Not The News

Editor's Note
Scarlet Lake

So… Scarlet Lake, Art Detective, has taken on two assignments: to find the lost muses of the art gallery, and to also find the kitchen muses AWOL from the new coffee shop on Main Street called The D-Café.

Scarlet figured one of three things had happened:

One… the muses, all of them, had been kidnapped.

Two… all the missing muses had simply gone on vacation somewhere.

Three… well, this possibility was too nasty to even consider. So she didn’t.

She knew finding them wouldn’t be easy. Nothing like this ever is. But the Fourth of July was coming up, and she loved the holiday… the hot dogs with ketchup, mustard and relish, the fireworks, and most of all, the parades. And the word on the street was that this year Mt. Jackson was going all out with the most elaborate parade ever.

There’d be floats and marching bands and beauty queens and clowns and horses and even midgets in funny little cars. She loved the midgets in funny little cars.

A couple of days before the Fourth, Scarlet went food shopping… only to encounter ANOTHER mystery: there was not a hot dog, or a bottle of ketchup, or a jar of mustard, or a jar of relish to be found anywhere! She tried everyplace in town. The story was all the same: a day earlier, someone had bought up everything they had in stock pertaining to hot dogs. Everything!

“Who did this?”, she asked. And the answer was the same everywhere: three young ladies dressed in diaphanous gowns and moving with amazing grace… they bought everything, paid with a credit card, loaded it all into a large truck, and drove away.
Oh, well… no hot dogs this year. Bummer. But was this connected with the mystery of the missing muses? And if so, how? She’d think about it tomorrow. This afternoon she was going to the parade!

And it was a big deal… a really big deal. There were the floats: the bright red float from Mt. Jackson Kumquat Packing Company, … the motorcycle built from PVC plumbing pipe from the hardware store, and the dancing propane bottles from the Gas and Oil Company.

But Scarlet liked the beauty queens riding in convertibles.
She could still look that good with a little make-up, a lot of money, and twenty years off her age.

There was the queen from the local fertility clinic: Miss Conception… from the meat market managers : Miss Steak… and Scarlet’s favorite, the beauty queen of the local wooden boat builders association: Miss Teak. Scarlet couldn’t put her finger on it, but there was just something about that girl. She’d be worth watching.She noticed a couple of the guys thought the same thing.

She toured the sidewalk art show in front of the gallery, even buying a couple of pieces she couldn’t resist.

They didn’t have hot dogs, but they did have pop corn and caramel glazed kumquats. Not too shabby!

Tomorrow she’d talk to Miss Teak. There was just something about that girl…

(to be continued)

Back To Top