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[16 Aug 2005|10:16am] |
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Autopsy sheds little light on professor's death
The Mesquite Ridge Tribune
A toxicology test for Dr. Harold Francis, the Parker State University professor found dead on campus Nov. 3, shows several unknown substances in the professor's blood, according to Mesquite Ridge Police Department spokeswoman Gina Keller.
Francis' body was discovered in the attic of the PSU library in a state police described as "shredded." Doctors at St. Joseph's Hospital say it is not clear whether the extensive slashing was done before or after death. The autopsy report shows that the wounds are consistent with those made by "a crude, homemade knife or large animal claws."
Police investigators say they still have no suspects or possible motives in the killing.
A source close to police says volumes of coded pages found in Francis' office may be notes regarding unauthorized experiments. But "the Mesquite Ridge Police know nothing about any coded pages related to Dr. Francis," Keller said.
The animals alleged by a source to have been taken from Francis' home by Army officials also remain a mystery, as both police and Fort Bauser officials say they know nothing about the specimens.
It was early morning, and the rain had finally ended. The only damp came from the dew on the grass and the last few wildflowers that clung to the Texas earth despite the autumn chill. Morgan wandered through the park, headed toward her secret place. The morning's paper, thankfully, did not mention the fact that the police had called her the night before. All they told her was that it appeared someone had begun to write her a message, but been interrupted. They did not say who they thought the message was from, or what it was about. This only frightened her more. She needed to escape.
Though there were trees scattered here and there through the park, there was one place far from the jogging path where they grew thicker. It was here that Morgan could be certain she would remain undisturbed.
( Read more... )
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| We Poor Shadows #3 -- Fear of the Unknown |
[02 Aug 2005|08:31am] |
Note: The passage about the morality of genetic engineering was written two years ago and has nothing to do with recent discussions on the topic some of you may have seen in a certain forum. There will not be another episode of We Poor Shadows posted until next week, as I will be out of town.
Donnette, her car now in Mesquite Ridge but waiting for parts, stepped out of a taxi and looked around the trailer park. On either side, the homes were dingy and dangerously dilapidated. In the overgrown yard on the right, a big, nasty looking dog growled as he guarded a rusty El Camino. On the makeshift porch tacked onto the trailer on the left, a trio of thug teenagers stared silently at Donnette. On the whole, she thought, she'd rather take her chances with the dog.
Directly in front of her stood an old but kept-up trailer painted a sunny shade of yellow. Little bushy plants with red flowers lined the front wall, and the grass was cut. A tall, round glass candleholder standing in a windowsill displayed Jesus, hands outstretched. White ceramic angel-shaped wind chimes hung near the door. Sighing, Donnette relaxed and approached the door.
Just as she was about to knock, she noticed a light green sheet of paper lying on the porch. Picking it up, she turned it over and saw that it was a flyer.
( Read more... )
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| we poor shadows #2 |
[28 Jul 2005|10:45pm] |
Searches of slain professor's home,
office yield only more questions
The Mesquite Ridge Tribune
Investigators examining the home and office of a murdered professor Wednesday turned up few clues, but what they did find only added to the strangeness of the case, Mesquite Ridge police said.
Dr. Harold Francis, a biology professor at Parker State University, was found brutally slain in the attic of the campus library Monday. Police have named no suspects or motive in the case. The one telling clue, investigators said, was that the attic showed no signs of forced entry and was left locked after the killing took place.
Francis left behind no known relatives, and along with a lack of clues, investigations have failed to uncover a will.
A source close to the police who asked not to be named said, "In the office, they found hundreds of handwritten pages that appeared to be notes, but they seemed to written in some kind of code. At the home were found a number of small exotic animals that were hungry but otherwise looked to be in good shape."
According to the same source, officers from nearby Fort Bauser Army Base arrived as police were concluding their investigation and collected all the animals at the house. Fort Bauser officials declined to comment on the animals, nor would they confirm that anyone from the base had visited the residence.
Dr. Gerald Burk, dean of sciences at Parker State and Francis' supervisor, was unable to shed any light on the coded information, nor was he aware of any personal experiments Francis was conducting.
Acelyn couldn't stop shaking as she read the paper, which someone had left on a table. Father was dead, she had no way to provide for herself or the others, and it seemed they were dangerously close to being discovered. She sat slumped in a chair in a lounge in the science building, wrapped in her wings as she sobbed, a beam of moonlight filtering through a window in the ceiling her only illumination.
( Read more... )
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| a serial |
[22 Jul 2005|06:56pm] |
A few words of introduction:
A handful of the characters you are soon to meet I first developed in college. Their story is much different now, and what I will be sharing here will begin with a failed Nanowrimo attempt of a couple years ago.
