Philip and the Case of Mistaken Identity and Philip and the Baby (9781597051095) (2 page)

“Oh. I won a prize. I won the
Reading
Computes
contest. And I don’t even remember entering.”

A frown crossed Philip’s face.

“What is the
Reading Computes
contest?” his mother asked.

“I saw a sign at the library when I took out
books, but I didn’t pay much attention. Some contest to get kids to
read instead of sit in front of their computer all day. And I won!
The library lady said she picked my entry blank out of the box. But
I don’t even remember entering. Come to the library with me,
Philip. I want to see what I won.”

Emery grabbed his jacket and he and Philip
headed for the library. As they walked, Philip told himself that
what he was thinking couldn’t have happened. It couldn’t be that he
went to the library for Emery, paid twenty cents for him, had the
librarian fill out an entry blank for him, dropped the entry blank
in the box for him, got smiled at by some stupid girl, and
Emery
got a prize.

He was so aggravated that he couldn’t even
talk. But Emery couldn’t keep quiet. He went through a long list of
what his prize might be and each time he named something, Philip
got more and more aggravated.

When they reached the library, they went
straight to the second floor. Emery walked up to the librarian’s
station, Philip at his shoulder.

“Hi, I’m Emery Wyatt. I won a prize.”

Philip looked at the front of the librarian’s
desk. He hadn’t noticed it yesterday, but there was a big sign
announcing the
Reading Computes
contest. Everyone who
returned books, got an entry blank for the contest.
Emery got
his yesterday, thanks to me
, Philip thought.

Philip drummed the fingertips of his right
hand impatiently on the top of the librarian’s desk.

“Why, yes. Do you have your library card?”
the librarian smiled. It was the older librarian from the day
before.

Emery fished it from his pocket and handed it
to her.

She smiled again, nodded, and gave Emery back
his card. Then she bent down and reached for something under the
desk. She brought up a big box wrapped in red gift-wrap and a blue
bow.

“Here it is,” the librarian smiled again.
“Congratulations and I hope you enjoy your prize.”

Philip wondered whether there wasn’t
something wrong with the librarian’s mouth that forced her to smile
all the time. Then he looked at Emery and
he
was smiling.
Must be catching
, Philip thought. Well, he hadn’t caught it
yet, and he didn’t think he would.

The two boys left the library, and all the
way home Emery named more things that might be in the box. Twice he
made Philip stop while he shook the box to hear what was inside,
and while Emery shook the box, Philip pressed his lips together
tight and looked up at the sky.

“Can’t tell,” said Emery, and he started
walking faster.

When they got inside Emery’s house, Emery’s
mother was walking through the living room, a diaper in each
hand.

“Here’s my prize, Mom,” Emery smiled. His
mother just made a funny grunting noise and went up the stairs in a
hurry.

Emery began pulling the red paper off the
box. He removed the lid and looked inside.

“Hey, all right!” he exclaimed.

Reluctantly, Philip peeked.

Inside was a stack of books. As Emery pulled
them out one by one, Philip could see that they were all mysteries.
There were a couple of Encyclopedia Browns, a couple of The Three
Investigators, a
Great Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes,
and a
few with titles that began with “
The Mystery of the...
”

“There’s more,” said Emery. He pulled out a
box that said,
Disguise Yourself Detective Kit
. Emery opened
it and Philip saw it was filled with fake glasses, phony hair,
phony noses, and even a pair of phony ears. There was also a
magnifying glass and a weird hat covered with little squares. The
hat had a tiny bow on the top holding up the earflaps and a short
brim both in the front and in the back.

Emery held the magnifying glass up to his eye
and slowly turned to Philip.

“I’ve got my eye on you,” he said in a spooky
voice.

“Yow! Your eye looks three times bigger,”
said Philip.

Emery laughed. “I knew it would.”

“You know, I won this prize for you,” said
Philip in an excited voice.

“You? How did you?”

“Yesterday. The library lady filled out some
entry blank after I gave her your books.
And
paid your
twenty-cent fine. I put the entry blank into the box.”

“Why did you tell her you were me?”

