House of Goodwinning.

The back door was open. I poked my head inside to check it out. From my vantage point, I could see that the kitchen was a mess. Dirty dishes were stacked precariously in the oversized sink while houseflies were abuzz everywhere.

“Hello? Is anyone home?” I said, hoping to find a familiar face. I asked again, to which I still got no response. Vigilantly, I walked the rest of the way into the house. I didn’t go too far from the door at first, just peeking into the living room and hallways to see if anyone was there.

All of the sudden, I felt a cool draft brush over my shoulder. I went back over to the staircase where I felt another such breeze flowing down to me from the upper level. I was curious to find the source of the draft, so I set off upstairs to investigate. At the top of the flight, I saw bedrooms on both sides of me with a bathroom directly in front. The breeze was still coming at me from the right, so I walked into the right corner room to find a quaint country study waiting for me.

The walls were decorated with various awards – county fair-type prizes, as well as pictures of a gentle-looking family of three. I thumbed through a stack of papers on the desk in front of an open window for more information about the previous residents of this house. It was the Goodwinning family, parents Lorem and Ipsum, and their son, Dolor. Goodwinning…an odd yet fitting name for people who obviously took much pride in their lives and accomplishments. I wondered what must have happened for them to leave all of this.

I also picked up another item on the desk that caught my attention. I appeared to be a legal contract detailing an agreement that would give the Goodwinning estate, land and everything, to someone named Cicero. His last name was scratched out on the document, making it unreadable. “Who is this ‘Cicero’ guy,” I thought, “and what connection did he have with the Goodwinnings?”

As I thought more about it, I looked up from the desk to see a small cottage beyond the flowing drapes of the gaping window in front of me. It was set back past the trees below, down by where the lake would have been. I figured that any answers to what happened here would most likely be found at that cottage, so I headed down there.

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