The Boy Detective Fails (25 page)

“I don’t think I ought to, Mr. Mammoth.”

“God, that’s what I love about you, kid: a heart of gold, a real heart of gold. Your integrity is amazing. If I could only find a way to buy and sell
that
. But … well, that was never my strong point, now, was it?”

“It doesn’t seem so.”

“You’ve done the right thing, kid, the right thing. To be completely honest, I’m tired of hiding out here, this place is like a prison to me. The poor schleps on the phone, the sob stories, they’re killing me. You’re on salary from now on. Salary and a vacation, how’s that? This kid here has a heart of gold. Sure, sure, twelve years, twelve years of all those sob stories, and no one but the boy here had any idea how to save
me
.”

As they slowly step from the bathroom and approach the lobby, Melinda appears, staring at them both. “What’s going on here?” she asks.

“All this time, all this time, she never knew, kid. It just kills me.”

“Melinda, it looks like this man has something to tell you,” Billy says.

Mr. Mammoth smiles, placing his hand on Melinda’s shoulder. “You’ve got the run of the show from now on. That prosthetic limb idea I heard you talking about? It’s a keeper. A keeper, I tell you.”

“Wait a moment, what’s happening here?” Melinda asks.

“Billy solved a mystery. A great one.”

“Wait a minute, what mystery?”

“The one about where you go when you die—ha ha. Go on and tell her what the answer is, Billy.”

“Excuse me?”

“Where do you go when you die? Ha ha. Go on, go on and tell her, Billy.”

Billy smiles. “You become a little voice in someone’s ear telling them that things will be all right.”

TWENTY

The boy detective cuts out a newspaper clipping of a headline and photograph of Larry being arrested, which reads,
MAMMOTH FRAUD
. Billy pins the article to the wall next to his other clippings. He sits on the bed, takes out a pad and pencil, and tries solving Mr. Lunt’s riddle, scratching and writing.

Silver line, line of twine, old lungs. Silver line, line of twine, old lungs
. Billy sighs, scribbling out one word after the other. He smiles, talking to himself, trying to solve the riddle. He taps the pencil against his forehead, then pauses, pressing his fingertips against his cheeks. He grins even larger, surprised to find himself smiling.

One of our town’s greatest attractions was the Tiddlywinks, a family of dancing bears who performed in our vaudevillian concert hall around the turn of the century. The three bears all wore blue tutus and were tame enough to dance with courageous strangers. When their owner died, a man by the name of Morgensten, the stewardship of the creatures was left up to the town and, unwisely, the mayor decided to return the animals to the wild, relocating the bears into the woody forest surrounding the outskirts of our small city: a very bad mistake indeed. Unable to fend for themselves, the family of bears, still in tutus, rampaged down Main Street and later had to be shot. A bronze statue was erected and placed with their remains in the center of town. It is a strange sight now, the three of them there, dancing on clawed tiptoes. It is what we see when we imagine what the afterlife must be like: our happiest triumphs, our most sincere moments, stolen from the seam of our lives, a respite just before the onset of imminent tragedy.

TWENTY-ONE

On the bus, Penny eyes a woman’s expensive-looking handbag. She makes her way over and carefully reaches in, stealing the woman’s pink eyeglasses. Penny slips them into her pocket, smiling, pleased with herself. She inches away to the other end of the bus, sees a lady with many white and pink boxes and shopping bags. Penny stands beside the woman and looks down into the largest of her paper bags.

Inside: a lovely pink pillbox hat.

Penny looks at it, very excited. She reaches down, darting her hand, as the bus moves, but the lady inches the bag further away. Penny discreetly reaches down a second time while a burly man with a large mustache across the aisle watches her. Penny notices and pretends to be straightening her nylon. The burly man goes back to reading his paper. Penny reaches a third time, grabs the hat, slips in into her bag, and heads for the bus exit. She hops off, smiling madly.

