It was a perfectly ordinary morning. Aside from the sweet smelling pink fog and the mysterious figure in said fog. I had been following it for quite some time. The person, not the fog.

The fog was just another strange happening here in the fading town of Crossroads. It would roll in every once in a while, smelling awful and making potroling the streets even worse.

I always felt slightly dazed after the fog rolled through, but I chalked it up to sinuses. The strange figure in the even stranger fog was an entirely different matter.

I wasn’t sure what, but something about the figure struck me the wrong way as it was stepping out of the doorway of the old town hall. Perhaps it was the strange gait or the unusual hat, but something smelled fishy.

So I found myself tailing behind them. “Salem Scott, stop it right now,” I could almost hear my Aunt Liza saying, “that person could be going to volunteer at an animal shelter or a soup kitchen.”

“Then,” I told her, “they won’t mind if I see them committing such noble deeds.”

She huffed but said no more.

I considered it, there was no reason for me to be doing this, I had plenty of work on my plate, plenty of cases to be solved, and there just wasn’t a good reason. After all it’s none of my business if they walk funny or have an unusual fashion sense. It’s not like I’m one to judge.

I could have stopped then, I could have turned around and walked back to the park, or the library, or the train station where I could have hopped aboard the next train back to the city, back to my home. But instead I continued to follow this person for no reason at all.

It wasn’t to long before something fell out of the pocket of their trench coat, landing on the hard side walk with a loud thud. So loud in fact that when they didn’t turn around I wondered if they were hard of hearing. They continued to walk. I stooped to pick the thing up.

It was a plain leather wallet, I looked up and saw that they were turning into an alleyway next to a dilapidated Laundry Matt. I began to run. They must be hard of hearing because I was shouting trying to get their attention, but they didn’t even turn around.

I rounded the corner and saw a dark alleyway with no one in it except for a few trash cans.

I opened the wallet hoping to find some identification, but instead what I found was a wad of papers and a letter, addressed to me.