Part Five
It had been a few months. Between a massive computer crash and having to track down the infamous Daniel to get confirmation of Mystery Inc.'s accounting of events, the steps leading up to my article's first draft had been tedious at best.
I'd been overzealous when I blurted out that I knew who the Soothsayer was in front of Fred. There would be consequences if I was wrong (which I was prepared for) but I wasn't entirely comfortable with the thought of being right. The moment I published my article someone's life was probably going to change, and the weight of that realization had caused me to procrastinate beyond professionalism. And to top it off, my editor was demanding I speak with Daphne.
The Blake family owned an isolated beachfront property, two stories with wooden railings and a swing on the porch; a former bed and breakfast named the Stefanianna House, which I found myself parked in front of. Repainted with an orange roof, violet paneling and a light green trim convinced me that I had arrived at the correct address without having to conform it with the GPS. Late afternoon sunlight draped gently over the sand, creating the image of a perfect seascape. I felt like I didn't belong here.
I'd been sitting in my car for half an hour, not working up the nerve to smudge this oil painting with my fingertips. When I started this whole journey I had never expected to meet Daphne. Granted I hadn't expected to meet any of them. Shaggy had been a chance encounter. I'd gone looking for Velma, but I didn't think I'd find her on the first try. At that point I really thought that would have been it for me; Velma would have answered all the important questions, the trail would have dead ended, I could not have anticipated hugging Scooby, riding in the Mystery Machine or getting caught in one of Fred's traps. But the one thing I would have bet my life on was that I'd never meet Daphne.
If meeting Scooby Doo had caused me to regress to the innocence of my childhood, then the looming introduction to Daphne was taking me into my misfit adolescence. She was the popular girl, the homecoming queen, the cheerleader; she was THAT girl. I expect every teenager, male or female, had some kind of a crush on THAT girl when they were in high school, and had experienced the unconscious effect THAT girl's smile or frown could have on one's sense of self worth. Even though I'd long since left high school behind me, I was apprehensive about the prospect of meeting Miss Blake.Maybe it was because Daphne was always a bit of a mystery herself. I was never entirely clear on why she’d joined Mystery Inc. in the first place. For Fred I'd always assumed. But then she stayed through that whole Flim Flam period while Fred and Velma were…doing whatever they were...come to think of it, maybe I'd been focused on the wrong unsolved mystery.
I finally worked up the nerve and meandered up to the front door of the house, reaching for the intrusive metal handle. A middle-aged gentleman with a receding grey hairline in a coat and tails beat me to the knock. “Ah the journalist,” he smiled. “Miss Blake is expecting you.”
“Thank you, Mr?”
“Jeeves,” he answered.
I blinked. Seriously? People are actually named that? On purpose?
I'm quite sure my perplexity showed on my face, but Jeeves (again, seriously?) maintained more professional composure than I did and politely ushered me into a drawing room. At least I'd call it a drawing room. I don't actually know what a drawing room is; a room where you draw, I presume. It was spacious, with three huge windows on two walls showing a beautiful view of the beach and a single desk with two chairs in the corner. If I was going to draw in a room this would be my first choice.
Adorning the wall next to the doorway I had just entered was a series of bookshelves containing leather bound books, stacks of papers and the occasional globe or unicorn shaped statuette. This must have been one of the Blake's personal libraries. The ceiling was at least a story and a half high and a roller ladder was attached to a track about two-thirds of the way up. The bottom of an ornate wooden staircase began where the shelves ended. I secretly wondered if I might be able to take a sabbatical in this house for when I'd have to write Scooby's memoirs.
"The mistress will be down shortly," said Jeeves (I know this is an unimportant detail to obsess over but I can't even type his name with a straight face).
"Thank you," I said.
"Would you care for a spot of tea?"
"Please," I said even though I really don't really drink or like tea. Something told me he would be bringing out a whole tray of sugar, milk and honey which I could use enough of to make it taste like not-tea.
And then I heard a voice from the top of the staircase, the only voice that could make the word 'jeepers' not sound completely ridiculous. "Mind if I join you?"
There was a moment where the world stopped. What's-his-name said something but my brain didn't process it. Daphne sparkled, and in that moment it was the only thing that registered. For whatever reason: diet and exercise, good genetics, a trip to ILM, she hadn't aged a day since delivering that suit of armor to County Museum.
"Daphne." She cheerfully introduced herself with a feminine handshake. "So, you've solved our unsolved mystery?"
"I'm almost positive," I said, trying to keep a sense of humility about myself. "I was hoping you could fill in a few details."
"I'm always happy to help." She scurried up the roller ladder and retrieved a purple three ringed binder. She began flipping through it from the top of the ladder as she reminisced. "Did you know we technically had eleven unsolved mysteries?"
