Superhero Detective Series (Book 2): The Missing Exploding Girl Read online

  “Well, since you know about Clara’s powers, I have to ask: do you think she would use them to hurt anyone?”

  Amy shook her head firmly.

  “Absolutely not,” she said. “Though her family life is less than ideal, Clara is a gentle kid. I don’t think she would hurt anyone. God knows she had the provocation to do so.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I was not the only one Clara told about her abilities,” Amy said. “She also told a few of her friends. What do you expect? She’s a thirteen-year-old going through a life-changing event. She would have been less than human if she had not told some of her friends. Though she swore them to secrecy, remember what Ben Franklin said: three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead.” Amy shook her head. “Those friends told a few of their friends, and so on and so forth. Before you knew it, everyone in school knew. Some of the kids started bullying Clara. You know how kids are. If you stand out, it immediately makes you a target. Though Clara got teased and got into a couple of fights, not once did she use her powers against her tormentors. When I asked her about it later, she said she didn’t want to hurt anyone.”

  “Do you know Clara was at the Dupont Circle explosion?” I asked.

  Amy nodded yes.

  “I saw her on the news,” she said. “She was kind of hard to miss since they kept showing footage of the explosion over and over again.” Her eyes suddenly widened and her hand went to her mouth. “You don’t think Amy was hurt or killed in the explosion, do you? The thought never occurred to me before. I had just kind of thought her powers would have protected her.”

  I shrugged.

  “I don’t know quite what to think just yet,” I said. “I assume from your response that you don’t think Clara had something to do with the explosion, then?”

  Amy looked shocked and outraged at the thought of it.

  “Heavens, no!” she said.

  “Clara has run off before,” I said. “Do you think that’s what she did this time?”

  Amy shrugged. She was still visibly shaken at the thought of Clara being hurt or killed.

  “I don’t know. I’m guessing no since she’s been gone so long, but I have no way to know for sure. I discussed her running away from home with her before. She did it six times before that I know of. She told me she was not really planning on leaving home for good or trying to scare anyone. She just said life at home was more than she could take, so she just needed to take a break now and then. She would go off and stay with friends, and occasionally sleep on the street when she could find nowhere else to go.” Amy shook her head at the thought of it. “I told her how dangerous it was to stay on the street, but she’s at the age where she’s still convincing she’s invulnerable and that nothing bad could possibly happen to her.”

  I thought of the mangled bodies in the Dupont Circle subway again. I wondered how many people’s illusions of invulnerability were shattered that day.

  “Any idea of where she might have gone this time?” I asked.

  Amy shook her head again.

  “No clue. A couple of the friends Clara has stayed with before and are close to go to school here, though. Erica Smoyer and Stacey Ipson.” Amy glanced up at the clock mounted on the wall over my head. “They should be in class now. If you want, I can find out what classes they are in, pull them out for a bit, and have them talk to you.”

  “That would be great,” I said. Amy turned to her computer to look up where Erica and Stacey were. As I watched her, I thought about how much she seemed to care about Clara and the rest of the students. Too few people who worked in school systems did.

  “Clara and the rest of the students are lucky to have you, Amy,” I said. “You do good work here.”

  Amy made a face as she continued to peer at her computer screen.

  “If that’s the case, why is Clara missing?” she said.

  CHAPTER 7

  A short while later, I was sitting on a wooden picnic table in the Anderson High school yard beneath a sprawling oak tree. Clara’s friends Erica Smoyer and Stacey Ipson were seated across the table from me. From time to time an acorn would fall onto the wooden table, making a sound like a tiny gunshot. I resisted the temptation to return fire into the tree. I didn’t want to scare the girls.

  I had around my neck a lanyard from which dangled a bright yellow badge that read “Visitor” in red letters. Amy had given it to me before she walked through the school building with me to fetch Erica and Stacey. No doubt she thought the students would mistake me for a physics teacher if it was not clear I was a visitor. They might ask me about Schrödinger’s cat. Or worse, they might mistake me for a sex ed teacher and ask me about a different kind of pussy.

  Erica and Stacey were both fourteen, though they desperately were trying to appear older. Erica was white, tall for her age, and thin, with long black hair that was in a braid that extended down her back. Stacey was a light-skinned black girl who was short and slightly chubby. She would be fat in a few years unless she had a vertical growth spurt or changed her lifestyle. Both girls would be pretty in a jailbait sort of way if they did not have so much makeup caked on that they looked almost clownish. It looked like they had applied the stuff in the dark with a trowel.

  Excitement about the fact they had been pulled out of class to talk to a private detective vied against the bored facade of sophistication they mightily were trying to maintain. If I weren’t worried about bruising their fragile young egos, I might have laughed at them. As it was, I simply tried to take them as seriously as they took themselves.

  “Are you really a private detective?” Stacey asked. Her eyes were wide.

  I nodded.

  “Do you have some ID?” Erica asked. She asked it as seriously as a U.S Senator confronting an undercover cop who had knocked on her front door in the middle of the night.

