Here’s what I wrote at prompt one. It has not been edited or spell checked. That’s what editors are for, yes?
Lisa Pella was driving an ancient Ford LTD up Hwy 2 from Kalispell towards Libby. The car wasn’t in the best of shape and a slight squeal could be heard from somewhere under the hood. In the back seat her cousin Ted, the car’s owner, dozed, awoke, coughed, snored, and groaned. Ted wasn’t helping her keep her head straight and she so wanted to do that.
Lisa hadn’t driven this road since she was teen and her family had vacationed on Middle Thompson Lake at a place her uncle, Warner, built “for the summer,” but stayed in year round till his death by misadventure a few weeks ago. That’s what the police report said: misadventure.
Warner had died on this road, though Lisa wasn’t quite sure where, mile marker something or other. The funeral had been held Great Falls, not here in the mountains and no one in the family had come west. A funeral home in Kalispell had handled the arrangements.
She thought it had happened somewhere past Happy’s Inn, the post office, gas station, general store, laundromat, and one of two taverns. Funny, she didn’t remember her uncle drinking much during those summers so she didn’t suppose he was drunk, or even tipsy when he’d died. But still, he had gone off the road.
Misadventure. The report the state troopers had filed didn’t say accidental in the box marked cause of death. It listed misadventure. She’d had to look that up. It meant that his death hadn’t been caused by a criminal act. There was no blame assigned. But yet, it wasn’t an accident. Why was that?
“We there yet Lisa?” Ted said from the back seat.
“No,” she said, “another ten, maybe fifteen miles.”
The squeal from under the hood rose in pitch, becoming a little more frantic.
Great. This would be a wonderful place to breakdown Lisa thought. Miles from nowhere. There were people around, back in the woods every few miles she supposed but her memory of this road was a little hazy but she didn’t recall a big population, mostly she’d been in the car with her parents. Mostly she’d been angry in that car as a teen. But, she thought, what teen isn’t angry?
She’d been elected, appointed really, to come to the lake to go through her uncle’s belongings. No, not appointed. She’d volunteered.