Mrs. Bing frowned her disapproval. “That’s not very nice. I can only imagine how upsetting this must be for Melissa.”
“I feel bad for them,” Griffin admitted. “But that doesn’t change what jerks they were before this happened. Like I set out to make this a war between boys and girls. Pitch is the one who did that. And Savannah jumped on board the minute she found out Melissa’s invention was about her crazy dog.”
“In case you haven’t noticed,” Mrs. Bing said icily, “I’m a girl, too. Don’t make me choose sides.” And she headed back upstairs.
The boys were not far behind her. “This stinks,” Griffin grumbled. “How are we going to fix it if we don’t even dare turn it on?” He brightened. “Hey, maybe we can test it at your house.”
“No way,” Ben returned firmly. “If it shuts down our DVR and my mother can’t record her soap operas, there’ll be heads all over the place — including yours and mine.”
Griffin was in the kitchen grabbing two Gatorades when a thump from upstairs captured his attention.
Must be Mom, he thought, but then he caught sight of her at the computer, retyping her lost e-mail, oblivious to everything else.
Ben had heard it, too. “Is somebody upstairs?” he asked. “Your dad, maybe?”
Griffin shook his head. “He’s in the city today. It must have been a book falling off the shelf or something.” Curious, he started up the stairs, Ben right behind him. Halfway up, they heard the sound of scrambling.
“Oh, boy,” Griffin groaned. “If the squirrels are back in the chimney, my dad’s going to freak.”
But as they reached the top landing, he caught a glimpse through the open door of his bedroom and knew immediately that something was wrong. The contents of his closet spilled out into the room, his dresser drawers were pulled open, and his comforter had been tossed up onto the bed, as if someone had been searching underneath it.
Griffin and Ben ran into the room.
“No squirrel did this!” Ben whispered nervously.
More thumping sounds drew them back into the hall.
Griffin pointed. “The bathroom!”
The two raced into the white-tiled room and stopped short. It was empty. Griffin threw aside the shower curtain. Nobody there.
All at once, Ferret Face began struggling and flailing.
“Chill out, little guy!”
The pointy nose emerged from Ben’s collar, and the beady eyes looked straight up.
Griffin and Ben craned their necks to follow the little ferret’s gaze. There, in the narrow channel below the open skylight, hung Pitch Benson, caught in the act of making her escape.
“Pitch?” Griffin blurted. “What are you doing? We have a front door, you know.”
Pitch jumped down, red with embarrassment. “Melissa’s out of her mind,” she said belligerently. “She can’t believe what happened to the Hover Handler.”
“The Hover —” Light dawned on Griffin. “You broke in and ransacked my room because you thought I stole the Hover Handler? What’s the matter with you, Pitch? How long have we been friends — since kindergarten? You ought to know I’d never do anything like that!”
Pitch was shamefaced. “Sorry, Griffin. I wasn’t thinking straight. I guess this wrestling thing really got into my head. So when the Invent-a-Palooza started up, I got down on you for treating Melissa like the B-team just because she’s a girl.”
“It never had anything to do with that,” Griffin said earnestly. “To be honest, I didn’t want to enter the contest at all, but everyone started putting all this pressure on me because of my dad. Like that makes me Thomas Edison. And then I made this stupid bet with Vader — it’s my own fault, but I can’t back out of it.”
“I’m really, really sorry,” Pitch repeated. She held out her hand. “Truce?”
Griffin shook it. “But only if you help me clean my room.”
“Done. We can’t be fighting. We’ve got Melissa to worry about. Griffin, I can’t even tell you how destroyed she is by all this. She won’t talk to anybody. She won’t even come out of her house. Her folks are going nuts. I’m worried about her.”
“Then we’ve got to do something,” Griffin agreed. “That’s more important than any dumb contest. We need a plan.”
There was a quiet moan from Ben, who covered it up by clearing his throat.
Pitch nodded thoughtfully. “Normally, I’d run a mile, but I think you’re right this time. Melissa’s in real trouble. So what do we do?”
