R.D. Clarke is a loser.

It's mere days before his 27th birthday and R.D. still lives in his childhood bedroom and works as a secretary for his father - renowned detective Jerry Clarke. R.D.'s malaise is lifted when the beautiful Lauren Welbourn drops by without an appointment to urge the elder Clarke to find her missing brother.

Showing uncharacteristic guile (and stupidity), R.D. pretends to be Detective Clarke and takes the case, which provides more excitement and danger than he bargained for.

Armed with nothing but his wits and hilariously limited detective skills, R.D. must navigate through an endless procession of lies, double lives, family feuds and love triangles to uncover the secrets behind a young couple's sudden disappearance.

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Prologue

Bap!

Bap!

Bap!

Two right hands with a left in between crashed into my face in such quick succession I was sure my monstrous assailant had three arms. The second shot snapped one of my cuspids in half, but I didn't dare spit it out – I feared that would only encourage him, so I maneuvered the shattered piece of tooth under my tongue.

"Where's your boss?"

His booming voice urged me to provide whatever information he wanted, but I feared my lips were too swollen and rubbery to allow me to provide the answer even if I knew it. For the record, I didn't.

Bap!

Another right hand caught me dead on. My bulbous, pulsating upper lip exploded and blood began to run into my mouth.

As my taste buds were inundated with that warm, bitter sensation, I couldn't help but think that maybe aimlessly darting to 30 still living at home with mom, my day highlighted by first person shooters and prepackaged food fresh from the microwave wasn't so bad after all.

Bap!

At least not compared to this.

Blood began to trickle out of my left nostril, mixing with snot, tears, and the busted lip to form an unappealing cocktail of bodily fluids.

It's in a predicament like this where you begin to analyze your life and wonder where and how it went wrong. It's an easy answer for me – I dove into the beating of a lifetime from the warm comforts of leisurely slackerdom for the same reason most men do the stupid things they do.

For a girl.

Chapter 1

The generation gap shows itself in the weirdest ways.

After my parents got divorced, my mom – the secretary at my school (a profession that contributed to more than its fair share of shame and embarrassment for me) – would save money on child care by having me hang out in the office until it was time for her to leave. This situation gave me a unique perspective on the inner workings of a public school, as I learned my mom was less an administrative professional and more a professional solitaire player. From three to four-thirty, Mrs. Clarke was more interested in chaining black tens to red jacks than she was with making Walt Whitman Elementary School run better.

Twenty years have passed. Mrs. Clarke is now Mrs. Burns. After remarrying, she left the school and started a successful catering business

I have become a man, chronologically if not emotionally. I am now the one in the family blowing off administrative duties by aimlessly clicking away at a pointless computer game – the difference being that I, unlike my mother, scoff at antiquated card games and use my time more efficiently – tending to an imaginary farm and hoping girls I had a thing for in high school feel the need to socially network with me.

My workplace is the Clarke Detective Agency, home to one of the most well-known and respected private eyes in the Philadelphia Metropolitan Area: Jerry Clarke, a decorated police officer who went private after becoming eligible for his pension. Not only is Jerry Clarke my boss, he's my father.

As you can imagine, having a top-flight detective for a dad and a mom who worked at my school made your typical childhood hi-jinx next to impossible to pull off. My stepfather, Dr. Otto Burns, told me this led to my Peter Pan complex and inability to grow up. He's a professor of psychology at Drexel University.

He's also a prick.

Otto reads into things excessively, saying things like 'Rob, you wear long hair and still dress like a teenager to compensate for your lost youth.' coupled with contradictory messages like 'you grow a beard to make you feel like a grown up because you don't think you've arrived at adulthood yet.'

Like I said a prick.

Detective Dad was out doing field work, a task that took up much of his time, meaning I had the office to myself more often than not and did all the little things like balancing the books, arranging appointments and tasks even less interesting than that while my dad was out cracking cases. The case load was pretty heavy at the moment and no appointments were scheduled for the foreseeable future, let alone today, so I was startled when the all too familiar buzz rang out.

My dad made his share of enemies -- during his days on the force and as a P.I. alike -- so the buzzer was a security measure: nobody got into the office without being seen on our CCTV camera.

This particular view of the camera feed was more pleasant than most... scratch that, more pleasant than all the previous ones. The ringer of the doorbell was a stunning girl about my age wearing dark jeans and an orange shirt that pushed out where things should be pushed out and pushed up where things should be pushed up. She was fit, distant from chunky and anorexic in equal measure and her dark brown hair was emboldened by her pale skin.

I stopped ogling the image long enough to walk to the front of the office and pop open the door. If she was hot on the little security camera, she went supernova in person.

"Hillo," I said, not knowing whether to say hi or hello and making myself look like an ass in the process.

"Huh?" She responded. She either didn't hear me or didn't want me to feel more stupid than I already did.

"Hello ma'am," I said, trying to sound confident and professional, "how can I help you?" The "hello" route was the best way, as saying "hi" would have made me sound like a seven year old. In retrospect, I probably spent way too much time thinking about which greeting to use.

