by Joe Meno
Billy sighs, touching the soft white scars on his wrists, and then looks down the aisle and sees a short, mousy-looking young woman in drab brown and pink. The lady has very large glasses on her very tiny face and she frowns as she makes her way toward an opening in the busy line of people who are all still very wet with rain.
A strange thing then happens—it is strange, yes.
The young woman looks over her shoulder, very suspiciously, looking to see where other people are now glancing. The lady adjusts her pink pillbox hat, then slowly approaches a matronly woman near the rear of the bus, eyeing the other woman’s great black handbag which is hanging open vulnerably. The young woman is trying to stare surreptitiously, but great invisible dashes - - - - - - - - - - are being directed from her eyes toward the other woman’s purse, and the way her narrow black eyebrows are arranged—pointed, with intent—it is clear where the young woman is looking.
The boy detective takes notice of the young woman, leaning forward in his seat. She inches her hand from her pink coat pocket toward the other lady’s handbag, her small fingers, nimble and quick, reaching into the matron’s purse. The young woman takes something from the purse and quickly slides her hand back into her coat pocket, concealing it. Then, turning away, she makes her way toward the exit in a hurry.
The boy detective watches the young woman’s movements moment to moment, his hands clenching with impotent fury. He cannot help what he is about to do—no. He cannot help himself. A bluebird, falling from the sky, cannot stop itself from flying. A clipper ship, adrift in the ocean, cannot stop itself from floating. A magnolia, rising in the water, cannot stop itself from growing. So it is that the boy detective stands and begins making his way toward the lady thief. Just as he reaches his hand out to grab her pink sleeve, she moves and quickly gets off the bus, the glass doors nearly closing in his face. Billy follows just as quickly, accidentally stepping into a gutter full of rain. The lady ties a pink scarf around her head, ducking from tree to tree, almost disappearing in the soft gray haze. Billy catches up with her. From behind, he touches her right hand, scaring her, staring into her face.
“Excuse me, miss? Miss?”
The lady is very startled. “Yes? You … you frightened me.”
“I believe I saw you take something from that woman’s purse.”
“No … I …”
Like that, the lady in pink runs off, darting between people. Dark umbrellas hide her path. Billy follows, hurrying past people on the street. The lady, out of breath, stops ahead and leans against a parked car. Her face is wet with tears or rain. Billy catches up with her and takes her hand again.
“You did take something from that woman, didn’t you?”
The lady is now crying. “You. You scared me.”
The lady reaches into her pocket and takes out a cheap plastic pen. She throws it down. It floats in the rainy gutter, slowly turning. Billy leans over and picks up the pen as the lady runs off, her pink scarf blowing behind her head. Billy watches, speechless, the pink scarf a dot, a speck, then gone, gone, gone. The boy detective slips the pen into his pocket, watching her disappear, and wonders what is the meaning of any of it.
THREE
The boy detective has never kissed a girl. Shhh—it is a secret. It makes him feel very bad.
FOUR
At school, Gus Mumford breaks the other children’s arms. He is the best at it. He is doing it right now. Ow. Ouch. Yikes. He shoves Benjamin Radcliffe against a bank of lockers, smashing the boy’s ear, pummeling his face into the puke-green metal door with glee. Gus Mumford does not know why he is doing this. It just seems it is what the other children expect of him and so he does it to the best of his ability.
Gus Mumford’s greatest maiming—the one of which he, to this day, is most proud? Blackening both of Jeremy Acorn’s eyes with a single, deftly dealt blow to the nose.