“Well, for starters, we have to figure out who took the Hover Handler,” Griffin decided. “Maybe you had the right idea, but the wrong house.”
She frowned. “The wrong house?”
“Seriously,” said Griffin, “how could you possibly suspect me in a world that contains Darren Vader?”
The boat’s clean, Griffin,” Pitch reported. “The only thing I found there was a dead fish they forgot in the refrigerator. Believe me, they’re not going to forget it next season. They may never forget it as long as they live.”
Griffin crossed the boat off the list in his notebook. “Are you sure there aren’t any secret compartments?”
“Well I didn’t have a lot of time to poke around in there.” Pitch rolled her eyes. “I had to hurry. Logan was annoying the harbormaster.”
“Annoying?” Logan was wounded. “I was acting. I distracted him while you scoped out the In-Vader.”
Pitch grimaced. “I don’t think he believed you were a Swedish exchange student here from Oslo to study boats.”
“I was totally in character,” Logan insisted. “I had him eating out of my hand.”
“He was laughing at you,” Pitch shot back. “And by the way, Oslo is in Norway.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Griffin put in quickly to keep the peace. “The important thing is no Hover Handler.” He turned to Ben and Savannah, who had just emerged from the Vaders’ backyard. “Anything in the toolshed?”
“Just lawn mowers and patio furniture,” Ben replied. “We would have looked closer, but Savannah punched Ferret Face.”
“I didn’t punch him,” Savannah said patiently. “I just gave him a tap on the nose so he wouldn’t hurt that poor little chipmunk. That’s how animals learn.”
“He learned, all right,” Ben returned bitterly. “He scratched the living daylights out of my stomach. You may be the big expert on dogs, but you don’t know squat about the ferret world.”
Savannah hung her head. “I can’t even call myself a dog expert anymore. I’m powerless to stop my poor Sweetie from chasing that truck. We’ve got him locked in the basement now. If he has access to a window, he might go straight through it.”
“Don’t worry,” Griffin encouraged. “When we get the Hover Handler back, he’ll be golden. Did you get a good look inside the garage, too?”
Ben nodded. “I even looked under the cars and popped the trunks. Nothing.”
“What now?” asked Pitch.
Griffin shrugged. “Vader must have stashed it in his house somewhere.”
The five surveyed the gracious home across the street. It was one of the biggest houses in Cedarville, with a procession of windows on three different levels, indicating many rooms inside.
“Lots of hiding places in there,” Ben commented bleakly.
“Not necessarily,” Griffin countered. “He can’t stick it in the middle of the living room or his parents will want to know what it is. That just leaves the basement and the attic. And, of course, his room.”
“Yuck,” put in Pitch.
“This would be so much easier if we had Melissa,” Ben said with a sigh. “With a few keystrokes she’d take control of his computer and we could spy on him through his own camera. Or she’d hack into the security system and we could see the whole house. We’d have webcams in the windows and wireless microphones down the chimney, so we’d hear every word anybody says in there.”
“I know it stinks to be without the kind of technology we’re used to,” Gri
ffin admitted. “But you guys all heard Mr. Dukakis — Melissa won’t see anybody. She won’t even talk on the phone. She hasn’t been in school for a week! If this keeps up, she’ll go back to the way she used to be — too shy to whisper.”
Pitch nodded. “Point taken. That’s one of the main reasons we’re doing this — to get Melissa’s life back.”
“Besides,” Griffin went on, “if you’ve got the right plan, you shouldn’t need fancy gadgets.” He held up his paper with a flourish.
Logan had a complaint. “You’re under-using my talent. I could ring the doorbell and portray a friend calling for Darren.”
“You’re not that good an actor,” Griffin told him. “No offense. Nobody is. You’d have to pretend you can stand Vader.”
Logan thought it over. “You may be right. Not even Johnny Depp could pull that one off.”
“Okay.” Griffin clapped his hands. “Places, everybody. For Melissa.”
“For Melissa,” they chorused.
The five started for their positions. But they’d barely gone a few steps when the front door opened and Mrs. Vader stepped out onto the porch to pick up the Sunday paper.
