Remote Detectives

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When I was eleven years old, I started a detective agency with my little sister. We turned an unfinished room in the basement where mother did laundry into an office. The cement flooring, unpainted walls, and single light bulb hanging in the dark corner provided an ideal atmosphere for our work. We kept our funds safe inside a small tin box above the exposed wooden beams in the ceiling, not that there was much—all pocket change I’d contributed as start-up cash. We had to stand on a chair to reach it. One day, my father, who either admired our entrepreneurial spirit or just took pity on us, slipped a dollar into that tray. When I noticed it, the only bill among coins, I felt the detective agency—and my own—on the brink of explosion. It suddenly colored everything fictitious. 

“You must,” I told my father, “assign us a case. Or we can’t accept payment.”

We had a lot going on during that time. For me: I started learning karate, sign language, morse code, and how to write basic words in Japanese. For my sister: a steady regimen of gymnastics, ballet, swim classes, figure skating, and soccer. She was also involved in various art projects in and out of school, as an artist, regardless of the medium, was what she wanted most to be when she grew up. 

“More than a detective?” I said, unable to hide my disappointment. 

We were about halfway up a big old spruce tree in the park around the neighborhood circle and were camouflaged by its dense, leafy branches. Nobody could see us as they walked their dogs or baby strollers around the cul-de-sac. And if they did we’d ignore their waves and hellos, per my strict instructions. My little sister, Willow, wore her hair up in a ponytail so she wouldn’t get caught in the ‘sap trap’, but our neon Umbro shorts didn’t protect much against the sharp inner branches of the tree, and our legs were full of scratches and cuts.

“I can be both,” she said. Her smile revealed a gap on her lower left side from a tooth that had fallen out the previous week. 

The next day, we were inspecting our detective equipment in the basement when, right above us, we heard my father storming around the family room. The commotion was distracting while we were endeavoring to examine two magnifying glasses, one purple and one blue; a little brush to dust for fingerprints; some powder to apply to the print-covered area; a paper roll of yellow caution tape to mark off a crime scene; an old pair of binoculars that belonged to my grandmother’s long dead second husband, plus a newer, cheap pair we both preferred because they were so much lighter, though not nearly as powerful; and finally, our matching bubble-blowing plastic pipes which, though invaluable for brainstorming sessions, made me too self-conscious to use outside the house.

My father suddenly interrupted our equipment inspection by opening the basement door and, too lazy to trek all the way down, rapidly flashing the lights on and off to get our attention. He said he had an urgent case for us. We asked him to descend to the office and fill out an official form. “Oh hell,” he said under his breath. “Help me find the damn remote, will you please? It’s missing again. I don’t know what you guys did with it. Every time. Every damn time, I swear!” His voice strained, as if he was unable to keep something in his grip.

“Excuse my language. Here, take this. A retainer.” 

He reached into his pocket and flicked a quarter down the steps. It hit the thin carpeted ground and bounced against the wall. 

“Incoming!” he said in an affectedly deep voice, as if he was preparing soldiers for fire.

My sister bent to retrieve the first coin and didn’t see the second one skipping down the stairs. The coin hit her in the foot just right, where there’s not much flesh, dead center of the ankle, leaving a red indentation. I heard the surprisingly loud metal-on-bone clank. She cried a little (I might have, too), and we ran upstairs to show our father what he had done. He put the remote down on the kitchen table—that’s right, he was holding it in his hand the whole time—and rubbed my sister’s foot gently. That’s when my sister and I saw the remote, exchanged glances, and began laughing. 

Confused, he asked what was so funny. We pointed, and he looked at the object without recognition. “What?” he said. “What am I looking at?” He picked the remote up as if humoring us. 

“Dad, you don’t get it?” my sister said, eyes wet now with tears of laughter.

“Oh for heaven’s sake…” he flushed, then smiled. We teased him about it until he told us to get back to work. On his way back to the family room he stopped and turned to us frowning, as if he was considering about asking for his change back. “Hey that was easy money for you, guys, huh?”

