Welcome to the Wakefield Doctrine (the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers)

This is the Doctrine’s contribution to the Six Sentence Story bloghop.

Hosted by Denise, constrained by a sentence limit (high and low) of six, there are worse ways to spend the remaining time you have on earth.

Previously…

Prompt word:

BREED

“Hazel, I need you to clear my calendar for the next…”

I was looking at my phone as I stepped into the reception area, my head full of memories of a trip to Europe necessitated by accepting Leanne as a client the first time. Her husband was killed over there in a car wreck; I was aided in my investigation by a German detective who looked like Sargeant Shultz, an intriguing secret organization and an impressively-scary woman in Chicago. Still not sure which of those last two still gave me nightmares.

My part-time admin had the all-too-rare ability to anticipate rather than require explicit instruction, so the silence that met my half-formed sentence was pretty loud; being the born-diplomat, I added a simple, neutral, interrogative, “What?”

I began to realize this was one of those times I was expected to know what she was thinking and extrapolate from there; she was staring at the steno pad on her desk, tapping the blotter with her pen, and while they say familiarity breeds contempt, the look on her face was the angular-opposite fractal of that attitude and much more akin to something the apocryphal child-raised-by-a-tiger-in-the-jungle would recognize.

After the temperature of my self-imposed cauldron reached the desired temperature, she looked me in the eye and, with a barely-there playful undertone, asked, “Do you need me to spell it out?”