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The Case of the Missing Black Socks
"Where did my socks go?" my mother asked as she pulled the laundry out of the dryer. As I sought to find an answer to this mysterious question, I saw, in a flash, my future.
It was amazing to me how I was suddenly transformed into the detective I've become. The mystery of the disappearing socks was my first caper. I remember how I got up and started collecting all the facts. First, the color of the socks: black. One of them had a hole in the toe. Then I asked how many there were. My mother told me ten, and that she had come out with only seven.
I thought about how three black socks could just disappear from a dryer. My six-year-old mind came up with all sorts of entertaining ideas. My first guess was that a man in a mask had come in and stolen them. "But we would have heard that!" protested my mom. So I scrapped the idea.
Then I thought about the possibility that they had shrunk out of existence. "Socks don't just disappear like that, Davey." Then I proposed that they got all the color bleached out of them and were actually white now, but again my mom negated it.
There was only one thing left to do: investigate. I picked through the empty dryer and naturally found nothing. Then I went through the clothes-pile. It took me about twenty minutes, but I finally found the missing black socks somehow camouflaged with her black pants. They were all there, and the caper was solved.
Since then, I've had a number of interesting cases to occupy my time. All sorts of things, from screws loose to missing pets and even a murder mystery. That was a particularly fascinating case, as I remember it.
I had just gotten home from school one day when my sister presented me with a dead rat. Half of its tail was missing, and she told me she had discovered the horrid thing in the basement. She asked me if I could figure out who or what killed it.
I was engrossed in the case right from the start. I immediately threw my books on the bed, despite my mother's protests, and ran to the basement to the place where Elisa found the rat. She pointed to the exact spot, a small clearing on the floor amidst old furniture and boxes. That was all the information she could provide me with, and I informed her that that was all I needed.
I told her to leave the crime scene while I searched for clues. Two years had passed since the black-sock case, and my skills at finding and handling evidence had improved dramatically, as had my ability to think logically. The first thing I did was to examine the rodent. Its limp body was in as good of shape as it could have been, showing no signs of being mangled or hit, save the tail. The point at which the tail was missing looked like it had been chewed. I concluded that the rat must have bitten it off, or that something else had.
But why? The next step in my investigation had come fairly quickly. When one can ask a question like "why?", one can often tell which way to proceed. I got down on my hands and knees and looked all along the floor, being very careful not to knock any of the boxes down. I found paw prints matching those of the despicable creature alongside one of the boxes further toward the wall. I followed them for a ways, now carefully lifting and moving boxes out of the way without disturbing the fine layer of dust on the floor. The paw prints formed an almost perfect parallel to the edges of the blank spots formed by the cardboard cubes. Apparently it had traveled a long, difficult path to get to the place where it died.
I went on a little longer, then found a mousetrap with its spring lax and the other half of the rodent's tail caught under the blunt metal. This confirmed my suspicion about the rat itself having gnawed it off. There was also a small amount of blood on the floor next to the trap.
So the one question remained: What killed the poor thing? This would be a more difficult question to answer, since the tracks I had followed led away from the trap, and the other set of tracks came in from a large hole in the wall. I decided to scrap the hole for the moment and go back to my starting place. I hadn't found any tracks leading to the death site, but there was another set that went between some more boxes. I pulled the boxes out of the way and followed this trail. It had been twice-tread, with a set of tracks going in and the same set coming out. I figured that wherever these tracks led was a dead end.
It didn't take me long to find the end of the maze. Only two boxes. Then I came upon a paper bag with a hole ripped in the side, and there was a funny-smelling brown grain scattered in the small space. I opened the bag from the top and pulled out a small package. In the dimming light, it was difficult to read the label.
Just then, my mom opened the door to the basement, shedding light on the package of foul ingredients. She said, "Davey? What are you getting into down here?"
"Rat poison," I said, reading the label, and unaware that I had just answered my mother's question. Her gasp of shock snapped me back to reality, and I realized what I had just said. "Sorry, Mom, I was trying to figure out what killed that rat that Elisa showed me."
"What rat?!" shrieked my mother, now even more incredulous than before. I understood then that my sister must not have told her what happened. This would begin an even more interesting investigation: the Search for the Mad-Mom Cure.
That's a case I never solved.
- Matt Kellner, 1994