In waiting for a response, I got a closer look at the girl. Her chestnut brown hair was way too out of place for someone who obviously took great steps to be attractive, ditto for the slightly uneven makeup and pale eyes accented with red. It didn't take Jerry Clarke to figure out the girl had been crying.

"I was looking to see Detective Clarke," she said as I gave her the universal 'follow me' hand signal. I sat at my desk, taking a moment to throw today's newspaper over my mouse pad, which featured various stars of the eight-bit era of video games. I motioned to a group of chairs along the wall to my left, the girl grabbed one and took a seat across from me.

I waited until she was seated to begin my response. "Appointments are usually Mondays and Wednesdays," I started, "Are you sure you have the right date?"

"I don't have an appointment."

I knew she didn't, and to this day I don't know why I didn't just say that. I also don't know why I continually obsess about whether or not I say the right things.

"Well then," I said, trying to sound professional, "We'll have to set one up. Give me the details of your case, and we'll see if it's worth taking on." This was customary during busy times, when dad could be choosier with his workload.

The girl seemed dismayed with my statement, looking away and stretching her quivering lips into a desperate frown. "I did." Desperately blinking back tears now. "I e-mailed Detective Clarke and he turned me down."

"And you were hoping stopping by in person would make him reconsider?"

No, stupid, she's here to sell you a vacuum.

"Yeah." She replied, not nearly as snarky as my inner monologue. "It was a bad idea, sorry to have wasted your time."

She reached for a box of tissues on my desk, looking up for approval before taking one. "Help yourself," I said with a nod. She mustered a weak "Thank you" and dabbed at the corners of her eyes. She started to get up, but I motioned for her to stop.

"Refresh me on your case."

Her eyes gleamed a bit for the first time, making her look even prettier. "Are you sure?"

"Yeah. I was about to take a lunch break. I'll listen to you so long as you don't mind me eating a roast beef sandwich while I do it."

She cracked a smile. "That's fine."

I walked over to a mini-fridge against the back wall of the office and pulled out a tied-up Acme Supermarket bag containing said roast beef sandwich – complete with lettuce and mayo on seven grain wheat bread – and a bottle of spring water. I plopped the bag down on the desk, untying it before sitting down. "Shoot," I said, moments before shoving sandwich into my gullet.

"My brother went missing two weeks ago. No one's heard from him since, and I'm starting to fear for the worst."

I nodded as I swallowed the first bite of the sandwich. "What was he doing two weeks ago?" Sounded like something my dad would ask.

"He went to the SuperFantaCon at the hotel by the airport."

"SuperWhattaCon?"

"SuperFantaCon. It's one of those geek conventions. Comic books, sci-fi, people coming dressed up like their favorite movie character -- that kind of thing."

I nodded, and then took another bite of my sandwich. She leaned forward as she talked and a necklace drooped down as she did, a large die was attached like a charm or a locket – not one like the six sided dice you'd find with a board game, but one with more sides than I could count, the ones popular with pen and paper games like Dungeons and Dragons.

The kind of games someone who goes to something called SuperFantaCon would play.

"Nice necklace," I offered.

She looked down as if she'd forgotten she'd worn it. "It's my brother's. He lent it to me."

"Tell me more about the convention."

No immediate response. She was looking for something to say, which didn't bode well for the prospects of useful information. "He went with his girlfriend and her brothers."

I decided to interrupt with a one word question: "Names?" Again, sounded like something my dad would ask. I also grabbed a pen and a napkin to scribble on; Detective Jerry Clarke took copious notes

"Stacey. Stacey Simpson. Her brothers are named Andre and Wesley." I jotted the names down, making notations for brothers and girlfriend; though I almost instantly realized that was pointless – there was little chance her brother's girlfriend was named Wesley. It was also at this point that it dawned on me I was in the midst of a long conversation and didn't know who I was talking to.

"And your name?"

"Lauren Welbourn. My brother's name is Peter," she said, answering my next question before I could ask it.

"All right Lauren, when did you realize something was up with Peter?" Knowing that I was going to get a break from talking, I unscrewed the cap off my water bottle and took a healthy swig.

"Right away," she said without hesitation. "He went off with Stacey. Wesley and Andre never met back up with them, they stayed at the hotel all night trying to find them."

"No luck?" I said, going back to making myself look like an ass after a nice stretch of being smooth. Of course there was no luck -- if they found them making out in the storage room there would be no missing person’s case.Lauren shook her head, I wanted to put a bullet in mine.

"At first glance, it sounds like your brother and his girlfriend ran off. Was it a serious relationship?"

Lauren sighed and stood up, "Yeah. It was. That's what the rejection e-mail said: there was no case, my brother most likely ran off and eloped." Sound logic from dear old dad.

"But you don't think that's the case."

Lauren shook her head, giving me a surprised look, probably because she didn't expect me to show further interest. "No, no I don't. Peter was..." she stopped and took a deep breath.

"Peter is meticulous, he doesn't go to the bathroom without planning out the steps. He wouldn't just up and leave like that."

