Bedbugs and Fleas
It doesn’t matter whether your table is antique or modern, round or square if you’re the only one who sits at it. That’s why I don’t have one in my apartment, just a stool at the counter between the kitchen and the space most people use as a dining room. My desk and computer are there. I figure I might as well use the area productively and this way I don’t need to rent a bigger apartment with a room to use as an office. Ms. Charters, the Educational Assistant who was with me all the way through school after Grade Four when they identified my problem, used to say “Waste not, want not.” So even though I could afford a bigger place, I don’t bother. Why buy a table and chairs that never get used?
I found out Ms. Charter’s first name is Ellen, but I still can’t think of her as that. Even though now I know she was about my current age when she started working with me, I was only nine at the time the school decided I had Asperger’s Syndrome so she was always Ms. Charters to me. She said I had a good brain but it jumped around like fleas deserting a dead dog. Did you know fleas can jump two hundred times their own height? I wonder who measured that.
The other kids at school made fun of me. She helped me learn to control what they thought was weird. I used to make flappers. If you fold a piece of paper exactly right, you can hold it beside your ear and shake it back and forth very rapidly so it makes a sound I find comforting. So whenever I got upset, which was often, I would make one. She told me not to do that, at least when there were other kids around. I didn’t like people touching me either, but she taught me not to freak out, just move away. Her word was 'subtly'. Good thing I can’t jump two hundred times my own height. That wouldn’t be subtle. Also loud sounds bother me, but they’re inevitable in a school. And changes to routine. I eventually got to the point where I managed even if the teacher was sick and we had a supply.
I still don’t make eye contact when I’m in a conversation. She said that bothers other people since they rely on visual clues for a lot of information. Not me. She brought a video to the classroom of an actor making different facial expressions that I was supposed to learn to recognize. But I guess other people do that automatically and they must do it really fast because despite all I learned, I wouldn't be nearly as good at it as normals - if I ever looked.
She also told me not everyone thinks fleas are as interesting as I find them. How can anyone not be fascinated by a creature that can live up to a year without eating? Hungry maybe, but alive.
Maybe sometimes my head leaps around like she said, but it always comes back to fleas. The first time I saw a picture of a flea was in Grade Two, right after I saw a diagram of a human brain. They have the same basic shape, so I connected fleas to what was inside my skull. Of course I know better now; there actually isn’t a flea in my head, but that’s what I used to think.
When I went to university, I thought a fresh start would be possible. By that time, everyone at my high school ostracized me but I envied the way they all had friends. The guys in my residence all seemed to be sports fans and I wanted to fit in so I memorized scads of hockey statistics. The first time I sat in the common room with them watching a game on TV, I told them everything about each player’s scoring history. Before long, they told me to shut up. So that wasn’t just the first time, it was the last.
I tried to interact with girls too. Three times I asked someone to go for coffee after one of our lectures, but none of them would go out with me a second time. The fourth try, the girl was at least honest. “You’re a nice guy,” she said, “but being with you is exhausting. When you’re not talking about fleas - which is not the most interesting topic out there - your ideas jump all over the place and following your train of thought is worse than running a marathon. Takes too much effort.”
After that, I gave up. I devoted all my energy to learning about fleas, eventually specializing in investigating their role in transmitting disease. Did you know in the Middle Ages, the Bubonic Plague didn’t kill fleas, just made it so they couldn’t digest food? The resulting hunger made them frantic to try a different person and that’s why the Black Death spread so fast.
Now I work in a hospital lab, but it’s okay to be focussed there. I work alone too. There are other people in the lab but I’m the only flea guy. When I go to a meeting, it’s about fleas so I'm supposed to be fixated on that topic. Once I was interviewed for a radio show, but that was by phone so they weren’t expecting eye contact and I didn’t have to shake hands.
About six months ago, bedbugs became a problem here and the hospital hired a woman to investigate them. Dr. Morgan, the head of the lab, said all the hospitals in the city are chipping in for her salary but we have the biggest lab so she’s based here.
She doesn’t make eye contact either. It took me four months to realize that, since I never looked at her when we talked. One day when I was in a cubicle in the washroom, I overheard two other guys from the lab talking about her and that made me realize. They called her Bedbuggy and said that’s all she can talk about.
