She held a pen between her teeth as she spoke.
“？‘Polymath’？” I suggested.
“Shit,” she said. “I messed it up.”
“I could be wrong.” I looked over at Chloe. She shrugged.
“No, yours makes more sense. I should be using a pencil.” She tossed the crossword into a nearby trash can and smiled. “What do you need?”
“We’re looking for a phone number,” I said.
Amanda smiled. “I mean, what do you need from the store?” She motioned around the room. There were dozens of bins filled with vinyl records, and the back wall was covered in floor-to-ceiling shelves of books, CDs, cassette tapes, and all kinds of old electronics.
“Oh,” Chloe said. “We don’t really need anything. We’re just looking for Hazel’s number.”
Amanda nodded and smiled, but didn’t say anything.
I could tell by her face that we were missing something.
“Well, I could certainly use some new records,” I said.
Amanda smiled yet again. “That’s great. We have a terrific selection. Just let me know if you need help finding anything.”
I ended up picking out three albums: Neil Young’s On the Beach, Let It Be by the Beatles, and Arthur by the Kinks. I took those back to Amanda, but she wasn’t quite ready to help. When Chloe added a jade necklace and a Posies concert T-shirt to the pile, Amanda walked over to the back wall and dug something out of a box on a high shelf.
“Here you go,” she said.
She handed Chloe a small green cardboard box that contained a handheld game by Coleco from 1978 called Electronic Quarterback.
Chloe and I looked over the box. It was well-worn, with crooked strips of yellowed masking tape running up two of the four sides. It claimed to contain “all the action of a real football game.”
“What is this?” I asked, but Amanda had stepped away to help another customer.
Chloe pulled the game out of the box. It looked like any other handheld sports game from the seventies. It was green-and-cream colored. The top half was a little football field, and the bottom contained the switches and buttons that would have controlled the tiny red lights that represented the players, had the thing been equipped with batteries.
I was looking for the battery compartment when Amanda came back over. “What are you doing?”
“I assume we’re supposed to play this game to find the phone number somehow?”
“Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, kid,” Amanda said. She grabbed the game and pointed to something carved into the plastic on the back. It was a name and a phone number.
Property of Shirley Booth
1-425-224-6685
Amanda wouldn’t let us take a picture of the game itself, but she did let Chloe write down the phone number once we promised we wouldn’t post it anywhere online.
“Shirley Booth?” I asked.
“Google it,” Amanda said, then she boxed up the game and slipped it up onto a nearby shelf.
* * *
—
Chloe and I left Bloom Vintage and made our way back to my place to call the number.
A quick search for Shirley Booth revealed she was an actress who’d passed away in the nineties. She’d played the title character in an American sitcom called Hazel that ran from 1961 to 1966. That series was based on the comic strip Hazel by Ted Key.
“Shirley Booth was Hazel,” I said. “Clever.”
“Are you ready?” Chloe had predialed the number, and her finger was poised over the call button on her phone.
“Let’s do it,” I said.
Chloe pressed the button.
We were calling Hazel.
The phone started ringing. It sounded kind of rough and distorted, like an old analog line from the eighties. After three rings there was a click and a woman’s voice relayed the following message:
Hi, you’ve reached Golden Seal Carpet Cleaning. We’re currently out of the office. Please leave your name, contact information, and a brief message, and we’ll get back to you when time allows. If you’re applying for the advertised position, please visit the stationery room on the second floor. Thank you.
“My name is K. I’m here with my friend Chloe. We’d like to speak to you about…well, about a lot of things, but I suppose most pressing is the fact that Alan Scarpio told me something was wrong with the game, and that I needed to help him fix it before the next iteration began. Now Scarpio’s missing and we’re not sure where to turn. Please call me back.”
I left my number and hung up.