The Boy Detective Fails by Joe Meno Read Free Book Online

begin undressing …’ And she said, ‘But I’m only a kid, I’m only fifteen.’ And right there, I decided maybe the best way to understand these women—all these women—was to maybe try and open one up, you know, to take a look inside and see how they all work, like a time machine …”
    Professor Von Golum gets nervous suddenly and looks around, startled.
    “Did you hear that, Billy?” he asks. “The nurses are always lurking around. Do you want my advice? Keep whatever you have that’s valuable with you at all times.”
    Professor Von Golum picks up one of Billy’s sweaters and begins to try it on, admiring himself in the mirror.
    “You cannot trust anyone in this place, Billy. Well, except me. We are like old friends, are we not?”
    Professor Von Golum stands, walking across the room, then pulls a clipping of Billy and Caroline off the wall. He stares at Caroline, her hair short and blond, a daisy behind her left ear, the old man gumming his jaws, his beady eyes transfixed.
    “Now that girl, that girl, she was always so lovely.”
    Billy grabs the clipping from the Professor, who chortles and nods, turning away quickly.
    “What you need to do is to learn to trust people again, Billy. You’re out in the world now. Not everyone wants to hurt you.” The Professor gently pats Billy on the shoulder and smiles, his black eyes glinting. “Yes, yes, speaking of trust, listen—Perhaps this may be of interest to you. There’s a fellow staying here, Mr. Lunt. He’s a daft old gent, like you and me. He was a crook, though, you see—a thief, with banks, robbery, terrible stuff. He pulled down quite a bit of loot back in his time, or so he says, and he’s living right here among us, sleeping in the room right next to yours, right across the hall from mine. That selfish old gent, well, he has a pile of loot hidden away, still just sitting there—a bundle from a job back in 1909, he says. That poor old fellow refuses to share the certain whereabouts of this wondrous wealth, and what I believe is, as cohorts in this facility, it ought to belong to all of us. And so I have been doing some figuring, and you and I as geniuses, well, I thought we might convince him, or discern exactly, where the load of said cash is hidden …”
    Billy shakes his head sheepishly. “Please, no, sir. I just want to be left alone.”
    “No, eh? Well, it’s your loss, Billy. Because somehow, someway, I’m going to get my hands on that lovely treasure and when it’s all said and done, I’ll be on the lam somewhere living like a king and you’ll be still here rotting, doing paint-by-numbers with the rest of these ninnies.”
    The boy detective is silent.
    There is an awkward pause, until the Professor speaks again: “I am going to have to destroy you now, aren’t I?”
    “Yes, I guess so,” Billy says, staring down at his hands.
    “Yes, it seems that way.”
    “All right.”
    “OK, consider yourself destroyed as soon as I am well rested.”
    “Yes. Fine.”
    Very quickly, Professor Von Golum grabs the newspaper clipping from Billy’s hands and runs through the door, still wearing the boy detective’s blue sweater. Within a blink, Professor Von Golum has disappeared into his room across the hall and has closed and locked his door. Billy stands, shaking his head, then sighs, returning to his suitcase to soundlessly finish arranging his things.
    It is after some time, when the boy detective is nearly finished, that he finds, at the bottom of his effects beneath his clothes, Caroline’s gold diary. He slowly lifts it out and then, without a thought, turns to the last entry. Billy moves his finger down the tiny white page.
    It reads, in girlish handwriting:
    nothing is good. nothing is ever good.
    On another page, near the front of the diary, he discovers this entry:
    how to begin? as usual, Billy was quite courageous today, my brother
    the famous detective. as we searched through the abandoned old house
    i discovered a