FINDING ME
by
Stormwatcher
Chapter 3
The Chapters
Chapter Three: Life on Elm Street
A few droplets of rain plunked here and there on the windshield and roof as Joe turned onto our street and approached our house. We were both surprised to see that not only was the porch light on, the living-room window was still brightly lit. That meant someone was awake and waiting for us, and that meant there was probably a lecture ahead, or at least a lot of explaining. Nothing unexpected when arriving home at that hour- one o’clock, just as I’d predicted- but not something to look forward to with glee, either.
Our house is on Elm Street, a residential turn-off from High Street. (We heard a lot of jokes when those ‘Nightmare’ horror films came out some years ago.) It’s an older neighborhood, built back when they didn’t used to chop down every tree in sight and then plant a few scrawny saplings when the construction was complete. The whole street is lined with trees, in peoples’ yards and on both sidewalks. The branches overlap above the asphalt and make a sort of tunnel. It does make life difficult in the autumn, all the raking and leaf-blowing, but it’s pretty in spring and great for shade in the summer.
They didn’t use aluminum siding on houses back then, either; our house is one of several stone ones among the younger brick homes. It’s three and a half levels- technically four: basement, ground floor, second floor and attic, but we only count the attic as half because it’s not much more than a crawl space. Nothing up there but air heating and cooling machinery and a lot of itch-producing pink insulation. It’s a pretty big house, with two full baths and four bedrooms on the second floor: Dad’s study, which used to be the smallest bedroom, is at the left end; then Joe’s room, the bathroom, my room, and the master bedroom at the far end with the second bath in there. Downstairs there’s the living room and dining room- there’s a wall between them but it’s more like a partition- the den, the guest room with the half-bath (shower, technically), the kitchen and pantry, and then the stairs going to the basement. The kitchen/back door leads into the garage, so to get to the back yard, we either go out the front and around the house, or into the garage and out the side door.
Right outside that garage side-door is the set of steps that lead up to what Joe and I call our lab. It used to be servants’ quarters, back when people had servants, and it sits right over the garage. We've brought up a couple old chairs, a table, a bookcase and a pair of cabinets to keep our equipment in. Such as it is. We have our fingerprinting and casting kits, a chemical set and a microscope, a couple lock picks, flashlights, twine, old clothes and makeup for disguises- anything we think will be useful. And, yes, magnifying glasses, even if it is a cliché.
We have a pretty wide variety of books in the bookcase, too. There’s a set of encyclopedias and some other single-topic reference books on people and things- like ‘The Empire State Building: A History’. Then there’s some general-knowledge stuff, like a book each on plants, poisons, stars and shells. And we’ve picked up a few rather obscure titles, like ‘A History of Locks’ and ‘Automobiles: Foreign and Domestic: From Steam to Electricity’, and ‘Bombs’, which not only tells you how to disarm a number of bombs, but how to make them, too. We never know what might come in handy, informationally speaking. I just hope I won’t ever need to know too much from that bomb book.
Joe and I were still in Elementary school when we first started showing an interest in solving mysteries. Dad wasn’t too sure he should encourage us; he did teach us some of his skills, but always the sort of thing would be useful whether we became detectives or not. Like observation techniques. We found it fascinating, and the older we got, the more interested we grew. Dad’s enthusiasm didn’t keep pace with ours; he gradually began to show us real detective methods- like fingerprinting- but he always reminded us what a dangerous profession it is. And he was very careful to keep us out of any situations where we might have gotten hurt. (Which isn’t to say we didn’t get into some of those, but never with his approval and usually without his knowledge.) Then Dad got kidnapped while trying to locate a band of smugglers. Joe and I figured out where he might be, checked it out and found him in the old house they were using as a base. By then he’d been held prisoner for over a week and was in pretty bad shape. We did get caught before we could escape, but in the end we got backup in and the smugglers got arrested.
