The Boy Detective Fails Read Free Page B

diary and then, all at once, and quite uncontrollably, she would begin crying.
    • Young Fenton Mills became dangerously overweight, ballooning up to well over three hundred pounds, his body impossibly expanding in all directions, like an overinflated blimp. He was featured on several talk shows of the afternoon variety and developed a nearly religious following among housewives and cleaning ladies. His photo at the time frequently appeared on Fenton FOREVER T-shirts and bumper stickers.
    Instead of passively enduring her continued depression, Caroline, once again exhibiting her ambiton and courage, decided to follow in her older brother’s footsteps. Her first case was investigating strange rumors of ghoulish moans and wails at an abandoned cave, which had at one time harbored the city’s ancient stockpile of mustard gas and had been promptly closed for public health reasons. Caroline, alone, crept past the opening of the barricaded cavern, with signs which read, Danger! and No Trespassing! treading lightly through the poorly fitted boards into the strange mischief of the dark night.
    She was, sadly enough, unable to ever solve the strange case on her own. Shortly thereafter ( and here we are just speculating ), perhaps out of humiliation, pride, or defeat—or so badly missing the wonderful life of adventure and companionship her older brother had always made real—poor Caroline did a terrible thing.
    As she stood naked in the family’s grimy white tub, black candles burning, her tape player warbling “Yesterday” by the Beatles, the shower issuing a woozy, constant stream of steam, Caroline slowly slit her bared and tender wrists with a razor blade snapped from a pink disposable Petite Lady Shaver, the plastic formed in the factory not more than a mile down the street. In a moment, then, the girl collapsed with a terrible thud, her head hitting the faucet, her body falling limp against the tile flooring.
    The sound of their daughter’s fall interrupted Mr. and Mrs. Argo’s studied reading of their respective newspapers that evening. Lowering their pulpy pages and looking at each other confused, they knew at once there was some significant trouble. Within a few moments, there was a panicked phone call, then their firm hands were under the girl’s willowy neck, and Caroline was being wheeled out on a wobbly silver stretcher, Mr. and Mrs. Argo walking beside her, trying their best at comfort but only actually talking to each other nervously.
    —It will be all right.
    —It will be better than all right. Everything’s going to happy once again, you’ll see.
    —Let’s just hope for all right.
    —Yes, yes, I’m sorry.
    Caroline survived the tragedy, but was never the same fine, carefree girl ever again. No more running in fields or investigating caves; no longer was she ever barefoot. Instead she grew into someone else, asking her parents to now call her “Patient 101174,” and refusing to remove the plastic bracelet the hospital had forced her to wear. Caroline began draping herself in black clothes and black makeup, becoming something much more miserable, much more distraught, much more blank-eyed than she had ever been.
    If only after this first incident the boy detective had been called, if only Caroline’s secret had then been told, the end may have come out differently, but no. Perhaps Mr. and Mrs. Argo decided it would be better to keep mum Caroline’s mistake, not wanting to unduly worry Billy, who was at the time carefully composing “Secret Criminal Plots in Abandoned Amusement Parks,” the subject of his first semester’s final paper, the grade of which we all now know was merely a C-, the lowest the boy detective ever received in his academic life.
    No, it was all kept hush-hush from the boy detective for his own good.
    Within a few months of that first incident, Caroline found herself lying beside a bevy of strange, pimply faced boys, French-kissing them in the nearby field—the one she had