The Mystery of the Strange Noise in the Bathroom

It starts on a Tuesday, and the first person to hear it doesn’t believe it.

Hssssss. A long breath of a sound from behind the bathroom door. Then a knock in the wall, one soft knock, like something small has settled. Then nothing.

The bathroom is empty. It has been empty for an hour.

“Okay,” says the woman of the house, to nobody. “What was that.”

Franklin arrives at a dead run.

He arrives at a dead run for most things, but he arrives at this one with purpose, because a noise from a closed room is exactly the sort of event that requires him. He plants himself in the hallway, chest out, and announces that the matter is now his.

Nobody responds to this. He takes that as agreement.

The Duck is already there.

She has been in the hallway for some time, lying along the wall by the linen closet with her chin on the floor, which is where she is during most of the day and which is why nobody notices her during any of it. She is facing the bathroom door. She has been facing it since the first time the sound happened, which was not this morning. It was yesterday.

Hssssss.

Franklin barks at the door.

The Duck does not bark at the door. The Duck is counting.

She counted yesterday too, without meaning to, the way you notice that a dripping tap has a rhythm. And the thing about the sound, the thing that has been quietly bothering her for about twenty-six hours, is that it is not random.

It comes. Then it goes away for a long time. Then it comes again.

And it is always the same long time.

She doesn’t have a word for twenty minutes. She has something better, which is the shape of twenty minutes: it is longer than the mail and shorter than the afternoon; it is about as long as it takes the sun to get from the edge of the rug to the leg of the chair.

The sun is at the edge of the rug now.

She settles her chin back down and watches the chair leg and waits, and while she waits she works on the other half of it, which is the part she likes.

Nobody is in the bathroom. Nothing goes in. Nothing comes out. Whatever is making the sound is making it by itself, on its own schedule, without anyone touching it, and there is exactly one thing in that room that has ever made a noise without being touched, and it is the big cold white one, and it makes it after it has been used.

But nobody has used it.

The Duck thinks about that for a while.

Then she gets it, and it is so simple that she puts her ears back: it thinks it has been used. Something in there is quietly emptying, all day, a little at a time, and every so often it notices and fills itself back up. It has been doing this since yesterday. It will do it again when the sun reaches the chair leg.

Case closed.

She does not do anything about this, because there is nothing to do about it, and because getting up would mean somebody looking at her.

Meanwhile, Franklin has abandoned the door.

Franklin has abandoned the door because he has remembered what is behind the door, on the floor, next to the big cold white one. The small can. The small can is full of tissues. Tissues are, in Franklin’s assessment, the single most underrated food product in the house, and the fact that the family keeps a whole can of them in a room they close is, frankly, suspicious.

He gets the door open with his head. This takes a while and involves a great deal of noise.

He gets his whole front half into the can. This takes less time.

He cannot get his front half back out of the can.

What happens next happens all at once, the way these things do. Franklin reverses out of the bathroom at speed with the can still on, hits the door, knocks it wide, and comes to a stop in the middle of the hallway wearing a small trash can and a quantity of tissue, at which the entire family arrives from three directions.

And the sun reaches the leg of the chair.

Hssssss. And the knock in the wall, one soft knock, like something small has settled.

Everyone stops.

“That’s it,” says the man of the house. “That’s the noise. It’s the toilet, it’s running, it’s been running, it must be the flapper, “

And there in the middle of the hallway, at the center of all of them, at the exact moment of the sound, stands Franklin. Wearing a can. Chin up.

“Franklin found it,” says the woman of the house.

Franklin does not correct her, and this is the important part: he is not lying. Somewhere in the last four seconds the afternoon has rearranged itself in his head, and what he remembers now is an investigation. He remembers the hallway. He remembers deciding. He remembers the sound arriving exactly when he had determined it would.

The tissue is incidental. Every detective looks a certain way at the end.

They take the can off him. They tell him he’s very clever. Somebody scratches his ears and somebody else says they’ll call about the flapper in the morning, and Franklin accepts all of it as roughly proportionate.

From the top of the linen closet, where she has been the entire time, Cookie watches the whole thing without moving.

“Twenty-six hours,” she says. “I’d have mentioned it eventually.”

And down along the wall, by the closet, out of the way of everybody, the Duck puts her chin back on the floor.

He did great.