I always enjoyed reading Purdy boys mysteries when I was young. It was even an idle fancy from time to time that when I grew up I would be a detective. But when I grew up, and had a mystery to face with my main man (best friend) Gerald by my side, being a detective wasn't at all the enjoyable adventure I'd imagined it would be. Instead it was my only means of possibly living instead living a life of hell and remorse.
My parents moved my last remaining grandparent (Grandpa) and me away from the boarding house when I was twelve. Grandpa resented being called old and feeble but stuck by me when my parents decided the neighborhood I'd cherished was full of bad influences. They'd been informed by Principal Wartz of the not-so-singular times I'd had something marked on my permanent record like the day he had suspended me or I had played hokey. Some of the tales of my exploits got around to them. They did not approve of a twelve year old boy with romantic attachments and they did not appreciate Grandpa's senile humor like I did.
Instead they wanted me to go to college. To become wealthy and famous and accomplished and by default then, happy. My parents meant well for me. But at the core of it all it was the same as not caring about me. They took me away from everything I knew and loved.
On the eve of my fifteenth year, I remember her cerulean eyes startling mine after we had tumbled into each other at a bus stop. Just like the good old days. We were teenage runaways for five long days. Our lips crashed and met and we thirsted for one another like the day on which she played Juliet and I was Romeo. We reenacted the play with our souls. With our very bodies. But then just as mysteriously as Helga's arrival in the city where I lived she vanished once more only to send me a postcard three weeks later saying she had returned home and I had sulked home to my parents. Until the eve I had turned eighteen. Technically, I left a half a day before I turned eighteen but by the time anyone found out about it, it would be too late to bring me back. Instead, I flew straight back the boarding house Grandpa had sold me in defiance to my doubting father- his son. I had hoped against all hope when I arrived there that Helga would be waiting for me there on the stoop.
Instead I laid my suitcases down on a dusty street. No one had swept the leaves from the sidewalk for years and the roof leaked in more than a few places. I had to mend what I could myself. And in the meantime I looked for traces of my old life.
There were plenty of children in the neighborhood- none of them with blond hair. I took this both as a discouragement and an encouragement. My friend Gerald was still in touch but Phoebe had pursued her first love of scholarship out of the city long ago. Of most of my childhood friends there was no trace. The old Pataki house was a heartache that stabbed me through so painfully I thought I would die on my feet as I saw it. The windows were boarded shut and I vandalized it to enter, hoping against hope there would be some clue as where its former occupants had gone. Olga Pataki's old trophies still lined the walls. Big Bob's commercial tapes lay about the living room. Upstairs in Helga's room, I lay on her bed and breathed in dust. Then I forced open the lock to her closet. Within in lay more letters addressed to me than I could ever carry. But never sent. My heart stopped.
I needed to know why. And where. Where had the love of my life vanished? It was as if the pain of the entire seven years apart from her were a mere discomfort eclipsed by this grand thing- this loss- as if I had been widowed. Gerald had a a few choice cuss words when I called him past two in the morning. Half-read letters clutched in hand, I pleaded with him to let me know whatever it was he had been holding back from me.
"I'm telling you man," Gerald complained into phone, his complaint coming out more as a baritone rasp than sigh. "Helga stopped talking to me and even Phoebe three years ago. When she dropped out of high school." I placed my hand over the receiver and nearly swooned.
"Dropped out of high school?"
"But then I heard from my mother who used to work with her at the store, ya know, checking out groceries and stuff, that she enrolled in a private academy. Big Bob had plenty of money for her to advance to a... debutant academy. She didn't need public high school. Rhonda Loyd didn't either. Come to think of it, if you find Miss Lloyd or Curly, you might find out something about her. Both their families are loaded, ya know."
"I'm going to the library first thing in the morning," I said slamming down the cold, hard plastic pay phone receiver I was holding. I breathed out the chill, early pre-dawn air then went back inside to lay down on Helga's old bed in the ruins of a house that was once hers.
"She never wrote back," I muttered out loud to myself. "Damn." I had sent her a letter once a week, hoping. She had written a letter every single day it seemed and stashed it away in the closet never to be seen again. So far the letters I had read lacked the knowledge I was seeking. There were simply too many. I would need to enlist help to read them all.
The library had every phone book there was in the city, and then some. Anxiously, I looked for Pataki but found none. Nauseated with worry, I then dialed the first familiar number I could find. In three short rings I was connected to Gerald's mother, I explained to her the situation as calmly and as humbly as I could.
"Helga Pataki?" she said pausing to turn off whatever breakfast food she had been cooking on the stove. "I remember your friend. Everyday when she was a little girl she would come in and buy a snack or drink for herself from the mini-mart. And then when she was a teenager- how can I say this? She was going through a rough patch."
