Phantoms Won’t Faze this Featured Detective
The Dear Holmes “Featured Detective” Program honors one detective per mystery for their clever and well-thought-out solution to the case. To learn how to send in your own solution, visit Dearholmes.com/solve.
Dear Detectives,
We can’t thank you enough for your help in locating Wesley Norton and ensuring the safety of The Phantom Project. What seemed like a suspicious spy disappearance turned out to be a handful of different odd circumstances colliding at just the right place and time (though yes, spies were involved.)
From the start of this mystery, it was clear that Mr. Norton’s disappearance was much more than met the eye, but to what extent was it being misperceived? Most investigators seemed to agree that Norton’s murder was unlikely, as a body hadn’t been found and there was no other evidence truly suggesting the fact. That said, it was plausible that Norton might have been abducted, or more interestingly, that he simply “abducted” himself for some strange reason.
Once word came of Norton’s strained marriage, and of his dalliance with “Miss Lighter”, detectives started converging on Norton as his own captor — most agreed that he had made himself disappear, however, the reason for this continued to puzzle detectives until receiving Mr. Tennant’s last two letters. As information on Norton’s coworkers and travel plans came to light, so did the different layers of this peculiar case. A number of hypotheses reasoned that Miss Leider was taking advantage of Mr. Norton, and that he was an unknowingly working as an informant. Conversely, some theorized that the two were working together. They could have, for example, been studying a sort of “gas”, sometimes at a hidden site on Ben Macdhui, which resulted in the strange sights and large amounts of “fog” reported.
As we now know, neither of those theories quite explain this case. While Mr. Norton and Miss Lighter were meeting in secret, their illicit relationship was nothing more than that: an affair. Detective Aubrey C., of Cupertino, CA, was first in line with a full explanation of the mountainside mess surrounding that affair. An honorable mention goes to both Detectives Jennifer F. and Isabel C., who were quite close to the mark, but Detective Aubrey gathered all the pieces of this case — from Norton’s affair, to the “grey man”, to Nowak and Cox’s collusion — and laid out a quick resolution.
Congratulations (again) from the Dear Holmes Team to Detective Aubrey C. — a special reward will soon be on its way!
Want to be next month’s Featured Detective? Mail your solution to 1101 14th St NW, Suite 910, Washington DC 20005, or submit online at Dearholmes.com/solve.