Future Tense
(July 2018)
10-Digging into Dirt
That Wednesday evening, Stan came home looking angry and tired. Sheila met him at the front door hugged him. "I heard what happened at the clinic. That's horrible, that somebody tried to kill the Gnomes." She led Stan inside, closed the door, and switched on a table lamp.
It wasn't yet dark outside, but the blinds were closed and the light-blocking curtains drawn, Stan saw. He growled, "Somebody told you to be careful, huh? Yeah, somebody attacked the Gnomes—Punt. He learned somehow that Gnomes can vote and that they're probably all gonna vote for me. He also had some New York lawyer come to the courthouse and file an objection to accepting Gnome votes, but, hell, what can he do? They're citizens. They pay taxes. Tyler says the case won't even come to a judge before next week, probably after the election. Punt's hoping to disqualify the Gnomes. The election will be over, but if I win and the margin's thin, that might be enough to disqualify me and then he'd be the Mayor. Jeff was burnin' up about his Gnomes getting shot."
"Did any of them—"
Stan sat on the sofa, slumping. "Nah, Doc la Fievre patched 'em up. Five of Jeff's people were shot, though." Sheila sat beside him, and he put an arm around her. "Punt's gone too far, honey. He's messed with our people." He pounded his fist on his thigh.
"Did they catch the—"
"The shooters? Sort of. The Gnomes kinda dealt out their brand of justice, but I talked Jeff into turning the three goons over to the people police. We're keeping it quiet, though—they're not in the local jail, but over in Hirschville as John Does. Hospital wing. They're being treated for, uh, mild poisoning. Jeff thinks they won't be conscious for three, four days."
"Poisoning?" Sheila asked.
"Yeah. Well, venom. They got bit a little." Stan sighed. "If we can keep their whereabouts quiet, when they come to, I'm pretty sure they'll talk about who hired them to try to kill the Gnomes. Gotta be Punt, but I'd bet money he used a go-between. Ah, Jeeze, this is such a mess. I'm almost starting to think that guy Punt ain't very nice."
Sheila leaned against him. "At least nobody died."
"Lucky for those three guys," Stan said. "'Cause if one of the Gnomes hadn't made it—well, Jeff wouldn't have told me where to find those three guys, and by the time anyone might discover them, there wouldn't be anything left but dried-up husks. Hell, I almost wish—nah, forget it. I mighta been a pickpocket and a con artist in my time, but I never was violent. Let's go up to the Shack. We have to talk to everybody about this."
"Don't you want to have dinner first?"
"No appetite," Stan said. "Wait a minute. I'm gonna get my baseball bat."
Dusk was falling. Honestly, even though Stan wielded the baseball bat expertly when he had to—he wasn't spontaneously violent, but when he or his family were under attack, Stan could fight back in self-defense—the Louisville Slugger wouldn't be much of a deterrent from mooks bearing shotguns.
However, though neither Stan nor Sheila knew it, they had a guardian angel. They didn't see a sign of anything out of the ordinary, though, as they walked up the hill to the Shack.
But a figure watched over them, in Ninja gear, but armed with one of Fiddleford McGucket's offbeat devices. It did not look like an ordinary pistol, more like a foot-long rectangular black box with a pistol grip. Instead of a barrel, it had two quarter-inch parts.
And instead of bullets, it fired two intense beams, one green, one red. The weapon would not destroy a tree, a car, or anything inanimate. It wouldn't plink empty beer cans off a fence posts, the way even a BB gun would.
On the other hand, if it hit living flesh—even if the flesh were covered in thick fur, the way a grizzly bear's skin was, or even if clothing covered it, the kind that humans and Gnomes wore—then the red beam and the green beam would complete a circuit. Like magic, the target would disintegrate!
Uh, no. Remember the flashy things from that movie? The one that removed memories of alien creatures from human minds?
Sort of like that. The human target would experience an extremely hot flash, and when that faded, so would his or her memory of everything for about ten years back, maybe twelve.
The amnesia beams would work through glass windows. They would work at any line-of-sight distance. They were completely silent. Not even a zzzap! or a thwip!
The figure tailed Stanley and Sheila to the Shack. Then climbed a tree beside the Shack and from there leaped lightly to the roof, landing nearly without sound. Even Wendy would have been impressed by that display of ability. And then the guardian remained vigilant, not remaining still, but sweeping the area 360 degrees, the earpiece connected to a signal from Stanford Pines's detection apparatus.
All clear. Agent Hazard was on the job.
Nobody had ever got past her.
And she was determined that nobody would.
Ford wouldn't let anyone speak until he had scanned the entire Shack, and all of the surrounding grounds, for bugs.
"Were clear," he said at last. "I apologize for insisting that everyone come down to the lab for this, but if we were upstairs, there's a bare chance that someone off-property with a parabolic microphone aimed at a window could eavesdrop on us." He looked around the table. "Well, here we are—Wendy? Mabel? Are you all right? You both look a little pale."
Wendy gave him a weak smile. "We're OK, Dr. P. It's one of those female things."
Ford blinked. "Oh," he said. Though knowledgeable in a myriad of fields, he had been surprisingly ignorant about those female things before marrying Lorena. Oh, he had learned about them while studying for his M.D, but since he'd been without feminine company while on the run across scores, if not hundreds, of alternate dimensions for much of his life, he had lacked what you might call personal experience that would have made the lessons stick.