“Oh, hello,” she said, a little taken aback. “Are you here to see Darren?”
The Man With The Plan was struck dumb, which did not happen very often. Mrs. Vader understood as well as anybody that her son and Griffin were hardly friends. On the other hand, what other explanation could there be for the five kids swarming on her property? She could not possibly know that her house was the object of a stakeout for a stolen Hover Handler.
Griffin finally found his voice. “Uh — is he home?” It wouldn’t be smart to express his honest opinion of Darren to the one person who probably liked the guy.
“Yes, we’re just about to have brunch,” Mrs. Vader replied. “Why don’t you kids join us? In fact, I insist.”
Ben cast Griffin a stricken look and shook his head ever so slightly. The message was clear: Please get us out of this. Griffin, too, wasn’t craving extra face time with Darren. But the opportunity was too great to pass up. Why peek in windows by periscope, hoping to catch a glimpse of the Hover Handler, when you could waltz right into the house as an invited guest and have a good look around?
“Thank you, Mrs. Vader. We’d love to. All of us,” he added with a meaningful glance at Pitch, who seemed to be hiding behind the telephone pole she’d been about to climb.
They followed Darren’s mother into the house, down the hall, and into the spacious kitchen. “Thank you for coming. We have so much food.”
If the five team members were not thrilled to be guests in the Vader house, that was nothing compared with the look on Darren’s face when they all trooped up to the table. “Mom — what gives? How come they’re here?”
“Well, I don’t think they’re here to see Dad and me,” his mother said reproachfully.
“Just be grateful they are here,” grumbled Mr. Vader at the head of the table. “They can help us eat some of this — stuff.”
That’s when they caught sight of the brunch spread out on the buffet. There were poached eggs, scrambled eggs, fried eggs, frittatas, deviled eggs, eggs Benedict, omelets, and French toast.
“Man,” commented Ben, awed. “You guys must really like eggs.”
“Well,” said Mr. Vader, helping himself to a deviled egg, “ever since the EGGS-traordinary came along —”
“Don’t tell them, Dad!” Darren piped up urgently. “They’re the competition!”
“Oh, Darren, it’s the Invent-a-Palooza, not the Hunger Games,” Mrs. Vader chided. “Where’s the harm if your friends know that your invention is a self-feeding egg cooker?”
She pointed to the granite counter by the stove. There stood the EGGS-traordinary, a gleaming chrome tub. Everybody watched as an egg rolled down from a mesh hopper. It was cracked open by a tiny hammer, which jettisoned the shell and dropped the contents into the cooking mechanism. In barely a minute, a small plate of scrambled eggs came riding out on a conveyor belt, ready to eat.
“Wow, Darren, you made that all by yourself?” asked Savannah.
“Yeah!” Darren shot back belligerently.
“My law firm represents a small appliance company,” Mrs. Vader explained. “They helped with the design and the manufacturing. But the concept was all Darren.”
“So eat my dust,” Darren added.
They all sat down to brunch. Even Ferret Face was given his own bowl of eggs Benedict under the table. Everybody had a hearty appetite, but they barely made a dent in the EGGS-traordinary’s output. As the meal went on, Darren overcame his resentment at having his secret revealed and began to boast about his invention and how only a truly brilliant mind could have conceived of it.
“Yeah, I’d say I’ve got the Invent-a-Palooza pretty much in the bag,” he concluded. “Nobody’s going to come up with anything better than this. There’s a speech in your future, Bing. I’ll punch it up for you, so you don’t bomb.”
The scrambled eggs turned to poison in Griffin’s mouth. He was dying to point out that not one ounce of this wondrous machine was Darren’s own work. His mother’s client had done the whole thing for him, complete with professional-grade manufacturing. But how could he say that in front of Mr. and Mrs. Vader when he was a guest in their home?
After brunch, Pitch sidled up to Griffin. “So what’s the plan? Half of us keep the Vaders busy while the rest of us search the house?”