I nodded to show I was listening

And he was having problems with Stacey. Peter and I are really close, we tell each other everything. He was thinking about leaving her."

"Hardly the time to run off," I speculated.

Lauren nodded vigorously.

"That's why I'm here! Nobody wants to dig deeper into this. The police buried the case! I'll take it to another private investigator if I have to, but everything I read says Detective Clarke is the best."

Studies on the human brain say that it sometimes can work contradictory to itself, that different regions of the brain can want to do different things, and it sort of fights amongst itself to come to a consensus, but this was not one of those situations. There was only one logical thing to do: send her on her way, maybe give her the information of another PI my dad was friendly with.

"I'm Detective Clarke."

Damn you brain.

"Really? I thought you were older?"

Good job genius -- try coming up with an answer for that.

"That's an image I strive to protect," I said, "reputation be damned, nobody wants to hire a private eye who looks like he graduated high school nine years ago." She nodded, she was buying it.

She was buying it?

Chapter 2

Lauren left my, er, my dad's office after giving me her contact information and texting me a picture of Peter and Stacey, as well as one of the Simpson brothers.

Soon after my first meeting as a detective impersonator concluded, I was sitting at a small black metal table at a sidewalk cafe three blocks away even though I'd just eaten lunch. Though my midsection has gotten a little doughy since I've gone lax on working out, I do not have an eating disorder.

In my haste of eating a bagged lunch that had been sitting in that mini-fridge for a few days, I forgot that I'd made plans to have lunch with Quentin Gardner, my best friend ever since I can remember.

Quentin is a wiry rat of a guy who seemed perpetually caffeinated even before he started his six French vanilla cappuccino a day habit. He wore a faded purple t-shirt promoting a band I never heard of and wasn't entirely sure existed, his light brown hair was a mess and his thin-rimmed round glasses were smudged: the earmarks of a man who worked alone.

Quentin's a blogger, but unlike 99.99% of them, he makes money doing it – a lot of money. He maintains and edits a site that lampoons celebrities and political figures alike, garnering a measure of fame for digging up dirt on a major presidential candidate a few years back. In that line of work, it helps to only sleep three hours a night.

I was in the midst of spilling my guts while Quentin enjoyed his lunch, a good thing since Quentin found the problems of others entertaining.

"You said you were your dad?"

I nodded, staring longingly at Quentin's cheeseburger with caramelized onions and crumbled blue cheese and wishing I'd skipped lunch.

"You're nuts R.D.," he said, mouth full. Besides moonlighting as a detective, I go by many names – most of my friends call me R.D. (my middle name is Declan), my mom and stepdad prefer Rob and my father goes for Robert. Any of them are fine by me.

I didn't respond to Quentin's declaration of my insanity: a silent acknowledgment that I was, in fact, nuts. Not one to like silence or any other kind of down time, Quentin chirped in quickly, "what are you gonna do now?

I shrugged. "Dunno. My dad was right when he turned the case down, the guy probably lied about the breakup and ran off with his girlfriend.”

"And knowing this, you took the case why?"

I bit my bottom lip. Quentin wasn't going to like this answer. "She was really, really pretty," I said, sounding ashamed.

Quentin rolled his eyes. After a tumultuous breakup with his high school sweetheart shortly after graduation, Quentin had spent the past nine years without so much as going on a date, and would heartily boast about the benefits of celibacy whenever pressed on the issue.

"And I felt bad for the poor girl!" I offered, mostly trying to justify my actions, though I wasn't lying.

"And when she inevitably finds out that you're pretending to be your dad, she's going to feel like the world is all sunshine and rainbows?" That one hit me in the gut. It's one thing to do something and instantly know it's a bad idea, it's another thing entirely to have it pointed out and your nose rubbed in it.

"She doesn't have to know," I said, trying to BS myself as much as Quentin, "I'll do my due diligence, I'll talk to the girlfriend's brothers, I'll dig around the convention lead. When it turns up nothing, that's what I'll tell her." I grinned, doing a good job of convincing myself, if not my hyperactive friend.

"Guess it could work out that way," Quentin offered as he pulled out his phone. I have suspicions that Quentin leads a double life as a kidnapper, and if he doesn't crack open his phone at least once every five minutes to check in, some poor girl will get a bullet to the brain. Either that or he likes to use his phone a lot. He probably just likes to use his phone a lot.

"Look," I said, still justifying, “it's a dumb idea. A really, really dumb idea.”

"Dumb's one way to put it. Illegal's another way," Quentin matter-of-factly stated as he kept his head down, jabbing at his phone with his thumb. "So is irresponsible, disrespectful to your family, playing with the emotions of a girl you have a crush on..."

"All right!" I interrupted, "It's one of the dumbest things I've ever done."

"Let's not forget potentially dangerous. You know, if the girl's on to something and the guy who dealt with the brother wants to take care of you too.”

That was one I didn't think of. I shrugged it off anyway. "Eh, every boy wants to be their dad. I'm getting a chance to."

