The Case at Shribbley's Peat Parade

No one wants to be that person.

The one that eats the last piece of a cake. It doesn’t matter if you are attending a celebratory event, a reunion, or just to have some with the family. To be “that” person leaves you subjected to the shame you receive from everyone else. Ironic. For those who all decide that the cake is not worth the ridicule leave it be. No plastic cover or pan can keep that piece alive for long. After a few days the dryness sets in. The icing begins to firm up as moisture separates and settles in small droplets around the edges. No one wants to eat a cake that’s turning into a sweet, sweaty piece of jerky.

In this case, the cake is then thrown away as everyone agrees that it was sad to see it go to waste. On the other hand, it may still end with an O.K. corral style verbal gunfight where everyone is mad at one another for having not finished it off, equally distributing the distaste in seeing the final slice go uneaten.

It’s just cake.

Yet it holds such a high place in history. Marie-Antoinette said “Let them eat cake,” a response regarding starving peasants who had no bread. Despite the translation now revealing she actually said brioche is irrelevant, as the first quote lives on regardless. Just like the line “The cake is a lie.” This may be the single most quoted statement when gamers are around cake. Thanks to GlaDOS from the Portal series, the passive-aggressive AI defense robot will be referenced indefinitely.

“Just goes to show you really can’t have your cake and eat it too,” I scratched haphazardly at a scab on my neck.

“He almost snatched victory from the jaws of defeat, you could say,” my partner added, not looking up from his doodling as if unimpressed by his own jokes at this point.

Phil and I had been discussing cake in detail for about an hour now. The hospital room chimed with beeps and whirs from the machines hooked up to Timmy Todd nearby. So far he was not fond of the discussion, blinking slowly, moaning and grunting with each reference and mic drop. It’s a process us detectives go through as we reach the home stretch. I suppose this would make more sense if we start at the beginning.

In Alabama one of the first groups of settlers to drudge through the swampy marshes came across a stretch of flat, solid land. It was not an ideal location at first, as it was not very easy to get to. This made building there a little unconventional as well. The few that stayed stubbornly began to build a community anyway. There was absolutely no reason to do this; between the gators and mosquitos, sinkholes and miles of endless slosh, it had nothing to offer but hardship.

However, this paid off unexpectedly as the settlers began to adapt to their new homes and survey the lands. The discovery of peat came when one of them carried a torch into a small cave. The underground nook had a vein of fossil fuel in the form of peat moss and its explosive reproductive spores. Which is exactly what it did, resulting in the discovery of coal. The town found a name that day, in honor of the man who died for it: Shribbley.

Shribbley could have really become something, but it never really expanded as the founders decided to keep their findings secret. Enough of an income was generated over the years to fund some growth, as the coal vein provided for the town. A scepter is now kept in the town hall with the most prized possession they have; a chunk of coal bejeweled with pieces of gold and silver that had been found within the mines. It is suspected to be worth about $428 dollars, but they never bothered to learn this.

Every year since, the residents gather for a parade on the day of the coal mine’s discovery. For the last 13 events, it has consisted of around eight floats followed by a semi pulling a trailer full of grills cooking up food for the 132 citizens who call Shribbley home. It lasts all of ten minutes, ending with a cookout buffet of fish, bat, gator, and other unknown meats until evening fireworks close out the night with hollering and broken beer bottles at the edge of town.

This year, Timmy Todd had decided it was his time to get out. Shribbley had nothing left to offer and he needed to make a fresh start. The night before the celebration, he used sheet metal and cardboard to cloak his beater truck, disguising it to resemble an armadillo. In the truck bed he layered some tarps and filled it with water. He then proceeded to lower a cage from the rafters of his barn holding two fairly sized alligators into the pool before covering it with his makeshift metallic armadillo shell.

Timmy Todd was ready to steal the town scepter.

At noon the next day the local church bell tolled, as it does every day. The citizens of Shribbley were lined up, the kids chomping on buttery corn on the cob on a stick, the adults drinking moonshine and Sprite. With the final gong of the bell, they cheered and began to throw coal out into the street, paying no mind to their blackened hands and clothing and dust.

The opening of the parade ceremoniously initiated, horns blared from the vehicles that turned the corner at Snickle’s Bend and towards the town square. A few horses lead the charge, already freaking out from the commotion, fear releasing their bowels as they marched on, peppering the road with their own coal. Crunching and squishing the sprinkled offerings before it came the largest float of the parade, a large man holding a torch and the scepter; Mr. Jamethus Shribbley.

In rows of two following the highly flammable statue of the town’s involuntary martyr were vehicles representing different animals. A car dressed as a chicken was quickly losing its feathers as it drove alongside a giraffe made from a ladder and stained blankets. A van fashioned to look like a fat cat was paired up with a goat that had already lost one horn after the first turn onto the main road.

