Patricia Briggs

Patty and I grew up on Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys books. So it was inevitable that, when spying a mysterious white substance early one morning on the pavement of the back country roads where no mysterious white substance had ever appeared before, we would want to get to the bottom of the mystery and be just like our young literary heroes! The game was afoot! Although I never read Sir Arthur Conan Doyle until I was in fifth grade, so I don't think he counts. Nancy Drew was my idol, until I discovered Stevie Nicks.

We don't actually know what this white stuff is. It's not chalky or powdery; but we don't think it's paint, either. Neither Patty or myself was willing to be like a cool television detective and taste it, LOL - for one thing, we wouldn't know what drugs taste like anyway, and for another, eeyew - it's been on the road and that's just nasty! Also, other drivers get testy when you're holding up traffic to investigate. People are so impatient these days. I don't recall anyone honking at Nancy, or even at the Scooby gang!

We decided to be proper investigators and find out where it came from first! Since all the white stuff is on the right side of the road, we did reverse engineering and went the other direction, hoping the mystery vehicle hadn't been driving backwards or on the wrong side of the road. We followed the traces all the way to the OIE (Old Inland Empire highway), and then the traces disappeared. There was nothing in either direction. Aha, we declared! We intuit that when they turned off the highway, they must have hit a bump (or something hit them), causing a leakage of the mysterious white stuff! We felt very clever; eat that, Nancy!

So then we turned around and decided to find out where exactly this mysterious substance ended up - the critical part of the mystery! So we followed the trail. And followed it. And followed it some more. These guys were going way the heck into the boonies! Finally, we saw where the white trail turned off! It veered into a long gravel driveway of a ginormous dead vineyard. I am not kidding - and my imagination would have rejected this as way too cliche or trope. It was a freaking big vineyard - acres and acres and acres of dead grapevines hanging over posts and wires. As a wine lover, this was particularly heinous to me; it struck me straight in my heart! I may have sniveled a little. There was a big old building of some sort at the end of the driveway. It was very ominous looking, and the white trail was apparently leading straight to that building.

Patty and I looked at the driveway, looked at all the No Trespassing Signs, looked at the driveway, and looked at the No Trespassing Signs. And then, yes. You guessed it. We turned around and left. We shamed Nancy, the Hardy Boys, and the Scooby Gang. We are dead to them. We have lost face.

In our defense, those guys are all used to getting shot at when they trespass. Patty has to go to DragonCon next week, and they wouldn't like her bleeding all over the tables at the panels. In the books and movies, the bad guys are all bad shots. Out here in the countryside, the homeowners tend to have much better aim. So we chickened out and decided not to push our luck. We did not go down the driveway and intrepidly (and illegally) break into a scary looking building. We did not discover any nefarious goings on or naughty activity. And I didn't take any pictures because it was private property, not a public road. It was awesomely creepy, though!

Mercy would have done it! But we didn't. We are failures as detectives. I have canceled my Amazon order for deerstalker hats and pipes (we don't smoke anyway). We are hanging our heads in shame. On a positive note, though, we don't have to set up a gofundme for bail money, so there's that!

--Ann the trusty assistant

P.S. The general consensus is that it is likely lime for the farm fields. That sounds like it is probably correct. But also...much too practical and boring. No, I'm going to have to insist that it is either something nefarious or magical in nature (malignant, of course). We have to have SOMETHING to make our adventure worthwhile, right??? 🤣🤣🤣