Edison’s Alley (10 page)

Mitch shrugged. “It couldn’t hurt to ask.”

“I think that’s a great idea!” said Petula, and she grinned at Nick. “And imagine, it came from
you
!”

Outside the restaurant, Mitch stopped short in front of the local-interests bulletin board, which was covered with business cards, postcards, and flyers for upcoming events. “Hey,
look!” he said, jabbing his finger at one of the flyers. A large photograph graced the piece of paper. “The harp!”

“What harp?” Petula said pleasantly.

Nick grimaced. Petula was like sand at the beach—she had a way of getting into everything, making the world feel uncomfortable. He took a closer look at the flyer.

According to the headline, a local harpist was putting on a benefit concert for charity. Mitch pointed at the photo of a woman sitting behind a harp.

“That’s the harp from your garage sale, isn’t it?” Mitch asked. “I remember seeing it there.”

Just then, another diner came out of the restaurant, still wiping the grease from his lips with a napkin. He noticed them studying the flyer.

“You kids like music?” the man asked.

“Maybe we do and maybe we don’t,” Petula said.

The man tapped the photo of the harpist with his finger. “Well, don’t waste your time. This isn’t music. I don’t know what it is. I saw her ‘play’ at a
coffeehouse last week. Her harp had no strings, and yet…” His thoughts seemed to go far away for a moment, then he shook it off. “Anyway, whatever it was, it sure made the
neighborhood dogs howl. And in key!”

As soon as he left, Petula said, “Sounds like a Teslanoid Object to me.”

Nick looked at the flyer and nodded. It was the same stringless harp he had sold. The performance was two days away. “We can’t take a chance that the Accelerati will get to it first.
We need to find her before Saturday night.”

“I’ll find her,” said Mitch.

“And I’ll go around pulling down the flyers,” offered Petula, “so the Acceleroonies don’t see them.”

“Accelerati,” corrected Nick. He was about to tell Petula that they didn’t need her help, but the fact was, they did. “Look, if we’re going to let you in on
this,” he told her, “I have to know we can trust you.”

She looked shocked by the suggestion. “Of course you can trust me,” she said. “I wouldn’t want to do anything to add to your bitter disappointment.”

When Nick got home that afternoon, Danny was playing video games in the living room, intentionally oblivious to the real world around him.

“Lucky you didn’t come with us for pizza yesterday,” he said, without looking away from his game. “It made half the team sick.”

“Yeah, I heard.”

Through the window, Nick could see their father out back, planting a tree. Mom was the one who’d had the green thumb in the family. Perhaps this was one of his dad’s ways of
remembering her. Or maybe it was just another one of his ways to keep busy.

Nick went out the back door. “What kind of tree is it?” he asked.

“Blood orange, so I’m told,” his dad answered. “But it won’t give fruit for a couple of years.”

He took a break, wiping sweat from his forehead with his T-shirt sleeve, then looked at Nick with the kind of uncomfortably intrusive gaze that only a parent can deliver.

“You doing okay?” he asked.

Nick shrugged. Actually, there were quite a few reasons why he wouldn’t be, only some of which his father knew. “Yeah, fine. Why?”

“It’s just that…you never talk about your friend,” he said. “The one who…passed away…in our living room. I know the whole asteroid business made it
seem less important somehow…but it happened.”

Nick stiffened. Since that day he had never discussed Vince with his father. “Yeah, I try not to think about it,” Nick told him. And then, in a sudden burst of crazy-mad inspiration,
he said, “His identical twin brother is really having a hard time with it, though.”

His father grimaced. “I can’t imagine.” Then, satisfied that had done his parental duty as bereavement counselor, he returned to the matter at hand. He pointed to the hole he
was digging. “What do you suppose that is?”

Nick looked down and saw the shiny edge of something metallic and smooth. The hole, he realized, was more like a shallow trench—as though his father had started out making room for the
tree, but had grown more interested in exposing the metallic rail. He had uncovered at least five feet of it—enough to reveal that it had a slight curve.

