Rain had fallen all night long, forming
little ponds all around the house. As it was surrounded with dirt, the water
had converted the landscape into a horrible mixture of mud and overgrown
foliage. However, the weather had improved over the morning, which Claudia took
as a permission to go outside and check on her beloved plants. Normally, she
would have carried all the pots inside before the tempest but that storm had
come in such a way, no one had predicted it to land just there, on Hownhall.
The small town still preserved much of its
architecture and every year one of them was chosen as the prettiest in the
entire county. The contest was only a month away and Claudia had a lot to do to
make her estate be at its most perfect. She had already won the prize for two
consecutive years and she planned to do so for the remainder of her life. Being
seventy six years of age, she knew that wasn’t much of a time window but it was
something to put her mind into.
Her husband Jim had died only two years prior
and that same year she decided to enter the contest. She had loved the man for
many years, but he wasn’t the type to like a lot of people in the house. They
would spend entire days enclosed in there, reading and not talking. To Claudia,
that was torture. She liked when the children visited and brought the kids but
Jim had always dreaded those visits because he had never really being into
children, which explained why their own had such a tense relationship with him.
So when he died, Claudia decided to do something
that made her feel alive and still willing to contribute something to society
and to herself. She got the idea from the weekly newsletter written by several
women of the county. They were a small group that gathered often in the town’s
main square and discussed the many ways that they had at hand to improve their
lives and the coziness of the region. They loved their part of the country and
wanted everyone to know about it.
So once she entered the contest, Claudia
decided to simply be the best at it. She went out of her way to get the most
beautiful flowers ever seen, which she bought from people that did walks on the
remote mountains and in areas that were difficult to access. Practically no one
else had all of that in front of their house, so it certainly gave her an edge.
The other detail was that, when she was much younger, Claudia had learned a lot
about design from her deceased brother Remus, who had been one of the top
designers in the capital, a great artist in every way.
As she prepared once again for the contest,
stomping the mud and cleaning all the leaves and overgrown branches of the
trees, Claudia heard some rumble in the house that was closest to her. As she
lived in the outskirts of the small town, only one other house was close to hers
and it hadn’t been inhabited since before Jim had died. An older couple had
lived there for years but they had both died and no one had ever come to
reclaim the property. However, that was about to change.
Claudia continued to use her gardening tools
but she moved slowly towards her fence, from where she could easily see the
entrance of the other house. There was a moving van in front of the gate and
two men dressed in couple carried boxes into the house. More voices came from
there but Claudia couldn’t really hear much more than the typical noise people
make when moving things around. Later, she was tired of not seeing anything and
decided to leave work for the day.
At night, the woman would always make herself
a hot cup of chocolate, with some small marshmallows to enjoy in front of her
favorite dramas. Jim had never really liked sweet foods or drinks, so now she
enjoyed them continuously. Her doctor had told Claudia that she should measure
her consumption of sugar a little bit but seeing she was and older person, he
also told her it wouldn’t be wise to cut on any food. So she didn’t and decided
to treat herself every night.
A powerful revelation on her soap was obscured
by a scream, a loud and powerful scream coming from the neighbor’s house. Claudia
didn’t got up from her armchair. She clicked on the “mute” button of her remote
and tried to hear something else. It was possible at her age to imagine noises,
so it wasn’t really that scary. But then, a weaker scream was heard. She
decided to stay still and think what the best response would be. Seconds later,
she was calling the police.
Granted, the police always took a while to
arrive. Such a small town did not have a police force to help people in need.
They came from another county, which made their trip around twenty minutes.
Claudia did not hear another scream during that time. She didn’t stand up
either. She didn’t want to get so involved in the matter. She just wanted to
clarify what happened because maybe her neighbors were simply loud people and
she wanted them to know early on that she was not going to stand up for that.
She had learned to be like that from Jim.
A young female officer and an older male
officer arrived exactly twenty minutes after the call had been made. Apparently
it was still raining in their part of the country because they were drenched.
Claudia did not let them inside her house and simply repeated what she had
heard that night. The officer looked at each other and they decided to
investigate. She knew they had decided not to believe her but that didn’t
matter. Anything to live at peace in her home.
She entered the kitchen as they left,
preparing them some tea. It was a nice custom to give a beverage to people that
came to help. True, she wasn’t going to let them get the floor all wet,
especially after seeing their boots live a trail of prints on her property. But
she had to be gracious and look as if she was accepting of everyone. Claudia
clearly wasn’t, as she had been prejudiced for a long time, in part because of her
husband but also because of her very conservative upbringing.
Actually, she had noticed that the policewoman
was not from those parts, or at least her parents weren’t. According to what
she saw on TV, she knew it was wrong to feel that way about people but she
couldn’t help it. It was as if something manipulated her from inside her head.
She tried to change her ways but, in the end, it didn’t work. So she simply did
what she had done with her husband for so many years: she kept her mouth shut
and didn’t get into “difficult” business.
The police officers came back in a matter of
minutes. However, the man ran to the police car, not saying a word to Claudia.
The young woman entered the house without being properly invited, grabbed the
phone on the living room and started dialing. As she waited for someone to
answer, Claudia was livid: there was mud all over the entrance and on the
beautiful white carpets. They were ruined. She looked outside and saw, in
horror, that they had broken a pot with gorgeous roses when coming back to the
house.
Claudia did not hear when the policewoman
alerted her precinct that a double murder had taken place. She didn’t hear the
gruesome details, of how the wife had been decapitated and how the husband had
been found without his genitalia.
The older woman only cared about her contest,
about her little world. And it was all thrown to the abyss because of that
silly murder. She was so enraged at the matter that she decided to find out who
had killed the couple by herself. It couldn’t be more difficult than her topsy-turvy
life.
