Dead End

Just like that, the Dead Kid Detective Agency wrapped up its very first case and set off on, let’s assume, a long career of uncovering the most pernicious crimes in the town of Sticksville’s history. A beautiful yet morbid friendship had been cemented.

But I suppose you’ll want to know what happened immediately afterward.

Police business first. Mr. Page confessed to the murder of Terry O’Shea, but October Schwartz didn’t press charges for the whole abduction thing. Currently, Mr. Page is in prison awaiting his trial, at which he intends to plead guilty. He was in a wheelchair for a month due to his injured knee. And he was fired from Sticksville Central, obviously.

Second, the father-daughter stuff. Following that terribly exciting Hallowe’en night, and after Mr. Schwartz slept for a million years, October and her dad had a very quiet weekend recuperating at home. Saturday morning, October could be found at the kitchen table with a half-eaten bowl of Quaker oatmeal, scribbling away in her Two Knives, One Thousand Demons notebook. She wasn’t penning the adventures of Olivia de Kellerman anymore. Instead, she was recording what she could remember of Mr. O’Shea’s mystery and how the dead kids helped her solve it. Maybe the adventures of the Dead Kid Detective Agency would prove to be a more inspiring topic. October had a crazy idea that once she’d typed the story up, she could use it to help Cyril, Tabetha, and Morna learn to read. A simpler book, one that didn’t use big words and phrases like “liberation” and “Phoebe Cates,” would have probably been more appropriate, but what did October know? She was thirteen and certifiably delusional.

Mr. Schwartz casually placed the maroon Scrabble box in the middle of the table and noticed his daughter toiling away in her book.

“Haven’t you had enough knives for one weekend?”

“That was a bayonet,” October replied.

“I know you’re working on your book, but can I interest you in a game?”

A few words into the game, Mr. Schwartz began to ask his daughter the questions he hadn’t been able to ask late last night while he lay prone on Mr. Page’s neatly trimmed grass. His colleague had killed another colleague, who was once a member of the FLQ, as far as he understood it. Not the kind of Hallowe’en memories he wanted his daughter to treasure.

“October,” Mr. Schwartz said, linking “V-E-I-L” to an “S.” “Were you spying on Mr. Page? Is that why you were over there?”

October wondered how much she should tell her dad. If he was worried about her spending time in the cemetery, he’d probably be way less enthused with her cloak and dagger work. And any mention of dead kids was surely off-limits. Besides, she missed them too much to even think about mentioning their existence. As far as her dad was concerned, October decided, his ignorance was her bliss.

“Why would I spy on my history teacher?” October said, acting offended by the mere insinuation. “I ran away after our . . . fight . . . and when I was walking down Overlea, I ran into Mr. Page, running around in his costume.”

“Really.”

“He must have already gone mad from guilt or something. The unit on the October Crisis was coming up in class.”

“Well, the important thing is that you’re okay now,” he said, rising from the table to make some tea. “That must have been very scary for you. I know I was terrified. How’s the forehead?”

“Fine,” she said, touching the bruised area of her hairline. “Still hurts when I touch it. Or when Voldemort is near.”

“Don’t say his name out loud,” her dad whispered.

“I mean You-Know-Who.”

Mr. Schwartz placed the full kettle onto a stovetop element. “The strangest thing about last night is that I really felt like I was moving under someone else’s power. Like somebody was shoving me out of harm’s way.”

October watched her dad grow more and more flustered as he tried to explain the phenomenon without getting, you know, overly spiritual.

“Look at me,” he said. “Your clinically depressed dad’s going to need a new batch of pills. That’s what you’re thinking, right? I’m just telling you how it felt.”

“Maybe you have mental powers,” October said, fishing a bag of chocolate fudge cookies out of the kitchen cupboard.

“Like ESP?” he asked. “I thought about that. I mean, my body moved where I wanted it to move, somehow evading Henry’s attacks. I suppose it’s possible. But I would have thought I’d have a little more control over it. Y’know . . . like floating through the air instead of sliding backward on my face.”

October nearly choked on a mouthful of cookie, she laughed so hard. “Can you pour me some tea?” she asked.

“You know, another thing I can’t get my head around is how the police never suspected Henry.”

“It did look like an accident, I guess.”

“Yes, a case of Occam’s razor, I suppose,” her dad said, filling two mugs. He handed the one with a black cat on the side to his daughter.

“What? Occam’s razor?” She’d never heard of Occam before, not to mention his shaving products.

“It’s a science term. A principle, really,” her dad, captain of the nerd team, explained. “It says that for whatever results you achieve in an experiment, the simplest explanation for those results is most likely the correct one.”

October nodded as she emptied four — no, five — spoonfuls of sugar into her mug.

“So, the police saw what looked like an accident, could find no evidence to the contrary, knew of no enemies of the victim and concluded it was an accident. Occam’s razor.”

“But that wasn’t what happened at all.”