"Every boy wants to be their dad when they're eight. Not twenty-seven," Quentin said, never so much as glancing up from his phone.

"Duly noted," I said back resentfully. What did he know? Besides, I'm only twenty-six.

Quentin finally put down the phone, grabbing a backpack that had been sitting at his feet and producing a pen and a small spiral bound notepad – he was every bit the ace reporter. Without a word, he scribbled something down quickly, ripped the page off and handed it to me.

Linda and Mitchell Canton, Canton Collectibles, followed by two phone numbers – one marked home, the other business.

"If you're going to play detective," Quentin explained, not bothering to give me a half second to ask what the number was for, "I should at least give you a little nudge in the right direction." Quentin shoved about a third of a burger in his mouth after speaking, allowing me time to stare at the paper and give him a confused look.

"Linda and Mitchell run one of the biggest tables at SuperFantaCon." Quentin's advice came with a full mouth and a look of admonishment – I was given 1+1 and had to break out a calculator. "If something crazy happened there, they'd probably have an inkling.

"Thanks."

Quentin was too wrapped up in his cheeseburger to acknowledge my politeness. Niceties weren't his thing – not that he wasn't a good guy, but they were a waste of time. Sometimes I wonder if our friendship was born out of the fact that he addresses me by my initials – R.D. – instead of a full name, saving him valuable time better spent ingesting caffeine and designing Wordpress themes.

The hard work on the burger paid off, as Quentin was able to wolf down the remainder as I neatly folded the piece of paper twice and stuck it in my left pocket.

After looking at his watch, Quentin took an empty plastic bottle out of his backpack and poured the remainder of his drink into it rather hastily, so hastily that a good eighth of it spilled out onto the table.

"I gotta run," he explained, digging into his pockets as he talked. Three twenty dollar bills sailed out of his hands, clearing the spill and landing on my side of the table.

"That's enough to cover my share, right?"

I looked at the sixty bucks. "Yeah, unless you bought a bottle of champagne while I wasn't looking."

Quentin shook his head, in too much of a hurry to appreciate a good quip. "Awesome. Later."

And he was off. I learned a long time ago not to waste time returning a goodbye – Quentin's love of conversational brevity was such that he would just hang up the phone after saying goodbye to you or you saying goodbye to him, the same rules applied in person.

But hey, he gave me sixty bucks, how bad could he be?

I flagged down my waitress and ordered one of those blue cheese and onion burgers, I'd take care of the doughy midsection later.

Chapter 3

Turns out Canton Collectibles wasn't too far from where I was at, so I decided to stretch my lunch out and pay them a visit before returning to work. My dad was a stickler for punctuality, but he wasn't due back for a while so no one would really care if my lunch hour became a lunch ninety minutes. Besides, I was likely to get way more out of Mr. and Mrs. Canton if I saw them in person.

The walk was a short, uneventful one. Spring was turning into summer, the explosion of color and the soft, comforting breeze making every step a pleasurable one. My destination was about five or ten minutes away and I could have gone back to my car, but who would want to in this weather?

Canton Collectibles was a small storefront in the middle of a commercial strip sandwiched in between a coffee shop and a tax preparation service. Various comic books, action figures and other assorted playthings for those experiencing an extended adolescence adorned the windows. A tiny, hand painted sign hung over the displays:

CANTON COLLECTIBLES
COMICS, TOYS, GAMES, AND MORE!

The store was open for business, though the empty aisles inside seemed to betray the sign on the front door. Boxes were laid out on card tables. Each table having a piece of paper taped to the front reading "Back Issues" and a corresponding price ranging anywhere from $2.00 to $7.00, depending on how rare or desirable the selections were. The signs were hand written in black permanent marker – this shop clearly aimed to keep operating costs at a minimum. Generally, the cheaper tables had more comic books populating them.

There was a woman behind the counter, I assumed this was Linda Canton. Ignoring her for the moment, I browsed some of the three dollar boxes. Nothing there really interested me, but I'm not much of a comic book enthusiast – I read a few of the more well-known ones when I was eleven or twelve, but nothing too extensive. Thumbing through the selection in the box, I found I didn't recognize about half of the characters featured, only recalling the ones I'd seen in movies and a few I remembered from childhood.

I didn't want to come in and start rattling off questions, so I grabbed a pair of titles featuring heroes I knew from their big summer blockbusters and headed for the counter, smiling the friendliest smile I possibly could.

The woman behind the counter I presumed to be Linda Canton was rail thin with tired green eyes and long blonde hair with shocks of brown root bursting through. She didn't return my smile. In fact, other than looking at my purchases, she didn't acknowledge my presence at all.

The prices of the books were tagged with pieces of masking tape applied to the Mylar pouches the books were placed in. "You want the bags and boards?" she asked gruffly, not even looking up.

"Huh?"

She looked up for the first time, shooting me a contemptuous glare. "This is in a Mylar bag, there's a piece of cardboard behind it, and they keep the book in better condition. The bag and board are an extra fifteen cents per book. Do you want them bagged and boarded, or not?"

