The Body in the Book
By Nitya Khandelwal
As part of the ‘Being Sherlock’ workshop, all participants worked with the same set of clues and the same detective, and yet, as it always happens with words, the stories changed. Here it is a missing chef, trap-doors hidden inside books, random clues, and four girls and a detective trying to solve the mystery.
As I saw them sitting together, my eyes went to her face that had a tiny smirk and I knew something was up.
“Sana, what have you found out about this detective?” I asked. “I am sure you have found something, otherwise I wouldn’t be seeing this sly smirk on your face.” Sana glanced at me as I sat down. For the last few days, we have all been looking for this mystery detective, and by we, I mean, me — Nitya and my closest friends, Sana, Vidhushi and Amrutha.
“Four coffees, please!” Vidushi asked the waiter.
And then Sana began to speak. “I was looking around for clues to find the detective, as we all have been, and to my luck when I was calling Amrutha to know if she had found anything, I was at the bakery. The baker must have heard me say his name, so he told me that our detective is a baker! He used to work with him but the detective moved to work at a different bakery a while ago. The baker had no idea that he was a detective…”
“Oh my. I guess we have found our first clue!” I said.
When I came back home I realised that this clue is very important. I started to conduct my own search for the detective with this one clue we had. At least this was something. For three years now we had been trying to find Amrutha’s missing father, and finally, we knew this was the detective to help us — except, we had no idea who this detective was. It looked like he needed us to find him. Some detective, sigh.
I went around many bakeries looking through photographs of all their employees, and soon I had a big pile of books and images. I sat at my university garden like I was preparing at the last minute for an exam. I found that there was one person from the bakery Sana talked about who had one thing in common with two more employees from other bakeries. They did not let anyone take their photographs. The only evidence the bakery has of them is a shadow and in this shadow, you can see that they are wearing the same type of hat. What kind of hat? I do not know but it is a hat since one can’t see any hair and can only see firm lines through the head. With this new clue, I called Sana, Vidushi, and Amrutha.
A week passed by, but no one had found any more clues. I couldn’t help but notice that Amrutha (one of the most social people I know), had kept to herself after the day we met at my university. I called Vidushi and Sana, and we decided to pay Amrutha a visit. What was she doing in her little bubble after all? The next day, when we knocked at the door of her room, THUD. Something had fallen, or is it someone? Amrutha opened the door, and what a mess she was! Her room looked like a garbage disposal, and she herself did not look human. We were all very shocked. “Oh sorry… I was going to call you guys after cleaning this mess up, but guess what! I found a new clue!” she said.
“And to find this clue, you did this to yourself? You are something different aren’t you?” I said.
“How idiotic,” Vidushi whispered and nudged me.
“Well, tell us what you have found,” Sana said.
“Okay, so I found that our detective limps while walking.” But there was something Amrutha wasn’t telling us.
Another week passed, and one Monday, Vidushi texted all of us to meet at a bus stop. Even at a 10-meter distance, I could see Vidushi’s bright face.
“What’s up?” I asked. It was early morning.
“You know I hate getting up early!” Sana said. “This better be good.”
“You guys! I found another clue!” Vidushi exclaimed. “After some research with your clues in mind, I have found a very peculiar fact about our detective. He loves to read ‘Asterix’!”
“Asterix?” I said. “That’s utterly random.”
“But isn’t it a good random, because now we can come down from a billion people to a few, who are bakers, wear a hat, limps, and love to read Asterix!” Sana said.
“I’ll give you points for positivity,” Amrutha whispered.
Not so long afterwards, we found our detective’s residence. He lived in an isolated house, at the edge of the city. We all pulled up into his driveway. ‘Aadi Jones’ read the nameplate on the mailbox.
“Aadi Jones,” I wondered, “where have I heard that name before? I know I have heard it.”
“I guess this is it guys,” Sana said. “Finally we have found our detective!”
Amrutha exclaimed. “Let’s meet him”. We walked to his front door and knocked. Knock! Knock! The door opened with a silent creek. As it opened, we were faced with a man probably in his mid 20s. There it was, the hat, his limp, and we could all see the Asterix books piled behind on the couch.
“Hello,” he said, “how may I help you? Come in.”
“You are Aadi Jones, right? We have been looking for you, detective!” Vidushi said.
“Hmm, it took you long enough. I have been waiting,” he said. As we all sat down in the lounge room, my memory seemed to have returned. “Oh my god… You’re my uncle… The one that fled three years ago with no explanation!”
