Wednesday's Words on a Friday

The original Words for Wednesday was begun by Delores and eventually taken over by a moveable feast of participants when Delores had computer troubles.

The aim of the words is to encourage us to write. A story, a poem, whatever comes to mind.

If you are posting an entry on your own blog, please let us know so we can come along and read it.

This month the words are supplied by  ME and can be found right here.

This week's words are:

1. shutdown
2. wreck
3. hairclip
4. marked
5. old school
6. brewery

and/or:

1. release
2. hell-no!
3. cherries
4. insignificant
5. coffee
6. almost

here is my story - yet another filler chapter

Back in the city, Stanley and Irene had commandeered an incident room and filled it with boxes of files dragged up from the cold cases storage room. Everything dated up to sixteen years ago and from the area enclosing Shark Cove, Littleton, and Braytown. Pushing two tables together, they sat one on each side, reading files, making notes and swapping thoughts and ideas. Irene was the first to find a connection, with the explosion of the ceramics factory in Braytown, where a couple had been killed and their daughter Stephanie hospitalised for several days before being released to a hospital under the care of a Doctor Wurtzel. The hospital being the one in the valley behind the Scenic Retreat where the file said Stephanie had been staying with her parents who had recently bought the Retreat from the previous owners. After reading this to Stanley, he said, "The previous owners, are they named? I wonder if that might have been the Saunders couple?" "I think it might have been," said Irene, "they did say they've lived there since their honeymoon and I got the feeling they meant the Retreat not just the general area."

"What else does it say about Stephanie?" asked Stanley. "Not much," said Irene. "She recovered from her head injury and the shock of finding her parents had been killed and went back to live at the Retreat. Somehow that doesn't tie in with the mental shutdown we've seen in her." ”You’re right about that,” said Stanley, “keep looking, there must be something else that happened. Maybe something with a man that had a crooked nose.”

“Do we have any files at all about the Scenic Retreat?” said Irene, looking at the two dozen boxes stacked next to the tables. “Not the Retreat specifically,” said Stanley, but there may be a mention of it if we can find the file about The Cove Hotel where Ed mentioned a murder, he said about sixteen years ago, but I think he knows more. I didn’t press him at the time, you were watching Sara help Stephanie with the paintbrushes. He just said something real quiet like and I scribbled it down.” Irene marked the page she was reading in the current file and stood up, saying, “I’ll get us some more coffee and see if the bakery has sent any danishes yet, for the morning tea. Do you want one?” “I’d like one with the cherries in it if there is one, but a custard danish would do if there aren’t any cherry ones. It’s almost time for the regular day shift to begin too, we should be in the room and hear the signing off and handing over of current cases by the night crew I suppose. How about we lock up and take our morning tea with everyone else?”

“Sounds good,” said Irene, adjusting the hairclip that had come loose. “I’m going a bit cross-eyed from all the different handwriting in these old files.” They collected fresh coffee and a danish each, Stanley was happy to find one with cherries, while Irene settled for apple. In the big community room, fresh faced day staff were finding places to sit while the duty Sergeant called out rosters and handed out cases, while the night shift staff handed over phone messages and new files of cases that had come in overnight. One in particular caught Stanley and Irene’s attention. A skeleton had been found in the back garden of a house a little way outside Littleton; the home owners, Harry and Eleanor Cooper had recently bought the place and were just beginning landscaping the yard. Statements had been given from them and from the local police up there, the skeleton was now on its way to Clarence Kirby’s lab in hopes of some DNA being extracted, but there wasn’t much hope of matching it to anyone currently on file anywhere. The file was handed to Jerry Morgan with instructions to follow up as much as possible, then a question was asked, “Does anyone here know anything at all about someplace called The Merry Moose?” Apparently a pink plastic tag stamped with that name had been unearthed along with the skeleton. Lots of mutterings and head-shakings followed the question, so Jerry Morgan was instructed to also call up some of the retired cops who might have been around fifteen to twenty years ago. “Look up Sam Simpson first,” said the duty Sergeant. “He’s working at the Riverside Brewery now as night security. Used to know most of the night clubs back then, his brother being in the security business and all.” Jerry took the file and headed out stopping at the doughnut table to get the last danish and a couple of doughnuts as well.

Irene and Stanley thought perhaps any connection to Stephanie, Bernice and the old quarry was probably insignificant, but they both wrote down the information anyway. Littleton was in the general area of their search after all, so they might as well keep themselves in the loop. They rinsed their coffee cups and went back to their incident room and all those files. “We may have to do a bit of old-school detecting ourselves,” said Stanley, “tracking down the cops who wrote these files, seeing if they remember anything at all that might help us.” “We should probably read a few more files first,” said Irene, “see if any of them connect with any others. And we don’t want to release any of our findings just yet, do we?” “Hell no!” said Stanley. “Where we are now, we don’t know anymore than what we’ve heard and read, we’d look like fools if we said we had news on anything. The only new thing we know is the granite seam under the cliff, we need to find out more about that too.”

“I still want to know about the wreck out by the reef at Shark Cove too,” said Irene. “Probably doesn’t have anything at all to do with the case, it may just be the reason Shark Cove gets humming with tourists every summer. Lots of scuba divers practising treasure hunting and teaching new divers.”