I've always said this story should be a comic book, but given my abyssmal art skills, words alone will have to suffice.
Welcome to Mesquite Ridge, a smallish and wholely unremarkable city in North Central Texas. It is home to a university and an Army base, two factors that help it avoid evaporating like many of the surrounding little towns. It is a safe and attractive, if boring, place to live.
And all manner of strange things go on there...
We Poor Shadows
Campus increases security
after killing
Police have few leads
in professor's death
J. McDonnell
Editor
Parker State University has contracted a dozen security guards to patrol the campus after dark as a supplement to the existing seven-member campus police squad, Vice President of Student Affairs Jimmy Sloane said Wednesday.
The additional hires will be responsible for keeping watch over the entire school, focusing in particular on the three residence halls. The move is hoped to help alleviate fears after biology professor Dr. Harold Francis was found dead in the attic of the university library Monday.
Chief of campus police, Michael Wright, said the matter is solely in the hands of city police. The Mesquite Ridge Police Department had little to report regarding the case other than that it is being investigated as a homicide and that so far few leads have surfaced. However, a police spokeswoman added that the death appears to be an isolated incident.
Francis was discovered after a library worker on the building's third floor noticed an unusual stain on the ceiling, according to a student who requested to remain anonymous. The library employee asked a supervisor to unlock the attic to investigate, and Francis was found "looking like a wild animal had
got him."
Neither campus nor city police have suggested a specific cause of death or method of entry into the attic. The student source said there was no sign of forced entry. Head librarian Heather Heaton declined to comment on the state of the crime scene, but said the only keys to any of the building's doors are held by six library employees, all of whom have been ruled out by city police.
Francis, 66, spent 39 years teaching various biology courses at Parker State. Dean of Sciences Dr. Gerald Burk said of him: "I commend him for his dedication to this school. He was a brilliant man. It's unfortunate that Dr. Francis was so reserved; I think if more people had had a chance to really get to know him, they really would have loved him."
Several students remembered Francis as "tough" but "fair and always patient."
Francis will be buried at Mesquite Ridge Cemetery Saturday after a 1 p.m. memorial at Brothers Funeral Home.
Mac looked over her article on the computer screen again, sighing. There were so many things she'd heard about the death, things she couldn't put in her article because they couldn't be verified. She'd questioned the wisdom of including the one nameless student she had used, even though she knew he could be trusted, wondering if she would catch hell for it in the morning. But the article just seemed so empty without it. As it was, the questions far outnumbered the answers.
"Jodie," Nick said, trying to get her attention. Mac didn't budge. It had been so long since people called her that, she'd almost forgotten it was her name.
The lanky, red-haired photog walked up behind her. "Jodie."
She jumped. "Dammit!" she snapped.
Nick stepped away, taken aback. He might be The Storm's best photographer, but he was still a nervous little wide-eyed freshman.
"I'm sorry," Mac said, "I guess I'm just jumpy. They can say 'isolated incident' all they want, that still doesn't help us in the dorms sleep any better."
"I got that pic you wanted," Nick replied, handing her both the print and the negative.
It was the only photo of Dr. Francis they had, which was strange, because they had archives of The Storm all the way back to the beginning of time. Weird that a professor with a 39-year tenure should be photographed only once by the student paper. Stranger still, the yearbook had no photo at all.
Nick's photo showed Dr. Francis judging a science fair at a local elementary school. Mac had written a little feature on the event for her series on how the college interacted with the city. It was the only time she'd ever spoken with the man -- like most of her journalism peers, she'd taken geology. Dr. Francis was short and skinny and gray-haired and shy. She couldn't guess why anyone would want to kill a harmless little old science guy.
The wording she'd used in her article about his condition was putting it mildly, if the rumors were true. Students were saying there was so much blood in the stain on the third-floor ceiling it was threatening to drip. Nobody could go look at it to see if that were true, though, because the floor was restricted now. If you needed a book that was on the third floor, you had to send a librarian up to fetch it. The police wanted to preserve the crime
scene, even the bottom of it.
Other rumors said the professor's body was so tattered -- beaten to a pulp and torn to shreds -- that his faculty badge that was the first clue it was Dr. Francis. That led to early rumors that it was actually somebody else, but Dr. Burk and other professors verified his identity.
There were no family members to identify or claim him, so the science department had taken on the funeral arrangements. It was a very expensive favor they'd done for their colleague. The university might find a way to reimburse them, Sloane had told Mac off the record. Nick, a computer science student, had heard from one of his science friends that the Biology Club was planning fundraisers to provide a nice headstone. Between all this and the ongoing investigation, the sad chronicle would continue for quite some time,
and The Storm would dutifully report it. As if Mac didn't have enough stress in her life.
