The Boy Detective Fails

by Joe Meno

  To the boy or girl that finds this:

  Mr. Howard Lunt, aged 9, hid this April 24, 1902. Congratulations! Put back in spot so others might find.

  Signed,

  Mr. Howard Lunt, President, League of Amateur

  Whodunit Enthusiasts.

  Billy and Penny look at each other and smile. He nods, quite pleased. The boy detective slips the note back into the bellows, seals it up, and lowers the accordion back into the drainpipe. They walk back toward the bus station. The sun begins shining over their shoulders.

  FOUR

  We would really like to think that you were holding hands with somebody while you read that last part. If not, you might read it again and ask someone to hold your hand right now. You might then write that person’s name somewhere here on this page with a heart glowing around it. Why not? It might be fun.

  FIVE

  Billy and Penny sit on the bus, smiling, side by side. Billy looks across the aisle and sees a young boy with glasses in a red cardigan sweater doing a crossword puzzle, sitting beside his mother. Billy eyes him, smiling, and, digging into his pocket, pulls out his pad and pencil, and begins scribbling something down.

  It is this: a treasure map with a big X marking the spot.

  Billy finishes and tears the drawing from the pad of paper. He hands it to Penny, who smiles at it. Billy nods toward the child across the aisle. Penny looks from Billy to the boy and nods, understanding. She stands and very carefully slides the treasure map into the kid’s sweater pocket without anyone noticing. She sits back down and winks at Billy.

  Billy and Penny sit side by side, slightly dirty but smiling, staring straight ahead. In a moment, Billy frowns and Penny notices.

  “What is it, Billy?”

  “It’s all over now. I’m not young anymore. No more adventures, no more mysteries, no more secrets.”

  Penny hugs him. Billy smiles at Penny, holding her hand.

  “We’ll make our own secrets now, maybe.”

  THE END

  NURSE ELOISE’S ANGEL FOOD CAKE!

  You will need

  4 c. egg whites

  4 tsp. cream of tartar

  3 1/2 c. sugar divided into 1 1/2 c and 2c.

  2 c. cake flour

  1/2 tsp. salt

  1 scraped vanilla bean

  Put egg whites and cream of tartar into mixing bowl. Using your mixer’s whip attachment, whip until soft peak. Gradually add 2 c. sugar and scraped vanilla bean and beat until stiff peak. When beater is pulled out and held upside down, a curl should hold its shape.

  Sift flour, 1 1/2 c. sugar, and salt.

  When whites are ready, slowly and gently fold in dry ingredients—don’t over mix!

  Dollop into two angel food cake pans—ungreased!

  Run a knife around the pan edges to get rid of any large air pockets.

  Sprinkle top with sugar.

  Bake at 350° F approximately 35-40 minutes, until cracks in top no longer look moist.

  Eat and enjoy—yum!

  BOY DETECTIVE PUZZLE!

  The boy detective needs your help! Assist him with escaping the mystery of the haunted maze.

  BOY DETECTIVE CONNECT THE DOTS!

  Help the boy detective face his darkest fears! Connect the dots to reveal what is hidden.

  HIDDEN MESSAGE WORD SEARCH!

  Search for the missing words to reveal Billy’s secret message.

  Billy Effie Gus

  Bloody Fail Haunted

  Caroline Fenton Penny

  Clue Ghost Puzzle

  Crime

  Starting at the top left, the letters not used in the words you’ve found spell out Billy’s secret message to you:

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  With many thanks to: Koren, Dan, Johnny, Anne, Johanna, Todd and Ashley, Jon Resh, James, Mark Zambo, my folks and family, Jenny Bent, Michelle Kroes, Jay Ryan, Todd Dills, Mickey Hess, Sean Carswell, Jonathan Messinger, Quimby’s, the House Theatre, and the Columbia College Chicago Fiction Writing Department.

  What I listened to while writing this book: Belle and Sebastian, the Coctails, Wilco, and the Beatles.

