Authors: Ashley Edward Miller,Zack Stentz
Colin Fischer (14 page)
Her cell phone chirped.
Colin
. Mrs. Fischer paused to admire the caller ID photo—a shot of Colin emerging from the Air & Space Museum with a rare, broad smile. The image was from six years ago—half a lifetime in Colin years—but it never got old.
“One sec,” she said, “the world is ending, and evidently my son is in the middle of it.” There was more laughter from the group. Colin was no mystery to them; he had never been in trouble, least of all the end of the world.
Mrs. Fischer muted the conference and picked up
the phone. “I’m a little busy right now, Big C,” she said. “Can this wait?”
“I’m sorry, Mom,” Colin said in his usual pleasant, slightly flat tone of voice. Unlike most people, he used the exact same speech patterns for telephone and face-to-face communication. “I want to let you know I need to stay after school today. I need to do some research.”
There was silence on the phone line. For an instant, his mother thought it seemed odd that Colin would be assigned a research project so early in the school year. On the other hand, Colin was prone to research projects whether they were assigned or not.
“Okay,” she said. “Home by six?”
“Yes.”
“See you then. Good luck with your research.”
There was another, even longer silence on the line.
“Thank you,” Colin said simply, and hung up.
Mrs. Fischer stared at the image of her smiling, seven-year-old son, frozen in time. Then the screen went black, and the spell was broken. And she returned to work.
Colin should have been
in detention, and he knew it. This was a calculated risk, acceptable only because his window to investigate this case was already closing. Such was the nature of things. Time had a way of eroding both evidence and eyewitness memory. Colin needed both to prove Wayne Connelly was innocent.
Carefully, he placed his cell phone in his backpack
and looked down at his Notebook, oddly entranced. For the second time in less than a week, Melissa had sullied it with her feminine, cursive handwriting.
I’m sorry, Mom. I want to let you know I need to stay after school today. I need to do some research.
GOOD LUCK! - XO
Melissa had been sure to emphasize he was not to speak the last part aloud, but deftly avoided his question about the meaning of “XO.” These were obviously not her initials, nor did they indicate a year in Roman numerals.
17
In the end, Colin circled the strange marking with a note that he should
Investigate
later.
Colin flipped back a page to double-check the address of his destination. He’d found himself in an unfamiliar neighborhood, and he wanted to be certain he was in the right place. He’d carefully followed the directions in his phone’s map function, but Colin felt strongly that with any machine it was important not to trust, but verify.
The street was lined with dingy, two-story stucco apartment buildings, crammed into the northwest corner of the San Fernando Valley. The jagged red rock formations that separated Chatsworth from Simi Valley rose up behind blocks of concrete and steel like shark’s teeth flashing in the afternoon sun.
Colin walked along the cracked sidewalk, following faded addresses on the curb to the number that matched what he saw on the materials in Dr. Doran’s office and copied into his Notebook. He paused to record his observations, standing vulnerable and alone before the home of Wayne Connelly.
Wayne Connelly’s house. Single story, peeling paint. Smells of cigarette smoke and stale beer. Toys scattered in the front yard, including a one-eyed doll. A hot pink Big Wheel with white tires is parked in the driveway next to a rusting Honda. Wayne is too large for the Big Wheel. Sibling?
Colin fixed on a spot of bare, faded wood beneath a peephole. A cheap buzzer had been there once, but it was gone now. It wasn’t clear whether the buzzer had fallen off or been ripped out; both fates seemed equally plausible. He balled his hand into a fist to knock, suddenly remembering countless fairy tales featuring children, strange forests, and doors that should never be opened.
Colin knocked anyway.
11
The oft-told story is that a frog tossed into a pot of boiling water will leap out immediately, while a frog in a pot of water where the temperature is turned up slowly will not notice the change and sit contentedly until it dies. This is not actually true. Frogs are actually quite sensitive to changes in temperature and will hop out of a pot the moment it becomes uncomfortably warm. Colin once got in an argument with a middle school science teacher over this very fact and offered to prove his point with a large flask, a Bunsen burner, and a live frog. Instead, his teacher consulted Wikipedia before grudgingly accepting Colin’s assertion.