All my friends seemed to be shocked by my discovery. “It is true, I am your uncle and I know that you have come here to get my help to find Amrutha’s father. But what you don’t know is that you are the ones who are going to help me.”
It was my uncle. That is where I heard the name. I couldn’t believe it, but I had to listen with all my might to know what happened. He started explaining, “When your dad disappeared, Amrutha, I knew that this was not just his own doing, so I went undercover to find him since he and I were very cl — ”.
“But aren’t you very young to be my father’s friend?” Amrutha asked quietly.
“Yes, but age is a number, and now please don’t interrupt and listen all the way through. After I went undercover, I spent 3 years, 1 month, and 2 days trying to find him. 3 months ago, I received a letter from an unknown person. This is what it said.
‘Dear Aadi, I know that you are trying to find me; trust me, I am thankful, but don’t. I want everyone to think I am dead. I should be dead. But… only my daughter can find me and I have left clues for her. So you should stop. Don’t Find Me.”
Amrutha’s eyes started to water, and Sana tried to comfort her. It was from her dad. “You see, this is why I need Amrutha and all of your help to find him because according to him only she can find him, and I am not giving up, so we will find him.”
It is the next day and we have all met up to find more clues about Amrutha’s father. “Let’s begin with the place he loved the most,” I said. “THE NATIONAL PARK OF ROSES!” Aadi and Amrutha exclaimed together. Amrutha glanced at Aadi with a death stare as if they were going to make this a competition of who knows Amrutha’s dad the best.
In the next 20 mins, we found ourselves in a garden full of roses. We searched for hours until we heard Amrutha shout. We all ran in her direction to make sure she was okay, and we saw an old piece of parchment in her hand. It said, “Gritting my teeth, I wedge the flat of my knife blade.” That’s a weird clue. Where did she find it?
“It was in the roots of my dad’s favorite rose,” Amrutha said.
“How can a person have a favorite rose, when this whole garden is full of roses that look the same!” Sana wondered loudly. We all decided to call it a day and go home.
After I went home and rested, I went to the cafe to grab some coffee. I sat down next to a man who looked in his mid-40s. As I sat down, a child ran past making me spill my coffee on the stranger.
“Oh my god, oh my god! I am so sorry. Are you okay?” I cried.
“I’m fine — ugh — that kid should really watch where he’s going. It’s not your fault. Oh, this just made my day worse,” the stranger said.
I quickly ran to get some tissues and paper from the counter and came back.
“What happened? If I may ask?”
“I am a head chef at this huge company, and today we had so many CEOs visit for this meeting, right, that all the cooking made the staff in the kitchen go crazy. The new trainee dropped the main dish so we had to remake it, we ran out of eggs, and worse, my best knife wasn’t cutting properly. I was so mad that when I came home I wedged the flat of my knife blade so much that it became very sharp. Something so stupid with a knife could never happen!”
As soon as he said this, my brain flashed . Of course! That is what the first clue means! It means that Amrutha’s dad must have had to wedge the flat of the knife blade somewhere! And he was a chef, so that made absolute sense! But why? Was his life in danger? Is that what he was trying to tell us? Was he running away from something?
The next day, we decided to go to Amrutha’s house to look for clues. We went to her dad’s study and looked around for some time when suddenly Amrutha gasped, and we all knew she had found the next clue.
Try, try till you succeed. And if you don’t then it was meant to be. The lost are found only when they want to be seen.
“How is that a clue now?” Vidushi complained.
“Where did you find it?” I asked.
“I opened my dad’s cookbook, to look at his amazing pictures of food he used to make for us, and it fell off, reading ‘clue’ on top.”
“Did you see which page it fell off?” I asked.
“It was from one of the recipes he used for one of his cooking competitions,” Amrutha said.
“By any chance, was this recipe really hard for him to make, a recipe he kept failing at?” I asked.
“Yes it was”.
“Then I know what this clue means. It is a clue that he has put to try to give you hope for you to succeed and I bet this recipe is not something ordinary. There must be something more with this to where he is.” I said. I then told them about all my discoveries yesterday.
“Well, girls, we have together found more discoveries than I found in the past year,” Aadi said happily. We all decided to leave since it was getting quite dark, and go home to get some rest.
The next day, we decided to go to the library to check some books with the same recipe to that dish, to look at similarities or differences. While roaming around the cookery books aisle, I saw a book with the same cover as Amrutha’s dad’s cookbook. I called my friends to come where I was and I reached out for the book. As soon as I touched it, the book opened, and transformed into something like a trap door on the floor and I fell into a cramped space. It was as if I was swallowed into the book. I could hear my friends calling my name from above with worry. I replied and it seemed that they could hear me.
