It was that time of the year when the air grows brisk and the days begin to grow short, and as Molly Martin sat in Mr. Grub’s chemistry classroom she noticed it was getting dark already. Still, no one had come.
The classroom was the site of the very first meeting of the Honey Hills Society of Young Detectives, or maybe the Honey Hills Young Detectives’ Society, Molly hadn’t decided yet. Currently she was seated alone in a circle of chairs, ten minutes past when the meeting had been supposed to end.
So that’s it, she thought to herself. Nobody else cares.
The previous winter, Molly’s friend Jess B. had died. Or at least, that was what her parents had said. There was no body, and there was no funeral. Her parents moved away shortly thereafter. The police barely looked into it before confirming that Jess was “dead.”
In isolation, Molly might have believed that. But it was not in isolation. Strange things had been happening in Honey Hills. One month hence would be the anniversary of the disappearance of Wayne Greene, a high school boy who had never returned from a trip to Bumblebee River with his friends. The friends didn’t speak for a week thereafter, and when they finally did speak they seemed to have no recollection of the night of the disappearance. Just the previous month a couple had lost control of a boat on the very same river. The man washed up dead, but his girlfriend was never found. That was, in the past three years, three missing people. Police didn’t seem to care, media didn’t seem to care, and Molly didn’t have the money to hire a private eye. So only one recourse was left to her: starting her own detectives’ club.
Looking around at the empty room, though, it appeared to Molly that the endeavor was a failure. Some classmates had feigned interest, but she saw now that there was truly no one but her who cared to wonder what might be going on. With a solemn look on her face she stood up, took the deerstalker cap off of her head, and set it down on the chair behind her. She supposed she wouldn’t need it, after all. Slowly, she walked to the classroom door.
“Hey,” a voice called out behind her. “Quitting already?”
She turned on her heels, eyes wide. There was a man sitting at Mr. Grub’s desk, in the far corner of the room. He was old and wrinkled, small and lean in frame. His face bore a large bushy moustache, the last flecks of brown being fast chased away by a soft dark grey. He wore black dress shoes, brown plaid pants, an off-white shirt with a muted red tie, black suspenders, sunglasses, and a hat much like the one she had just left behind. He was leaned back in the chair, with his feet up on the desk.
“How did you get in here?” she said.
He chuckled. “A real detective never reveals their secrets,” he said. A gust of wind caught his tie then, blowing it up into his face. Molly looked over and saw that the window was open.
“You really thouldn’t be here,” Molly said, the fear she had felt a moment ago now somewhat dulled. The man looked not dissimilar to her great uncle Chet, whose visits had been a frequent highlight of her early years.
“When I caught wind of a new fraternity of those dreary laborers practiced in the unveiling of secrets lost and buried, I had a hunch it would be a fraternity of one. That you sit now alone is little shock to me; this town is burdened by apathy and denial.” Upon saying this, the man produced a pipe from his shirt pocket and placed it in his mouth.
“Hey you can’t--” began Molly, but she stopped as she saw bubbles shoot out of the pipe, climbing harmlessly into the air.
“Yes, in a town like this holding a torch up to all nooks and crannies unexplored is unpopular work, a lonely torch to bear, due perhaps to its weight, whether physical or emotional, who can say? Not just any mind can bear the truths which hide in the dark.” He took the pipe out of his mouth then. “You though, I can tell you’re not just any mind.” He stood up then, swinging his legs down from the desk.
“Pleathe get to the point,” Molly said. “My parenth are ecthpecting me home for dinner thoon.”
“Of course, of course. It would be quite ungentlemanly indeed to take up any more of your time, without having been asked to do so!” He reached again into his shirt pocket, this time pulling out a slip of paper. He held it out to Molly. “This clue came to me in a dream. However! I have found myself unable to read it. It is not for me.”
Slowly Molly advanced forward, then plucked the note from his hand. “I thuppothe if you think I thould have it, I’ll take a look,” said Molly.
“And I hope that look will be one into a rabbit hole, and not merely a puddle gone dry. Now I shall bid you good luck, and take my leave.” With that, he strode right past Molly, out the classroom door. The smell he left in his wake was familiar to Molly, an old sort of cologne she imagined they didn’t make anymore.
The note she held in her hand was written in blue ink with hasty penmanship, on a napkin which bore the impression of a set of teeth on its other side. The note read as follows:
THE SUN SETS OVER THE BRIDGE
THE BRIDGE WEAVES COUNTRY’S THREAD
COLD AND DARK AND WET AND ALONE
SNOW THEN SLUDGE THEN DUST AND DIRT
Well, thought Molly, what a bunch of nonsense. She stuck the note in her back pocket, then made her way out of the classroom.
At dinner, Molly hardly ate a bite. She pushed the food (roast beef and mashed potatoes, there had been cauliflower also, but Molly disliked cauliflower) around her plate until she thought it began to resemble the strange man who’d left her that silly note. Then she dashed her fork through it all, not happy to picture his face.
“Do you not like your dinner, Molly?” her father asked.
“You know your father worked awfully hard on that food,” her mother added.
“I did! Slaved away an hour in that hot kitchen, I did.”
“Is something different than usual, hon? It’s really good.”
“Thank you for noticing! Jerry down at the station let me in on his secret spice.”
“I like it fine,” Molly interjected. “I’m jutht not hungry.”
“Is something wrong, snugglebug?”
Molly stared daggers at her father. She hated when he called her that. “I’m fine,” she said. A silence followed, her parents both staring hard at her. “Okay, well, nobody thowed up to my detective club,” she finally said, turning her eyes down toward her plate.
