Finally, Billy stared down at his last gift, wrapped in blue paper, which proclaimed,
Happy Birthday to a Fairly Nice Boy!
Standing beside Billy, Caroline and Fenton clapped obnoxiously, pulling on each other’s paper party hats, wildly blowing their noisemakers in each other’s ears. Ignoring them, Billy opened the box from his aunt. When all three children saw what was inside the package, the noisemakers went deadly quiet in their mouths and there was a profound and immediate silence. Within the box, there was more than their small eyes, hearts, and minds could grasp in a single glance: a magnifying glass, a pencil, a pad of paper, a fingerprint set, a number of real lock picks, a pair of binoculars, an eye patch, a working flashlight, and a fake black beard with a matching mustache.
What happened then was this: The lost part—the silver, misplaced key to his heart, the part of him that seemed to be missing—had been suddenly found. Words were not necessary. The room was still as the boy detective took the magnifying glass in his hand and began to do what he had always been meant to. At once, the mysterious, the unknown, and the unidentified moved from the shadows into sharp contrast before his eyes. It was at that moment that the boy detective first began to detect.
It went exactly like this: Billy held up the magnifying glass, the lens bringing the wondering faces of his family into perfect sharpness, their soft expressions suddenly becoming serious, each a portrait of some hidden secret. Billy spied his older brother with the magnifying glass, as he was the relative standing the closest, and Derek immediately confessed that he was gay. Also, that he hated life in the Navy.
After the drama that followed, in which Mrs. Argo dropped the birthday cake out of nervousness and Derek hugged Billy and apologized for ruining his younger brother’s birthday, the boy detective laid in his bed and wondered what other strange discoveries might now be awaiting.
Within two weeks, the answer came. Staring at the front page of the
Gotham Daily
, the children found a picture of themselves staring back, beneath a headline that read:
BOY DETECTIVE SOLVES STRANGE MURDER CASE
Kid Sister and Neighbor Boy Help Out
From that front-page photograph, this interesting description: Billy, Caroline, and Fenton accepting congratulations from hefty Mayor Pierce, a shady union-supported candidate with an enormous bald head, all four of them in front of the Gotham Town Hall with a galley of news reporters before them shouting question after question and flashing their flashes. In the accompanying pictures, the children look wonderfully composed and serious. Billy, in his blue suit and clip-on tie, holds the detective kit’s magnifying glass to his right eye and wears the eye patch over his left. Together, Caroline in her white dress wearing the beard, and Fenton with the mustache and his beanie, hold a simple drawing depicting a stick figure disguised as Abraham Lincoln running with a long-barreled pistol; Lincoln’s one long stick leg is stuck in a large gray crayon-colored mansion where the victim, a Sir Tobias Earl, was shot to death, while the other leg stretches into the entrance of the local wax museum (where, with the boy detective’s insight, the perpetrator was found hiding). In the front-page photograph, the Mayor stands unconvinced beside the children, the round man in a wrinkled black suit, his own mustache both weak and droopy; at first it seems he is offering to shake their hands but then, fearing he may look foolish, he simply presents the children with the reward offered by the grieving millionaire’s family. The Mayor holds up the gigantic white check, the amount of
$1,000.00
almost as indecipherable as the embarrassed
Congratulations
, he seems to be muttering.
Within a week or two, then, another clue, and another headline:
BOY DETECTIVE SOLVES FATAL ORPHANAGE ARSON
Kid Sister and Neighborhood Boy Lend a Hand in Murder Investigation
Another photo from the front page once again: Outside a dilapidated, still-smoking orphanage, the charred embers of a swing set and dormitory rising like skeletal ribs in the distance, young Billy points at a crooked-looking fireman being led away in handcuffs by two bearded policemen, all of whom are frowning sadly. Caroline and Fenton look on with disapproval. Caroline is holding up a smudgy fingerprint belonging to the guilty fireman. Fenton again stands with a drawing that illustrates the suspect’s motive: a scribbling of the burning orphanage, doodled children burning in their sleep, while buried beneath, an immense cache of pirate’s treasure lies quietly, clearly illustrated with the familiar shapes of gold doubloons and a smiling skull adorning the chest. In a subsequent photograph, Billy and the other two children are given a second award by the Mayor, again on the steps of City Hall. The Mayor, chagrined by both the scandalous rogue fireman and the children’s crime solving abilities, which some critics believe call his entire administration into question, this time deigns to shake their hands, while spotty, faceless townspeople stand by applauding.
BOY DETECTIVE DISCOVERS URANIUM DEPOSIT
Children Save Town from Bankruptcy
In this photo: Billy and Caroline and Fenton wear large miners’ helmets, their single cyclopic lights aimed in the dark at a great green glowing rock. Caroline points to a long silver radiation detector, which Billy holds, smiling widely, the long handle of the device leading to a wide arching head which is lit up madly. Once again, the kids shake hands with the Mayor, who, hunched into the opening of the mine and overcome with sweat, looks altogether foolish. He has begun to show the sure signs of his imminent mayoral defeat: His face is completely smeared with dirt, as are the newspaper stories concerning his lazy police force. The Mayor, being the Mayor, looks downright humiliated, but does his best to smile the politician’s winning smile, not fooling anybody.
BOY DETECTIVE SOLVES FLYING SAUCER HOAX
Three Dead at the Scene
With the advent of these triumphant newspaper clippings, Billy Argo’s parents, Jack and June Argo, couldn’t have been more proud or happy. Mr. Argo was a judge advocate general, an officer in the Navy, and a world-class bantam-weight karate champion. Oftentimes, he would be found in the backyard breaking bricks with his bare fists, or would not be found at all, flying off in the middle of the night to help prosecute a wayward sailor. His wife, Mrs. Argo, was a world-renowned Nobel Prize—winning chemist and amateur artiste. When she was not busy in her lab, inventive with her rows and rows of Bunsen burners and powdery silver chemicals, she would paint portraits of famous world leaders. When they were not occupied with their own work, both parents gladly encouraged their son’s determined sense of justice and unyielding curiosity.
Through all of Billy Argo’s trials and tribulations stood his charming sister Caroline, who was always darling and a real ace with the fingerprint set, and their loyal sidekick and friend Fenton, whose belief in the decency of man and certainty concerning the triumph of good over evil was unshakable. The three of them had all pledged to the three cardinal rules of detection, which young Billy had, of course, invented, and were later recorded in Caroline’s diary with perfect penmanship:
Cardinal rule #1: the boy detective must solve any inexplicable mystery
Cardinal rule #2: the boy detective must foil any criminal caper he can
Cardinal rule #3: the boy detective must always be true to his friends
Between them, soon enough, all foul riddles, all wild hoaxes, all staged problems were solved quickly, with joy, fondness, and surrender.
The boy detective’s most memorable case: The Haunted Candy Factory (but we may be getting ahead of ourselves already).
Trouble began the following year when Caroline, bored with always being the boy detective’s assistant, requested a magic set for Christmas. That wonderful morning, the silver Christmas tree blooming with false white light, Caroline tore through the boxes and boxes of other gifts to find the crinkly silver gift-wrapping that held a True-Life Junior Magician Set. In her small, starchy white nightgown, Caroline pulled apart the box, her fingers working ferociously against the paper. Billy looked on with dismay and fear. From within the box, Caroline yanked out a black top hat, and immediately a white dove took flight, fluttering and flitting above the family members’ heads. Gleeful, the girl clapped, chasing the bird wherever it landed, ignoring the gift Billy had bought for her: a brand new magnifying glass, decorated with a gold ribbon around its handle.
“What will you name your bird?” Mrs. Argo asked.
“Margaret Thatcher,” Caroline replied, without giving it a second thought. Billy turned, pouting, opening a gift from his father: a taxidermy kit and set of torque wrenches. For him, it was the worst Christmas ever.
For several months, then, Caroline was completely disinterested in her older brother’s adventures.