Maybe she's like me and I should try connecting with someone again. I've pretty well resigned myself to being alone all the time, but sometimes alone is lonely. But if she’s like me, she wouldn’t want to go to a restaurant or any other place there might be unpredictable people and loud noises. If I invited her here, what could be the reason unless it’s to have a pizza? But then we would need a place to sit and there’s no table. There’s only one armchair in the TV room too, since that’s all I need. The counter’s wide enough for one person on each side and there are cupboards underneath so I wouldn’t have to worry about our knees accidentally touching, but I only have one stool. If I bought a table and chairs, I would have to move my computer and desk, and that would mean getting a bigger apartment and moving is just too complicated. A second stool would be easier.
But I guess I better read up on bedbugs.
A.D.D. P.I.
Janine says I’m going to be late for my own funeral but I say she’ll be early for hers, which is worse. We’re perfect partners – at work. If we lived together, she would drive me crazy by insisting the towels be folded into perfect rectangles, the pantry be alphabetized, and the lawn be cut with scissors so every blade of grass is exactly the same length. She would tear her hair out at my spontaneous schedule, last-minute decisions concerning meals, and the messiness of being a person like me. For her, order comes way above empathy.
I first hired her six years ago when the piles of folders threatened to topple onto the half-empty cartons from Wong Fu’s Take Out. A notice from Revenue Canada about a missing quarterly tax remittance had arrived in the mail that morning, along with the third warning that the payment for the credit card for my detective agency was long overdue. I would rather use my brain for solving mysteries, not for remembering such mundane things, but I admit they’re important. Just not to me, so I brought in someone from Jackson’s Temps to organize. I wish I could have done that in school when they explained my bouncing brain by saying I had Attention Deficit Disorder.
Hiring someone was supposed to be for a few days only but sorting the office proved to be a bigger task. Eventually, I could see the top of my desk and find a file in less than an hour. When Janine tackled the mountain on the blue chair in the reception area, I discovered it actually had a red-plaid seat-cushion, something I hadn’t seen in so long I had forgotten. So I admitted to myself I needed her - though I would never tell her that. She hounds me about eating regularly, and though I always object, that’s more for form; secretly, I like not having my thinking-time interrupted by stomach rumblings. She also offered to take on the divorce cases I avoided which could have been providing a regular income. I like solving mysteries, not establishing an organized paper trail, though that is a necessity in those cases; cheaters usually wilt when confronted with a detailed itinerary of their transgressions, and lawyers insist on an orderly list. Perfect for her.
So I
kept her on as both office manager and part-time associate investigator – a label she chose. It’s nice to be able to give her receipts from lunches with clients and know they will be filed away for tax-time, but I refuse to keep regular hours the way she wants. She has learned not to assume I will arrive at exactly 9:00 a.m. and take lunch from 12:00 to 1:00.
Late one afternoon last week, I ambled in after searching through the dumpster in the alley behind Clippers, the shop owned by a client’s hairstylist-husband. The client was one of Janine’s divorce cases, except the husband wasn’t contesting it. The wife thought he was hiding assets and wanted her share. So finding them counted as a mystery - hence my involvement.
She had said, “He has his own bank account but I sneak a look at his monthly statements; it used to be sizeable. Over the past few months, he’s been making frequent large cash withdrawals, but never a regular amount so he’s not simply transferring the money. He goes out every Saturday and I want to know what he’s up to.”
Unlike most dumpsters, that one didn’t smell too bad; all the empty shampoo bottles helped. Among the coffee grounds and hair clippings, I found old message slips. Most were for other people and were simply routine, but seven were distinctive. They all had his name on them and were the only crumpled ones. The rest had simply been tossed, though some were stained by used tea bags or remnants from hair-dye bottles. When I spread out the unique ones, I could see they were all calls from between 2:30 and 3:30 on a Monday, when you would think a business owner would be present. There was also a brochure for Faraday’s U-Store-It, as well as several flyers for Saturday estate auctions. Faraday’s is beside the Beer Store on Michigan Avenue where I’m a regular. My bouncing brain decided he was renting a storage unit, taking delivery Mondays of whatever he bought at auction on Saturdays. That’s an example of my head connecting random things to solve a mystery.
Since that happened on a Monday, I went to the Beer Store at 1:45, supposedly to make a purchase., Then I watched for him from inside my car in their parking lot. All the storage units face the Beer Store, so I could take photos while his unit’s door was open. He showed up at 2:45 as I hoped. It looked like antiques in there, but you would need an expert to evaluate them. His soon-to-be-ex will be happy to hire one.
