Chapter Twenty-Two
The Mad Mind Revealed
The man in the brown suit continued to guffaw as he swiveled about in his chair, scratching at his neck with one hand. His eyes narrowed with malice, and he pointed an accusatory finger at Evelyn as he did so – he had caught her in the act of betrayal, and they both knew it.
“I can explain!” she cried out, shouting to be heard over the music. “I was just bringing these two interlopers to the chamber, in order to-”
“Don’t bother!” Mr. Weatherbee interrupted. “I’m way ahead of you, Ms. Magellan.”
Maria and Sara could not help but notice that Mr. Weatherbee’s demeanor had completely transformed from when they had seen him earlier in the day. No longer was he the quiet, boring man who blended into the background. Now he was loud, confident, and quite brazen. In fact, there was something suspiciously familiar about this aspect of his personality… something that nagged at their memories and created disquiet in their minds.
Leaning toward Evelyn, Maria asked, “What’s Mr. Weatherbee’s first name?”
“It’s Eli. Why do you ask?”
Maria exchanged a worried look with her sister. “Eli Weatherbee. So his initials are E.W.”
“The same as Ebenezer Widget-Bocker,” Sara groaned with dismay.
“Ooh, you solved the mystery, did you? Do you fancy yourselves to be a pair of detectives?” Mr. Weatherbee taunted from his chair. “It took you long enough, didn’t it? You two certainly aren’t Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, I’ll tell you that much. I suppose we might as well let Ms. Magellan in on the secret, then… she’s certainly been kept in the dark for long enough!”
“Let me in on what?” Evelyn asked, utterly flabbergasted by this development. She shouted to be heard over the rollicking tunes of Eye of the Tiger. “What’s going on here? What are you carrying on about, Mr. Weatherbee?”
“Behold!” the brown-suited man declared… and then, he began a most curious transformation.
Mr. Weatherbee grasped the top of his hair with one hand, and with a flamboyant wave of his arm, he exerted force and tugged upward. To the astonishment of Evelyn, her colleague’s hair came off, as if it were a wig.
Far more surprising was that his face also came free, pulled away in a single deft motion. He had been wearing a meticulously detailed, skintight mask that had been thoroughly convincing. The mask must have been causing his skin some degree of irritation, which would explain his frequent scratching at the bottom of his neck.
Once it was removed, the truth was instantly revealed to the sisters. The man who had been posing as Mr. Weatherbee was none other than Ebenezer Widget-Bocker: mad scientist extraordinaire, mastermind of nefarious plans, and a person with a serious, serious grudge against the Beans.
“You,” Maria and Sara said simultaneously, uttering the word like an accusation.
Evelyn was so shocked, she took an involuntary step backward. “Who are you?”
“I am Ebenezer Widget-Bocker! I am the greatest mind on the face of the planet… and I certainly had you fooled, didn’t I, Ms. Magellan?”
“Well… yes, I guess you did,” Evelyn admitted.
Ebenezer pointed at the realistic mask of Eli Weatherbee, which he had discarded and thrown to the floor. “Quite convincing, isn’t it? Courtesy of the Black Hats’ Espionage Department.”
Evelyn scratched at her head, clearly bewildered by this unforeseen development. “We have an Espionage Department?”
Ebenezer hopped out of the chair. He withdrew a pair of thick eyeglasses from an interior pocket and placed them on the bridge of his nose. With a few quick motions, he removed the drab brown suit he had previously been wearing, revealing a bizarre outfit beneath. He wore a brightly colored leotard, along with a long, flowing cape, which he had somehow kept concealed beneath his suit.
The cape was black with gold trim along the edges, and it fluttered behind Ebenezer as he strutted about in his leotard. He did not remove the brown dress shoes he had been wearing with his suit, nor did he discard his darkly colored socks. The end result was something that was totally absurd, though the sisters suspected that Ebenezer was quite pleased with his outlandish appearance.
With this done, he plopped back into his swiveling chair, as if a king upon his throne, basking in the adoration of his loyal subjects. Gray tufts of hair sprung from his head with disarray in a manner so haphazard, it would have been impossible to suggest that there was any order to such design.
Behind his thick, round glasses (which almost looked like goggles), his shifty, calculating eyeballs darted this way and that, as if eager to digest the reaction of his visitors. Ebenezer had a great zest for showmanship, and he was delighted with his own performance.
It was an odd thing to behold; this tiny man in a rather fanciful cape and foolhardy leotard, bopping his head to Eye of the Tiger while concurrently cackling with wholehearted abandon.