12
It was a long-held belief that the ancient Anasazi people of the American Southwest were peace-loving farmers. That belief had to be reassessed when archaeological digs around Anasazi population centers unearthed clear evidence of cannibalism. In fact, the word
anasazii
itself is a Navajo term, translating roughly to “ancient enemy.” The Navajo and other neighboring tribes considered the Anasazi dangerous sorcerers and shapeshifters, as well as taking issue with their rather particular culinary habits. Colin found the whole idea of cannibalism distasteful—it was hard enough just to kiss his grandmother.
13
Or, as was once noted in the 1985 science-fiction film
The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai across the Eighth Dimension
, “The reason for time is so everything doesn’t happen at once.” Colin liked this movie a great deal, mainly because his father took such enjoyment out of it. Even so, he quibbled with the realism of a hero who was a quantum physicist, a rock star, a surgeon, and a ninja all at once. Surely, no human being could know so much about so many different things.
14
Understandable, since Caltech is widely regarded as the worst athletic school in NCAA Division III, a fact Colin’s father pretended not to care about.
15
The Thirty-Nine Steps
was adapted into a movie in 1935 by Alfred Hitchcock. The film took several liberties with the book, including substituting the character of Annabelle for a man named Franklin Scudder. Colin’s father surmised this was most likely to add “romantic tension” for the female audience. However, he could not explain why Hitchcock thought women wouldn’t appreciate a perfectly good story just as it was.
16
“Pressure points” were often used for control moves in some forms of
ju-jitsu
, a martial art that enjoyed wide popularity among the boys of the San Fernando Valley. This was in part because of its use in mixed martial arts, but even more for its romanticized association with ninjas, mysterious Japanese assassins renowned for their ability to strike quickly and melt back into the shadows. Colin thought it would be cool to become a ninja, except for all the touching.
17
Roman numerals (I, V, X, L, C, M) are sometimes used to designate the year, seen most often at the end of movie credits. They also often appear in the titles of major sporting events, notably the Super Bowl. For a short period during the 1980s it was even fashionable for movie sequels to use Roman numerals; e.g.,
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
and
Superman II
. The practice fell out of favor soon after the release of
Star Trek V: The Final Frontier
and
Superman IV: The Quest for Peace
, which may or may not have been related to their box office results, although Colin had his suspicions.
DUPIN’S DETACHMENT
Most casual readers think the first modern fictional detective was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. This is not the case.
The origins of the modern detective story actually date half a century earlier to Edgar Allan Poe and his fictional French detective C. Auguste Dupin. In three stories—“The Purloined Letter,” “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and “The Mystery of Marie Roget”—Poe created an entirely new kind of literary crime-solver. Dupin combined a rigidly analytical mind with a vividly creative imagination and an ability to put himself in the mind-set of a deranged criminal. In the history of detective fiction, Dupin was revolutionary.
Even more revolutionary than Dupin’s
techniques were his motives. Stories about heroes avenging crimes and bringing evildoers to justice go back centuries, but the emphasis had always been on the necessity of revenge, upholding personal and family honor, or the restoration of social order. Dupin was interested in none of these things.
Dupin was driven by sheer intellectual curiosity. In creating him, Poe paved the way for Holmes, Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, and the entire category of the gentleman detective. In so doing, he demonstrated how to reach the correct conclusion free of emotional bias or attachment to a particular outcome. What is most impressive about this accomplishment is not how quickly and easily Poe redefined the way we think about crime and punishment, but that it took so long for everybody else to catch on.
Dupin is now largely forgotten. I used to wonder why, like most modern readers, I preferred the adventures of Sherlock Holmes. It was only when reading one of my brother’s Batman comics that I understood it. With his complex psychology, dark obsessions, almost inhuman energy, and intellectual gifts, Sherlock Holmes wasn’t just a detective—he was the world’s first superhero.