"Eleven?"
"Most of them happened during the last two years of Mystery Inc. Once people started recognizing us. We were being told made up legends by business owners looking for local publicity. It made it difficult to separate the real fake ghosts from the fake fake ones."
"I can't believe people would do that."
Daphne giggled as she turned another page. "It's actually funny how many thieves thought dressing up like zombies would scare people away from a heist instead of drawing more attention to it. We may have had a couple of cases that we abandoned too soon for lack of turning up any clues or ever encountering the thing we were there to unmask; the Manacled Mamba, the Grey Griffin -a personal favorite, and of course there's Weerd and Bogel but that's probably never going to be resolved. And then there was the Soothsayer."
She paused on the page she'd been searching for, and I wasn't sure what was going through her mind. Three primary suspects, one unrecovered treasure, and an accident which destroyed the costume and anything inside it.
"Miss Blake?"
"Daphne."
"Daphne," I said, "I have to ask this. Was the person in the costume killed that day?"
"No." She smiled, shutting the binder and returning it to its home on the shelf.
"But at the time you thought so?"
Daphne pushed off the shelf causing her to ride the ladder down the wall where she snatched up a wooden treasure box along the way. By the time the ladder had come to a rest she'd slid down the rails, landing with a gymnast's grace on the floor. "This," she said, "is the missing piece to the mystery."
I followed her over to the desk where she set the treasure box down and opened it for me. I was kind of surprised to find a series of postcards showcasing various world landmarks; the Eiffel Tower, the Pyramids, the Hollywood sign. And on the backs of every postcard were the same words. "Wish you were here -D.B."
"We started getting those mailed to us one month after the whole soothsayer fiasco. For two years straight we kept getting them, once a month. Twenty-four in all." She flashed a knowing grin. "Now what do you make of that?"
I drew in a deep breath. "If I didn't know any better I'd say someone is gloating."
"What else?" Daphne prodded me.
"Whatever it was inside C.S. Barley's coffin was obviously worth quite a bit of money. Lindsey Channing would have had no reason to ever dress up like a spook to scare anyone away from the house since she already owned it at the time. Which suggests that she didn't actually know about the...can I call it the Macguffin Jewel?"
"Macguffin?" Daphne laughed. "I like that."
"But Sheriff Braxton, whose first name was Sam-"
"So no D.B. there."
"Right. He'd been eyeing a political career and needed money to finance a campaign. I think he knew about the Macguffin Jewel and wanted to casually slip it out from under Lindsey's nose once she turned over the deed to the museum. But obviously he didn't succeed because he's only just now running for Governor."
"Velma came to that same conclusion."
"Did she ever do a follow up on Daniel?"
Daphne nodded. "Once the postcards started coming in we all realized we'd never gotten Daniel's last name. A quick search revealed he was part of the law firm William & Joseph. He was the Joseph."
"But Velma didn't stop there did she?"
"Of course not. Like I say, nothing slips past her. A little more digging and we found out Daniel had legally changed his name to Joseph when he was eight. His mother remarried."
"And at the time his mother's name was Heather Barley."
I noticed Daphne's smile was fading a little. "Daniel was C.S. Barley's son. Who would have guessed?"
"So based on all the evidence, Velma was convinced that Daniel Barley had swiped the Macguffin Jewel away from both Lindsey and Sheriff Braxton and escaped with it during the commotion of a fake wax figure in the Soothsayer costume apparently falling to its death in a vat of chemicals."
Daphne sighed. "And he'd gotten away with it because of us meddling kids."
We sat in silence for a moment, as if we were waiting for some cop to show up out of nowhere say something like, "Well that just about wraps up this case." While sitting across a desk from Daphne Blake I suddenly had a thought which would never have come to me in the time I'd spent waffling in the car outside her beach house. What was it like to be Daphne? The word 'perfect' came to mind. Not that she was perfect because nobody is, but how many times in her life had she been called perfect? I could look at her and see her meeting the expectation like a virtuoso. Her hair was perfect. Her dress was perfect. Her nails and makeup and manners.
You don't meet the challenge of perfection without becoming a perfectionist.
I looked at 'perfect' danger prone Daphne in her perfect oil painting beach house that I'd been so afraid to smudge and gave her the most genuine smile I could. She received it the way she'd trained herself to, with only the slightest glimmer of distress in her eyes.
I spoke. "But that's not what happened, is it?"
Our conversation was cut short by the return of Jeeves with the tea I didn't want. He set the tray between us and fixed each of our cups. I began stirring way too many sugar lumps into mine as he prepared to leave us again. "Is everything all right miss?" he asked Daphne.
"Everything is fine," she assured him. "Thank you."
