The only possible title for this is “The Case of the Missing Rain”

This was whipped up today during my downtime at work. It’s the result of precisely zero research, editing or revision and I have absolutely no idea where I could possibly go with it.

Jocelyn could see every grain of wood, every knot of rigging. Every detail made sense, and the ones that didn’t she pieced together from context. Right now she was sorting through piles of supplies stacked on deck; barrels of who-knows-what all lined in perfect rows, bags of nothing important stacked in four-sided pyramids and arranged in a two-by-two grid. Next were the crates, which she had carefully constructed and intended to put in a nice, tidy pile near the ship’s aft.

She grimmaced. She had seven crates. How was she going to make a nice, tidy pile with seven crates? They wouldn’t fit end-to-end, and stacking them one atop the other would look sloppy and unrealistic.

She looked at the picture on the box the ship came in. There, stacked up around the mainmast amidst several coils of rope were eight crates. Jocelyn wrinkled her nose as she tried to figure how much of her $2.17 she ought to be reimbursed.

The little bell above her office door tinkled, and was followed by a small voice that simply said, “Hello, miss?”

Jocelyn was jostled away from the deck of her ship and sat bolt upright. The small voice belonged to a small head in her doorway, underneath which a pair of hands was nervously wringing an old grey hat.

“Beggin’ your pardon, miss, but my name’s George Darner. Are you open, miss?” asked the little head. “If you’re not open I can always come back later.”

It took Jocelyn’s brain a moment to switch gears and reply, “Oh, no, no, I’m open. Come on in. Please.” She busied herself with sliding aside the tiny ship, the glass bottle and the box with the picture and removing from her desk drawer her scheduling book, two shotglasses and a bottle of cheap whiskey. Jocelyn didn’t much care for whiskey, but she was very clear on what appearances she ought to be keeping up, so that’s what she continued to buy. What she wasn’t clear on is why anyone would buy a $7 bottle when there were $2 bottles available; she imagined it had something to do with the fancier label.

The little head and its hands entered the office, revealing their attachment to a little man wearing a raggedy grey suit which fit him in only the broadest sense of the word. It clung too tightly around his neck and too loosely around his legs, and his jacket seemed to hang off his shoulders at an awkward angle. He looked tired. His face sagged a big, as though a naughty child had held him int he sunlight under a magnifying glass. Scratchy stubble had taken over most of his face, threatening a beard, but it looked less like he had shaved recently and more like the hair simply hadn’t the energy to continue growing.

The little man gingerly closed the office door and sat down in the chair across from Jocelyn. He took a quick glance at the whiskey, the way that same naughty child might look at a cookie jar with his mother standing in the room with him. He didn’t take it. “I thought maybe you weren’t open,” he said, “on account of your lights ain’t on.”

He was right. Except for the desk lamp currently shining on her scheduling book the room was all shadows.

“Oh!” exclaimed Jocelyn as half her body lurched to open her window blinds and the other half tried to cross the room and tug on a chain dangling from a bare light bulb. She managed to get both done, but outside observers would be hard-pressed to determine precisely in which order.

“Sorry about that,” said Jocelyn. “It’s easier for me to see what I’m doing with more focused light.” The little man had an expression on his face that said he had no idea what she was talking about. “All these little pieces, see.”

The little man smiled weakly and nodded in confused agreement. “Well, we don’t have ‘lectric lights down on the farm. Not like folks in town. They’re real nice.”

Jocelyn was surprised. “You came all the way up from the valley just to see me?”

“Oh, no, miss,” said the little man, who was looking around the office and trying to make sense of its furnishings. There was a ukulele on a big green chest along one wall, a bicycle with a flat tire on another. Tucked away in a corner behind a filing cabinet was a metal bowl, filled with water, which looked like it had lost a fight with a cougar.

“Actually, I came into town to see Stetson and Moury, you know, over on Third Avenue?” The little man looked dejectedly down at his hat. “But they said they couldn’t help me.”

“I see. And that’s when you decided to come to me?”

“Well after that I went to see Stone Lawson, that gent you always see in the papers, but…” the little man sighed, and looked a bit embarrassed. “Well, I don’t have a lot of money, miss, and that Lawson fella, well, he only takes the real big cases, don’t he? Bank robberies and what-have-you. Still, nothing ventured, nothing gained, right?”

“So you figured–”

“After that I went calling on Jeb Tate in that big building downtown. Oh, but he just shooed me off…”

The little man continued to explain how he had systematically visited each and every detective in town, but had been turned down at each one because of the ridiculousness of his story, or the lack of his funds, or both. It was the Booth Brothers, shady characters who lurked in a dank little office by the river, who eventually advised the poor man that Jocelyn was the lady to see about that kind of case. Only he had had trouble looking her up, having misheard her name as “Jacqueline”, on account of how hard the Booths were laughing when they gave the referral.

“I’m happy to help however I can, and I’m sure you’ll find my rates quite reasonable,” said Jocelyn, quite pleased that the notice of her colleagues might result in an upturn in business. “What’s the case?”

“Well miss, I think someone’s stealin’ my rain.”

Jocelyn blinked and let the words sink in. She clasped her hands together to make a kind of cradle for her chin and leaned forward, elbows on her desk. “I’m not sure I follow. Stealing your rain?”

The little man’s face perked up a bit. This was the furthest the conversation had managed to get, and he took it as a good sign. “I’m a corn farmer, miss. We Darners have been farmers far back as any of us can remember. It’s good, honest work, but… well… crops ain’t so good this past year. We got this letter, see, from the bank–” Here, the man reached into his jacket pocket, produced a worn envelope and handed it across the desk to Jocelyn. “That’s when it stopped rainin’. Kind of odd, dontcha think? That it rains real regular for years, crops come up good, then we get this letter and it goes away?”

The letter had been sent by Morgan & Smythe Trust of Hapersville. Jocelyn turned the envelope over in her hand several times. There was no postmark; it had been hand-delivered. It had been carefully cut open along the top. The edges were folded and worn, and the paper was smudged with dirt. The contents had obviously been removed, read, and replaced many times.

“But how could someone take your rain?” asked Jocelyn. “Doesn’t it just kind of stop and start all on its own?”

“I reckon it does, miss, ‘cept when it doesn’t, if you take my meaning.”

Jocelyn wasn’t sure she did. She looked at the man sitting across from her and the sad, polite smile on his face. In the light his suit didn’t seem to be quite as ragged as it did at first. It was old, and obviously originally made for a larger man, but it was relatively clean and well cared for, if a bit inexpertly repaired. His hands, still nervously clutching his hat to his lap, were well-worked and thickly calloused. The parts of his face that weren’t covered by scruff looked to have been scrubbed clean very recently, but not so often previously.

His name was printed quite clearly as George Paulden Darner III on the bank’s letter.

She had to admit it was a novel case. What if there were something to it? “Mr. Darner,” she said, “I think maybe I can help you.”