scooter’s front yard, I sprinted as fast as I could the couple blocks to my house—not because I was in a hurry to get home, but because I knew it was going to be hard to get to sleep with my adrenaline pumping and my imagination running wild. I figured maybe if my body was tired by the time I laid down it would be easier to fall asleep.

  My plan worked. I pictured old Mr. Mathisen reading our letter as he stood in the shadowy protection of the thick woods and chuckling to himself. “Those darn kids finally lost the football in just the right spot in the bushes, huh?” He looked up at me and smiled. I tried to wave, but I couldn’t raise my arms. My body was already feeling the weight of the blackness that was creeping over me, and it pulled me completely into a peaceful, dreamless sleep.