"Uh, sure," I replied.

"Six-thirty," she said.

"No tax?"

"It's built into the price of the book."

I handed her a ten dollar bill, one left over from Quentin's generous chipping in at lunch. I wanted to ask why they incorporated taxes into the sticker price, but not the mylar casing or the cardboard, but she didn't seem to be the type that wanted to answer too many questions, so I decided to make the few that I ask count.

As she handed me back my change, I was sure to make eye contact. "So," I began, sounding like I was trying to make conversation, "You get a lot of repeat business here?

"What do you care?" she responded curtly. Not exactly service with a smile.

"I'm looking into a missing person's case," I explained, hoping the/e direct route would get me somewhere. "Peter Welbourn."

"You're a cop?" The woman asked, a hint of disbelief in her voice, more than a hint of impatience in her eyes. I shook my head.

"Then get the hell out of my store!

"Lin! Lin! That's no way to treat a customer!" a deep, soothing voice exclaimed from behind me. I turned to see a large, tall man with a longish beard and a ratty salt and pepper ponytail. The man, wearing sandals, a brown button down shirt and old, torn jeans, was carrying a roll of paper towels and a bottle of household cleaner. I looked behind him and saw a section of empty card tables surrounded by metal folding chairs. I assumed he was wiping them down before coming to talk to me.

"Anyone who wants to help find Peter is more than welcome here," the man said, smiling and offering his hand. I shook his hand, taking in the fact that his eyes had trouble focusing and he smelled of marijuana, "Mitchell Canton. That's my wife Linda. Don't mind her, she's a little wary of new faces." Linda, for the record, was still giving me a look that could kill.

"Peter was here a few times a week, but he hasn't been by lately," Mitchell explained, putting an arm on my shoulder and guiding me toward the empty tables. "He was spending more and more time with his girlfriend. He wouldn't be the first person who got a girl and stopped coming around."

"Her name's Stacey, right?"

"Yeah. Stacey... her last name's escaping me right now."

"Simpson?"

Mitchell nodded emphatically. "Yeah. Her brothers come in every now and again. They're not so much into comics, they're too tied up in that ARG they got Peter into."

"ARG?"

Mitchell took a seat at one of the empty tables, motioning for me to take another.  I complied. "Alternate Reality Game," Mitchell explained. "Well, sort of. It was a kind of a cross between an ARG and LARPing."

Mitchell stopped, recognizing that his rapid fire acronyms were making my head spin around. "Live action role playing," he explained, "it's kind of like playing a pencil and paper dungeon type game in real life. Most people think of it as people who dress up like knights and wizards and hit each other with foam swords and beanbags that represent fireballs."

I honestly didn't know how to respond to that.

"It sounds lame, but I tried it once on a lark and it's actually really fun," Mitchell said, his enthusiasm about everything in life starting to make me pine a bit for his more... subdued wife. "But that's not what Peter's into. Peter played a game called T.R.A.N.C.E. that was a little more grounded in modern times. A little more aggressive."

"Aggressive?" I asked, having no need for long questions, as Mitchell seemed more than eager to provide in-depth answers.

"You know what? I have a flier for them! Sit tight for a second!"

Mitchell got up and walked over to a cardboard box lying inauspiciously on the floor next to the wall and began to thumb through it. Not knowing where to look with Mitchell gone I turned my attention to the counter, where Linda was giving me a dirty look. Mitchell was back quick, however, and dropped a glossy flier in front of me. It featured a group of FBI looking guys slyly pulling guns on one another. Words along the side gave the game a name.

Tactical
Recon
Action
Network
Conducting
Espionage

"Hope they spent more time coming up with the rules of the game than they did on the name," I quipped.

"Oh they did," Mitchell told me, sounding proud. "The deal is they pretend that they are a squad of secret agents charged with furrowing out and eliminating another team of secret agents before it's too late."

"How do they eliminate someone?"

"Water pistol," Mitchell explained. And my parents looked at me like the biggest nerd on the block because I wanted to forgo trying out for the baseball team to play video games.

"The trick," An increasingly enthusiastic Mitchell elaborated, "is nobody knows who is on the other team. You have to find people who are in on the game and get information out of them. There are people in the game called information brokers who the squad members have to interrogate."

This game was getting so elaborate it made Chess seem like a coin toss. "And this T.R.A.N.C.E. game, they were playing this at SuperFantaCon."

Mitchell stopped to scratch his beard for a moment, jogging a memory made weaker in the haze of THC. "Yeah, but he didn't look like Peter anymore." That statement earned a quizzical look from me. "Peter used to have this long, dark red hair, like almost brown." Mitchell's description was consistent with a picture Lauren had sent me – all I knew of Peter is that he was fairly tall, quite thin, pale with a clear complexion, and most distinctively, shoulder length deep auburn hair.

"He shows up at SuperFantaCon and I barely recognized him -- he got a tan, cut and bleached his hair and he was wearing this nice suit -- he looked like an FBI agent or something. He got too far into the game, man. He was straight with me, but he kept calling himself Vincent Holden when he talked to the vendors he didn't know. Didn't matter if they were in the game or not."