In the middle of third period—spelling, Gus Mumford’s worst subject—there is a knock at the classroom door and a small creature enters the room: It is strange because Gus is unsure whether it is a girl or a boy standing there. The child’s skin is bright pink and its head is almost completely bald: There is a single blond strand of hair at the top of its head and its eyelashes are long and white. When it takes off its jacket, it is wearing a small white shirt and a patterned pair of slacks. Gus Mumford twitches his nose and watches Miss Gale lead the small pink child to an empty seat at the front of the classroom. Immediately there is a crowd of whispers and exclamations, and one of the girls, Missy Blackworth, the child who is always called on first in class, says a single word that seems to speak to the entire class’s feelings: “Bald.” Gus Mumford returns to his drawing—a graphic depiction of gigantic ants with swords, feasting on the various limbs of his teacher—every so often looking up from his page to stare at the back of the bald pink head before him. At recess, in between delivering a heretofore unheard of ten Indian burns to children on the playground, Gus watches the pink child, still unsure if it is truly a boy or girl, who is sitting on the bicycle rack making a cat’s cradle with a string of yarn.
Gus Mumford looks at the pink child’s nose and decides it must be a male. Still, he is the most lovely male Gus Mumford has ever seen: small eyes, small lips, blond eyelashes more dainty than any young girl’s.
When Missy Blackworth slowly takes a seat beside the pink boy, Gus stops punching a first grader named Clancy Seamen in the belly, turning the poor soul loose, and watches with squinted eyes what might happen next. On the other side of the playground, two third-graders quietly sit on the metal bike rack side by side, whispering to each other. All is well until Missy quickly reaches up, touches the boy’s soft pink head, and runs off giggling in horror, jumping up and down, laughing as she hurries back to her circle of friends, holding her hand out before her as if it is now glowing. Gus Mumford wipes Clancy Seamen’s spit off his fists and walks quickly over to Missy Blackworth. Without another thought, he breaks the laughing girl’s wrist.
Gus Mumford has a secret: He has been talking. He has been saying words out loud, but only to the inhabitants of Ant City, the ant farm his neighbor Billy generously gave to his sister. Hiding quietly beneath the front porch of his house, he holds the rectangular glass metropolis in his hands and says—his voice unfamiliar and creaky—“I have a new friend at school. He thinks very highly of me.” He is lying, of course, but is quite sure the citizens of Ant City will be unable to recognize that.
FIVE
The boy detective always returns to the case of the Haunted Candy Factory. He tells the story over and over and over again when he is feeling unsure of himself. Why? Because there is a beginning, a middle, and an end. He is comforted by it—the structure—knowing there is an answer to the strange question being asked.
After doing some smart sleuthing (having inspected the only clue in the case of the Haunted Candy Factory, and having deciphered its strange meaning, which seemed to suggest the villain was a sinister dentist of some kind), Billy had traced the producer of the out-of-date paper the original note was typed on to a supplier, who revealed the buyer, a Dr. John Victor, and his address. The boy detective and his sister Caroline found that it led them to an abandoned dental office, not more than a block away from the cursed candy factory.
Climbing through an open window, the boy detective and Caroline snooped around for a while, staring at the dental instruments and medical gowns overwhelmed with cobwebs.
“There’s his office,” Caroline said.
Immediately inside the office, the two children discovered an important clue.
“Look,” Caroline exclaimed, “the ghost!”
There, lying in Dr. Victor’s desk, was a large white sheet with holes cut out for eyes. Beneath the cloth, a large set of silver keys.
“Some ghost,” the boy detective said. “I told you there was nothing to be scared of.”
With that, the door to the office swung shut. Together, the two children rushed forward, but not in time. They hea
rd the outside bolt being rammed into place.
“We’re prisoners!” Caroline gasped.
Again and again, the Argo siblings threw their weight against the door. It was hopeless. Breathing hard, Billy and Caroline looked for another means of escape.
“The windows are all boarded shut,” Billy said, blaming himself for not having been on guard.
“What will we do?” Caroline asked.
“I know!” the boy detective exclaimed. “Look!”
There in the ceiling was a large metal air vent.
“We can climb through!” Caroline happily guessed. Climbing on top of an old dental chair, Billy found the pedal that controlled the chair’s height, and held it down with a discarded block of wood. With a whoosh, the two siblings rocketed skyward, close enough to slip into the safety of the air vent.
“Follow that light,” Billy whispered. “I think I know exactly where it leads.”
