Weekend Writers' Retreat: aesculus wondrous

Posted for the meme
Writers' Weekend Retreat
hosted by Grandma's Goulash

  

Nobody could remember who had suggested the weekend retreat for writers, although some said it was Grandma. All anyone could really remember (beyond the plot and characters for his or her own work-in-progress) was that the weekend promised to be a whole lot of fun.

  

Eventually, someone made a reservation at a summer camp that had just closed for the season. Someone else got the camp’s address and arranged for food to be delivered. Another of the writers invited a TV talk show host as guest speaker.

  

Things were falling into place quite nicely, for a gathering arranged by so many absentminded-professor types. But something, or rather someone, fell out of place—out of a tree, onto a sidewalk, in fact, and the investigators from the crime scene division said he had been dead before being placed in the tree.

Placed? Who could have “placed” him there? Who could get 250-pound Marc Dubois into a horse-chestnut tree without breaking any of the branches? All the breakage happened when the body fell, the experts said.

Then the plot thickened. Or, as Clarice Boudreau often said about Marc Dubois, “The thick plottened.”

Obviously, none of the writers could have done it, either singlehandedly or with help, so the police let them go away for their weekend retreat, with strict orders to go nowhere else.

When none of them returned, however,  the police went to the camp to check on them. After seeing what had happened there, it was the police who retreated.