The Bloodwater Mysteries: Doppelganger Read online

  THE

  BLOODWATER

  MYSTERIES

  doppelganger

  PETE HAUTMAN

  WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD

  AND MARY LOGUE

  G. P. Putnam’s Sons

  G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

  A division of Penguin Young Readers Group.

  Published by The Penguin Group.

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.).

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  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd).

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa.

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England.

  Copyright © 2008 by Pete Hautman and Mary Logue.

  All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group, 345 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, Reg. U.S. Pat. & Tm. Off.

  The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content. Published simultaneously in Canada.

  Design by Gina DiMassi. Text set in Granjon.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hautman, Pete, 1952–

  Doppelganger / by Pete Hautman and Mary Logue. p. cm. — (The Bloodwater mysteries)

  Summary: High school newspaper reporter Roni finds an age-progressed photograph on a missing children’s website of a boy that looks just like her sidekick Brian, throwing the pair into an investigation of Brian’s past and family heritage.

  [1. Identity—Fiction. 2. Missing children—Fiction. 3. Adoption—Fiction. 4. Korean Americans—Fiction. 5. Mystery and detective stories.] I. Logue, Mary. II. Title.

  PZ7.H2887Do 2008 [Fic]—dc22 2007020421

  ISBN: 978-1-101-65228-2

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  For Luke and Mary Brindle

  contents

  1. an article of interest

  2. among the missing

  3. a real scar

  4. the rhododendron incident

  5. a family matter

  6. the lost emperor

  7. darwin dipstick

  8. ms. perhaps

  9. suds science

  10. albert e.

  11. cross-eyed baby

  12. kimchi chick

  13. go back lane

  14. squirrel skulls

  15. pop

  16. upended

  17. darwin, again

  18. the foundling

  19. the art of the whine

  20. pebbles

  21. ojinx-o teegim

  22. an old friend

  23. mrs. kay

  24. strong boy

  25. pizza soup

  26. louella

  27. crazy mirror

  28. dak-ho

  29. rope-a-dope

  30. kyung-soon

  31. blood and tea

  32. ki-nam

  33. two families

  1

  an article of interest

  Brian Bain heard a familiar thump on the side of the house, the sound he had been waiting for. He abandoned his computer in mid-keystroke, ran down the steps and through the living room, and opened the front door. He looked around. The paperboy was already out of sight.

  It took him a few seconds to find the source of the thump. Then he saw the newspaper stuck deep in the rosebush next to the steps. Too excited to care about a few small scratches, Brian reached in through the thorny stems and sweet-smelling blossoms and extracted the morning edition of the Bloodwater Clarion.

  He sat down on the steps and immediately began paging through the paper. A few seconds later, on page twenty-three, he found it.

  The photograph took up almost half the page: his own face, almost life-size, smiling and holding up a paper airplane. The caption beneath the photo read, “Brian Bain, 13, displays his winning design in the Zeb Bloodwater Paper-Airplane Contest.”

  More than half a century ago, Zeb Bloodwater, the grandson of Bloodwater’s founder, had fashioned a pair of wings made from brown paper bags and balsa struts, then launched himself off the two-hundred-foot-high Barn Bluff. The Clarion’s annual paper-airplane contest was in memory of Zeb’s first—and final—attempt at flight.

  This summer, Brian had won the contest, which required that the airplane be folded from the front page of the Bloodwater Clarion. He named his airplane the SS-XLR8. First prize was a framed certificate and—most important—his picture in the paper.

  Famous again, Brian thought as he admired the photograph. He had been in the paper twice before, but both times it had been with Roni Delicata. First, there had been the article about the Alicia Camden kidnapping a few months ago. He had been in the paper again when he and Roni had uncovered the secret behind the vicious attack on a local archaeologist. But those pictures had been much smaller, and Roni had been standing in front, hogging the camera.

  This time Brian was alone on the page, and the picture was huge. Best of all, it had nothing to do with crime solving or Roni Delicata. It was all about him and his accomplishments.

  Brian imagined Roni flipping through the paper and then coming upon his face staring out at her. He grinned.

  She would be excruciatingly jealous.

  Fifty miles away, a woman reading the online edition of the Bloodwater Clarion came across Brian’s picture. Her heart began to pound. She reached out and ran her fingers across the image of his face.

  Softly, so quietly no one else could hear her, she said, “Oh, no. He must not find you. I will try to keep you safe.”

  Another woman also paused upon seeing Brian Bain’s picture. She stared at the photo in disbelief. Her lips stretched across her face in an unfamiliar way. It felt so peculiar she was afraid she had somehow injured her face. Then she realized that she was smiling for the first time in many years.

