“Yes, but…”
They turned to Captain Al. He was back in his chair, blank stare drifting off again, idle fingers holding on to an empty glass.
“It’s not right,” he reprised. “The…the whole case, the way it ended.”
A couple more phrases eluded him. Then his mind seemed to track back to what it knew for certain.
“The night you went missing,” he started. “The final night, when you went back to the lake by yourselves…We were searching for you, Deputy Wilson and I, and…(A crooked smirk.) Your aunt Margo was frantic; she always was; she hated these adventures of yours. But I was…” A word fluttered before his eyes, one he hesitated to clasp. “Scared. Wilson and I, we were riding the police motorboat and we were scared. I can’t…And when we found your boat capsized I…for a second, I feared the worst. I knew you all could swim, but it was so dark…not night dark, but veiled dark, and…damn, so quiet. The world is not supposed to be that quiet. Not the deserts, not the bottom of the ocean.
“And then, hours later, against my gut feeling…morning came. And there you were, waving at us from the pier on Debo?n Isle. So we drove there, and we found you outside the big mansion at sunrise, and birds singing, and wind blowing your hair, and there was Wickley tied up in a fishnet on the pier, wriggling in that ridiculous costume, and…(Al looked up at them.) You were smiling. And then while Wilson was cuffing the guy, I took you aside and asked, ‘What happened in there?’ And none of you said anything at first, and then Peter said, ‘We solved the mystery.’ And…that was it.”
The audience remained silent.
Andy checked Kerri. Nate checked Peter.
Tim listened to the captain, compassionately.
“When Wilson fell ill,” the captain resumed, “I went to visit him often. Talk about the old times. And you were…Hell, you were brought up so often. He was so fond of you. And one of the last days, I was in his room, he was bedridden, and he said, ‘Remember, Al, when the children got lost in the lake and we spent the night searching for them? Remember when we found them? How frightened the poor things were?’?”
Al looked up again. Water wavered across his eyes.
“But you weren’t frightened. You were smiling.”
Thirteen years later the children stayed still, not breathing.
And then the moment passed.
Al rubbed the bridge of his nose.
“You okay?” Kerri asked.
“Yes. You must excuse me. I’m an old man and…I’ve usually drunk myself unconscious by this time of day.”
Tim was already aiming for the exit, having picked up the signs that the scene was over.
“Okay,” Kerri said. “Take a nap, Captain. We’ll take it from here. Thank you.”
Al nodded, eyes closed, and didn’t walk them to the door.
Tim and Nate and Kerri had already started down the stairs when Al called, “Andy.”
She turned around. The captain put the lid on the cookie tin and pushed it across the table.
“No way,” Andy said. “These are yours. Your memories.”
“They were always for you kids,” he explained, with a melancholic look that had taken decades to forge itself. “I was planning to give them to you when you came back the next holiday. But you didn’t come. And I just…forgot about it.” He raised his head and smiled the sorrow away. “But it’s yours. You’re gonna need it. Remember all the good work you did.”
Andy retraced her steps and took the box. It was heavy. Treasure rattled inside.
“Thank you, Captain,” she said.
She was back at the door when he called again. “You still wanna be called Andy, don’t you?”
She smiled. “Yeah. Thanks for asking.”
She clacked her heels, saluted, and left Captain Al’s house.
—
As she hurried down the stairs she noticed nobody had gotten inside the car yet. The rain had ceased and the sun channeled a shaft onto their striped station wagon as if Heaven were appointing a quest to it.
“What’s wrong?”
Kerri handed her a white envelope.
“This was inside the car,” she said.
“I left the window open a slit,” Nate explained. “It was beginning to smell.”
Andy flipped the envelope in her hands. The front side bore the letters BSDC.
“Someone followed us here?” she said, surveying the junkscape. Andes of car parts and rusted metal rose against the yellow afternoon.
“They may have left it while we were parked in town,” Nate conjectured. “It was between the seat and the door; I just didn’t notice it until now.”
Andy opened the envelope. It contained a single sheet of paper with a short message written in caps: “STOP PROCRASTINATING. GO TO THE LAKE.”
“So what now?” Kerri asked.
“We go to the lake,” Nate answered.
“Why, because an anonymous note told us to?”
“We were planning to go anyway, weren’t we?”
“We could also go see Dunia Debo?n, or talk to the deputy. There’s only a few hours of daylight left; we should put off the lake till tomorrow.”
“We could go today and camp for the night,” Andy suggested.
“Whoa!” Kerri checked the other two, then backtracked to make sure she hadn’t put an exclamation point too many there. “That’s quite a crash therapy, isn’t it? We were supposed to be taking it easy; now we’re talking about spending our first night at the lake?”
“What’s there to fear?” Nate said. “You think we’re fighting a big evil corporation. Worst that can happen is a CEO in a chupacabra costume.”
Kerri turned to Andy. “Okay, you decide; what do we do?”
“I decide? No, I don’t. I told you, I’m not the leader; we do things together.”
“I’m for going to the lake, Kerri isn’t; you’re the tiebreaker,” Nate recounted. “So, what do we do?”
Suddenly Andy found herself between Kerri and Nate, both with their arms crossed, expecting leadership from her.
She queried the dog. “Tim?”
The Weimaraner sat down obediently, awaiting command, a kerosene breeze blowing at his ears.
Andy checked the handwritten message in her hands again.
“STOP PROCRASTINATING.” Those two words did it, actually. She took offense that easily.
“Let’s go back to HQ and get our camping gear. We’re going to the lake.”