Morning all. Coffee is brewing and even if the sun isn’t up, I am oddly awake. Not entirely sure how or why, but I am going to take advantage while I can. So on with the morning prompt!
I like the thought of finding a potential murder plot and then trying to decide if it is a murder plot, as well as how to thwart it. I like the idea of a detective story starting this way, but as with all mysteries I’d need to figure out the ending and work back to write the beginning. But this is definitely something I might look into.
Wednesday, October 25th: The dog growled at the empty stairwell.
The dog growled at the empty stairwell. Mark frowned. Benny wasn’t normally a growler. He was a quite dog. At best he would offer one bark at a time when he was really excited. ‘And even that is when you delay through the ball past what he deems appropriate.’
Mark waked over, Benny looked at him and then back to the stairs. He growled again and then barked. He seemed to be staring at one place and Mark walked over, wondering what had gotten the dog so excited. He saw something shiny near the floorboard. Bending closer he could see it was an eye hook. Threaded through it and running across the stairs was a near invisible piece of fishing line. It was attached to the other side of the stairs with another eye hook.
Mark stepped back. When not looking at it directly the string was nearly impossible to see. Benny stopped growling and came to sit next to his feet. Mark rubbed his head absently. The sting couldn’t be seen, but was so placed that if someone hit it going down the stairs, they would most likely take a header down the stairs. It could prove fatal.
At the moment, Benny and Mark were alone in the house. He left with the others when they went out that morning and no one had issues with the stairs then. He returned before anyone else as his errands were just in town and they had gone out to the lake for the day.
For the moment he left the string where it was, knowing no one was going to be near the stairs for the next couple of hours.
Having alerted him to the danger, Benny felt his job was done and trotted along beside him as he went out into the back garden. Released from the house benny went on the hunt for any potential invaders into the garden. Thus far this year, the rabbits and squirrels had been frequent visitors and Benny met every incursion with a chase. He never caught any of them, but Benny liked both the chase and the removal of invaders from the area he patrolled.
As Benny went on patrol, Mark went up and down the row of vegetables, picking what was ripe and putting it into the basket. At this time of the summer he made both eclectic salads and whatever vegetable dishes they had enough to create. It was sometimes a standard dish, other times something unnamed that seemed as though it might work for the moment. Right now they were moving into vegetable overload where it seemed everything was coming in ripe and coming in buckets. He already had several jars of tomato sauce put up for winter use and thought he had enough for another batch this afternoon. That had been his plan and even as he gathered food for dinner, he picked the tomatoes to jar into a sauce.
While he worked, he thought of the sting across the stairs. It wasn’t there for a good reason. That much he knew. There was nothing good that would come from a near invisible trip hazard like that. The thought that someone in the house could be trying to do harm to someone else sat uncomfortably inside him.
‘Maybe it is a prank,’ he thought. He added a few more tomatoes to his basket. If it was a prank it was an ill conceived one. ‘The boys prank each other all the time.’
While true the thought had no weight to it. Their planks usually involved silly string and water balloons. This was something different.
Ten til Midnight 