Mystery of the Lost Child, Part 1
Saturday, November 5, 2011 at 05:05PM 
Note: This is the second story involving two close friends and detectives named Edward Door and Jacob Edwards living in tiny seaside village filled with overly idealistic and intellectual people. These stories test Jacob and Edward’s idealism and post-modern worldview. The first of these short stories, “The Mystery of the Tossed Child” can be found here but not here. Though the story below can be understood as an independent short story, it would help to read the first one, found here but not here.
Has winter crept up behind our little town and assailed it? Is Father Frost breathing down its neck? Has the mud of the street hardened, no longer spreading its proverbial wild oats onto every shoe and rug? Have homemade wreathes been cut, twisted, tied, adorned and hung on every door? Are friendly greetings between residents accompanied with a puff of momentary fog from blue lips? Does smoke float lazily from eight little, oddly shaped chimneys? Is the occasional glass of piping cider drunk, its steam reddening the drinkers smiling cheeks? Yes, yes. But all is not well in the row of houses by the sea. An occurrence has shaken the postmodern residents, so that, even in this season of joy, dark whispers are heard on the street corners, and lowered voices haunt the fireside of the little inn at night. A young pastor has moved into the community and has built a church,
“A church, I tell you” Edward Door exclaimed to his friend and companion, Jacob Edwards as they both sipped cider from steaming mugs at a back corner table in the cozy little inn next to their house, “And what will be next? Hmm? . . . Truth? Ha! I laugh at that, Jacob. Do you laugh at it?”
“I do indeed Edward, Ha! But it’s not just the church that vexes me or even the young clergyman—though I am quite vexed by him, yes I surely am, no need to look worried, Edward; he vexes me, he does—it’s those eight urchin boys he brought with him.” He wrinkled up his pointy nose like a child would after being told to take out a particularly smelly bag of trash; Edward did the same. “I heard he took them in off the street—parentless, all of them.”
“As did I!” put in Edward.
“And he expects to live with all of them in that pathetically typical-looking church he stained our community with? Really! And that poor young wife of his, do you know, Edward, she doesn’t work, not at all. Oh of course they say she looks after the eight orphans, schooling bathing and feeding them, but I call that oppression, not a profession.”
“Oh ho ho, wonderful stuff, Jacob. Keep it up.” Edward encouraged excitedly.
“She positively has no profession, whatsoever; that’s what I say. She has to sacrifice a real job and real success to raise children, Edward, children!”
“I believe it’s an impossibility for me to agree with you more, Jacob. No, I’ve thought about it; it is impossible. A woman should be able to have an honorable profession, a noble calling if you will, not raising loud, runny-nosed puerile little people. I won’t call it a career or a profession, Jacob. I refuse.”
“That’s good of you, Edward.”
“And what if she likes runny-nosed puerile little people?”
Jacob and Edward jumped. The person who had just spoken was a woman standing next to their table smiling brightly and holding the hand of a small curly-headed boy hugging her knee with one arm and trying to ward off another small boy—slightly bigger than him—with the other. The woman was young, not over thirty, and though not divinely beautiful; she was bright-eyed with a cheerful, benevolent glow about her. She wore a simple outfit of inexpensive clothes: not the simplicity of hurry and negligence, but the simplicity that makes one think that she is a very industrious and prudent woman. Her brown hair was pulled up on her head, and she wore a blue bow in it. Her face was of the same good simplicity as her clothes, but with an added rosiness.
“I beg your pardon, ma’am?” said Edward.
“I’d like to beg it too” said Jacob.
“I said” the woman replied in a wonderfully knowing and happy way, “I like taking care of these dear boys.”
“An’ we like her” said the curly headed boy, matter-of-factly, “and candy.”
“Thank you darling! And I believe I have the most noble profession in the world: motherhood.”
A red tint had made its way into the cheeks of Jacob and Edward, not like that of the woman’s cheery glow, but the type that indicates embarrassment and the overwhelming feeling of being very silly at the moment.
“Ah, yes, well uh ‘to each his’ er . . . I, I mean ‘to her,’ emmm—oh dear--their own, yes, ‘to each their own,’ you know. ”
As Edward stumbled his way through this pathetically meaningless proverb, Jacob nodded furiously, first at Edward, and then at the woman, hoping to bolster his friend’s point with nonverbal positive reinforcement. To this demonstration the woman only laughed and said good-naturedly,
“I presume you two are the detectives!”
The two men’s faces now showed surprise and a hint of smugness. Edward waved off the woman’s recognition with one hand and said with an ill-disguised flippancy, “Oh that . . . you’ve heard of our little exploit? Well, that does embarrass me terribly. Does it you, Jacob?”
“Terribly.”
“We’ve all read it in the papers,” laughed the young woman, “Come on, no need to be shy about it. It’s a wonderful story—that poor child left in a closet; thank the LORD she wasn’t really thrown over that cliff. It’s obvious you both have incredible minds for reasoning.”
Even redder in the face than before—though a more embarrassed shade—the two men simultaneously took over-zealous drinks of their cider and left little golden droplets on their chins.
“There they go again, Edward.”
“I heard it too, Jacob.”
“I thought we had risen above the level of reasoning on a balloon filled with the warm vapors of skepticism and relativism,”
“What a beautiful metaphor, Edward. Really uplifting.”
