Snooping in the sun

Teresa was meandering around the boutiques, thrift shops and tea rooms of sun drenched Solbridge, putting the last day of her summer break to good use when she heard the commotion further along the boulevard.

Flashing lights and piercing sirens were just as enticing to Teresa as a fox is to a hound and this humid, stifling and somewhat oppressive afternoon was no different.

She dashed across the road and noticed two policemen kneeling down next to what she could only presume was a body, for the policemen had placed a white sheet over the probable corpse.

The paramedics were just arriving on the scene but sadly, it looked like their skills wouldn’t be needed on this occasion.

‘What’s happened, was it a hit and run?’ Teresa asked a fellow onlooker, eager to be among the first handful of people to hold such information.

‘No’ the elderly woman replied with trepidation in her voice, ‘I saw it all, no, no it wasn’t a car’.

‘So what happened then?’ Teresa again asked, this time with a more demanding tone and an air of impatience.

‘Maybe I should go and speak to the police and tell them what I saw’ said the woman clutching two bags of shopping in each hand, clearly not expecting to witness a death when she left her home earlier in the day.

‘It was a man, a man came running from right behind me and punched that boy’ she said pointing to the body, ‘he nearly flattened me as well’.

‘The boy fell and, …oh I can still hear the sound of his skull’, the woman’s bottom lip began to quiver as she recollected her memories.

As the woman walked away to offer her assistance to the police officers, Teresa noticed a note book on the ground. If her mind wasn’t already overly industrious with all this drama, it certainly was now.

‘Could it have been dropped by the attacker’, she muttered to herself while nonchalantly placing her foot on top of the potential evidence. A quick look surely can’t do any harm she thought.

With her mind racing, Teresa reassured herself that if the notepad did transpire to be evidence, then the fact her fingerprints are on it could easily be explained, as it was she who had found it, picked it up and eventually submitted it to the police. But not before her curiosity had been adequately satisfied!

Other members of the assembled crowd were trying to catch a glimpse of the deceased, allowing Teresa to pick up the notepad without drawing too much attention of her own.

As if clutching a jackpot winning lottery ticket, Teresa headed off into the neighbouring streets and entered a crowded coffee shop.

Has the heat gone to my head she thought as she sat at a small round table, still gripping the item for dear life.

Teresa knew she shouldn’t, but after asking the waiter for a glass of iced lemonade to combat the intolerable heat, she began to leaf through the ordinary pocket-sized notebook in the hope of finding clues, evidence or just something to give her a rush of excitement.

It became apparent that the notepads contents had most likely been jotted by a male, for it referred to a woman as being his wife, a woman who he appeared to be somewhat angry with.

With her head down and her nose buried in the book, sporadically Teresa couldn’t help but squint over the rim of her glasses, scanning the horizon in a paranoid frenzy for someone marching towards her, questioning how she’d come to be in possession of this book.

As she continued to read, Teresa soon realised that these were the writings of a man whose wife had been unfaithful with a younger married man. It went on to detail the physical appearance and daily patterns of her mutually adulterous companion.

Teresa’s heart was racing so much she could hear it. She was now fixed on a spot on the wall gazing into nothingness, piecing together the clues from her very own murder mystery.

It was now fair to assume the man who dropped the book was indeed the man who ran by the old woman and attacked the young man, resulting in more than a punch, but a death, a murder!

How can I explain this she wondered. She had now placed the notepad on the table tapping her finger nails on it in a world of her own.

She hadn’t even touched her full to the brim lemonade when her thoughts were interrupted resulting in Teresa nearly jumping out of her skin, jolting the table and spilling the lemonade which the notepad dutifully soaked up.

‘Would you like the bill?’ the waitress repeated.

Oh God thought Teresa, why am I so nosey!

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