It is a dark and stormy night here in Alabama; thunderstorms are rumbling through periodically. Both my dogs are on high alert—they go to opposite ends of the house to hide once they hear thunder—and my well of topics has run dry for the month, so I thought I would, on this blog by writers who write mysteries, share with you a story about a mystery I solved in my own kitchen.
If you have never had to raise a fourteen-year-old girl, count yourself lucky. My mom raised three, and she always said that girls at that age should be marooned on a shrinking ice floe. I am sure there is the rare girl-child out there with a uniformly calm, sweet, and helpful demeanor through her early teens, but I wasn’t one, and neither was my daughter.
Our mystery opens when my child is fourteen and in her bedroom. I am in the kitchen, staring at several round white spots, maybe two inches in diameter, along with a long smear of white between them, that mysteriously appeared on the floor three weeks earlier. Both my daughter and I tried mopping and vacuuming them in the intervening weeks with no luck.
Tired of looking at them, I sat down on the floor and started working on getting those spots up. The spots were made by a thick, hard substance, and the only way to remove them was to scrape the substance off with a knife. It was too thin, too uniform, and not stretchy enough to be gum, but it was too tough to be something like sugar or icing.
After a while, Kayla surprised me by joining me on the floor to help. Volunteering at home and fourteen-year-old girls rarely appear in the same sentence. She wanted to know if I knew what the spots were. I told her I wasn’t sure, but I was beginning to think I might be better off not knowing. Realizing I was talking about substances deposited by unwanted critters, she said, “Eeee-youuuuuuuuuu!” We live in the South, so imagine that word spoken with twenty separate syllables and diphthongs.
We continued to scrape together in silence. Many mystery books mention that silence can be a good interview technique.
After a while, she said, “These spots look exactly like someone got mad and slung the stove top cleaner bottle around without realizing that it wasn’t shut good.”
I sat back to look at her, and she added, “Not that I did anything like that!”
I had enough for a conviction, but I let her off on a technicality.
Have a great weekend!
