The Case of the Gasping Garbage (4 page)

B
usiness was slow. Doyle and Fossey, Science Detectives, hadn’t had a case in a week. Not even a phone call.

(The word on the streets was that Frisco was slashing his prices. No interest, no payments till next year. But that was just a rumor. If truth be known, Frisco was grounded. “No phone calls, no TV, no computer, and above all, no science for a week!” screamed his mother. “Not until you stop testing your hypotheses on your little sister!”)

Rumor or no rumor, Drake didn’t let slow business keep him from science. And on this particularly pleasant afternoon, he was smack-dab in the middle of a scientific breakthrough….

The solution in the beaker churned and bubbled, smelling like stinky cheese on a summer’s day.

The phone rang.

Drake put his experiment aside. Business was business. It paid the bills. Breakthroughs would have to wait. (Besides, he was feeling a mite queasy from the smell of stinky cheese.)

“Doyle and Fossey.”

Nothing.

“Doyle and Fossey,” Drake said again.

Finally, after what seemed ages, a tiny voice spoke.
“Drake?”

“Speaking. Who is this?”

“It’s Lilly. Lilly Crump.”
Lilly Crump was the girl in the fifth grade. Even her voice was tiny. More like a squeak.

“Oh. Hi, Lilly,” Drake said as he pushed up his glasses. “Now, speak up. What seems to be the problem?”

“No problem, really. You see, I’ve just received an anonymous love letter. And it’s my very first love letter ever. I need you to help me find out who it’s from. I’m desperate.”

Normally, Drake didn’t take cases that love. After all, he couldn’t measure love; he couldn’t even put it in a test tube. But business was business. It paid the bills. “Check,” he said. “I’ll be right there.”

Click.

Drake phoned Nell. “My breakthrough on how to take the stink out of cheese will have to wait. Meet me at Lilly’s house right away, Scientist Nell. We’ve got a desperate case to solve and we’re desperate.”

“Right.”

Click.

At Lilly’s house, Drake and Nell examined the letter. They held it up to the light. They sniffed it. They peered at it through their magnifying glasses.

“Charming,” said Nell.

“Astounding,” said Drake.

“Naturally, you would want to know who sent this to you,” added Nell. “Where did you find it?”

“I found it in my desk after I came in from recess today,”
said Lilly.

Drake pushed up his glasses. “I had a similar case once. I know just what to do. First, Nell and I will need to return to the lab. I’m afraid we’ll have to take the letter.”

“Evidence,” said Nell.

Lilly nodded.
“I understand.”

“Scientist Nell and I must conduct further analysis. Expect our report within twenty-four hours,” Drake said as he rushed out the door.

Back in the lab, Drake pulled a book off the shelf. He flipped through the pages until he found the right chapter: “Anonymous Letter Detection: What to Do When Your Love Life Is Sinking Fast.”

After they finished reading the chapter, Drake and Nell looked at each other.

“Looks like we’ll need to go into action,” said Drake.

“Check,” answered Nell. “Tomorrow at school we’ll gather more evidence.”

The next day, Drake and Nell sat on the grass during recess. Between them lay a mound of assorted pens, each one carefully labeled.

“How did it go?” asked Nell. “Did you have any problems getting pens from everyone?”

“Only from Baloney,” answered Drake. He pushed up his glasses. “When I asked to borrow his favorite pen, Baloney sat on me and threatened to squeeze my eyes out. Fortunately, when he left, his pen was lying on the floor beside me.”

“Wow,” whispered Nell. “The dangers of science.”

Baloney was the biggest kid in the fifth grade. Even his elbows were big. (His real name was Bubba Mahoney, but everyone called him Baloney.) Usually Drake used his good scientific sense and stayed away from Baloney, but business was business. Drake knew that a good scientist must put aside his emotions and stick to his goal. Even if it means being sat on.

“Now,” said Drake, “it is obvious to me that since the letter was written in black ballpoint ink, we can immediately remove all the pens that aren’t black. How many does that leave us?”

“Hmm … a moment, please.” Nell tested the pens on a piece of scrap paper. “Out of the original twenty-eight pens, we are left with nineteen.”

“Hmm … nine down, nineteen to go.”

“Affirmative.”

Once school was out, Drake and Nell rushed to the laboratory. All afternoon they worked. They cut long strips of paper. They labeled each strip.

Elliot Zelder,
Nell wrote across the top of one strip, using the pen labeled
ELLIOT ZELDER.
On the bottom of the same strip, she drew a heavy dot.

Baloney,
wrote Drake on another strip with Bubba Mahoney’s pen.

James Frisco,
Nell wrote with Frisco’s pen.

And so on …

When all the strips were labeled, they hung the bottom of each strip in separate beakers of alcohol. Finally, they cut a strip from the love letter. At the bottom of the love-letter strip was the heart, drawn in black ink. They suspended the end in another beaker of alcohol.

