Speedo looked nervous, and hitched up his bathing suit—a nervous habit, since it was in no danger of falling down. “You’re not going to tell anyone, are you? I mean, it’s a trade secret. If people knew where I go to find food, everyone else’ll do the same, and I’ll be out of business.”
“I won’t tell a soul,” Mary said, “but you have to tell me one thing. How many birthday parties did you have to sit through until a cake crossed over?”
He puffed up proudly. “Three hundred and seventy-eight!”
Mary shook her head. “You must be sick of birthdays!”
“Hey, you do what you’ve gotta do, right?” Then he walked around, talking about the cake like it was a used car he was trying to sell. “It was something to watch, though. That little kid reached up and pulled the whole cake right off the table before they could even put the candles in! It smashed in a heap on the floor, but as you can see, it left a lasting impression on the table where it sat: The ghost of a birthday cake, just waiting for me to take.”
Mary looked at the cake and thought about dipping her finger in again, but stopped herself. It would be too easy to keep on eating it and not stop until the last crumb was gone.
“So,” said Speedo, “what do you think it’s worth?”
“What are you asking?”
“How am I supposed to know what I want, when I don’t know what ya got to give?”
Mary considered this. The cake was worth ten times anything she had ever traded for. This, she knew, was this Finders gold mine, and he might never find another one. He deserved a fair and honest trade.
Mary crossed the large room to a chest of drawers, and pulled out a set of keys.
She tossed them to Speedo, and he caught it.
“Keys?” he said. “I’ve found lots of keys. They ain’t no good unless the thing they unlock also crossed into Everlost—and that never happens.”
“Something very strange happened in the living world a few weeks ago,” Mary told him. “A man sent his car into one end of a carwash, and it never came out the other end. No one has any idea what happened to it.”
He looked at her, his face a mix of hope and distrust. “And what did happen to it?”
“Sunspots.”
“Huh?”
Mary sighed. “If you had read my book, Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Vortexes but Were Afraid to Ask, then you would know that sunspot activity tends to create vortexes from the living world to ours, through which living-world objects sometimes fall.”
“Oh,” said Speedo. “Sunspots, yeah.”
Mary grinned. “In a parking stall at the north side of old Penn Station, you’ll find a silver Jaguar. I don’t travel much, so I doubt I’d have much use for it.
It’s yours, if you promise to bring me all of your best food finds.”
She could tell that the Finder was excited about the car, tut he was a good negotiator. “Well,” he said, “I already do have a pretty sweet ride….”
“Yes,” said Mary, “you talked about it last time you were here. As I recall, it’s more trouble than it’s worth, because you can never find a place to park it.”
“Yeah,” he said, “I guess I could do with something smaller. Okay—it’s a deal!”
He shook her hand a little too forcefully, finally letting his true excitement show. “A Jag. Wow!” His smile stretched right into the middle of his ears, and Mary simply had to say something about it. Someone had to.
“You should try to remember that the living only have thirty-two teeth.”
He looked at her, stunned by her directness.
“Eight incisors,” Mary continued, “four canine, eight bicuspids, and twelve molars, if you’ve got wisdom teeth.”
“Oh,” he said, getting red in the face.
“It’s clear you put a lot of importance on your smile, but when you think about it too much, it starts to take over.”