“Well, Occam’s razor isn’t a hard and fast rule,” said her dad. He sighed, scratched at last night’s five o’clock shadow — now much more like a solar eclipse — and drank from his “Scientists Do It Methodically” mug.

Once you befriend dead kids and discover your teachers are former Quebecois bomb makers and murderers, Occam’s razor must not apply. Simple explanations jumped out the window the moment October first saw Morna MacIsaac in the Sticksville Cemetery.

“I hope you’re not worried,” Mr. Schwartz said to his kid. “This sort of excitement isn’t typical in Sticksville, I’m sure.”

A semester hadn’t even passed and already October had been found out as a baby, labelled a basket case by most of her peers, and nearly been impaled by her bayonet-wielding history teacher. Things could only improve. But with five dead kids scheduled to make a return appearance outside her backyard within a month, she imagined things in Sticksville were only just beginning to get unusual.

Monday, November 3rd was October Schwartz’s first day back at Sticksville Central, and despite the absence of Mr. Page, things remained pretty much the same as they’d always been.

Rumours about Mr. Page started inching through the school by nine o’clock. There were rumours that he had been arrested. Rumours that he was wanted for arrest, but he’d fled to the United States and adopted a new identity and was currently working in a high-end dog grooming salon or washing dishes in a Malaysian fusion restaurant. Reports varied. But as to what he was or wasn’t arrested for, there were a multitude of theories. Most assumed he was a child-snatcher. Wouldn’t you?

But Mr. Page wasn’t the biggest news after the weekend. Travis Belluz puked down Megan Davies’s shirt while getting to second base at some costume party on Friday night, and that was way more scandalous. And revolting.

Other kids continued to talk about October behind her back, but now they talked about her rumoured involvement with Mr. Page’s arrest, in addition to her suspected mental illness and her age. Ashlie Salmons was still the devil, and continued to make October’s life intolerable, and Mr. Santuzzi was just as strict and unsettling a teacher as ever. October honestly had trouble not thinking of him as a murderer. It seemed so right! Occam’s razor, proven wrong again. When did the stupid thing ever work?

Waking her from a daydream in Monday’s math class with a shout, Santuzzi reminded October, “In Singapore, they have public canings for people who can’t pay attention.”

Okay. That guy was really not a murderer?

Yumi and Stacey were still the same people they had always been. When October met them in the cafeteria, they had countless questions about Mr. Page’s arrest and the rumours that surrounded it. Yumi, in particular, was eager to glean everything she could.

October told them about how she’d been kidnapped by Mr. Page, about the bayonet and soldier’s costume, and about how Mr. Page had caused Mr. O’Shea’s “accident.” Again, the crucial aspects of her murder investigation and the presence of a certain number of dead kids were omitted from the narrative, but the details she revealed were shocking enough for Yumi.

“What? That’s for real? I thought that was just his stupid history-based Hallowe’en costume. I didn’t think he’d gone insane.”

“We went trick-or-treating at his house,” Stacey said.

“We didn’t go trick-or-treating,” said Yumi, smiling over Stacey’s memory gaps, embarrassed to be sitting with a trick-or-treating loser. “Don’t listen to him. He’s a drummer. He finds the board game Risk fascinating.”

“We did too go trick-or-treating.”

“Oh no! You were probably there! All chained to a drainpipe or locked in a cupboard or something,” she said. “I’m sorry! We were there. I’m so sorry.”

Yumi had greeted this new information with an equal measure of horror and joy — horror that her good friend had experienced such a frightening imprisonment, but sheer joy at knowing someone involved in something so cool. Yumi would definitely be one up on her cousin now, in the information department at least. Stacey, as usual, was rather blasé about it, and treated October as if her big revelation had been that she was originally from Iowa. October sometimes felt Stacey was like a taller, less dead, slightly more masculine version of Morna in that respect. She wondered if they could be related, but she couldn’t remember Stacey’s last name at the moment.

“So, are you free Friday night?” Stacey asked.

“Um, I think so. Why?”

“There’s another concert at the Y. Yumi and I will be in attendance, and there’s an extra working seatbelt in my dad’s car.”

“Oh, please come,” Yumi insisted.

“Well, my dad’s a little strict about me leaving the house after the kidnapping,” October smiled. “But I’ll see what I can do.”

“Hey, Zombie Tramp,” shouted Ashlie Salmons, interrupting a totally perfect Kodak moment. “I heard you and Mr. Page were going to elope when the police busted him. Honeymoon in Niagara Falls. How’d that work out for you?”

What a hosebeast. Things were definitely back to normal at Sticksville Central.

That afternoon, October strode into the Sticksville Public Library, coasting across the carpet like a heat-seeking missile aimed at the history section. She found several books on the pre-war era, Canada’s involvement in World War I, and the country’s immigration waves. She photocopied every scrap of information she could find about Sticksville, Ontario, in the early twentieth century. She even pocketed a pamphlet offering a walking tour of the historic pubs and restaurants of Sticksville and its surroundings.

She needed everything she could find. After all, a dead Scottish lass was counting on her.