Within the darkness of the silver vent, the siblings crawled and crawled, soon finding their way into a deep, dark cave. At the end of the cave was a pixie-faced young girl, Daisy Hollis, heiress to the Hollis Dry Cleaning fortune. There, monogrammed on her light blue dress, were her initials: DH.
“We’ve been looking for you for sometime,” Caroline said. “Everyone has practically given up—”
Wait a minute, no—that isn’t right at all. Daisy Hollis is not part of this story.
The boy detective, on the bus, pinches himself, staring at the scars on his wrist.
Daisy Hollis? No, that’s a mistake. That’s not the case you’re remembering.
Here’s how it goes:
With a whoosh, the two siblings rocketed skyward, close enough to slip into the safety of the air vent.
“Follow that light,” Billy whispered. “I think I know exactly where it leads.”
SIX
It is not so very strange: The boy detective is going to the movies on his own. He does not want to ask any other resident to accompany him because his favorite film is playing. He does not know what the film is, but decides whatever it is after tonight—his first film alone—it will be his favorite.
As Billy’s ticket is being torn, he looks up and notices the usher smoking two cigarettes at the same time. The tall, lanky fellow in the red vest and tiny red hat is none other than Frank Hartly, a fellow former child detective.
Together, the Hartly Boys—Frank and his younger brother Joe—solved many mysteries in the nearby town of Bayville, until they discovered that their father, also a professional detective, was leading a very well-organized counterfeiting ring. With their father’s arrest and subsequent incarceration, the Hartly brothers forever turned away from detective work and private investigation. Billy had not heard from or seen them since, thinking they too had wanted to disappear into the quiet comfort of some semblance of normalcy.
Billy blinks, staring at the young man’s face. The rugged chin and unruly head of blond hair, the chiseled cheekbones and determined eyebrows make it quite clear: This is Frank Hartly, one-half of the best boy detective team on earth, now just a clerk at a movie theater.
“Frank,” the boy detective whispers. “Frank Hartly?”
“Yeah,” he says with a nod, ashing on the floor, trying to remember Billy’s face. His eyes squint and strain as he works to picture who Billy might be. “Who’s asking?”
“It’s Billy Argo. I knew you when we were younger.”
“Billy Argo! I thought you were dead, man. Jesus.”
“I was just out of town for a long time,” Billy lies.
“I thought you had OD’d or something. Hey, did you hear about Violet Dew?”
“Yes.”
“She’s divorced now. It’s terrible. How are you? I mean I had heard … Well, forget it.”
“No, go on,” Billy says.
“I heard your sister committed suicide and you shot yourself.”
“No,” Billy says, “none of that is true.”
“Well, I’m happy to hear it—hey, you know who’d get a kick out of this? My brother Joe,” Frank says, grabbing his walkie-talkie. He begins shouting into the two-way. “Joe, come over to the ticket booth, you’re never gonna believe who’s here!”
“You still work with your brother?”
“Yeah, we were lucky to find this place. Most jobs, they don’t want to hire two brothers together. But we’ve been here about two years. Joe is assistant manager. He was always the charming one.”
“So do you like this job?” Billy asks.
“It pays the bills and provides for the pills,” Frank whispers, taking a long drag. “Seriously, do you know any doctors who write fake scrips? I have a Demerol habit that cannot be fixed.”
“What happened?”
“I took a bad fall at the Old Mill—on a case, you know—my leg got caught in a mill wheel, slip, fall, crush. We solved the case, but the damn thing never healed.”
“I am on four different medications at the moment,” Billy confides.
“Painkillers?”
“Antidepression and antianxiety. If I take too many, I fall down.”
“Do you have any on you?” Frank Hartly asks.
“No,” Billy lies.
“Billy Argo!” Joe Hartly shouts, suddenly appearing. “Man, I was such a huge fan of yours when I was a kid,” he says, shaking Billy’s hand. “The Case of the Haunted Candy Factory. That’s solid gold.”
