The Fifteen Minute Novel is an attempt to take a single prompt and use the last sentence written each day as a start for the next day. This year I had several prompts circling around a similar story, so I have combined them. However, the story starts the same way each day, with the last line from the day before and a timer set for fifteen minutes. The hope is to end up with a complete, if very rough draft by the end of the year. Some stories are better than others, but I always learn a whole lot about my own writing when I do this so for me it is not only a nice way to work out a story, but it is a tool for helping my writing get better. And so, we continue this story for 2024 with…
Day 221: She and Janine went to the nearby diner to caffeinate and wait. They had only just sat down in their booth when Sophie’s phone rang.
She and Janine went to the nearby diner to caffeinate and wait. They had only just sat down in their booth when Sophie’s phone rang. Sophie frowned, not expecting anyone to call. She answered it as it was a local and verified number.
“Hello?”
“Ms. Daniels, this is Roy from the garage, we have a situation with your car. You might want to come in quickly.”
“Okay,” Sophie replied. “What is the issue?”
“I’d prefer to show it to you if you could just come in,” he said. Roy rang off and Sophie looked at her phone.
“Something wrong?” Janine asked.
“They want me to come back now as they found something concerning,” Sophie explained.
Janine made a face as they both slipped back out of the booth and walked back towards the exit. “Sounds expensive,” Janine said. “If they want to show you rather than tell you it sounds very expensive.”
Sophie nodded and felt all of her upcoming plans for both big vacations and mini ones start to evaporate as she slid into the passenger’s seat. She may want to expand her horizons but she needed the car in functioning condition before she could think of anything else. While Sophie didn’t know a lot about cars, she let the few things she knew could go wrong circle through her head as Janine drove. All of the things that she knew could go wrong besides a flat tire sounded expensive.
‘And I know it isn’t a flat tire,’ she thought.
Janine pulled into the parking lot and frowned. “I guess the police are having vehicles serviced.”
There were several police cars and dark looking vans in the parking lot. Sophie got out of the car and Janine followed. They walked into the small office. Before it had just been the man behind the counter and her dropping off her keys. Now the small space was filled past what she thought was capacity. She moved to the counter, Janine following her.
“Hi,” she said when she reached the counter. “Someone named Roy called me because there was a problem?”
The man behind the counter nodded. “That’s me, we found something suspicious in your car.”
“Suspicious?” Sophie asked. She couldn’t think of anything she had that would be suspicious let alone something she might leave in the car. “Like what?”
“That is what they are trying to determine,” Roy said. “There was something attached to your vents.”
“Attached to my vents?” Sophie repeated. She felt incredibly stupid for simply repeating what was said to her but she had no idea what could be in her car.
A second man slipped behind the counter to stand next to Roy. He didn’t look like he worked in the garage and when he moved over, Roy stepped aside, quickly deferring to him.
“Have you had your heating on in your car lately?” the new man asked.
“No,” Sophie said shaking her head. “I live close enough to work that it wouldn’t warm up between the two. Because I thought about turning it on I realized I hadn’t done my winter servicing. Well that and the clunk.”
“The clunk?” the man asked.
Ten til Midnight 