Easter egg mystery solved with a bang

“There’s one missing,” we said, and Jenny, the oldest of the kids, started counting the eggs.

“No, see,” we said, interrupting her, “there were two dozen eggs — 24 — and there’s one missing from these cartons. That makes 23 eggs. There’s one missing.”

But Jenny just sighed and started counting again. After all, there must be several ways to come up with a total of 24 eggs, and she had more faith in her system than in ours. We sighed and watched her count.

In the end, though, all systems agreed. There were 23 eggs. One egg was missing.

“Well, you said we found them all,” she said in defense of her clients, who were all less than four feet tall.

“Yes,” we said. “You found all the eggs we hid. But then you kids insisted on hiding the eggs again for the adults to hunt. And now we’ve looked and we can only find 23 of them. One of them is missing.”

She shrugged and looked at the other kids. They shrugged, too. “Grown-ups are just lousy lookers,” their eyes said. They knew enough not to say it aloud, but we got the point.

“No, see,” we said, “we give up looking. We’ve looked everywhere. We want you to go find the last egg.”

And they scurried off to look, excited once more.

But kids have short memories, so none of them could recall where they might have hidden the elusive 24th egg.

It was probably a bad idea from the start, but it was too late for that kind of thinking. After all, when we adults hid the eggs for the kids, our goal was for all eggs to be found eventually. And that always meant a bit of red shell peeking out over the rim of a flowerpot, or a glimmer of bright yellow dawning over the heel of a shoe.

And—just in case—a mental note of where each egg was hidden.

With the kids, however, the goal was different. They snickered like little Mafia hitmen with contracts on two-dozen tiny multi-colored Jimmy Hoffas. “They’ll never find this one,” they said.

And they were right, with one of them.

“Did you eat any of them?” we asked the kids when they bored of the search, and they all shook their heads vigorously.

We looked at the dog. “Hey, don’t blame me,” her look said. It always said that. She slunk from the room, just in case we didn’t believe her.

And so we went on with our lives, and the mystery went unsolved. We didn’t worry too much about it, because Easter is all about mystery, isn’t it?

But Easter can’t last forever, and before long it was the Fourth of July.

We were back at my parents’ house, where we had hidden the eggs months before, and now the barbeque grill was smoking on the patio. The air conditioning was humming away because it was hot even by July 4th standards. Through the shut window in the kitchen, where Mom was mixing the potato salad, she could hear random fireworks popping in the distance, smuggled over the border from neighboring states by some uncle.

And then there was a tiny explosion that sounded like something had hit the side of the house. Not very big or loud, mind you — just sort of a “pop” that rattled the kitchen window.

Mom and Dad’s tiny kitchen window was always shut, as was the storm window behind it. It wasn’t that they couldn’t be opened, just that it was inconvenient to do so, since you’d have to climb over the sink like a monkey to get to them. So the windows stayed closed all the time.

But something seemed to have hit the glass — a misguided bird, perhaps — with the sound of a tiny explosion. On further inspection, there looked to be a colorful, gooey mess on the glass, but on the inside, between the panes.

Mom reached over the sink and opened the inner window. It was an awkward stretch for her, though it would have been a fun, easy scamper for a nimble little monkey-child.

In case you’ve ever wondered what happens to an Easter egg hidden between two panes of glass and left in the sun for three months to bake in the heat of its own tiny greenhouse, I can tell you.

But I won’t tell you here, because you might be sitting down to breakfast right now, and that breakfast might include a couple of eggs smiling up at you next to your bacon and toast. So I’ll leave it to your imagination.

But I can tell you that an ancient, overheated Easter egg goes with a bang, not with a whimper.

And the aftermath is bad enough that even the dog gets up and leaves the room with a backward glance that says: “Hey, don’t blame me.”

And, for once, you take her word for it.

This story is excerpted from TR Kerth’s book “Revenge of the Sardines.” Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com

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