

"The Banking Boom"

by Alex Perham

copyright Alex Perham 2014

Smashwords Edition

This is for Jen, my editor, my partner, the love of my life. Without her I'd be in a ditch somewhere—or worse, still living with my parents.
COLD OPEN

Like the universe as we know it, our story begins with a bang. Not a big bang, well... a relatively large bang. Our story begins with a relatively large bang. This is the kind of bang that will shatter nearby windows and rumble the ground a bit. A bang that could be felt for roughly a five block radius. Within that five-block radius in Burlington, Oregon, was 112 E. Western Avenue. Within 112 E. Western Avenue is Office 5B. And within Office 5B is the importation firm of Mr. Stephen Bell.

"What the hell was that?" asked Stephen Bell, "Penelope get in here!"

Penelope, his assistant, rushed into Mr. Bell's office, "What is it?"

The sunlight shined through the office window and off her almost black hair. She kept a streak of purple in the front of her hair because it made her feel like she was a member of the X-Men.

Mr. Bell was a 38 year-old importer of exotic cheeses and various crackers. His import shop, Damme Good Cheese – spelt "D-A-M-M-E" after the Belgian cheese of the same name — was the result of a business trip he had taken to Portland, Oregon. It was in Portland where he was first exposed to the sexy secret society of artisan cheese enthusiasts. Stephen had never heard of artisan cheeses before. The only weird, artisan cheese he thought he knew of was muenster. He thought muenster was a weird cheese because he thought it was branded after the television show of the same name from the 1960s. This brave new world of cheeses gave him the kind of excitement he had never felt before. He also thought that being a "Cheese Master" —as the practice is called—seemed like a hilarious thing to have a business card. So, it was a surprise to his wife and everyone else when he returned home from his business trip, quit his job, withdrew his life savings and opened a cheese shop.

Stephen was an average man of average height. His average looks were a great match to the rest of his averageness. His hair was the color of smoldering embers. While his hair was going grey prematurely, the auburn color did its best to hold its ground for as long as possible. Stephen's clothes always fit him a little big. It wasn't that he didn't know his true size but, instead, that he felt like clothes should give you a little room to wiggle.

"I said, what the hell was that?" Mr. Bell said in a way that was as friendly as you can say something of that nature. That is to say, he said it with a smile. The warm smile of someone who was just happy to have company.

"I ... uh..." Penelope said as she stuck her head outside the window.

There was another explosion followed by more screaming.

Penelope swung her head back into the office, "I think there was an explosion."

This is The Banking Boom.

ACT I

"Well, what do you see?" asked Stephen.

"Well, there's many people running up High Street," Penelope ducked back in and told Stephen in a manner that was kind of rude.

"Well, stick your head out the window again and ask someone."

"Why can't you–oh, all right. Whatever." Penelope stuck her head out the window. People were running up High Street in the direction away from the blast. In the mass of 20 or so people–Burlington, OR isn't that large of a town–there was a young, dopey looking man with a red beard around Penelope's age. She called out to him. "Hey! What's happened?" The dopey man stopped and looked around for where the voice was coming from. "Up here, ya doof." The red-bearded man turned to Penelope.

"The State Bank's exploded," shouted the man we're going to name Ben because Ben is a nice name.

Penelope ducked her head back in to the office. "The State Bank blew u--"

"--I heard, isn't that exciting" Stephen interjected with a weird and unsettling sense of glee in his voice.

At first Penelope was a little annoyed that Mr. Bell put her through all of this only to take the satisfaction of relaying the information away from her. Then she was a little worried at how excited Stephen seemed to be based on this revelation. Ben, on the other hand, was still standing outside waiting for Penelope to stick her head back out so he absorb her beauty one last time. Ben was smitten. Ben once fell in love with a gorgeous toaster but that's a story for a different series.

Penelope's beauty was one that wasn't typical of media norms. Penelope wasn't a large girl by any means but she was bigger than petite. Big enough that celebrity gossip magazines would talk about how she's let herself go and that the counterculture would applaud her for looking like a real woman. While the last part was true, she looked as real as any woman could look, this wasn't because of some magnificent design. Penelope just liked pizza. Chicken nuggets, too.

"We should go check-out the scene," suggested Stephen absolutely bouncing with excitement.

"...Why," Penelope asked as she backed away from his desk and toward the door to his office.

"Maybe they need help collecting all of their monies. You like money, don't you Penelope?"

"Of course," she said, "why else would I be working here?" she added under her breath.

Stephen Bell stood up, collected his brief case and he opened the bottom drawer of his desk. He rifled around through his things and found a small, leather wrapped package which he slipped into the breast pocket of his suit jacket. He patted the placement of the package and said, "We should go. They're going to need our help."

"Our help?"

"Who else but we to solve this here mystery." Stephen was very happy with how Seussical that sentence came out. He straightened his jacket and headed out the door, leaving Penelope behind.

"I don't think this was part of the job description," she shouted after him.

Stephen stuck his head back in through the door and grinned, "I hired you as my assistant and for case cracking, I'm definitely going to need an assistant. Doesn't solving mysteries seem exciting?" Mr. Bell's face was lit up like the first time a seven year-old had seen DisneyWorld. Penelope couldn't help but find his sudden eagerness a little contagious.

"Oh, all right but I better be getting a bonus for this," she said submissively.

"If we can afford to, it'll be yours," Stephen responded.

Penelope did not think that sounded promising.

∞

Before we go any further, let's go back. Back to the day that Stephen Bell had hired Penelope Prescott to be his assistant. It was the second week of August. Penelope had spent the entire summer after she left graduate school mostly sitting around, watching VHS tapes of kids movies, eating chocolate ice cream and hoping for a sudden event horizon that pulls the entire Earth back into 1993. After getting a her Masters of Physics, she didn't really know what she wanted to do with her life. She moved back home, into the same room she'd slept in every day from 1990 to 2004, where she proceeded to, pretty much, turn into a piece of furniture. All of her friends either never came home from college four years ago or they've started careers in smartphone app development or something equally glamorous and modern. She had no reason to leave the house.

Penelope's parents seemed to understand to some degree.

"Maybe she just needs a break," her father reasoned, "six straight years of academics is intensive for anyone."

Penelope's mother had a little bit more reservation, "What if she's depressed? What if she never gets a job and we're stuck paying her allowance until we're 80 and she has to put us in a home and she just collects our social security?"

The truth was that Penelope reserved all of her self-loathing and job hunting for the after hours when everyone was sleeping. It wasn't that she didn't want to find a job, she was just afraid of being an adult. After two months of no responses from various laboratories and universities that she had contacted in hopes of applying the degree she's going to have to pay for, she started to just look for anything — anything not fast food. That's when she got the call.

"Hi. Yes, hi. This Stephen Bell-Ward," said the man on the phone, "is this Penelope Prescott?"

"It is."

"I was just looking over your résumé and I think you've got a great skill-set for the position I'm offering." Mr. Bell-Ward pronounced "résumé" in a way that made you feel the accents that hang over each E. He paid good money for his copy of Rosetta Stone: French 1 and he was going make sure he used it often.

"I do? I'm sorry, I really don't remember what this position was for," Penelope was slightly embarrassed.

"Oh, don't worry about it, I'm sure you put out many résumés," Stephen said in a very understanding tone with an almost uncomfortable sense of humility. "It was a position as a personal assistant."

"Oh! Are you guy who owns that weird business downtown?"

"Weird?"

"I mean I'm sorry. I didn't mean weird like weird. I meant just... I don't know. Odd?" Penelope really thought she had painted herself into a corner.

Stephen laughed, "It's all right, importing artisan cheeses may seem weird to the civilians but it's incredibly fascinating once you get into it."

"I'm sure it is, I mean someone doesn't just go into that sort of thing on a whim." She said, which is entirely not true. Most artisan cheese masters do, indeed, pursue a life in cheese on a whim.

"Great! You start Monday. I'll see you in my office at 9 A.M.! Don't be late you'll miss all the excitement."

"I... what? Excitement?"

The phone clicked. Penelope tried to call back and no one answered. Mr. Bell hung up so fast it left her lingering on some unanswered questions. What kind of personal assistant needs a degree in physics? Who just calls someone and hires them on the spot? And most importantly, what is the deal with Stephen Bell-Ward?

∞

When Stephen Bell quit his job, withdrew his life savings and opened a cheese shop, he also alienated himself from his then wife, Brittany Ward. Not because he threw himself into his business or anything like that. He alienated himself from her by no longer being profitable in the Bell-Ward organization. And for Brittany–who never took his name despite him taking hers—it was time to fire him from the company, so to speak. Their divorce was a particularly hard on Stephen, who spent most of his time sitting his import shop hoping for someone to come by that he could talk to about his problems. Nobody ever came.

After the divorce was finished and the majority of their combined assets were awarded Brittany, Stephen Bell moved into an efficiency apartment on the west side of town. He made sure that cats were allowed because he figured that after Brittany left him, he might as well double-down and own an army of cats — the word "army" in this instance means four. He named them Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Michelangelo – because Mikey was his favorite. They were his family and he made them Christmas stockings. It would have been really cute if it wasn't so sad.

∞

When Penelope and Stephen arrived at the bank the police had already got there. The scene of the explosion had been taped off and had a number of fairly generic looking officers—you know the type, the ones with the thick necks who are really bulky and you can't really tell if they're buff or just fat—maintaining the parameter.

The parameter was about a half-block radius from the site of the explosion. The explosion itself only seemed to blow out the back left corner of the bank. There wasn't much structural damage done to the building itself and the lack of ambulances made it seem that any injuries were minor at best.

"Well, I guess this is it. Nothing to do here. The cops are on it," said Penelope like a great weight was lifted off of her shoulders. She spun around on her heel and tried to head back to the office.

Stephen grabbed her by the wrist, "Please, just humor me," he looked her in the eye and hoped that his years of social engineering correspondence courses had actually taught him anything. "This really means a lot to me."

She couldn't say no. She really couldn't — at that moment a detective interrupted the weird moment they were about have together.

"Hey, you two!" the detective yelled from a distance, "nothing to see here! We've already have enough of you Sherlock Holmes types, today. Go home."

"Sherlock types," Stephen questioned Penelope, "what does he mean by that?"

"People who think they can solve crimes and mysteries, I guess."

"That's where we're different. We're more like Columbo. Penelope, wait here. " Stephen took off confidently toward the detective.

"Sir, I asked you to go home and do not impede justice," the detective said in a matter-of-fact tone.

"Excuse me detective, what's your name," asked Stephen.

"I know yours, Mr. Bell, " responded the detective.

"Oh! Have you been to my cheese shop?" Stephen lit up with excitement. Is this what it's like to be a celebrity? he wondered to himself.

"No." The word was like a knife through Stephen's heart.

"I... Uh... Have we met?" he asked sheepishly.

"My name is Ricard Alvarez, Mr. Bell. I was at your divorce proceedings. I'm your ex-wife's new husband." Alvarez continued on to unintentionally twist that knife.

Ricard Alvarez was a very conventionally handsome man, exceptionally handsome for a member of the Burlington police force. His strong features were nearly god like, his brown eyes piercing and his head of hair, a jungle of follicle intensity. Not only did Stephen pale in comparison to Ricard but Stephen was literally pale in comparison. Ricard's bronze skin tone made Stephen look like the color of uncooked dough. It was easy for Stephen to understand why his ex-wife would go for Detective Alvarez, he was also beginning to fall in love with Ricard's eyes.

"Mr. Bell-Ward," Penelope joined the two men standing at the line that had been taped off, "I think we need to get back to the office."

"Your friend is right," Detective Alvarez folded his arms, "you should probably get out of here."

Stephen's shoulders dropped, "I guess you're right. Come along, Penelope."

As Stephen walked away, Penelope hung back for a minute.

"I'm so sorry about this Detective," said Penelope very apologetically.

"No need to apologize, we deal with a fair number junior detectives when something big like this happens. You get used to it." Detective Alvarez's tone was condescending in a way that is usually reserved for children talking about kids younger than they are.

"Did you really just say 'junior detectives'?" asked Penelope with a grimace on her face.

"I... I guess, I did."

"Don't be a dick," Penelope said frankly, "you're too pretty for that. So, just don't."