“Why, thank you, Jacob. It came to me as wind through the Aeolian harp.”
Now the two detectives turned to the woman.
“My lady” they started simultaneously, stopped and immediately deferred to the other to speak, while wondering secretly to themselves whether it had been appropriate to call a pastor’s wife ‘my lady,’ and indeed whether it would have been much more proper to called her ‘my good lady’ or better yet just, ‘good lady’ leaving out the cumbersome—and possibly misconstrued—possessive pronoun, ‘my.’ This parallel thought process created and awkward silence, which the young woman graciously filled.
“I am sorry to have offended you. I only meant to compliment you on your detective work, and . . .”
“We would prefer ‘post modern detective’ work, good lady” interrupted Jacob; Edward nodded.
Smiling, she went on, “Oh! of course, post-modern detective work it is! Anyway, we are having an open house at the church this evening, if you two would like to come. The boys’ll perform a couple songs we’ve taught them, and then cookies and coffee for all. It would be wonderful to have you there, the post-modern detectives of the town!”
“We would now prefer to be called the PMDs, if you please.” said Jacob
“Yes quite! We would.” put in Edward, still nodding.
“Well then, I formally invite you, the PMDs of this village, to the Church’s open house and hope to see you there, seven o’clock sharp! ” The woman gathered up her young charges now wrestling at her feet, tightened her red scarf and was out the door and in the chilly winter air before the PMDs even had a chance to think,
“And we formally reject your invitation, humph.”
Now, let us leave this scene and walk down the street from the little inn with its close musty air and tangible cheer and, turning left, make our way down the crescent-shaped street of the village to the last house, slightly detached from the rest. But what’s this? Darkness hangs about its misshapen door and dirty windows. This house is indeed incredibly built like its neighbors but its aspect—rather than being invitingly silly or absurdly quaint—is grim, without humor. It is built into a small hill that rises in that part of the wood, and only its front and two small windows can be seen before the gaping mouth dug out of the ground swallows the rest of it.
Inside this forbidding house sits Dr. Bennie Champion—a wheezing, hacking, dirty, scowling man—on his favorite stool in the darkest corner of his grime-smeared hut. If nature’s laws allowed for the heart of a man to fill the room it occupied with a color representing that heart’s condition, the room we are now observing would be filled with tar blackness consuming the weak fire in the grate and sliding out like coal smoke from the crack between the window and the wall. But because of matter’s indifference to the evil or good occupying it, we can see the twisted expression on his long face. He probably had a trimmed mustache or a goatee at one time, but now an unkempt beard hides the permanent frown lines surrounding his tightened lips, which, in turn, hide a rotted and putrid mouth always ready to spout hate and violence to mankind.
I suppose a non-advanced and pathetically old-fashioned community would question such a character living among them, and the smells surrounding him, but absolute tolerance is their policy—though the young pastor’s advent has tested this resolve to its limit. But Dr. B. Champion has simmered in his vices uninhibited for the entire existence of the odd little village. When citizens of the hamlet hear Dr. Champion muttering things like, “I’ll take her liver” or “he must go out the window; blood blood,” they merely smile and marvel at the beauty of the inner workings of an obviously brilliant mind expressing itself in such a raw and honest way.
So there he sits upon his stool, a withered and terrible sight. Let us not make the mistake of thinking he is mentally unstable, for he may be the most stable of his entire village; but hush now! He speaks,
“The madman said that god is dead; so no one’s watching me. Ha! He’s gone gone gone. Dead, stabbed, bleeding rotten stinking gone, and no one’s is watching me. I’m a dirty speck in this ridiculous universe: a ridiculous stupid senseless silly speck of dust. No one is watching me!” Suddenly a mangy rat bolted across the room, seemingly frantic to get away from having to hear this pathetic monologue. Dr. Bennie screamed, grabbed a book lying open next to his stool and flung it at the creature; he missed, cursed and yelled, “You’re not sentient! You don’t count!” He sat back on his stool roughly and now seemed to address his statements to the rat he so recently tried to kill, “They all believe it too, don’t they. This life is meaningless; I’m like you, you flee-bitten bubonic low-life, dust, dust . . . But here’s the real question: what to do?” His tightened lips relaxed and formed a malignant smile. “The young pastor, oh filleting or skewering him would shake things up. His wife would make better company though.” Now he broke into a weak laugh that ended in a bout of violent coughing, “Then again, why not just go for his precious orphans, start small. Reduce the world’s population, one urchin at a time. It’s unsustainable, right? Right?! I’m doing nature a favor. You’re welcome!” more uncontrolled laughing and coughing, “It’s settled, then. You hear that, rat? No one is watching; I feel no fright, so I will kill an orphan tonight!” With this burst of verse, he pulled himself up off of his stool, God-like, and stalked out his door into the gathering darkness.
. . . continued in, "The Mystery of the Lost Child, Part 2"
-Eric Tippin
In my wife's chair on Applewood Ln. Newton, KS
November 5, 2011
Reader Comments (1)
Now you've got me interested! Can't wait to see how Jacob and Edward (was this on purpose? I haven't read Twilight, but I know the names) get involved in part 2. The two men are very likeable, though obviously misled.