28. Shut Out of the Lettuce Inn

At the reception desk of the Lettuce Inn, a small, haggard-looking man hummed quietly to himself as he purposefully tapped letters on an old keyboard.  Soon, all the guest information would be updated, and then he could get back to reading his book.  Unless he actually needed to talk to the customers.  Chester let out a short bark of a laugh.  The chances of him getting any more customers today were...  His thoughts were interrupted by the sound of the front door being loudly forced open.  Stopping his work and looking up, the man was quite surprised to find himself face to face with a tomato and a frantic-looking cucumber.  Calmly, he steepled his fingers over the desk and addressed them with a perfectly polite air.  “Can I help you?”  Inwardly, he felt a twinge of worry.

Immediately the cucumber began speaking, obviously very worried about something.  “Well...well we need to come in to the Lettuce Inn!” he proclaimed, leaning rather too close to Chester’s desk for comfort.  The receptionist shrunk back a bit.  He wasn’t really a ‘people person’, and for some reason vegetables had always made him even more nervous than other humans.  It was rather ironic when one considered that he was one of the very few humans to live in Bumblyburg, but working here, he had hoped he would see as few of them as possible.  “You are in the Lettuce Inn,” he gently reminded the cucumber.  The addressed just gave him a wide-eyed stare.  Luckily, his friend intervened.

“I’m Bob the Tomato, and this is Larry the Cucumber,” he offered, nodding politely up at Chester before glancing concernedly at his friend.  “And we’re just here to...” Bob broke off, frowning, and Chester saw him exchange another glance with his cucumber friend, as if searching for help.  After a moment, Larry turned back to the man behind the counter, and attempted to speak more calmly.  “We need to look around a bit,” he explained, “in the inn.”  Chester looked skeptical.  “We won’t disturb any of the guests,” Bob attempted.  “We just need to find someo–thing, rather.”  Larry nodded empathetically.

Chester frowned.  He wanted to believe that these two were telling the truth, but he couldn’t help recalling a certain incident a few months back, where a couple of veggie thieves had come into the inn, claiming to have been invited by a patron.  But once they were inside they had broken into the inn’s safety vault and made off with a bunch of possessions and money.  When they were arrested, only about half of the loot had been recovered.  So, Chester felt he had the right to be especially wary of letting strange vegetables slip in under the wire again.  “Just why, exactly, are you here?” he asked slowly, and Bob frowned.  “We told you, we need to find something,” he repeated.  “Something very important to us.”  “And what exactly is the nature of this ‘thing’ you are searching for?” Chester needled, his hands slipping below the desk.

“Well...this...thing...is very important, and in a rather worrisome situation,” Bob hedged, while Larry stood biting his lip to keep from saying anything.  “He...I mean, it could be very necessary to help us...in the upcoming...”  But Chester instantly picked up on Bob’s slip.  “He?” he questioned, his fingers deftly finding and pressing a small button designed for emergencies.  It had been installed during the clean up for the incident with the thieves, and had never been used, as far as Chester knew.  But it was supposed to call the police here, and now was as good a time as any to test the system.  “So you’re looking for more than just a simple inanimate object, here?” Chester pressed, even more suspicious that the tomato was trying to hide that fact from him.  “Ah...” Bob licked his lips nervously, obviously worrying about saying too much.  “Please, sir, he’s our friend and he could be in trouble!” Larry burst out, hopping closer to the desk again.

Chester raised an eyebrow.  “Is your friend a vegetable? If so, I don’t know what he would be doing here.”  He was mainly trying to stall for time, until the police got there.  The cucumber looked sincere enough, but the tomato seemed a bit fishy, and he didn’t think it would hurt to run a check.  Bob sighed impatiently, quickly catching on to what was being pulled on them.  “Look, we haven’t got all day here, sir.”  Chester just shrugged.  “I do,” he stated.  This bluntness seemed to catch the tomato off guard, and he just stared dumbfounded for a moment, allowing Chester to collect his thoughts.

“Even if your friend did have a reason to be here, I haven’t seen any of your kind today, so I doubt he actually is,” the man reasoned.  Bob looked confused for a moment, but Larry quickly countered.  “You never know! He might have gotten in...another way!”  Chester chose to ignore the fact that the veggies were still hiding something from him and tried another tactic.  “Look, if he were here, surely someone would have seen him?”  “How do you know they haven’t?” Larry demanded.  “Did you ask them if they’ve seen another veggie around?”  Chester frowned.  “I happen to be the current manager on duty, and ANY suspicious personnel seen wandering around...”  “Oh, so any veggies are automatically suspicious?” Bob asked heatedly.  “Is that it?”  He was starting to really dislike this guy.  “But maybe they missed something,” Larry broke in hastily, hoping to avoid an argument. “The inn doesn’t seem very crowded, so the chances of anyone noticing him would be lower.”  “Not likely,” Chester objected.  “Every floor of this inn sees heavy traffic, if only from the cleaning service. Well, almost every floor,” he added as an afterthought.  “Almost?” Bob asked, one eyebrow raised in interest.