“Well,” said her mother, giving her father an uneasy glance. “Have you considered maybe there just isn’t a whole lot to detect?”
“Linda!” said her father.
“Paul, I mean… If anyone was going to find Wayne Greene it would’ve happened a long time ago.”
“It’th not about Wayne Greene!” Molly blurted out, standing up. “Jeth B. ith mithing!”
“Molly, honey,” her mother began.
“Molly, sweetie,” her father interjected. “Jessop is dead. I’m sorry.”
“No!” said Molly, walking out of the kitchen and towards the stairs. “There wath no body!”
With that she marched up the stairs and into her bedroom, slamming the door behind her. Tears welling up in her eyes, she pulled the note out of her back pocket and read it again. Stupid, she thought to herself. So stupid.
That night, though, Molly had a dream. She was walking down a dark hallway. The air around her was thick, and she could tell there was something she was looking for, though she did not feel it herself. She merely saw the feeling, like a third person observer, not actually within the body being observed. She saw herself stop, and got the impression then that she’d found it, though she saw nothing and felt no change in the air.
Suddenly she was in her kitchen. It was dark, but through the window she saw the sun hanging in the night sky, emitting no light at all through the painted navy blue. The air had the same thick feeling as before, but now she could see, the room illuminated by a halogen lamp mounted on a hardhat sitting on the dining table. Somewhere deep within she knew that her family owned no such thing. Sitting on the counter was a blue and black monster in the shape of a man. It said nothing, only looked at her.
Then she was transported a final time. She stood in front of a highway overpass. The sun was still out, but it gave no light, and the sky remained the same dark blue colour. The air was still thick. A sound began to rise around her then, the ambient hum of nature, growing louder and louder. As it did, the air began to grow thinner. Soon it was a deafening roar in her ears, and she could breathe as normal.
It was then she awoke. Her alarm clock read four in the morning. Immediately she reached for the note, which she’d cast aside the night before. She read it one more time, then began getting dressed.
The previous year a new overpass had been built just south of town. Its main function was to make the town’s minigolf course, which was located inconveniently on a stretch of southbound highway, more easily accessible. Many townsfolk, Molly included, had objected to what they saw as a strange waste of town funds, and debate among councillors eventually led to a shutdown of municipal government, making the overpass, to date, the town’s most recent infrastructure project. It was here that Molly was headed, racing the sunrise on her bicycle, animated by a conviction which she did not wholly understand.
She arrived just as sunlight was beginning to flood the town, while the sky was still mostly dark. Palms beaded with sweat, she read over the note a final time. For reasons which were unclear to her, and which she was not in the moment inclined to interrogate, she had absolute confidence that there was truth in her dream, and by extension the strange man’s dream. Deductive reasoning, then, led her here.
Having found a bridge which connected a highway (which she supposed must have been what the note meant by “country’s thread,” though she thought it was a clunky bit of metaphor) she began to search for something in the dirt on the side of the road. She didn’t know what to look for, exactly. “Cold and dark and wet and alone” wasn’t much to go off of.
Crouching down in the ditch though, something caught her eye. A bit of glass, poking out of the dirt, just catching the coming sunlight, with a bit of blue and black underneath. She walked over for a closer look.
Half buried in the dirt was a beaker with a lid. The inside was full of blue-black mold. Molly dug it out of the dirt with her hands and saw that the bottom bore a label: “Property of Mr. Ogilvy Grub, Honey Hills Middle School.”
Sitting in the beaker, atop the mold, was a pile of human teeth. Molly shook the beaker around to get a better look at them. It was a full set, not a single one missing.
“Jess B.…” Molly said, softly.
Later that day Molly gave the beaker over to the Honey Hills police department, hoping that an examination of dental records would confirm what she already knew. It wasn’t until a week later that anything came of this, though.
She was alone at home, waiting for her parents to arrive back from work, when she heard a knock at the door. At this point she was antsy for anything that might be linked to the teeth, so she bounded downstairs to open it. Before her loomed a tall man in a black suit, holding a badge in front of him. She didn’t recognize the badge, but it resembled somewhat the one carried by Honey Hills police officers.
“Good afternoon. Are you Molly Martin?” he asked.
“Yeth thir,” she said. Her heart was racing.
“Molly, respectfully, I have to ask you to stop.”
She felt her heart plummet into her stomach. “What?”
“You’ve been poking around in things that aren’t your business. Digging up bodies that are already buried.”
“Ith...ith thith about the dental recordth?”
“That doesn’t concern you.” He crouched down then, to better meet her eyes. “Listen, Molly. You’re a smart kid. Someday I’d love to work alongside you. But right now you’re too young. Stay in school, and stay out of police business.” He stood up then, and left.
With a pit in her stomach so big it felt like it might swallow her whole, Molly went inside, then sank to the floor with her back against the door. For a moment she wallowed in despair, but then a realization hit her.
Someone wants me to stop looking, she thought to herself. That’s all the proof I need. Those were Jess B.’s teeth out there.
On her way out the door for school the following morning, Molly found a box on the front step. A tag on top read “To Molly Martin” in now familiar handwriting.
Inside, Molly found the deerstalker cap she’d abandoned at the inaugural meeting of the Honey Hills Young Detectives’ Society. Next to it was a note, written in messy blue ink.
“Molly,” it said. “You are a real detective.”
With shaky hands she reached into the box and placed the cap on her head. At once any shred of doubt left from the previous day was gone. She strode down her front step with her head held high.
On the walk to school she contemplated Wayne Greene, Jenny Smith, and most of all Jess B. Many secrets remained lost and buried, and she was determined to unveil them.