Morning all. Hit the snooze alarm one time more than I planned so i am running a little behind. So without further delay, let’s jump into the morning prompt. Stretch those fingers and lets get going. Fifteen minutes please, no stopping.
I kind of like this. Not sure why fourteen bodies. It seems like a bit much. when I reached the end though I wanted to make sure it was more than one body though so I put fourteen. As mysteries require a lot of forethought, when I sit down with this to break it out I will have to figure out how many there actually are and why, the number then being relevant. I just used the fourteen as a mental note to my future self.
Thursday, September 21st: The tree fell over in the storm.
The tree fell over in the storm. It was a huge old oak that stood in the neighborhood well before there was a neighborhood. It had been part of the original estate. When the original family needed cash they sold part of the estate. As it long since ceased being a working property, the large house was just used for family gatherings, holidays and weddings mostly with a few brief vacations thrown in. The rest of the time the house was left shuttered. It came as no great hardship to the family to sell the land although they did grumble about the nearness of other people during many of their celebrations.
When a lightning storm set the still empty field’s ablaze, the house was consumed. Rather than go to the expense of rebuilding, the family had the remains razed to the ground, taking with them the remnants of outbuildings. The property was then sold to a developer who put in the neighborhood settling entire streets filled with homes instead of the few large scale homes that were built along the perimeter of the old estate during the first series of land sales.
It was now the owners of those homes who complained about the nearness of the neighbors and whispered about the area going downhill over their cocktails. During construction much of the land was scaped back to bare earth. The stately old oak that marked the entrance to the original estate was left, as was a section of the stone entry way. It was widened a bit to allow for more traffic, one side of the original entrance gate moved more than a dozen feet further from it’s opposite side. But the tree and entrance remained.
And it was this tree that gave the name to the subdivision that sprang up where the estate used to be. Stately Oaks was the name the builders gave it, although the residents, having less pretension than the builder simply referred to it as the Oaks. The fact that there was only one oak never seemed to bother anyone.
When the tree came down, the neighborhood felt almost as though one of their neighbors died. The fact that as it came down it took out the section of shifted entrance column and wall and blocked the road meant that friendly neighbor or not they all had to deal with it.
The rain was incessant for about a week prior. Then, just as they were celebrating the end of the rain the windstorm arrived. The oak could not withstand the two pronged attack and with a crash that sounded like an explosion, it fell. While the noise and the destruction drew them, It was what they found under the roots, that kept them all standing outside on that cold blustery morning. It was why in this quiet neighborhood the lights from four police cars flashed red and blue lights over the area. Hiding in the roots of the mighty oak were the remains of no less than fourteen people. They were stacked one on top of each other like logs for a fire.
Ten til Midnight 