The Bloodwater Mysteries: Doppelganger (3 page)

“Nothing,” said Brian.

“You look like you’ve been in a fight with a bobcat.”

“Oh.” Brian remembered that he was a little scratched up. “Actually, it was a rhododendron.”

“And what were you…oh, never mind. Have you come to lodge a complaint against the bush?”

“Um, it wasn’t really the bush’s fault.”

Mrs. Bain pulled a file from the cabinet. “Hello, Roni. Are you the one who caused my son to engage in fisticuffs with a rhododendron?”

Detective Annette Bain did not entirely approve of Roni Delicata. Brian could hardly blame her. Every time he nearly got himself killed, it seemed Roni was somehow involved.

“I have an alibi,” said Roni.

“Show her the picture,” Brian said.

Roni, for once, just did what he asked her to do. She opened her laptop and turned it on. A few seconds later the age-progressed image of Bryce Doblemun was looking out at them.

His mom sat down behind her desk and stared at the slightly chunky Korean boy’s face. “I hadn’t seen this latest age progression,” she said.

“You
know
about him?” Roni asked.

“Bryce Doblemun? Of course I do. He disappeared several years ago from his home in Minneapolis along with his adoptive mother. Apparently she ran off with him. There was quite an investigation. As far as I know, they are both still missing.” She frowned at Brian, then at Roni. “Why are you showing me this?”

“Roni thinks he looks like me.”

“Ah, I see. Looking for another mystery, Roni?”

“You have to admit, it is kind of a coincidence,” Roni said. “He looks just like Brian. Same age. And he disappeared from Minneapolis, which is pretty close to Bloodwater. Also, he’s an adoptee.”

Mrs. Bain raised one eyebrow. Brian knew that raised eyebrow well. Roni was treading on dangerous ground.

“And?” said Mrs. Bain.

Roni, to Brian’s horror and admiration, plowed ahead.

“So…how did you get Brian?” she asked.

Mrs. Bain sat back in her chair and placed one finger on the side of her chin. “We adopted him, as you well know.”

“How old was he?”

“Roni, I understand your curiosity, but don’t you think that this is rather personal?”

“I was just—”

“Really, Roni, it’s a family matter.” She stood up. “Now, if you two sleuths will excuse me, I have work to do.”

Brian knew that if he didn’t say something, Roni would never let him forget it.

“Mom, do you have, um, papers for me? Adoption papers?”

“Of course we do.” She looked at her watch. “Can we talk about this later, sweetie?”

His mom called him “sweetie” only when she was trying not to be mad at him.

Mrs. Bain picked up the file on her desk. “I’ll see you at dinner,” she said. “And when you get home, put some antiseptic on those scratches.” She walked out of the room.

“I think she knows something she’s not telling,” Roni said as she shut down her computer.

Brian had a prickly feeling deep in his gut. He was afraid that Roni might be right.

the lost emperor

Roni was talking a million miles an hour as they left the courthouse.

“…and even if your folks really adopted you like they say, maybe Vera Doblemun stole you and then you escaped and got found on a street someplace and you were re-re-orphaned—”

“I don’t think there’s such a thing as
re
-re-orphaned,” Brian said.

“Whatever—you know what I mean. Or maybe Vera Doblemun was horribly murdered by a gang of child stealers and they sold you to an adoption agency. We should find out which agency you got adopted from. We could break in and look through their records. We could—”

Brian stopped. Roni kept walking. It took her a couple of seconds to realize she’d left Brian behind.

“What?” she said, looking back.

“I don’t want you stirring things up,” Brian said.

Roni looked at him as if he were insane. “You don’t want me to investigate? We need to find out—”

“Shut
up
! I
know
who I am. My parents are not criminals.”

“I just—”

“Suppose you found out that your mom maybe wasn’t really your mom. Would you want me running all over town dredging up your family history?”

“I wouldn’t turn down your help.”

“I’m not saying I don’t want your help. I just want to find things out my way, at least to start.”

Looking chastened, Roni said, “Will you tell me what she says, at least?”

“Absolutely.” Brian dropped his skateboard to the sidewalk and caught it with his foot. “If I find out I’m really the Lost Emperor of Korea, you’ll be the first to know.”

