All of my friends hated watching mystery movies with me. I’d always figure out who the culprit was less than a quarter of the way through the movie, usually within the first two scenes if the movie was exceptionally poorly done. All my friends got mad at me when I blurted it out, as if they really didn’t know themselves who was responsible for the crime. I never understood how they could not know.
I have to admit, Agatha Christie gave me a bit more of a challenge that the typical murder mystery. It usually took me three or four chapters to figure her out instead of the usual two, but at any rate, it was never any real challenge. Once you know what to look for in a mystery story, nothing is hard to figure out anymore.
When I was eight, I remember standing in front of the mirror wearing the blood red dress with the white lace around the edges. I looked like a glass of tomato juice. Not the tomato itself, just the juice. I didn’t really feel like smiling when I looked in the mirror, but I did know I had to put on a happy face when I marched down the aisle at the head of the procession. After all, it isn’t every day you get to meet the pope. I should know, since I’ve never met him, and probably never will, but it might be interesting if I do, and if I ever do, I will make certain to tell you about it. At the time, I didn’t know who the pope was, and the man who would be performing the ceremony for my sister and future brother-in-law looked enough like what I imagined a pope would look like for me to pretend that that’s really who he was. My brother-in-law was careful to point out that that wasn’t really the pope, but I believed it was for a long time afterwards anyway.
I would never answer the phone when it rang. I always left it up to my parents or younger brother to inquire as to who was calling. Then if it was for me, I could prepare myself before the first hello. The one time my brother told me it was for me, but refused to tell me who it was, I got pretty mad at him. I figure he just forgot to ask, but he pretended as if he just didn’t want to tell me. But it ended up to just be my best friend, Cindy, and I’m certain he would have recognized her voice, so I’m not quite sure what was up with that, but I didn’t much feel like pursuing it any further. Cindy never really had anything interesting to say anyway, so I doubt there was any sort of conspiracy between her and my brother, though it might have been intriguing if there had been.
I wasn't terribly fond of pets when I was little, but I did have a gerbil that I managed to keep alive for just over five years. I got him in the fifth grade. He was a gift from my parents, an attempt to make me take my mind off of more pressing and depressing matters. Whenever I first told someone about him or showed him to someone, I would challenge that person to guess his name. They never could. I was always torn between being amused and frustrated by their blindness. The rodent's name was Rumplestiltskin.
My first love interest was Peter Charleston. I was in the sixth grade at the time. I feel like I was right on schedule. Some girls get it early, others get it late, but I felt like I was just right. He had chestnut hair and eyes of the same color. He wore his hair just down to his ears and he had a dog that he uncreatively named Rover. I never saw the dog in person, but he showed me pictures of it, and it looked to me that it must be the type of dog that always had fleas and that you wouldn’t even bother bathing because it would just get dirty again. It didn’t even have a collar on in the picture, unless the long dingy hair was covering it up. Peter seemed proud of his dog Rover. It was about all he talked about. I’m kinda glad we never got around to kissing. I suppose if we had, he would have licked me with his tongue instead of using his lips.
The day that Cindy fell off her bike and scraped up her knee on the curb, I was all too excited about running back home and shouting out that Cindy was dying and that we had to call the ambulance. I was just about ready to dial 911, when our next door neighbor called and said that he had seen the spill from his window and helped Cindy into his house, where his wife was now washing the wound and applying hydrogen peroxide. I was a little disappointed when I looked at the damage later and realized it wasn’t as bad as I thought it was. It turned out that most of the blood had been red paint from where our next door neighbors had just had the numbers 1128, their house number, printed on the curb near the base of their mailbox. My mother scolded us for riding our bikes in the street, which we were not allowed to do, and then popped some buttery popcorn for us to eat while we watched a movie about bears and elephants performing in the circus.
Everyone knows what a policeman looks like, even when they’re young, and so at the age of 10 I had no trouble realizing what was going on the instant my mother opened the door and we saw him standing there. The solemn look on his face gave it all away. I remember that his eyes were heavy and seemed to sink down towards his cheeks in a way that told me he had done this all too often before. All he had to say was “I’m sorry” and I knew exactly what had happened. Actually, I knew it as soon as he said to my mother, “Are you Mrs. Prescott?” You’d think they’d be a bit more delicate and tender about these things, but they have to go on like that and give it all away. Still, my mother didn’t start crying until he explained exactly what had happened. I never quite understood why it took her so long. I thought, somewhat bitterly, that trees don’t move and that I was certain my sister wasn’t the one doing the driving.
I wrote my first novel when I was 14, but no one would publish it. When I showed it to my English teacher, Mr. Buckner, he told me that plagiarism was illegal. I didn’t say anything more to him about it, but I was rather proud that he would think that. Most of the comments I got back from the publishers said that the mystery was impossible and that no reader could ever figure it out. I didn’t get it. It was much to obvious to me, even more obvious than the mystery movies I had just started watching on TV.
I met Andrew in English history, Jason in biology, and Matt in organic chemistry. They were all nice enough, but I wasn't really interested in any of them. They each asked me out, and I rejected each of them. It was the hardest with Matt because he was the cutest of the bunch, but I had had practice with the other two by then, so that made it a little easier. I think some rumors might have gone around my dorm building that I had sexual problems, but I ignored all such nonsense. I knew it wasn't really the problem, and I convinced myself that that knowledge was enough to keep me going.