  E-Book Extras

  Excerpt from Marvel and a Wonder

  More by Joe Meno

  Please enjoy this excerpt from

  Marvel and a Wonder by Joe Meno

  available September 2015 from Akashic Books

  _________________

  The white mare appeared on a Monday. Neither the grandfather nor the grandson had any idea who’d sent it. At first there was only the violent agitation of the pickup as it rattled along the unmarked road, towing behind it a fancy silver trailer, all ten wheels upsetting the air with a cloud of dust high as a steeple. The grandfather raised his hand to his eyes to try to make out the shape of the thing coming. It was a late afternoon in mid-July and the sun had just begun to falter behind the hills and tree line. The black pickup with its out-of-town plates bounced through the gate then pulled to a stop near the corner of the bleachy henhouse. Every bird on the farm, all the Silver Sussex roosters, all the Maran hens, turned to face the commotion with a prehistoric silence, waiting for the grit to begin to settle. When a man with sunglasses like a state trooper pulled himself out from behind the truck’s wheel, stretching his legs from what appeared to have been a long trip, Jim asked him what it was about. The man had a clipboard and some papers which he asked Jim to sign, in triplicate, before leading him around to the back of the trailer. There he handed Jim a pink sheet of paper and pair of silver keys. The horse, sleek-looking even behind steel bars, huffed through its pink nostrils, disappearing back into the darkness.

  “It’s yours,” the man said.

  “Mine?”

  “Yours.”

  “But . . . but what for?” Jim asked.

  The man with the sunglasses shrugged, itched his nose, and said, “I just get paid to deliver it,” then he put away his ink pen and began to unhook the trailer from the pickup’s hitch. It seemed the trailer had also been bequeathed, though Jim still did not know from whom. The man with the sunglasses handed another pink piece of paper to Jim, stepped clear of a mud puddle, and climbed back inside the cab of the pickup.

  “But there’s been some kind of mistake,” the grandfather said.

  The man readjusted his dark sunglasses, lit a cigarette, exhaled—the smoke rising in twin, nearly invisible tendrils about his craggy face—and looked down at the clipboard and said, “This the right address?”

  Jim nodded.

  “You Jim Falls?”

  The grandfather nodded again.

  “No mistake.” The man scowled and gave the ignition a start. “By the way, it’s got a name. Right here,” the man said, pointing to the pink page. Then the black pickup was pulling away, was driving off, then was gone. Jim walked over to the rear of the trailer. The horse was turning back and forth before him with an air of expectancy, the old man and the horse like children then, hesitant at their parents’ ankles, waiting to meet. The grandfather had never been fond of horses; there had been a pair of mules his father had borrowed to plow furrows for the corn, but those days were long gone.

  The hired hand, Rodrigo, had always claimed to have been raised on a horse ranch. Without so much as a word, he set down a Maran rooster, stepped up to the trailer, unlocked the bar, opened the gate, and slowly led the horse down the ramp. He whistled through his front teeth once the animal was standing there in the full sun where they could take in its shape.

  “It’s a racehorse, Mister Jim,” Rodrigo grinned, patting its sleek flanks, then looking under, apprising its sex. “And a lady.”

  Jim reached out a tentative hand in the horse’s direction, feeling the humid moistness of the animal’s nose, placing his palm against its neck. Its ears flicked, the blue-black eye staring back, expressionless. In its stoicism, in its stony quiet, the grandfather saw what he most often loved about the land, the country, the world. It was enough to say he had not nor would never have dreamt of standing this clos
e to a horse on this day or any other, and the unexpectedness, the absolute un-reason of the animal’s arrival, is what gave the grandfather a sense of joy.

  “What you going to call her, Mister Jim?” came Rodrigo’s voice.

  The grandfather studied the animal’s shape, tried to take in its perfect, imperturbable appearance, and then, looking down at the pink paper, he said, “It says here her name’s John the Baptist.”

  “John? For a lady?”

  “Yes, John. For a lady. That’s what it says.”

  “From the Bible?”

  “I guess so.”

  Rodrigo shrugged, and then searched inside the trailer and found an expensive eastern saddle and bridle. He whistled once again through his front teeth and then set to tack up, the horse remaining completely still as the blanket, then saddle was fit into place, then the bridle. It huffed once, not even a snort, and became silent again.

