Girl Detective

I read a book while I was at the beach called The List of Suspicious Things by Jennie Godley. Adrien recommended in one of her posts and it sounded right up my alley, so I bought it. I’m not spoiling anything when I tell you that it’s about a young woman growing up in Yorkshire during the age of the Yorkshire Ripper whose father is threatening to move them away from the area because it’s not safe. Desperate to stay, the main character she decides that the only thing to be done to keep her family from moving is to figure out who the Yorkshire ripper is.¹

Miv, the main character, along with her best friend, starts keeping a notebook where she jots notes and clues as they surveil their neighbors. The whole time I was reading it it reminded me so much of me and my elementary school friend, Kendal. Kendal moved to our town in 4th grade and she went to the same babysitter’s house after school that I did. We hit it off immediately.² The Outsiders movie was huge at the moment, but we also read the book and became obsessed with the story. Every afternoon at the babysitter’s house, we would “play” Outsiders, pretending to be Greaser girls, not Soc girls because clearly the Greasers were the good guys in the story.

We also used to play detective on the weekends when we were at each other’s houses. We had both read all of the Nancy Drews and I had also read all of the Trixie Beldens and there was nothing I wanted more than to be a girl detective. One time, we had begun to create a clubhouse of sorts in a small shed in her backyard, but one afternoon we discovered that someone had come in and messed it all up. We knew it was the group of neighborhood boys, our classmates and friends at school but our sworn enemy outside of class, who had destroyed our sanctuary-to-be, and we set out to prove it.

We found a footprint in the soft dirt outside the shed and knew that we must make a plaster cast of the footprint if we were going to pin the crime on one of the guys. Having absolutely no access to plaster, instead we made a concoction of flour and water and poured it carefully into the shoe print. If the shoe print had been in the sun it might have eventually hardened into some kind of thin biscuit evidence, but it remained instead a gelatinous goo, thereby destroying our evidence.

Kendal and I loved horror movies, too. Every weekend would find us watching one or more of the Friday the 13th or Halloween movies.³ We would stay up all night, both of us piled up in the recliner in my living room, watching them with a blanket pulled up to our eyes, or watching music videos on Night Tracks, a program that ran from midnight to 6 a.m. on TBS on Friday and Saturday nights.

We once tried to hold a seance. We lit candle in one of our bedrooms, I forget whose, and Kendal leaned over it, trying to summon a spirit only to singe off most of her bangs, the crackle and burnt hair smell alerting us to the danger. There was also the time we tried to use a Ouija board. Attempting to create a mysterious atmosphere, we draped a towel across the lamp in my bedroom only to realize mere moments later that the towel had trapped the heat from the lightbulb and melted a part of the lampshade. In writing this I’m shocked to realize how often we came close to starting a fire!

We were both obsessed with the Twilight: Where Darkness Begins series of books. This was the original Twilight I must clarify. I have tried for years to find these books but my search was until only recently impeded by the newer Twilight books. I finally found the original series and planned to buy some of my favorites only to discover that they are selling for $75+ on eBay and other sites! My nostalgia does have its limits, I’m afraid. It was also Kendal and I who took turns checking out The Headless Roommate and Other Tales of Terror from our local public library. This was in the days when you would write your name on the card in the back and hand it to the librarian. The card for this book was full, front and back, alternating between Kendal and Leandra, Kendal then Leandra and so on.

Our birthdays were exactly one week apart in October and almost always bookended the county fair. My mom laughs to recall once coming to pick us up to take us to the fair. We had been primping because the fair was the social scene and she said that she could smell us from the yard because we had doused ourselves in Sand & Sable perfume, Kendal’s favorite.

We once tried to make biscuits at her house in the middle of the night, but her mother had no baking powder so we used baking soda instead. Same thing, right? When they came out of the oven they were flat and kind of greasy and somehow tasted like fish? Needless to say, they went into the trash.

I’ve written about Kendal briefly before, in this post. We were constantly together and as I said in that post I thought they were going to have to sedate me when she moved away in sixth grade. My mother loved her and never hindered our friendship, but she tells me now that she was always a little worried that Kendal was a bit of a bad influence on me. She said that Kendal brought out a little wildness in me. And part of me wonders now if that’s not one of the reasons why I loved Kendal so much. There has always been a little wildness in me, but the good girl/people pleaser/teacher’s pet never felt free to do some of the things I wanted to do, but being with Kendal gave me that freedom.

I’m not saying that Kendal and I could have solved the Yorkshire Ripper case, but it absolutely sounds like something we would have been obsessed with and would have tried to solve.

1. This book reminded me in spirit of a book called A Man at the Helm by Nina Stibbe in which a young girl and her sister set out to find a husband for their mother. It is very funny and is one of my favorite books.

2. I’m ashamed now to remember that we kept our friendship a secret for a long time, ignoring each other at school but talking non-stop at the babysitter’s house because a few of my other friends had decided that they didn’t like her. That is one of three things that I’m actually ashamed of in my life.

3. I do not enjoy these types of movies at all anymore.