Ebenezer was quite pleased with himself, and he was reveling in the moment. But as unsubtle as his behavior was, the sisters could not blame him too much for his jubilant mood.
He had achieved his objective, after all… by revealing his unexpected presence, he had caught them by surprise and shocked them into a stunned silence. Most bewildered of all was Evelyn, who had worked under Eli Weatherbee’s direction for years, never suspecting that it was an assumed identity.
One of Ebenezer’s hands rested upon a joystick that was built into an armrest of the chair, and he used this to swivel it about, moving it back and forth to the rhythm of the rock n’ roll. His other hand held a remote control, presumably for the oversized stereo of the Black Hats’ stronghold, which continued pumping out the rambunctious tunes.
After several moments of prolonged laughter, during which Evelyn and the sisters could only stare, Ebenezer’s guffawing finally tapered off, and he brought his swiveling chair to a stop. He lifted the remote control, and with an air of finality, pressed a button.
Nothing happened, and Ebenezer’s wild smile faltered. He eyeballed the remote control suspiciously, shaking it about, repeatedly pressing buttons, to no avail. Finally, he flipped it over, removed the batteries and reinserted them, and gave the remote one more shake.
This time, when he pressed the power button, the music came to a stop. The following silence was overwhelming, coming as it did on the heels of such loud, powerful rock n’ roll.
“Ah! There we are,” Ebenezer declared with satisfaction.
“What was that all about?” Sara asked.
“What? Why, it was entrance music of course,” Ebenezer explained, his face falling with disappointment. “Does no one appreciate my flair for the dramatic, my passion for theatrics, my untouchable style? I’m surrounded by philistines, I tell you!”
Maria and Sara exchanged glances with one another, stifling their giggles. Though Ebenezer’s passion for showmanship could be inadvertently amusing, they knew that he used it to comfort his fragile ego and soothe his long harbored insecurities.
While they were briefly looking at each other, the sisters were able to instinctively read one another’s intuitions. As their eyes met, they subtly nodded in agreement. Then, without ever having discussed the matter, they slowly began inching forward at a rate so slow, they hoped it would go undetected.
They scarcely lifted their heels from the floor, slowly shuffling forward, masking their intentions with other movements, such as gesticulations of their hands as they spoke, or running their fingers through their hair.
Evelyn had fallen in behind Maria and Sara, and she immediately grasped the notion of their plan. Slowly, ever so slowly, they were creeping toward Ebenezer, aided by his emotional impulses and hotheaded manner… tendencies that made him apt to overlook such subtle movements.
Ebenezer was still a fair distance away from them. At the turtle-like pace at which they were moving, it would take quite some time to close the distance. But the sisters knew that every inch counted, and if they just maintain
ed a slow, steady rate, they might be able to get close enough to Ebenezer… close enough to stop him from engaging in whatever hare-brained plan he had cooked up in that demented noggin of his.
“But how could it be entrance music? You were already in the room, sitting right there in that chair,” Maria pointed out. “You didn’t actually enter it. We were the ones who entered it. If you think about it, you were playing entrance music for us, weren’t you?”
“Now that you put it like that, I suppose that it was awfully thoughtful,” Sara conceded. “Eye of the Tiger is a very exciting piece of music!”
Ebenezer ground his teeth and grumbled something inarticulate. His face began to redden, and his eyeballs bulged behind the lenses of his glasses.
Somewhat alarmed by the scientist’s explosive condition, Maria whispered to her sister, “What’s he doing?”
“Silence!” Ebenezer squawked, thumping one of his tiny fists against an armrest.
“Relax, there’s no need for such rudeness. If you have something you’d like to say, just wait your turn, and we’d be happy to hear you out, Mr. Widget-Bocker,” Sara assured him.
Ebenezer glowered at Sara, seemingly thrown by her reasoning and politeness. He lost his momentum and stammered, fiddling at the joystick that was mounted to his chair. He had dropped the stereo’s remote control upon his lap, and that hand, now freed, was rhythmically clenching and unclenching, as he muttered beneath his breath.
“Go ahead, Mr. Widget-Bocker, speak your piece!” Maria encouraged him, while slowly continuing to edge forward.
“Did you really think that you could outsmart me?” Ebenezer demanded. He seemed to be at once outraged and amused by the notion that others thought they could best him. “Don’t you know who I am?”
“Of course we know who you are,” Sara said. “We’ve been through this before. You’re-”
“I am Ebenezer Widget-Bocker!” the mad scientist interrupted (quite unnecessarily). “I am the greatest mind on the face of the planet!”