Detective Alvarez – taken aback — just nodded.

"Penelope! Leave the handsome, confident, strong jawed detective alone," Stephen yelled in a defeatist tone. "We've bothered him enough. Let's go back to the office."

When Penelope rejoined Mr. Bell she found him a couple of blocks away, in the alley behind the bakery.

"What are you doing back here," scolded Penelope.

Stephen was crouched down on the ground near the wall of the bakery, "Penelope, come here! Lookit what I found."

As Penelope came closer, she found that on the ground in front of Stephen was a ziplock bag and a glove.

"Do you notice anything?" he quizzed.

"That you pick up garbage," Penelope answered. That may or may not be the right answer.

"No, the glove and the baggy both have this fine grey residue on it. Look!" Stephen forced the baggy and the glove into Penelope's face. The dust flew off the glove and into her nose and mouth causing her to cough like a someone taking their very first drag of a cigarette.

"Get that out of my face," she coughed. "It smells like fireworks."

"Exactly! It's probably explosives residue, which means-"

"-Which means we should probably take it to the Detective." Penelope said with the reasoning of a sane person.

"Close, it means we've found a clue. And a clue means we have a mystery to solve!"

"No! Give me those," Penelope ripped the bag and the glove out of Stephen's hand. "We're not Scooby and his gang, we're not solving any mysteries. We're just going to take this evidence back to Detective..." Penelope realized that she never asked him what his name was.

"Alvarez."

"We're just going to take this evidence back to Detective Alvarez and we're going to go back to the office-shop and we're going to go back to our normal boring lives and go home at the end of the day like normal boring people."

"Penelope, please. Be reasonable here." The irony of this sentence was lost in the absurdity of the situation. "I just need something in my life right now."

"Why don't you try yoga or Buddhism or something?" Penelope has dabbled in both of those things. She thought they made her a more interesting person.

"It's just like – I think my cats are starting to resent all the time I spend at home. Then with someone as ruggedly handsome like Alvarez being my ex's new husband."

"Does someone have a crush?"

"It's just..." his eyes softened, his shoulders dropped. "I need this."

This look, the desperation in his voice, it killed part of her defenses. "I don't know. We could go to jail for this. I don't know about you but I've never been to jail and I'd rather my first time be for something cooler or more noble than pretending to be the Watson to your Holmes."

"Just this once. Please. I'll take all the responsibility for this. I'll say as your employer, I was forcing you to take part in this."

"Well, aren't you?"

Stephen did not take this in the half-joking way that Penelope intended. "You know what I mean. It's completely on me."

"I will help you but under one condition, you can't let me go to jail."

Stephen's shoulders picked up, "absolutely!" The willingness to live returned to his voice. "I'll keep you safe."

There was an awkward pause. The earnestness in Stephen's tone took Penelope by surprise. Penelope realized that as the pause lingered, Stephen started to look visibly troubled by it. "So... uh..." Her eyes searched the ground. "Where do we start?"

"Well... Let's meet back here behind the bakery at nine o'clock sharp." His eyes scanned the wall. "Go home and change into something black. We're gonna have to investigate under the cloak of darkness so that flatfoot – Alvarez – doesn't nail us for snoopin'."

"Okay, new condition. I'll help you as long as you stop talking in 1930s noir slang."

"Fine."

As Stephen and Penelope went back their homes to change into their investigative garments, Detective Alvarez picked up some of the rubble of the bank wall and fashioned a sculpture. He called it the "Hand of God." One of the officers at the scene suggested to Alvarez that he submit it to an art festival. The Detective did just that, it won best in show. He later sold it for 1,500 dollars. It was a very impressive start to his career as an artist. Was there anything this handsome detective wasn't good at?

∞

At a quarter 'til nine, Stephen Bell-Ward arrived at the scene of the explosion. As he made his approach he noticed someone else rustling through the rubble.

"You there! What are you doing?" he shouted toward the shadowy figure. In response, the shadowy figure shot at him.

"What the hell!"

GUNSHOT

"Knock it off!"

GUNSHOT

"Get the hell outta here!" yelled the gruff voiced shadowy figure and then continued to shoot in Stephen's direction again.

"Listen here!"

GUNSHOT

"All right, you have a point. Go on about your business," Stephen shouted as he went tumbling into the alleyway behind the bakery. He found the dumpster full of baked goods to be the best place to hide while he waited for Penelope to arrive. Thirteen minutes later, Penelope arrived to find Stephen sleeping in his secret hiding location.

"Mr. Bell-Ward," she asked as she gently shook him, fearing that he accidentally ate rat poison he found behind the dumpster or something equally stupid that you would normally associate with behavior of a cocker spaniel.

Stephen startled awake, "Go away! I didn't see anything!"

"Mr. Bell-Ward, it's me. Penelope."

"Oh, Penny! Thank God you're here!"

"I prefer you call me Penelope–wait, why are you asleep behind this dumpster?"

"I was hiding behind the dumpster. I got here a little early and I found someone digging around the scene. They began shooting in my general direction. With a gun!"

A sense of panic rose up inside Penelope, "you know, maybe this whole investigation thing wasn't a great idea."

"No, Penny–"

"Penelope."

"Penelope. Where's your sense of adventure?"

"My sense of adventure is sitting at home, browsing the internet for slash-fiction about Power Rangers."

"I don't know even know what that means. You never wanted to be a detective?"

"I did like Harriet the Spy."

"Well, Harriet, let's investigate. Should I get you a notebook?"

This stream of logic really shouldn't work on Penelope, she thought to herself in third person. She was a well adjusted 20-something that came from a loving, upper-middle class home. There is no reason for her to do anything brash or stupid and yet, she found her self following Stephen Bell-Ward to the scene of the explosion.

"The voice of the man who shot at me, it sounded strangely familiar," Stephen said as he crouched down and started to dig through the rubble.

"Familiar how? Like, 'local commercial voiceover guy' familiar?"

"Nah, more like 'guy who yelled at me for taking his parking spot' familiar." Stephen stood up and gazed out over the mess of stone and dust. "I wish what I knew I was looking for."

"Well, did you see where this mystery man was looking?" Penelope asked as she felt herself starting to get invested in this whole mystery-solving nonsense.

Stephen stared out over the rubble looking for a landmark that he could base his shadowy memory of where the shadowy figure was standing in the shadows. It was as difficult as it sounds. "I think maybe it was somewhere over here." Stephen gestured to a spot that was totally and completely wrong.

Penelope scanned the rubble for anything that stood out to her. She saw some charred safe deposit drawers, something that looked like it may have at one point been a Christmas tree, and then something that fired off some dormant synapses that recalled a prerequisite chemistry class – an exploded 5 gallon jug of water. "Could be this," she asked as she lifted the pinwheel shaped piece of blown out plastic.

"A water jug?"

"Yes, exactly."

"I don't think I follow."

"There are more over here." She rushed over to some more melted, grotesquely disfigured pieces of blue plastic.

"So what you're saying is that our explosives expert blew up the bank's storage room?"

"Sort of. Take one of these jugs back to the office. You still have that glove and baggy right?" Penelope began to take off down the street.

"I do. Wait, where are you going?"

She stopped. "I need to get some supplies from my apartment. Bring all of the stuff we've found to the office. I'll be there in 20."

∞

After the incident with the mysterious, shadowy gunman at the bank, Stephen Bell had been a little on edge. Back at the office, while he waited for Penelope's return, he heard someone slam their car door which made him jump. Then two people were having an argument and he thought he heard the voice of his assailant and hid in the utility closet behind the toner for the copier. Finally, he opened a can of soda and nearly gave himself a heart attack. So, when Penelope tried to use the key Stephen gave her to enter the office – which had a history of not working well– he completely forgot that Penelope was even supposed to arrive.

"I told you, I didn't see anything! How'd you find me! Don't shoot!" Stephen shouted in fear while Penelope finally got the key to unlock the door after numerous unsuccessful attempts. With the swinging of the door, Stephen dove under his desk.

"Mr. Bell-Ward, it's me," Penelope assured him. There was a pause.

"Are you alone?" he shouted out from under his desk.

"Yes."

Stephen slowly rose his head from behind the desk, his eyes just barely breaking the horizon of the desktop. Once he confirmed that Penelope hadn't been kidnapped and forced back to the office by the gruff-voiced monster that he'd built in his head, Stephen crawled out from under the desk.

"Jesus, I'm sorry. It's been a rough 2 hours while I waited."

"It's only been 30 minutes."

"...Yeah?" Stephen suddenly considered that maybe he doesn't know how to tell time or that maybe, by some amazing stroke of scientific anomaly, time does travel much slower in his office than the outside world. What, it's possible, he told the doubting voice of reality in his head. He noticed that Penelope was carrying a suitcase. "What's in the suit case?"

Penelope thumped the suitcase down on the desk and unclasped the spring-loaded latches. "It's my chemistry set," she explains as the lid opens.

"Why do you own a chemistry set?"

"I minored in chemistry in college."

"Why are you working for a goof like me?" This was a question that passed Penelope's mind regularly and every attempt to answer it was followed with a slightly depressing thought about jumping in front of the next passing train. This time was different.

"You're nice," she replied surprised to feel that answer pass over her lips. "I mean, I feel like I get good karma from this. Like helping someone with special needs," Penelope added in a lame attempt to course correct from being what she thought was too nice. She then realized that she may have gone too far in the other direction and now sent the conversation car careening off the cliff into a small village of cute anthropomorphic pandas which all died in the fiery crash. She internalized this visualization and went back to emptying her chemistry set onto the desk.

Stephen looked down at the ground feeling like a dog who just received a verbal lashing for farting on the bed–the feeling of being completely unsure what they did wrong.Then, it hit him, "Wait, you went to college?"

That synched it for Penelope, he really didn't read her resume at all did he? She let out the tiniest sigh, "Anyway, the amount of water jug remnants scattered around near the site of the explosion set off a trigger," she explained. "At the scene of the explosion, did you notice anything?"

"I... did," Stephen answered in a manner that just radiated confidence — that is, if confidence had the complete opposite definition than the one that Messrs Merriam and Webster had agreed upon.

The vein of observation had been opened, "There was very little fire damage on anything in the blast area, right?"

"Y-yeah." Stephen was really rocking this whole confidence thing.

"This tells me that it was a force based explosion and did not use combustion. Something unlike TNT or C-4," Penelope explained. "Something like a concussion."

"Like being hit with a large, explosive hammer," he added finally catching up to speed.

"Exactly." Penelope started pouring a blue chemical, that looked suspiciously like window cleaner, into a beaker and began swishing it around. "On these little bits of plastic from the jugs, there should be some residue left from whatever caused this explosion."

"And you work... for me?" This fact was still lingering in the back Stephen Bell's brain and it stuck its way out of his mouth.

"Focus." She added the plastic to the almost glowing blue fluid. "If this solution changes color, we'll have more information about our explosives and maybe our explosives expert." She started swishing the plastic around in the beaker, like someone who knows what they're doing at a wine tasting.

Stephen and Penelope focused their gaze on that swirling piece of plastic, as if they were going to be able to will the color into changing. After a moment of swirling like a bottle tornado from a fifth grade science fair, a lime green color started to cloud the otherwise transparent blue solution like blood in water. "Green!" Stephen shouted. "What does green mean?"

Penelope pulled out a book from her suitcase of wonders and started thumbing through it. "I was never good at this part." She stopped on a page that held a table with colorful squares, she tore the page out of the book and held it up to the beaker.

"What'd you do that for?" Stephen questioned. "Now you're gonna have to tape that page back when you're done."

"That's it! I should have known it, I've been so dumb."

"No you haven't, Penelope."

"I what?"

"You haven't been dumb. You're like the smartest person I've ever met."

"I, uh, thanks." Penelope blushed. It wasn't that she hadn't heard that before but it was always from people who had some kind of personal investment in her happiness.

"What should you have known?"

"It's some kind of alkali metal that was mixed with the water in the water cooler jugs." Penelope was never very good at remembering what reacted with water.

