by Joe Meno
“I am afraid this may be a medical condition,” Billy whispers, trembling slightly.
“No, no, I’m sure it’s something more sinister.”
“Why do you think that?”
“Look here, I received this,” the young man says, and hurriedly removes a small white card from his suit coat pocket, handing it to Billy.
Billy stares down and reads: MARKED BY THE ARROW: YOU. “Where did you find this?” he asks.
“I don’t know. It just appeared in my back pocket.”
“It is very strange.”
“Yesterday it was my upper leg. Then the knee. Then the ankle. Today the whole foot. I have no feeling down there. It’s as if it was never there. I’m very concerned about it.”
“As you should be.”
“A strange woman in a mask put the card in my pants pocket. I was on the bus and she approached me and a few moments later it was there.”
“She wore a mask?”
“Yes. Black, like you wear to a masquerade. And she was wearing long black gloves. It was frightening.”
“I see.”
“Perhaps it was foolish to mention it to you,” the young man whispers, and glances about the office quickly. “But I’m afraid tomorrow I’ll wake up and there’ll be nothing left.”
“I understand. It is very serious.”
“Maybe I should not have bothered you,” the young man whispers. “No, no, I don’t think we should have spoken.” He then hurries away, disappearing behind a row of cubicles in the back of the office. The boy detective nods carefully and returns to his calls, frowning at the spot where the young man’s shoe has left a strange mark on a stack of mimeographs.
“I would like a wig—a blond wig, if you have one—right away.”
“We have over thirty styles and colors,” Billy reports sadly.
“I need a wig that’s long, so people don’t recognize me. Do you have something like that? For people when they want to hide?”
“Perhaps it might be easier to choose if I send you a catalog.”
“No, no, I need one as soon as possible. Today, if I can.”
“I see.”
“Which one do you recommend?”
“The Young Starlet is very popular.”
“I want something very plain. Very plain.”
“Perhaps the Nordic Princess model.”
The line goes quiet for a moment. Billy can hear the woman sitting there, breathing.
“I’m waiting for a taxi. I’m moving out today. I need it very soon.”
“Well, perhaps I might call you at some other time …”
“I’m in this apartment all alone right now. Please don’t hang up on me.”
“OK.”
“My roommate thinks I should call the police. I don’t want the police involved.”
“Perhaps I should call back—”
“I was kidnapped. They took me to a factory. Then they let me go. That was three days ago. I can’t stay here. I can’t go anywhere. I don’t want to be alone.”
“I’m … so … I …”
“I should have listened to my parents. I’m never coming back to this town again.”
Billy hangs up the telephone, finds a Seroquel, and pops it into his mouth.
At work, just before he leaves, the boy detective slowly strolls past the ladies’ wigs division. Among the darling models of glossy hair and expressionless Styrofoam heads, the office cubicles are mostly empty. In the background, one of the cleaning ladies has begun vacuuming. There, Billy finds, beneath an empty desk marked with Eric Quimby’s name on a small gold placard, a pair of black socks heaped clumsily into a pair of brown dress shoes. Examining the soft gray seat, Billy discovers the same small white card, the message, MARKED BY THE ARROW: YOU. Sitting there and looking up, he sees the telephone on the desk is lying off its receiver and that, according to the signal light, a call is on hold. Billy holds the phone to his ear and presses the receiver.
A strange, metallic voice sings in a whisper directly into his ear: “It’s always twilight for lovers … It’s always twilight for love …”
Frightened, Billy returns the receiver to its cradle and backs away, stumbling over the cord from the vacuum cleaner, hurrying into the quiet solace of the elevator.
As he catches his breath, he notices a darkly dressed woman in a blue velvet dress, dark high heels, and a black mask standing beside him. He does not move. He begins to count, closing his eyes, his fingers pinching the sides of his legs until the elevator rings and the doors part open. Rushing past, Billy turns to see the small wood-paneled box is now empty.
