by Jeff Lindsay
“Ooh,” she said again, which was not encouraging.
Well really, there’s only so much you can do with monosylla-bles, even if you are a gifted conversationalist like me. Since there was clearly no help coming from Rita, I looked at Cody and Astor, who had not moved since I came in. “All right,” I said. “Can you two tell me what’s wrong with your mother?”
They exchanged one of their famous looks, and then turned back to me. “We didn’t mean to,” Astor said. “It was an accident.”
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It wasn’t much, but at least it was a complete sentence. “I’m very glad to hear it,” I said. “What was an accident?”
“We got caught,” Cody said, and Astor poked him with an elbow.
“We didn’t mean to,” she repeated with emphasis, and Cody turned to look at her before he remembered what they had agreed on; she glared at him and he blinked once before slowly nodding his head at me.
“Accident,” he said.
It was nice to see that the party line was firmly in place behind a united front, but I was still no closer to knowing what we were talking about, and we had been talking about it, more or less, for several minutes—time being a large factor, since the dinner hour was approaching and Dexter does require regular feeding.
“That’s all they’ll say about it,” Rita said. “And it is nowhere near enough. I don’t see how you could possibly tie up the Villegas’
cat by accident.”
“It didn’t die,” Astor said in the tiniest voice I had ever heard her use.
“And what were the hedge clippers for?” Rita demanded.
“We didn’t use them,” Astor said.
“But you were going to, weren’t you?” Rita said.
Two small heads swiveled to face me, and a moment later, Rita’s did, too.
I am sure it was completely unintentional, but a picture was beginning to emerge of what had happened, and it was not a peaceful still life. Clearly the youngsters had been attempting an independent study without me. And even worse, I could tell that somehow it had become my problem; the children expected me to bail them out, and Rita was clearly prepared to lock and load and open fire on me. Of course it was unfair; all I had done so far was come home from work. But as I have noticed on more than one occasion, life itself is unfair, and there is no complaint department, so we might as well accept things the way they happen, clean up the mess, and move on.
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would be. “I’m sure there’s a very good explanation,” I said, and Astor brightened immediately and began to nod vigorously.
“It was an accident,” she insisted happily.
“Nobody ties up a cat, tapes it to a workbench, and stands over it with hedge clippers by accident!” Rita said.
To be honest, things were getting a little complicated. On the one hand, I was very pleased to get such a clear picture at last of what the problem was. But on the other hand, we seemed to have strayed into an area that could be somewhat awkward to explain, and I could not help feeling that Rita might be a little bit better off if she remained ignorant of these matters.
I thought I had been clear with Astor and Cody that they were not to fly solo until I had explained their wings to them. But they had obviously chosen not to understand and, even though they were suffering some very gratifying consequences for their action, it was still up to me to get them out of it. Unless they could be made to understand that they absolutely must not repeat this—and must not stray from the Harry Path as I put their feet upon it—I was happy to let them twist in the wind indefinitely.
“Do you know that what you did is wrong?” I asked them. They nodded in unison.
“Do you know why it is wrong?” I said.
Astor looked very uncertain, glanced at Cody, and then blurted out, “Because we got caught!”
“There now, you see?” said Rita, and a hysterical edge was creeping into her voice.
“Astor,” I said, looking at her very carefully and not really winking, “this is not the time to be funny.”
“I’m glad somebody thinks this is funny,” Rita said. “But I don’t happen to think so.”
“Rita,” I said, with all the soothing calm I could muster, and then, using the smooth cunning I had developed in my years as an apparently human adult, I added, “I think this might be one of those times that Reverend Gilles was talking about, where I need to mentor.”
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you—!” she said, and even though she was close to tears, I was happy to see that at least her old speech patterns were returning.
Just as happily, a scene from an old movie popped into my head in the nick of time, and I knew exactly what a real human being was supposed to do.
I walked over to Rita and, with my very best serious face, I put a hand on her shoulder.
“Rita,” I said, and I was very proud of how grave and manly my voice sounded, “you are too close to this, and you’re letting your emotions cloud your judgment. These two need some firm perspective, and I can give it to them. After all,” I said as the line came to me, and I was pleased to see that I hadn’t lost a step, “I have to be their father now.”
I should have guessed that this would be the remark that pushed Rita off the dock and into the lake of tears; and it was, because immediately after I said it, her lips began to tremble, her face lost all its anger, and a rivulet began to stream down each cheek.
“All right,” she sobbed, “please, I—just talk to them.” She snuffled loudly and hurried from the room.
I let Rita have her dramatic exit and gave it a moment to sink in before I walked back around to the front of the couch and stared down at my two miscreants. “Well,” I said. “What happened to We understand, We promise, We’ll wait?”
“You’re taking too long,” said Astor. “We haven’t done anything except the once, and besides, you’re not always right and we think we shouldn’t have to wait anymore.”
