Cold Cereal (The Cold Cereal Saga) (19 page)

So why was he even considering the riddle? He could feel it in his pocket, as awkward as a two-dollar bill.

The car stopped, and Erno sat up as best he could. They were parked at the end of the street, having all agreed that they should watch and wait a bit before barreling up to Scott’s front door. Goodco had a fleet of white vans, so they looked for this first.

“Not that they’d use a white van if they were being sneaky,” said Emily. “Sneaky would be a lime-green Volkswagen. Nobody would suspect the assassins in the lime-green Volkswagen.” She was right. Neither of the kids had seen many movies or TV shows, but bad guys always seemed to drive white vans or black town cars. They probably all shopped at the same evil dealership. Even Agent SuperCar’s enemies drove around in white vans. White vans that turned into robot polar bears, but still.

“Biggs,” said Erno. “Do you have any scrap paper in here?”

Biggs did. Every time he parked his car someone put a flyer for carpet cleaning on it, and he had a small collection of these in the glove box.

Emily twisted around to face him. “What do you need that for?”

“I thought I ought to write out some message to Scott, in case we have to leave in a hurry. I thought maybe I
could write it out in a code or something, so the Goodco people won’t know what it means.”

“A code,” Emily smiled. “Sounds like something Dad would do.”

Erno forced himself to smile back.

After ten minutes Erno had scribbled all over four flyers for carpet cleaning, one for a weight-loss program, and yet another for tax services—that last one got him thinking. He started over.

“Emily, am I using the word
conspired
right?”

“‘Conspired,’” said Emily. “Worked together to bring about a particular result.”

“Thanks.”

Another few minutes and he finally had a draft he felt comfortable leaving on Scott’s doorstep. If it came to that. He’d enjoyed it: crafting a clue of his own instead of tripping over someone else’s two or three times a month. He was still admiring his handiwork when Emily’s crisp whisper brought him back to the here and now.

“Look,” she was telling Biggs. “There he is again.”

“What is it?” asked Erno.

“There’s a guy. In that black car with the Pennsylvania plates. It’s been here longer than we have, only I didn’t notice there was someone sitting inside it until just a second ago.”

Erno squinted at the back of the black car, the black
town
car, and saw the driver’s head turn.

“I think he’s watching Scott’s house too,” said Emily, back to a whisper.

Biggs looked like he was trying to make himself small, which was like watching someone fold an origami crane out of a refrigerator carton. The three of them stared at the man in the car, and the man in the car stared at the house.

Silence.

“Nobody’s doing anything,” said Erno after a long stretch of nobody doing anything.

“What do you want us to do?”

“I dunno. We could go ask him why he’s here. We could question him about Goodco. Biggs could roll his car over.”

“Those are all terrible ideas.”

“Never rolled over anything bigger than a Jeep,” said Biggs.

“Wait! Look.”

The shiny black door of the town car opened, and a man in a black suit and dark sunglasses stepped out. He was lean, not so tall, and he clenched a plume of bloodred roses in his fist.

“Maybe he’s dating Scott’s mom,” whispered Emily.

“Maybe he’s just pretending to date her so he can kill everyone.”

“He’s probably just a dinner guest.”

“At eleven in the morning?”

“It’s Thanksgiving.”

Erno blinked. “It is?”

The man in black crossed the street.

“We have to do
something
.”

“Okay.”

Erno kicked through the tiny rear door of the Citroën and tore off down the sidewalk as the man in black drew up to Scott’s front stoop. Did the assassin hesitate? Did his finger waver at the doorbell as he contemplated his grim business? Erno bounded up to the stoop, slapped away the bouquet of roses (which were certainly hiding a gun, or a knife), and planted himself between the man and Scott’s front door.

“What the—” The man flinched. He removed his sunglasses, and Erno got a good look at the face of Reggie Dwight as Biggs hustled up the steps with Emily in his arms.

Have you ever been close to a movie star? We’re so used to seeing them through a screen or a pane of glass that we expect them to always be that way, like zoo animals. Then, suddenly, there’s this giraffe standing in front of you, and you can’t decide whether you should talk to it or run. But when Emily touched the man behind his ear, he fell asleep in a heap on the doorstep and didn’t look so famous anymore.

“Oh, shoot,” Emily said, looking down. “It’s Scott’s dad.”

“It’s Reggie Dwight,” Erno corrected. “Wait…”

“Reggie Dwight is Scott and Polly’s dad,” Emily whispered loudly.

“He’s … seriously?” said Erno.

“I was never a hundred percent positive, but it just made sense, you know? I tried to tell you, but you laughed so hard you choked on a cherry pit.”

“You gotta stop telling me these kinds of things when I’m eating.”

Reggie Dwight twitched and made a grunty noise.

“What should we do?”

“Kids,” said Biggs. “Van.”

It was at the top of the hill—a white van sliding like a fat specter around the corner.

And so they rang the doorbell and ran. Erno left his note to Scott tucked inside Reggie’s jacket. It read:

The accountant’s student came to be
the chairman of his company.
We’re high above where friends conspired
to send him after he retired
.

It was a riddle, sure—a clue like Mr. Wilson would have left. But it wasn’t a game. It had never been a game.

The doorbell rang. And a moment later Mom yelped “Oh my goodness—John!” in such a way that Scott thought he ought to go to the front door after all.

They’d known for only two hours that his father would be coming for Thanksgiving dinner. He’d called from New York, apologized for the last minuteness of it, didn’t seem to even realize that it was an American holiday. The surprise had scarcely begun to fade when Scott joined his mother and discovered the man himself sleeping on their doorstep beside a jumble of stems and rose petals.

“Help me get him inside,” said Mom. Scott lifted his dad’s head while Mom dragged him by his expensive wing tips.