On the bus ride, he tries to convince himself he did not see what he has seen. When he places his nervous hands within his coat pocket, he finds a small white card that he does not recognize. It reads: IGNORE WHAT YOU THINK YOU NOW KNOW. He leaves it on the plastic seat beside him and hurries off at the next bus stop.
NINE
It is perhaps the most terrifying unsolved case of all time: the Phantom Killer of Texarkana. From February 22 through May 3, 1946, a strange killer held the small town of Texarkana, Arkansas in a grip of fear, murdering five people and assaulting three others. The first victims were young couples, attacked while parking at the Lover’s Lane section of road near Spring Lake Park. The fourth couple was attacked in their home, ten miles northeast of the town.
The strange occurrences began on February 22, 1946: Nineteen-year-old Mary Jean Larey and her boyfriend, twenty-four-year-old Jimmy Hollis, were parked on a dark road, ending their date. Suddenly, their kisses goodnight were interrupted by a gigantic, ominous shadow that belonged to a man in a bright white hood. The man moved slowly, tapping a gun against the window of the car, demanding that the couple get out. He first beat Jimmy unconscious with the pistol and then terrified Mary, pressing the barrel of the gun against her soft cheek. Luckily, a car light soon appeared and frightened the enormous hooded man off, thereby saving Mary and Jimmy’s lives.
At first, the incident was considered the work of a transient and was ignored, but then on the morning of March 24, two police officers discovered the body of a man lying in a parked car on the side of the road; it belonged to twenty-nine-year-old Richard Griffin. Some distance away from the automobile was a second body, the man’s girlfriend, Polly Ann Moore. Both victims had been murdered by a shot in the head from a pistol, a .32 caliber, the same gun Mary Jean Larey and Jimmy Hollis described in their encounter with the fiend.
On April 13, the bodies of fifteen-year-old Betty Jo Booker and her boyfriend Paul Martin were discovered, once again shot with a .32 caliber pistol. Betty Jo had also been molested and bound to a tree before being shot. Police were sure of the connection, but unsure how to resolve the identity of the killer or the motive for his actions. After the local press dubbed the murderer the “Phantom Killer,” residents of the town became tremendously fearful, afraid to leave their homes after dark.
Starting April 14 and continuing through May, the streets of Texarkana were like a ghost town. The Phantom Killer eluded police for nearly a month, committing his final murder on May 3, 1946, striking the home of Katy and Virgil Starks.
The Phantom Killer was never caught, and disappeared as mysteriously as he had arrived, leaving many to wonder why he had appeared in the first place. Why had he done what he’d done? Why had he gone mad with such criminal brutality at the sight of love?
The boy detective reads this in his therapist’s waiting room in a magazine entitled Crime Psychology: A Satisfactory Study. He sets the magazine down as the therapist calls his name.
The boy detective is now lying on his side on the large brown vinyl couch. The therapist is watching and taking notes. He interrupts whatever Billy is saying and Billy sits up.
“Billy, I want you to be honest and tell me something.”
“OK.”
“Why do you think your sister killed herself?”
“Pardon me?”
“Why do you think Caroline killed hers
elf?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know?”
“I mean I don’t know. I don’t know everything.”
“So it’s a mystery?”
“Yes.”
“But I thought you never failed to solve a case?”
“We never did.”
“Not you and your friend and your sister, just you. I thought you never failed to solve a mystery.”
“I didn’t.”
“Well, it seems to me you’re avoiding the greatest mystery of your life: why your sister killed herself.”
“No.”
“Perhaps, for some reason, you think you know the answer already.”
“No.”
“Perhaps you think it was you—that you were the reason. That somehow you were to blame.”
“I …”
“Did you love your sister, Billy?”
“Yes, of course …”
“Did she love you?”
“Yes. I am sure of it.”
“Is that why you feel responsible for her death? That if you truly loved her, you would not have left her alone? That if you truly cared for her, she would not have died? That love—like you—never fails?”
“I am leaving now, doctor.”
“You can leave if you like, Billy, but we both know that won’t change anything.”
