Little Acorns Become Mighty Oaks, Part Two

[hallolujah]

Thank you so much for the kind comments. Feel free to leave critiques about grammar (I want to improve my writing after all). I hope you all enjoy this next part and I can update at this pace. Thank you for reading and have a great day.

Chapter One

Little Acorns Become Mighty Oaks, a Thurston Calder Mystery

Two

The man was still dangling from the tree when I texted Thuy that I couldn?t make it to study time. Something told me that I was going to be here for a long night. I called 911 and knew that I would only have a couple of minutes to get a closer look at the body. Call it morbid curiosity.

His skin was deathly white, fitting for a dead man. Cropped black hair over closed eyes and what used to be a handsome face gave me the impression that this man was professional at his profession, ruling out him being a drug dealer. His face looked semi-bloated but he mustn?t have been here long to achieve this amount of bloating without being discovered.

I could hear sirens coming from about a mile away and I knew that as soon as they got here they would push me away. Shame too, because I thought there was something odd going on about this whole scene. There was a circle of wet dirt in front of the man and puzzled, I bent down closer to it and smelled. Was that a hint of cinnamon?

I backed away and the red and blue lights of the cop car began to flicker amongst the buildings. I turned to find a man with a bald head, long red beard and a beer belly squeeze out of his patrol car and point at me. ?You call 911, son??

I nodded. ?As soon as I saw it.?

Officer Kilroy, whose name I noticed from the badge on his uniform, lightly pushed me aside to see the body up closer. ?My God.?

A moment passed while Officer Kilroy was transfixed on the body. I cleared my throat, ?Are you okay there, Officer??

That snapped him out of it. He shook his head and said, ?Why of course I am.? We turned to see that an ambulance and another cop car had pulled up beside Kilroy?s vehicle. As two paramedics rushed past me, Officer Kilroy said to me, ?You sure the man?s dead.?

?People?s necks don?t usually bend that way,? I pointed out to him.

Kilroy didn?t seem to like that and mumbled, ?Damn college kids think they know everything.? He then coughed when he noticed me staring at him and said, ?I?ll have Detective Hatcheson take your statement.?

He left my side and in his place stood a man a couple inches taller than me. He was as skinny as a rail and had a body like a beanpole. His pale white skin stretched tightly over his sunken face, giving him the impression of a living Grim Reaper, minus the fact that he had a large beak of a nose and cold gray eyes fairly hidden behind long brown hair. He looked a perfect match for such a depressing job of investigating the darkness of human kind.

?Name?? Detective Hatcheson asked once he had taken out a small notebook and a pen.

I gave him my name as well as contact information before he got into the heart of the matter. ?Do you know the victim??

?Haven?t a clue,? I shook my head.

?And you just found him hanged from a tree?? By now the paramedics realized that he was in fact DOA and cut the rope to cart him off to the morgue.

?Yeah, I was walking back to my dorm and saw him,? I told him. ?I honestly don?t know who would do such a thing.?

?Whoa wait a minute,? Hatcheson held up a hand to slow me down. ?What makes you think someone did this to him??

I shrugged. ?I don?t know, just a feeling.? And that was being truthful. I just knew that the local police would think of this as suicide but I wasn?t so sure about that. My gut was steering me away from the obvious and my gut never steered me wrong. Well, except that one time I thought that my Aunt Thela?s radish salad would be delicious.

Hatcheson didn?t notice my non sequitor shuddering and sighed. ?I think we?re done here. If you think of anything,? he paused to hold out his business card to me. ?Don?t hesitate to call.?

I nodded and took the card. Wow, a detective card. I?d only seen these things in those vice shows. ?Don?t worry, I will.?

I left the crime scene but before leaving completely, I surveyed the scene one last time. What was it that I had sensed that made me think that this wasn?t a suicide? I looked beyond the tree and saw the windows of the residence hall the tree had belonged to and knew. Witnesses. If no witnesses of the residence hall, especially those one-two- ? - six windows down with a direct line of vision at the tree, then something was up.

---

I opened the door to the dorm room and found Trevor at his desk, typing on his computer. ?Hey,? I greeted as I closed the door and threw my backpack on my bed.

Trevor was a nerd but a hot one without even realizing it. He wore prescription glasses that strangely complimented instead of distracted the fact that he had breath-taking eyes; sapphire blue. His glasses sat on the bridge of his straight and long nose. High cheekbones, thin lips and a wide jaw gave him a very handsome face. I think for the moment he was growing a goatee, but the facial hair was coming out red instead of brown to match his wavy hair atop his head. He was short, about 5? 6? and thin but lean. He said he didn?t work out when I asked him but I would catch a peek of nicely lined abs on his vascular body. This boy didn?t fool me that easily and I?m a blonde.

Trevor waved his hand to signal that he acknowledged me but continued his typing. Trevor was a junior, a bioengineering major and also shared my commitment to college through coursework. ?Is that another paper you have to type up?? I asked to try to start a conversation.

?Yep,? Trevor answered. Did I mention that he had a habit of only answering in monosyllabic answers when he was focused?

?That sounds great,? I trailed off. We both weren?t natural born Chatty Cathys so I just continued my nightly routine. I grabbed a change of clothes for bedtime and hopped in the shower to wash the day away and the thoughts that came pouring into my head as I lathered my hair, rinsed and repeated.

I saw a dead man today and was more intrigued than frightened. That boded well for my future career as a forensic scientist but it was still unsettling. Instead of frantically calling the police, I was levelheaded and methodical. I acted as if I was an ace detective in one of my novels but this wasn?t a work of fiction; this was real life! But I?m not a detective. I shouldn?t interfere with any of this and it wasn?t my place.