  I pulled out my private detective license and pushed it across the table to them. They put their heads together and examined it thoroughly and with ill-concealed excitement. If I also revealed to them I was a superhero, their heads might have exploded. Since I did not want to single-handedly cripple the concealer and lipstick industries by killing their best customers, I kept my Hero status to myself. I almost asked if they wanted to examine my gun, too, but they probably would have said yes. They might even have shot me with it if I did not show them the respect their young minds thought they deserved.

  Erica pushed my license back over to me.

  “What can we do for you?” she asked.

  “You know Clara Barton is missing?” I asked.

  They both nodded.

  “And you two are both her good friends?”

  They nodded.

  “Any idea of where she is?”

  They both shook their heads.

  “Do you know why she left?”

  Two head shakes.

  “Any idea of if she left voluntarily or if someone took her?”

  They shook their heads.

  “Has she contacted either of you since she disappeared two weeks ago?”

  Head shakes.

  “How about anyone you know?”

  Another set of matching head shakes. It was like interviewing two mute bobbleheads. I was a superhero being thwarted by fourteen-year-olds. It was times like this I was glad I worked alone in my private detective business. If I did not, what would the guys back at the office have said once they learned I was being outfoxed by two teenaged girls?

  It was time to change tactics. I focused my attention on Stacey. Divide and conquer.

  “Stacey, I understand Clara has stayed with you and your parents a couple of times when she ran away before. What can you tell me about why Clara ran away then?”

  Stacey shrugged. At least it was not a head nod or shake. Progress.

  “Her dad. It was always her dad. He’s a real asshole,” she said. She said the word “asshole” almost as a challenge, as if she halfway expected me to make an issue of her use of it. I said nothing about i
t. I just acted like we were three cosmopolitan adults sitting around shooting the breeze and using adult language. I did not reciprocate in the use of vulgar language, though. I ran in some pretty rough circles, and knew some words that probably had not yet trickled down to suburban Anderson High School. I did not want to pierce the thin veil of the girls’ assumed worldliness and shock them out of a year’s growth by using some of the words I knew. Besides, it would be embarrassing for a Hero to be arrested for contributing to the delinquency of a minor.

  “What was Clara’s problem with her Dad?” I asked Stacey.

  Stacey snorted.

  “What wasn’t her problem with him? He belittled her and her mom, wouldn’t let her do anything, told her the only thing she was good for was to be someone’s wife, that sort of thing,” she said. “When Clara got her powers, things got worse. You know about them, right?” I nodded. “Well, once her dad realized she was a Metahuman, he went from treating her like she was nothing to treating her like she was less than nothing. Clara said he said she was a monster and evil, and he wished she had never been born. She said he started hitting her too.” She glanced over at Erica. “Clara swore us to secrecy about the hitting part, but since you’re a detective and looking for her, you should probably know.”

  Jesus! I thought. I would have said it aloud, but I didn’t want to seem less hardened than these two teens. I was really regretting not beating the tar out of John Barton when I had the chance.

  “If he hit me, I’d cut his dick off in the middle of the night,” Erica interjected. Stacey nodded in emphatic agreement. Erica said it so fiercely I believed her. I was tempted to put a protective hand over my own private parts, but a grown man cupping himself in a school yard is bound to get you talked about.

  “What about Mrs. Barton?” I asked. “Did Mr. Barton lay his hands on her, too?”

  “Not that Clara told us,” Erica said. Stacey nodded in agreement again. “It was just her and just after she got her powers. Clara’s dad is super creepy.” She looked at Stacey. “Remember how he stared at me when we went over there to check on Clara after she didn’t show up for school for a couple of days after she disappeared?”

  Stacey nodded.

  “Yeah, he was undressing you with his eyes. You’re his type, skinny just like his wife. He’d probably try to fuck you if he had a chance.” Stacey looked back over at me. “It’s the ones who talk about religion the most who you can trust the least. I don’t know how a loser like him got the money to buy that expensive car he’s driving around in. You remember, we saw it when we went to check on Clara,” she said to Erica. Erica nodded in agreement.

  I was glad they had brought up the BMW I had spotted at the Barton house. I had not been able to stop wondering about how the Bartons had been able to afford such an expensive car. That car must have cost more than John made in a year.

  “Do either of you know when the Bartons bought that car?” I asked. Now that I had gotten the two talking, it was going to be hard to get them to shut up. I didn’t mind, though. I had nowhere else to be, and the more the two talked, the more likely it was they would say something useful.

  “It must have been right after Clara disappeared,” Erica said. “I was over their house with Clara right before she disappeared. They did not have that car, then. Just a beat up old Civic.”

  “Any notion where they got the money from for it?” I asked.

  They both shook their heads no.

  “Maybe Clara’s dad prayed it into existence,” Stacey said.

  “No, he beat up a little girl and stole it from her,” Erica said. They both giggled. It was the first time since I had been speaking to them they dropped their masks and sounded like kids rather than hardened women of the world.

  “So do you guys think Clara ran away this time? Maybe because her Dad was hitting her?” I had asked a similar question earlier, back when they were giving me head nods and shakes for answers. But we were old pals now. Maybe they were inclined to be more forthcoming.

  Both girls shook their heads.