  “You ride her, Mister Jim?”

  Jim stared at the ghostly creature, at its formidable stature, and shook his head with a frown. “Not in this life, buster.”

  Rodrigo shrugged his shoulders again, holding the leather reins in his hand, asking a serious question by raising his eyebrows slightly.

  By then the boy—having heard the unfamiliar pickup rambling back down the gravel drive—walked out of the house and stared at the animal suspiciously. He stood a dozen feet away, pushing his glasses up against his face, trying to decide if this interruption was going to be worth his time. “Whose horse is that?” he asked.

  “Fella said it’s ours.”

  “Ours?”

  “Mine, I guess.”

  “But what for?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  The horse gave a soft whinny, which would have gone unheard if it wasn’t for the open air of the farm and the nearby highway—quiet at this time of day.

  Rodrigo pulled lightly on the reins, turned to face Jim once again, a daring smile crossing the farmhand’s face, the question having already been answered, in his mind at least, awaiting a sign, which Jim gave without begrudgement, nodding in a curt manner.

  “Okay,” Rodrigo said, slipping his left boot into the silver stirrup, then pulling himself up and fitting in his right. The horse took no notice of the stranger upon its back, its nostrils flaring slightly, its tail alighting back and forth, until the lean-faced man gave a short, gentle kick and the horse, as if having heard some celestial trumpet, was off, bucking and rearing in a flash of dust and dirt, clearing the low wire chicken fence, wreaking havoc in the dry-looking field of corn. Before the man on its back could whisper, “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” the animal seemed to have made one full pass of the entire property, galloping breakneck alongside the culvert, its hide speckled with sunlight.

  “Good God,” was all the grandfather could get out.

  It was clear from the first that the horse had been bred as a racer; standing fifteen hands high, it was lean-muscled with long legs, the hindquarters a rig of fibrous muscle. Four years old, it looked as spry as a filly.

  By the time Rodrigo had slowed the animal down to a canter, then a trot, then was heeling the horse before them, the farmhand’s face had lost none of its expression. There was a wide smile frozen below his black mustache, creeping from one ear to the other, his dark eyes runny with tears.

  The boy hung behind the fence apprehensively, excited by the creature’s presence, but too frightened to get closer.

  Jim, on the other hand, felt a weakness well up in him. He carefully strode over to the animal, slowly raising his hand to the side of its broad neck, and then he began to pat it, in ever-widening circles, the horse breathing huskily, its blue-black eye momentarily lidded by the longest eyelashes Jim had ever seen on an animal. It felt like the horse was the answer to something. He had an ache just then, not in his joints nor his stomach nor his liver, and remembered the place where he had been struck one afternoon when catching sight of the back of his wife Deedee’s knees as she stood on a chair and reached to retrieve a box from the top shelf of the school supply closet where she was teaching. He put his hand over his chest now, wondering if this is what it was like to get hit by lightning.

  “Do we get to keep it?” the boy asked.

  “I don’t know,” Jim said.

  The horse turned before them and snorted. Jim gave an easy smile.

  “But where’s it gonna live?”

  “We’ll see.”

  The boy held out a hand and patted the horse’s flank.

  Later it was decided they would drive to the nearby hamlet of Mount Holly the following morning and make an appointment to see Jim Northfield, the former lawyer and judge.

  End of Excerpt

  More about Marvel and a Wonder

  “Faulkner-ian epic for the contemporary age . . . . The novel’s prose is marvelous in its spare, convincing grit while the story’s themes of family, redemption, sacrifice, and faith echo the plays of Sam Shepard at times. . . . A grandiose, atmospheric portrait of Middle America in all its damaged glory.” —Kirkus Reviews

  “Marvel and a Wonder is such a tender love story. The love of an irascible grandfather for his baffling grandson; the love for a mysterious horse; the love for a country that no longer seems to love us back. Joe Meno writes with poise and wit and stunning amounts of empathy. What a beautiful story. What a lovely book.” —Victor LaValle, author of The Devil in Silver

