Charleston · Case File Four
One of These Cars Killed Her
A Murder Mystery Elimination Puzzle Book
57,800 Plates · 11 Clues · One Car
She walked that route for thirty-one years. The tide changed it once.
Melba Frasier kept a spice booth in the Charleston City Market for thirty-one years. She sat on her piazza at four every morning and walked to work at half past.
On the highest tide of the year the water closed her street — as it does several times every autumn, on a clear morning, with no rain in it at all. So she went up and over to cross the Crosstown, four lanes of highway straight across the peninsula, at a signal, in the dark. She was struck in the crossing and the car did not stop.
Nobody was watching that road for a crime. Six plate counters had gone up for one flood season to answer a question about water, and they came down in November. One export survived, in the appendix of a report almost nobody read: every registration that crossed the peninsula between four and eight that morning. 57,800 of them. Plate and county, no image.
Every one is printed in this book. The car that killed her is on one of these pages — it has to be. Eleven established facts survive from the investigation. Not one of them names the car. Together they name it exactly once.
- 57,800 plates · 200 sheets · 11 clues · 1 car
- Read the case file, take one clue at a time, and mark every plate that fails it.
- Choose your own order. Narrow it down, then name the car.
- Around twenty-four hours of work. This is not a book for one sitting.