“I didn’t. She just wrote the name the
computer told her to. From your books.”

Philip thought of the smiling girl. If she
hadn’t been there, he would have been able to tell the librarian
his real name. “You should give me some of the prize.”

Now Emery frowned. He looked into each book.
Then he showed the inside of each book to Philip. Inside each front
cover was a bookplate that said, “Property of Emery Wyatt.”

“They wrote my name in each book. I can’t
give you a book that already has my name in.”

“Why not?”

“Well, anybody that saw one at your house
would think you stole it from me.”

“I’d tell them I didn’t. I’d tell them you
loaned it to me.”

“You wouldn’t get a chance because they’d be
too polite to mention it to you. They’d leave and tell all their
friends what they saw, and then they’d all think you were a thief.
I wouldn’t want that to happen to my best friend.”

“If I was your best friend, you would give me
some of the prize,” Philip said, his voice rising.

“Here, you read these and I’ll read these.
And then we’ll switch. But when we’re all done, you have to give
the books all back to me.”

“Why?”

“Because they have my name in them.”

Philip couldn’t think of an answer.

“And we can both play detective this week.
You can use my disguise kit. It’ll be fun.”

Philip calmed down. Emery was being pretty
generous.

“Here, look,” said Emery. He picked up the
Great Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes.
On the cover was an
illustration of two men sitting on a train facing one another. A
window was in between them. One of the men was leaning over
explaining something to the other man. “I can be this guy,” he
said, pointing to the man leaning over, who was wearing the kind of
hat that was inside the disguise kit. “You can be this guy.”

Philip read the caption. The man with the hat
from the kit was Sherlock Holmes. The other man was called Dr.
Watson.

“Why do you get the fancy hat?” Philip wanted
to know.

“I won the prize.”

Philip was about to argue that
he
had
won the prize but decided he didn’t want to walk around with that
silly hat on anyway. Emery could keep it.

“Is there another hat in there like Dr.
Watson has on?” Philip asked. Watson was wearing a domed hat with a
small brim going all around it.

Emery checked through the box. “No. But I
have an old baseball cap. We can cut the brim off and use it.” He
ran upstairs and back. In his hand was a tattered red cap with a
white ‘P’ on it.

“It’s got a letter on it,” said Philip.
“There’s no letter on the hat in the picture.”

Emery looked at the picture. “We can turn the
hat inside out. Like this.”

Philip looked inside the cap. No letter. He
nodded.

Emery’s mother came downstairs.

“If you want lunch you have to eat it now
while they’re asleep,” she said.

Emery shrugged. “Want some lunch?”

Philip shook his head. He’d tried that
before. Emery’s mother was always so busy she made terrible
lunches. Once she’d given Philip a sandwich but had forgotten to
put any meat in it. Philip had been too polite to mention it, and
for the first and only time in his life he had to eat a bread
sandwich.

“No, I’ll go home. When you finish eating,
call me and I’ll come right back and we can get into disguise.”

Emery nodded. The boys said good-bye and
Philip left.

Halfway down the street he remembered he
still hadn’t gotten his twenty cents from Emery.

When Philip arrived back at Emery’s house,
Emery had his disguise kit laid out on the dining room table. A
small round mirror, encased in a light blue plastic square, stood
on the table. Emery was holding a mustache under his nose and
looking into the mirror.

“How do I look?” Emery asked, wiggling his
upper lip to make his mustache dance.

“You look stupid. Nobody our age has a
mustache. Except that one girl in Mr. Beebers’ class, but she
doesn’t count.”

Emery threw the mustache back into the box.
“Ready to get into disguise and do something sneaky?”

“Like what?”

“I think we should follow somebody and try to
learn all their secrets.”

“Suppose they haven’t got any secrets?”

“Everybody has secrets. Remember when you
snuck into Disher’s garage—”

“All right. All right. Never mind. You didn’t
tell anybody, did you?”

“No, it’s a secret. But it wouldn’t be a
secret long if we were on our trail.”

Philip wanted to change the subject. “What
shall we disguise ourselves as?”