On the subject of the periodic table, Stephen was so far out of his element that he would not have even realized that this sentence contained a pun. The last time he took chemistry was in high school. Unfortunately for Stephen's intelligence and learnedness, he shared the class with a number of girls he found to be exceptionally pretty. He spent the majority of the time fantasizing about them. If not the pretty chemistry girls, then Star Trek. And sometimes both of these things together. He really liked The Next Generation—especially Counselor Deanna Troi.

"But which one?" Penelope began furiously flipping through the pages of her chemistry book to find the answer. "Why don't these things have a control F function?!" she cursed toward the sky.

"There's an index," Stephen said sheepishly, not wanting her to turn the wrath she had toward the sky in his direction.

"Of course." She closed the book and opened it back up to the front. She turned three pages, spotted the word alkali and turned directly to that page. It was on the other side of the page she had just torn out. Penelope experienced series of emotions at that moment. Embarrassment, self-loathing, anger, then followed back to embarrassment.

"So which is it? Which alkali thingy caused the explosion?" asked Stephen getting restless.

"The only thing that would cause such an explosion without having an absurd amount would be rubidium! It's like super volatile! It and water together are like bad news."

"Bad news bears?"

"Yes. Very bad news bears." She liked that phrase, bad news bears. She repeated it in her mind, imagining that this phrase would catch on with her group of friends and she could see herself as a tastemaker. Then she realized that all her friends went out on their own and became their own people. Trying not to let that depress her, Penelope turned her thoughts toward her parents. Maybe they'd think it was hip. Then she questioned, what is my mind?

"So if we know what caused the explosion, does that mean we're close to know who caused it?" Stephen wondered out loud.

"Maybe but it may take some work to find out where someone would get rubidium." Penelope stressed.

"I just figured they probably got it off the Internet," said Stephen nonchalantly.

"Of course! You genius!" Penelope hugged Stephen.

"Me genius?"

"I'm sure there are a ton of places where you can order rubidium online. I wouldn't have thought of that." Penelope was really stuck in the mindset of a 1950s radio detective and forgot that they live in the 21st Century and that things Amazonian in nature do exist.

"It's getting pretty late, you should probably head back. We'll look into this tomorrow," Stephen said finding that his eyelids were getting heavy. He stretched and yawned, knocking over one of the graduated cylinders that Penelope had taken out of her suitcase sending it crashing to the floor. "I'll replace that."

"It's okay," she said although she didn't really mean it, "I didn't like that one anyway." Penelope took a look at the mess of beakers and chemicals on the desk and decided that it wasn't worth cleaning up at the moment. "Do you mind if I keep this stuff here?"

"Nah, not at all. I'll probably sleep here in the office tonight anyway. I think either Blinky or Inky was trying to smother me in my sleep last night." Stephen said in a manner that was surprisingly deadpan for how ridiculous the sentence that accompanied it sounded. "I can't really tell those two apart."

"O... kay." Penelope took a step back. "I'm gonna just get out of here then. Goodnight Mr. Bell-Ward."

As she started toward the door, Stephen called out to her. "Goodnight, Penny-elope, good work, today." He tried to correct himself but failed miserably.

She stopped and turned back toward Stephen Bell, "It's okay if you want to call me Penny. I'll allow it."

Stephen's face lit up, "really?! Look at us, a couple of detectives. Partners. 'Steve and Penny, Private Investigations'! You can call me Steve if you'd like."

"I think I'll just stick with Mr. Bell-Ward for now."

"Yeah, alright, one step at a time."

Penelope laughed, "See you tomorrow."

And as she walked out the door, Stephen thought about the day he had how much had changed and how he felt like it was the start of something significant. He opened the bottom most drawer on the left side of his desk and pulled out a pillow and a blanket. He pushed some of the chemistry stuff off to the side and rested his pillow on the desk. Just before he rested his head, Stephen stopped to think for a second. Did he really want to sleep that close to whatever those chemicals could be? He moved his office chair out of the way and placed the pillow on the floor under the desk where he proceeded to lie down in his makeshift capsule bed and go to sleep for the night.

As the sun rose the next morning, everyone started to stir in their beds. From Penelope's room in her parents house that was just the way it had been for the last 11 years to Stephen Bell who spent the better part of the night dreaming that he was being chased by shadowy figures with chemistry text books and to Stephen's apartment full of cats who just appreciated the night to themselves. No one—especially the cats—had no idea how big today was actually going to be.

ACT II

It was few hours after sunrise when Penelope headed over to the office of Steve and Penny Private Investigations née Damme Good Cheese. It was early enough that you could still get a fast food breakfast. It was the kind of hour that was just after all responsible adults arrived at their dissatisfying yet lucrative normal people jobs but before the creative types who spent the night bar-tending as a means to pay the rent while they worked on their art.

At this hour, Stephen was still asleep under his desk. He remained asleep when Penelope unlocked the front door to the cheese shop. As she walked through the shop, struggling to carry two coffees and bag of breakfast sandwiches, he stayed fast asleep. When she finally made it to the office in the back of the shop, she greeted Stephen warmly, "Morning Mr. Bell, I brought—"

Stephen interrupted by snoring loudly.

"—breakfast." Stephen responded by whimpering softly and then snoring some more.

Penelope set the coffees and the sack of sausage muffin burgers on the desk and crept around the side of the desk to find Stephen wrapped in a blanket, like a burrito of warmth and sleepy-time. She jostled him lightly to no response. Then she jostled him somewhat firmly, "Mr. Bell, it's time to get up."

More snoring.

"C'mon Mr. Bell, wakey wakey!" Penelope was beginning to feel like she was just being ignored. "Get up!" She jostled harder.

"No! No! Get off my face!" Stephen was finally awake. He shot up off the pillow smacking his head on the bottom of his desk for the second time in 24 hours. When the pain subsided after a minute, he slid out from under the desk to realize that he wasn't with his cats after all. "Oh, Penny! Guten morgen!"

Penelope worried that hitting his head may have made Stephen German.

"Have you been here long?" Stephen worried that he might have been talking in his sleep again. "I didn't say anything, did I?"

"You whimpered a little but nothing else."

"Oh, good." A sense of relief washed over him. "I just know that sometimes I talk about my feelings in my sleep," Stephen explained when it could have just been left unsaid.

"I brought breakfast," Penelope interjected, ignoring the slightly uncomfortable feeling that wanted to linger in the room.

"Oh good! What is it? Eggs? Pancakes? Sausage?"

She took a long look into the bag, "I think it's all three. Together. In a sandwich."

"Great! My favorite!" His eagerness to eat superseded the step one usually reserves for taking the wrapper off first. With a mouth full of breakfast and paper, Stephen asked, "Did you sleep well?"

"I slept all right," she responded. "I did have a really weird dream."

"Was it the shadowy men with the chemistry books?"

"Um, nope. Not this time at least." This was a nightmare Penelope had once in the past. In this nightmare, the shadowy figures were representations of stress of picking a major and the chemistry books were a suggestion of the path she felt she was supposed to take. Stephen's nightmare, on the other hand, lacked subtly and depth.

Penelope took a seat on the other side of Stephen's desk and took out her laptop from her messenger bag and laid it on the desk.

"Oh, are you ready to get to work?" asked Stephen.

"Yeah, sure," Penelope said. "Just let me check Facebook real quick. It'll only be a minute."

As she was scrolling through her news feed, she scrolled past several posts her mom made about the dogs in their home who live like kings. She scrolled past the video of the all girls choir rendition of "Where is My Mind?" by Pixies. She scrolled past KLWT's post about the bank explosion and stopped on the picture of INTERNET HEARTTHROB CHARACTER ACTOR in public dressed as his character in BIG COMIC BOOK MOVIE BLOCKBUSTER. Wait, what was that? She thought as she scrolled back up. She clicked the news article about the explosion. "They talked about the explosion on channel 5!"

"Oh! I wanna see!" Stephen rushed around to the other side of the desk and began reading over her shoulder. "Look! Someone stole a truck full of fertilizer off at a rest stop 45 miles from here." He pointed to the Local News section of the site.

"Let's just worry about one thing at a time. Can we?"

"I supposes."

"They're saying that the police found gunpowder at the scene of the explosion," she said with a heavy layer of confusion in her tone. "That doesn't make sense."

"Maybe you were wrong Penny." Stephen gave her a pat on the back. "You gave it your best effort."

"Maybe they're wrong."

"Don't take it so personally. This is only your first investigation. And anyway, I found the baggy and the glove with the gunpowder on it. All signs point to... gunpowder."

Suddenly, Penelope had perhaps one of her greatest movements of clarity thus far in her 27 year-old life. It was second only to that time, at three in the morning, she realized how sad it must be for a dragon to never be able to blow out their birthday candles. She may or may not have been high. "What if!" She tried to buy time while she made sense of her thoughts as if this was debate "What if those two things were planted there?"

"You mean, like, on purpose?"

"Where did you find them again?"

"I found them on the sidewalk a few blocks away from the explosion."

"Just out in the middle of the sidewalk?"

"Pretty much," Stephen said not really knowing where this whole thing was going.

"What if I told you they were a diversion? A red herring to throw the police off the scent to buy them some time before they strike again." Penelope's brain was firing on all cylinders.

"Then that would mean we have the upper hand...?" Stephen's was trying.

"Absolutely!"

"But where do we go from here," Stephen suddenly felt lost.

Penelope reached over to the glove, picking it up and inspecting it. Expecting it to answer the question for her. She turned it inside out and inspected the fibers on the inside. She spent a good minute looking over every inch as Stephen waited for a response. That's when she noticed, the glove had answered.

"This seems like a good place to start." She tore the tag off the interior of the glove and handed it to Stephen.

"The Glove Box?" Stephen read the tag out loud, including the question mark.

The question mark was a sore subject for the manufacturer of the glove, Wilson Reynolds, who had the fabric tags ordered from a website that assured quality but did not have Quality Assurance. When Wilson filled out the online form for what he wanted embroidered into the tag, the website insisted that the box where the text went included a special character. Confused by this, Wilson typed a question mark. Of course, none of this mattered to Penelope who was piecing together all of the puzzle bits that she'd accumulated thus far.

"The glove is custom made," Penelope explained. "Whoever had the glove made probably has a profile at this shop and there is where we'll find our explosion-er," she trailed off. "I don't know what the proper term is there."

"To The Glove Box then!" Stephen grabbed is jacket and began to head out the door as if he came up with all of this on his own.

Penelope let out a sigh, picked up the glove off the desk and went after him. "Mr Bell-Ward, we'll need the glove," she called out after him as they both left the shop.

∞

On this morning, Penelope wasn't the only one to have had an important discovery. The cats that currently have the run of Stephen's apartment discovered that without Stephen in the apartment and without being gifted the evolutional glory that is opposable thumbs, it is hard for them to feed themselves.

I TOLD YOU, Blinky said to Inky, Pinky, and Michelangelo in the manner of communication that only cats can understand, WE SHOULD HAVE THOUGHT THIS OUT A LITTLE BIT MORE.

I THINK YOU'RE MISTAKEN, Pinky defended himself, I WAS THE ONE WHO THOUGHT WE NEEDED TO KEEP THE HUMAN AROUND.

COME OFF IT, Inky blasted the two of them, WE WERE ALL APPRECIATIVE OF A GOOD NIGHT'S SLEEP.

I JUST WANT TO EAT PIZZA, said Michelangelo being true to himself and his namesake.

∞

Also making important discoveries this morning, Detective Ricard Alvarez — who routinely woke up at the brink of dawn — woke up in the morning to find that he actually, finally, had a day off. This was not his only discovery, though. As he stretched and contemplated whether or not he should return to bed, he noticed for the first time, how beautiful the sun looked as it crested over the top of the hills.

I need oil pastels, thought Detective Alvarez. I need to show everyone what beauty I see.

The recent Mrs. Alvarez (née Ward, never Bell) began to move around subconsciously in bed to take up the space that Ricard had previously occupied, like one does when they've slept next to someone for more than a few nights. She rolled over and barely opened her eyes to see Detective Alvarez standing at the window.

"Ric," she barely croaked, "you don't work today. Come back to bed."

"Have you ever seen a sunrise so beautiful?" asked Ricard as he started to perform the Warrior Pose he learned from the one yoga class he took.

"Yeah, it's great." Brittany didn't even lift her head.