I was puzzled by that last part. "In the game?" I asked.

"Even someone who plays a game like that doesn't want to come off as too crazy," Mitchell explained after spending most of our meeting making them sound nuttier than a squirrel's kitchen, "You don't want to go trying to interrogate someone who's not in on the game, so everyone involved wore these little black buttons – pure black, nothing on them – that was your cue to play the game."

"And Peter wasn't paying attention to this?"

"I'm not sure, it's not like I was following him around or anything, but he wasn't acting like himself." Mitchell stopped and coughed a bit. "I saw him an hour or two before I packed up, he was talking to Stacey in the corner by my booth. That was just about all I saw of him, it just took me funny to hear him over and over again with the Vincent Holden."

I jotted down the name Vincent Holden, thought I'd take a look into it. There was a good chance that this was the identity he was using if he was going to elope, so I could scan registries for a Holden, Vincent in wedding announcements – BOOM! Legitimate detective work.

I stood up, offering my hand, which Mitchell happily accepted. "Mr. Canton, it's been my pleasure, thank you for all of your help."

"If I can make sure Peter's happy and healthy, it's my pleasure to help."

I nodded, grabbed my bag of two comic books and began to walk out, looking over to Linda Canton. "Have a good day," I offered, getting a cross look in return.

Still looking at Linda, I started to turn my body before my head, crashing into what felt like a brick wall as I did. I reeled back three or four steps and turned to see a house of a man standing in front of me – a big, bald white guy, well over six feet and almost three hundred pounds of solid muscle packed into a tight blood red t-shirt and black cargo pants.

"Sorry," I said, trying to regain my breath.

"No worries," the mountain of a man replied, moving on to a rack of new releases. Scary dude, but not half as scary as Linda Canton.

Chapter 4

I was enjoying my masquerade as a hotshot detective as I walked back to work, trying to piece together what I had learned from Lauren Welbourn and Mitchell Canton into a patchwork explanation: with his obvious overactive imagination, Peter Welbourn invented the persona of Vincent Holden, guaranteed no one would bother him by leading Lauren to think he was fighting with his girlfriend, then broke away for a fresh start.

This detective thing wasn't so hard after all.

I strolled back into the office, feeling good about myself. The feeling lasted about as long as it took to close the door.

"Vacation's over now, right?" a familiar, booming voice asked me.

Dad had gotten back to work early. He was behind my desk, a large cup of coffee to his left, a half empty box of doughnuts to his right. Once a cop, always a cop.

"Uh yeah, sorry," I sheepishly offered. "Must have lost track of time."

"I've been here for an hour and fifteen minutes! What time did you leave?"

I silently thanked my lucky stars – he'd just missed out on bumping into Lauren. I could cover up a long lunch easier than I could impersonating a private detective.

"I must have just missed you," I explained, "I was a few blocks away at that outdoor cafe. I met up with Quentin and I guess time just flew by from there."

Jerry Clarke nodded, eyeing me like a witness or a suspect.

That look. It was the same look I got every time I did something wrong as a child, a look I got sometimes when I did nothing at all. "Quentin, huh?" A statement said with more confidence than I could ever hope to muster.

"Yeah, Quentin"

"He still a homo?"

That's my dad.

I shook my head. "Quentin's not gay," I explained, knowing full well the futility of what I was doing, "he's celibate." I didn't get an immediate response, I got a stare down: the infamous Jerry Clarke glare, his steely blue eyes dissecting you, looking inside, discerning truth from lie before you even opened your mouth.

Dad kept his hair short, it was going from a dark brown to more of a salt and pepper and he didn't seem to care enough to invest the time or money to dye it. He came to work every day dressed in a suit, a habit held over from his days as a police detective.

"He have a girlfriend?" Dad asked.

I shook my head.

"Has he had a girlfriend in the past seven, eight years?"

"No dad, he hasn't."

"Robert, he's a homo. Bet he bought you lunch too."

I don't know which was more annoying: when my dad acted like a bigot, or when he was right. I didn't say anything for a while, watching as a coy, knowing smile developed on his face. He reached for the coffee and took a sip without ever looking at what he was doing – his eyes were locked dead center. He was having fun with me.

"He did, didn't he?"

"He left a generous tip," I said, not lying, but not giving the old man the satisfaction of outsmarting his dumb kid.

"Bet that's not the only tip he wanted to leave ya!" Dad said, cackling.

A disgusted expression hijacked my face and I turned my head in embarrassment. "Come on, that's sick!" I exclaimed, but my disgust only made his braying intensify.

"Anything important happen before your date?"

I shook my head. "Not really." I was going to leave it at that, but I knew my dad was the type to peruse the CCTV tapes, "had a prospective client we had to turn down come in for a second opinion, I heard her out and sent her on her way."

''Why'd we turn her down?"