I pushed the thoughts about the crime scene aside and finished washing my body. I dried off, brushed my teeth, changed into my pajamas and came out of the bathroom to find Trevor now playing Legend of Zelda on his computer. ?I thought you were writing a paper,? I commented after closing the bathroom door.

?Done,? Trevor said, squinting his eyes as the screen and concentrating on the video game.

?Oh cool. Hey, mind if I cut the lights?? I asked as I leaned to the light switch.

?Nope.?

I turned the lights off and using the backlight of the monitor as my illumination I crawled into my bunk bed. The time on my cell phone said it was 11:46. I was dead tired even at that early hour and soon fell asleep. The events of the day had been playing in my mind like home videos on a projector but they slowly faded away and all I saw was blackness.

---

I never thought that tweed was sexy until I saw the stud in it. The cafeteria had been transformed into a large ballroom with furnishings and decorations for the perfect formal gala. A large water fountain was erected in the center of the room and the ballroom was crowded with waiters and other affluent people, dressed in vintage, turn of the 20th century clothing. I was dressed in a slim black tuxedo that showed off my lean body and was lost in the sea of conversations around me from the partygoers.

But like a cow trapped in a UFO?s tractor beam, I gravitated towards the hunk. He was the exact same man I had seen in the cafeteria, except instead of a simple shirt, hoodie and shorts, he was in a tweed suit. It was brown and the fabric looked wrinkleless on him. The top three buttons on the top were unbuttoned, revealing a white crisp undershirt. The reason those buttons were not in fact fastened was because based on how he was filling out his outfit, he would tear the suit apart if he dared to try to contain his mammoth chest. The suit appeared to have been painted onto his body, that?s how tight it was. The sleeves defined his muscles, sticking to him like flies to flypaper and showed off the power that he contained. His shoulders were as broad as ever and when he turned around, it looks as if the suit would tear at the seams if he dared to breathe deeply, as if he should really care about a stupid suit. His large lats tapered down to his little waist and I could see a big bulge in the front of his trousers. It was obscene how large it was, his cock looked semi-soft but reaching a good nine inches with a suitable girth. It rested beautifully on his tremendous thighs which were above his calves, big enough to easily be longer than my own thigh.

He reached for a golden pocket watch in, where else, his pocket and I could see the subtle flex in his arm. That sleeve looked close to bursting! I swore I heard a thread snap. He put the watch back into his pocket and looked up to see me staring at him. Then he smiled, pearly whites welcoming me to meet the Adonis of the Ballroom. His body, his face, his eyes, the fact that he exuded sex made me want him even more and I stepped forward, ready to meet him and maybe, just maybe, I deserved him.

The distance between us seemed to increase however as I stepped. To my horror the ballroom was beginning to crumble away and everything was disappearing. I ran faster, trying to catch the man before he too would leave existence, but he was moving away, far far away to the horizon. He was a giant of a man before, but now he was but a speck in the distance and then he was gone. I was standing in a void with no one left. I was alone.

---

The alarm clock woke me up from my nightmare. Startled, I raised myself up straight and promptly hit myself in the forehead on a bar of Trevor?s bunk bed above me. ?Fuck!? I swore in a stage whisper and rubbed my forehead. Not a good way to start the day.

I got out of bed when the pain started to subside and did my usual morning routine in the bathroom: piss, brush my teeth, shower, you get the idea. I combed my hair so I didn?t look like a hermit and checked the news on my laptop. The very first headline I saw was ?Suicide on Campus?. I closed my laptop swiftly and grumbled. This couldn?t have been a suicide, there was no way!

I took a deep breath to cool down and checked the clock. The time read 7:48 AM and it was a Tuesday. That meant I only had Geology lab in the morning and it was in twelve minutes.

I grabbed my backpack, put on my shoes, walked out the door and locked it. You never know what?ll happen. I walked to lab and it was entirely uneventful. We were supposed to identify the rocks on the table, but all I could think about was how the professor had rocks for brains for making this lab so banal. Our group finished quickly and I was out of there and the entire day was all to myself.

My plan was to return to the dorm to take a nap but I stopped in front of the residence hall where I had found the body. I hadn?t checked the news to see if they knew what had happened to him but I still wanted to talk to the occupant of the room with the sixth window. Trouble was I wasn?t a resident of this hall. You were only granted access to your hall by swiping your ID in a slot and you couldn?t swipe into a hall that you didn?t live in. I?ll have to lie to pull this off.

I walked to the entrance and shoved my hands in my pockets and waited outside. I put on a great Oscar-winning performance when a female resident with brown bangs saw me before swiping their ID. ?You lose your card??

I nodded. ?I tried calling my roommate to bring me my ID but he?s not answering.?

?That?s what the call button is for,? she pointed at the telecom box I was leaning on.

?I didn?t want to bother them,? I smiled.

She giggled and swiped her card. ?There you go!?

?Thanks muchly,? I said with gratitude before entering. I waved at the RA at the front desk to give the impression that I did in fact live there and turned down the left hallway.

Dorms only have one window so I knew the room I wanted was the sixth one of my left. I strode there after my counting and noted the name tag on the door. RA Silas. Great. This was going to get me into trouble but my curious side wouldn?t let me leave without my questions being answered. I knocked on his door and waited. Nothing.

I knocked again and still received nothing, so I turned to leave. The sound of the unlocking stopped me and I watched the door crack open. As the door opened wider and wider, my jaw dropped more and more. Silas was the stud.

[michaelv2]

Moving along nicely. Hope Silas has his shirt off...

[Mad Dog]

Still intrigued, but I'm hoping for either longer chapters or more action soon.

[dikdash]

Whoa, that's one unexpected meeting. I'll look forward for the third one.