"I don't think you understand. I have to show the world. I'm gonna go for a jog and maybe by that art supplies store." He leaned down and kissed her on the forehead.

Brittany responded but incoherently, she was already back to sleep.

∞

The Glove Box was a small factory on the westside of town. It did very little to demand your attention and when it did, it was in the kind of building that you'd drive past everyday and ask yourself, "what's in there?" or, "why doesn't someone turn this into a music venue?" or even worse, "why don't they just tear that down and build a Starbucks or an Arby's or something?" If anyone in town bothered to walk anymore and were to walk by the factory, they'd be close enough to read the sign on the door that stated what exactly it was.

Penelope was keen to ride her bike around town (weather permitted) and had ridden past The Glove Box on more than three occasions — one of which being the night she graduated high school and wanted to avoid seeing the supposedly fun water balloon war that everyone in her senior class was going to instigate in the town square. This made her very familiar with the location of The Glove Box which came in handy given that Stephen insisted on driving although he had no idea where this place actually was.

"I think it's on Monmouth," said Stephen, blindly guessing.

"I'm telling you, it's on Broadway," Penelope insisted. "It's like 12 blocks west of our office."

"I've never seen a factory over there."

"When was the last time you were over there?"

"Just the other day," he said indignantly. "I was just thinking about how there really should be a Starbucks on that side of town."

"Just trust me."

Stephen's face grew stern. He pulled the car into the post office parking lot to turn around and head back the way they came. It wasn't too much later that they were finally on the proper side of town.

"It's coming up here on the right," Penelope instructed.

"Yeah, right around here would be a perfect place for an Arby's or something," said Stephen as he unwittingly pointing right at the Glove Box.

"That's the place. Pull into the parking lot."

"You mean the place next to the veterinary hospital that used to be a video store that used to be an Arby's?"

"Yeah, just park there."

Their destination was on the right.

The bell above the door rang as Stephen and Penelope entered the shop portion of the factory.

"Hello, hello! I'll be just a minute!" shouted a voice from behind the saloon doors behind the counter.

A slightly short portly man with stringy blonde hair came rushing through the pair of double hinged doors. He looked like someone who hadn't expected to see anyone anytime in the next lunar cycle. His manner of dress was not that of a businessman but instead of a Jerry Garcia impersonator. At first, second and third glance, he appeared to be a squatter living in the factory. This wasn't just any squatter, though. It was the lone glove-smith and the live-in resident of The Glove Box, Wilson Reynolds.

"Sorry, I was just working on a big order," said Wilson who was absolutely doing no such thing. He was, instead, lying on his sofa-bed, watching The Game Show Network, and eating canned potato chips. He looked down, realized what he looked like, only found offense in the potato chips on his chest, and brushed off the crumbs.

"I'm sorry, is the owner the shop in?" asked Penelope.

"I am the owner, my good lady," explained Wilson who looked over the two standing in front of him. "I think I know you from somewhere," he pointed toward Stephen.

"I don't think we've met... unless you were at my divorce proceedings as well," Stephen said hoping that the answer wasn't true but would have been kind of astonished by the coincidence.

"You're the owner of that cheese shop downtown, aren't you?" asked Wilson who was a huge fan of cheese.

"I, uh... yes! I am!" Stephen was not used to be recognized for his contribution to the community. "Do you enjoy the cheeses?"

"It's the only place in the area to get Jalsburg and for that I am ever grateful."

"I can't believe this is happening," Penelope said out loud figuring that she was the only one really listening.

"If you've never had Jalsburg on a water biscuit, you have no idea how important this man is," Wilson said to Penelope who was surprised that she wasn't just talking to herself. "Now, what can I do for you fine folks today?"

"We found this glove outside th—"

"We found this glove outside." Penelope interrupted Stephen concerned that he was about say much more than was needed — he certainly was. "We were wondering if you could tell us who it belonged to, so we could give it back."

Wilson took the glove and looked it over. He put it on and opened and closed his hand as if his fingers were reading vital information about the glove. "Oh, I see. Well, this is very interesting." Wilson seemed as if the glove was telling him all about its journey.

"What's interesting?" asked Stephen.

"I call this cut The Leather Gentleman. It's popular amongst the business men," Wilson explained. He took the glove off and looked at it, stretching it out as if it was a royal decree on parchment. "This one is wider in the palm than the standard cut."

"So you're saying this is pretty unique for a glove, yeah?" Penelope's voice became more excited with a potential direction to go in.

"There's only about three people in this county with palms like that." Wilson said as he turned to a filing cabinet behind him. He began shuffling through paperwork that seemed like it had absolutely no organization at all because it didn't. This was apparent as he rained order forms all over the behind-the-counter area. Eventually the filing cabinet was empty. Realizing that he didn't find what he was looking for, Wilson turned back to Stephen and Penelope, "Give me just a moment."

He disappeared behind the counter, sheets of paper spewing into the air like geyser. As Wilson began muttering to himself, Stephen's mind started to wander. He visualized the recognition he would receive after solving the case.

Everyone will be so proud of me, he thought. Maybe I'll get the key to the city — I wonder what that does. "Will it get me free coffee at the place down the street?" he unknowingly asked himself out loud.

"Abe Drincoln's House of Brews?" asked Penelope not really sure where this came from but would never miss an opportunity to say the name of that establishment out loud.

"That's the one," Stephen confirmed—slightly alarmed that he thought Penelope was reading his thoughts.

"What about it?"

"Do you think a key to the city would get you free coffee from there?"

"Hm. Possibly."

Stephen drifted back into this fantasy, thinking about all of the coffees he would drink when at that moment, Wilson popped back up from behind the counter like Whac-A-Mole.

"A-ha!" Wilson raised a piece of paper in the air. "I found it." He placed the paper on the counter and smoothed it out. He picked up a dusty pair of drug store glasses off the far end of the counter, wiped them on his shirt. He cleaned the lenses and one of the lenses popped off. "Good grief, another one fell out," Wilson mumbled to himself as he put the glasses on.

Penelope noticed that the frames Wilson Reynolds had just put on were completely absent of lenses. She fought in her head about whether or not she had to point it out. She went through the scenarios, she expected that Wilson would probably tell her that he had no idea what she was talking about because he seemed like he was a special kind of crazy.

"Excuse me, those frames don't have lenses," Stephen pointed out.

"Whatchyou mean?" asked Wilson.

I KNEW IT, Penelope thought to herself.

"The frames don't have—"

Penelope stopped him from repeating himself and confided to him, "Just let it go."

"It seems that your mysterious glove man, is J. William Bailey." Wilson took off his useless eye glass frames and purposefully folded them up and put them on the counter.

"Do you have his address?" asked Stephen.

"What do you need his address for?" Wilson was starting to get suspicious.

Sensing the tensions building, Penelope interjected, "We're going to his house and give him the glove."

"Oh! Of course," laughed Wilson. "Wow, if I ever lose something, I hope whoever finds it has half the energy you guys have. You are some kind of super samaritans."

"Oo, I like that. Super Samaritans — that would look great on a business card." Stephen began to daydream.

Wilson started to copy down the address to J. William Bailey's place of residency. Squinting, he lifted the paper close to his face.

"My eyes are so damn poor. Hold on." He picked up the lensless frames off the counter and put them on. "That's much better. Very much better." Wilson jotted down the address on a scrap piece of paper and said the address out loud for affect, "717 Suite C. North Rickland Avenue."

Wilson handed the slip of paper to Penelope — who was the only one paying attention. She read the address on the paper then snatched up the order form and read the address on it.

"Those are clearly fours." She scratched out the address and wrote it down herself to avoid any possible comedic misunderstanding. "Also, there's no such thing as Rickland Avenue," she added as she changed the address to read "414 Suite C. North Richmond Avenue". She tapped Stephen on the shoulder.

"What? Yes! Penny, do you think we could wear costumes?" asked Stephen coming out of his dream world.

"No costumes. We've got an address."

"Oh, wonderful!" Stephen turned to Wilson Reynolds, "Thank you good sir for all of your assistance."

"No, thank you sir for your excellent cheese shop!"

Penelope hung her head, shook it a few times and muttered to herself, "The only person in this town weirder than him."

"Come on, Penny," called Stephen as he headed toward the door. "We have a glove to return."

If there's one thing that Stephen A. Bell was good at, it was sharing his observations on what might be the some of the most obvious truisms. This very well might have been the most annoying aspect of his personality except that it was surprisingly refreshing. It was because these little details were so obvious that people had a tendency to over look them. It's as if someone was to point out that currently the air is made up with an adequate amount of oxygen to sustain life. You can't recall the last time you thought about that, can you?

"Well, that was easy." Stephen claimed triumphantly. "I'm surprised."

"This whole thing has been really easy." Penelope added.

The pair were in Stephen's 1998 Buick LeSabre barreling across town. The exterior of the vehicle was the color of a pomegranate. Unfortunately, the color of the interior was also the color of a pomegranate which could make anyone suffer from synesthesia-induced vomiting. Stephen kept the car in great shape. He made sure that he did every preventative care maintenance job that the guys from that public radio show had ever mentioned. It was his thought that the longer he had his car, the more likely he was to be the cool guy with the classic car — though, if he'd done a little bit of research, he would have notice that never once has a Buick been considered a classic car.

"I wasn't expecting it to be so easy. I mean, we're pretty great and all but it's only our first case." In the mind of Stephen, he was already champion Super Samaritan of the Year — an award that he made up while he daydreamed but was sure that it had to be a real thing.

"I'm pretty worried about it, actually. Something has to go wrong." Penelope's voice filled with doubt and cynicism to bring balance to Stephen's blind optimism.

As they pulled up in front of 414 North Richmond Avenue, it wasn't what they expecting. They were excepting it to be the kind of place that a crazy person would live in — someplace like the Unibomber's cabin or a home with a suspiciously well kept lawn. It also wasn't what they were expecting in that it didn't look like a residence at all but instead it looked like a warehouse that someone had reconditioned into an office complex. Once they were inside, the pair suddenly realized that they were in a condominium. Unsure about the kind of magic at play in this instance, Stephen walked in and out of the building several times. He eventually stopped.

"Well, this sure is a weird living space." Stephen said as he looked down the hallway of doors. "The doors seem to be lettered in reverse alphabetical order. Neat!"

Penelope walked down the hallway starting from letter S ended up on a door labeled Z. "No suite C down here," Penelope yelled.

"Where could it be then? Another building? Another mystery?"

"Let's try the next floor," she said, frustratedly rubbing her eyes.

As they approached the stairwell, the noticed someone had hung a sign on the door. The sign read,

STAIRS TEMPORARILY OUT OF ORDER, PLEASE USE ELEVATOR.

-MGMT

"How can stairs be out of order?" Penelope wondered.

"Another mystery?!"

"C'mon, let's just use the elevator." Penelope hadn't had enough caffeine yet to handle Stephen's excitement over mysteries.

As they approached the elevator, they noticed that someone had hung a sign on the doors. The sign read,

THERE'S NOTHING WRONG WITH THE STAIRS, IT'S THE ELEVATOR THAT DOESN'T WORK. I'VE REPORTED THIS DAMN THING SEVERAL TIMES AND BUILDING MANAGEMENT THINKS THAT I MEAN THE STAIRS. HOW CAN STAIRS BE OUT OF ORDER ANWAY?

-BILL BAILEY

"Can we trust the guy who blew up the bank to give us good advice on what service is actually out of order?" asked Stephen genuinely struggling with the concept that one of these notes is lying.

"One, we don't know for sure that he committed the crime, we just know his glove was at the scene with powder on it and two, I'm trying the stairs. You can stand here and press the button to the elevator as many times as you want." Penelope headed back toward the stairwell on the other end of the corridor.

"I will do just that thank you very much." Stephen pressed the button to call the elevator; it lit up to indicate the button had been pressed. Impatient, Stephen pressed the button again, this time the button sent a shock through his system. It wasn't a strong shock but it was enough to force a person to pee themselves a little — which Stephen did but, again, only a little.

"Penny! Wait! The elevator was a mistake!"

After having tried the next floor only to find that not only was it only letters J-R but it was also missing a Suite O for some reason. Struggling to not investigate the mystery of the missing O — a mystery Penelope had to promise that they'd come back for later, Stephen and Penelope ventured forth the top floor of the former warehouse turned office complex turned high-end condominium.

