The dames were meant for each other. Isabelle collared pharmaceutical fakeloo artists. Carol gumshoed adoption cases. Just a couple of dolls with too much time on their hands once they fell into the big sleep – retirement, that is. It wasn’t the cabbage. It was the calmness. Retirement was for palookas. They were both as antsy as stoolies stuck in stir.

So they decided to put their sharp-eyed, sharp-eared skills to better use. They got their tickets. They became investigators – the private kind. This is their story.

When Cornwall, Ontario’s Carol Villeneuve retired from her career in healthcare in 2007, she was only 57, and she quickly discovered she had no talent for the retired life. “I was restless; I had to do something. You can’t just sit still.” The pro bono work she’d done for years, helping people find their adopted children or birth parents, kept her reasonably busy. But it was getting expensive. “I realized I just couldn’t afford to do that for nothing anymore, so I went and got my PI licence.”

Meanwhile, Isabelle Keeley, of Ottawa, missed the career she’d left behind. Flying all over the world, she used to ensure the integrity of clinical trials for the pharmaceutical industry, exposing fraud and misconduct. “You want to stay engaged. I don’t think I was ready for the rocking chair on the porch,” she says. During her travels, she’d noticed that she was almost invisible to nearby strangers in public places. “I’d be sitting by myself at a restaurant reading a book, and people just disclosed the most amazing things at all the tables around me. Nobody ever paid any attention to somebody with grey hair.” Private investigations seemed to fit the bill for her post-retirement career.

At the P.I. exam, they ended up at the same table. “Isabelle stuck out mainly because she was another grey head just like me,” says Carol with a laugh. “The whole room was full of young people taking private security; we were the only ones taking private investigating.”

They struck up a conversation. “We just connected like you wouldn’t believe,” says Carol. They even drove the same Kia – and both had manual transmissions. “We said it was meant to be; it was fate.”

In May, they launched I C Investigations, “An All Female Agency” serving Ontario and beyond. The two applied their specialized skills to their new careers, widening the focus to attract a broader clientele. Carol’s experience in adoption investigations suited her perfectly for skip tracing and finding missing persons. “I remember saying to Isabelle, ‘If I can find an adoptee with no name, I can find anybody with a name,'” says Carol with a laugh. Isabelle’s experience gave her rare insight into fraud cases.

The women find their gender – and appearance – gives them an edge on the stereotypical male P.I. “We’re good at what we do,” says Carol. “And as women, we’re not intimidating. Would you look at a little old lady and think she’s trying to follow you? Noooo. If you’re sitting beside me, and you’re two teenagers talking, would you give me the time of day? Noooo. It’s wonderful for surveillance. And if we have to serve papers, people will answer the door every time if it’s a woman. We can get away with a lot of things that others can’t.”

Isabelle recalls sitting in the car outside the home of an acquaintance of someone they were looking for. She decided to just knock on the door and ask where they were. “At first the woman who answered looked frightened when I asked, but I told her it was absolutely nothing bad – don’t worry. So she said ‘Sure,’ and gave me the cell phone number, the address, the whole thing. I don’t think a man might have got the information.” (It really wasn’t for anything bad, Isabelle assures us.)

After four months in the trade, the pair has kept busy, a case always on the go, with current assignments in Northern Ontario and the U.S. – and they’re really enjoying their “retirement careers”. “Extremely so,” says Carol. “A lot of people at our age just aren’t ready to stop. They say 60 is the new 40!”