#faq: You stole this plot from Nancy Drew. A: Yes and?

[sleuthomatic]

A timeline for Harper - Part 1

December 17, 2042 - Ava Marion Giddens is born in Raleigh, North Carolina. Her father is a foreman at a cigarette factory, and her mother is a high school history teacher. She’s the youngest of three kids, with older twin brothers in elementary school. She begins her life in a small town outside of Raleigh.

She’s partly named after her neighbor, Miss Marion, an elderly widow who’s been a friend of the Giddens family for ages. While her parents are working and before she’s old enough to go to school, Ava spends a lot of her time with Miss Marion. Since her grandparents aren’t in her life, she thinks of Miss Marion as her grandmother. Although she lives very simply, Miss Marion is rumored to have a fortune from her late husband’s successful uranium mining ventures. What money she does spend is on caring for her friends and neighbors. When Ava’s dad was injured in a work accident, Miss Marion covered the hospital bill. Ava still remembers her mother trying to refuse, and weeping with gratitude when Marion insisted.

2048 - Ava begins reading the Nancy Drew books and immediately decides she wants to be a detective when she grows up.

She continues to be friends with Miss Marion, who promises every once in a while to make sure Ava and her family are well taken care of someday. It’s only when she’s older that Ava understands this means financially — although they’re not poor, the Giddens family is in considerable debt.

2052 - Ava is in fifth grade. When she’s not playing softball or gossiping with her chums about boys, she and her best friends run an amateur detective agency. They hold office hours on the playground, keep their files in Ava’s backpack (written on bright pink paper decorated with stickers), and accept payment in either candy, or quarters for the candy machines. They help their classmates recover lost items, spy on unfaithful puppy crushes, and occasionally settle disputes about just who has control of the girls’ bathroom.

When Ava suspects that a school board official is accepting bribes from a local business tycoon, she breaks into his office to investigate. The good news: She was right, and the official gets in big trouble. The bad news: Ava gets in even bigger trouble. Giddens Detective Agency is shut down for good. Ava is heartbroken for a little while, but has moved on by the time middle school rolls around.

2056 - Miss Marion passes away. Her distant, wealthy relatives from Morrisville turn up to snap up her fortune and her home, and leave a bad impression on the whole neighborhood, to which Marion had always been such a blessing. Despite her grief, Ava feels there’s something fishy about how fast they moved in and how the will left nothing to the community that Marion had devoted her life to improving, or the people she loved.

In her free time after school, she tries to do some digging, find out what she can about the will. She comes to suspect that the will read in court was a forgery produced by the Morrisville relatives. When she’s caught exploring Miss Marion’s house, trying to open up a secret compartment she found in an old clock, the relatives turn up and call the police to have her arrested for trespassing.

She isn’t charged, but she gets a stern talking-to from the precinct detective. And an even worse one from her mother, who orders her to stop snooping in others’ private affairs. Ava is bitter about this for some time. She’s convinced that the secret compartment held the real will of Miss Marion, and regrets that she’ll never know for sure.

But, soon enough high school is on the horizon, and Ava has dreams of becoming a jazz singer.