"It has to be up here, right?" asked Penelope, surrounding herself with self-doubt. "I absolutely don't understand what is wrong with whoever runs this building."

" It's process of elimination, Penny." Stephen assured her. "It will be up here."

Stephen started to walk down the hallway, counting down the letters in order from I to A. As they got to the point where Suite C should have been, there was no Suite C.

"Of course there isn't," Penelope said as she threw her arms in the air. "This... I'm done. It's been nice working with you Mr. Bell-Ward but I'm just going to go home, put on my give-up-on-life pants, read fan-fiction, make GIFs of my cat, and eat pizza until my body explodes."

It was at that moment Stephen realized something — other than the fact that he didn't know what a GIF was — he realized that maybe he and Penelope weren't that different. Penelope started to head back toward the stairwell but Stephen grabbed her by the wrist.

"Hey, wait!" Stephen looked her in the eyes but this time it wasn't with the same old kind look of desperation he had normally had but instead it was a look of new found confidence. "I know this is frustrating but that guy at The Glove Box was an idiot. He probably misheard the address originally. It could be Suite B or Suite D, right? They both sound like C, right?"

Although, at first, Penelope was ready to tell Stephen to find a new college graduate to guilt into helping solve crimes, curiosity got the best of her. She wanted to find out how this whole thing played out. I've come this far, she'd thought to herself. Why not see it through?

"Okay, I'll take door B and you take door D." Penelope ordered.

"That's it!" Stephen excitedly called out. "That's what I'm looking for!"

"Wait, Wilson has bad eyesight right?" asked Penelope not really looking for a response although Stephen did confirm. She looked at the hallway of doors. "Which one of these look the most like a C?"

"I suppose when you squint, C's and G's look awfully similar." Stephen used his unique powers of deduction.

"Exactly. Let's try Suite G."

As they saddled up to the door to Suite G, the moment grew tense. The duo both seemed nervous — too nervous to knock on the door. They both had chosen that moment to remember that this could be very dangerous.

"Well, go on. Knock," suggested Stephen.

"Me knock? You're the adult male here. You sacrifice yourself, it'll be honorable," she responded completely devoid amusement.

"No, you!"

"You'd have to explain to my parents what happened to me."

"Oh, fine." Stephen conceded and then knocked lightly on the door.

"C'mon. If you're gonna knock, you might as well make it count." Penelope knocked confidently on the door after a lapse in judgement.

"Mr. Bailey, sir," Stephen squeaked.

KNOCK KNOCK

"Mr. Bailey, sir," he squeaked again.

POUND POUND

"Bailey open up! We found your glove and we'd just like to return it!" Penelope demanded in her best cop show impression which was surprisingly intimidating.

Stephen jiggled the handed and the door popped open. They both paused, looked at the door and then looked at each other.

"Well, that's not what I was expecting to happen," Stephen said bluntly. "I just wanted to intimidate him a little."

"Should we go in?" asked Penelope with the answer in her mind clearly being no.

"Fuck it." Stephen puffed out his chest. "I'm going in."

What happened next seemed like it happened in slow motion and immediately all at the same time.

"Wait! That's not a good idea," Penelope cried.

Stephen stepped into the condo, "Doesn't seem like anyone is home, Penny. Come on in!"

The door slammed shut behind him separating the two. In a panic, Penelope tried the doorknob but no good. The door was locked. She pounded on the door as hard as she could but no one was answering.

"Steve!" she yelled. "Steve! Just let me know that you're okay! Oh god! Oh god! This is my fault! I'm sorry! I'm so sorry! Just be okay!"

ACT III

When Stephen first discovered the glove on the sidewalk, this was definitely not the situation that he expected to find himself in. Not even Penelope, who had proven to have a much better gift for foresight than Stephen could have seen this coming. When the door slammed shut behind Stephen Bell he learned — rather bluntly with a blow to the back of his head — that he wasn't alone in the room.

When Mr. Bell eventually came to, he woke up under the impression that he had just fallen asleep at his office again. When he tried to stretch his stiff, tired arms he found that he had trouble extending them outward. That's when he realized that his arms were behind him.

Well, this was a weird way to fall asleep, Stephen thought. He tried to move his arms again only to discover that they are tied behind him. He struggled for a moment and — still completely unaware of the fact that he was not in his office, mainly due to the concussion he'd received — called out for Penelope.

"Penny! Untie me! I think I was pretending to be kidnapped again and fell asleep with my hands tied up," he cried out.

"There's no pretending this time," a voice responded.

Stephen picked his head up and as his eyes focused, he saw a man standing in front of him. He was impeccably dressed. He was wearing a charcoal color three-piece suit. Stephen could tell he was wearing black and silver cufflinks that were monogrammed but he wasn't close enough to read them. His golden yellow tie had a paisley design. This was a man who wasn't dressed to bash someone in the back of the head but instead try to talk his way out of very dangerous situations.

"No pretending? Are you kidnapping me?" asked Stephen.

"Not kidnapping, really," said the well-dressed man. "It's more like a detainment. I'm turning you in."

"Turning me in?! I'm turning you in!" declared Stephen as he tried to Hulk-out and rip his arms free from the bindings. The only he potentially ripped was his rotator cuff.

"Turning me in?!" the well-dressed man was very confused. "How do you suppose you're going to do that tied up to a chair?"

Stephen paused and considered the situation. "Fair enough," Stephen admitted.

"So while I have you tied up," the well-dressed man fixed his cuffs and straightened his jacket, "why don't you explain to me your motives for blowing up the bank, Mr. Bailey."

"Wait, hold on, what?"

∞

Earlier that morning, Detective Ricard Alvarez went to the art supply shop on the westside of town. Inspired by the sunrise, he felt that he needed to load up on art supplies because the world had lived too long without him sharing the beauty he sees everyday. He is not really sure where this desire to make art came from but to Detective Alvarez it was as if it was always in in him just hadn't clicked until the day of the explosion at the bank.

Not really knowing where to start, he started picking up unrelated art supplies drawing attention of Karen — sole proprietor of the art supply store, Arts-y Farts-y.

"Is there anything I can do to help you?" asked Karen.

Detective Alvarez chuckled nervously like a man who'd wandered into a drugstore and was trying to figure out what type feminine hygiene products his wife uses. "I, uh, I think I'm okay."

"Oh, really?" she responded. "I don't think you want to use the tracing paper with those oil pastels — unless, of course, you're looking to make a mess."

Detective Alvarez blushed, "Okay. Fine. I just became interested in art. Help me. Show me how to make art."

Karen showed him around the store a little and explained that no matter what he does, he really needs to find a strong foundation in drawing. She set him up with a nice collection of drawing pencils and a good, leather-bound sketchbook because, "if you're going to start, you might as well start in style," as Detective Alvarez said.

It was close to noon when Detective Alvarez started to hear someone pounding on his door. He ignored it as he was in "the zone" as he thought of it and did not want to be disturbed. He reached over to his laptop and turned up the music. The pounding continued. Then he heard a young woman's voice.

"Detective Alvarez! Please be home!" the voice pleaded. "Please answer the door!"

"This better be worth it," Detective Alvarez mumbled to himself as he turned down the volume and opened his window.

"Detective Alvarez! Please, it's an emergency!"

He opened the door to find Penelope at his doorstep. "Girl from the bank explosion yesterday, what are you doing here?"

"Can I come in?" asked Penelope as she helped herself in. "Steve— I mean, Mr. Bell-Ward is trouble. Wait, why does it smell like pot?"

"I... uh. It's medicinal?" Detective Alvarez responded in the most unconvincing way possible. He snapped out of his guilt. "How did you even find where I live?"

"I went to the police station first and they told me that you were off so I just came here."

"So they gave you my address?"

"There's really no time to explain," Penelope insisted, "Mr. Bell-Ward is in, like, super trouble."

"So they gave you my address?" Detective Alvarez repeated in astonishment.

"We have to go now, we'll take Mr. Bell-Ward's car— wait," Penelope looked over Detective Alvarez's shoulder. "Is that a sketch of Kevin Arnold from The Wonder Years?"

"Yeah, it's Fred Savage. Do you like it?"

"Not bad," Penelope was legitimately impressed. "You really just need to work on the shading. It's subtlety that makes an illustration look three-dimensional."

"Oh, like Those Red Heads From Seattle?"

"Is that a band or something?" asked Penelope completely missing Detective Alvarez's reference.

"Those Red Heads from Seattle was a 3-D musical western from 1953," explained Detective Alvarez. "It was my favorite movie one summer."

The genre of 3-D musical western was just never meant to be.

Realizing that she forgot everything that she came here for grabbed the detective by the wrist, "We have to go! His stupid life is in danger!"

∞

"I'm telling you, you daffy bastard, I'm Stephen Bell not J. William Bailey, that's you!"

This was an argument that was at a stand still for the past hour and a half.

"That's what Bailey would say," the well-dressed man retorted.

"I own a cheese shop. I'm in local commercials. Surely you've seen me before!"

"I don't own a television, I'm lactose intolerant, and I'm not from around here. I wouldn't know if you were lying or not."

"This is all too convoluted. Untie me this instant! Someone will come looking for me!"

It was just after that declaration that the door of J. William Bailey's condo was kicked in — much to the surprise of both men. As the dust from the broken particle board began to settle, the figure of a man holding a gun came through the shattered entranceway.

"Down on the ground!" the shadow yelled.

"Oh, thank God! The police are here," said both men simultaneously. They then looked at each other wondering how that happened given the unlikelihood in he entirety of language that two men of separate brains would put the same words together in the same order at the exact same time. This wasn't the first time that Stephen had thought about this, though.

He'd spent a long time thinking about stuff like this. He would then wonder if anyone else had ever theorized about this before and if not, does this make him a genius? Mind you, the man had never smoked an ounce of pot in his life. He was absolutely terrified of drugs and generally tried to avoid anything stronger than ibuprofen — which he liked because it reminded him of M&M's.

"Back away from Mr. Bell and get down on the ground!" shouted the man with the gun who happened to be Detective Alvarez as he revealed himself by stepping further into the room.

"My hero!" Stephen said while inadvertently doing his best Olive Oyl impression.

"Who's Mr. Bell? This is J. William Bailey—"

"—No you are!" interrupted Stephen.

"—the man who blew up the bank. A wanted criminal!"

"Down on the ground!" commanded Alvarez.

"This is a misunderstanding, I'm Jon Sinjon!"

"DOWN ON THE GROUND!" Detective Alvarez fired a warning shot at the wall behind Jon Sinjon, who then didn't hesitate to place himself face down on the carpeted floor of J. William Bailey's condominium.

Penelope came rushing through the door when she heard the gunshot. "Steve! Are you okay!"

"Penny! J. William Bailey tied me up and kept trying to convince me that I was him. It's like I'm in some art house movie that I feel pressured to like," Stephen said bringing Penelope up to speed.

"You guys, why won't anyone believe me?" Jon Sinjon pleaded into the carpet.

"Do you have any identification?" asked Alvarez who still had his gun pointed at Sinjon.

Sinjon struggled to turn his head to look up at Alvarez, noticing then that he had a gun pointed in his direction, quickly closed his eyes and wished really hard that he'd never come to Burlington, Oregon. He wished that he was back in Oswego, Illinois, in his little Oswego home, in his soft Oswego bed and most importantly nowhere near having a gun pointed at his face. Jon Sinjon slowly opened his eyes to reveal that his wishing abilities weren't strong enough to get him back to Oswego. In fact, they may have done the exact opposite because when he opened his eyes he saw that Detective Alvarez had come even closer, pointing his gun directly at Sinjon.

"Well, do you?" Alvarez asked again.

"I... uh. It's in my wallet. In my breast pocket." Jon said as he started to move but thought better of it. "Can I get it?"

"No funny stuff. This my day off and I'm already annoyed that I have to be here."

"Nothing funny, promise." Jon reached into his breast pocket and pulled out his wallet. Riffled through it trying to find his drivers license which he clearly remembered putting back in his wallet after visiting the very nice girl with the interesting earrings at the rental car counter.