And then they waited. And waited. And waited.

“Hot chocolate?” asked Mrs. Doyle as she peeked into the lab.

“No thanks,” said Drake. “Just muffins.”

“Coffee. Decaf. Black,” said Nell.

“Affirmative,” replied Mrs. Doyle. And soon she returned with muffins and a steaming cup of coffee.

Then, as Drake and Nell watched, rainbows of colors slowly crept up the strips of paper. Purples, reds, golds, pinks, and blues. It was really quite lovely.

Finally, Drake and Nell compared the different strips to the strip cut from Lilly’s love letter. “Analysis complete,” said Drake. “Out of the nineteen strips we tested, only two match the ink in the love letter.”

Nell scratched her head, obviously thinking hard. “One of the matching strips belongs to the spelling bee champion. And the love letter was filled with spelling errors, so it couldn’t possibly be him. Which means that …”

Drake and Nell gasped with surprise as they read the name on the last matching strip. “We’ve found our man,” they said together.

M
eanwhile, Lilly Crump waited at her house. And waited. And waited.

Why don’t they call? she thought. She wrung her hands. She paced back and forth. She stared out the window. You see, Lilly Crump was lonely. She had no brothers or sisters. She didn’t even have a dog or cat. All she had was an itty-bitty fish with buggy eyes. So when the phone finally rang, Lilly leaped to answer.
“Hello?”
Her heart was pounding.

“Lilly?”

Lilly recognized Drake’s voice.
“Yes?”

“We’ve got your answer, Ms. Crump. Come to the lab immediately.”

“I’ll be right there,”
squeaked Lilly.

Lilly was true to her word. Within five minutes she arrived.
“I ran the whole way,”
she gasped.
“Now tell me before I die. Who is it? Who’s in love with me?”

Drake pushed up his glasses. “Observe,” he said, pointing to the strips of paper. “Inks are not all the same.”

“Certainly not,” agreed Nell.

“An ink may look black—” said Drake.

“—or blue,” added Nell.

“But they are in fact made of many different colors. Nell and I separated the colors in a process called chromatography. It’s quite elementary, really. As alcohol moves through the ink, the different colors separate.”

“That’s because,” Nell explained, “the different colors do not have the same weight. They move faster or slower depending upon how heavy they are.” She pointed at the strips of paper with her long wooden pointer. “As you can see, each ink is like a fingerprint. All we had to do was match the ink in the letter—”

“—with the ink in the paper strips,” finished Drake proudly. “And each strip is carefully so we know whose pen it was.”

“And?”
asked Lilly, her eyes wide.
“Whose was it? Who wrote me the letter?”

Drake and Nell glanced at each other.

Drake swallowed hard. The science of love was proving to be quite a challenge. “Uh—you tell her,” he said.

Nell took a deep breath. “Ms. Crump, I think you’d better sit down.”

Lilly sat. She could hardly wait.

“It was Baloney,” Nell finally blurted. “Bubba Baloney Mahoney.”

Suddenly there was a silence. A deep silence. A deep, dark silence. A deep, dark, dreadful silence. (A silence rather like when you’ve just found out that your favorite football team has been beaten 85 to 0, or perhaps when your teacher tells you that, yes, your assignment was due
today
.)

Drake couldn’t stand it any longer. He shook Lilly’s shoulders. “Snap out of it!” he ordered.

Lilly didn’t respond. Instead, she slid off the stool like a wet noodle and fell to the floor.

Drake was desperate. He knew that if he didn’t do something soon, Lilly might go into shock. After that, a coma. After that … well, he knew that whatever it was, it would be quite awful. “Quick, Scientist Nell!” hollered Drake. “Pour a beaker of water over Ms. Crump’s head! There’s not a second to lose! Four hundred milliliters should do the trick!”

“Check!”

Sploosh!

“
Splutter!
”

Dazed and drowned, Lilly stared at them. Her hair dangled in limp, soggy strings, like a wet mop that hadn’t yet been wrung out.

“Speak!” ordered Drake.

“Oh, Baloney!”
Lilly said. She clasped her hands together.

“Huh?” Drake and Nell looked at her in astonishment.

“Thank you, Detective Drake and Scientist Nell. Thank you! This is the happiest day of my life!”
Lilly gave each of them a teeny-tiny hug.

Drake returned the love letter, along with a business card. “Call us. Anytime.”

“Oh, I will! I will!”
Lilly said. Then she flew out of the room as fast as her little legs could carry her.

After she was gone, Nell shook her head. “There are some things science can’t explain.”

“Indeed, Scientist Nell,” Drake said. “Indeed.” That evening, Drake wrote in his lab notebook: