When the boy detective comes to, he is lying on his side, staring up, and mumbling. “My nose is bleeding. My nose is bleeding. My nose is bleeding.” The blood is running copiously down the side of his face, dripping down the front of his blue sweater, irreparably staining it. He lifts his head and sees the two boys have disappeared and the two Mumford children are standing above him with worried looks on their small faces.
“I am OK,” he mumbles. “I am OK.”
“We thought you were dead,” Effie Mumford whispers, holding up his head.
It is a good thing that Nurse Eloise knows how to stop a bloody nose. She has had four older brothers, she explains. She stands over Billy in the television room of Shady Glens, holding an icepack to his face, while Mr. Pluto stares at him very nervously. Finally, when the bleeding stops, Nurse Eloise asks: “Billy, how did it happen?”
But the boy detective is silent.
“I know you are embarrassed, but I’d like to know how you got a bloody nose.”
But Billy only shakes his head.
“I get them when I am nervous,” he says.
“Was it the two boys at the end of the block? The blond one and the short one?”
For a moment, the boy detective is a statue. Then his eyes twitch and he nods once, solemnly. Nurse Eloise pats his back and sighs, “I thought it was them. They are no good, either one of them.”
Mr. Pluto stares at the boy detective and then hurries from the room, his massive steps echoing down the hallway.
“Just lie there with your head forward,” Nurse Eloise says. “I’m going to do my rounds and I’ll be back to check on you in a half hour.” She hands Billy the television remote, which lies unused in his lap. He leans his head forward and tries to blink to keep himself from crying.
In a few moments, Mr. Pluto returns, maneuvering a small bicycle down the hallway. It is the exact same suspiciously pink bicycle the two teenage boys had been walking with.
“An act of evil is the death of wonder,” the giant man whispers, his voice deep and intelligent.
Very gently, Mr. Pluto hands Billy the bicycle and then nods, holding out his fist. In this gigantic hand he is carrying an enormous hunk of human hair. It is perfectly banded together in a black ponytail. The boy detective is immediately both gratified and slightly frightened. He stands staring at the bike silently until Mr. Pluto strides off, smiling.
Nurse Eloise reappears and adjusts the icepack. “Billy, are you feeling any better?”
Billy nods
yes,
but it is not because his nose feels any better. It is because he is thinking. He is thinking that those boys may somehow be involved in the case of the bunny’s mysterious decapitation. He holds his hand up beneath his chin and nods his head again, a perfect portrait of the great detective in thought, if you could remove the pack of ice that is keeping his nose from further swelling.
At home after school the next day, there is a telephone call from a Mysterious Stranger. Effie Mumford is eating a bowl of cereal. She has her glasses on from the previous summer, big and brown and plastic and held together with white tape, the prescription not quite right. She and her brother Gus are trying to watch a cartoon in Japanese when the phone begins ringing.
“Effie …” the voice murmurs. “I know what you’re doing right now. I know you two are there all alone.” The voice is high and sounds phony, the breath coming fast and shaky. “Come out on your porch. Come outside. I want to see you.”
“No, go blow,” Effie mutters, and hangs up the phone. Five minutes later, as she empties the bowl, the telephone rings again. Effie sighs and answers it, sitting in front of the TV.
“I want you to tell me a secret, Effie.”
“No.”
“If you tell me a secret, I won’t call back.”
“I don’t care.”
“If you tell me a secret, I won’t murder you tonight.”
“Fine.”
“What is your secret, Effie?”
“Nobody in the whole world likes me.”
“Why doesn’t anyone in the whole world like you?”
“Because I’m weird-looking. Because I’m way ugly.”
The line is silent for a long while.
“I’m coming over, Effie. I’m going to come over and you’re going to let me in.”
“Nope.”
“I’m going to come over and you’re going to let me in. You’re going to let me do whatever I want, aren’t you?”
“No.”
“You’re going to let me do whatever I want to do, aren’t you?”
“I don’t care,” Effie says. “Come on over if you want.”
“I’m coming, Effie. That door better be open when I come, Effie.”
“OK. Fine.” Effie hangs up the phone and goes over and makes sure she has locked the door.
With Gus, her brother, she sits in front of the television until it is dark and they finally hear the familiar rusty whine of their mother’s car. The both lie down quickly, closing their eyes, imagining their mother and father coming in, standing over them, blinking and smiling. When they open their eyes, it is only their mother there, in her small blue hat and blue coat, her arms full of groceries. Directly behind their mother, there is the family photo on the wall, their father’s head cut out, gone, completely missing.
“Effie,” her mother whispers, “why are you wearing your old glasses, honey?”
The boy detective practices his strange detective words in bed at night: he practices what he is going to say and how he should say it, and because of this, he does not sleep. It is because it is not so easy. We, like the rest of the world, expect someone who is named
the boy detective
to solve every crime, every riddle, every mystery, and it is this fear—of failing us—that forces him to lie there in his bed all night, practicing his very strange words and very dramatic faces.
In the early evening, the boy detective interrogates the two teenage boys at the end of the block. They sit on their front steps, the chubby boy holding the back of his head with a serious look of pain.
“I want to know the truth: Do either of you have any idea who killed that girl’s bunny?”
“No way,” the chubby one whispers.
“We did see a dead cat, though,” the tall one says. “It was missing its head, too.”
“Where? Where did you see this?”
“Down by the river. Right by the drain pipe.”
“Where is that?”
“In the woods, behind the last house on the street. It’s where the stuff from all the different gutters goes.”
“How long ago was this?” the boy detective asks.
“Two days ago. It was just sitting there. It was pretty awesome nasty.”
Billy stares at the boys’ faces for some sign of mendacity, but there is none. He feels quite sure they are not lying.
“As I promised,” the boy detective says, handing them back the small pink bike.
“Dude, it’s not even ours,” the chubby one chuckles. “It’s totally stolen.”
The boy detective chooses to ignore this and hurries down the street toward the end of the block. He follows the narrow metal gutter along the curb where it winds downward—past several small hills into the darkness of the woods, loud with the sound of the river—to the spot where all the water empties from a large silver drain pipe. There the trees are tall and close together and the prairie grass is high and green, the small silver-colored insects bright and buzzing, a gym shoe, an old dirty magazine, someone’s entire book bag discarded here.
Following the soft patter of water until he is leaning over and slowly pushing the reeds aside, the boy detective discovers several large footprints, very similar to those found beneath the Mumfords’ front porch. The boy detective glances up. He thinks he is being watched. There is the sound of someone breathing in the shadows. A twig snaps. A branch is quickly moved. Billy looks down and immediately something in the shallow part of the brackish murk catches his attention. It is just as the boys have said: There, along the bank, is a small white cat, fluffy and immobile. The creature’s head is mysteriously missing. Billy stares at the animal, following the footprints along the river to a thicket of woods and trees.
Ahead, what appears to be a shadow—a glimpse of the shape of a man—dashes suddenly into the darkness. Billy stares and holds in a breath. Somewhere close by, a branch whispers as it snaps. He keeps his eyes open wide as he moves, trying to memorize everything as it is, then hurries toward the sound in pursuit.
Holding his hands out in the dark, pushing tree branches and waist-high weeds aside, the boy detective catches sight of a large man crossing into a sliver of moonlight. The man is carrying a rectangular valise, running in the darkness, leaping over fallen logs and woody brambles, disappearing into the shadows, then returning, his breath fast and nervous. The beams of moonlight breaking through the tops of the autumn trees are shaky. The wind whistles high in the empty branches as the moon itself peeks through like one great suspicious eye. It is then that Billy realizes he is lost. He is lost and now he has no clear sense of where the strange man might be hiding in the darkness around him.
Billy begins to turn, and as he does, he stares directly into the face of the man who is missing his head: There are no features, no eyes nor nose nor mouth nor any kind of face, only a ghostly blank space, from which a hideous voice escapes.
“Why are you following me?” the ghoul asks angrily.
The man stalks closer in his worn dark suit, and from his dark hand comes the large black valise. Quickly, the man opens the case and retrieves a pair of long silver scissors, and in that moment Billy begins to cry, backing away, stumbling into a wide tangle of brambles, falling on his side. He struggles, grasping the man’s thick suit jacket, gripping at the man’s wrist as the scissors move dangerously close. Terrified, Billy pulls at the headless man’s necktie and as he does so, the black cinch comes easily apart. In a moment, the villain begins to howl, mortally undone. Billy holds the unknotted tie in his hand and watches in horror as the strange man begins to hiss, the ghoulish voice echoing in the woods, “What a life of woe I have led, what a life of woe …”
Soon the headless man’s clothes begin to sag miserably, becoming lifeless, and Billy, looking down at the black tie, quickly realizes the villain has met his end. The strange man continues disintegrating, as if he has been unstitched, his black suit and shoes and pants and valise lying there unattended, a cloudy vapor rising like steam from the un-occupied items of clothing.
The woods are suddenly silent.
When the boy detective looks around, there is no one and nothing, only the dark night as it appears in speckles and spots in the weepy corners of his eyes. He looks curiously through the strange man’s belongings, and there, in one of the man’s pockets, he finds a small invitation which reads:
Attention:
We have noticed you and your work recently and liked what we’ve seen. Please join us at the Wax Museum at midnight this Wednesday to discuss your possible future with our most prominent organization. The museum is located in the mini-mall along Route 9. Come alone. Entertainment will be provided.
Billy stares at the invitation and wonders. He finds two Ativan in his pocket and places them gently in his mouth. The only sound then is the wind in the trees. The only movement is the tricky light of the moon. He places his hand over his heart and feels it begin to slow down. The night blurs as he struggles to breathe. A strange hum echoes in his ears. Suddenly the world becomes shadows and he feels so very soft and hazy.
It is a scientific fact: The ghost world of Gotham, New Jersey is significant. The decapitated brown bunny, Mr. Buttons, will not rest until its head has been discovered and the perpetrator of the evil act responsible for its death has been identified. It wanders the neighborhood looking for its body. It decides it must find a body at once, and hovers above a small green and yellow garden gnome, trying the body on for size. It is upright and uncomfortable. Next, a stuffed toy elephant left on a neighbor’s back porch, though along the elephant’s belly is an enormous tear, right at its stitching, which is not very becoming. At the end of the street is a small plastic bird with wings that twirl in the wind. Mr. Buttons cannot fathom how this body moves and drifts back into the darkness, tired of trying. It, like all the ghosts of the world, is now only another victim of malice, waiting to be saved.
The boy detective is laying on the couch, his shoes and socks off. His therapist lights his cherry wood pipe ponderously. The boy detective has no choice: As part of his release program he must visit this strange bearded man twice a week.
“So why this need to save everyone, Billy? What’s the significance of that?”
“Pardon me?”
“Let me rephrase, yes: Why this need to rescue everyone from evil?”
“I don’t understand.”
“In all of these memories, you are always discovering the clue or saving the day somehow. Why? Who are you trying to get validation from?”
“No one. I like solving puzzles.”
“Life is a puzzle. Did you ever try to solve that?”
“Um … no sir.”
“Tell me, what did you father do for a living?”
“He was in the military. A lawyer for the Navy.”
“Interesting. Your mother?”
“She was a scientist.”
“Of course. The facts. The truth. Life has very little to do with either,” the therapist says, tugging on his beard thoughtfully. “What was the last crime you solved?”
The boy detective looks at his watch. “The hour is up.”
“What was the last crime you solved?”
“I don’t solve crimes anymore, doctor.”
“Why not?”
“I’m an adult now.”
“So you just gave it up?”
“Yes.”
“So you quit?”
“No. I stopped.”
“Why did you stop?”
“Because I’d gone off to college.”
“Not because your sister died?”
“No, it was before that.”
“What were you studying in college?”
“Criminology.”
“Criminology? Very interesting, Billy. I thought you had given it up.”
“I had.”
“You gave it up because of your sister’s death?”