Hey there! Grab yourself a cup of coffee and get cozy because today I’m sharing a short story mystery I wrote for my graduate Detective Fiction course once upon a time. I stumbled across this story the other day, which I wrote in 2011, and it was such a fun piece to revisit. The assignment was to take a list of ordinary objects—a C.D., a dagger, a bowl of oatmeal, a nightgown—and include each one of them in the story. I loved writing this mystery and I hope you enjoy it, too! (Readers who are familiar with my novels will see my love for a surprise letter here. They always show up in my fiction!)
Photo by Andrew Piper on Unsplash
Lillian Adams sat quietly at her desk by the bay window, the tiny village of Easterly quietly thriving in the distance, its rooftops dotted like splotches of paint on the glass. She sighed to herself. In the early years of her career, there was such a thrill in knowing that readers flocked to her hometown, eager to shop where she shopped, blissful that they could dine outside on the portico of her favorite restaurant.
“Can we get the grilled artichoke hearts,” they would ask with thinly veiled delight, “and the hollandaise sauce?”
Then they would ask if it was possible to see the famed author, as though her affection for French food made every server at Le Bon Plat an expert on her whereabouts.
But that was decades ago now. Lillian hadn’t written a novel under her own name in more than twenty years and fans had long since stopped asking for her usual dish.
No one asked her for very much at all anymore.