“Where are you? What is there?”
“I am in this cold dark cramped place. The floor is ice cold, all I see is dark walls and I can’t keep my spine straight. Pull me out!” I yelled and two arms grabbed me to pull me out.
“Are you okay? What was that?” Vidushi said.
“I don’t know but it was not quite enjoyable to sit there for even those two mins!”
When I got out, and calmed down, I did not see Sana or Aadi around.
After going home, I called Sana to know why she wasn’t there and she told me the most bizarre thing ever. After she helped me get out of the trap-floor with Amrutha and Vidushi, she noticed our detective, Aadi, gone. She looked around and found him sitting on a bench at the front of the library. She sat with him.
“I started to talk to him,” Sana said. “about the space in the library and he told me that he knew what this space had been used for. He told me that Amrutha’s father never had a problem staying in confined spaces, and that he had been hiding here, and the book we just found also belonged to Amrutha’s father. I was so shocked to hear that!” I must say, I double shocked. We had just discovered Amrutha’s father’s hiding spot.
I hadn’t told anybody yet, as Sana said not to, but I guess Vidushi caught up to something not being okay. She decided to confront Aadi directly and went to his bakery to talk to him. He wasn’t baking there as he usually would, but was selling. There wasn’t a big crowd so she got behind the counter and started talking to him. She later told me that Aadi had told her about the book’s secret. Now we all knew… except the daughter herself, except Amrutha.
That same evening, I got a call from Aadi. He told me that he met Amrutha in the bus, looking very emotional and almost close to tears. “She told me that she went back to the library, opened up the book and went into the trap-door herself and felt like her dad was there. It must have been where he lived, she said. So I told her that we all knew this already, and that made her even more upset. So why don’t you girls go and comfort her, it looked like she needs it,” my uncle told me. So I called all the others and we went to Amrutha’s house. We comforted her all night no matter how mad she was and she finally forgave us.
In the night I looked through all the clues: he is a chef, and he is hiding in confined spaces. I finally analysed it and thought I solved the mystery. First thing next morning I went straight to my uncle’s house to tell him what I had found. I was in a very enthusiastic mood. “Good morning, uncle.”
“Why are you here so early, Nitya?”
“You won’t believe it, but I think I have figured this mystery out!”
“Alright, I’m listening.”
“Okay, so first thing is I know that Amrutha’s father is a chef but ran away from his house three years ago. This was the same time when the WCC ended (World Cooking Competition), which he won. I’m guessing that he had many rivals to get past to win that competition. These rivals must have been so angry that they threatened him and he thought his family would be in danger. So he fled into hiding, but left clues for his daughter to find him when they were safe; hence only Amrutha could find the clues. Then he made trap-door floors out of this book (I held out the book) and there aren’t just two copies. There are three, meaning that Amrutha’s father must be in the third copy of the book, and this third copy has been kept where the competition was hosted, the Blue Water Resort!”
I let Aadi digest this since it was a lot of information. After a few minutes, Aadi’s face grew bright which was quite unlike him but I guess he must be happy to know where his best friend was.
“Well done, Nitya! I am proud to say that you are my niece. It wasn’t long ago that I connected these dots with why he went into hiding, but you also discovered where he must be now!”
“I’ll go tell the others, so we can start our trip to Blue Water Resort,” I said.
After I told the others, they looked at me in shock. Sana and Vidushi just stared while Amrutha almost burst into tears. Then the next day, we all went to Blue Water Resort. When we got there we instantly began to search for the book. We went into the library straight away. After a long search, I found the book and called the others. I asked Amrutha to open it, since it was her dad. She hesitated at first but then, as her hands spread to open the book as expected, and turned to the same recipe page, it turned into a trap-door floor. We all looked into the space, and there he was, in flesh, Amrutha’s father. He looked up like he had woken up from a long sleep. His eyes first went to Amrutha. “Amrutha? Aadi?” he said weakly. “It’s me dad, your daughter, I know everything that happened. We are safe now,” she said. We pulled him up and it seemed as if the father and daughter hugged for the longest time.
And then he spoke, “My rivals were trying to make me work for them — a slave in their kitchens, their pawn in future competitions because the money at stake was huge, almost a million dollars— and I just couldn’t do it. This seemed the only possible way to keep you safe and keep them distracted.”
Then he turned to Aadi, “My friend, thank you for leading my daughter to me.”
Ah well, who doesn’t like a happy ending?
Nitya Khandelwal is 14 years old and lives in Denmark.