Chester regarded him blankly for a moment.  “Well, every room except the basement.”  “The basement!” Larry exclaimed quietly, as if having come to some sort of revelation.  “But he couldn’t have gotten in there,” Chester muttered, more to himself than to the two in front of him.  “It’s locked at all times, and I have the only key.”  Absently, he removed the very last set of keys from the board behind him and twirled it around a finger.  “But they could have another way in,” Larry whispered, his eyes staring at the far wall as he thought.  Bob, on the other hand, was watching the keys.  “Can we borrow those?” he asked, his pupils following the hypnotic motion of the smallest, oldest-looking key on the ring as it spun.  Chester’s eyes narrowed in suspicion, and he immediately clasped the keys tight in his fist, causing a startled Bob to look him in the eye.  “I’d rather you not,” he responded darkly.  “Please!” Larry begged, his attention returning to the present scene, but he was ignored.  Both the veggies begged him to reconsider, but Chester only shook his head sternly.  Just as he was about to replace the keys to their rack...

“Do you treat all your visitors this rudely, Chester?” a voice asked from the doorway.  Everyone looked to see the source of this new interruption, and Larry immediately brightened, his eyes lighting up with recognition.  “Steven!” the cucumber cried happily, and Bob gasped in surprise.  Chester just frowned sourly.  “You.”  Smiling in obvious amusement, the detective approached the desk uninvited.  Bob noted that instead of his traditional trench coat, the man was dressed in a casual button down shirt, which looked like it belonged in the 18th century, and a pair of brown slacks.  “Yes, it’s me,” Steven acknowledged, leaning on the front desk.  He held out a hand expectantly.  “What do you want?” Chester growled, but the sudden movement he made to dart his hands protectively behind his back seemed to indicate he knew all too well what the detective was after.  “Oh, I just wanted to invite you all to a nice little tea social out in Bumblyburg Park,” Steven replied snappishly.  “Wear your frilliest pink dress.”  Chester blinked, quite taken aback by this unexpected sarcasm.  “But seriously,” Steven amended, standing up and rubbing his left elbow while looking disdainfully at the receptionist, “I would really appreciate it if you would let my friends and me borrow that key for a little while.”

The detective let out a startled gasp as he felt Larry hug him tightly for a moment.  “Thank you thank you thankyou!” he cried gratefully into his shirt.  Steven, looking distinctly uncomfortable, extricated himself from the cucumber in time to catch the key that was suddenly hurtled at his head with unnecessary force.  As Larry backed away with a muttered apology, and Bob sighed in relief, Steven led the way to the basement door.  “My regards, Chester,” he called back, granting a small bow in the desk’s general direction.  “Give them to the police officer who will arrive in about a minute.”  Bob shot Steven a sharp glance, but the detective was already at the door, which had been hidden behind a lavish velvet curtain.  As Steven unlocked the door and started carefully down the dark stars, his companions following, Chester glared lividly at them.  A minute later, though, when the front door opened once more, he swore quietly to himself and cursed the detective for being right.  A carrot in a police officer’s garb, his grey mustache quivering, ran into the carpeted atrium and straight to the desk, looking wildly around for the source of the trouble.  Chester sighed heavily.  This just wasn’t his day.


Geneva Blueberry sighed heavily as she closed the door of her office in town hall.  She was glad to finally be able to have some peace and quiet, but on the other hand, the events of the day had been less than satisfying.  Now that she thought about it, the mayor decided, that whole “hearing” business had really been a useless venture from the start.  No matter how hard she had tried to keep the room under control, there was just too much tension.  Getting the representatives of those two companies to debate rationally was like trying to convince two warring armies to sit down to a friendly game of checkers.  It just didn’t work.  Beyond that, there was the further matter of George Squash.  The man was excessively infuriating, and more so in his ability to slip under the radar when it came to his shadier corporate dealings.  Oh yes, the mayor was as aware as anyone else what a slimy character the head of Squash Co. really was, and yet without any hard evidence, she was powerless.