Since then, Dad’s included us a lot more in all the aspects of his work- not just the safe parts- and encouraged us to take on mysteries of our own. When we first started out we made a lot of mistakes and had to get Dad’s help pretty often, but he didn’t mind. He told us it was the best way to get better, to make our mistakes and learn from experience like he did. We've made pretty good progress, too; we work by ourselves a lot now, though we still go to him occasionally for advice or suggestions. Even when he's off in some remote part of the world or deep in something top secret (which happens a lot), he'll call to check in and end up giving us suggestions or warnings- or praise. Other times he asks us to assist him, which is totally fantastic as far as we're concerned, because Dad prefers to work alone most of the time. He's always told us when he's proud of us, but knowing he trusts us and feels we're good enough to be a real help to him is a wonderful feeling.
Dad started as a cop for the New York force, and he got so good that they couldn’t promote him any higher unless they gave him a desk job. He didn’t want that, so he left and started detecting all on his own. He got a reputation in a hurry for being able to solve virtually impossible crimes, and a lot of his methods are now standard practice among police detectives. He's even given classes and lectures and he's held in high respect, even awe, by a lot of very important people. He's not perfect, of course, or he wouldn't ever need help or get into tight spots, but he's a lot more ingenious at getting out of trouble than most people. That's one of the things he's been teaching us lately: how to find and exploit unseen weaknesses, or create them. Joe and I are pretty sure this means he's accepted the idea that we want to be detectives and maybe work with him, if he wants us to. If not, we'll just work together; he might be retired by then. But we haven't asked how he feels, in case asking makes him reconsider and go back to telling us how dangerous it is. It's not likely, especially not after last summer, but we're playing it safe.
Mom, on the other hand... Mom never took our detective training very seriously when we were little. I guess she figured it was a hobby, another stage that we were going through and would get tired of. She didn’t try to stop us or put down our interest, though. I think she was glad that we spent so much time with Dad, but I do remember her urging Dad to do other things with us- ‘not just detective work’. Which he did, and we enjoyed those times, but not as much as we enjoyed mysteries. It wasn’t until we got a few years older and Dad started giving us little assignments that Mom realized how serious we were about it. She didn’t like the idea much, and still doesn’t; she doesn’t say so, nor try to prevent us from taking cases, but we can tell she’s not thrilled about it. I think she hopes we’ll change our minds, because she keeps mentioning what a good lawyer I’d make, and urging Joe to think about football scholarships when he starts college-hunting. I do have a certain amount of success on the debate team, and Joe is definitely one of the Varsity football stars, but those are our hobbies, not the things we want to make our livings doing.
The reason Mom wants to divert us from detective work is because there is a real good chance one or both of us could get seriously hurt while doing it. That scares her, and when Mom is scared, she can get pretty snappy! (We found that out the hard way, after that smuggler case. She didn’t like hearing all the risks we took and all the gunplay that was going on. I think the only reason we didn’t get grounded or worse is because we did find Dad and get him out of trouble long enough for the police to arrive.) Mom works in a cancer-research lab over near the hospital, but before that she had a position as an emergency room technician. She never talks about it much, just says the job burned her out and she needed a change, but I think it explains why she worries so much about us and Dad getting into danger. She’s seen people who’ve actually suffered the things that we’ve almost suffered, and that freaks her out. She knows what we’d look like if we were brought in shot or drowned or frozen or something, so she can sort of visualize it happening to us- never mind that we're obviously fine by the time we're telling her about it.
Since we don't want Mom
to get upset and worry- or yell, or ground us, or forbid us from taking
cases (or all of the above; who knows?)- we've gotten into the habit of
‘editing’ what we tell her, as Joe puts it. We talk about what
happened, but we downplay or leave out the dangerous parts. I do feel
guilty about not being completely honest with her, but it seems the
wisest thing to do, and it’s a precedent we’re used to. Dad seldom
tells her everything that goes on in his cases, either, though he does
usually tell us. I guess somewhere along the way, Joe and I decided that
was another detective lesson. Don’t give full a disclosure unless you
know that the person you’re giving it to can handle it.
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The Hardy Boys belong to Simon and Schuster and the Stratemeyer Foundation. The Hardy Boys Fan Fiction authors of the Hardy Detective Agency have just borrowed them for an adventure or two. The authors promise to put the boys back when they are done with them. The authors do claim copyright to the original characters in this story. Please do not borrow original characters without express permission of the authors.