Morning all. As my coffee is currently brewing this seems an apt sentence to start a day off with, let’s see what kind of stories it has to tell. Timers set for fifteen minutes and let’s see what appears.
Huh. I was not expecting a murder. But I kind of dig it.
Tuesday, July 15th: The coffee was fresh.
The coffee was fresh. The pot was hot in it’s carafe but not over heated and more importantly there was no acrid burnt scent in the air letting him know it hadn’t been sitting on the hot plate too long. Stan looked around the small office. The room wasn’t large, but because one entire wall was made up of floor to ceiling windows it didn’t feel as cramped as it might. In the center of the room were two desks. They were placed so that if two people were working at the desks they would be facing each other.
‘Partner’s desks,’ Stan thought. One was as neat as a pin, the pencils and pens lined up according to size and color so they formed a gradient line, shortest and darkest towards the center, tallest and lightest towards the outer edge of the desk. Stan wondered if whoever aligned them spent extra time sharpening the dark blue pencil so that it was shorter than the others just so it would fit. Given the attention to detail and the alignment of everything else on the desk, he suspected they had.
Nothing was out of place on this desk everything lined up as though someone did it with a ruler in their hand. Even the folders, nearly stacked at the upper right hand corner had not a page out of place. The second desk was not overly messy, but by comparison it seemed so. The folders were stacked and the papers neat, but hear and there post it nots protruded. Odd little tongues of color flicking out from the pages in no decenranble order. There was what looked like an old glass cup that seemed like it once held a poured wax candle inside and was now filled with pens and pencils, all haphazardly thrown in. The lable for the former candle was mostly peeled off but there was a little bit of the label that hadn’t fully peeled off. It was turned away from the person whose desk it was effectively hiding it from their sight.
‘Plain view of neat and tidy though.’ Stan wondered if it was an out of sight out of mind thing or a silent and steady taunt between coworkers. Without knowing any of the people involved, he couldn’t say. ‘But neat and tidy would notice it.’ Given the utter perfection of the desk Stan knew that partially torn off label would be a torment.
‘Maybe it distracts from the post it notes,’ Stan thought.
While one wall was composed of window glass, the opposite wall was filled with a book case. A glance at the titles let him know they were mostly reference books. All were what he would expect.
‘Of course I also expected someone to be here.’
Stan received the text telling him to be at the office at 10:30. It was now, by Stan’s watch, checked every morning against the computer and set five minutes fast, exactly 10:30. ‘Or 10:25 if I want to get technical making me slightly early.’
He looked back to the coffee pot and it’s little carousel of accoutrements. The coffee was fresh, the pot full. A box of doughnuts sat next to the wooden stir sticks. Stan reached over and opened the box. Twelve doughnuts were arrayed in the box. None removed.
‘So coffee and doughnuts for the meeting but no people,’ Stan thought as he closed the box. He took a step further into the room. Away from the coffee pot another scent reached him. A darker, more violent scent. His step further into the room also let him see partially past the second desk. Part of the body came into view.
Ten til Midnight 