“Here, put this on.” Emery handed Philip the
red baseball cap. It was turned inside out and the brim had been
cut off. Emery put on his double-brimmed Sherlock Holmes cap.
“That’s first.”

Philip bent over to look into the mirror.
“Let me see the picture.” He compared himself with the man in the
Sherlock Holmes book. “The hat should have a little brim all around
it.”

“I tried to leave some brim, but it was too
thick. I couldn’t cut it with the scissors.”

Philip nodded. His hat didn’t look as good as
he thought it would, and Emery’s hat looked better than he first
supposed. Philip studied the four white lines running up and down
the inside of his baseball cap, where the four quarters of the hat
were sewn together. “I don’t like these lines, and the air holes
look dumb.”

“Nobody’ll notice,” Emery said.

“What about the wigs?” Philip asked. There
was a bushy black-haired wig and a straight-haired red wig.

“I tried them. They’re too itchy. This other
stuff is way better.”

Philip watched Emery glue on a fake nose.
Then Emery took a dark pencil from the kit and colored in his
eyebrows. Finally, he put on a pair of black-rimmed glasses. Emery
stuck his finger through the circle where the glass should be.
“Empty,” he smiled.

“What can I use?” Philip asked, impressed
with the way Emery had changed his appearance.

“Here, try this nose.” Philip took the nose
Emery handed him, held it in place, and looked into the mirror. It
was a very large nose. “Isn’t there a smaller one?”

“Nope. Only two noses in the kit.”

Philip felt a slight stirring over the fact
that Emery had taken the smaller nose for himself. But all he said
was, “Give me the glue.”

Philip attached the nose and rechecked
himself in the mirror. It was a shocking change. “Wow.”

Emery handed Philip a red pencil from the
kit.

“Color your eyebrows and give yourself some
freckles.”

Philip stared at Emery and said slowly, “Why
do I have to use the red pencil?”

“We both can’t look the same, can we? We’re
not disguising ourselves as twins.”

Philip wanted to argue that the ridiculously
big nose he was wearing would successfully prevent anyone from
thinking they were twins, but things were getting too interesting
to waste time arguing, so he took the pencil.

Looking into the mirror, he pressed the
pencil hard against his right eyebrow and colored. Then he colored
the other eyebrow. With an artistic flourish he connected the
eyebrows over his nose. Then he pressed the point of the red pencil
against his cheek.

“Wet it,” Emery said.

Philip wet his finger and applied the spit to
the pencil point. Then he dabbed his cheeks until they were covered
with red spots. He turned to Emery.

“That looks great.” Emery smiled.

Philip checked the mirror.

“You sure I don’t look like I have the
measles? People will be running away from me.”

“No, no. Nobody’ll notice.”

Philip took another look into the mirror at
his eyebrows. It looked as if someone had thrown a long piece of
saucy spaghetti at him and it stuck to his forehead. But he did
look different.

“You can use the ear,” Emery said.

Philip turned to him. “The
ear
?”

Emery handed him a big plastic ear.

“Where’s the other one?” Philip asked.

“I can’t find it.”

“You lost an ear. A whole ear?”

“I spilled everything and it must have rolled
someplace.”

Philip looked at the big ear. “Ears don’t
roll.”

“It went somewhere. Here, put it on.”

Philip took the big ear, scrunched his own
ear up, and stuffed it inside the rubber ear. He checked the
mirror, turning his head back and forth. The big ear and the big
nose sort of went together. But it was only one ear.

“I can’t go around with one big ear and one
little ear,” Philip protested.

“Look at me,” Emery argued. He turned
sideways. “How many ears can you see?”

“One,” Philip answered.

Emery turned to the other side. “Now how many
ears can you see?”

“One,” Philip answered.

“So there.”

“So there what?”

“People can only mostly see one ear at a
time. Nobody’ll notice your ears don’t match.”

“But now you’re looking at me and I can see
your two ears.”

“That’s only because we’re talking together.
Don’t talk to anybody and people will only see one of your ears at
a time. And even if they see both, they’ll be too polite to mention
that your ears don’t match. Did you ever tell anybody that their
ears didn’t match?”