“It’s good to see you too, Joe,” Billy says.
“Well, what have you been up to?” Joe asks.
“Working.”
“Oh, like on a case?”
“No, just working like you: at a job.”
“Well, this job is bullshit. We were security guards at the mall here for a while,” Joe says, “but they said we were way too ambitious.”
“Joe shot a shoplifter in the leg. Shooting people is frowned upon,” Frank chimes in.
“We weren’t even supposed to carry guns.”
“That’s too bad,” the boy detective says with a frown. “It’s good that you have each other still, though.”
“Yes, yes, it is,” Frank Hartly agrees.
“Well, I hope you enjoy the movie,” Joe Hartly says. “It’s good.”
“Yeah, maybe afterwards we can meet up and talk for a while,” Frank adds. “We have, well, a kind of informal group that gets together—nothing serious, just some people who sit around and talk, mostly former detectives, you know. We discuss old cases and stuff. If you ever want to come, let me give you my number.” He writes it on the back of the ticket stub and hands it to Billy.
“I’ll give you a call,” the boy detective whispers, and with that lie a silent alarm goes off in his heart.
SEVEN
That evening, lonesome, the boy detective is lying in bed counting snowflakes. He has counted as many as a thousand. He stands suddenly, awakened by some commotion outside, and looks out of the small barred window of his room. He notices the Mumford children moving in the dark, long after they should be in bed asleep. Puffy, in her purple and white coat, Effie Mumford is crouching on their front lawn beside what appears to be a large silver rocket, its nose pointed skyward. In an instant, the girl flips some silver switch and the sleek-looking missile begins vibrating, small puffs of smoke burning from its engines.
Billy places his face against the glass, holding the bars and watching as the children clap and holler, backing away slowly from the rocket as it begins to twitch and hover. Unable to stop himself, like a magnet to strange behaviors and intrigue, the boy detective begins taking notes in his small notepad:
—1:03am: Subject: Effie Mumford, female, age eleven, blond, in a white and purple winter jacket. Testing a new rocket perhaps?
—1:07am: Subject slips, falls on her backside, looks around to see if anyone has noticed. Her brother, Gus Mumford, age nine, frowns; subject pulls herself to her feet and continues watching.
—1:10am: The rocket begins to very slowly lift off from the ground.
—1:11am: Subject takes a bow, clapping for herself, thanks imaginary audience.
—1:12am: The rocket lifts off suddenly, turns hard, and crashes into the maple hanging over the subjects’ front yard. The rocket explodes while the subject and her brother run and hide beneath their front porch. The front lawn has begun to burn. Also, a small bush goes up in flames.
—1:13am: Mrs. Mumford hurries onto front porch and begins shouting.
—1:15am: Mrs. Mumford puts out the fire on the front lawn, extinguishes the burning hedge, and shouts until the Mumford children disappear inside.
—1:16am: The rocket, lying inert on the front lawn, explodes. In a report of small silvery blasts, the word “HELLO” is spelled out in glowing sparkles that soon die.
EIGHT
At work, the boy detective is busy at his desk, pretending to talk on the left-handed telephone, when a skinny, sad-eyed young man approaches and stands there staring. The young man is nervous; he looks around and very quietly leans beside Billy and whispers: “Are you the detective?”
Billy looks up. The young man’s face is that of an eager, timid boy, with a pointed chin, bright eyes, and extremely narrow cheekbones. Billy leans close to answer, smiling.
“Yes. I am the detective.”
“My name is Eric Quimby.”
“Yes?”
“I work in the ladies’ wigs division. Please … I need your help.”
“Yes?”
“I would appreciate your candor regarding this matter.”
“Of course.”
“I believe I am in danger.”
“Danger?”
“Yes. Take a look at this.” The young man lifts his left leg and plants it on the corner of Billy’s desk. Slowly, he raises his pant leg and reveals that below there is nothing left: no flesh, no bone, no skin, only empty space, the sock and shoe somehow mysteriously staying in place.