“It’s quite ironic, really,” she mused, rolling a pen across her desk.  “What’s the use of being the Mayor when I can do nothing?”  She shook her head sadly.  “I don’t even know who to believe anymore. Charles is such a nice man though, I can’t imagine him ever committing a crime on this scale.”  She really wished the meeting had never needed to occur; all it had done was breed further confusion.  She was upset with herself for taking so long to realize George’s true purpose in calling for this public appraisal: to discredit Veggie Co. in any way he could.  Unfortunately, the strange circumstances that brought their time there to an abrupt end had done much toward this cause.  She frowned, wondering why Archibald had run out so quickly, and what had happened to him after.  She would have gone to investigate it herself, or at least sent someone over to do so, but she was distracted by trying to calm the crowd and keep the two CEOs from tearing each other apart.  By the time the audience had finally begun to depart the building in an orderly fashion, one of the ushers reported to her that Bob had apparently taken off after Larry, who everyone had seen tearing after Archibald hysterically, and now all three were nowhere to be found.  George had finally ceased taunting his rival and was seen calling to his employees about something, and at that point Charles had sent his son down to speak to his own employees.  Geneva offered to have her private escort see the pineapple home, and the weary CEO had agreed.  And that brought Geneva back to where she was now: sitting in her office and wishing there was something she could do.

As she relaxed back into her chair, prepared to focus on the massive pile of paperwork she had to sort, she felt something fall to the floor.  She reached down and picked up the piece of paper, squinting at the strange marks on it.  She hurriedly slipped her reading glasses on.  When she again found the writing to be completely incomprehensible, she finally recognized it.  “The cake maker plans in code, according to George,” she mumbled, frowning.  “I wonder what it really is.”  She spent a few more minutes puzzling over it before tossing it away in despair.  “Oh what’s the use?” she sighed dramatically.  “It’s not like it matters. George has so much evidence in his favor, and it’s all way out of my hands by now anyway. There’s simply nothing I can do.”

“Sure about that?” a voice asked quietly from beside her, and Madame Blueberry started.  “Who are you and how did you get in here?” she demanded, shrinking back from the blond carrot in an electric blue jumpsuit and dark glasses.  “My name is not important,” the carrot replied, lightly hopping around the desk to face the mayor across it.  “What is important,” she continued, still in the same calm voice, “is that I’m here to help.”  The mayor blinked.  Something about that line sounded familiar… “You’re one of the Sherman Sisters, aren’t you?” she asked.  “I’ve met you before.”  Sunpaws smiled and nodded.  “What are you saying, that I can do something?” the mayor asked, watching as the carrot bent down to retrieve the piece of paper she had recently thrown to the floor.  “Yes Madame, that is precisely what I’m saying,” Sunpaws responded, setting the document back on the desk.  The mayor’s eyes held a hungry look as she absently slid the paper closer.

Sunpaws smiled wryly; she understood the cravings of the ever-curious better than most.  As such, unlike some of her fellow Sisters, she didn’t usually like to draw out suspense or shroud her advice in cryptic veils.  “The first thing you can do, if you so choose it, is to find the true meaning of that note.”  The mayor looked slightly surprised at this, but Sunpaws merely shrugged.  “Surely you have someone who can crack the code?”  After thinking a minute, Geneva nodded.  The carrot smiled in response.  “Good. Secondly, I’d be much obliged if you could run…this in tomorrow’s paper.”  The mayor raised an eyebrow as she was handed a second document which was just as foreign to her understanding as the first.  “What is this?” she asked, and she thought she noticed a nervous wince from the agent at the tone of her voice.  “It’s a coded message,” she responded plainly.  “But this one is valid, and could be of great help to us if it managed to reach…its intended target.”  Her dark glasses slipped down, but whether this was intentional or not was hard to determine.  For a moment, she locked gazes with the mayor of Bumblyburg, each trying to read the other’s expression.

After what seemed like a long moment, Geneva nodded shortly, accepting the paper and the terms that came with it.  She had decided to trust the Sherman Sisters, who after all had always had the best interests of Bumblyburg in mind before.  “Yes, I will have this message run in the paper tomorrow.”  “Thank you,” Sunpaws purred, obviously very much relieved.  She pushed her glasses back up and slipped back behind the mayor’s desk.  Geneva didn’t notice, as she had already picked up the phone.  “Jean? Get me the Bumblyburg Times, please, I need them to make a few adjustments to tomorrow’s paper.”  There was a pause, and then she added another request.  “And after that, put Josephine Storky on the line.”  “It will be done,” her secretary responded immediately.