“I’m ready,” Cody said.
“Really,” I said. “Then I guess your mother is the greatest detective in the world, because you’re ready and she caught you anyway.”
“Dex-terrrr,” Astor whined.
“No, Astor, you quit talking and just listen to me for a minute.”
I stared at her with my most serious face, and for a moment I thought she was going to say something else but then a miracle took place right there in our living room. Astor changed her mind and closed her mouth.
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“All right,” I said. “I have said from the very beginning that you have to do it my way. You don’t have to believe I’m always right,”
and Astor made a sound, but didn’t say anything. “But you have to do what I say. Or I will not help you, and you will end up in jail.
There is no other way. Okay?”
It is quite possible that they didn’t know what to do with this new tone of voice and new role. I was no longer Playtime Dexter, but something very different, Dexter of Dark Discipline, which they had never seen before. They looked at each other uncertainly so I pushed a little more.
“You got caught,” I said. “What happens when you get caught?”
“Time out?” Cody said uncertainly.
“Uh-huh,” I said. “And if you’re thirty years old?”
For possibly the first time in her life, Astor had no answer, and Cody had already used up his two-word quota for the time being.
They looked at each other, and then they looked at their feet.
“My sister, Sergeant Deborah, and I spend all day catching people who do this kind of stuff,” I said. “And when we catch them, they go to prison.” I smiled at Astor. “Time out for grown-ups. But a lot worse. You sit in a little room the size of your bathroom, locked in, all day and a
ll night. You pee in a hole in the floor. You eat moldy garbage, and there are rats and lots of cockroaches.”
“We know what prison is, Dexter,” she said.
“Really? Then why are you in such a hurry to get there?” I said.
“And do you know what Old Sparky is?”
Astor looked at her feet again; Cody hadn’t looked up yet.
“Old Sparky is the electric chair. If they catch you, they strap you into Old Sparky, put some wires on your head, and fry you up like bacon. Does that sound like fun?”
They shook their heads, no.
“So the very first lesson is not to get caught,” I said. “Remember the piranhas?” They nodded. “They look ferocious, so people know they’re dangerous.”
“But Dexter, we don’t look ferocious,” Astor said.
“No, you don’t,” I said. “And you don’t want to. We are supposed to be people, not piranhas. But the idea is the same, to look DEXTER IN THE DARK
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like something you are not. Because when something bad happens, that’s who everyone will look for first—the ferocious people. You need to look like sweet, lovable, normal children.”
“Can I wear makeup?” Astor asked.
“When you’re older,” I said.
“You say that about everything!” she said.
“And I mean it about everything,” I said. “You got caught this time because you went off on your own and didn’t know what you were doing. You didn’t know what you were doing because you didn’t listen to me.”
I decided the torture had gone on long enough and I sat down on the couch in between them. “No more doing anything without me, okay? And when you promise this time, you better mean it.”
They both looked slowly up at me and then nodded. “We promise,” Astor said softly, and Cody, even softer, echoed, “Promise.”
“Well then,” I said. I took their hands and we shook solemnly.
“Good,” I said. “Now let’s go apologize to your mom.” They both jumped up, radiating relief that the hideous ordeal was over, and I followed them out of the room, closer to feeling self-satisfied than I could remember feeling before.
Maybe there was something to this whole fatherhood thing after all.
T H I R T Y - T W O
Sun Tzu, a very smart man, in spite of the fact that he has been dead for so long, wrote a book called The Art of War, and one of the many clever observations he made in the book was that every time something awful happens, there’s a way to turn it to your advantage, if you just look at things properly.
This is not New Age California Pollyanna thinking, insisting that if life gives you lemons you can always make Key Lime pie. It is, rather, very practical advice that comes in handy a lot more than you might think.
At the moment, for instance, my problem was how to continue training Cody and Astor in the Harry Way now that they had been busted by their mother. And in looking for a solution I remembered good old Sun Tzu and tried to imagine what he might have done.
Of course, he had been a general, so he probably would have attacked the left flank with cavalry or something, but surely the prin-ciples were the same.
So as I led Cody and Astor to their weeping mother I was beating the bushes in the dark forest of Dexter’s brain for some small partridge of an idea that the old Chinese general might approve of.
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And just as the three of us trickled to a halt in front of sniffling Rita, the idea popped out, and I grabbed it.
“Rita,” I said quietly, “I think I can stop this before it gets out of hand.”
“You heard what— This is already out of hand,” she said, and she paused for a large snuffle.
“I have an idea,” I said. “I want you to bring them down to me at work tomorrow, right after school.”
“But that isn’t— I mean, didn’t it all start because—”
“Did you ever see a TV show called Scared Straight?” I said.
She stared at me for a moment, snuffled again, and looked at the two kids.
And that is why, at three thirty the next afternoon, Cody and Astor were taking turns peering into a microscope in the forensics lab. “That’s a hair?” Astor demanded.