“When I hit it with the shovel, I got kind of carried away,” his father said.

Nick instinctively knew whatever this was, it was Tesla-related. As such, it should not be his father’s problem. “Maybe just cover it back up,” Nick offered, “and put the
tree somewhere else.”

“Maybe so,” his father said, “except…when you cover up strange things, they never go away completely, do they?”

No,
Nick had to admit to himself,
they certainly don’t
.

His dad sat on a stump, took off his cap, and scratched his head. “Funny thing,” he said. “After that day, I couldn’t stop thinking about how the bat cracked even though
it never hit the ball, and how all those windows broke, and how the asteroid never did what all those genius scientists said it would do. And I can’t help wondering…what if it was
me
? What if
I
knocked it into orbit? That’s crazy, right?”

Nick could feel tears welling up in his eyes. He tried to fight them but couldn’t. And when his voice finally came out, it was a whisper. “What if it’s not crazy?”

His father looked right at him. “It has to be, Nick. Don’t you see? Because if it’s not crazy, the alternative is terrifying.”

Without warning, Nick launched himself into his father’s arms, and they held each other as tightly as they could. And for a while, that embrace seemed to protect them from all the terror
the world could hurl their way.

Nick didn’t let go until he felt his tears subside. He couldn’t help but notice his father was wiping his own away, too.

“Whatever that is in the ground,” Nick said, “let’s just bury it and plant the tree somewhere else. It might not go away, but it doesn’t have to be our problem
right now.”

Although Nick knew he’d have to deal with it later, whatever it was, he found another shovel and together he and his father hid the thing beneath the dirt. They planted the tree close to
the house, where someday, Nick could imagine, it would spread its leaves, filling the kitchen window with a soothing green view, and give them the sweetest oranges they had ever tasted.

V
ince’s knack for ferreting out lost Teslanoid objects had nothing to do with the fact that his unwanted childhood nickname was “The
Ferret.” The name originated solely from the unfortunate combination of how skinny he was, and the fact that his front baby teeth had made him look somewhat rodent-like for a time. It was the
beginning of his life as an outsider.

Even as an outsider, though, he had his own antisocial circle. It was from these shadowy friends that he got leads on the lost objects—because fringe folk loved nothing more than yakking
about weird stuff, and weirder people.

He was hanging out at the skate park, watching wistfully as kids did tricks he could no longer attempt without the risk of losing battery power, when a fresh lead came his way.

“Dude,” said a skateboarder buddy with more scabs than flesh on his legs, “there’s this lady on my street with, like, cats coming out of her ears.”

“Literally, or figuratively?” Vince asked—because, considering the devices he was tracking, cats coming out of someone’s ears was not entirely out of the question.

His bud just looked at him, blinking, not quite getting the question. “Dude!” he said. “She’s got, like, a million of them in her house!”

Vince sighed. “Literally, or figuratively?” he asked again. “Do you actually mean a million, or just lots and lots?”

“Lots and lots,” the kid said. “But here’s the weird thing: they disappeared all of a sudden and now we’ve got, like, all these mice in the neighborhood.”
Then he leaned in and whispered, “She’s still bringing cats to the house, though. The kitties go in, but they don’t come out.”

In spite of Vince’s burglarizing misadventure, this definitely warranted investigation—even though curiosity might kill him instead of the cats.

The house in question was on a street that had seen better days. Even the trees were leaning away from the homes as if they wished to have nothing to do with them. As he approached the
residence, he heard the cats. Faint. Distant. But it was more than that. The sound of their meows seemed fundamentally changed, although he couldn’t quite say how.

Vince had discovered that when it came to Tesla’s objects and their owners, front-door entries were to be avoided. Instead he went around the side and found a convenient doggy door, which
was obviously not for dogs. It had been duct-taped from the outside, as if someone wanted to make sure that the critters within could no longer get out. He peeled away the duct tape, and being
ferret-slim, was able to shimmy partway through.