It is raining on the street,
Oh no
. Penny, beaming, hurries down the sidewalk, around a corner, and into an alley. She opens her bag and looks at the hat, very happy. Suddenly, someone grabs her hand. She looks up. When she does, her tiny heart breaks.
Oh
. It is Billy. He looks very disappointed. He lets go of her hand and frowns. Penny gets very nervous. She immediately begins muttering.

“I … I only found this, here. It’s … it’s not stolen.”

“I don’t think so.”

“But it was here, I only found it.”

“I was on the bus. I saw what happened.”

“Oh. I see,” she says. She looks down at her feet, her bottom lip trembling.

“I … maybe I should …”

“I don’t know how to stop,” she says. “It just seems impossible for anyone to be good, don’t you think?”

“What?”

“It seems impossible for anyone to be good in a world like this, Billy.”

Upset now, Billy begins to back away.

“Billy, wait, please … don’t leave me …”

Penny kisses Billy. He kisses back, but very sadly.

“Please …” she whispers.

“I believed in what you told me. I was starting small.”

“Don’t give up because of me. You can find an answer. If anyone can, you can. Just please, don’t be discouraged because I was weak. Please don’t give up because I’m a thief.”

The boy detective shakes his head.

“You stole my heart … worst, worst of all,” he says.

Billy and Penny kiss again. It is brief and then over and then only a sad memory.

Billy stumbles out of the alley. His teeth are chattering, his hands shaking. In the darkness there, Penny lowers her head and begins to sob, softly.

TWENTY-TWO

The boy detective is on the bus crying. The people sitting beside him do their best to ignore him.

TWENTY-THREE

At work, the boy detective is distraught. He sits with his head folded into his hands. The papers and catalogs on his desk are spotted where tears have landed. At the moment, he is crying on the telephone to a customer, mumbling about losing Penny.

“I do not believe I will ever meet anyone like her again. All is lost,” he says.

“I have been married three times now and I’m thinking about trying it a fourth time,” the customer replies. “You have to believe this is not the end, but a brand-new start maybe.”

“Yes, well, thank you very much for listening.”

“Well, thank you for the discount on the Sympathetic Vamp wig. My boyfriend was just talking about me trying a new look.”

“It’s my pleasure. Goodnight.”

Billy hangs up the phone; as soon as the next customer answers, he begins crying once again. He searches through his briefcase, then his pockets, then the filing cabinet, and remembers that all of his vials of pills are completely empty. Why has he done this to himself? Why has he decided now, of all times, to try and be bold? Billy begins to pound his head against the desktop until the sounds of the office have disappeared, his vision now soft and blurry.

Billy, sadly shuffling home in the morning, catches sight of Gus Mumford sitting on his front porch, waiting for the school bus. Billy takes a seat beside him. In the young bully’s hands are the remains of Ant City, a dirt and sand metropolis of mass graves, a lone red citizen still marching there, constructing and rearranging his fellow townspeople’s tombs.

Gus, staring up at Billy, hands him a note which reads:
Ant City is now a graveyard.

“That’s terrible,” Billy says, staring at the strange sight.

Gus nods and, pointing, hands him another note:
They’re all dead. All except him.

“Yes. Well, he must be very lonely.”

Gus nods and, holding the small glass rectangle up, unhinges the opening at the top. He places the ant farm in the soft grass of the front lawn and the two of them watch the lone red ant as it quickly makes its escape.

The boy detective returns to Shady Glens to find Nurse Eloise in the kitchen, baking a cake and crying. She smiles sadly at Billy, a touch of flour on her nose, and asks if perhaps he would like to stir. Billy nods silently and the two stand beside one another—Billy holding the wooden spoon, Nurse Eloise still sobbing, staring down at the creamy batter—until finally she whispers, “I have received some terrible news.”

“What might that be?” Billy asks.

“My boyfriend, the magician, has been in a terrible accident. He has accidentally been sawed in half.”

“Is he … Did he survive the accident?”

“The doctors said the top part arrived at the hospital dead, but the bottom part was completely fine.”

“I see.”

“What will I do now, Billy? He was the only one for me, I see that now. I feel as if I too have been cut in two.”