Ford said, "All right, folks. Stanley asked me to research Punt's past and his connection with Gravity Falls. Let me show you this."
They sat around a table on which Ford had spread a flexible three-by-three-foot black pad gleaming with an intricate network of printed circuitry. The table was too small for everyone, so the chairs were spread out and scattered a bit. Ford switched on a computer, typed with four fingers, and said aloud, "Lights to ten per cent." The voice command dimmed the room.
A hologram glowed to visibility atop the pad.
"I know that place," Stan said. "It's a house over on Montrose."
"The old McEnery house," Lorena, the expert on Gravity Falls history, said. "It was built back in the 1920s. Vernon McEnery owned some mines, one in the Valley, some silver mines in Nevada. He was a widower when he retired to live here, but he died before living in the house for even one year. It's had a series of owners over the years."
"One of them was Burnwald Punt's father," Ford said. "The Punts lived there from 1939 to 1950. When the family moved away, the place stood empty for five years. The Punts still owned it, and they had maintenance done on the lawn and house, but it was essentially abandoned. Finally in 1955 they sold it to the Northwest Realty Company. They rented it for a few years, then sold it in 1961 to Seth Clawkins, the owner of a cruise line. The Clawkins family occupied it until 2002, then closed the house. It was empty for three years before being resold to Northwest Realty again. They resold it at a profit in 2008 to the Musel family. They use it only in the winters, when they stay here to enjoy skiing and such."
"Oh, yeah, the rich snobs," Stan said. "I don't think I ever met them, though. They keep to themselves."
"Normally they don't rent the place out," Ford said. "However, my agents learned that the current owner, Fielding Musel, has just signed a lease for a two-month rental that will begin on Friday night—midnight. The entity that is renting the house is Transnational Fiduciary Exchange, Inc. That company exists only to receive and hide funds. And it's owned by—"
"Burnwald Punt, am I right?" Dipper asked.
"You are indeed."
"He's planning to live here?" Mabel asked. "Yuck. We'll never get that funky Punt stench out of the town!"
Tripper, too low to see the hologram, yipped.
"I don't think he's gonna live here," Stan said with a frown. I wonder…there might be some reason he wants to get into that place legal-like."
"Wanna beat him to the punch? We could bust in and search the joint," Wendy said.
Ford grimaced. "That would be extraordinarily unwise. Either Mr. Punt or the legal owners could bring a trespassing charge against us."
"Yeah," Stan agreed. "If they caught us. But I like the way you're thinking, Wendy."
"Let me show you something else," Ford said. He clicked away on the keyboard again.
An image came to life, a somewhat faded color photograph—not three-dimensional, but flat, and it slowly revolved so everyone could see it.
It was a family portrait. A lean, dark-haired man and a thin, haughty-looking woman sat smiling at the camera. Between them a black-haired toddler sat looking bored.
Ford said, "Mr. and Mrs. Punt and little Burnwald. The photograph was taken in December 1949. Burnwald was born on January 4, 1947, so he would have been close to two years old."
Wendy said, "I wouldn't have guessed that kid would grow up to be so dumpy and ugly."
"His hair's the wrong color," Mabel added.
"This is the last photograph we were able to find of the youthful Burnwald. His family left Gravity Falls for New York in November of 1950, but here's the next picture of him, in 1957, his student ID for his military school."
The image of the eleven-year-old replaced the one of the family.
"Something definitely stinks," Mabel said.
The boy in the new photo had sandy-blond hair, a pouty expression and close-set eyes.
The toddler had black hair, a vacant expression, and wide-set eyes.
"They could be two different people," Lorena said.
"If only we had more time," Ford said. "This is definitely a circumstance we need to explore."
"Twins!" Mabel exclaimed. "I'll bet they're twins, and one of them's an idiot the family's ashamed of! Maybe the normal one's still hidden away in the Punt house in New York!"
"The birth records show that it was a single birth," Ford said.
"A changeling!" Dipper exclaimed. "Maybe the fairies of Gravity Falls did a swap!"
"There are wee folk in the Valley," Ford acknowledged, "but there's no evidence they ever indulged in, ah, the changeling trade. And I'm certain that Burnwald Punt is fully human. But just to check something, I had the Agency experts do an age adjustment on both children. This is computer generated, so it's no more accurate than a detailed police sketch, but look at this."
He changed the image again. "This is the toddler aged up to eleven." More keyboard tapping. "And this is the eleven-year-old aged down to two."
The faces floated side by side in the display.
The original toddler looked thin-faced and slack of expression.
The de-aged eleven-year-old looked chubby-faced and scowling.
"Completely different hair colors. And their faces are nothing alike," Sheila said.
"Yeah," Stan agreed. "Now, that's a real suspicious discovery. I'd say it's worthy of police investigation."
"It's only a sketch. If we could just base it on something more solid," Ford said. "All right, that was the show-and-tell presentation. Lights up, please." When the system turned the lights fully on again, he said, "More troubling findings. Though he's never been indicted or even suspected of any specific violation of criminal law, he has definitely dealt with organized crime. His New York businesses have Mob connections, and his building projects have laundered money from Russian gangsters. There's no doubt of that—but no unassailable proof."
For a few minutes they all sat in silence.
Then Wendy spoke up: "Dr. P, I have a question."
"Yes?"
"About a minute after Stan and Sheila got here, who walked around up on the Shack roof?"
Ford stared at her in evident surprise. "Wendy," he said in a respectful, even awed tone, "what an agent you could be!"