The first thing he noticed was the mice.

They were all around him! He couldn’t go backward through the tiny door, so he had no choice but to squeeze all the way inside. The mice scattered, hissing. He stood up and found himself
face-to-face with a woman in the kitchen.

Big, fluffy pink slippers. Straggly hair, and a faraway look in her eyes. She was the very definition of “Crazy Cat Lady.” She wielded a Swiffer floor mop as a weapon.

“Who are you? Get out of my house! Get out!”

She swung it at him, cutting a wide arc, which he was easily able to avoid.

The woman had mice clinging to her woolen sweater. But the noise these mice were making was wrong. They were mewling, like…like…

All at once Vince knew he was in the right place.

“Wow,” he said, “I love your miniature cats!”

She hesitated before swinging the mop again, suspicious. “You do?”

“Of course I do! Who wouldn’t? My friends told me you had miniature cats, and I just wanted to see for myself. May I?”

The woman still looked at him suspiciously, then pulled one from her blouse. It was a palm-size tabby, and very cute, if you liked that sort of thing. She held it out to him and Vince reached
for it, but the tiny cat hissed at him.

“Maybe I’ll just look.”

“The health inspector said I can’t have so many cats. But if they’re small…”

As Vince took in the surroundings of the untidy kitchen, he could see that his friend’s exaggeration wasn’t all that far off. There were hundreds upon hundreds of miniature cats.

“How do you do it?” Vince asked, and the woman, thrilled to have someone more interested than appalled, was happy to talk.

“Shelters,” she said. “I get ’em from shelters. You’d be surprised how many cats nobody wants. I save ’em from gettin’ put to sleep and I bring
’em here. Of course, until a few weeks ago I couldn’t bring ’em all—but now there ain’t no limit!”

“But…how do you do it?” Vince asked again.

The woman gave him a smile that was missing some key teeth. “I’ll show you, but you can’t tell no one!”

Clearly she’d been itching to tell someone about it.

Vince followed the woman into her laundry room, where there was plenty of dirty laundry, but none of it looked like it had any intention of getting into a washing machine. A full-size cat was
sitting on the pile. The cat lady grabbed it and, holding it tight, put it in the sink and turned on the faucet.

“No, don’t!” Vince said reflexively.

“Don’t worry,” the woman said. “I ain’t gonna hurt it. I just gotta get it wet. It won’t work unless it’s wet.”

As cats don’t like water, it did its best to squirm away, but she held it tight until its fur was soggy. Then she opened the door of an exceptionally old dryer with her free hand.
“In ya go!” she said cheerfully.

“No!” said Vince again.

“You’re a nervous type, ain’t ya?” she said.

She shut the dryer and turned it on. It rumbled and grumbled, but as Vince looked in the glass door, he could see that the drum wasn’t turning. Something else was going on inside, though,
because the cat was glowing.

“This is one a’ them ‘do not try this at home’ kind of things,” the crazy lady said. She shut the machine off after ten seconds, and when she opened the door, the
cat was entirely dry. And the size of a hamster.

“I got the thing at a garage sale,” she told him, which he already knew. “First time I used it to dry my clothes, everything shrunk to doll size. In one of the pockets I found
a dollar bill the size of a cookie fortune. When I realized it wasn’t just the clothes that had shrunk, I got to thinking…”

The tiny cat jumped up onto her sweater and climbed to her shoulder to nestle with a host of others. “It’s a dream come true,” she said. “Finally, after all these years,
I have enough cats.”

And that line, Vince realized, was his in. He had discovered that for each of the items he had recovered, the object in question had fulfilled a need, or had slapped the person around enough to
impart a valuable lesson. She might always be a crazy cat lady, but at least now she no longer had the insatiable desire to acquire more cats.