At that moment, the very nice girl with the interesting earrings who helped Jon Sinjon with an affordable midsize sedan was trying to call him to inform him that his driver's license was currently located at the airport Lost and Found. Sinjon wouldn't get the message until later, though, as he put his phone on silent just before he decided to hide in J. William Bailey's condo and bash Stephen Bell in the back of his head.

With a sense of panic similar to that of a villager making a offering to an already angry god, Jon Sinjon asked, "Will you take a gym membership?"

"Does it have your picture?" Stephen interjected feeling as if he hadn't said anything in a while.

"Yes."

"Well, give it to the man." Stephen looked over to Detective Alvarez for agreement.

"Penelope, will you get that?" Alvarez put the gun back in his holster.

Penelope knelt down to take the gym membership card from Sinjon and began to read what it said out loud. "Jon Sinjon. Member since 2005. Occupation - Private Investigator."

"Oh God, there's two of them," Alvarez sighed. "Look, I'm just as happy as anyone else that there are a lot Sherlock Holmes adaptations out now but let's not all start thinking we can solve mysteries."

"I'm really more of a House kinda guy," Sinjon said defending himself.

"My favorite was Columbo," Stephen added. "He was an everyman character I could get behind."

"Can I get up now?" asked Sinjon.

"Yeah, alright," Detective Alvarez said in a manner that indicated that he was pretty much done with this circus.

As Jon Sinjon began to get off the floor, that's when everyone — including Stephen — realized that Stephen was still tied up. Penelope rushed over to untie Stephen's arms from behind the chair.

"Sorry about bashing your brains in," apologized Sinjon as he obsessively straightened his suit.

"S'okay," Stephen seemed to take this whole thing with great stride. "a fellow private investigator has to do what he has to do." Stephen had a new found sense of brotherhood with Sinjon.

"Your gym membership says your from Illinois, why are you here?" asked Penelope.

"I read about the bank explosion on the Internet yesterday and I caught the first plane I could," explained Sinjon. "I went directly to the scene of the crime to look for clues. That's when I found this." Jon Sinjon pulled a glove out of his back pocket. It was the match to the glove that Stephen and Penelope had found on the ground.

"J. William Bailey's glove," Stephen explained for anyone in the room who wasn't playing along. "We found one at the scene too."

"Wait, both of you are withholding evidence from the police?" asked Alvarez who wasn't — in fact — playing along, "That's a crime in and of itself."

"No need for the lecture, Officer," Sinjon said. "Just allow me to finish solving this case and collect my reward."

"Wait, there's a reward?" This was the first Stephen had heard of anyone paying money for case solving.

"Thirty-five thousand dollars," Sinjon explained.

The sense of brotherhood that Stephen Bell had been feeling was immediately lost. "Out of my way! I have to solve this case! Come along, Penny!"

Stephen and Jon began to tussle over who got to exit the apartment first like two brothers vying for shotgun in the mini van. This was complete with hair pulling, nipple twisting, and the dreaded wet willy.

"Between you and I, detective," Penelope addressed Alvarez casually, "the gloves aren't real evidence."

"Oh, you're a private eye, now as well?" Detective Alvarez asked.

"I'm just thinking it out. Doesn't it seem more likely that Bailey planted those gloves at the scene to throw people off. Correct me if I'm wrong but there was no gunpowder residue anywhere near the actual explosion, was there?"

"None that we've found but if these were fake clues, why would he put his name out there for us to find?" asked the Detective.

"That's a good point. Whomever was behind this could have easily stole these gloves and planted them to lead us off the trail but why here?" Penelope's brain began spinning running scenarios as if she actually knew what she was doing.

"Maybe it's a trap." Alvarez said rather bluntly not really thinking about what he was saying.

"Right! A trap!" An oven timer just went off in Penelope's brain. "Everyone needs to get out of the building."

It took a moment still but the concept of a trap did finally register in Detective Alvarez's mind. He looked over at the two stooges jockeying for position to get out through the entrance and the thought passed through his head, these two are going to be the death of me.

Penelope pushed through them and made her way out the door, "We have to go! This is a trap!"

"A trap?" questioned Stephen.

"What kind of trap?" chimed in Jon Sinjon.

"Does it really matter?" answered Penelope.

"Well, I mean. If it's a physical trap, that could be dangerous." Sinjon put it very astutely.

"But if it's a mental trap, we could figure it out!" Stephen patted Jon Sinjon on the back. "Right Jon?!"

"Right!"

Detective Alvarez walked up behind the men who were facing Penelope on the other side of the hole of the wall where the door used to be. Because both men were too busy switching between congratulating each other's egos and locking horns on who got to get out the condo first, they couldn't feel Alvarez's presence behind them nor did they really notice that he firmly and confidently shoved them both through the opening.

"There's no time for this," Alvarez said with a no-nonsense tone. He then pulled the fire alarm and shouted, "Everyone out of the building! This is the police! Everyone's in danger!"

As the four went banging on every door on their way out of the building, they were surprised to learn that there was no one else in the building. If the commotion wasn't enough, Detective Alvarez firing a warning shot drove everyone out of the building concerned about their own safety. In fact, some of the residence had called the police, not knowing that the police's most successful and handsome detective was already on the scene.

It would be incredibly poetic if our story also ended with a bang. You know, the sort of thing that really put a button on it. It starts how it finishes. Everyone dies. That sort of thing. Too bad that'd be a terrible ending and luckily our intrepid four — although we really only care for two of them — made it out of the building safely. They made it out of the building safely because nothing had happened. Absolutely nothing had happened.

When they made it to the outside world, they noticed that the residents of the building had formed a rather disgruntled looking mob.

"It's okay folks, I'm a police officer," explained Detective Alvarez flashing his badge to the mob whose murmurs were growing louder and grumblier.

"WHAT DO YOU MEAN CAUSING ALL THE NOISE?" a voice shouted.

"We were in the midst of a hostage situation," defended Detective Alvarez

"WELL, WE WERE IN THE MIDDLE OF DOING OUR OWN SHIT!" shouted another voice.

"YEAH. I WAS WATCHING MILLIONAIRE. I HOPE YOU KNOW WHICH MAYOR OF NEW YORK CITY WAS THE HOST OF THE PEOPLE'S COURT, BUDDY!" exclaimed a third.

"Ed Koch." Stephen answered. "They've done that question before," he confided to Penelope.

"DAMMIT, I HAD MY MONEY ON DINKINS!"

"Everyone, I just need your patience for just a moment and you can all return back to your homes." The detective was trying to restore some sense of order.

"Hm. You'd think that it would have done something by now," Penelope said as she turned back toward the building.

The four of them stood staring at the reconditioned warehouse expectantly. Almost as if they were waiting for it to speak to them. After a moment or two, with the tension between the anticipating crowd—and the building—rising, Jon Sinjon decided to break the silence.

"Well, I don't know what you three are going to do with the rest of your day but I'm going to solve this case and collect my reward," he declared, buttoning the top two buttons of his suit coat.

"Like hell you are," Stephen interjected. "This is my town! I'm cracking this case and I'm collecting your — I mean — my reward!"

"Well, I'm going back in to look for clues," Sinjon responded.

"Not unless I get there first!"

During this exchange, Detective Alvarez — in what became known as the single most impressive feat of policing that the Burlington P.D. had ever recorded — grabbed Stephen by the waistband of his pants. A small number of cop cars pulled into the parking lot. Their flashing lights and overall commotion created enough of a diversion that it allowed Jon Sinjon to break away back toward the warehouse. Once Stephen realized that Sinjon had taken off, he tried to go after him only to have been stopped by Alvarez's vice grip. Sinjon was already back inside.

There was a strange and very loud knocking sound.

In the field of demolition, the tactic used when tearing down a building is to place explosives on weight-bearing portions of the building allowing the building the implode from the inside. Demolition Magazine—which is a completely and utterly real magazine that people subscribe to—ranked their favorite implosions of the 20th Century. On this list were some of the old giants of the Las Vegas strip, as well as skyscrapers from around the world. If they stay around long enough to make a list for 21st Century, one would hope that 414 North Richmond Avenue would make the list. Not because it was particularly big or impressive but because it was unexpected.

The implosion of the building had a weird satisfying feeling about it. Not only did it satisfy the weird anticipation that built up to it but for the residents of the building, it was as if it gave them a new beginning — tabula rasa. Like a collapsible top hat—or crush hat to those who have class—the top of the building came down and then each floor after it. And although the building wasn't very big, the resulting dust cloud was much, much larger than you'd expect.

In the middle of the exceptionally humungous dust cloud, Stephen realized that Jon Sinjon had gone into that building and that it could have been him. Also in the middle of that dust cloud, Penelope realized that this kind of explosion must have had ignition source. Once the dust had cleared after what felt like an eternity and everyone—who could finally see— had finished counting their fingers and toes, a small, white automobile—the kind of automobile that brags about its intelligence both in name and in a very braggart onboard navigation system—tried to pull into the parking lot but because of the two police cruisers kept the car from entering, its driver got out of the vehicle.

The man was very round. His head was round. His torso was round. Even the glasses he wore were round. If a person could impersonate a snowman, it'd be him. He took off his glasses and began to clean them on his shirt as he wobbled up to the front of the crowd.

He looked at both Stephen and Detective Alvarez, thought for a second and then turned to Alvarez and asked, "Are you the one in charge here?"

"I'm a police detective," Alvarez responded. "I guess I'm in charge."

"My name is Bill Bailey. I live...ed here. What the hell happened?"

"Long story," explained Stephen.

"The someone detonated explosives inside the building causing it to collapse," Alvarez explained better.

"Aw, hell! I had a pizza in there." The sight of disappointment on J William Bailey face was like watching butter melt. He almost appeared to cry but the moment that his eyes welled up, he blinked twice, stiffened his face and said, "At least that takes care of the damn elevator."

Stephen began laughing uncontrollably. The stress of the whole situation had got to him, he assumed. It shouldn't have been that funny. He turned to his right to see if Penelope was laughing as hard as he had but she wasn't there. He turned to his left, she wasn't there either.

"Ricard! Where's Penny?!" Stephen grabbed Detective Alvarez by the shoulders.

At some point in that cloud of dust, Penelope Prescott had disappeared.

Detective Ricard Alvarez had seen a lot of things in his time with the Burlington Police Department. He'd arrested two clowns who were having an altercation outside of children's party over encroachment of territory. He'd tracked down the deranged man who was kidnapping people's dogs and cats (and one time a horse) then returning them to their owners dressed in outfits. He was even once called to the scene of an accident between a man, his penis, and the gas tank of a candy apple red 1962 Ford Thunderbird. One thing he had never scene, though, was someone virtually vanish.

Despite the attempts of Stephen, Detective Alvarez, and Officers De Motte and Odenkirk to search the surrounding areas, Penelope was no where to be found. There were no traces of where she could have gone off to or any evidence that someone had been in the area near by to have snatched her from right in front of everyone.

"I just don't get it." Stephen said as he walked up to Detective Alvarez. "She couldn't just vanish."

Typically when something or someone vanishes in a cloud of smoke or dust, it's either due to magic, ninjas, or magical ninjas — the most dangerous type of magician... but not the most dangerous type of ninja. Penelope Prescott's disappearance wasn't related to anything like that. The disappearance was more inline with prestidigitation than anything mystical or badass.

Stephen felt a vibration in his pocket but as someone who had long been a sufferer of phantom vibration syndrome—as well as other pareidolia—he's learnt to just ignore it. The vibration stopped only to begin again a short time later.

That must by my phone, Stephen thought. Don't bother checking it, nobody will have called, he thought in response to himself. You're just going to look like a weirdo.

The vibration came back again.

"Screw you, brain," Stephen said aloud as he reached into his pocket to check his phone.

Penny 2m ago

missed calls (2)

Frantically, Stephen called her back. He got no answer.

∞

Penelope knew that there had to be an ignition source for this explosion and so while everyone was struggling to see through the dust, she took this as her opportunity to investigate the site the where the building was just previously standing. Quickly, she looked around to see if she could find anything while the dust was still obscuring everyone's view. She was concerned that if the person behind the explosion was still in the area, this whole investigation would go terribly for her.

