Maybe This Should Stay Between Us: a Short Story

You know that feeling that you get when you just know something is wrong? Like there’s something that you can’t see, but you know it’s out there? Yeah, that’s how I’m feeling as I stare down at this girl, maybe nineteen years old, laying on her back in the grass.

She’s dead, by the way.

You may be wondering why I’m looking at a dead body. Don’t worry; I don’t have some weird fetish. I’m a detective, a police detective. This is my job. I get to find out who, what, when, where, and why a person ended up in the morgue. It doesn’t seem like it would be a very fun job, but it is. Well, not the dead person part, but I love solving a case, or just the thrill I get when I chase down bad guys.

Not that I really get to do it very often, of course. Crystal Haven is just so quiet. Nothing really goes on here, unless you count the sale Wal-Mart had last weekend.

Oh, how rude of me; I haven’t introduced myself yet, have I? My name is Samantha Spencer, but most people call me Sam. I’ve only been a detective for about three years, but so far I’ve done pretty well for myself. At least, that’s what my partner, Head Detective Alexander Burnes, tells me. He’s a great guy.

Anyway, back to the body. I didn’t see anything wrong with it, other than the fact that she was dead, but she did have a look of pure shock and pain on her face.

“Do we know what happened here?” Burnes asks the analyzer, a guy named Parker.

He shrugs. “It’s hard to tell. We do have an ID, though.” He holds up a wallet open to the girls drivers license that is in an evidence bag. “Victims name’s Katherine Globe, twenty years old. Her card tells us that she’s had a history of heart problems, but we can’t rule that as a cause of death quite yet.”

“Well, we can’t rule it out, either.” Burnes says with a roll of his eyes.

“How about we head over to the morgue to talk to Carl?” I suggest.

“In a minute,” Burnes tells me, “I want to check out the area around the body.”

I nod and follow him. Nothing about this girl is too unusual, I note. Brown hair, shoulder length, grey eyes, average height and weight. Crime scene tape surrounds the area around her.

After a while, it gets uncomfortable staring at her, so I choose to look at the grass instead. I’m glad I do, because I notice something really weird: there’s a pattern in the grass.

“Burnes,” I call, motioning him over with my hand, “come look at this.” I study the grass some more. It made a weird shape, sort of like this:

~øº~øº~øº~øº~

And it goes around in a circle, all around the body.

“Is that… a crop circle?” Burnes asks me, his face pale and his voice strained.

I nod. “Do you think we should tell the Chief?” I ask wryly. “After all, aliens as a cause of death. We won’t sound crazy at all.” Note my heavy use of sarcasm

 “Maybe this should stay between us,” he says, “we’ll let them know the victim died of a heart attack.”

I nod in agreement. “I wouldn’t like to be locked up in the loony bin, that’s for sure.” I say, and we head off to type up our reports.

Maybe if we had stayed a moment longer, we would have noticed a gray-skinned figure fade into sight next to the body, before it disappeared in a beam of light.

~Fin~