As Roni watched the Lost Emperor of Korea roll off, she was already thinking of ways to move the investigation along. Don’t go stirring things up? Who did he think he was dealing with? Stirring things up was her specialty.

She slung her backpack over her shoulders and shoved her hands into the pockets of her jeans—sort of a boy thing to do, but it seemed to help her think. Besides, she had decided not to care what anybody thought of her. That Roni Delicata, she just does her own thing, people would say. Problem was, nobody seemed to notice.

She looked around to see if anybody was noticing now.

Downtown Bloodwater on a weekday afternoon was not exactly a happening place, unless you were a sixty-something retired schoolteacher in the market for some moldy old antiques. Roni saw several of that breed carrying large
shopping bags and peering into shop windows. To them, she was all but invisible—just another slightly schlumpy, slightly overweight, slightly loitering teenager. The only kids her age they really noticed were the big scary ones.

Sooner or later, she thought, they’ll notice me. One big case was all it would take—a missing kid found, the capture of a dangerous criminal, or a story on the front page of the paper. The day I graduate from high school, she decided, I’m out of here. She would go to London, Paris, New York…even Minneapolis would do. Someplace where things were happening, where she would fit in with the other strange people who just did what they felt like doing.

Until then, she would keep digging up information about the missing Bryce Doblemun—even if Brian Bain didn’t approve.

Real emperors had thrones, crowns, and loyal subjects. It sounded like a lot of work. Were there ever emperors in Korea? Had Korea ever lost an emperor? He would have to look it up.

As he walked into the quiet house, Brian did not feel like royalty. He felt like a vague, amorphous blob that was slowly floating around the world, twirling in all directions, tethered to no place at all. Yikes. If he didn’t watch it, the next thing he knew, he’d be writing poetry.

Brian heard his father muttering to himself in his office, but he didn’t feel like trying to get his attention. Way too much work. He walked quietly up the stairs, collapsed on
his bed, and stared at the ceiling. What was his earliest memory? The little dog? The red-haired lady? They seemed like a dream, and maybe they were. But what about his earliest memories of his current parents? His mom liked to tell a story about taking Brian to the county fair and letting him wander. He had walked around without ever once looking back to see where his parents were. Of course, they’d been right behind him all the time, following him to make sure he didn’t get into trouble.

Brian remembered that day, or at least he thought he did. The way he remembered it, he had been searching for his little dog.

His mom—his second or third mom, he should probably call her, maybe even shorten it to
Mom
³
—thought it was a funny story because he had been such an independent and fearless kid. “You just took off on your own,” she would say with a laugh. “If we hadn’t stopped you, you’d have joined the carnival!”

What else did he remember? Going on a ride. Riding on a big duck that went around in circles with a lot of other big ducks. A kiddie ride, but it had been exciting at the time. Seeing his parents’ blurred faces watching him as he went around and around and around.

Brian felt as if he were melting into his bed. If he didn’t know who he really was, was he in danger of dissolving? He rolled off the bed and fell to the floor on his hands and knees. He crawled to his dresser, pulled open the bottom drawer, and dug into the far corner under a sweater he hardly ever
wore because it made his neck itch. He pulled out a small wooden box and removed a small metal coin. On one side was a picture of a building surrounded by Korean writing. The other side had a big numeral 10 next to the words
THE BANK OF KOREA 1972
. It was the only thing he had from Korea, and he couldn’t even remember where he had gotten it.

He thought of biting it to see if it was gold. It had a goldish glint to it. He wondered what it was worth—maybe he should take it on
Antiques Roadshow
. Tell his story. Maybe his country would discover him then.

Maybe he really was a lost emperor.

darwin dipstick

Batman has his Batmobile; Green Lantern has his ring; Wonder Woman has her invisible airplane. Roni needed Hillary, her trusty Vespa, if she was going to seriously work on this case. Roni had run over another nail, and Darwin Depaul—better known as Darwin Dipstick—had said he could fix the Vespa in a jiffy. A “jiffy” meant she needed to stay on his case if she wanted Hillary back before the snow flew.

She decided not to phone Darwin. Instead, she would drop in on him at his gas station. Sometimes it was best to take people by surprise.