"Didn't seem like there was a case there." This wouldn't have been a problem for most detectives, who would've found evidence Peter Welbourn and Stacey Simpson were married somewhere and got some easy billable hours. Dad had enough of a work load to discriminate and felt such cases were a waste of time. "Missing brother," I elaborated, "most likely ran off with his girlfriend."

"You refer her to Mike Robley?" Mike Robley was a colleague and the recipient of many of our referrals – a longtime P.I. who worked with my dad while he was on the police force and later helped him set up shop when he went private.

This set up a problem for me, as I did not refer her to Mike Robley – and from the time I tried to explain that it was Arnie, our pet Great Dane, and not three year old me who knocked over a jar of cookies, causing an ant infestation, up to this very day – I have been unable to successfully lie to my father. "Yeah, I farmed off the work," I replied, hoping he wouldn't call Robley to verify anything I'd said.

Dad stood up from the desk, offering me my seat back. "Good," he stated simply, "and don't forget to give Luther his invoice by the end of the day." Luther Milton was a repeat client, a wealthy owner of Mr. Milton's, a small chain of soul food restaurants who had a bad habit of marrying and divorcing his prettier employees. Dad had spent about 10 hours tailing the latest fiancée, not finding much in the process.

"Will do."

The real Detective Clarke began to walk to the real Detective Clarke's office, looking back to me as he opened the door.

"Oh and Robert, take a look in your drawer when you get a chance.” He was walking as he talked and wound up closing the door before I could ask about his request. I opened the drawer as commanded and found a rectangular box wrapped in understated chocolate brown paper.

A tag on the gift read "Happy Birthday, From Dad." It was a really nice pair of sunglasses, better than the two for twenty dollar ones I usually buy at the mall, but I was as taken aback as I was grateful.

Looking at my calendar, I realized why Quentin subtly picked up the tab, and it wasn't because he was trying to get into my pants.

I had forgotten my own birthday.

Chapter 5

I still remember my fifth birthday, it was both a milestone of mine and a tribute to good, old fashioned American excess.

While children were starving in third world nations, my day started with a trip to work with my dad, who was meteorically rising up the ranks of the police force at the time. The department had a cake ready for me that was painstakingly crafted into the shape of a police badge.

Later that day we had an actual party at the house, where a cake was done up to feature some of my favorite Saturday morning cartoon characters.

Finally, we ate out at a local diner that night, where desert was a small two layer cake with chocolate frosting and five large candles poking out of the top.

I remember wondering aloud at the table how the people at the diner figured out it was my birthday. "Oh, a little bird must have told them," my mother explained, to which I reasoned that:

A: birds can't talk.

B: birds are not allowed in restaurants.

At that point my dad spilled the beans that they let them know before we came, somehow making the moment a little less special. I learned an important lesson that day: if you ask enough questions, you're going to wind up with answers you don't like.

That lesson was now twenty-two years in the rear view, and I found myself asking myself a question I didn't want to know the answer to.

How could I forget my own birthday?

My mom and stepfather didn't make a huge deal out of it, but did buy a small cake – a tiny pre-made one you'd find sitting in a supermarket, only this one read "Happy Birthday Rob," in dark green icing. Little green and yellow flowers decorated the sides and the entire thing was surrounded by a yellow border.

I wanted to punch that cake.

I never thought the idea of striking a tasty desert treat would ever cross my mind, but I also never thought I'd forget my own birthday. I remained fixated on the cake as my mom plunged two candles into it -- one shaped like the number two, the other like the number seven.

My mom was approaching fifty, but could pass for forty if you didn't look too close. She embraced the age-denying makeups, dyes, and creams that my dad eschewed and never met a fad diet or workout that she didn't embrace for a good two or three weeks. Her hair was black now, after tours of duty as red, blonde, and seemingly infinite shades of brown.

"What's the matter?" she asked sarcastically. I looked up to see mom giving me a funny look. "Didn't think you were ever gonna get old?"

I shrugged.

"Think of how I feel – I hit the big 5-0 next year." This was not the first time I had been reminded of this. The first time was on her 49th birthday. The second time was also on her 49th birthday. The 49th time was on her 49th birthday.

"I kind of forgot it was my birthday," I confessed.

Mom just smiled, as moms often do. "Oh, Rob, don't worry. It's the first of many senior moments."

Senior moments? At 27? Was she right?

"Did you start forgetting stuff when you were twenty-seven?" It'd be fair if she did. When she was twenty-seven, she was raising a four year old, working full time, and taking business classes on the side. I work for my dad, live with my mom, and play a lot of video games: my memory should be sterling.

"Rob, I started forgetting things when I was six," was the reply, in as reassuring a voice as mom could muster. "People forget stuff, it happens. You're probably so wrapped up with other things you just forgot."

"You're going through a quarter life crisis," a booming, confident voice said from the other room. Good old Otto Burns, my stepfather, the prick. Otto was seven years younger than my mother, but looked older with his retreating hairline and advancing waistline, trimmed professorial beard, and 'I'm-smarter-than-you' glasses.

