Inspector Zelda All Knotted Up

Previously in the Adventures of Inspector Zelda...

Inspector Zelda shook her head in frustration. She would probably have shaken other things in frustration - her hands, her cup of pens, the walls ... but she was too mad at them to pay them any heed.

The knocking, which had seemed so promising of adventure, had turned out to be a maintenance man, stuck on the other side of the freight elevator. With the push of a button he was freed.

Now she sat alert in her desk chair, barely moving, barely breathing, waiting for the whiff, the twitch, the quiet shuffling step of a scandal.

But then ye olde clock chime app tolled on her smartphone, signalling that it was now time for her lunch break. With a grim smile, she shoved on her sneakers and made for the elevator bank when - WHAM! Inspector Zelda found herself facedown on the hard shiny black floor. Carefully, she twisted her spine until she could spy the culprit - an untied shoelace!

Inspector Zelda pulled the laces taut and tied them with ferocity. Double knots. Double power.

On with her day ...

to be continued ...

Inspector Zelda's Loose Ends Become Looser

Previously in the Adventures of Inspector Zelda...

Inspector Zelda scowled at the horizon. That fog, that ghastly grotesque fog that had looked so promising in its sinister nature only the day before, now it was ... humdrum. Dull. Ordinary. She almost laughed to think that she had contrasted it not twenty-four hours earlier in her mind with the benign transparent blue-grey fog that now confounded her vision of Upper Manhattan in its banality. The clouds hung low over the upper limits of the fog, but even they were a cheerful puffy white - no threatening stormclouds.

Well, clearly the weather could look after itself.

Inspector Zelda once more prowled the hallways of her pristine district, sniffing out for any nefarious goings on. All seemed utterly lost, when ...

... was that a knocking?

Inspector Zelda quickened her pace, all senses alert.

To be continued ...

Inspector Zelda at Loose Ends

Inspector Zelda prowled the halls covertly. She was restless, at loose ends, uninspired. She had thought The Case of the Pen Bandit would be her big break, and that her door would be battered down with intriguing cases and clients vying for her services. She had thought the case would bring her the proper attention. Oh, it had brought her attention, all right. But not the sort she anticipated.

Inspector Zelda had been transferred from the dark-shadowed 28th floor full of questionable characters and lurking danger. She was now on one of the bright and shiny upper executive floors. Everything was bright. Everything was shiny. Too bright. Too shiny. It was like a street sweeper had been transferred to the pristine halls of a private hospital - there was nothing here for her to clean up.

Her covert prowlings brought her to one of the large picture windows gazing north onto the island of Manhattan. Even the view up here was cleaner than she was used to. But - wait - what was that looming haze? Inspector Zelda's unfocused glare sharpened as her mind cleared. A wide heavy haze was creeping down from the north of the island. Everything about it looked suspicious. It was an odd consistency, opaque and sickly yellow-green-grey; nothing like the clean translucent blue-grey fog that flavored the horizon preceeding or following a spring rain. No, this ... this fog was insidious. And it was approaching.

Inspector Zelda flung herself to the nearest detective station and logged on to the internets. There, she learned from the Book of Faces, as well as Bird Emissions, that this creepy sickly floating presence was making itself known not just in upper Manhattan, but as far off as Queens, Long Island, Westchester.

Inspector Zelda raised her eyes in horror. If it had spread to Westchester, who knew where else it might go?

To be continued ...