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Today is the day I do it as intended.

No planning in my head, before setting the timer. No editing as I go. Just RAW, nonstop, thank-god-it-stops-in-five minutes, stream of consciousness, freewriting.

Prompt: monkey

Set your timer for 5 minutes
Start writing
Use the hashtag #freewrite
Publish your piece (include a link to this post if you wish)

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Monkey see no evil, monkey hear no evil,

monkey have no fun.

That was the joke around town, the cops telling it at the cocktail lounge on the corner of Main Street and 12th Avenue, just across the street from the grocery store. The store where police officer Bobby Johnston rang the bell for the Salvation Army kettle every Christmas season.

Bobby came out of Vegas, after marrying a local girl who'd gone there on a lark--and came back as a stool pigeon. She ended up dead in a one-vehicle collision with a telephone pole. Whoever she told about Bobby and the drug trafficking, it was for nothing. Someone heard what she said, but no one got arrested.

Bobby got hired on at the police department not long after his wife's untimely demise. He was a Navy vet, like Captain Blackstone. His qualifications didn't matter; just his loyalty. And those boys in blue were nothing if not loyal - to one another. To the town, not so much.

When my sister Ginny took a job at that cocktail lounge on the corner, she was working for the summer to save up money for college. I was barely thirteen, unaware of what went on twenty miles from the farm, in the big city of 12,000 residents. She didn't earn enough for even one semester of college, so she stayed on. Then--

Five Minutes are Up

--Then, Ginny went missing. The police said age eighteen is adult, and Ginny had likely run off with a rock band. She was that kind of girl, everyone else said. Everyone but those who knew and loved Ginny.

The parents of Bobby's unfortunate wife told someone they didn't think their daughter's death was an accident, and they believed the missing girl, Ginny, had come to a similar tragic end. This made it into the newspaper only with the disclaimer that the coroner found young Mrs. Johnson's alcohol levels so high, it was just lucky the telephone pole was the only casualty.

A few weeks later, the day after Thanksgiving, the family home of the drunk-and-now-dead girl caught fire. This was in the days before smoke alarms. Mom, Dad, and two brothers perished. Cause? "Undetermined." How could one family suffer so much tragedy? Somebody had to know something, but these deaths sent a message. Monkey see no evil, monkey hear no evil, or monkey will be silenced. For good.

Ginny's body washed out of a culvert in March. She'd been stripped of all her jewelry, every stitch of clothing, and all dignity.

Suddenly, she was no longer regarded as a teen runaway.

"Foul play is suspected," Captain Blackstone told the news crews.
Suspected.

"A girl doesn't just strip off all her clothes, go lie down in a culvert under a gravel road, and die of natural causes or suicide,"
a new-hire speculated on the TV news.

"What Ginny Was Wearing When Last Seen" - an artist's rendition

Almost a year passed before the next young woman was found dead in a ditch. A college co-ed, another bright, beautiful, ambitious young woman whose goal was to spread her wings and soar beyond the limits of the rural Midwest. Only a few blocks from the cocktail lounge on Main Street, the private college stood like a guiding light in the midst of cornfields, gravel roads, and bored small-town boys running drugs for wheelers and dealers from far-off cities. Like Las Vegas.

Another girl raped, beaten, strangled,

and left dead, without a clue.

"It was a bright, sunny Labor Day
when my daughter disappeared. Surely, some people could have
seen Lisa. Why didn’t they say anything?”
her mother said to reporters.

The shoe repairman said he saw something, but Bobby J. had a talent for misleading witnesses, defaming them, leaving their testimony out of the file, or finding petty ways to make sure nobody would want to suffer through another information-gathering (and obfuscating) session. Captain Blackstone had hired him for just that purpose.
Monkey see no evil, monkey hear no evil.

"...be wary of strangers,”
the college girl's mother concluded.
“Sometimes it’s easy to think that nothing will happen. Tell your
friends where you’re going. We have to look after one another.”

Beware the people you think you know,

I would counter.

So many deaths in a little college town.

The police speculated it was a Holiday Killer. He might be a college student. The killer had a shoe fetish because the victims were always found barefoot. Naked, too, but that part didn't fit the shoe fetish theory. The bride was coated, booted, and fully dressed, but that car wreck was an accident, so she didn't count. Local girls fretted about the possible peril of being put out of commission by this bogeyman the local LE had created.

My sister kept a diary, which the police confiscated and never returned, but she also had a penpal, who sent us a copy of the last letter. At the time, we told the police everything we ever learned and gave them the names of people mentioned in that last letter. Nothing came of it, of course, until the Fourth of July, when Rick Lukeman died in a trailer fire. Of undetermined origins, of course. Rick was a regular at the cocktail lounge. He had to be the same Rick my sister had mentioned to her penpal, the guy who wanted her to get out of town with him because he had a vague sense of impending doom, but Ginny didn't listen.

Almost half a century later,

Bobby was still alive, ringing the kettlebell, doing good deeds for homeless boys, and rehabilitating felons.

Me, I figured he was recruiting those former felons and homeless young men to continue his trafficking business. When the state kicked in some money to solve Cold Cases, all those years later, Bobby high-tailed it back to Las Vegas.

The Cold Case money hasn't bought anything yet,

which is a bit of an embarrassment for a quaint little college town in the Midwest, known for Grant Wood Gothic images of red barns, rolling green pastures, white church steeples and old brick storefronts promising wholesome values and good living. Killers hide in plain sight here. Best not to raise an eyebrow, though, or your house might burn down.

"Someone knows something"- but nobody is telling.

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Disclaimer:

This may read like a memoir, but I have changed names, dates, and other details, shuffling things around in hopes that nobody points a finger and says, "Ooh, I know who she's talking about, but he's innocent! He's a good man, so religious, who does so much good, there's no way he's a killer on the sly!"

For all I know, the smarmy religious man may be as innocent as others believe; some other villain might be framing him, making a Red Herring out of the guy, while the real killer continues to roam free. Like "Riders on the Storm" (The Doors):

There's a killer on the road
His brain is squirmin' like a toad
Take a long holiday
Let your children play
If you give this man a ride
Sweet family will die
Killer on the road

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We're still taught to fear the stranger, not the guy next door who wins awards for his community involvement with the Jaycees (John Gacy).
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The house fire on Christmas morning happened to a different family, in 2017, years after their daughter's death had been ruled accidental, but the family insisted it was murder. The parents and two sons died in that fire. The remaining daughter is frantically searching for clues to convict someone.

I only wish I was making these things up. The truth is too unbelievable to make good fiction.

Few readers would believe the luck of the real-life family of the college girl murdered and disposed of like roadside litter.

Two months after Lisa’s death, Mary’s other daughter,
Carmen, was thrown from a horse and died. Shortly after the
death of their second daughter, the Peak’s home caught on fire. The Wartburg Trumpet

Again: I could not make this stuff up. But the truth is best told in the guise of fiction--at least, when the truth is not so outrageous, sordid, and unbelievable, as the "truth" all too often is.

Disclaimer #2

I flunked the 5-minute freewrite once again, by going on and on after my five minutes were up. An hour has passed!
UPDATE: How many times did I come back and revise? A: Not telling.

Thank you

to @mariannewest, @brisby, and
@omra-sky, @marcoriccardi, @snook, @marie-jay, @byn, @ebitularmbert, @f3nix, @eyedreemit, @whatisnew, @honeydue, @deirdyweirdy, & @wordymouth for all their time and attention to Freewriting!

Keangaroo

because Kean sounds like Kane (not keen, hint, hint)

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