Griffin sighed. “Don’t bother. Darren didn’t steal the Hover Handler. Why would he? He’s so confident that his egg cooker is going to blow the competition away that he doesn’t even care about anyone else’s invention. He’s already got first place all sewn up.”
“Yeah, you’re dead meat,” Ben added earnestly. “There’s no way your dumb vacuum cleaner motor is going to beat that — even if you can get it to work.”
“Come on,” scoffed Pitch. “If Darren built that thing, I’m the Queen of England.”
Griffin shrugged helplessly. “I know it. You know it. The judges will probably know it, too. And they’ll still have to give him first prize.”
They thanked the Vaders for their egg-cellent feast and took their leave.
“Later, losers!” called Darren at the door. His mood had really recovered since he’d encountered Griffin and the team in his kitchen.
“Well, I guess we don’t have to bother looking for the Hover Handler anymore,” Logan observed. “Darren’s going to win the Invent-a-Palooza no matter what.”
“Don’t say that!” Savannah was almost in tears. “We have to find it for Luthor! I can’t keep the poor baby tied up in the basement for the rest of his life!”
“And don’t forget Melissa,” Pitch added. “If she doesn’t recover her invention, she’ll never recover at all.”
“So we have to get it back,” Ben concluded. All at once, he shuddered from head to toe and peered inside his shirt. “Ferret Face, is that French toast? Who told you to take a doggie bag? It’s sticky!”
“We’re at a dead end,” Griffin concluded glumly.
“What are you talking about?” challenged Savannah. “What about Operation Recover Hover? What about the plan?”
Griffin wheeled to face them. “Don’t you get it? We don’t have a plan — we have a mystery! If Darren doesn’t have the Hover Handler, who does?”
Melissa was back at school, but she wasn’t the same Melissa anymore. Her eyes never made an appearance at all. She did her schoolwork, yet even to teachers, her conversation was limited to a simple yes or no.
Griffin and the team made a huge show of welcoming her back. She acknowledged them with a slight wave and a barely audible “Hi.” At the lunch table, their animated chatter bubbled around her, yet did not penetrate the wall she had constructed around herself.
“We’re really sorry about that whole boys-versus-girls thing,” Griffin told her earnestly. “We didn’t mean for you to end up in the middle of it. I was wrong to be miffed when you e
ntered the contest. It had nothing to do with you being a girl; I was just caught off guard.”
“The whole thing was stupid,” Pitch agreed. “And anyway, it’s all over now. Honest.”
A bit of sandwich disappeared into Melissa’s hair and presumably reached her mouth.
Ben leaned in to Griffin’s ear and whispered, “Don’t mention the Invent-a-Palooza. That’ll remind her about the you-know-what.”
“Everything will remind her of her stolen invention,” Savannah argued in a low voice. “If I talk about Luthor, she’ll remember that the Hover Handler was created for him.”
“I know a topic that’s safe,” Logan said enthusiastically. “The Ouch-Free Bandage Company has green-lighted my commercial! As soon as they hire a director, they’ll be ready to start shooting.”
A napkin entered the cocoon of hair, emerging a moment later, smeared with peanut butter.
* * *
Not even Mr. Kropotkin could get through to Melissa. The teacher begged her to start on another entry for the Invent-a-Palooza.
“It doesn’t have to be as elaborate as the Hover Handler, Melissa. But this contest is tailor-made for you. You’re so talented! Won’t you reconsider?”
The answer, when it came from behind her hair, was a quiet, firm “No.”
* * *
Every day after school, Griffin and Ben made their way to the Dukakis house, braving the long detour created by Mr. Hartman’s fence. Each time, Melissa would refuse to come down from her room, using the excuse that she was “busy.”
“Maybe she’s working on a new invention,” Ben said hopefully. “Or rebuilding the old one. That would be good.”
“She isn’t,” Mrs. Dukakis replied sadly. “She’s just sitting there, staring at the ceiling. She hasn’t turned her computer on in days.”
Griffin and Ben were horrified. For Melissa, giving up technology was like giving up breathing.