“I’m leaving anyway.”
The boy detective, abandoning his shoes and socks in the office behind him, runs so fast his tears fall sideways down his narrow face.
As you may have noticed, it seems there have been an extraordinary number of conjoined twins born in our town. What seemed like a strange fact at first was later revealed to be the result of years of improper disposal of medical waste. It is not so unusual to see two or three sets of these twins shopping at your local grocery store on any given day. What is out of the ordinary is to see someone standing behind you in line, a soft red mark along the side of his or her head, a wound that suggests the terror of separation, a medical procedure which is hardly ever successful. Most with this curious affliction choose to die as they were born: as one. In our graveyards, we have arranged special plots for the proper interment of these unlucky people: a long rectangular gravestone that recalls a strange double life, revealing a partnership that, living past death, gives us an unlikely cause to be envious.
TEN
The boy detective is on the bus again, staring ahead, almost asleep. It is still raining. The bus is again crowded. People are again standing and talking on their cell phones or reading their papers. Like that, Billy notices the lady in pink at the other end of the bus. She has her hand in another woman’s pocket again.
Billy stands and begins moving toward her, slowly. The lady looks up and notices Billy and what he is noticing. She becomes flush, grabs her own pink purse, and hurries toward the exit. Billy follows, hopping off the bus in a crowd of other commuters, as the lady runs away.
In the rain, Billy follows, catching her, grabbing her hand. The lady squeaks, trying to pull free. “Please … wait … please …”
The lady drops her pink purse, spilling it as she struggles to get away. Hundreds of pens, pencils, paper clips, tissues, lipsticks—all stolen items—fall out. Billy lets go of the lady’s hand to help pick up the mess. When he looks up, the lady in pink is gone once again. Along the wet ground are more of her stolen goods: office supplies, napkins, a small white wax paper—wrapped sandwich, an apple, and laminated ID cards—dozens of them, photos of all kinds of men and women. Billy smiles, finding several more, all from the same company, ELECTEC, then an ID of the lady in pink. Beneath her drab, small face is her name: Penny Maple.
The apple and sandwich seem to point to the fact that perhaps she is only now going to work. A cleaning lady? Are her pink clothes a uniform perhaps? Maybe she is heading to her job right now?
Billy excitedly shoves everything back into the purse. In this moment, he decides he will return the purse to her and try to ask her to please stop stealing.
ELEVEN
The boy detective enters the small silver office building and sneaks past a snoring guard into a waiting elevator. When the elevator doors open, he can hear the sound of a vacuum running. He follows the sound and slowly sneaks around the corner of a small green cubicle and finds the lady in pink, now in a pink cleaning smock, leaning over a small white vacuum, running it back and forth, dancing to her headphones, shouting along loudly. It is impossible not to smile, seeing her: eyes closed, feet tapping in place, yelling louder than the vacuum cleaner.
In a moment, the lady stops vacuuming and begins dancing with a tall silver coat rack. One of its rungs holds a suit jacket, which is swaying back and forth in time. Then the lady grabs a handful of files and tosses them up in the air. Finding a chair, she sits and spins around, pounding her feet on the top of the desks. Like that, she has climbed up on a conference table and, her face all red and nearly out of breath, she slides down the table, scattering an enormous pile of recyclable paper.
If somehow, through science or magic, we could discern an X-ray of Billy’s heart just then, it would look like a lovely, perfectly shaped balloon—the kind sold on Valentine’s Day in the comical rounded heart shape—growing larger and larger, filling his chest, his eyes, expanding to the size of the room, as the lady swings her hair around, still dancing. Perhaps it would look like this:
Billy smiles, genuinely moved. He forgets himself and starts clapping.
The lady turns, dropping her headphones, startled. She falls off the desk and hurries for the exit. Billy pleads, running after her, calling: “No, wait, please, wait …”
The lady nimbly runs into the office stairwell. Billy follows only a few steps behind, but once inside the stairwell, the lady in pink is gone, and there is absolutely no echoing sound of retreating feet to relate where she might have escaped to. A door slams and locks somewhere in the stairwell and Billy stops, calling over the railing: “Wait! Please wait!”
