Pun Detectives and the Case of the Kidnapped Kitten! (Part 2)

Long white apron draped over billowy black skirt.

Sleeves as puffy as an airbag in a car wreck.

Headdress, lacey and starch stiff.

Dark hair with helmet-straight bangs that framed her (killed me to admit it) picture-perfect face.

And all the other key components that maid up… err, made up Lily's maid outfit. So far, I hadn't seen her wear anything else. As she and I walked side by side in silence, I wondered whether she ever wore normal clothes too.

We were back in the Old Building now. This time on the first floor. We slid up to the last classroom at the end of a long, deserted hall. This was the location of the karate club, apparently. Why was it all the way out here of all places? And what was that smell? A sharp scent was pinpricking every nose hair I had, and it was coming from inside the room. I would’ve loved to say that my first ever case as a RED smelled fishy, but it didn’t. It smelled so familiar… What was it? I sniffed a couple times, and it hit me. It smelled... fruity.

I could hear the dulled murmur of conversation through the door, which, after a second or two, Lily rapped lightly. We entered.

Inside were three kids. One of them, a girl wearing a white karate gi without a belt, leaned against a wall. Another, a boy wearing a pair of broken glasses mended at the bridge with a loop of scotch tape, sat on the floor, hunched so far over it made my back hurt just looking at him. The last of them, an older looking guy, probably a senior, with a glitzy earring sparkling out of his left lobe and hair worked into gel-hardened spear tips spikey enough to put an eye out, sat on the sill of an open window.

Whatever they’d been talking about just before we entered, they weren’t talking about it anymore. All eyes were on us.

“Hello,” said Lily, curtsying. “Pardon our sudden intrusion.”

“H-hey,” I said, giving them a weak wave. God. I knew I should’ve spent sixth period coming up with a cool RED intro instead of daydreaming about what mixing every vegetable in the world into one great big salad would taste like.

The guy sitting on the windowsill spoke, his earring sparkling, catching the light like a prism. “You guys are the detectives right? We’ve been expecting you. Principal Wade told us you were coming.”

Well, that made things easy.

“And just in time too,” he continued. “We’ve got a problem on our hands.”

“That’s putting it lightly,” said the girl.

The guy with the earring nodded. “True. What we’re dealing with here” — he cleared his throat — “is a kidnapping.”

“In the park?” I blurted out, remembering a split second later that he had woken up.

“Huh? No. What are you talking about?” He was eying us up good. “Are you guys really the detectives?”

“Yes,” Lily said before I could. I silently thanked her for it. Any more from me and this conversation would end up exploring realms of awkwardness not yet discovered by human society.

“This is Wallace Wade,” Lily said for me, “Badass Officer of the Radioactive Equivoque Detectives. And I am his assistant, Lily Lilac. Pleased to make your acquaintance.”

“If you say so.” The guy with the earring was nonplussed. Then again, he didn’t seem very plussed either, so I guessed that maybe he was non-nonplussed, effectively making him nonminused. I silently promised to look up the definition of “nonplussed” as soon as I had the chance. If it wasn’t obvious, I didn’t know it.

“As long as they can help,” said the girl, “then who are we to complain? Right, Wednesley?” She looked expectantly at the boy sitting on the floor. From the looks of it, he seemed like he was planning on sinking into the floor, what with the way he craned his neck and hung his head and generally seemed to be making himself as small as he could.

Without even looking at the girl, or us, or anyone, or anything at all besides the floor between his tightly crossed legs, the kid, Wednesley, just said, “Yeah…”

For a second, nobody knew what to say, and all sound collapsed to the scratch and rustle of leaves and branches, still green and supple even as fall was beginning to round the bend, scratching the part of the window that was closed. It was stupid given the tense atmosphere, but all I could think for a moment was that there sure were a lot of trees around the Old Building, here on the north end of campus.

The wind was picking up just a little, and it was starting to blow a rush of green through the open window — the branch of a tiny nearby tree.

An orange tree.

So that was it. That was where the fruity smell was coming from. I knew they’d once planted a few smallish orange trees at the back of the school once upon a time — I’d seen them in old pictures of the school — but I didn’t think…

“I didn’t think there were any orange trees left back here,” I said.

The guy with the earring actually smiled. “This is the last one.”

Without getting up, he probed into the thick leaves on the branch and pulled out a small, lopsided little orange ball. “Want one? Kind of a long story.”

I nodded and he tossed the orange to me. I was so hungry I almost bit right into it, peel and all. I peeled fast, tossing cool, waxy rind into the trash can in the corner. Then I stuffed three juicy pieces into my mouth. “What’s a long story?” I sprayed. Err, said.

“The one we’re about to tell you of course. The one about the kidnapping. Well, it’s actually just a disappearance. But we’re hoping you can help.” He picked another orange off the branch and flashed a look Lily’s way. When she shook her head no, he dug a thumb into the fruit himself.

I wondered: did robots even eat? The ones I grew up with sure didn’t, but Lily was in a completely different ballpark from them. She was far more human in mannerism and appearance for one, so I had to wonder. For another, she hadn’t poured juice down my shirt or used my head to crack eggs or pantsed me in public, at least not yet anyway, and just that was enough to set her apart.

But I could be grateful for all of that later. Right now, we were about to get into the details of my first ever case as a Radioactive Equivoque Detective.

I could feel my stomach drop like a weight. No, an anvil. NO, an anchor.

No pressure, right?

The end of Pun Detectives and the Case of the Kidnapped Kitten! (Part 2)!
To be continued in Part 3!