“That’s right,” I said.
“It looks gross!”
“Most of the human body is gross, especially if you look at it under a microscope,” I told her. “Look at the one next to it.”
There was a studious pause, broken only once when Cody yanked on her arm, and she pushed him away and said, “Stop it, Cody.”
“What do you notice?” I asked.
“They don’t look the same,” she said.
“They’re not,” I said. “The first one is yours. The other one is mine.”
She continued to look for a moment, then straightened up from the eyepiece. “You can tell,” she said. “They’re different.”
“It gets better,” I told her. “Cody, give me your shoe.”
Cody very obligingly sat on the floor and pried off his left sneaker. I took it from him and held out a hand. “Come with me,” I said. I helped him to his feet and he followed me, hopping one-footed to the closest countertop. I lifted him onto a stool and held up the shoe so he could see the bottom. “Your shoe,” I said. “Clean or dirty?”
He peered at it carefully. “Clean,” he said.
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“So you would think,” I said. “Watch this.” I took a small wire brush to the tread of his shoe, carefully scraping out the nearly invisible gunk from between the ridges of the tread into a petri dish.
I lifted a small sample of it onto a glass slide and took it back over to the microscope. Astor immediately crowded in to look, but Cody hopped over quickly. “My turn,” he said. “My shoe.” She looked at me and I nodded.
“It’s his shoe,” I said. “You can see right after.” She apparently accepted the justice of that, as she stepped back and let Cody climb onto the stool. I looked into the eyepiece to focus it, and saw that the slide was everything I could hope for. “Aha,” I said, and stepped back. “Tell me what you see, young Jedi.”
Cody frowned into the microscope for several minutes, until Astor’s jiggling dance of impatience became so distracting that we both looked at her. “That’s long enough,” she said. “It’s my turn.”
“In a minute,” I said, and I turned back to Cody. “Tell me what you saw.”
He shook his head. “Junk,” he said.
“Okay,” I said. “Now I’ll tell you.” I looked into the eyepiece again and said, “First off, animal hair, probably feline.”
“That means cat,” Astor said.
“Then there’s some soil with a high nitrogen content—probably potting soil, like you’d use for houseplants.” I spoke to him without looking up. “Where did you take the cat? The garage? Where your mom works on her plants?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Uh-huh. I thought so.” I looked back into the microscope.
“Oh—look there. That’s a synthetic fiber, from somebody’s carpet.
It’s blue.” I looked at Cody and raised an eyebrow. “What color is the carpet in your room, Cody?”
His eyes were wide-open round as he said, “Blue.”
“Yup. If I wanted to get fancy I’d compare this to a piece I took from your room. Then you would be cooked. I could prove that it was you with the cat.” I looked back into the eyepiece again. “My goodness, somebody had pizza recently—oh, and there’s a small chunk of popcorn, too. Remember the movie last week?”
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“Dexter, I wanna see,” Astor whined. “It’s my turn.”
“All right,” I said, and I set her on a stool next to Cody’s so she could peer into the microscope.
“I don’t see popcorn,” she said immediately.
“That round, brownish thing up in the corner,” I said. She was quiet fo
r a minute, and then looked up at me.
“You can’t really tell all that,” she said. “Not just looking in the microscope.”
I am happy to admit that I was showing off, but after all, that’s what this whole episode was about, so I was prepared. I grabbed a three-ring notebook I had prepared and laid it open on the counter.
“I can, too,” I said. “And a whole lot more. Look.” I turned to a page that had photos of several different animal hairs, carefully selected to show the greatest variety. “Here’s the cat hair,” I said. “Completely different from goat, see?” I flipped the page. “And carpet fibers. Nothing like these from a shirt and this one from a wash-cloth.”
The two of them crowded together and stared at the book, flipping through the ten or so pages I had put together to show them that, yes indeed, I really can tell all that. It was carefully arranged to make forensics look just a tiny bit more all-seeing and all-powerful than the Wizard of Oz, of course. And to be fair, we really can do most of what I showed them. It never actually seems to do much good in catching any bad guys, but why should I tell them that and spoil a magical afternoon?
“Look back in the microscope,” I told them after a few minutes.
“See what else you can find.” They did so, very eagerly, and seemed quite happy at it for a while.
When they finally looked up at me I gave them a cheerful smile and said, “All this from a clean shoe.” I closed the book and watched the two of them think about this. “And that’s just using the microscope,” I said, nodding around the room at the many gleaming machines. “Think what we can figure out if we use all the fancy stuff.”
“Yeah, but we could go barefoot,” Astor said.
I nodded as if what she had said made sense. “Yes, you could,”
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I said. “And then I could do something like this—give me your hand.”
Astor eyed me for a few seconds as if she was afraid I would cut her arm off, but then she held it out slowly. I held it and, using a fingernail clipper from my pocket, I scraped under her fingernails.