Author's Note: This is the first multi-part story I’ve worked on in some time. Please read, enjoy and leave a comment.
Part 1
It was something of a truism that, if you dug deep enough every neighborhood, no matter how small, had its mysteries and a rare few of those were even actually mysteries. Famous crimes, strange disappearances, spooky occurrences and unexplained phenomenon, the kind of things that might even draw in tourists or a television crew if the neighborhood was insistent enough in promoting itself. Of course, most neighborhood mysteries were completely mundane. Little more than housewife gossip, the type passed around church pews and barbecues, or wildly exaggerated stories that became little more than urban legends, if they were interesting enough. Hickory Lane could not even claim that much. Oh, there was certainly plenty of gossip, that seemed to be something of a universal constant, but most of it was of an utterly mundane sort. The Emerson divorce had been the biggest news in a while, but that ended up being too painfully amicable to make for a good story. No, the real enduring mystery of the neighborhood was a house. Not a haunted house, nothing so interesting, just an old house. It was a nice house, most would agree, a small two-story affair at the far end of the block right next to a thicket of hickory trees that had given the development its name once upon a time enclosed by a wooden fence in the back. Now, who had built the house and when was something of a mystery. No one in the neighborhood was entirely certain just how long it had been there, though most agreed that it had to have been among the first homes built here and certainly the oldest still standing, but that was hardly the sort of mystery that got tongues wagging. Nor was the house some rundown and abandoned ruin of an earlier age. The building itself was clean and well kept, the shutters painted, the yard and the gardens in the back were neatly tended and the pool was cleaned regularly. That was no mystery either since the house was occupied and had been for years. No, as was also traditional the true mystery of 137 N. Hickory Lane was its residents.
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