Image by Goran Horvat from Pixabay
Tuesday morning – the boring news cycle that tends to run in August was completely broken up – the Dickerson case that had been unsolved for 40 years was solved with the body being found, a suspect being arrested, and the suspect confessing in a fit of rage – “How did they find out?”
Meanwhile, that same day, Ms. Dina Dickerson, granddaughter to the late Mrs. Diana Dickerson, passed a Covid-19 rapid test and double-masked, just to come to the Veteran's Lodge to give Henry Fitzhugh Lee, in his persona as Capt. H.F. Lee of the Big Loft Police Department's Special Investigations Divisions, a big hug before quietly going on about her business until trial.
It would eventually be known as “The Case of the Missing Prompt” – it was a series of prompts missing from a special edition of in Dickerson's Crosswords and Word Finds – a local Lofton County magnate dating back to the Civil War though under different names and products for people to entertain themselves. The Union had blockaded the South, so tracts and other light reading and puzzlework had become popular, and Dane Dickerson, then a paper magnate, had seen opportunity coming in 1860 and gotten ready to meet the need. The company he had left had been worth $500 million in 2020 terms … and, of course, heirs squabbling about control of the company and the money also floating around that had come out of it.
Mrs. Diana Dickerson had married in, but loved her husband Thomas and completely supported his vision for the company, and retained his shares – she was the hardest-working married-in Dickerson ever to the day she disappeared. It took seven years to have her declared dead – but the person who wanted that done most of all miscalculated, as all her children attained their majority by mere days before the declaration could go through, and thus soaked up the shares and got even more in the way of cashing the company out for money.
However, the eldest daughter of the eldest son, Dina, had known and loved her grandmother, and had never accepted any of the stories about her grandmother's disappearance. She was responsible for preparing the words and puzzles used in Dickerson's Big Book of Crossword Puzzles, and in 2020, did two such books. One went to be published to the general public. The other, its abundant missing prompts chalked up to a programming error, was not released … but made its way to Capt. Lee's desk in June 2020.
It takes a special kind of mind, and perhaps a pandemic for time, to solve 750 crossword puzzles that are each missing a prompt … and thus, sequentially, to find the clues that Dina had left … she had overheard the murderer bragging about what he had done, where he had put the body, what souvenirs he had taken, and where it all was. Dina had put the roadmap to all of it in that messed-up crossword puzzle book, and that had allowed Capt. Lee and Special Investigations to find the body and evidence and snatch up the murderer and his accessories on a single day. This also quietly swung the balance of power in the Dickerson family back to those who wanted to do right, right on time for a critical decision that would allow the family heritage to continue on into the 21st century. Meanwhile, the family members who had done and countenanced the murder of Diana Dickerson would never see the light of day as free people ever again … while their heirs could not declare them dead … the pit they dug, they fell into!
“Who was the beautiful old woman?” seven-year-old Amanda Ludlow said. “She seems like a nice grandma type of person!”
“She is,” her big Lee cousin said. “She is a loving granddaughter who loved her grandmother, and became a powerful woman just like her.”
“Oh, then I'm good because that is just what I'm going to do!” Amanda said. “I love my grandma so much and that's who I want to be when I grow up!”
“Well, if Dina Dickerson can do it,” he purred, “surely you can too.”
He prayed, silently, that Amanda's way not be so hard as Dina Dickerson's had been, and for the safety of grandmothers standing for the right everywhere, in a world in which too many were ready to cash them in for profit.