Billy stares down at the batter which, at this point, has been mixed quite well. He hands the bowl back to Nurse Eloise and awkwardly touches her hand. Nurse Eloise smiles and goes back to crying.

In an hour, Billy, following the sweet smell of frosting, wanders down to the television room and finds the cake finished: It is a great white skull whose gumdrop mouth is set into a frown. He places one finger on the cake, expecting a sweet sugary confection, but instead it is bitter and unappetizing. He backs away and returns to his room, then he stops and turns, and hurries down the hallway. He finds Nurse Eloise standing in the medication room, eyes soft with tears and runny mascara, staring down at her hands full of blue and white pills. Billy smiles sadly at the young woman, who nods and smiles back.

Nurse Eloise slowly places the pills in Billy’s hands and resumes crying. “I am so embarrassed, Billy,” she says. “I am so embarrassed.”

Billy holds the young woman’s hands and then carefully shows her his scarred wrists.

“Oh, Billy. Billy, I didn’t really want to die. I just didn’t think I could get through this.”

“Neither did I,” he says. “Neither did I.”

Sitting in the television room, accompanied by Mr. Pluto, the trio plays Hearts until finally it seems the darkness has passed and the tears have run out. Nurse Eloise kisses each of them on the cheek and says, “Thank you both. Tomorrow night, how about a nice Angel food cake for the two of you?”

Billy lays in his bed then and smiles, watching the silvery snow fall across his eyes. He goes to sleep, and instead of caves, he dreams of dove wings, of clouds, of everything nice. What he dreams looks this:

girl with a singing harp

TWENTY-FOUR

The Mumford children wander the dark woods along the murky river: There, the sounds of lost secrets echo in their ears and disappear. Effie Mumford, in her purple and white winter jacket, black headphones covering her ears, holds the tape recorder close to the brambly ground, doing her best to capture long forgotten whispers. Gus Mumford, who walks quietly behind her, watches the needle of the compass as it ticks back and forth. Marching over fallen trees, past sinkholes, and under the fading canopy of the night as it comes into view, the children pause suddenly. Effie Mumford catches sight of something odd, simply left there in the solace of the wet leaves and dirt: a small black shoe.

The Mumford children stare at it for a moment, Effie going so far as to hold the microphone of her recording device close to it, and then, slowly, she begins to inspect it, kicking it with the tip of her own foot.

“Look how out of place it seems lying here in the woods,” she whispers.

Gus Mumford nods, holding the small compass beside it. The needle barely moves.

“It looks new,” Effie Mumford whispers. “There’s no scuff marks anywhere on it.”

Gus Mumford nods again. He hands his sister a note:
It is a girl’s.

“Yes it is. A girl with very tiny feet,” Effie replies, holding the small shoe in the palm of her hand. Setting it back down in the dirt, the two Mumford children glance around. Gus Mumford hurries off, finding a second shoe, just a few yards away resting silently beside a log. He hands his sister another note that reads:
It is the same.

Effie Mumford stares down at the shoe and then looks up, catching sight of something else glinting in the near darkness.

“Look!” she shouts and the two children hurry off.

Up ahead, near the very sharp declination of the woods, right where the greenish rush of the river meets the sturdy whitened trees, they see something red. It is a ribbon, caught there in the thorny fingers of a fallen branch. Grasping it in her hand, Effie Mumford discovers something else: Down at the tangle of weeds and cattails, along the gray stones and dark pebbles of the riverbed, there is a soft white blur—a girl’s nearly naked body. There are the bare white legs and soft arms and a flash of a navel, all of which is covered in dirt. The compass in Gus Mumford’s hand begins to tick in all directions, and the two run as fast as they can while Effie Mumford shouts for help.

At school the next day, everyone stares at Effie Mumford. In the cafeteria, in study hall, walking alone down the hall, her heavy textbooks held like a shield against her spindly chest, it seems the entire world is glancing at her—not glaring, no, only looking at her and wondering what it is she has seen.