“Tell that to Willow’s foot,” I said. 

•

We needed a dog but never got one. Having a powerful sense of smell on the team would have been a game-changer in our line of work, especially in those early days when the agency was just starting off. Our reasoned arguments failed to convince our parents. They had had a Dalmatian once (it was my father’s) before having kids, and he had not yet healed from the loss. Maybe it was better to have loved and lost that one dog, but once in a lifetime was enough for them. No more dogs.

“We can revisit the possibility when you’re both older,” my mother said, without much enthusiasm. “Did you practice the piano today?” 

To make up for having no dog, we doubled down on snacks. We ate them, forbidden, in the secrecy of the basement. The thing about surveillance, there’s a lot of boredom in it. This was part of the attraction, I think, to becoming detectives. It meant we had something to do between our scheduled activities, something to fill our after-school-day-hop-fence-afternoons; it transformed the nothing into something, the meaningless into meaningful, the little into the big and important. When my mother found our stash of double-stuffed Oreos we’d hidden for the particularly boring, hunger-inducing afternoons, she summoned us to the kitchen and placed the incriminating evidence on the table. She surprised me by not reprimanding us for disobeying house rules but instead demanding a job at our detective agency. Her excellent use of deduction, she said, displayed in finding these snacks before something else did (most likely ants), was proof of her competency. Her facetious attitude upset me, and I reminded her that our work wasn’t a joke.

She shrugged, scooped up the cookies, and walked away, closing negotiations.

“Wait. Please. We’ll eat those!” 

But she marched over to the trash can, stomped on the foot pedal, and dumped the last of them. Reinforcement cookies wouldn’t arrive for another week or so, when my mother went grocery shopping again—if we were lucky. Dejected, neither my sister nor I felt much like working that day. We needed a break. We kicked the soccer ball outside for a while in the front yard, discussing strategies for bringing in new clients, such as printing flyers to post around the library or hang in our school’s hallways, or possibly taking out a classified ad in the newspaper’s weekend edition. A phone call drew my sister back inside the house—from her friend Maggie Lamar,  inviting her over to swim. Willow asked my permission to take the rest of the day off from work. I said of course but made her promise to keep an eye out for any unsolved cases over at the Lamar household. There was something a little off about that family, I felt, and let my sister know of my suspicions. “No family is that perfect,” I warned her.

She nodded and raced off to change into her swimsuit.

My sister took off on an old boy’s bike, an ultramarine  BMX Mongoose that used to be mine. She pedaled like mad out of the driveway, including through the turn, which I’d told her on many occasions not to do, since the pedals could scrape the ground and cause her to lose her balance. I winced watching her zoom by, but the pedals just cleared the pavement. Maggie lived about three blocks down on South Main Street, on the corner of Elm, halfway between the hamburger joint and the middle school. Door to door, the ride was probably five minutes, even for her nine-year-old legs. We knew this because Mrs. Lamar always called to confirm my sister’s safe arrival. Likewise, when Maggie came over to our home, my mother always phoned the Lamars to let them know their daughter had reached us. But that day there was no phone call. It was my mother who had to ring, at about the twenty minute mark. My sister had yet to appear at her destination. 

“You’re sure?” I overheard my mother on the phone with Maggie’s mother. “Okay, yes, please do immediately.” I could tell there was a weariness in her voice.

That afternoon when we kicked the soccer ball in the front yard was the last time I’d see my little sister. 

•

It didn’t seem real that Willow was gone. Officially declared a missing person on the local news the following evening. To my eleven-and-a-half-year-old mind, it was like something out of a fairy tale that would resolve itself before long. My mother wept, my father did his best not to, and when he couldn’t find the remote that evening, this time there was no sign of frustration. With some physical effort, he calmly took a knee and switched the television on manually. He stayed down there the whole time, as if in genuflection, while a photograph of my sister in her soccer uniform flashed across the screen along with contact information should anyone know her whereabouts. 