Jeeves nodded and left us to our tea. Daphne held up her teacup in a toast. "To the truth then." I mirrored her and took a sip. And for the record, it wasn't as horrible as I thought it was going to be.
"Velma pointed out there was no legend of the Soothsayer to accompany its appearance," I said. "In fact she even commented on how odd that was for a Mystery Inc. case. You'd think if anyone inside the museum had wanted to scare somebody away with their costume, they'd want to put some kind of a context around it. Daniel had every chance to effectively tell the backstory. In fact, the only reason you guys even knew there was going to be a ghost to begin with was because of the old man at the general store."
Daphne still held her teacup to her lips even though she was no longer drinking from it.
"Fred and I stopped by that general store. I happened to notice a collection of things like glow in the dark paint, raincoats, small light bulbs which could pose as a specter's eyes. And on top of that, there were Scooby Doo coffee mugs."
Daphne set her teacup down and nodded slightly.
"Here's what I think happened. When the mystery machine showed up unexpectedly at the store, the manager (being a Scooby Doo fan) put it together where you all were going. So he threw together a costume and went through all the usual tropes; warning you all to leave, chasing Shaggy and Scooby in the kitchen, kidnapping you."
The look on Daphne's face was stoic at this point, and I felt bad about the direction I knew I was going but I had to see it through to the conclusion.
"All of this was leading up to Fred's trap. But when it failed and everyone was convinced the Soothsayer had been killed, the manager only had to collect his jewel and calmly disappear back into the general store."
I hesitated, waiting for some kind of response from Daphne, but she only whispered "Go on."
Here it was. "I've been wondering how Velma could have missed a few things and it occurred to me that there might be an avenue she'd refused to explore, namely the Soothsayer needed help to pull off a heist like that at a moment's notice. You're the only one who spent any time with him. When he kidnapped you. You were the one who found the PhantomCon ticket stub which threw suspicion onto Daniel. No one would have guessed that you'd planted your own ticket as a clue. And you were the one who caused the trap to malfunction. Did I miss anything?"
"Just, why would I do that?"
I pointed to the treasure box with the postcards. "D.B." I said. "I think it stands for Doctor Bell."
Daphne blinked. "Who?"
"He hypnotized your aunt several years ago. I imagine susceptibility runs in your family. I think Doctor Bell got out of jail-"
Daphne interrupted me. "Do you really think that? Seriously?"
I turned my eyes downward. "No. I just can't-"
"Yes you can," she told me. "Solve the mystery."
I couldn't look at her as I accused her of being an accomplice, so I rubbed my forehead to block my line of sight. "D.B. isn't who the postcards are from. It's who they're to. The old man was thanking you for helping him escape."
"And why?"
"I don't know."
"I betrayed my friends, -my family, Fred, Velma, to help a crook. Why would I do that?"
I really had no idea. "You knew him?"
"I'd never met him before."
"He threatened you?"
"I'm not helpless."
"He threatened Scooby?"
Daphne shook her head. "He was dying."
I stared at her, not quite able to wrap my head around what she'd just said. "He told you that?"
She leaned in towards me with a melancholic sincerity. "Do you know how many times I've been kidnapped? No one has ever asked me what I do when that happens."
I...never would have thought about that. "What did you do?" I mumbled.
"What I always do. I try to talk the person in the mask down. I tell them how likely they'll be caught. I ask if prison is worth it to them. I tell them exactly what their costume is made out of and make my best guess as to who they are. With the Soothsayer, I turned out to be right."
"And he took his own mask off?"
Daphne nodded again. "His name was Vance. He'd worked his whole life at that store. He seemed to be a good man. But then he found out he had a terminal illness with about a month, two at most to live. He suddenly felt like he'd done nothing with his life that he'd be remembered by."
She trailed off. I briefly fumbled for words before she reclaimed the memory.
"Then we came into his store. I guess he thought if he could just be a part of a Mystery Inc. mystery one time, it would be worth something. Even if he spent the rest of his short life in jail for it."
I suddenly understood. "And so then you got the idea, what if he became the one that got away?"
Daphne gave me a half grin. He would be legendary. I'd keep the secret for a while until people got tired of the story and then I'd reveal who he really was, and Vance would be immortalized in Mystery Inc. lore. And all I had to do was lie."
"And the Macguffin?"
"I didn't know about that. I don't think Vance did either, not until he was running around the museum in a painted raincoat. He must have seen an opportunity and taken it."
"That was...a tad underhanded."
Daphne shrugged. "Whatever it was he stole, it granted him two more years of life. Isn't that worth it?"
"Worth what?" I asked.
Daphne pinched her lips together uncomfortably. "The guilt."
