Yeah, yeah, I know. "Shouldn't you be working on Savannah Book IV?" Yes, I should. However, like Ken Burns or Anthony Weiner, when something strikes my fancy, I attend to it. Last week it was the need for a shiny pair of red heels for the Holidays. Ca-caw! Ca-caw! (Done, BTW. Thank you, Jessica Simpson and Cap't. Bloodstone!) This week, it's Christmas shopping for others ... and a nice little harlot dress to go with those Jessica Simpsons for a Christmas partay!
As it pertains to reading, writing and even TV & film, I'm always in the mood for a good mystery, usually British and hopefully Victorian. Of course, in a video interview about The Darlings of Orange County with fellow author Natalie Wright, I admitted my brain doesn't seem to be wired for mystery writing; I have to watch the same episode of Poirot or Midsomer Murders over and over to recall who dunnit. Although I do know Maggie shot Mr. Burns. Ergo, I feel the need to challenge myself and do just that, write a mystery.
So, I've started a little something. It's still mise-en-scène in Colonial Williamsburg, but just a bit different. Want to see it? It's just page one, but here it goes!
Excerpt from Old Dead White Guys: The Colonial Williamsburg Murders (working title) by Jennifer Susannah Devore
“How many times a year do you see a dead colonial?” Agent Bruce looked up into the blinding January sun, her Ray-Bans doing nothing to block the glare bouncing up under the shades from the January snow that coated the oyster shell driveway.
“Depends which year,” Officer Hillstrand scratched behind his ear as he surveyed the crowd kept at bay by mounted police, a line of four horses standing stoic and still, their riders equally perfectly postured and unfazed by the dozens of cameras, attached to news teams and curious tourists alike, trying desperately to get a clear shot of the freshly deceased through a sizable gap in a series of white partitions placed around the crime scene.
“This is pretty damn bold,” Agent Bruce stood up with an audible groan, bracing both knees as she did so. “Smack dab in our face,” she placed her hands on her hips, her right hand instinctively upon her holster, and swiveled slowly to scan the crowds. “I guess the university dumpsters and the woods below The Green Leafe just weren’t flashy enough,” she snarked.
“This is flashy alright,” Hillstrand cringed as he looked at the body. “Where’s the other damn partition?!” he suddenly yelled. “Get that shit covered up now!” he pointed to the gap which opened slightly onto the Palace Green.
This time of year was actually excellent for a murder. The day was a bitterly cold one, hovering just around twenty-degrees. This was helpful on two fronts to the investigators: cold weather works like a walk-in freezer to preserve a dead body and nobody goes to Colonial Williamsburg in January. The gawkers grew in number, but nothing like the circus this could have been had this happened during the summer; not to mention the body would have been much worse twelve hours into rigor on a ninety-eight-degree Virginia day with ninety per cent humidity. Hillstrand shivered at that thought as he walked around the body to get another view from the backside. As he looked, he rubbed his neck. It was like sitting in the front row at the movies. He’d be happy once they could finally cut down the body. For now, he rubbed the growing crick and lolled his neck back and forth as he pondered the tempered, theatrical rage it took to stage this.
The body hung, dressed in full , British-colonial regalia: woolen knickers, a handsome, yet worn, frockcoat of a rust hue, white stockings and well-trod black clogs. A healthy fellow of about six feet and two-hundred-plus pounds, his sturdy frame swung awkwardly in the morning breeze on the front gates of the Governor’s Palace, one of Colonial Williamsburg’s most popular and photographed landmarks. Facing out toward town and the long Palace Green lawn, his hands were tied behind his back with his canteen straps. He hung by the neck exactly in the middle of the grand wrought iron gates that led into the Palace, where the two halves came together, suspended by his own leather mandolin strap; he was a musician, a strolling balladeer meant to give the living history museum an air of levity, entertainment and authenticity.
His mandolin remained strung to his body, but hung at an odd angle as it was still attached to the strap, securely ringing his neck. He also wore a smaller leather strap around his hips: a thin holster for his tin whistle. In fact, the whistle itself found a more intimate home where it now rested. The whistle had been rammed down his throat; but enough still emerged so that it made a sickening whistle when the winter breeze caressed and swung the body just right.
“Can we get this poor bastard down, yet?” Agent Bruce barked, just as what sounded like an A-sharp pierced the air.
“Just waiting on the M.E. He’s driving in from Richmond. I think he was fishing up there,” Officer Hillstrand offered.
“Fishing? In this kind of cold? Why? What the hell do you fish for in Richmond, anyway? Carp in a fountain?” Bruce, a San Diego native shrugged and pulled her Burberry scarf tighter.
Officer Edgar Hillstrand, himself a Seattle transplant and a passionate fisherman answered authoritatively, “Uh, the Chickahominy River runs up there and today’s the very last day of striped bass season.”
F.B.I. field agent Albie Bruce, who had started to walk away in search of hot coffee, turned back and raised her palms at Hillstrand, silently giving an all too clear, “Big whoop.”
“Well,” Hillstrand mistakenly took this gesture as a request for further information on local fishing, “see, today’s the last day you can fish for striped bass. After today, it’s illegal. Most likely, he’s doing his best to throw a few more hooks while he can,” he smiled, satisfied he’d offered up something pretty valuable.
Bruce didn’t look impressed or pacified and snapped, “I don’t give a crap what today is. I don’t care if it’s the last day to catch a damn mermaid and make her his personal love slave. We got a dead Robin Hood or whatever blowing in the wind here and I want him down. The longer he hangs here, the longer this whole case is compromised.”
Right on cue, the wind blew and the victim’s neck hit a nauseating C-minor. Bruce winced and looked at her victim. With a spark of pity for the method of demise, appropriate sorrow for the family members whom had yet to see the crime scene and a healthy bit of professional admiration for the killer’s attention to irony and detail, she shook her head and wondered why a grown man would dress up like Peter Pan, or whomever he was supposed to be, and run about with a bunch of other grown-up fools singing and strumming all over this overpriced, colonial Wally World?
She turned away from the body, then after a glance at an attentive Hillstrand whom was clearly awaiting instruction or query, watched as a couple of local law enforcement officers, bass fishermen she mused, finally secured the gap in the partition. She could hear audible disappointment from the Palace Green crowd and, disgusted, taught the oyster shell path a lesson as she crunched it mercilessly beneath her navy, Ralph Lauren, work pumps. She left the body and headed toward the temporary command center that was set up in the courtyard. She refilled her stainless steel coffee Thermos from one of the two large, metal coffee pots on a folding table. She splashed a dash of half-and-half inside, turning it the shade of Beyonce, screwed on the top, shook it, then unscrewed the top and filled the Thermos lid with steaming, bland comfort.
“First Colony coffee,” she scrunched her face in revulsion at the Virginia brew as she took a hearty yet vile gulp. “What a bunch of crap. Why can't I get any damn Peet's in this town?”
As always, all material copyrighted and not permissible for copying, for commercial or private use. Cheers!
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