My parents kept me home from school the next day, which had been a rare and joyful experience in the past. But that day, police infested our home. I knew from television and movies that cops were unfriendly, mean, corrupt. Fat, donut-devouring, lazy specimens. I loved donuts, still do, but if we had had a box of them in the kitchen that day, I would have pelted the officers with them. It was one thing to be a failure on TV, but this was real life. Almost two whole days had passed, and they still hadn’t found her.

Later that afternoon, a fresh squad of officers arrived, including a real detective who, to my delight, wore a long trench coat though unfortunately no hat (he was bald). The cops were deep in conversation with my parents about my sister’s last known whereabouts. Morons, I thought. I ate two cookies, my usual afterschool snack, even though I hadn’t been to class that day, and then helped myself to several more because nobody was paying attention. 

What did the police hope to accomplish by talking to my parents? At the time I didn’t know that local law enforcement had deployed all of its resources in the search. Hearing them list my sister’s interests, activities, and obligations in and outside of school made me angry as I ran down the basement steps to retrieve my detective gear. Somebody had to find my sister. It might as well be me. 

Using knowledge gleaned from detective handbooks, and relying on the common sense I was beginning to develop, plus my gut, which hurt thanks to all those cookies, I decided to keep the search close to home. Willow couldn’t have gone far. I knew my sister. And if she had, well, there wasn’t a lot I could do about that anyway. I sped around the neighborhood on my BMX bike, a model just like my old one but bright fire engine red. With binoculars, a periscope, and a magnifying glass, I searched for clues of Willow’s whereabouts, for anything amiss, but nothing struck me as out of the ordinary in the neighborhood: no unfamiliar cars or overstuff mailboxes, nor suspiciously drawn blinds.  I wasn’t  sure how long I’d been gone, but the gathering storm clouds began to obscure what had been a sunny sky, making the early onset darkness feel much later than it could’ve been. 

Back at the house, I barely recognized my parents, who seemed like ghosts. The shell of them was intact, but that was about it. “Oh Simon! Simon you can’t…” My mother, angrier and more frightened than I’d ever seen her before, hugged me and sobbed and kept asking if I was all right.

“I’m fine, mom,” I said. I cried for the second time that evening because I hated to see her like that. “Where is she? Is she back yet?”

My father gently pried us apart and gave my mother a glass of water to drink. He helped her to the kitchen table, strewn with documents and photographs of Willow. After waiting for her breathing to steady, he walked over to me with the saddest expression I’d ever seen on his face. His knee gave out on that walk, and he almost fell over. 

“We were about to put you on the news, too, pal,” my dad said in a quiet whisper. I knew he was trying to make light of the situation, but I could see that his eyes were red. He rubbed my back, without looking at me. His gaze was distant, like he was seeing something far away. 

•

By the fifth anniversary of my sister’s disappearance, my parents’ marriage had unraveled. The agony of Willow’s disappearance, the constant hope of her showing up, and the fear that that day would never come proved unendurable for my mother and father, each of whom blamed the other for losing their child, without actually ever saying so. The town set up a tree program in her name and vowed to plant a Weeping Willow every year of her absence, even if that meant a hundred years of Weeping Willows. My parents appreciated the gesture, but a tree was no consolation, and after the first year, they never attended the planting ceremony out in Riverside again.

My father traveled regularly for his pharmaceutical sales job and would take off for days at a time, sometimes for a whole week, claiming these business trips doubled as searches for his missing daughter. That was what he told us. In fact, he was having an affair with an old college classmate who had moved about two hours south of our town, on a little farmland she’d inherited from her grandparents. There he did recover a daughter, but it wasn’t Willow. By the time my mother found out about my father’s secret child, the woman was expecting again. 

When I visited him after the divorce—for the first and only time—I couldn’t believe that, in addition to the two more children and a new wife, this new family of his also had a dog. He must have really loved this woman to compromise on his no-dog stance, with a woman who wasn’t even as attractive as my mother—younger, perhaps but heavier-set, and always on the verge of laughing at something whether it was funny or not. I didn’t say anything to my father that day, barely acknowledged my half-siblings or my stepmom. Instead I just petted the dog, a shy, sandy-colored Shar Pei, until my mother picked me up again to take me home.