“What happened?” asked Polly when they joined her in the living room. “Is he drunk?”

“Your father doesn’t drink, sweetie.”

The three of them hoisted him to the lip of the sofa and rolled him onto his stomach. He gave a contented sigh.

“Tch,”
said Mom, examining the back of his suit jacket. “I should have vacuumed.”

“What’s wrong with him?”

“I don’t know, baby. Give me a second.”

“He’s dressed like he’s at a funeral,” said Scott. “That’s flattering.”

“It’s just how he is—how he’s always been. Either he’s wearing pink with orange feathers onstage or he looks like he’s the CIA. He’s not good with gray areas.”

John smacked his lips and said, “Look who’s talking.” He opened his eyes cautiously and turned on his side. “What happened?”

“We were hoping you could tell us.”

The movement dislodged a folded sheet of paper from the inside of John’s jacket. It read
FOR SCOTT ONLY
in pencil. “Whoop,” John murmured. “Mail for you.”

Scott unfolded the riddle and read it.

“Was about to ring the doorbell,” said John. “Boy came an’ slapped my flowers and then I fell ’sleep.”

Mom glanced at the note. “Is this one of Erno’s family games?”

“I don’t know.”

Mom sighed. “Dinner’s in an hour. Scott, you want to take your dad upstairs and help him get cleaned up?”

Scott did
not
particularly want to do this, actually, but he recognized it as one of those rhetorical questions.

“This is where you all live?” asked John as they ascended the stairs. “It’s small.”

“This is just our Thanksgiving house,” Scott muttered. “We have a house for every day of the year.”

“What was that?”

“Nothing.”

Scott sat on the toilet lid as his father checked himself over in the mirror.

“I didn’t mean anything … untoward,” said John. “I’m glad to be here. I’ve been wanting to visit, but … it never seemed like the right time.”

But then you punched the Queen of England, and your schedule cleared right up
, thought Scott. He felt like he was always thinking mean thoughts like this. They scared him sometimes.

“Would you excuse me?”

Scott left the bathroom and turned into his own adjoining bedroom, and lightly closed the door behind him.

“That your da?” asked Mick. He was nestled in the bedclothes reading comic books.

“It’s him,” Scott whispered. “You’ll have to be even more careful until he leaves. Right? I mean, we already know my mom can’t see you, so I probably get it from Dad.”

“He’s not leavin’,” said Mick. He folded a page of the comic back to mark his place, and Scott winced. This was
Abraham SuperLincoln
#344, and the first appearance of Penny Arcadian, but he thought better than to try to explain its historical significance to an elf.

“What do you mean, ‘He’s not leaving’?”

“Your ma’s about to go off on her jaunt down south, isn’t she?”

“To Antarctica. Goodco’s sending her. But this woman from the Goodco day care will be looking after us. It’s all set up already.”

“Don’t think so,” said Mick, and he looked thoughtful. “Didn’t suppose I had any glamour left for a foretellin’. Maybe I don’t, an’ it’s just good ol’-fashioned wisdom. But I think your da will be stayin’ on for a while.”

Scott was shaking his head. “No. No, he wouldn’t want to. I…
I
don’t want him to,” he said. It came out sounding a little like a question.

Mick shrugged. “He punched the Crown o’ England—he can’t be
all
bad.”

Scott frowned and slipped back into the hall, where he almost knocked his father down.

“Is that Polly’s room?” asked John.

“No. It’s mine.”

“I thought I heard you talking to someone.”

“I was,” Scott said. “To my imaginary friend.” It was a
comfortable deception, since he wasn’t entirely sure he was even lying.

“I had one of those when I was your age. Well, Polly’s age maybe. Maybe younger.”

“Uh-huh.”

“It was this little gnome or something that I’d see now and again. I’d try to talk to him, but he’d always run away.”

“You had an imaginary friend who wouldn’t talk to you,” said Scott as they returned to the stairs. “Did you have low self-esteem or something?”

John snorted. Scott wondered, of course, if his dad’s childhood friend had been only as imaginary as the little man currently ruining his comic book collection. John had grown up in England, after all—he must have had at least as many opportunities to spot the Fay as Scott had here in New Jersey.

“So … how long are you staying?”

They descended the stairs before John answered. “Actually, your mother and I want to talk to you kids about that.”

At dinner Mom asked Scott to say grace, which was ridiculous. They never said grace, except maybe when Grandma Adams visited. To be specific, Mom asked Scott to “say a few words,” so Scott found himself saying more than a few words about the Pilgrims, and how they had to
flee from England, and how awful England was back then because there wasn’t any freedom and you couldn’t just punch the queen whenever you felt like it; and now Scott could feel his face get hot and his mouth dry, so when his mom cleared her throat in kind of a serious way he said “Amen” midsentence and started dishing out mashed potatoes.

The turkey was dry, flavorless. Difficult to finish. And a halfway-decent metaphor for the dinner itself. Scott wouldn’t have minded hearing Polly prattle on as she usually did on every conceivable subject, but she was apparently having one of her well-earned quiet moods. She always had one hand or the other hidden, and Scott knew she’d be clutching her little prince figurine like a rabbit’s foot under the table.

After dinner Mom had the idea that the four of them should take a walk around the neighborhood and maybe drop in on the Utzes.

“We can wish them a happy Thanksgiving,” she said, and didn’t say anything about asking them to explain what exactly had happened earlier on the porch. Scott supposed the subject would just come up naturally. And during their walk his parents explained that they’d been talking and that John would be staying with them while Mom was doing research in Antarctica. This had the effect of thawing the last of Polly’s shyness, and she began
firing off comments and questions like she was making up for lost time.