The boy detective holds the pink purse, smiling sadly. He hears another door slam somewhere and shakes his head. He leans over and leaves her identification badge on the stairs; keeping the purse, he heads back to the elevator once again.
On the bus home, he holds the purse in his lap and wonders why he did not simply leave it there.
TWELVE
The boy detective is lying in bed, thinking about kissing Penny Maple.
Penny Maple
oh, Penny Maple
Penny Maple
oh, Penny Maple
PennyPennyPennyPennyPennyPennyPennyPenny Maple
He is thinking this: smooch-smooch, kiss-kiss. He is imagining what her small pink lips might feel like next to his. He is lying in his bed and imagining these things: what her ankles look like naked and the soft smell of her hair beneath her hat. He is holding her purse and he is becoming overwhelmed and he begins kissing the soft fabric. He cannot stop himself. He smells her flowery perfume and discovers a pink scarf inside the purse and he begins kissing that, too. Very soon, he is kissing everything—the pillow, her purse, the scarf. He is lying under the covers and practicing every kind of kiss he knows.
On his own, Billy has developed nearly forty kinds of kisses. Each one is scientific, with its own place and purpose. Tonight he practices the first ten he knows in this order:
Eskimo
Closed-eyed
French
Slow-breathing/fast-breathing
The Cary Grant
Nibble-kiss
The Venus de Milo
Fish-kiss
Top-lip kiss
Bottom-lip kiss
The boy detective opens his notepad and begins to plan new ways of kissing—methods that are untamed, wonderful, never before considered. The boy detective is suddenly afraid that kissing might always remain a mystery to him. He sits up in bed, wondering how Penny likes to be kissed, and whispers her name again and again like a song:
Penny Maple
; oh, Penny Maple
Penny Maple
oh, Penny Maple
PennyPennyPennyPennyPennyPennyPennyPenny Maple
Penny Maple
oh, Penny Maple
Penny Maple
oh, Penny Maple
PennyPennyPennyPennyPennyPennyPennyPenny Maple
Penny Maple
yes, Penny Maple
you are Penny Maple
your name is Penny Maple
PennyPennyPennyPennyPennyPennyPennyPenny Maple
Penny Maple
yes, yes, yes, Penny Maple
Penny Maple?
oh, yes, Penny Maple
PennyPennyPennyPennyPennyPennyPennyPenny Maple
Penny Maple
oh, no, Penny Maple
Penny Maple (Maple, Maple)
oh, Penny Maple, yes, yes, yes
PennyPennyPennyPennyPennyPennyPennyPenny Maple
Penny Maple
oh, go now, Penny Maple
Penny Maple
you are the only Penny Maple
PennyPennyPennyPennyPennyPennyPennyPenny Maple
Penny Maple
oh, look out, Penny Maple
Penny Maple
PennyPennyPennyPennyPennyPennyPennyPenny Maple
You scared me, too.
THIRTEEN
At school, Gus Mumford has written a note for the strange bald boy sitting before him. While Miss Gale posts enormous mathematical enumerations on the blackboard, Gus Mumford gathers his courage, folds the small scrap of paper into itself again and again and again, then—as gently as he knows how—flings the note against the back of the child’s strangely pink neck. Oh no—he has projected it much too hard. The paper ricochets off the soft bald head and falls there, between his feet. The boy blinks, turning around in his seat, his nearly nonexistent blond eyebrows lowering into a frown, his mouth a stab of red sadness. Gus Mumford is unsure how to proceed and simply lowers his head to his desk, pretending he is now mysteriously dead—perhaps it is scurvy or impetigo or the black death.
The boy reaches down and grasps the paper lightly with his small pink fingers. Slowly in his lap, he unfolds the note and begins reading. The note is simple, only four words: I LIKE YOUR EYELASHES.