She was right, I shouldn’t have come. 

•

Before graduating from high school, I’d already decided to push college back a year to help my mother who was out of work. Psychiatrically speaking, a diagnosis made her temporarily incapable of holding a job. I took a security position at the power plant on the outskirts of town where I spent most of the time staring at a set of black-and-white multi-screens surveilling the grounds, waiting for something to happen, but nothing ever did. To fend off the boredom that threatened always to put me to sleep, I started reading detective novels again, a habit I’d fallen out of while taking care of my mother. I’d finish one in a single shift. It didn’t matter how trashy or cliche the plots were, at least not at first. My standards of taste increased gradually to a steady diet of American classics—Chandler, Cain, MacDonald, Strout, and Hammett. My boss suggested I try Scandinavian noir next—and so I did. A creative writing workshop, held once a week at a three-hour block at the college in town, admitted me without even a writing sample since enrollment was so low. I wouldn’t have to sacrifice any work shifts, just shuffle around a few hours to make up the time. 

As my mother’s mind deteriorated, I started writing in a blue spiral notebook. It was a slightly autobiographical story of my missing sister that grew and grew until it exceeded my life or hers. It was a real novel! On the day of my wedding, I learned it had won honorable mention in a mystery contest I had halfheartedly submitted it to. I’d almost forgotten about the contest but recognized immediately the email address when checking my phone in the back of the kitchen of the church where we were about to be married. I’d been reading over the vows I’d written earlier that morning, making sure they sounded like “me” and from the heart—whatever that meant, when the email flashed on top of my phone screen. 

Maggie, my sister’s best friend and my wife-to-be, was the only person I felt understood me, but I had kept my writings even from her. Now, though, she was curious. My story hadn’t won the top prize, but the small Michigan-based publisher still wanted it. I let Maggie read the story during our honeymoon weekend in Niagara Falls in between making love and getting drenched in our translucent blue ponchos on a misty “Lady of the Lake” boat ride. She liked it even if she felt the attitude of the main character, a loner private investigator, was a bit hard-edged, especially towards the local law enforcement.

This burst of good luck had me at ill at ease: it was too good, happening too fast, and sure enough, bad signs appeared. First, the publication date. It coincided with the day of my sister’s disappearance. I did everything I could to adjust it, but this was a small publisher with distribution promises to keep, and a change of date was out of the question. Next, while the first novel had practically written itself, the second wouldn’t come. Finally, while we were dining at a fancy, out-of-town restaurant for our anniversary, I received an emergency phone call from the hospital informing me that my mother suffered a heart attack. We rushed back to town, about thirty minutes away, but we were too late. She died shortly after we pulled into the parking lot. Maggie and I had already spent considerable time at the hospital that year, both with my mother’s declining health, and for our own sake, as we tried to learn the cause of our fertility issues. 

•

I kept our old family TV remote from childhood, the last case Willow and I solved together, on my nightstand. Every day I would think about her and press a few buttons, making sure the little bulb lit up as if in acknowledgment of my vigil. Occasionally the red light wouldn’t flash on, and I’d be overcome by panic. I’d race to replace the remote’s AAA batteries from the cupboard, snap the case back on, and feel my heartbeat return to normal at the sign of that red glow. It creeped Maggie out a little, and some nights she even asked me to put it away, but she doesn’t have the heart to banish it completely. 

There was no second novel, or third one, or any more novels in me at all. Short stories came easier, and so I wrote them, almost on principle. For it seemed to me that the worst things possible happened in short stories—awful, terrible, horrible things—conveyed in several pages and then closed. The length of a novel diluted those effects. That lessening didn’t feel right to me. It felt dishonest. It didn’t capture, nor did it help solve, the trouble of existence—only obfuscated it. Novels provided answers, mysteries and puzzles solved, and conclusions drawn from an impossible hindsight. But short stories aren’t like that. They just end.