That meandering mind hasn’t helped me with the Cochrane Case though. I still don’t know where the body is – if there even is one. The police say there’s no evidence of foul play, that Annie Cochrane simply moved out and doesn’t want anyone to find her. Terry Taylor, the guy she lived with, has a history of bar fights, but not domestic abuse. However, Annie’s sister Marilyn is sure she wouldn’t have left behind the poncho tucked into the back of the closet, though everything else is gone. She says it had fallen onto the floor, was underneath a muddy jacket. Taylor says Annie took everything when she left and must have missed that poncho. The cops found it when Marilyn convinced them the disappearance was suspicious so they got a search warrant. After they decided Annie had simply moved out, they took Marilyn through the apartment to convince her too, and that’s when she saw the alpaca-wool poncho. Marilyn says Annie bought it on vacation in Peru and would never have left it behind.
There was nothing else unusual and no one heard anything so the police don’t think there’s any crime; they say Annie’s an adult, entitled to leave. Marilyn said the kitchen was immaculate for once, which she thought was strange because Annie wasn’t a good housekeeper and Taylor avoided the kitchen completely. She also said there was a bushel basket of apples on the counter, which she also found weird because Taylor’s about as domestic as a chainsaw and snacks on junk food, not fresh fruit.
When she gave me Taylor’s address, I realized the apartment was in the shabby three-story building two blocks down from the office so I could walk over, carrying my kit of G.P.S., camera, binoculars, and emergency money. I think Marilyn finding me was as easy as stopping at the first agency she passed when she decided watching his place herself was accomplishing nothing. From across the street, I saw nothing unusual about his rusty red pickup when he came home, though the back was unexpectedly clean, as was the shovel in it. But there was something orange mashed into the tire-treads. When I used my binoculars to look closely, I realized it was squashed pumpkin. I recognized it because once I drove over an old jack-o-lantern someone had thrown onto the street the day after Hallowe’en. I wondered how Taylor had managed that since Hallowe’en was still two weeks away.
Later, I phoned pretending I worked for the lottery company and Annie had won twenty thousand dollars. Usually, the missing person calls back or whoever answers says he’s the spouse so it’s okay to send the money to him. Not this time though. Taylor just said she was gone and hadn’t left a forwarding address. So either she genuinely left and he’s angry at her and won’t tell her about the money, or he killed her and trying to collect the twenty grand himself wouldn’t be worth the risk.
When I came into the office after my dumpster-diving, little Roland Marchand was sitting in the blue chair with the red-plaid seat. Our offices are over his grandfather’s variety store, and late in the afternoon, Roland sits on the front step beside the door to the stairway leading upstairs. He’s only seven, too young to leave alone, so he has to hang out there after school until his parents pick him up.
I wondered what he was doing in the office since our conversations are usually short and sweet. He always asks what lottery numbers to choose. Once I asked how he expected me to know and he replied that a Private Investigator could find out anything. So now it’s a game – I pretend I know but want a share of the prize for telling him. He pretends he believes me but negotiating a split is the stumbling block. He asks for the numbers, I say 50-50, he says 80-20.
Turned out his dog was missing and Roland figured I could find it since the agency motto on the door said ‘No Mystery Too Small’. I didn’t want to simply brush him off since he seems like a sweet kid – as if I would know. I think Janine would have pitched him out shortly though, since she’s about as maternal as a Mack truck and he was fidgeting. She had him confined to the chair; I could imagine her ordering him to stay put. In the few minutes I spoke with him before I took him into my office, he alternately knelt, sat, and squatted on his heels – without leaving his seat. I could hear the sound of grinding teeth from behind Janine’s phony smile.
I think the only reason I invited him in was to get him out of the reception area so she could clean the dirt from his shoes off the chair. I knew she would be itching to. But before I could say anything, he reached into a pocket and pulled out a collection of coins.
“There,” he said. “I hope it’s enough.” I have a sign on the wall - “I have to charge friends. People who don’t like me go elsewhere.” But for him, any amount would have done.
I couldn’t simply turf him. Besides, the Clippers Case was now solved and I didn’t want to concentrate on the Cochrane Case. Letting my head randomly jump around from one idea to the next is how I make the unusual connections which help me solve mysteries. Trying to control it doesn’t work, so it’s not like I wanted to focus on anything.