With the dust clouding her eyes, Penelope wasn't able to see very far in front of herself. She was squinting trying to see the base area around the rubble then, suddenly, she found herself on the ground. Penelope had tripped over something but she couldn't figure out what it could have been. She crawled back over the path she had just walked and that's when she found it. She'd tripped over a detonation cord.

Penelope saw that the detcord—as it's called by the readers of Demolition Magazine— was leading off, through the bushes and through a chain-link fence. She followed the line to the fence to find that it trailed down an embankment to a set of train tracks that lead into a tunnel. These train tracks were very much active—much to the dismay of the residents of the building and the town in general.

"There's no way that it stops there," she said to herself out loud. That's when she saw heard a minivan door slide open. She looked back to the street and noticed that a very oddly dressed man was leaving a maroon Dodge Caravan and heading into the forest-y area behind the destructed building. The man was maybe a little over six feet tall. He was wearing a grey formal jacket and a derby. It looked like he fell out of a Jane Austin novel. His red facial hair was formed into mutton chops and a mustache—or as style guides call them, "Friendly Chops". Something in her stomach was telling her to get back to Stephen and Detective Alvarez but something in her head was telling her that she needs to check that van.

That van has all the answers, her brain was telling her. Just go, open the hatchback and take a look.

Against her gut feeling, she snuck over to the van. She slowly lifted the hatch, hoping that the dust will conceal her just long enough to check out what this weirdly dressed man was up to but she wouldn't get enough time. She started to hear the bushes next to the road rustle and so she did what any reasonable person would do: she hid in the hidden compartment for the backseats of the minivan. Then something happened that she hadn't thought through, the van began to move.

In a panic, Penelope reached into her jacket to call Stephen. She called once, no answer. She called again, no answer.

"Dammit Steve," she said sort of loudly. She felt the vehicle stop.

"What was that?" the Oddly Dressed Man questioned which Penelope could barely hear as a mumble through the plastic covering on the compartment.

That's when Stephen decided to call her back. It was at that moment she realized how stupid it had been that she made her ringtone the theme song to popular Korean romance drama Coffee Prince.

"Now I really know I heard something," said the oddly dressed man.

Penelope quickly placed her phone on silent and tried to control her breathing.

This whole thing might have been a huge mistake.

∞

After few more failed attempts to call Penelope back, Stephen and Detective Alvarez decided that the best place for them to go next was the police station. Alvarez knew they had the ability to trace cell phones but had no idea how the machine actually worked. He knew he was supposed to take some learning modules about how to use it effectively but he was way too busy solving cases and being useful to ever spend time in front of a computer. Stephen had never been to the police station before so, for him, this was the field trip he never got to take in fifth grade.

The only experience he had of a police station came from television and movies. The entire drive there, Stephen spent his time and effort wondering if this was going to be a fun, jokey place like the police stations in Barney Miller or The Naked Gun or was it going to be more like Law & Order or NYPD Blue — he never really watched either but he got the general idea that it was a very serious place where very serious things happen and in the case of NYPD Blue, sometimes sex. He was really hoping for the former, he really liked Leslie Nielsen.

For Detective Alvarez—on the other hand—spent the drive switching between being increasingly frustrated that he's spending his first day off in ten days doing detective work and fretting over what could be happening to Penelope and whether or not everyone was going to be safe with a nut job with an explosion fetish on the loose. Detective Alvarez had—in a very impressive, albeit stereotypical fashion—never lost case. No one had ever died on his watch—except for presumably Jon Sinjon but nobody really cared about him anyway—and he wasn't going to let Penelope be his first.

When they arrived at the station, Stephen was disappointed to find that it wasn't like television or movies had portrayed it at all.

"That's it?" Stephen questioned.

"What's it?" asked Alvarez who had stopped in mid-stride and looked at Stephen as if he was looking at someone who just suddenly began speaking a foreign language—at least not one of the five he already knew.

For anyone who hasn't been in a police station, the expectation that has been set by media—no matter if it's fun or depressing—is incredibly misleading and ultimately disappointing.

"It's just like any other office," Stephen slouched. "I mean, I know TV plays up the drama and all but this just looks like accounting."

"Yeah, that happens to everyone."

As they were walking through the precinct and back to Alvarez's office, a fairly large man (both in stature and in weight) came wobbling over to the two men. It wasn't very clear if he had a dog toy hidden on himself somewhere or did his nose squeak on every exhale. As he came closer, the smell of his aftershave preceded him by several cubic feet. It was the kind of aftershave that would remind anyone of a father. Maybe not their own father but someone's. This was Burlington Police Commissioner Del Boggs.

"Ric! I thought I told you take a day off!" shouted Boggs across the precinct, bits of spittle and pastrami projected from his mouth mimicking a shotgun spray.

"Del, I was trying to take a day off but crime comes to me." Alvarez responded.

"I'm just givin' ya a hard time, Ric," said Commissioner Boggs as he slapped Alvarez on the back with a force that would make someone think that he's harboring resentment—which was entirely untrue. "Whattaya here for? Who's the pencil neck?"

Boggs gestured over to Stephen, who somehow snuck off and was fiddling with the digital fingerprint scanner. Stephen picked up the scanner and one of the cables became disconnected from the back. The noise that proceeded could be described as a combination of bird chirping and screeching hell beasts. Why someone programmed a fingerprint scanner to make this noise when it was disconnected from the Internet will remain one of humanity's greatest mysteries. With everyone's attention now on him, Stephen nervously fumbled to put the ethernet cable back in the device. Once the noise stopped, Stephen rushed back over to Detective Alvarez and Commissioner Boggs.

"This is Stephen Bell. He's my wife's ex-husband," explained Alvarez.

"Aren't you that cheese guy?" Boggs had been in Stephen's shop once. He was disappointed that Stephen did not carry American cheese despite the description on this business listing clearly reading, "Specializing in Unique and Exotic Cheeses" and American cheese for all intents and purposes being considered less of a cheese and more of a melty yellow dairy product. This meant very little at this moment to Stephen because at this moment he felt like a celebrity.

"Why yes I am, I'm the cheese guy," Stephen proudly puffed out his chest.

"Chief, we really don't have time to indulge him," Alvarez stated rather bluntly. "His assistant was kidnapped by the person we think was behind the explosion at the bank yesterday. We need to trace her cell phone to find her location."

"So what are you wanting for then?" asked Boggs.

"I... um. I need someone to show me how to do that."

"Goddammit, Ric! I told you to take those online things about it."

"Well, do you know Del?" Alvarez asked throwing the heat back at his superior.

"Shit. Of course I don't. Whadda look like? My son got me one of them i-computer screen things for my birthday, I can't figure out how to keep the damn thing on. I'm not learning how to use a goddamn cell phone tracker. I'll be retired or dead before I'll have to use it."

"That's what I thought, you bloated sandwich monger," Alvarez said jokingly.

The two officers that were called to the scene of what became an implosion of the condominium complex, De Motte and Odenkirk, rushed into the precinct.

"Alvarez! Someone saw a girl get into the back of van about a few blocks from the scene," Officer De Motte said with urgency. "We were able to track the van down to a location. We've got the SWAT unit on the way."

"He's in that weird old mansion behind the school over on Union," added Officer Odenkirk

"I thought that was West Village Cultural Society," wondered Stephen who felt like he hadn't said anything in a while.

"It used to be, they moved to the building that used to be the liquor store on Madison," Officer De Motte responded.

"Hm." Stephen paused to think about how silly it seemed for a cultural society to be located in a place that used to be a liquor store which used to be a grocery store.

"Stephen, I'm going to need you to stay here. We have to save Penelope which is not something that is going to happen if you come along," Detective Alvarez snapped trying to pull Stephen from his day dream.

"No way, I'm coming with you!"

"Well, I can't say I didn't try," Alvarez muttered reminding himself that today was supposed to be his day off.

And just like that, Stephen and Detective Alvarez were back in the car, speeding to the weird old mansion. This time the detective let Stephen turn on the siren and lights. It was a big moment for him.

∞

It was an unusually cool afternoon for early October, sixteen years ago. A twelve year-old Penelope Prescott was speeding through the channels of the tiny TV/VCR combo in her room with something in mind to watch but she had no real idea what it was until she saw it. With 72 cable channels, she was sure she was going to find something. She started to slow down as she got around the section that had the bank of kids programming but she kept going. She went through all 72 channels two or three more times before she saw what she wanted. It was World Martial Arts Council Masters.

Penelope had a couple of guy friends when she was in elementary school who were very into professional wrestling but she always thought it was silly—guys in spandex "fake hugging" (as her father had once put it), allegedly competing to wear a shiny belt.

"Why would anyone want to watch that?" she'd ask herself.

WMAC MASTERS (as it insisted on calling itself) was completely different though—at least it was in her eyes—it was a group of trained martial artists wearing cool costumes competing in exhibitions to win a trophy that you could potentially wear as a belt. Not to mention that some of them were women and there was cool story lines. Penelope had convinced herself that this was completely different.

She begged her parents to let her learn taekwondo. She promised it was going to be different from that time she was really interested in baseball, soccer, hockey and whatever other kids sports movie came out between the years of 1990-1996. This was going to be her passion, she was going to be a martial artist... at least for the two weeks that she attended classes. At the end of her two weeks, she accidentally broke the nose of Mr. Norris, Penelope's Kyo Bum Nim (or instructor) and former 3rd grade teacher. Devastatingly embarrassed, Penelope was never going to kick anyone in the face ever again. That is, until just now.

The Oddly Dressed Man wasn't sure what he was looking for in the back of his van but a Chuck Taylor to the bridge of his nose was no where in the vicinity of what he thought he might find. The crimson sea that was draining from his nose stained the charcoal grey dress coat he was wearing. His eyes began to water. Penelope struck him like a scorpion hiding in the sand. Much like that scorpion, after the Oddly Dressed Man staggered backward, Penelope remained coiled in the stowaway compartment in the back of the van.

"Oh God, I kicked someone in the face. Oh God," Penelope had a minor panic attack. "He had it coming, I'm a defenseless, in a prone position," she reasoned with herself.

"I think you broke my nose," the Oddly Dressed Man shouted through the blood and in a nasally tone. "I think its totally broken. Why would you just kick someone in the face?!"

Penelope climbed out of her hidey hole, "You were going to attack me!"

"I was just trying to find out why there was strange music coming from the back."

"Wait, don't I know you from somewhere?" Penelope asked not really expecting an answer.

Now that his eyes stopped watering, the Oddly Dressed Man started to notice who it was who broke his nose. He began to act cagey, nervously circling around her. "No. Nope. Never seen me before. Not at all."

"No, I definitely have," she stated with great confidence.

Penelope began searching her brain for answers and just couldn't place a finger on it. She ran through the checklist of people it could have been. She doesn't think it was anyone from her high school as he didn't give her that sense of panic that awkward social situations gave her. It wasn't Thom from college. She was certain because Thom was never going to finish college and so he had no business being up here.

Who could it be? she wondered.

Penelope opened her eyes to take another look at the Oddly Dressed Man at which point she realized that he was no longer in front of her.

"Where did you go, ya doof?" she wondered out loud and that's when it hit her.

It was a tire iron.

As Penelope opened her eyes, her surroundings were completely out of focus. In addition to her vision being blurry, her thoughts were also like someone took some lard and spread it across the lens. Everything was fuzzy. Thinking was like trying to swim through baked beans—it was something that could be accomplished but why would you want to do it? When her vision started to come through, she began to recognize her surroundings.

"Is this the house the Cultural Society was in?" Penelope asked assuming that someone was within earshot to answer. Oddly enough, someone was there.

The Oddly Dressed Man came strolling into the room. Here, Penelope got a much better look at him. He was no longer wearing the formal jacket, exposing the royal blue double breasted vest he was wearing underneath. He'd shaved off his facial hair, most likely due to amount of blood that was in his mustache, Penelope thought. She'd also noticed that he had wads of toilet paper shoved into his nose to clot the bleeding.

"You can't imagine how hard it's going to be to get my blood out of that jacket," the Oddly Dressed Man seemed overly annoyed with Penelope. "I really wish you hadn't kicked me in the face. I'm much less attracted to you now."

