Sneak Preview - Vignette

Here is a sneak preview of a vignette that I wrote for the holiday 2005 reader:

Searching for Todd Constantino

Where are you Todd?

You moved out to Hawaii immediately after graduating culinary school back in 1992. You didn’t leave a forwarding address. Your parents were your roots to our hometown. Then they suddenly moved to New Mexico. From Bayonne to New Mexico?

How I long for our high school days! Those carefree times, with our abundant idealism and tomfoolery. Nobody could ever match your exaggerated gestures while bodyboarding, bowling or driving. You were a model student, yet displayed a love of living on the edge. The lapses of judgment, such as the tryst with a waitress seven years your senior. That nickname “Casanova” that you wore like a custom-tailored garment. The pungent Vanillaroma trees in your eclectic Jeep AMC. You balanced your complex parents as best as you could, yet they still laid a major guilt trip on you. Someday, please explain to us why your mother was keeping 15 cats caged up in her basement.

We started searching for you five years ago. We thought that we could trap you in the worldwide web, like a spider traps his prey in a cobweb. We learned that you had been an executive sous chef at the Diamond Head Grill on Oahu. We learned that you prepared culinary delights for an Asian beauty pageant. We learned that you were a member of a local Mustang auto owners’ club. Delighted to have profiled you and to know that your blood continued to run as hot as ever, we were eager to move in for the kill. We planned to surprise you with a telephone call. Or to schedule a spontaneous class reunion in Hawaii.

We reached out through your contact at the Mustang club – and he passed on our message to you, along with the intelligence that you had moved yet again to the big island of Hawaii. We know you got the message, but you chose not to contact us. I personally spoke with your Aunt Luann from New Jersey. Sadly, she has no idea where you or your parents are either.

Earlier this year, I stumbled into some money through an inheritance. I decided to use a small portion of the money to hire the best private investigator that money could buy. I settled on Woon Chan, a gentleman who I’d worked with on another case. What he learned was shocking..................................

(to be continued in the Holiday 2005 Reader)