THE COOKIEDUSTER CASE, ENTRY 2
‘Brand!’ I shrieked, suddenly blind and without the wherewithal to remember where I had been in the room. ‘Brand! My eyes!’
The footsteps were apparent before the voice, a gait of pure indifference clacking into my vicinity on a pair of what were—if previous days were any indication—certainly overly-flamboyant boots, her disdainful voice owling out a ‘who?’ as though my sudden sightlessness had developed pronouns.
‘You, Brand! My eyes—I have lost my sight!’
‘Brandi,’ she said, sighing heavily and, from what I could hear of the shuffling fabrics, crossing her arms derisively. ‘My name is Brandi.’
‘What are these games, Brand!’ I hollered, reaching spasmodically for something to steady myself. ‘You wrote your name on my hand yourself—how dare you take advantage of a blind man!’
‘I wrote,’ she said, taking my hand in hers and nearly puncturing my palm with the eight little daggers she insisted were fingernails, ‘Brandi. See?’
I felt my elbow bend quickly, and the back of my hand—where she had written her name—met with my eyebrow in a collision that nearly knocked me off my feet, but before I could register a complaint about the appalling lack of professionalism in the office of late, she asked, ‘how long have you been staring at the lights?’
Of course—the lights! I had forgotten to look away from the ceiling lights before I declared myself blind, which would have been a source of embarrassment were it not for the fact that I was incapable of such base self-reproach, as remorsefulness had no more place in a functioning detective agency than whimsy did in a dog fight.
‘The frogs,’ I said, blinking sight back into my dazzled eyes. ‘I’ve been looking everywhere for them, but I fear they’ve gone.’
‘Can’t say I blame them ‘ Brandi said, taking me by the shoulders and sitting me on the couch. ‘Eyesight back? Good—read your hand.’
My hand did indeed read Brandi, and as I attempted to defend my apparent dyslexia by asserting my presumption that it was her whom mixed up the i with an upside-down exclamation point, she interrupted casually with an opposing viewpoint.
‘You’re an idiot.’
Though I disagreed vehemently, I found words to that effect difficult to wrestle from my tangle of thoughts that were then primarily focused on the apparent anthrax dotting a line down her outfit from shoulder to knee, and—at the risk of being seen to be changing the topic away from the unpleasantness of the previous one—wondered aloud as to the nature of this glaringly obvious chemical warfare, settling on the theory that it was an act of sabotage carried out with abject buffoonery.
Brandi left the room wordlessly in what I considered a tacit admission of guilt until she returned eating a cookie that had clearly been dusted in the same anthrax-adjacent powder I had spotted on her clothes, and against my better judgment I decided that there were far worse fates than death by cookie, suggesting gently that independent snacking had been known to cause a powerful dissatisfaction and mild to heavy societal disillusionment in lone snackers.
Brandi stared at me for a long time, nodding and chewing as she leaned against the desk, on which laid a single sheet of paper that she absent-mindedly slid around said desk in a circular motion, before finally—with a newly bitten-off chunk of cookie filling her mouth—questioning my modus operandi re: cases in the macro and this particular case in the micro, a query punctuated by a sudden seizure of the desk paper, which was balled up and flung into the air like a monstrous piece of confetti.
I shrugged and watched the tossed paper ball’s arc, determining that, for the most part, clues just kind of fell into my lap, just as Brandi’s grenade landed on my crotch with enough downward force to level a teeter-totter. I gathered everything I knew about how gravity worked as I slumped sideways on the couch, watching the paper ball unfurling itself as it rolled along the floor, revealing the hidden palm-sized tungsten sphere from my desk drawer that I had been saving for a heretofore-unnamed, I’ll-know-it-when-I-see-it special occasion, and immediately my taste for cookies had been diminished by half.
From the cookie-dusting to the clandestinely-purloined tungsten ball, there was far more to this Brandi than met the eye, and with my keen detection skills I had come to two dueling yet unassailably logical conclusions: this case would require far more elbow-grease than any previous, and that Brandi had been or was engaged in the type of witchcraftery that brought men to their knees . . . or in the case of yours truly, brought reasonably-priced, handsome detectives to a jackknifed fetal position on the couch.
Fortunately, I was an old hand at keeping my eyes peeled, as peeled peepers were not only essential for the circumstances described above, but for any situation that didn’t necessitate an extensive staring into ceiling lights looking for anxiety frogs.
