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father is Sholmos Bunyip. He was the head of International Mammon Studios, and the most powerful man in Hollywood. But then he turned into some kind of recluse—he just sits in his room in his house, which is a replica of a Roman villa, and never comes out."
    It turned out that Meg's and Peggy's fathers were big wheels in the movie business, like Mary Margaret's, so they knew stuff like this.
    "And Bruce Bunyip runs wild. He goes to Brown-Sparrow Military Academy, but they have no control over him. He does whatever he wants."
    "Why does Sholmos Bunyip sit in his room like a hermit?" Madge asked. "Did he go crazy or something?"
    "Remember two or three years ago, I think it was, when we had that huge rainstorm?" Meg asked.
    "Oh, when everything was soaking wet, and stuff was floating around?"
    "Yes, and it rained so much that people's memories
were affected and nobody could remember what had happened in the last twenty-four hours."
    "Oh, yes! I remember how wet it was after the rain, but I don't remember the rain," Mary Margaret said.
    "Right—that happened to everybody," Peggy said. "Well, it was right after that—Sholmos Bunyip was never seen again, and that is when Bruce Bunyip went wild."
    They were talking about the rainstorm that happened the night my probably insane friend Neddie Wentworthstein claimed he was going forth to do battle with the powers of darkness.
    This was all pretty interesting. I wanted to know more. But the girls had reached their limit for intelligent conversation. I was going to have to question Neddie Wentworthstein—and I would be on the lookout for Bruce Bunyip, my pretend boyfriend, around the Rolling Doughnut. The rest of the sleepover consisted of playing records, also ice cream sundaes, watching an awful movie that had not been released yet in the family's projection room, and I don't know what else, because I went to bed early and read the
Mad
comic I had brought with me.

CHAPTER 20

Why a Duck?
    The Hermione has a nice garden—sort of formal, Spanish, with red tile walks, and hunks of lawn. There are some neatly trimmed shrubs, and lots of flowers. Mr. Mangabay takes care of it. There's a good view of it from our living room windows. I observed Neddie Wentworthstein in the garden, exercising his duck.
    Neddie has a duck. Also a parakeet. The duck came as a little yellow duckling at Easter time, and Neddie raised it in his sunporch bedroom. Neddie had taught the duck to follow him around, which is no trick—ducks do that naturally, follow their mothers, and Neddie was the only mother the duck had ever known. More impressive was that he had taught the duck to obey the commands "stay"
and "sit" and to come when called. He got the technique out of an article about training dogs in
Boys' Life
and adapted it to duck training. The duck's name is Lucifer.
    I decided to go down and talk to him.

CHAPTER 21

In the Garden
    "Look! Lucifer can drop on command. Lucifer, down!" The duck flopped onto his belly.
    "I'm going to teach him to attack," Neddie Wentworthstein said. "He can be a protection duck."
    "I wanted to ask you, what happened that night?"
    "To what night do you refer?" Neddie asked.
    "You remember—the night you went off by yourself to do battle with the powers of darkness, something like that."
    "Oh, yes, that night," Neddie said. "It was wet, I remember. The next day the whole town was drenched. Stuff was floating."
    "Everybody remembers that," I said. "But what happened to you, and what did you do?"
    "It's funny," Neddie said. "I can't for the life of me recall."
    "You don't know what happened?"
    "Well, I did know. I wrote it all down in a notebook, but I don't know where it is. I put it somewhere safe and then forgot where I put it. Maybe it will turn up sometime."
    "That's it?"
    "Afraid so. I do feel like something important happened, but it just slipped my mind. Melvin, the guard at my school, says this sort of thing is normal, speaking in his capacity as