Orburn is a small town with a dark secret.
One group of friends want to find out what it is.
[ status: applications closed! ]
STARTED: MARCH 24, 2019
COMPLETED: ?
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MAY 7TH, 1984 - ORBURN
TWENTY-TWO DAYS HAD passed since the Porter Case, and the effects still gripped the small town of Orburn.
Residents didn't flock the beach as they normally did, and so the coast remained quiet. People were less likely to whip up last-minute plans and instead carefully planned where they would be and when bikes stayed chained up and stuffed inside garages. Small shops saw fewer post-school-visitors, and kids weren't too often out without an adult. Fear was obviously present, despite the dismissal of the Orburn Police Department.
Jude Hyde took no notice of this fear. She wasn't ready to rush the beaches at one-hundred percent, but as the daughter of the Orburn Chief of Police, she knew that the dismissal was rational. If her dad told her there was nothing to worry about, then she knew there wasn't anything to worry about.
She loved what her father did, and loved to sneak around his office and read up on the latest case he was tackling, whether it was a robbery or a simple civic dispute. She dreamed of investigating one day, following in her father's footsteps.
Orburn hadn't excited her all that much. Moving from the crime-riddled streets of New York to a cozy small town, there was a lack of cases for Jude to read up on. Even as the Chief of Police, her father hadn't brought home much to read. She tried her best to keep herself entertained with old cases and reading up on investigative techniques, but it was hard to do when the biggest case on the island previously was a missing bicycle (which had fallen off the car it was attached to and ended up on the beach). When Hanna Porter's case file found its way to her house one night, Jude was more than excited.
She had waited for her father to head to his room for the night before she snuck into his home office, snatching Porter's file from the top of the pile. She slid on her glasses and perched herself next to the unshaded window, reading the folder's contents under the silvery moonlight.
Nothing.
She read through the file twice and found nothing. There was a mandatory crime report, a victim autopsy sheet, and a very short report from one of her father's junior officers. The case had been written off as a suicide, which Jude had wondered after seeing a photo of the scene where Hannah had a piece of paper in her hand. It wasn't mentioned in the report, which was a little suspicious, but if it had been a very personal note, it might have purposefully excluded from the final report.
Jude shut the file and sighed. The biggest case Orburn had (presumably) ever seen, boiled down to a depressed woman who didn't have the help she needed in her life.