"How so?" I said, my teeth grinding in anticipation. "She missed you. And things weren't going so well at home. Her mother was attending Alcoholics Anonymous Meetings but then she relapsed a few weeks after she filed for divorce. Overturned her car. Poor Helga. The girl was never very fond of her mother but it was hard for her all the same. She worked at the mini-mart with me part-time for half a year before she finally pulled herself together to go back to school. Her father sent her to a private academy uptown. She dropped by from time to time to let me know how she was doing. Helga did very well in school. She even graduated early at the age of seventeen. I remember her sending me prints of her accepting her diploma in her graduation gown and tassel board. A very sweet girl." I sucked in my breath and bit it to keep my exclamation of relief there.
"Can I get copies of the prints? Do know how I can get in touch with her?"
"No, sorry, honey, I don't."
I said my goodbyes and thanks and hung up the phone carefully. I rang Gerald at his apartment next. He had found a job as a department shoe-store clerk handily long before his graduation. These days he was enjoying his freedom although from time to time Phoebe and he met up for a date and to keep in touch before she went back to her pursuit in a doctorate in neurosciences. On this morning, my best friend did not disappoint.
"Yeah. Hey, Arnold," Gerald yawned sleepily into the phone. "Look man, I rang up Phoebe last night and she'll be over to meet us at noon. Slausen 's Ice Cream. Yeah, yeah I know man. You owe me a thousand favors. But this one's on the house. I worry about what happened to the old girl, too. Just finish up at the library, alright?" I grimaced. That meant I had no time to look through the newspaper files for clues. But at least I had a start on the case. And allies.
"Okay Gerald," I said looking at my watch. I would have to peel through the remaining phone books in under two hours. In them, I found only two more old school mates. Harold was married to Big Patty and they now owned Green's Meats. Stinky Peterson had not left his family's old residence- a wooden home that his great-grandparents had dragged into the city during the Great Depression. Stinky had a lot to say about his job frying french fries but he had nothing to say about Helga. He only knew, too, that she had disappeared.
"Such a shame," he said over the phone with his long, southern accent drawl. "Such a sad, sad, tragic tale. With her mother crashing on the interstate and all."
I hung up on Stinky Peterson, cross. I was cross with myself, too, for it was to late to dig into the newspaper files about the crash today. It was already time for me to meet Phoebe and Gerald at Slausen 's.
Mostly I was angry at myself. For allowing Helga to vanish on me like this. For not knowing or being there for her in her difficult times. Why did she write me letters and never send them? Why had she shown up so suddenly after April's Fools day and melt against me so full of tears but also silence? Why hadn't she admitted to me just how bad things had gotten at home? Instead she resisted honesty like she always did. But this time her lips had distracted me from her half-truths. With her body snugly against mine and the sweet smell of her hair all around me I had been like half-drugged and not in the mood for interrogation.
I had dreamed of Helga ever since I had bloomed late at eleven. Every dream I had of a woman either waking or asleep had been of Helga. Over the years we had spent apart I had awaken with my hand curled out as if to touch her so often. I was eager to touch the real thing when she arrived so suddenly at my door. Helga had been as anxious for my touch as I had been for hers. Over the five days we had spent run away together, we slept together intertwined out under the stars or huddled under a porch on some rooftop. We were desperate and wild to be alone together for as long as two fifteen-year olds could. We had been speaking of moving to a small village and lying about our age when Helga disappeared. I had never been so angry or relieved when I got her postcard from our old hometown.
Reliving these thoughts had made my face contort into a horrible mask. My Darker Arnold was showing through. Like the time I had started a riot during a heatwave or broke into Future Tech Industries. I stopped to watch my reflection in the glass and calmed before I pressed open the door to enter Slausen 's. It was a regrettable choice of location by Gerald because this place pained me, too. Helga and I had a date of sorts here, on the way back home from school after I had blinded her by mistake in an April Fool's prank. That night she and I fit together so snugly as we did the tango for the YMAA April Fool's Ball. It was on that night more than any other that I discovered that the chemistry between us was incredible and almost irresistible. But at Slausen's there was a softer memory as well. That of Helga as a person I knew and cared for deeply.
Gerald and Phoebe waited for me inside the restaurant with anxious eyes. I knew my sleeplessness was showing. There were dark circles under my eyes and I had gone unshaved. But I did not give a damn about my appearance on this day.
"Phoebe," I said looking across the table imploringly as I slid into it. "Please, you've got to help me."
"I'll try," said Phoebe fiddling with the straw of the milkshake she had been drinking as she and Gerald waited for me. Gerald lifted a hand high up into the air.
"Three coffees!" he said hailing the waiter. I gave myself permission to have a little hope then. Because now three of us were on the case.