"You know," I tried to assure her, "I get it. You did something very kind for an old man who was in desperate need of kindness. It was certainly not your fault he wound up attaching a theft to it. And if you had admitted to helping him escape, I've no doubt Sheriff Braxton would have blamed it all on you because that's the kind of person he is. But what I don't understand is, why didn't you ever tell Fred or Velma?"
Daphne glanced out the window. "The sun is about to set. There is a perfect view of it from the swing on the porch if you'd like to sit out there with me."
Of course I said yes. We sat on the swing together gently rocking as the sun made its way to another part of the world much more effectively than I'd made my way from my car to the front door earlier. The whole time she didn't speak and I didn't ask her to. It wasn't until the blanket of the night sky draped over us that she answered my question.
"Have you ever lied to someone who trusts you?"
"I don't have kids." I was grateful she cracked a smile for me. "Probably."
"You know, when I planted that ticket stub as evidence I really thought Velma was going to pick up on it right then. And when she didn't...I don't know. In a way if felt...almost satisfying. I felt smarter than her. Just for that moment. I knew when we were away from the museum I'd tell everyone the truth, and also let Velma know the one other thing that she overlooked, which was that Daniel kind of liked her.
"But then I had to sabotage Fred's trap and dump the wax figure in the vat and pretend I thought I'd gotten someone killed. My performance was perfect, because the tears wound up being real. I wasn't expecting how it would feel to deceive. It's funny, in a way. We've dealt with so many creeps in masks who make it look so easy. Every time I remember that moment all I can think is, who was that girl? Not me. It must have been someone else.
"And all of them were so NICE to me about it. Although I don't think anybody ever told Shaggy exactly what had happened, but they knew I was upset and they...did everything they could to make it better. And then we found out about the empty coffin, and I swore I would keep my mouth shut until we were well out of the state. And then Velma did a background search on Daniel and I didn't know how to tell her that he was innocent. And then the postcards started showing up, and by then it had seemed like so long ago that I was afraid to even say anything.
"So I never did."
"You put on a mask," I said, and Daphne smiled tenderly at me.
"And I would have gotten away with it-"
I touched her hand. "I don't have to write this article."
"Yes you do," she told me. "It's the truth."
"To hell with the truth!" I said without thinking. "The truth isn't always the right thing. If I'd been in your situation I would have done exactly what you did. In fact, I AM in that situation."
Daphne looked at me with a puzzled expression. "How so?"
"Vance took off his own mask for you, and you chose to be kind."
She turned away from me. "That hasn't exactly left me feeling like it was a good thing."
"That's because Vance took advantage of your kindness."
I could see that she was mulling it over. "The gang deserves to know what really happened."
"Maybe so. But not from me." I gave her shoulder a friendly nudge. "You've been carrying this around with you because it just wasn't the right time. And then it was never the right time. What if this is the right time now?"
She drew in a deep breath and exhaled. For a moment there was only the sound of the ocean waves lapping at the shore. And then she smiled.
Epilogue
I promised Daphne I wouldn't print my article until she was ready. My editor was none too pleased, but I held my ground. I suspect it may have cost me at least one promotion, but some things really are more important.
It was about a month later when my news feed mentioned that Mystery Inc. was getting back together. I gave the screen a nod, as if it was a personal message to me, and published my article. I guess I was half-expecting instant responses from around the world, but the truth is the article ran and vanished with very little fanfare. But a few months later I started receiving some feedback (mostly criticism, but at least people were reading it). To my absolute delight I was briefly a trending topic; well, Scooby was, but my article appeared in the hyperlinks.
I heard through indirect sources that Braxton was furious over what I had printed. Good. Of course it was long past the point where he could retaliate against Daphne, so all he could do was be furious. He also lost the election. Something about people finding him unrelatable. I'm sure I had no influence on that, but I sometimes like to stroke my own ego and imagine I took him down single-handedly.
With Mystery Inc. back together, Scooby's book deal was put on hold. I was equally relieved and disappointed. No, I'm lying. I was mostly relieved. I really didn't have the time to write a whole biography. Although down the road I'd love to do a retrospective piece on the whole team. But in the foreseeable future I have bills to pay, so that's going to stay on the backburner for now.
I'd like to say I'm now an award winning journalist because of my article. I'd like to say that, but I'm not. Yet somehow as I look at my cubicle's bulletin board I can't help but feel that I am. Taped to the board, just above the spot where I keep my coffee mug and my now stale (possibly petrified) Scooby Snack, is a recent photograph of the whole gang: Scooby, Shaggy, Fred, Velma, and Daphne all gathered in front of the Mystery Machine. And down at the bottom, in flowery handwriting, is a personalized inscription that reads "Wish you were here! -D.B."
No idea where they are in the world, but it makes me happy knowing that Mystery Inc. is out there. I pick up my coffee mug and toast the greatest mystery solving team ever. "Here's looking at you, Scooby-Doo."
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