When she got to the station, she spotted Hillary in a back corner of the garage, still with the flat front tire. Darwin was sitting behind the cash register reading
Monster Trucks Monthly.

“Hey, kid,” he said, like,
Go away and do not interrupt my important reading
.

“Hey,” Roni said back, like,
I’m here, and I’m staying here until I get what I want.

Darwin sighed, closed his magazine, and ran his grease-blackened fingers through his nonexistent hair, leaving four
dark streaks on his bald dome. “Bad news, kid. Your new tire’s not in yet.”

“I thought you were going to fix the old one.”

“That tire of yours has got one too many patches. Had to order you a new one.”

“How long is that going to take?”

“Dunno. A couple days?”

Roni took a deep breath to calm herself. Two more days without Hillary? Unthinkable!

“How about you patch the old one anyway,” she said.

“Not safe,” Darwin said, shaking his head. “That baby blows and you go skidding down the street on your keister, your mama will have my head.”

“Yeah, well, if you don’t fix it, I’ll see that my mom mentions your little junkyard to the mayor again.”

Darwin’s eyes bugged out. The half acre behind the station was a notorious weed-choked field of automotive scrap. Once every year or two, the mayor’s office received a complaint and Darwin was forced to cut the weeds back and organize his rusting treasures in neat rows, a task he despised.

“You wouldn’t,” he said.

“I would,” Roni said.

Darwin’s shoulders sagged.

Roni said, “I’ll just ride it around town, Darwin. When the new tire comes in, I’ll come back and you can replace it.”

Defeated, Darwin unfolded his lanky body and stood up. “Okay, but keep it under twenty-five miles an hour.”

“I promise.” It was all Roni could do to suppress a smile. “Patch her up and I’ll get out of your hair.” The out-of-your-hair part was a little cruel, seeing as how Darwin had only two tufts of hair on his head, one above each ear.

“This is extortion, you know,” said Darwin as they walked back into the service bay.

“Technically, it’s blackmail,” Roni said.

“That don’t make it any better,” he said as he grabbed a wrench. He began to remove Hillary’s front wheel.

“A girl does what she has to,” Roni said.

Darwin snorted. Roni tried not to laugh.

“So I guess that boyfriend of yours is pretty famous now,” Darwin said.

“What boyfriend?”

“That Chinese kid you hang around with? I’ve seen you at the Dairy Queen together.”

“He’s not my boyfriend. What do you mean,
famous
?”

“Just saw his picture in the paper for that contest.”

“I wouldn’t call that
famous,
” Roni said.

“Those Chinese are real smart at folding paper,” Darwin said.

“You’re thinking of the Japanese,” Roni said. “They’re known for their origami. That’s paper folding. Anyway, Brian isn’t Chinese. He’s Korean, and he was adopted. He’s as American as you or me.”

“Nope. If he was born outside the country, he can’t be president.”

“Unlike you?”

Darwin laughed. “I could’ve run this country easy. If I’d finished high school.”

Roni tried to imagine Darwin in the White House. Oddly enough, it wasn’t that hard to do.

“Must be weird being a Korean here in Bloodwater,” Darwin said as he cleaned the inside of the tire, getting it ready for the patch.

Roni had never really thought how Brian might feel about that. He was just Brian to her. She hardly ever thought about him being from another country.

Darwin said, “This lady stopped in this morning and showed me the picture of him in the paper. Asked me where he lived. Course, I had no idea.”

“Who was she?”

“Never seen her before.”

“What did she look like?”

“Big.” He pressed the new patch into place. “Big and old and scary, with hair like Bozo the Clown.”

“Who’s Bozo the Clown?” Roni asked.

“Dude with orange hair. Before your time.”

Brian lay on his back and balanced the Korean coin on his nose. He heard his mother’s car pull into the driveway.

He decided to give her some time to relax. He had found that if he tried to talk to his mother too soon after she got home from work, she often snapped at him. Almost as if she were talking to a criminal suspect and not her own darling son.

After a few minutes, he got up and put the coin back in its box. He walked down the stairs and went right to the kitchen cabinets to get out the dinner plates. Then he went into the dining room and set the table. He knew how to get on his mom’s good side. His mother, sitting in the living room sorting through the mail, watched him through the doorway.