My father taught me how to drive, and he was not a very good teacher. I could sense that he was apprehensive about the thought of me getting out on the road, but he was probably better than my mother would have been, so I suppose I should count my blessings. I often wonder if he was any better with my younger brother, but I haven't bothered to ask about it. Dad wouldn't let me get my learner's permit until I was 16 and all my friends were already driving on their own. I finally got my license when I was 18, a matter of weeks before I left home for college. I'm really glad that I did get my license before college because that way I could always be the designated driver whenever my friends went out to party, which was essentially every other weekend. I would sit and watch them get drunk and then I would drive them all home. I frequently caught myself almost starting to wonder what would have happened if I hadn't been there, but I was always able to stop myself before the thoughts crossed my mind. I knew that those possibilities were not alternate endings that I wished to explore.
I read as much as I possibly could all through college, and into my graduate years as well. The summer after my first year of grad school, I even went back to all of the old Agatha Christie novels I had completed years earlier. I made a game of seeing how many alleged plot twists and red herrings I could remember after reading only the first page of the story. I did pretty well. I think I only forgot five or six moderately important things out of all the novels that I revisited, but who's counting anyway?
When Cindy told me she thought she had found the love of her life, my immediate reaction was to shake my head and sigh. Of course, she could not see nor hear that response since we were communicating via instant messenger, but I think she sensed it anyway. After a pause to collect my thoughts, I typed back that I hoped she would be careful and then quickly added that I really needed to get to bed so I could get up early for class the next day. I could picture her frowning and moving her fingers off of the keys as she sat at her computer hundreds of miles away, and then she typed back, "OK, see ya." I think she might have been meaning to type more, but I logged off before I saw any of it. I really was tired and I wasn't up to dealing with that sort of thing.
I always thought that pelicans were funny looking birds. They had a few at the zoo, and I would go and visit them the first weekend of every month while I was at college. It was interesting to watch how they changed. The third time I went, one of the old ones had died and they had gotten a new bird to replace him. The ninth time, there were two new babies in the cage. The seventeenth time, one of the babies had been transported to another zoo and his brother had been refusing to eat. The eighteenth time, the brother was dead. I don't know if pelicans can die of broken hearts, but I'm quite certain that that pelican did. I wondered if his brother shared the same fate, but I never bothered to look into it.
I would have gotten an A in my sophomore composition class if I hadn't confronted my professor about his obvious infatuation with me. No one else in the class seemed to notice, but it was all too obvious to me. When I asked to speak to him after class one day, I had the feeling he thought that I was finally going to respond to his subtle glances and advances in a positive way. When I told him I wished he would stop hitting on me, he became furious. He acted as if he had no idea what I was talking about, but his darting eyes gave it all away. When he was finished with his rant, I asked him point blank if he could deny that he had feelings for me and he stumbled over his words for several seconds before finally leaving the question unanswered.
I ended up getting a C- on the paper that just a week earlier he had told me sounded promising. It was about the real life influences on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's character of Sherlock Holmes. The supposed reason for the poor grade was my failure to cite sources at six key points in the paper as well as my use of long run-on sentences at the bottom of page three and the top of page five, but he and I both know the truth.
The first of the three times I was in the cemetery, it was very cold. The weatherman had said it might even snow, even though it was only October. I remember the chilling wind blowing my hair and freezing the tears that trickled down my cheeks. I was very somber, as I should have been, but I couldn't help but think about how pretty she had looked in her casket at the church. I overheard my parents talking about how banged up her face had been before, but the undertaker or whoever deals with that stuff had done an excellent job covering it up and making her look almost as pretty as she had been before. I had glanced at him, but I hadn't lingered long. For one thing, I hardly even knew him and for another, I had still managed at that point to convince myself that it was his fault.
In the cemetery, the wooden cases were closed and wreaths of red and blue flowers were laid on top of them. The priest said a few words and then we all went back to the church for lunch. I noted that no alcohol was served and since the only other time I had had a meal at the church was after the wedding and I had never been to a funeral before, I wondered if that was common practice at a post-cemetery lunch or not.
I remember when I moved into an apartment for the first time at the beginning of my junior year. Before then, I had lived in the dorms. I really hadn’t gone through my stuff much since I first moved into the dorms at the beginning of my college career. I was amazed by some of the things that I found when I went through it all before moving into my apartment. Old notebooks full of my ideas for stories. I watched the progressions. First it was stuff about ponies and rainbows and that sort of things. Then it was acrobats and circuses and carnivals. Then there was the brief period of stories about happy families overcoming challenges to remain together and happy. Then came the mysteries. There were pages upon pages of mystery ideas. I even managed to find the one that I had developed into my failed novel. I was smiling as I went through the pages until I came to a page I had completely forgotten about. It was the romance page. I can’t even remember where that phase fit in, but at one point, I had considered romance writing. Stories of loves discovered, lost, and rekindled. I looked over my notes and was amazed at how easily I had been able to make characters fall in love. The only thing more amazing was how easily I had been able to break their hearts for the sake of a good story. A death in a romance was different than a death in a murder mystery, I contemplated. But then again, maybe it wasn’t so different after all.
Before I let myself think about it more, I opened up another notebook and smiled. It was my biology notebook from the most recent semester. Page upon page of chromosomes and organ names and animal family trees. I pushed the other notebooks aside. I knew who I had become. Admiring the work of others was one thing, but I could no longer create a masterpiece myself.
Cindy’s getting married next week and she wanted me to be a bridesmaid, but I wrote back and told her I couldn’t. I’m going to be out of town that weekend, in Alaska studying horned puffin mating habits. I don’t really want to go to the wedding anyway. I never quite figured out what was up between her and my brother and I figure that if he goes and I see him there, it will become all too clear to me exactly how they feel about each other. I don’t want to know everything.
I really do have to get to the airport now so I can catch my plane to Puffinsville, but I will be back, and I’d love to talk to you some more when I return. And I’d love to hear, when I get back, if you’ve figured out who done it with what in where.
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