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Thursday, April 20, 2017

What mystery in your own life could be a plot for a book?

This question from Goodreads, in honor of Mystery and Thriller Week (May 1 to May 7), is a tough one, because my life is so humdrum.
I guess there was a bit of mystery surrounding a letter some of my St. Louis neighbors and I found a couple of years ago.  True, it was just an unpaid water bill, but the circumstances were a bit suspicious. 
We were chipping out some old sections of a concrete sidewalk to reclaim a small area for a neighborhood green space when we found the letter.  The bill had been due in March and it was now April.  We didn’t become concerned, however, until we noticed the bill had been due in March two years earlier.  But in thinking back about it now, it was probably because the letter was in the back pocket of a dead man’s jeans that really got us spun up.
The man was later identified as Bill Waite, which seemed about right.  And since he was a scientist working on some type of advanced stealth weapon, one of those three-letter agencies was called in to investigate.  I never realized they were so specialized, until I saw they were from the Bureau of Undercover Munitions.
The BUMs immediately suspected the next-door neighbor, Mary Hopkins, a 77-year-old, retired third grade teacher.  She had no alibi for the two-week period when Bill had gone missing.  There were whole blocks of eight hours or more when the widow claimed no one had seen her.  And since Bill’s girlfriend, Natasha Popov had disappeared about the same time as Bill, she couldn’t vouch for Mary either.  Last we saw, Natasha was driving off in her Ferrari, probably going to the airport to visit her old, dying mother in the Ukraine.  She did that a lot.
Of course, the whole mystery disappeared when the doctors completed the autopsy.  Bill had died of a heart attack.  It was just one of those strange coincidences that he fell in the open trench for the sidewalk at the exact moment that the worker and his six supervisors were all looking the other way…probably watching Natasha drive away, because she always liked to have her top down.
So, with the mystery solved, I guess that won’t work for a book after all, because my life is so humdrum…
Image from The Car Spy - 1997 Ferrari F355 Spider, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18039149

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