One of the other series I’m currently working on is named after the main character, Malcom St. Clair. Like Jazz Singer, Malcom is also a private detective, but more contemporary and living in Columbus, Ohio (because Columbus is interesting and not represented enough). Instead of interacting with aliens and ray guns, Malcom has to deal with the mundane boredom of being a divorced middle-aged man with a crippling mortgage and a city continually under construction.
Oh, did I also mention his brother has been missing for thirty years?
This snippet is from a family reunion scene that takes place somewhere around book three or four:
Malcolm carefully accepted the scrapbook, uncertain how to react. He muttered what he hoped was the appropriate words and pasted a smile on his face, but by the look he was getting from his mother halfway across the room he was certain he managed to screw it up. After all, if anyone could tell he was just going through the motions, it would be her. Nonetheless, Malcolm’s grandmother seemed pleased and soon moved on to other people and other topics, eagerly discussing her upcoming hip replacement with one of his aunts who worked as a nurse. Tuning them out, Malcolm sat down with the scrapbook filled with memories of his extended family and began to flip through it idly. Faded and slightly out-of-focus pictures marched by, choreographing his family’s progress through time, each one carefully noted with his grandmother’s spidery handwriting. Here, a great uncle proudly showing off his flight uniform, about to be shipped off to Vietnam, never to return. There, a distant cousin digging in a sandbox with a set of unnamed playmates. The images blurred together as Malcolm continued to turn the pages, prom dresses and cars, living rooms with new babies and first Christmases, the same poses repeating over and over on 4-by-3 rectangles, days and months and years ticked off by a dispassionate glassy eye.
Suddenly Malcolm stopped, staring at the frozen image of two boys chasing after a man attempting to get a pale yellow kite airborne. Barefoot and skinny, tan arms stretching out as if to push the kite skyward or maybe trying to grab it before it crashed back to earth. Taken from the back you couldn’t see the faces, but Malcolm remembered that day clearly, one of the last times he or anyone else saw his brother alive.
Malcolm closed the book with a thud and stood up. “Excuse me, I need some air,” he said to nobody in particular. Everyone at the family gathering paid him no mind, each one engrossed in their own conversations or what the buffet table had to offer. Pushing his way blindly through the crowd Malcolm fumbled with the door, the scrapbook doing its best to slip from his grasp. Eventually he managed to escape to the back porch, screen door clattering closed behind him.
The porch was empty, the rest of the family content to stay inside where it was warm, avoiding the late November air, crisp and cold with the promise of snow lurking around the edges. Malcolm leaned on the porch railing, staring at the trees that lined the property, a few stubborn leaves clinging to mostly bare branches.
The door opened behind him, allowing the brief snatch of someone laughing through before it closed again. Malcolm didn’t turn his head, preferring to ignore whoever it was that had come out to join him in surveying the trees guarding the St. Clair family grounds. The crackle of a plastic wrapper was followed by a sharp snap and click, the scent of tobacco being cut and lit filling his nose. He cut his eyes to the right for a second, glancing at the profile of Uncle Joe standing next to him, ever-present cigar cupped in his hand as he drew on it.
“Expensive habit,” Malcolm observed quietly, returning his view to the trees and the memories they contained.
“So they tell me,” Joe replied. “I wouldn’t know. I get a box every year from a friend still in the business.” Joe had never explicitly said, but from the hints dropped over the years it was fairly obvious Joe’s ‘business’ was government related and highly classified. “Sort of a thank you gift, a little reminder of a job well done and to keep my mouth shut if I want to keep getting more.” A soft rustle of plastic and the man was holding his hand out to Malcolm. “Want one? I’ve got plenty.”
Malcolm shook his head. “No thanks, I don’t smoke. But on second thought, I have a friend that does and she would enjoy it.” He took the offered cigar from Joe and put it in his inside coat pocket. He planned to give to Zhang the next time he saw her and needed yet another favor. The two men returned to standing silently, Joe puffing on his cigar while Malcolm continued to study the trees.
“Anything interesting in there?” Joe asked suddenly, dragging Malcolm back to the present day. “In that book you got, I mean,” he clarified, waving his cigar towards the scrapbook Malcolm had been given.
“Just pictures,” Malcolm said. “Memories of days gone past. Before everything got… complicated.”
Joe laughed, the sound somewhere between a snort and grunt. “That’s one way to put it. I heard about some of those ‘complicated’ things you’ve been getting up to over in C-town.”
“Not by choice,” Malcolm said defensively. “Things just happen.”
“Son, things never ‘just happen’. They might seem to at the time, but trust me, there’s always a reason for things going the way they do, even if you can’t find it right away.” Joe stabbed his cigar towards the scrapbook clutched in Malcolm’s hand. “Even with that,” he said, referring to Malcolm’s missing brother. “You just need to keep searching until you find the answer.”
Malcolm bristled. “What do you think I’ve been doing for the past thirty years?” he snapped, suddenly angry. “Everyone else seems able to move on, even mom and dad, just pretend like it never happened and that he was never there.” The smoke from Joe’s cigar drifted his way, making his eyes water. Blinking, he flipped open the scrapbook, stabbing at a picture of a grinning kid, a tooth missing and mischief in his eyes. “He was real. He existed.” Malcolm turned a few more pages stopping on one taken years later. “We existed.” The picture on the page was of Malcolm standing next to the same boy, arms around each other, his brother now more serious than before. “They ignore it because it’s easier to forget,” he growled. He kept flipping pages until he came back to the one where he and his brother were flying kites. “But I won’t. I can’t.”