  “I don’t think so,” Erica said. “Not for this long. If it was just her and her dad, do I think she’d run away for good? Sure. She’d run away and never look back. But, Clara loved her mom and wouldn’t just abandon her even though Clara thought she was—” she trailed off, looking at Stacey. Her long black braid flicked at the air like a horse’s tail. “What was the word she always used to describe her mom?”

  “Ineffectual,” Stacey said.

  “Yeah, that’s right, ineffectual,” Erica said.

  “Do you all know anything about the Dupont Circle explosion?” I asked. Their eyes widened simultaneously.

  “Oh my God, do you think Clara had something to do with that?” Stacey said breathlessly. She and Erica looked at each other. “We knew she could blow herself up, but we had no idea she was involved with that.”

  Apparently the two of them had not seen footage of Clara in the subway station on the news. I could hardly fault them. When I was fourteen, I did not sit around watching the news either. The only way I would have watched the news at that age would have been if lingerie models had been the newscasters.

  I held my hands up placatingly.

  “Easy,” I said. “No one is saying Clara had anything to do with that. I’m only asking because of Clara’s powers.” I feared the damage was already done. By the time I drove out of the parking lot, the school would probably be buzzing with the news that Clara had blown up the Dupont Circle subway station for the purpose of extorting more vacation days from the Anderson school system. The only thing in the universe known to travel faster than the speed of light was incorrect gossip. As Mark Twain said, a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still getting its shoes on.

  “Speaking of Clara’s powers,” I said, “have either of you see what she can do?”

  They both nodded. Their eyes were wide.

  “She took us into the woods and showed us one afternoon after school,” Erica said. “She made us stand far away from her, and as we watched, BOOM,” she said, pantomiming an explosion with her hands. “The force of it knocked me to the ground.”

  “Not me,” Stacey said smugly, “I’m tough.”

  “I’m tough too,” Erica said in protest. “The force of it caught me off guard, is all. Anyway, a few seconds later, Clara reappeared next to us. One second she wasn’t there, and the next instant she was. It nearly gave me a heart attack. It was almost as freaky as watching her explode. She wore a shit-eating grin, looking exactly as she had before she exploded.”

  “I think Metahumans are cool,” Stacey said. “I told Clara she should study to be a licensed Hero when she was old enough. She said she was thinking about it. You ever met any Heroes or Metahumans, Mr. Lord?”

  “One or two,” I said. I still did not tell her I was a Hero. From the gleam in her eye when she talked about Metahumans, I was afraid she’d try to seduce me right on top of the picnic table. Both I and the Heroes' Guild frowned on such things.

  I talked to the girls for a while longer. I did not learn anything else that was useful, other than the fact that the girls would have been happy to talk to me all day instead of returning to class.

  I thanked the girls for their time. I stood up to leave.

  “Are you going to find Clara?” Stacey asked as both girls looked up at me. Despite their affected adultness, their eyes were expectant and trusting.

  The truth was I didn’t know whether I would find Clara or not. Life did not follow a predictable narrative. Not every story had a happy ending, and the good guys did not always win in the end. I knew that, and the girls would eventually learn that. But, that was not the answer they wanted to hear. It was not the answer I wanted to hear either.

  “Yes,” I said.

  Then I left to try to follow through on my promise.

  CHAPTER 8

  A couple of days later, I stood in the parking lot of Huron Incorporated bright and early in the morn
ing. Huron made those pieces of rubber and metal on top of utility poles which power and telephone lines ran from. I had never before thought about those pieces of equipment, and I certainly had never given any thought as to who made them. But, everything has to be made by somebody. Come to think of it, that concept was the most compelling argument for the existence of God mankind had ever come up with.

  I probably never would have thought about the pieces of equipment on top of utility poles or Huron had Huron not been the place where John Barton worked as a third-shift foreman. It was then almost 8:30 a.m., and a lot of the third-shift employees, the ones who worked the night shift, had already left. I had been leaning against the driver’s side of John’s BMW for over thirty minutes, waiting for him to make an appearance. The early bird got the worm.

  Though there were plenty of other cars in the unpaved, red clay lot, none of them were near John’s. John’s car was by far the most expensive one in the parking lot. He had no doubt parked far from everyone to try to avoid getting his shiny new car dinged up by someone else being careless in backing up or opening his car door.

  I had been told John, being in a supervisory position, generally left the plant later than the people under him. I spent part of the time I waited for him admiring his car. It really was a nice vehicle, and a miracle of German engineering. The Germans really knew how to build a machine. If they had a larger population and had not been led by an evil lunatic, they probably would have licked us in World War Two. Part of me hoped me leaning against the car would not scratch the paint job of the beautiful machine. Another part of me hoped it would.

  Finally, I saw the rear door of the Huron factory open and John Barton stepped out. His car was parked pretty far away from the building. John did not see me until he was almost right on top of me.

  “Hey buddy, that’s my car you’re leaning up against,” he said. He looked tired after working all night. His clothes were smudged with dirt and oil, his eyes were red, and grey-black stubble peppered his face. He took a couple more steps forward, and his eyes widened in recognition.