Today’s prompt is inspired by a real world mystery that happened to me last week on the road where I live. The sun was just clearing the horizon as I was driving home from dropping off my oldest at the middle school. I noticed a truck parked in my lane with its hazard lights on. I stopped to ask if he needed help. The man said a motorcycle had run off the road and he was looking for the driver on the steep hillside that ran down to the river.
I drove home, which was only a minute away, told my youngest to get ready for school, grabbed a blanket, and went back to the scene of the accident.
The motorcycle lay on its side, just off the edge of the road. Skid marks marred the road. A broken pair of sunglasses and pieces of broken plastic were scattered on the pavement. But no driver. The man from the truck and I climbed all over the hillside and found no one.
The neighbors who lived closest to the scene joined us and said they would wait for the police, who still had not arrived after forty minutes. When the man had first called the cops, they said no one had reported an accident on my road.
So what happened? Where was the driver? Why hadn’t he or she reported the accident? I still have no idea what the true story is, but the scenario provides so many sparks of inspirations for a crime fiction story.
How would you use this real world inspiration for crime fiction?
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