  She picked up her phone and dialed.

  Thirty miles southeast of Bloodwater, in a dilapidated mobile home tucked into a wooded coulee, a telephone rang. The man sprawled on the bed opened one bloodshot eye and glared at it. The ringing continued. The man reached over the side of the bed, picked up a muddy boot, and hurled it at the telephone. He missed, but the ringing stopped. Grumbling, the man pulled a blanket over his head and tried to go back to sleep.

  A few seconds later, the phone began to ring again. The man cursed and rolled out of bed, dragging the blanket with him, stepped over the sleeping dog, and picked up the receiver.

  “What,” he said.


  “Good news, baby,” said the woman on the phone. “I found him.”

  2

  among the missing

  Roni Delicata took the fruit bar from its box and closed the freezer door. She tore the paper wrapper at the top, stripping it down as if peeling a banana. Admiring the bright color of the frozen fruit bar—so pink it almost hurt her eyes to look at it—she removed the last of the wrapper and threw it in the trash can beneath the kitchen sink.

  “How many of those are you planning to eat?” Nick Delicata’s voice stopped Roni’s tongue in mid-lick.

  Roni looked at the frozen fruit bar in her hand, then at her mother.

  “It’s made with real strawberries,” she said.

  “Yes, and real sugar, too,” Nick said.

  “It’s only my second one.”

  “It’s your third one this afternoon. I thought you were on a diet. Last night you hardly ate a bite of my lasagna.”

  Roni shrugged and took a big bite out of the fruit bar so she wouldn’t have to explain why she hadn’t been able to eat the gummy, sticky disaster that her mother called lasagna. As for her diet, well…that hadn’t been going so well. She blamed it on sheer boredom. But she had another six weeks until school started—plenty of time to starve herself.

  “You shouldn’t eat just because you’re bored,” Nick said, performing that irritating mind-reading trick that mothers do so well.

  “Who says I’m bored?” Roni said.

  “I know you. You’ve got the midsummer blahs. If you’re not in the middle of investigating for some article—or solving one of your mysteries—you do nothing but sleep, stare at your computer, and eat junk food.”

  “I read, too,” Roni said.

  “Then maybe you’d like to help me with these letters.” Roni’s mom was the secretary to the mayor of Bloodwater. She often brought work home with her, and that afternoon she had come home with two boxes of letters to the mayor, most of them having to do with Mayor Buddy Berglund’s recent proposal to make Bloodwater House his official residence—at the taxpayers’ expense. The citizens of Bloodwater were somewhat perturbed. Nick was dividing the letters into three piles: “opposed,” “vehemently opposed,” and “threatening.”

  “No, thanks,” said Roni, heading for the stairs. “I have to get back to my room. I’m reading the dictionary.”

  Nick laughed and shook her head.

  Roni settled into her desk chair, woke up her computer, and looked upon the face of a girl who had been abducted in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, several weeks earlier. Vanessa Angel Charleston, age six, believed to be in the company of her mother, Angelina Charleston. Roni studied the girl’s face, then read the specifics: height, weight, hair color, eye color, birthmarks, etc. She stared fiercely at the picture until she was sure that if she ever saw Vanessa Charleston, she would immediately recognize her.

  She licked her fruit bar just in time to keep it from dripping onto her keyboard, and clicked the next name on the missing-children website. Sooner or later, she would run into one of these lost, abducted, or runaway kids. What a story it would make if one of these kids were found in Bloodwater! Roni dreamed of becoming an investigative reporter. Finding a missing child could be her big break. She imagined her byline, P. Q. Delicata, on the front page of The New York Times. At the very least, she could write about it in her column for the Bloodwater Pump, the high school newspaper.

  Most of the younger missing kids had been snatched by one of their own parents—probably after a nasty divorce. The older ones, including a lot of girls her age—sixteen—were probably runaways. Only a few were victims of stranger abductions.

  Roni clicked on the next name. Bryce Doblemun. A cute-looking Asian kid. She licked her fruit bar and scrolled down, reading. Abducted by his adoptive mother at age three years and eleven months—almost ten years ago. She scrolled down to a second image: an “age-progressed” photo of the same kid—an artist had taken the photo of the young Bryce Doblemun and “aged” it to what he might look like ten years later.

  Roni stared at the age-progressed photo.

  The boy in the photo stared back at her.

  Roni’s mouth slowly fell open.

  “Impossible,” she said.

  A large pink strawberry-flavored blob dripped onto her keyboard.

  She knew him.

  3

  a real scar

  Brian Bain sat at his desk admiring his picture from the Bloodwater Clarion, now pinned up on his bedroom wall. He had decided not to call Roni about it—he would wait for her to stumble across it on her own. He looked at the phone, willing it to ring, and—amazingly—it did.

