Progress Bar from Writertopia
Finished with the second and third revised sections of the story!
Morning sunlight poured into the kitchen. Cyndia sat down at the end of the kitchen table, as far from Mrs. Baton and the stove as she could get without leaving the room. She felt like Mrs. Gregory was still attached to her shoulder, even though that had happened hours ago.
“We can’t go on the front porch.” Mrs. Baton gave the grits a quick stir. “And the poor Millers. This used to be such a good neighborhood.” She glanced at Cyndia, pursing her lips.
Cyndia cast her eyes down at the kitchen table. She babysat for the Millers. When he had come back to the Millers’ living room, Officer Peterson’s blanched face screamed what had been done to their children last night. She ached to do something besides sit here and listen. The cops had already interrogated her enough. More commentary from her foster mother wasn’t necessary. She realized she had missed something in Mrs. Baton’s tirade.
“All those stupid mysteries you read, planting ideas in your head. You just dreamed up a prowler.”
“Right and my imaginary friend broke into the Millers, killed them, sauntered over here, and left imaginary blood on the porch.”
“Don’t get impertinent. You just wanted an excuse to call the police. And they actually had the nerve to tell me where I should keep that old shotgun. We don’t need this kind of attention and you just revel in it. We’ll never get people to move out here now.”
Cyndia grabbed the rolled up newspaper off the table as she stood up. “If I hadn’t called the cops, we wouldn’t have found the Millers until they started decomposing.” She stormed out the patio door.
The late morning sunshine thawed her skin. Mrs. Baton didn’t follow her to the back yard to continue the tirade. Probably calling her case worker to tattle on the latest insolence.
She sat on the bench set next to the hedge blocking the yard from the trees, pulling herself into a huddle. All the houses on this side of the street had backyards that ended at the lake. She watched the lake ripple with the breeze. Didn’t the world know that a whole family had been wiped out? Did it care? She was tired, up all night, answering the questions of detectives who doubted her judgment. Well-read detectives, one hadn’t liked it at all when she said Inspector Lestrade was mentally quicker and Inspector Japp had better manners.
Her pointy chin rested on her knees. He hadn’t been wearing a mask or make-up. She was ready to swear to that in court. This was no good, she released her legs and straddled the bench. Best to see what the rest of the community would know. She unrolled her paper. Mrs. Baton might think the Commoner’s Press was beneath her and subscribe to the big city newspaper, but she couldn’t object to Cyndia subscribing with her babysitting income.
As expected, the murder of the Miller family dominated the front page and most of the second. Cyndia scanned the article, and it didn’t tell her anything she didn’t already know. He hadn’t been wearing a mask or make-up, so was he even human? But if he wasn’t human, where did he come from? And where did he go? I’m missing something, and I have to find it because the police don’t believe me. She flipped through the news pages until she found the local police bulletins.
The plan crash appeared to have no bodies, so its investigation was pending waiting for an aviation investigator. It had crashed in a field off of Laurence Lane. She squinted her eyes to gaze across the lake. Laurence Lane snaked around the uninhabited part of the lake. Cyndia folded the newspaper to hide its headlines and headed back into the house.
Mrs. Baton was in the middle of her getting ready to leave the house dash. “I’ve got showings all day across town.” She paused to put on lipstick, and judge the effect in the living room mirror. “Would you rather come with me?”
Cyndia restrained her gagging impulse. “No thanks, I’ll cramp your selling style.”
Mrs. Baton’s now mauve lips frowned. “I don’t think it’s good for you to be cooped up here all day.”
“I was thinking about a bike ride around the lake.”
“With a murderer on the loose!”
“Okay, bad idea. I’ll stay here and work on homework.” Cyndia turned to head down the hall.
“Just don’t go out alone. Maybe Bobby Sherwood would go bike riding with you. Now I gotta go.” Mrs. Baton grabbed her briefcase and sailed out the door.
“Bobby Sherwood? Fat chance.” The only other high school student in the subdivision, and he had made it clear she didn’t have enough boobs to get him interested. Besides, he was a dumb jock and would just get in her way.
#
An hour later, she leaned her bike on its kickstand and looked over the barbwire fence. The field was churned mud thrown aside by the twisted metal mass at the end of the furrow. She pulled apart the strands of barbwire and slipped between them into the field. The fence line was clean of trees, and that usually meant the field was still in farming use. The farmer would need a bulldozer to fill in the hole before he could plow.
She surveyed the tire tracks left around the gouge by last night’s investigators. Frowning, she looked further out and at the undamaged trees across the street. Where was the wing debris?
The metal hulk nearly buried in the ground was about the same size as a crop duster. What was sticking out was bent over the part that was in the ground. But from the outside she could see there were no supports for wings or wheels. No metal bits scattered outside the hole either. This didn’t look like pictures she had seen of plane crashes.
Avoiding the largest dollops of mud best she could, Cyndia got closer to the vehicle. It looked like there was an opening on the top where mud had cascaded into it. No, she wasn’t going to climb in, that would leave too much evidence that she had been here. She frowned and turned away. How would Holmes proceed? She was assuming that this was not an airplane, and so far the evidence wasn’t proving her wrong. And if the blue man on the porch was the pilot and he crashed. . . . “And the first thing he does is go kill a house full of people, that’s pathological on any planet.” She put her hands on her hips and surveyed the area again. Pathological or not, if that’s what he did, he would need the fastest route to the subdivision. That was across the road, through the trees and underbrush, and across the lake, and it was more likely to have physical evidence unaffected by the crash investigators.
Cyndia scanned the trees and underbush before stepping off the asphault. The broken and pushed aside twigs propped out at her like a computer-generated 3D puzzle. Something tore through the woods, and nobody around here had any dogs as tall as she was. She pulled a plastic toolbox out of the basket on the bike’s handlebars.
She stared at the ground as she crossed the road’s tiny shoulder and the grass-covered ditch. No footprints, so she moved her gaze to the broken branches. A large briar branch snapped back had caught three blue feathers. They didn’t look like bird feathers, though she couldn’t articulate why she though that. She opened the toolbox and pulled out a wooden ruler and a disposable camera.
“If it turns out to be from a blue jay, I’m going to feel really stupid.” She took the pictures with and without the ruler, and carefully plucked the feathers free with tweezers and put them in a clear plastic envelope. Once everything was safely packed in the toolbox, she carried it into the trees.
Small trees bent and snapped lower branches under the green canopy of the larger trees showed the trail, even to someone as inexperienced at tracking as her. But the forest floor was covered in too many dead leaves for footprints. The trail ended at the muddy beach of the lake.
She scanned the ground before stepping out of the tree line. To her right, sheltered from last night’s rain by the tree branches, was an impression of the clear webbed footprint. Cyndia took three pictures of it before she was sure her hands had stopped shaking bad enough to ruin the photograph. She set the ruler beside the footprint and took more pictures. There was a trail heading into the lake, but the rain had damaged the footprints. She took photos of that too.
I was right. Oh wow, the guy’s path was straight from the crash to the lake. Her knees felt wobbly. Was she also right about that not being a plane? And where was the murderer now?
She dumped everything into the toolbox and ran for her bike.
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