The Mystery of the Vanishing Sandwich

Half a tuna sandwich, on a plate, on the coffee table, at 2:15.

No sandwich, on a plate, on the coffee table, at 2:16.

The Duck solves this one in under four seconds, which is a personal record, and she solves it by the simplest method available to any detective anywhere, which is that she was in the room and she watched him do it.

Franklin ate the sandwich.

He ate it standing on the coffee table, which he is not allowed on, in one motion, with his eyes open. Then he got down. Then he sat and looked at the middle distance for a while with an expression of mild puzzlement, as though trying to recall something.

And then, and the Duck has watched this happen enough times now that she recognizes the exact moment it lands, he forgot.

Not deliberately. Not with any guilt about it. He simply reorganized the last thirty seconds into a version that did not include him standing on the table, and the new version took, the way it always takes, completely and permanently and in under a minute.

By 2:18 Franklin is investigating the disappearance of the sandwich.

He is extremely good at the opening of an investigation. He does the whole front room. He does the rug, the couch, the space under the couch, the plate, the plate again, and the general air above the plate. He announces that there has been a theft. He announces that the perpetrator is in this house.

Then he announces the name of the perpetrator, and the name is Cookie.

The reasoning, delivered at length, is not actually bad: it was a tuna sandwich. There is precisely one animal in this residence with a known and documented interest in fish. That animal is unaccounted for. That animal is always unaccounted for. That animal has never once explained where she has been.

“He seemed nice,” says Abby, of nobody.

Cookie, from the arm of the couch, six feet up, does not dignify any of it. She is accused in her own front room, in front of witnesses, and she declines to respond, because responding would suggest the accusation required one.

The Duck lies by the wall and thinks about her afternoon.

She could end this in a second. She won’t, and the reason is not loyalty, exactly, and it is not cowardice either. The reason is that the sandwich was on the coffee table and Franklin was on the coffee table, and if anybody in this house works out the second part, then somebody is going to be spoken to, in the voice, with the finger, and there is a version of the next hour where a small ridiculous animal is in trouble, and the Duck has decided, without ever putting it into words, that she is not going to be the one who arranges that.

So she does the other thing she does, which nobody sees either. She manages him.

When he heads for the kitchen, where the plate came from, where the case is, she gets up and goes to the front door and stands there looking out of it, and Franklin, who cannot tolerate the possibility of an event happening without him, abandons the kitchen and comes to see what’s outside.

Nothing’s outside. She knows nothing’s outside. That’s rather the point.

When he starts working the coffee table again, sniffing along the exact route of his own crime, she stands up, walks three steps, and lies down heavily on the rug beside it, and he sits on her, because he always sits on her, and an animal who is sitting down is an animal who is not detecting.

She keeps this up for an hour and ten minutes. It is the most exhausting work she has done all year.

At 3:30 the family notices the plate.

“Was there a sandwich here?”

“There was a sandwich there.”

They start with the obvious. They look at the cat, because it was tuna, and Cookie meets this with the flat unbothered contempt of a citizen who has been stopped for absolutely no reason and intends to remember it.

They look at Abby. Abby wags. Nobody has ever suspected Abby of anything in her life and nobody starts now.

They look at the Duck, briefly, out of fairness, and the Duck looks back at them with the deep uncomplicated honesty of a dog who did not eat the sandwich.

And then Franklin, who has spent seventy minutes on this case, who has built a complete theory, who is at this moment standing directly in the middle of the front room in order to deliver his findings to the assembled household...

...burps.

It is a substantial burp. It is not a quiet one. And it arrives in a warm and unmistakable cloud of tuna, into the middle of a silent room, in front of every single person who lives in that house.

There is a pause of about a second and a half.

“FRANKLIN.”

“It was Franklin. It was Franklin the whole time, “

And here is the thing, the thing that is the entire reason this series works: Franklin experiences this as a triumph.

The case is solved. He solved it. He identified the culprit. He assembled the household, he delivered the findings, and the findings landed. The room said the name, out loud, all together, at the exact instant he produced the decisive evidence.

That the culprit is him does not register as a problem. It does not register as anything at all. If anything it reflects extremely well on the investigation, which was clearly comprehensive enough to include everybody.

He stands there in the middle of the room, in the middle of the noise, chin up, being extremely told off, and he has never had a better afternoon.

They put the plate in the sink. They tell each other tuna’s fine, it’s just tuna, he’s had worse. Somebody says he’s not even sorry and somebody else says he’s really not, and the woman of the house says the thing she says nine times a day, which is “What the Franklin?”

Cookie stands, stretches one leg out behind her at considerable length, and steps down off the arm of the couch, exonerated and entirely uninterested in being.

“The record will reflect that I was accused,” she says.

And the Duck, who has been awake and working and quietly steering a pug away from his own crime scene since 2:16, who could have ended it in one second at any point in ninety minutes, and who has instead spent her entire afternoon making sure nobody found out...

...puts her chin down on the rug and lets her eyes close.

He cracked it. Sure.