She printed out her article and thrust it into her managing editor's lap as she walked out of the office. She needed an ibuproferin, and the nearest one was in her dorm. Anyway, she welcomed the opportunity to get out of the building for a few minutes. Those theater students rehearsing down the hall didn't help her headache any.
Mac hadn't even made it downtown to the printer's yet, and already she knew it was going to be a long night.
She began to round the corner to the door when someone smacked headlong into her.
"Oh, I'm sorry," the assailant said. "I'm looking for the newspaper editor."
"You've caught me," Mac scowled, looking over the other girl. She was mousy and slight, small boned and pale skinned with flat brown hair falling into her round glasses. Behind the bangs, long but sparse, hid a high forehead. Her eyes were huge but her nose and mouth were small for her face. Her shoes and jeans were black, and so was her blouse, the frilly kind with the laces and ruffled cuffs that they only made for thin chicks.
The big eyes darted around as if looking for ghosts in the dim hall. It was dark outside, and since only the theater and newspaper people were in the building this late, half the lights were off. "I'm the one who found Dr. Francis," she whispered hoarsely. "But I don't want my name in the paper."
"Well I don't know who you are, but it's not. Our article just says a library employee noticed the blood on the ceiling and reported it to a supervisor, and the supervisor unlocked the attic. I don't even know their names; the guy who told me that didn't say who you were, and I didn't even name him in the story."
The small girl nodded. "Good. I might need to talk to you later, though, if you'll let me be anonymous."
Mac's headache was growing steadily worse. "You can only be anonymous if you can convince me that being named would put you in some kind of danger," she said, rubbing her temples. "And you can only be used as a source if I can verify for myself that you know what you're talking about, which means that I need to know who you are, even if I don't report it. I'm not quite in Woodward and Bernstein's league yet."
"Who?"
"They broke the Watergate scandal."
The girl frowned blankly.
"Never mind. Just do us both a favor and never tell me anything you don't want repeated if they subpoena me."
"Um ... sure. Can you do one thing for me, though? Can you change it in your article so that it just says a student found the blood stain? It's true either way, but if it says I'm a library worker, I'll be easier to track down."
Mac wondered at the girl's paranoia. "I'll need to talk to my other source, but it should be okay. If all else fails, I'll just say a supervisor unlocked the attic after being alerted to a stain on the ceiling. Can you come with me? I was headed to my dorm for some ibu. I can call the guy from there."
As they walked, Mac learned mostly superficial details about her new acquaintance. Her name was Morgan White and she was a freshman, though she had about a semester's worth of additional credits from taking concurrent college classes while she was in high school. She lived in town with her mother, and this clerk job at the library was the first job she'd ever had.
She was telling the truth about her name -- or at least it was the same name as on her student I.D., which she had to show to the office assistant to enter the dorm given the stepped-up security. Whether she really worked at the library or not could be easily verified. Mac's source had no qualms about Morgan's input, and Mac agreed to tweak the story. But Morgan didn't want to talk about Dr. Francis or what she was worried about right then. She kept scanning the clothing-and-paper-strewn dorm room. What was she looking for,
surveillance equipment?
Whatever. Mac had a paper to put out. As soon as the Twisters' basketball game was over and the story written, she needed to get downtown to the printer's. She didn't have time to wait around for this girl to decide she wanted to talk. Ushering Morgan out of the building, Mac told her to drop by the office whenever she was ready. But unless she ran into her in the library, she didn't expect to see the creepy freshman again.
* * *
Once the editor was out of sight, Morgan let out a long sigh of relief. Mac McDonnell wasn't the friendliest person she'd met at PSU, but she seemed honest. She wasn't ready to let up her guard just yet, though. On campus after dark was not a place she wanted to be. It didn't matter how many cops were out or how many lights were on. There were some things that couldn't be warded off with guns.
Unlocking her bike from the rack by the student union, Morgan decided to stop by the park across the street from the school. She had an hour before her mother would expect her home.
Getting to the park forced her to ride past the library. She paused a moment to gaze at the building. She'd have to go back to work in there tomorrow. Back there where she'd been shelving political science books when she felt something thick and sticky fall on her shoulder. Back there where she'd seen Dr. Francis -- well, best not to think about that any more than she could help.
The sight of the body, however, was oddly not what upset Morgan most about the scene. The library attic, a haven for dust and cobwebs, held crates of volumes no longer in circulation, mostly obsolete science and technology texts. But scattered around the professor's strewn remains were several blood-soaked books.