  He checked the caller ID. It was Roni. Perfect.

  Brian picked up the phone. “Bain Aviation.”

  “Brian? It’s me. Are you online?”

  Brian touched a key on his laptop and the screen came to life.

  “Yep. Hey, did you see the paper?”

  Roni ignored him. “Go to this site,” she said. She gave him the web address.

  Brian typed in the address. “Did you see the paper?” he asked again.

  “No. Has the site loaded yet?”

  “Wait…here it is.” The missing-kids website popped up.

  “Now type ‘Bryce Doblemun’ into the search box.” She spelled out the name.

  Brian typed it in and hit the search button. A little kid’s photo came up.

  “What do you think?” Roni asked.

  “About what?”

  “Scroll down.”

  Brian scrolled down to the age-progressed photo.

  “Look like anybody you know?” Roni asked.

  Brian stared at the face on his computer screen. It looked vaguely familiar. “Not really.”

  “It’s you!” Roni said.

  “You’re crazy,” he said. “Look how fat his cheeks are.”

  “Just like your cheeks,” Roni said.

  Brian’s eyes went from the image on his computer to the article tacked on the wall.

  “I do not have fat cheeks. Besides, I’m not missing.”

  “Yeah, but…”

  “But what?”

  “Well, do you actually remember anything from before you were adopted?”

  “I was, like, six months old!”

  “Are you sure?”

  Brian didn’t say anything for several seconds. The question bothered him more than he cared to let on.

  “You still there?” Roni asked.

  “His eyes are squinty. I do not have squinty eyes.”

  “You do when you laugh.”

  Brian decided then and there to give up laughing, especially when he was around Roni. It wouldn’t be easy. Roni could be pretty funny.

  “He’s older,” Brian said.

  “You’re both thirteen. His birthday’s on the twelfth, yours is on the twenty-first. That could just be a typo.”

  “You think all Asians look the same,” he said.

  “I do not!”

  “How many Asian kids do you know?”

  “You mean besides you? Lots.”

  “Name three.”

  “Cynthia Lee. Denis Nguyen. Aaron White. And none of them look anything like you.”

  “Cindy’s a girl, and she’s from China, Denis is eighteen years old and only half Vietnamese, and Aaron White is Native American.”

  “Whatever. Are you still looking at the picture? Look at yourself and compare.”

  Once again, Brian looked at the photo of himself in the newspaper, then back at the image on his computer screen.

  “He does look Korean. But his ears are different.”

  “Not that different. And what about his name?”

  Brian looked again at the missing kid’s name. Bryce Doblemun. “What about it?”

  “Bryce? Brian? Pretty close, don’t you think?”

  “I’ll tell you what I think,” he said. “I think you’re insane.”

  “Yeah, well, maybe I’m crazy enough to call the missing-kids hotlin
e and tell them I’ve found Bryce Doblemun.”

  Brian felt his insides lurch. How come every time he talked to Roni, everything got so scary and complicated?

  “Don’t,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because…because I need a donut.”

  Roni laughed. “Now you’re speaking my language!”

  “Bratten’s Bakery? Twenty minutes?”

  “I’m on my way.”

  Was there really a resemblance?

  Brian stared at the face on his computer screen. Bryce Doblemun’s image swam in and out of focus. One moment he felt as if he was looking into a crazy mirror, a second later it was like staring at a complete stranger.

  Maybe they were somehow related. Brian’s parents had told him that his South Korean mother had given him up for adoption when he was just a few months old. He might have cousins, or even a brother or sister. He would probably never know. His biological relatives were six thousand miles away in a country he did not remember. The weird thing was, when he tried to recall his distant past, sometimes he thought he remembered living with another family when he was little—a few faint glimpses of a previous life: A big man who laughed a lot. A little dog. A lady with red hair.

  He scrolled up to the photo of Vera Doblemun, the boy’s adoptive mother. She was a thin, pinched-looking woman with light hair. The photo was black-and-white, and the description did not include her hair color. Her face did not look at all familiar.

  According to the website, Bryce and Vera Doblemun had disappeared from their home in Minneapolis. Roni would probably make a big deal out of the fact that Minneapolis was less than an hour away from Bloodwater. Roni could make a big deal out of oatmeal.

  Brian closed his eyes. He thought he remembered a little curly-haired dog with a pointy nose, and a swing set. The memories were faint and disconnected, like a dream. He had always assumed that they were dreams—like the time he remembered Bugs Bunny visiting him in his bedroom.

  How could he tell what was real and what wasn’t?

  He remembered running on a sidewalk with the little dog, and tripping and hurting his elbow.