Timmy Todd found himself beside a camel as he came into the middle of town, the people applauding and whooping excitedly. He kept his cap pulled down low over his brow, hiding as best as he could, especially when driving past Penelophine Graze, the local tall glass of milk. She always made his adam's apple get stuck below his tongue. As they passed the last house before town square, when the shops came into view outside his window, he set his plan into action. Pulling a cord by his foot, the mechanism he rigged to drop the tailgate did just that. Moments later the first scream of terror broke through the cheers as the alligators splashed out onto the street.

Seeing an alligator in Shribbley was a common occurrence, but considering children were present, and the element of surprise still held weight, a mixed bag of emotions burst like popping candy throughout the crowd. Women screamed for husbands as they grabbed up the kids. Men guffawed and hooted as they fought each other to get to wrestling the beasts and flex their muscles. The older folk just laughed with toothless bellows and smacking of knees.

It was enough. With all of the attention on the hissing beasts, Timmy Todd slithered through the vehicles to the float and snatched the scepter as quickly as a hawk swooping for a rabbit.

Tator, alligator number one (named by the locals), found his way into the storm sewer drain. This drain led to the edge of town, only about 200 feet away, by the riverbed where two fellas named Fredfurd and Gilbert were preparing the night’s fireworks display. Being only halfway through the preparations and fighting over who could eat more hotdogs, Tator got the jump on them. In a brash attempt to defend themselves, Gilbert tossed the detonator at the prehistoric jaws between his legs, and with a chomp, fireworks were sent sky high. Since the pipes were not secured, they were also sent straight over town square where the townsfolk were still scrambling to secure the other gator, Sally.

As acidic colors of phosphorus powder and soot rained down, the crowd averted their attention once more. Unfortunately, Mr. Shribbley did not survive as the 15 foot construct resembling him caught fire and unfurled within seconds. Shortly after, the street of coal caught fire as well.

As Sally slinked away into an alley behind the shops, an old veteran, blind as the bats being skewered on the grill, had become triggered by his PTSD. Always carrying for such an occasion as the infiltration of the enemy into his homeland, he gave out his battle cry, firing in all directions with his Smith and Wesson 1911. The fireworks and screaming families and flames painted a believable picture in Mr. Mackey’s mind, so no one blamed him or pressed charges. However, one bullet did take out the transformer that powered the intersecting street, Doggon Drive.

This didn’t bode well for RipperRot419. He was in the middle of his best gaming session to date, having 18 followers viewing his stream; a new record. When everything went out, RipperRot419 succumbed to #ragequit mode and threw a huge fit, breaking his keyboard and giving himself whiplash as he attempted to charge away, forgetting he had wired headphones on that yanked him backwards into his own desk.

The commotion was not foreign in this home, and Mrs. RipperRot419 began to deliver threats of acquiring a priest to cleanse her son of his wicked temperament, scaring Pocko, their chihuahua, into such fits that it quickly ran through the doggie door into the backyard.

Pocko met Sally then.

Vibrating like a paint mixer in the hardware store, Pocko attempted to bark and scream, urinating profusely, as Sally decided he looked like a good snack. Just as he (because the people of Shribbley didn’t bother to identify the sex of the alligators) went to snap up Pocko, Mrs. RipperRot419 walloped him with a shovel. Sally immediately spun about, but was no match for the expletive-spewing garden-tool-wielding warrior before him, as two more cracks connected on his thick skin.

With a wild swing of Sally’s tail, he ripped a massive tear in the above ground pool nearby, unleashing 5,500 gallons of algae-infested water. Sally had no choice but to ride it out, as the wave of water washed him away, back across the alley, and straight through the large glass window of Bettany’s Bakery and Brewery. Quite agitated, aching, and disoriented, Sally went for the first thing he could find.

It just so happened that Timmy Todd had removed the town jewel from the scepter and was pushing the mediocre gem into a large chocolate cake to hide it. As the tidal wave of water, pastries, growlers, glasses, and Sally crashed down onto Timmy Todd, he froze in shock and could only watch as the cake, its hidden treasure, and his own arm disappeared down Sally’s throat with a snap of its jaws.

“That about sum it up?” I asked Timmy Todd, who was getting the full account of what came from his attempted heist for the first time since waking from his surgery.

“Um, yessir. Detective sir,” was all he could mutter.

“Lucky they were able to get that arm back on, yeah? Sally bit off more than he could chew too!” My partner was going to keep the pun train rolling as long as possible here.

I smiled as a final thought crossed my mind over this crazy day. One thing was certain; regarding the case in Shribbley, this one took the cake.