I pretended it was like any other missing-person’s case.
“When did you last see him?” I asked after I took details like name, age, and description. I actually have a form for things like that but I’ve never filled in ‘Terrier’ for ‘race’ before or 'brown fur with one white paw' for 'appearance'.
“Yesterday morning,” he replied. “He always walks to the fence around our yard with me, then sits there while me and Mommy walk to school.”
“Anything out of the ordinary on the street, like unusual parked cars or vans?” I asked that even as I thought how crazy it sounded. That was usually the next question when I was dealing with a missing person. Roland didn’t seem to think it was meaningless though.
“A red truck,” he said seriously. “I remember because I saw one just like it when my school
went on a field trip to the apple farm.”
I wasn’t sure what to ask next since missing dogs are completely outside my experience. So stalling while I thought, I said, “An apple farm. That must have been fun.”
“You bet,” he said. “The teachers put us on a wagon and the farmer pulled it with his tractor. We went through his trees. They call it an orchard, you know.” Then he added, “The wagon had hay bales to sit on. They gave everyone an apple when we left.”
I was silent as I had no idea what to ask next, so he kept talking about the farm.
Eventually, I said, “I think I have enough information to start. Normally, I would check police stations and hospitals for missing people, but for a missing dog, I guess I should start with the pound and the vet.”
I could tell Roland was upset by the idea his dog might be injured but I didn’t want to give him false hope. Finding people often leads to uncovering tragedies, which always crushes me for a while, and finding a dog could do the same. Destroy him too.
“We have to hope for the best,” I said as I ushered him past Janine’s glare. “I’ll be in touch when I know something.”
Janine focussed on her computer screen, though I think her eyes rolled. As I expected, the chair was clean and there was a strong scent of lemon. There was a spray bottle of cleaner on her desk.
At home, I carried the case of beer that I had bought that afternoon to the kitchen. When I put a few bottles into the fridge, a fog of foul air drifted out and I realized it was coming from the carton of Shrimp Lo Mein I had forgotten after I put the leftovers into the fridge over a week ago. I held it at arm’s length and stepped on the trash can pedal but the bag was full. The table and counter were already covered with dirty dishes and empty beer bottles so there was no place to put the stinking box.
Smells like a decomposing body I thought as I tried not to gag. I need to clean this kitchen. This is criminal.
Then my mind did one of those connect-the-dots things other people find so hard to follow. ‘Decomposing body’, ‘criminal’, and ‘clean kitchen’ made me think of the Cochrane Case and I realized that might be a reason for the unusually spotless kitchen at Taylor’s. If he poisoned her – no one had heard anything and it was the usual cheap apartment with thin walls and nosy neighbours – he would have cleaned carefully after disposing of the body. Then my head jumped to the apples Marilyn saw on the counter and that made me remember Roland’s story about his field-trip. If anyone saw him outside the city, the bushel of apples could have been Taylor’s excuse for going out to the country.
I called Marilyn and asked if she had noticed a name on the apple basket at Taylor’s. “Robertson’s Orchards,” she said in a tone that said she thought I was crazy. I went to my computer, found the location of the orchard, and called up a road map of the county. Then I drove over to Taylor’s building and took the most obvious route to Robertson’s. Once I reached the countryside, I watched for fields of pumpkins, then tire tracks leading into one.
That’s how I found the body.
That’s depressing but it didn’t help find the dog. I can’t count on Janine to take Roland’s case either.
About The Author
R.K. (Bob ) Smith describes his work as ‘character-driven’, where people face challenges with courage, imagination, and persistence - or some other positive attribute. It is no wonder, seeing his life has included such diverse experiences as running a children’s camp in Lebanon, working in factories, teaching college and so on. The diversity of people and settings encountered in such situations underlie his ability to create believable people and situations.
Other Works By This Author
R.K. (Bob) Smith has had short stories published in printed and on-line formats.
Ebooks include:
Slices Of Life (also available in hard copy)
Printed credits include both anthologies and newspapers and their supplements.
Printed anthologies include:
From The Cottage Porch
To The Edge Of There & Back
The Wrack Line
On-line publications include:
The Right Eyed Deer
Writing Raw
One Thousand Trees
Website of Inscribemedia as winner of Global Short Story Competition
He has also published the novels
Full Circle - What Goes Around …
Learning The Rules
Student Body
For information about any of these, mailto:
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