4.
Operation Figure Out Sheldon Not-Pines got off to a rocky start the next day.
Literally.
Dipper lugged the burlap sack full of stones up the front porch steps, grunting as he tugged it over the lip of the top stair.
"This is the worst idea ever," he said, panting. "No one is going to buy these."
They'd been out in the woods all morning finding the rocks – anything fist-sized was acceptable to Grunkle Stan. "It's like growing our own money!" he'd exclaimed, hefting a limestone specimen.
Now Stan pointed at the wooden barrel in the corner of the gift shop. "Sure they will, as soon as I put up this sign." He held up a painted card that read Genuine Mystery Rocks - $5. "We'll tell folks they're from the forest – which they are – and that they're mysterious."
"Why are they mysterious?" Mabel was perched on the counter, her feet swinging against the side.
"That's the mystery." Grunkle Stan helped Dipper lift the sack and dump the rocks into the barrel. They thundered in with a sound like… well, like a load of rocks in a wooden barrel.
"Great," Stan said, shaking out the sack. "Only three more sacks to go."
"What's that noise?"
The three Pines turned to see Sheldon standing in the doorway that connected the shop and the house.
"Merchandise," Grunkle Stan replied, as if that explained everything.
Sheldon grimaced, and poked a bobble-headed Sasquatch figure on the shelf beside the door. It shook its head cheerfully. "Stan – can I talk to you?" he glanced at the twins. "In private?"
Stan looked uncomfortable. "Uh, sure. Whatever you need. Let's, uh – we'll go in my office. Dipper, keep hauling in those rocks."
He followed Sheldon out of the gift shop.
Dipper flexed sore hands, and headed back out to grab another sack from the back of the golf cart.
"Dipper!"
He looked up to see Wendy biking up the trail to the Shack. She waved a hand at him. "Get Mabel and your bikes!"
Dipper pointed at the bulging sacks of rocks in the golf cart. "I've got to get these inside first."
Sliding to a stop, Wendy leaped off her bike and hefted a sack of rocks in each hand. "Oof," she grunted. "Great – I'll help. Then you two need to come with me."
Together – Wendy taking two bags to Dipper's one – they lugged the rocks into the gift shop and dumped them into the barrel.
"What's so important?" Mabel asked, hopping down from the counter.
Wendy just grinned. "Seriously, man – you gotta wait for the reveal. I spent all night working on this."
"We'll grab our bikes," Dipper said, tossing the last empty sack in the corner. "Soos'll be here in a few minutes to open the shop."
Soon, they were back at the library. The librarian, a roundish woman with thick glasses and a pin on her lanyard that said 'Keep Calm and Read On,' gave them suspicious looks as they came in. Probably not too many kids came into the library in the summer.
But Wendy headed straight back to the computers and logged on, pulling up the Myface site.
"Ok," she said. "So I was going back through Spencer Pines' page yesterday, and I noticed something."
She clicked on three of the fishing photos they had seen before and opened them up side by side.
"What do you see?" she asked.
Dipper and Mabel peered at the screen. In the first picture, Sheldon was wearing a red flannel shirt, standing on a dock, and holding up a small trout. In the second, he was wearing a black t-shirt, sitting in a lawn chair by the side of the lake, and holding a string of three catfish. And in the last, he didn't have any fish, but was sitting in a boat and wearing an 'I'd Rather Be Fishin' shirt.
"I see a guy who likes to fish," Dipper said finally. "But we already knew that – what's the point?"
"Look really close," Wendy urged. "Don't pay attention to what's different – look at what's the same."
Mabel spotted it first. "His hair is exactly the same in every picture!" she exclaimed.
Sure enough, though the outfits and settings were different, Sheldon's brown hair was mussed in the same places in each photo.
"Exactly!" Wendy jabbed a finger at the screen. "He's got hat-head, man – there're a few other shots where he's wearing a ball cap. But he's got the same squished bits in each of these pictures."
"But they're dated months apart!" Dipper protested. "How's that possible?"
Wendy sat back, a satisfied look on her face. "It's not," she said. "Unless the times were faked."
"Can you do that?"
She turned back to the computer and pulled up her own Myface page. "Check this out."
She clicked on the photo that popped up, and showed it to Dipper and Mabel. "Notice anything special?"
"It's the same outfit you're wearing now," Mabel said. "And you have a scratch on your arm – the same scratch."
"That photo is from today," Dipper agreed.
"Precisely." Wendy snapped her fingers at him. "But look – my Myspace timeline says that this was posted more than a year ago. It's the easiest thing ever to backdate a post, man. You just fill out the time and date that you want it to appear. Now, here's the best part."
She went back to Sheldon's page and began to scan through. "Look at the timestamp on each post. They're all only a few minutes apart, even if they're on different days. 12:01, 12:03, 12:07, 12:10. So he made sure to set the date so it looked like everything was posted on different days, but he didn't bother to change the time, so it defaulted to whatever time it was when he actually posted it."
"So this whole thing is a fake?" Dipper stared at the grinning figure of Sheldon on the screen, posing with a soda in the back of a boat.
"It's all fake," Wendy agreed.
"So Sheldon Pines isn't real?" Mabel asked. "But he had a birth certificate."
"Ah-ha!" Wendy shouted.
"Shhh!" the librarian shushed from the front of the library.
Wendy rolled her eyes. "Ah-ha," she repeated in a softer voice. "And that is my final exhibit." She pulled something out of her back pocket and unfolded it.
"Your birth certificate?" Dipper took it, and squinted at the faded print. "Wait – this says your dad's name is George Clooney."
Wendy took the piece of paper back. "That's because it's also fake, man. I whipped it up on my computer last night, printed it out on nice paper, and then roughed it up a bit to make it look old. I did this in like, twenty minutes. With a little more time and better material, you could do way better."
Mabel's eyes were narrow. "Sheldon Pines is a big, stinking, lying, fraud," she spat out. "And he's got Stan eating out of his hand!"
"The question is, why?" Dipper asked. "Wendy, we found a magazine in his stuff that had an article about Gravity Falls." He decided to leave out, for the moment, the author of the article. "We think maybe he's here looking for one of the weird things that turn up in this town."
Wendy sat back and propped her feet up on the computer desk. "Well, he can come to my house," she said. "We've got a pixie infestation in the attic that's driving my dad bonkers."
"I think, if he went to all this work, he's probably looking for something a little bigger than pixies," Dipper said.
He stared at the computer screen, with Sheldon Pines' grinning face staring back at them, almost as if the impostor knew what they were talking about – and was mocking them.
"But what?"