"It's happening to a lot of adolescents now. Your body is telling you you're a grown man, you're ready to lead your pack, but your mind, and society as a whole, it's telling you that's not the case, that you're still a child."

I gave Otto a condescending look. "You got all that from me forgetting my birthday?"

Otto – Dr. Burns, as he insisted people call him in formal situations, possibly because he didn't want to be confused with Homer Simpson's boss, shook his head in a way that made me feel like I had the IQ of a turnip.

"You didn't forget your birthday," he said, matter-of-factly, "you didn't want to remember your birthday." Otto cut himself a piece of cake, not caring for the tradition of the birthday boy getting the first (and biggest) slice. "You're not satisfied with still living at home, not having the job you want, not being in a relationship or having children.”

I was starting to wonder if I was satisfied with anything.

“Your brain,” he said, trying extra hard to sound smart, “didn't want to recognize that another year had passed without these issues being addressed."

What a dick.

He was right.

"Hmm, maybe," I weakly replied after a lengthy silence. I had a small piece of cake, ate it quickly, and retired to my room without saying another word.

Once in my room, I hopped on my computer and did a search for the name 'Vincent Holden,' but didn't come up with much of anything for my efforts, mainly genealogy pages and a career profile of an English film financier.

'Vincent Holden' + 'Stacey Simpson' didn't get a hit either, though it'd make perfect sense for Stacey to be using a fake name too. A search for 'Vincent Holden Marriage' was equally futile.

I'd call around and ask the usual get hitched quick chapels in the Vegas area if there was anything, perhaps meet up with the Simpson brothers, and see what shook out with them.

I was about to turn in for the night when there was a knock at my door.

"Come in!" I called out, after which my mom quietly opened the door and walked through. My room hasn't changed much post childhood – The toys and cartoon posters have largely been replaced by knick knacks and, well... movie and cartoon posters, but the layout remains the same: a dresser with a television on top of it to the right of the door, a bed across from it and a desk on the other side of the room. Since I was at the desk, mom took a seat on the bed.

"Robbie, I wanted to apologize for what Otto said." She hadn't called me Robbie since I was about eleven or twelve.

"Don't worry about it."

"It's just that he sees the world through analytical eyes," she continued, oblivious to my interjection, speaking as if she was reading from a script.

I'd heard my mother rehearse arguments she had with my father many times over, I assumed she was working from memory here. "It's not that he's cold or he doesn't like you."

"He doesn't like me," I said, louder than my first interruption.

"That's not true!"

"It is, and it's fine, mom. I was sixteen when you guys got married, he probably thought 'two years with the kid, and I can get on with my life.' Eleven years later, he's still stuck."

"I don't think that's a fair statement."

I shook my head, leaning back in my chair until it touched the desk. "It's very fair, and I get it. You think I planned on turning twenty-seven sleeping on the same bed I used when I was seventeen?" In fairness, it wasn't literally the same bed, but the metaphor carried the weight I wanted to convey.

"I don't know what your plan is,” mom replied, sometimes I don't think you have a plan." I looked closer, noticing she was turning away ever so slightly, hiding the early stages of tearing up. For my part, I didn't have a good answer.

"This wasn't the way it was supposed to happen," I started, not knowing where I was going to finish, "but I'm not counting myself out yet. I picked up some side work I didn't tell dad about," the truth, though not the whole truth, "if it works out, maybe I'll pick up some extra money, get a place of my own."

"That's not what Otto meant. I wouldn't make a big deal about it, but you were really withdrawn down there."

I'm pretty good at spotting a liar, but that talent never really extended to my mom, I wasn't sure if she thought Otto wanted me out.

More importantly, I wasn't sure that it mattered. "It wasn't Otto that got to me,” I explained, “it's what he said: it's that he was right."

My mom took a deep breath and got up from the bed. "Take it from someone who waited almost forty years to start her dream job -- it's not too late."

She walked across the room, kissed me on the forehead, and then walked out without another word. It dawned on me in an instant that motherly advice has no expiration date.

I swiveled back to my computer, navigating the desktop – a still of Bogie and Bacall from The Big Sleep – and started snooping around for the address of the Simpson family. I hit pay dirt earlier and easier than I thought I would, finding an address for both a Simpson, Wesley and a Simpson, Andre at an apartment complex in nearby Chester County.

My pain in the ass of a stepfather had psychobabbled me into a state of reflection. Every move I'd made in my life was a half-step, a shuffle forward immediately followed by a quick hop right back.

I had potential – real potential – and I blew it. I graduated high school with honors and went pre-law, realized two and a half semesters in that it wasn't worth losing my soul.

Joined the police academy afterward, wanting to make a real difference on the front lines, no good either: couldn't shake the stigma or expectations that came from being the great Jerry Clarke's underachieving son.

Everything I had started had blown up in my face, but this one was going to be different. The case would be solved, the damsel in distress would be saved by the dashing hero, I was going to find Stacey Simpson and Peter Welbourn, no ifs, ands, or buts about it.

If I was going to play detective, I was going to play as hard as I could.