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Weekly Contest #373
Elias Mercer called the sheriff's office on a Tuesday in October. Linda Asher picked up."North Haven Police.""This is Elias Mercer, out at the lighthouse. I need someone to come out and look at something.""What kind of something?""Boat traffic at 2 a.m. same spot, three nights in a row, no running lights. I want it on record.""I'll pass it along.""I want someone out here, Linda. Not a yellow sticky note in a drawer.""I'll pass it along, Mr. Mercer."He hung up. Nobody came that week or the next one.He'd kept the weather log nineteen years, si...
Weekly Contest #368
Walter Coyne had lived on North Haven for sixty-three years. He had never gone past the dead end of Hwy 143. The road stopped at a turnaround ringed by cedars, and past that was a footpath. People said the path led to Mairenn's place. Most people who said it had never walked it themselves. The ones who had didn't talk about what they found there. Mairenn was a psychic medium. The entire town saw her as a witch. She went to town once a month for supplies and otherwise kept to herself on the east side of the island. Walter walked it on a Tuesd...
Weekly Contest #367
Tony Kincaid had won four hands in a row, and he should have known better than to push for a fifth.The poker game happened every other Thursday in his kitchen at 1016A West Main Street, above Fred's Barber Shop, and it had happened every other Thursday for six years, since Daryl Whitecloud moved into his apartment on Donovan and started complaining that nobody in North Haven played cards for real money. Tony played for real money. Tony played for anything anyone would put on the table."Last hand," Daryl said. He shuffled the deck twice and s...
Weekly Contest #366
Milton Renner stood in the parking lot of the North Haven Courier building and stared at the flyer taped to the window. VOLUNTEER FIREFIGHTERS NEEDED. NO EXPERIENCE REQUIRED. He read it three times.Six weeks earlier, Milton had burned down a toolshed. He hadn't meant to. He had been trying to get rid of a wasp nest with a can of hairspray and a lighter, a method he found on a forum, and the wasp nest was fine but the shed was not. Detective Smitty and Detective Daryl had come out to look at it, mostly because the shed belonged to Bill Hallor...
Wind cut down Main Street and pushed loose snow across the pavement. North Haven sat under its winter cover, ferry pulled from the water, harbor frozen solid, half the shops dark by four o'clock. When the island shrank down to a few hundred people stuck indoors together, gossip didn't spread slowly. It moved fast. Larry Clemons scraped frost off his truck windshield at six in the morning, breath showing in the cold, thinking about nothing more than getting to the marina before the pipes froze. He'd worked for Pete Makinen eleven years. Pete ...
Weekly Contest #359
(Story mentions death, murder scene) The call came in at six-forty-two, before Smitty had finished his first cup of coffee. The dispatcher said a body had been found on the footpath below the dam bridge. Cora Vance had spotted it on her way over the bridge. She lived above the North Haven Courier at 1018A E. Main and walked that stretch most mornings. Smitty was out the door in three minutes.Daryl Whitecloud was already there when he arrived. He stood on the gravel path with his hands in his jacket pockets, looking down at the body. The l...
Weekly Contest #357
My name is Laddie, and I am a rough collie. Remember Lassie? She was one gorgeous girl. I look like her, except I am more majestic. I live with my Mom and Dad. They believe they own the house. I have never corrected them because they seem happy with the arrangement.Most mornings begin with me stationed at the front window conducting security patrol. That is where I first met Chester. Chester was sitting on top of the fence, twitching his tail back and forth. He looked like he wasn't doing anything, but I knew better. Now, I have spent years ...
Weekly Contest #355
This story contains themes of death and murder. Adair Grayson opened the funeral home on Dorothy Street at twenty-two with a business loan and a used embalming table. His father had thought he was out of his mind, though Steven Grayson kept this to himself, the way a man who charges a hundred and forty dollars an hour to do exactly that. Eight years on, the loan was paid, the table replaced twice, and Adair had buried sixty-one North Haven residents. He knew which widows needed to talk and which needed to be introspective. He knew which fath...
Weekly Contest #354
By the time the Acheron cleared the Moon and settled into deep-range trajectory, Elias Vane had stopped checking Earth every hour. The first week, he kept finding reasons to return to the observation port — system checks, exterior scans, navigation confirmation. Most of the time, there was nothing to check. He simply wanted to look. From that distance, Earth’s blue and white looked simple and whole. It bothered him how simple it looked. Sometimes he pressed his thumb against the glass and covered half of it, staring at the fact that everythi...
Weekly Contest #353
(contains mention of dying) He was on his back in the snow when I found him, one leg twisted under him at a bad angle. Alive, but not for long. His lips were moving. I assumed it was prayer, but when I got closer it turned out, he was naming his sheep — working through them one by one. Bess, Graidh, Old Meall, and the three unnamed ones he kept meaning to name. I crouched beside him. He opened his eyes and looked at me. He was old enough that fear wasn't the first thing. "You're her," he said. "I'm her." He had the look of a man who had alwa...
Weekly Contest #351
Grace Pellitier had moved to North Haven a month ago. She had bought the small cottage at 100 Cross Street. She was at the kitchen table with her ten-week-old golden retriever, Bella, asleep under her chair. She was fifty pages into a thriller that wasn't quite working. Her Detective Cole Renner had just arrived at a crime scene. There was a body, no witnesses, and a mayor who wanted neither fact on the record. Plotting came naturally to her; character came harder. She kept putting people in rooms without knowing what to do with them. ...
Weekly Contest #350
Ellen Anderson had lived long enough to know trouble didn't announce itself. It didn't knock, call, or send a letter. It just showed up like mud tracked across a clean floor, a door left ajar, or a stranger who didn't quite fit. Eighty-one years had taught her that. Eighty-one years, and she still trusted that feeling. She stood at the kitchen sink at 106 Arbor Court, holding a chipped teacup she'd owned for so long she couldn’t remember where it came from. Outside, spring had reluctantly come to North Haven. The snow was gone, the ground wa...
Weekly Contest #348
Thump. Thump. Thump. Somewhere between twelve and thirty, Daryl Whitecloud figured out that your body doesn’t care about your uncertainty. Your mind can turn a question over and over in the dark — pick it up, set it down, examine it from every angle — but your heart just keeps going. Steady. Insistent. It doesn’t give a damn whether you’ve got yourself figured out yet.―――First time Daryl heard the question, he was twelve, sitting in his grandfather's birchwood canoe on a lake so still it looked like glass. His grandfather lifted a cedar padd...
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