Found Missing: Day 1

 Word Count: 6,002

Summary of Events:

Dallas responded to a car accident north of town, where he collected statements from the uninjured victims, as well as a handful of witnesses before he headed back toward town. On his way, however, he spied what looked like some hair in a snowbank, so he pulled over to examine it and discovered it was the corpse of a small dog; removing the tags from the dog, he decided it would be courteous of him to inform the owner, and so headed for the address on the tags, which was quite close by. He got no answer at the little bungalow that matched the address, and when he went to see if the car was in the garage he noticed the back door had signs of being forced at, which allowed him to get inside the house and have a look around . . .

Excerpt of the Day:

There were no sounds that Dallas could hear — aside from the quiet hum of the refrigerator, of course — and he looked through the house carefully, looking for anything out of order.

It was only when he reached the master bedroom that he saw such signs; the bed was unmade, there were clothes scattered over the floor, as if someone had searched the room, a long mirror mounted to the wall had a single crack that wasn’t too jagged across it from lower left to upper right, and the jewelry box was smashed, with jewelry scattered across the large and rather fancy vanity the room possessed.

In some ways it merely looked like someone had gotten up and left in a hurry, but, at the same time it looked like it could well have been someone was forced out of their bed, or just had their bedroom searched and caught the suspect red-handed.

Dallas turned away from the room, even though he wanted to keep investigating, and headed back to the main area of the house, rather puzzled by what he was seeing. The house looked abandoned with all the dust about it, but, at the same time, it seemed like it was still lived in.

This was reinforced when Dallas spied what was clearly and old woman’s purse by the front door. If the woman had just gone out with her husband, surely she would’ve taken her purse with her.

Nonetheless, Dallas went over to it and carefully looked inside it, finding a wallet, in which he was surprised to find several $5 bills, three $20s, and a $50 — a tally of $110 without counting the fives — as well as a hefty amount of change that he was surprised to see included a good number of pennies, even though pennies had been out of circulation for almost a decade.

Finally he found what he was really looking for: a driver’s license with the familiar green text across the top, with the light green background of a Saskatchewanian landscape with an orange Western Red Lily in the top right corner, and a black-and-white photo on the left hand side of the card that showed an elderly woman’s face, her hair done in a voluminous perm, and light-framed glasses of what was rather an old woman’s style on her face.

Just to the right of the picture, and filling up the centre of the card, was the pertinent text he was looking for.

The old woman’s name was given as Zelma Hardwick, and her date of birth told him that she was seventy eight years old as of just a few days ago, her eye colour was listed as blue, and her height was listed as 162cm — which meant she was nearly thirty centimetres shorter than he was — as well as informing him that the expiry date was coming up the following year.

But where was she? That was the question.