It all clicked in Penelope's head again, "You're the guy from the street. The one who told me about the explosion."

"Troy Vandenberg, criminal mastermind at your service, super sleuth," Vandenberg responded.

"Clearly you weren't dropped on your head," she stated while she realized that she was tied to a chair.

"What do you mean by that?"

"Well, I just think if someone is going to start looking and acting like an 1800s aristocrat and criminal mastermind they'd at least put together a full ensemble. The gym shoes really take away from the whole look."

"I don't know what you're talking about," Vandenberg responded while self-consciously kicking off his shoes.

"The whole schtick of criminally insane thing only really works for Batman villains. Is your name even really Troy Vandenberg? Sounds like the kind of name someone would come up with who hasn't even read a Jane Austin novel."

"That's absolutely my name. Why would you even think otherwise?"

"Okay, Mr. Vandenberg, criminal genius. Why exactly did you blow up the bank? I mean, since you and I both know that it was supply closet you blew up and not like anywhere that had money or anything." Penelope didn't actually know, it was more of a guess. Maybe she could get him monologuing long enough for someone to come find her, she thought.

"Burlington is very boring town, Miss... I'm sorry. I didn't get your name."

"Prescott. Penelope Prescott."

"Miss Prescott, you must understand. I moved here from the big city Los Angeles and it's just so damn boring. There's nothing to do. I'd sit here in my house and listen to the police scanner hoping for something big."

"Something big? What are you even talking about?" Penelope was getting annoyed already with this monologue and just wished someone would come in and save her already.

"You see, I wanted to be a Sherlock Holmes or a Batman—I could never decide which was cooler—" Vandenberg began to explain.

Jeez, Detective Alvarez was right, Penelope thought to herself. Everyone DOES think they're Sherlock.

"I figured that moving out to a small town of 30,000 would give me an opportunity make my mark. Be the world class sleuth vigilante I was meant to be. But when I got here, save for traffic violations and teenagers getting caught with pot and underage drinking, there was absolutely nothing going on."

"So you decided to blow up a bank?" Penelope asked really hoping someone would come soon.

"I wanted to ignite a wave of crime almost bizarre and fictional that they would need to turn to someone like me to help them."

"The problem with that," she added, "is that once you commit a crime, you're immediately a criminal. It's in the definition of the word. Heroes aren't criminals."

Troy Vandenberg looked at Penelope for what felt like a very long time but she was sure it was only a matter of seconds. She could see the frustration building on his face.

"I did what no one else would do," he screamed as he got in Penelope's face.

"Put people's lives in danger? I'm pretty sure everyone does that when they get in their car everyday."

Vandenberg backhanded Penelope across the face busting her lip open. The sting of the strike lingered for several minutes.

"You're such a coward. That was such a cowardly goddamn thing to do." Penelope 's voice trembled with anger. "You endangered the lives of others from a distance, you killed someone in demolishing that building and you hit a woman tied to a chair. Some hero you are."

"I killed someone?" Vandenberg asked with legitimate shock on his face. "I thought everyone was out of the building. I never meant to kill anyone."

"Well, ya did. Private investigator, Jon Sinjon was in the building looking for more of your planted clues," Penelope explained.

"I'll fix this," Vandenberg said frantically. "I'll keep you here for a few weeks or so, then I'll rescue you and I'll look like a hero!" He could almost believe himself.

"That's not going to work, you dummy," Penelope mouthed off. "I'm going to tell them exactly what happened the moment I'm free."

"Well, what do you want me to do, kill you?" Vandenberg asked with a sense of absurdity in his voice. "I'm not going to kill you. I'm not going to kill anyone else."

"So let me go. You weren't even going to kidnap me to begin with" Penelope reasoned. "All I am are more charges to get added against you in court."

Troy Vandenberg considered what she had to say and thought her point was valid. He still considered it for a while, trying to plan his exit strategy. Maybe he could untie her and flee before the police arrive. Change his appearance and come back to Burlington when the wave of exciting crimes finally hits. Maybe he'd wear a mask that way he could be an anonymous symbol for the people to rally behind.

While Vandenberg lost himself in his thought, the front door of the house that used to be the West Village Cultural Center was busted in. This snapped Vandenberg out of his game plan and brought him into the horrible realization that he was about to confront the police.

"No! They can't be here yet! I'm not ready! My jacket's not clean!" he cried as he ran off out of the room.

"Are you going to untie me?" Penelope yelled.

"No time!" he yelled from another room.

"Penelope! Are you in here!" She heard Detective Alvarez yell from a different room making her realize that she's on the second floor of the house.

"We're upstairs!" Penelope shouted in response.

"We're coming for you!" Stephen shouted.

Great, she thought with a sense of dread. He's here too.

Troy Vandenberg rushed into the room wearing his charcoal grey formal jacket that was still soaking wet and still had that blood stain and his derby. He had taken the tissues out of his nose to make himself look a little more formidable.

"How do I look?" he asked.

"Untie me!" That was not the answer he was looking for.

They both started to hear the footsteps of Detective Alvarez and Stephen coming up the stairs. Vandenberg slowly began clapping.

"Well done, Detective." Vandenberg said as they reached the top of the stairs. "You found me."

"Hey, your voice is familiar," Stephen pointed out trying to place where he's heard it before. "You were the guy shooting at me, when I was poking around the scene for clues, weren't you?"

"Uh, nope." Vandenberg responded kind of lost.

"Damn, I was so close." Stephen's disappointment lingered.

"My name is Troy Vanden—ow!"

There was a loud gunshot. Detective Alvarez shot Vandenberg in the thigh to immobilize him.

"You shot me! I can't believe it!"

"Don't even start." Alvarez said as he holstered his handgun.

"Have you ever been shot before! This really hurts!"

"It's been along day and I've had enough of this silly crap," Alvarez said as he rubbed his eyes.

"Oh, it really, really burns!"

"You're under arrest for the explosion of the First City National Bank, public endangerment, the kidnapping and assault of Penelope Prescott and the probable murder of Jon Sinjon."

"Don't forget to mention the theft of the fertilizer truck from the highway rest stop 45 miles from here." Penelope added.

"Fertilizer truck?" asked Stephen.

"You know the one that was on KLWT's website. The one you wanted to investigate," she further explained.

"Penny! You got tied up today too!" Stephen interjected realizing that Penelope was tied to the chair she was sitting in. He rushed over to Penelope to untie her.

"Do you have adult ADHD?" Vandenberg asked Stephen.

"Well, I have yet to be diagnosed," Stephen responded.

There was sense of enlightenment that passed over Penelope and Detective Alvarez. So that's what's wrong with him, they both thought.

"Well, Penelope Prescott, how did you know it was me who stole the truck?" Vandenberg brought the conversation back to him.

"Where else would you have gotten a large amount ammonium nitrate without a demolition license in order to make the ANFO explosions you used to bring down the condominium complex," she explained while stretching.

"Oh, you're good. Very, very goo—ow! This really hurts," Vandenberg said as he grasped his thigh.

Penelope walked over to downed Troy Vandenberg, "You know what, I really want to kick you in the face again for hitting a defenseless woman but I have a feeling you're gonna get enough abuse in prison."

"I just wanted to be Sherlock!" Vandenberg shouted. "I'm so sorry."

As the police escorted Troy Vandenberg—who Penelope never really believed that was his real name—to the ambulance to treat his bullet wound, Stephen took a moment to reflect on what had happened in the last 48 hours. He thought about how yesterday he was just a lowly cheese master but now, he'd captured a criminal mastermind. It was exhilarating. He knew his life was finally on the right track, this was his calling.

Penelope just wanted to eat pizza and go to sleep.

∞

Success has several different feelings: joy, accomplishment, relief—all of which Stephen had felt. This was such a big win for him, he felt that almost nothing could bring him down. As for Penelope, despite what she had gone through, she wasn't going to let it ruin his moment.

"We did it! I can't believe we did it," Stephen said as he bounced in his office chair getting a slice of pizza out of the box in front of him.

Penelope had several, vastly different feelings that have been associated with this success. The pain from the bruising and swelling of being assaulted by the man she refused to call Troy Vandenberg was making it hard for her to eat the pizza that Stephen had ordered to celebrate their first victory. Penelope would look back on this night as the time she made a lot of stupid decisions that she wouldn't take back for the world.

"I can't believe I'm going to say this," Penelope started then stopped with a heavy sigh. It was the kind of sigh that only precedes something that takes a lot to say. "Today was fun... this whole investigation thing was thrilling. I'd never felt anything like it."

"Even though you look like you've been hit in the face with a softball?" asked Stephen who had up until this point said nothing about her injuries because he felt guilty for dragging her into this.

Penelope laughed and then winced because even laughing hurt. "Even then, Mr. Bell-Ward."

"We're back to Mr. Bell-Ward? I heard you call me Steve a few times. I thought maybe we were becoming friends."

"You're my boss, it's professional for me to call you by your last name."

"I'm not your boss, Penny. I'm your partner," Stephen said warmly as he shot a glance toward Penelope like a child who was asking for something by telling.

"I don't know about that. This was so stupid and dangerous and stupid dangerous..." She trailed off as she thought more about the proposition in front of her.

There was a knock at the door.

"Oh God!" Stephen shouted as he bravely dove under his desk. "Vandenberg is here! They let him out of jail and he tracked us back here and he's planning on killing us!"

"You know, if it was him, I don't think he'd knock," Penelope was pretty sure of this.

"You guys here?"

As the door swung open, a familiar voice called into the room.

"I've been looking for you." It was Detective Alvarez

"What for?" asked Penelope.

"Where's Stephen?"

"Our courageous hero is under the desk," she responded as she gestured over to Stephen's side of the desk.

"Alvarez!" Stephen yelled muffled by the desk followed by the loud thud of the back of his head making itself acquainted with the underside of the desk.

"I just came by to give you the cheque for the reward in capturing Kenneth Long," explained Alvarez.

Stephen crawled out from under the desk, "who's Kenneth Long?"

"Troy Vandenberg."

"I knew that wasn't his real name!" Penelope shouted in celebration.

"So we got paid for this?" asked Stephen. "Great! Penny, I didn't want to tell you but I wasn't going to be able to pay you this week but this'll do just fine."

"Are you serious! When were you going to tell me?!" she shouted.

"Listen, I'm just gonna leave this here on the desk and back away." Alvarez stated in his best interest.

"I knew it'd work out," Stephen explained.

As Detective Alvarez was leaving their office, his cell phone began ringing. It was his wife. He answered.

"Yes, I know it was supposed to be my day off," Alvarez explained over the audible shouting on the other end. "I'm coming home right now."

Stephen and Penelope sat in silence for several minutes looking at the cheque sitting on the desk. The cheque was made out to the Damme Good Detective Agency for the amount of $3,500. Stephen picked up the cheque and looked it over thoroughly. Then he bit it because that's what he'd seen them do in cartoons before to test whether or not something was real.

"Seems genuine," he said as if biting it proved anything. Stephen looked at the face of the cheque again. "Damme Good Detective Agency, huh? What'd you think?"

"You're just assuming that I want to do this."

"You know you want to," Stephen responded trying to put on his best convincing voice—which was not very convincing.

There was a significant pause while Penelope mulled it over in her brain some more, "Welp, we'll have to call ourselves Damme Good Detective Agency. We can't cash the cheque otherwise."

"So you'll do it? Partner?" Stephen reached out his hand to seal the deal.

"This is a hesitant yes." Penelope responded reciprocating the handshake.

"I'll take it!"

When Stephen got back to his apartment, for the first time in a long time, his cats were actually happy to see him. Maybe it was Stephen's new sense of purpose or maybe it was the fact that they hadn't been fed in over 24 hours but the end result was the same, it was the first good night's sleep he had received in a very long time.

When Penelope arrived back at her parent's house, she walked right past her parents not saying a word ignoring their questions about what had happened to her face. She changed out of her clothes and crawled into bed. She fired up her laptop, turned on an episode of Coffee Prince and immediately fell asleep. This was the first good night's sleep she had received in a very long time.

They enjoyed their night sleep completely unaware that this moment was the beginning of their end—but this was nowhere near their last adventure. The mysteries and adventures of Burlington, Oregon had only just begun.