  “Both sprawling and intimate, Marvel and a Wonder is a vivid portrait of Heartland America, and infuses its array of characters with humor, empathy, and insight. I’ve long been an admirer of Joe Meno’s work, and this is his most ambitious book yet.” —Dan Chaon, author of Await Your Reply

  Marvel and a Wonder is a darkly mesmerizing epic and literary page-turner set at the end of the twentieth century. In summer 1995, Jim Falls, a Korean War vet, struggles to raise his sixteen-year-old grandson, Quentin, on a farm in southern Indiana. In July, they receive a mysterious gift—a beautiful quarter horse—which upends the balance of their difficult lives. The horse’s appearance catches the attention of a pair of troubled, meth-dealing brothers and, after a violent altercation, the horse is stolen and sold. Grandfather and grandson must travel the landscape of the bleak heartland to reclaim the animal and to confront the ruthless party that has taken possession of it. Along the way, both will be forced to face the misperceptions and tragedies of their past.

  Evoking the writing of William Faulkner and Denis Johnson, this brilliant, deeply moving work explores the harrowing, often beautiful marvels of a nation challenged by its own beliefs. Ambitious, expansive, and laden with suspense, Marvel and a Wonder presents an unforgettable pair of protagonists at the beginning of one America and the end of another.

  Marvel and a Wonder is available in paperback and e-book editions. Our printed books are available from our website and in online and brick & mortar bookstores everywhere. Digital editions are available wherever e-books are sold.

  Office Girl

  “An off-kilter romance doubles as an art movement in Joe Meno’s novel. The novel reads as a parody of art-school types . . . and as a tribute to their devil-may-care spirit. Meno impressively captures post-adolescent female angst and insecurity. Fresh and funny, the images also encapsulate the mortification, confusion and excitement that define so many 20-something existences.” —The New York Times Book Review

  “Wonderful storytelling panache . . . Odile is a brash, moody, likable young woman navigating the obstacles of caddish boyfriends and lousy jobs, embarking on the sort of sentimental journey that literary heroines have been making since Fanny Burney’s Evelina in the 1770s. Tenderhearted Jack is the awkward, quiet sort that the women in Jane Austen’s novels overlook until book’s end. He is obsessed with tape-recording Chicago’s ambient noises so that he can simulate the city in the safety of his bedroom, ‘a single town he has invented made of nothing but sound.’ Mr. Meno excels at capturing the way that budding love can make two people feel brave and freshly alive to t
heir surroundings . . . the story of the relationship has a sweet simplicity.” —The Wall Street Journal

  “In Joe Meno’s new novel, set in the last year of the 20th century, art school dropout Odile Neff and amateur sound artist Jack Blevins work deadening office jobs; gush about indie rock, French film, and obscure comic book artists; and gradually start a relationship that doubles as an art movement. They are, in other words, the 20-something doyens of pop culture and their tale of promiscuous roommates, on-again/off-again exes, and awkward sex is punctuated on the page by cute little doodles, black and white photographs (of, say, a topless woman in a Stormtrooper mask), and monologues that could easily pass for Belle & Sebastian lyrics (“It doesn’t pay to be a dreamer because all they really want you to do is answer the phone”).” —Publishers Weekly (Pick of the Week)

  “Meno has constructed a snowflake-delicate inquiry into alienation and longing. Illustrated with drawings and photographs and shaped by tender empathy, buoyant imagination, and bittersweet wit, this wistful, provocative, off-kilter love story affirms the bonds forged by art and story.” —Booklist (starred review)

  “The talented Chicago-based Meno has composed a gorgeous little indie romance, circa 1999 . . . When things Get Weird as things do when we’re young, Meno is refreshingly honest in portraying lowest lows and not just the innocent highs. A sweetheart of a novel, complete with a hazy ending.”—Kirkus Reviews

  “Along with PBRs, flannels, and thick-framed glasses, this Millennial Franny and Zooey is an instant hipster staple. Plot notes: It’s 1999 and Odile and Jack are partying like it was . . . well, you know. Meno’s alternative titles help give the gist: Bohemians or Young People on Bicycles Doing Troubling Things. Cross-media: Drawings and Polaroids provide a playful, quirky element.” —Marie Claire