Pun Detectives and the Case of the Missing Music! (Part 16)

The stench of chlorine punched my nose. I had always hated going to the public pool for that very reason, and the school pool was, by my calculation, about 20 times worse. Unluckily for me, coming here was a must. I’d just have to suck it up. Or rather breathe as little as possible and avoid sucking up any more of this awful smell.

The late afternoon sun filtered in from the glass sky roof up above. Soft amoeba blobs of light played on the tile and on the surface of the pool. Miraculously, the rain had cleared up all at once by the time I started to make my way to the East Ring. Now that I was back at the pool, the sun was even starting to show from behind the clouds.

The echoes of swiftly sliced pool water spread through the large room, the sound of a practiced freestyle. Vance was cutting water down one of the lanes, down the lane then up, down then back again. He’d stop and turn around before the water got too shallow. I wondered how much the swim team hated grandpa for having this pool built with a shallow end, like a public pool.

But that wasn’t important right now. Vance was. I had heard he always came to the pool by himself on Friday afternoons before going home, likely to get some laps in when no one else was around, the whole pool all to himself.

Perfect.

He was right where I wanted him.

I figured Vance would probably keep doing laps, so I stood nearby, ready to wait. But to my surprise, he swam to the ladder and emerged from the pool as soon as he noticed me.

Drying off with a towel, he said, “Hey, Wallace. What brings you back? Find any more clues on the case?”

“S-something like that.” Try as I might not to let it, his cheery attitude was already throwing me off. I didn’t think I’d ever be used to any popular kids giving me the time of day and talking to me like it was nothing. In a way, that made me more comfortable around Striking Eyes than I was around Vance. At least I knew she was being genuine. Ironically, her constant grilling of me was probably why I could talk to her so easily.

“Well?” said Vance. “What do you need? I was just getting a few more laps in before I pack up and call it a day. Then I’m out of here for the weekend.”

Liar. He wasn’t making to leave one bit before I showed up.

He was drying off with a towel — his own, it looked like; it was too big and fluffy to be the school’s. Back and forth like a pulley, he mopped his dripping back, legs, arms. All the dripping water made him look like he was melting, disintegrating drop by drop into a beady sweat like on the side of one of Lily’s popsicles.

Little did I know his real meltdown was yet to come, and every word I spoke was hurtling me closer and closer to it.

“It’s funny,” I said, trying to keep my cool. The situation was growing stickier by the second, and it wasn’t just the humidity. “I just remembered something kind of important. Something that had been in the back of my mind all week but that I never really thought too hard about till now.”

“Oh? And what’s that?”

“That on top of swimming, you do tennis and track.”

Vance froze. Either my eyes were playing tricks on me, or he was going white as the towel he was using to dry off. He was like an ancient Roman statue: chiseled, pale, perfectly still, and 2,000 years old.

Uh. Ok, maybe not that last one.

After a second or two, he started toweling off again.

“Yep. I do. What about it?”

“Oh, nothing much. It’s just that, you know, you have a locker for swimming, right? Two I mean, since you got an extra one as a gift from that Marine girl after all.”

“Oh, you know Marine? Yeah, she—”

“Don’t change the subject. You have a locker dedicated to swimming, am I right?”

“Yeah…?”

“Well, I was thinking: doesn’t that mean you also have a locker for tennis and track? The swim lockers are here at the pool, but it doesn’t make sense for the tennis and track lockers to be here too. Rather than one locker per person, how it actually works is that every individual person has their own locker per team, right? And so if you’re on more than one team, you have more than one locker.”

A crack split the air. Vance had cracked the towel like a whip. For a split second, I thought I noticed his brow furrow and a scowl replace his usual calm face. But just as quickly, he was back to normal, folding the towel up now, quickly. “So what?”

“We never checked your other lockers.”

“...Ok.”

“So let’s do it.”

“Right now?”

“Right now.”

“Look, Wallace, I’m about to go home. Let’s just do this next week, ok? Bright and early on Monday? Sound good?”

A smile about as warm as a picnic in Antarctica slid onto his face, a crooked line that made him look like The Joker, no joke. Sans the makeup of course. Above that wretched smile, his eyes sharpened to knives and his nostrils seemed to flare. He licked his crooked lips.

I wasn’t smiling though. Why was I so serious? Because this was where I had to hold firm. Keep cool.

But I just couldn’t!

“WHERE’S THE VIOLINS!? WHERE ARE THEY!?” A croaky, bat-outta-hell yell escaped me…

…nah, just kidding. I didn't say that.

What I actually said was, “Nope. Right now. It’ll only take a few minutes. Come on, we’re wasting time.”

He tossed the towel into his bag, elbowed into a t-shirt. “I’m not going. Not right now. I’m tired. I’ll help you out on Monday.”

“Oh. Well, I guess I’ll just go check for myself then.”

“Don’t be stupid. You need me to open the locks.”

Right into my trap! Now, the kicker. I had been practicing this part in my head for the better part of the last 20 minutes.

“Hm?” I said. “Is that what you think?”

“...”

“Guess I’ll just do it by myself. Well, see you on Monday then.”

About face. Right foot. Left foot. I started walking on manual, making as much of a show as I could of my leaving.

I didn’t make it three steps before Vance chimed in with a “No, wait! You can’t!”

I turned around. “I can’t?”

“S-sorry,” he said, obviously flustered if he was stuttering and apologizing to me all at once. “What I meant was you need to leave my locker doors closed. I mean, you know, you can’t open them. Literally, since you know the combinations to the locks… right? Hey, are you listening? Don’t just walk away! Stop!”

When I turned around to face him again, the Vance I had known up till now was gone. It was as if all the features and contours of his face had creased as easily and cleanly as a sheet of paper. He was mad, visibly, practically snarling at me like a feral dog. This, I realized, was the real Vance all along, and the demeanor he had worn till now was the fake. His lips curled upward into something far uglier and more frightening than any fake smile, a predatory leer. I wouldn’t have been surprised if steam began to pour from his flared nostrils. It was like he had grown two heads taller. Of course that last part was only my imagination, but I still backed away instinctively.

“How did you figure it out?” he yelled, his voice echoing.

“So you admit it then.” He was inching towards me, step by damp step. I kept my distance, backing off accordingly. “You took the violins!”

“Just answer the question, you little twerp.”

And so I obliged. I explained everything, all the flaming hoops of wordplay I’d jumped through to get here and uncover this crime, down to the last mental somersault.

The end of Pun Detectives and the Case of the Missing Music (Part 16)!
To be continued in Part 17!