Morgan had read every single one of them. Recently. They were all works from the library's limited paranormal section: some about bigfoots and monsters, others about psychic powers and magic and various other strange phenomena. One, the last Morgan had read, was a general survey of the paranormal by an H. Francis. She'd noted the coincidence in passing when she checked it out, but thought little of it. Looking at it on the attic floor, she'd noticed there was a little slip of paper poking out with her name on it in someone else's handwriting. It certainly hadn't been there when she'd reshelved the
book just the day before.
She hadn't been allowed to look at the slip to see if it said anything else -- the cops said that would compromise the crime scene. She asked them to at least let her know what it said after they were finished examining it, but they told her releasing that sort of detail could hamper the investigation. After that, the only thing she could think of to do was look up More Things in Heaven and Earth online. The results did not give her much comfort.
The "H." in H. Francis did indeed stand for Harold. This Harold Francis had spotted his first bigfoot as a teen on a Boy Scout camping trip in East Texas. By the late '50s, he had become an accomplished cryptozoology researcher who also investigated parapsychology. More Things had been published in 1962 and stirred a great deal of controversy in the field. Francis' findings discredited a number of other prominent researchers. The hostility generated by his book apparently led him to leave the field, because
in 1963 he sought obscurity in a job teaching biology at Parker State University. And in 2002, Morgan added mentally, he was dead.
The more she thought about it, the more of a puzzle it became. How had the killer gotten in without breaking the door or having a key? What kind of power would it take to leave a victim in such a state? Who had brought the scattered books, all of which were supposed to be on shelves, into the attic? And who stuck her name in Dr. Francis' book? She shivered and pushed her bike onward to the park, hoping she still had salt in her backpack.
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| idea ... |
[28 Oct 2004|12:19pm] |
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One of the dumber characters, on discovering that the villain is female, will refer to her as a "villanelle." Dez will correct this error, explaining what a villanelle is, giving an example, and remarking that Gator wrote one once. "Just 'cause he don't talk don't mean he can't write."
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| and the winner is ... |
[27 Oct 2004|10:50pm] |
I shall save the desert librarian story for when I have time to really do it well. Since the superhero reality show idea is just supposed to be silly and fun, not to mention something I don't mind subjecting to shaky ground when it comes to first rights and copyright protection, that's what's going to wind up as the subject of my Nano '04.
I'm changing one of the characters just a tad ... I've decided the animal-skin-wearing priestess will be from the same world as the pirate-cat-woman, and have felininzed her as well. I realize that this means she is a cat-descended person who goes around wearing a lion's skin, and that this may be kind of creepy. I see it as a potential plot point, and an opportunity to work in a snappy remark my husband came up with when I pondered whether I had ever seen a human wearing the skin of another species of primate (I haven't, to my recollection).
Additionally, I need a villain. Happily, my story being wacky and filled with (aspiring) superheroes, I believe I am within my rights to have a wacky, evil-for-evil's sake villain as well. None of this "mother never loved me" or "she's not evil, she just has different goals" stuff. (Not to disparage those who seek to make their villains interesting and relatable. Just my villain is going to be villainous rather than compelling.)
( Further details about the story and characters inside. )
Okay, any suggestions? :)
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| Nanowrimo 2004 |
[21 Oct 2004|01:12pm] |
| [ |
mood |
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 contemplative |
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So I'll be making another attempt at Nanowrimo. I've never been successful at it yet ...
2003: Began a story that was to be loosely based on my own Pacific Northwest Adventure, which was more or less a real-life National Lampoon Vacation, only wackier. The Nano project might have involved a wild goose chase to recover a valuable lost/stolen book. It definitely was going to involve a whole bunch of fortunes out of fortune cookies. I never got past the first writing session: 1,136 words.
2002: I got a bit further with this one -- 14,510 words. It was a comic-bookish storyline involving a genetically-engineered "gargoyle," wizards, fairies, scientists, rabid Christian fundamentalists, nice reasonable Christians, Wiccans, a tabloid reporter, journalism students, a monster hunter, vampires and one murder.
2001: I signed up, but didn't write a damn thing.
So ... Nanowrimo 2004. I'm torn. I'd originally planned to write something involving a peasant girl who lucks out and gets an education as a result of the tutoring requirement a wealthy student must fulfill to complete her training at the famous Library (/school/museum/temple) in the port city of Dobesq, which is located in a desert nation to be named later. Of course, there was going to be a mystery or political intrigue of some sort that my peasant would maybe accidentally learn too much about.
( The long version, detailed when I was sure this was what I was going to write. )
But then someone on the Nano forums had to go and post a link to the Hero Machine, and I wound up creating a whole mess of oddball characters and now I'm thinking I want to write something humorous involving them. At first I had in mind something about a bunch of Mystery Men-type aspirants at a superhero school, but my husband suggested a reality show, and that, I think, could be even funnier.
*sigh* Decisions, decisions.
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