I’m excited to introduce a new idea, so let’s see how this goes! I want to tell a “Choose Your Own Adventure” story with you, my reader. Except in this version, it will be a “Choose Your Own Murderer” story.
How it works: Every couple of weeks (or as often as I can manage), I will be posting a continuation of the story that I’ve started below. At the end of each chapter, I will include a poll where you can choose what you want to happen next/what choice the character makes. Using the top vote as my prompt, I will write the next chapter, and then the next, until we discover together who the murderer is.
Let’s go on this dastardly adventure together!
Chapter 1: Body in the Moat
Most of us hear about the body found in the moat before we see the flashing blue lights and neon yellow emergency vehicles barricading the lower half of the town.
It’s funny. You live in a town with a giant castle in the middle of it—water-filled perimeter and all—and you don’t really associate it with death. I mean, sure, people probably died there at some point. But that was hundreds of years ago, back when guys wore chainmail and battered each other senseless with sticks.
“… Bloated beyond recognition,” I hear someone murmur as I join the macabre queue forming up against the window partition.
It’s the closest we can get to the crime scene.
Across Caerphilly castle, to the south, sits a two-story cross-section of shipping containers with small shops and restaurants, and a closed-off balcony overlooking the imposing stone structure. The balcony is filled to bursting, but I manage to elbow my way near the front. Just below us is a stretch of canvas hiding picnic tables, and beyond that, sloping down toward the castle moat, sits the overgrown lawn, scattered with trampled crocuses and goose poop. It hasn’t rained in weeks, but the grass is green as ever. A strip of yellow police tape cuts off the footpath that might take gawkers closer to the place where the body had supposedly been dredged up in the early hours of the morning.
I glance over to a short, black-haired woman next to me, scrolling through local news outlets on her phone.
“They haven’t released a name yet,” she tells her friend in that lilting Welsh accent I’ve come to know and love. “Think it’s anyone we know?”
“Doesn’t make me feel safe,” replies her ginger friend, pressing a freckled hand to her chest and shaking her head in the commiserating way we all do when trying to eke emotions out of something that doesn’t directly affect us.
“Probably drug related,” an older gentleman says, his voice sending a new wash of worry through the crowd. “Whole place has gone to the crows.”
“Maybe they were drunk and fell in,” another townie suggests, returning reason to a potentially bigoted rant by the elderly populace.
I stuff my hands into my pockets and squint at the distant edge of brown water circling the castle. A white swan drifts across its smooth surface, fluttering a disgruntled wing at the commotion a dozen feet away. Officers in uniform mill about the shore, most of them standing around or pacing, their eyes scanning the groups of onlookers as if reading a murderer amongst them.
I glance down at my shoes. Scuffed and a little muddy. I grind my toe against the stonework to scrape it clean, the back of my neck suddenly hot. People are jostling me. I back out of the bodies and slide into a seat at an empty two-person table. Might as well settle in. It’ll be a long day of listening.
I shuck off my coat, then scan the QR code on the table and scroll through the menu. A person can be dead, and the service industry has to carry on making coffees.
“Hey.” I jump as Rupert Evans sits in the chair across from me with a grim smile, his face unshaven. “We need to talk.”
Damn.
How Was the Victim Killed?
A) Drowned
B) Thrown off the castle tower
C) Impaled/stabbed
D) Poisoned
To Vote in the Poll:
Visit the original story post here and scroll to the bottom.