BOY DETECTIVE EASILY BUSTS SILVER SMUGGLERS ON HIS OWN
WONDER BOY DETECTIVE UNMASKS TAROT CARD FAKE WITHOUT ANY KIND OF ASSISTANCE AT ALL
The boy detective took his sister’s absence very badly. The two children were often found in the small white hallway between their bedrooms shouting, cursing each other with ferocity: “You simple-minded dwarf !” or “You hopeless barbarian!”—enigmatic insults neither understood fully. In their disagreements, Caroline simply stated that magic was more fun because it worked on the notion of wonder and mystery. Upon hearing this, Billy threw her magic set on the floor, arguing magic was fun only for irrational, childish babies.
Most of these contests ended the same way: Caroline, alone in bed, crying.
A strange, important, event occurred one day: Caroline’s magic-set dove, Margaret Thatcher, born with a silent and inoperable heart defect, quite naturally passed away, falling on its side, dead in its shiny silver cage. It was a true shock, seeing the puffy white bird lying there dead, staring strangely back at her from beyond the world of the living. Caroline, at once, lost all interest in magic of any kind. Quite sure the ghost of the bird would return to haunt her unless it was given a proper interment, Caroline begged her brother Billy for his help. Together, the two children made amends and gave the beloved pet an appropriate burial, hiding the remains within a strongbox beneath the Argos’ front porch.
And like that, Caroline was happy to accompany Billy on his adventures once again.
BOY DETECTIVE CRACKS CASE OF THE UNBREAKABLE SAFE
BOY DETECTIVE QUIETS THE MYSTERY OF THE SINGING DIAMOND
BOY DETECTIVE PULLS THE PLUG ON THE PHANTOM LIGHTHOUSE
An excerpt from Caroline’s diary at that time reveals the joy of their continuing escapades:
all the other girls are wearing skirts and makeup.
some worry about their hair and nails,
but i’m not interested in that. i’d
much rather climb into a dark mine. i’d much
rather follow Billy into the dirt. sometimes
he can be quite hard to tolerate. sometimes he can
act rather bossy, but he can also be very sweet.
i often wonder, stepping quietly behind him,
could it be that he also enjoys my company? i am
not very talented with codes and puzzles but i am
actually very professional with the fingerprint set and am
very diligent in taking notes, even in the dark,
doing quite well documenting all our adventures.
it is good to be needed for something.
additionally, i have a notion that Billy has a fear of
heights, while i do not, and also, he is afraid of
bats: their sounds are enough to start him
panicking. there is something in their delicate wings that
really makes him shiver, though he acts quite brave
whenever our good friend fenton mills is
around. what i truly love the most are our secrets together.
Many months after the dove’s unexpected death, Billy and Caroline were to be found hiding under their slanted, white wood porch, having dug up Margaret Thatcher, studying the remains of the stiffened dead dove with Caroline’s new magnifying glass. In that moment, a sacred vow of trust was made, both brother and sister now mesmerized by the inexplicable nature of dying: If on one of their dangerous adventures, one should first pass into the greatest and most profound mystery—that of unyielding mortal expiration—then he or she would send back word, as evidence of a post-corporeal world, of which Caroline argued for and Billy against.
The word they chose, as solemn proof of some kind of afterlife, was shared with no one other than themselves, not Fenton Mills nor their parents. It was with a matter of a most serious pride in which the Argo children took their word, their oath, and their silence. The single word,
abracadabra
, was written twice on a single piece of Caroline’s pulpy notebook paper, then folded into edible size. Each child swallowed the word and then they shook hands to keep it as a blood pact, to be revealed under no circumstance, ordinary or otherwise.
Their perfect childhood having perfectly ended, the boy detective left his sister Caroline and friend Fenton for the prestigious, mahogany halls of the Greater New Jersey University and Pharmaceutical College to study criminal law, in hopes of becoming a leading international criminologist. He finished his final case on the day of his high school graduation:
BOY DETECTIVE GRADUATES HIGH SCHOOL EARLY
Solves Celebrity Double Murder Same Day
COLLEGE NOW FOR BOY DETECTIVE
New Mayor Fears Crime Already Back on the Rise
The boy detective soon found himself shaking hands with his father, kissing his mother, hugging Caroline and Fenton, and waving goodbye to the world he knew so very well. It was the first time any of them could remember that they would not be together. And each took to facing their loneliness in their own way: