Саманта Сильвер - Busy As A Beaver

“None,” I replied, my eyes moving from the lawn to the windows. The whole yard was still roped off with yellow police tape and a couple idly curious neighbors were taking a suspiciously long time walking past the place, but as far as I could tell, all the cops were gone.

Sophie and I made our way towards the front door, but as soon as we reached it, I stopped.

“What’s wrong?” Sophie asked.

“The seal on the door,” I replied. “How are we going to get past it without it breaking?”

“Can’t you put it back together?” Sophie asked. “What’s the point of being able to use magic if you can’t break in to a crime scene?”

“I can,” I replied. “The problem is, I can’t use magic to put it back together if I can’t see it. So once we’re inside with the door closed, we’d have to wait until we’re done to put it back.”

“And you’re worried a cop might come by in that time.”

“I mean, it’s a murder investigation, and it happened less than forty-eight hours ago. Yeah, I’m a bit worried.”

“Ok,” Sophie said. “Let’s go around the side and see if we can make our way in through a window or something.”

We walked around the side of the house, but unfortunately, we very quickly realized that the windows weren’t going to work. It wasn’t that we couldn’t unlock them—my magic took care of that really quickly. It was that we simply wouldn’t fit.

“I’m starting to really regret eating all that pizza over the last twenty-some years,” Sophie said despondently as the reality of our situation began to sink in.

“I’m not,” I replied. “If I had to choose between solving crimes and pizza, I’d choose pizza every day of the week.”

“This is why you’re a vet and not a detective,” Sophie muttered.

“Hey, you’re a vet tech and not a detective,” I replied. “Anyway, I have an idea.”

“Oh yeah?”

“We’re too big to get through the window, but what if we were smaller? And what if, as smaller creatures, we actually had better senses?”

“What are you thinking?”

“We’re going to turn into animals.”

“Ooh, do I get to be an eagle again?”

I thought about it for a second, then nodded. “That’s probably a good idea, actually. Eagles have insanely good eyesight, so you might be able to pick up on something that I can’t see.”

“What are you going to change into?”

“I’m thinking a squirrel,” I said, after a minute of consideration. “That way I’ll be able to reach the little corners, and it’ll be easy for me to open the window.”

“Right,” Sophie said. “I’ll stand right where I am now, if you want to do the spell.”

“Ok. I’ll make it last an hour,” I replied, pointing to where I knew my friend stood. “ Reformaroa avem una horoa .”

There was a flash of white light where Sophie had been standing, and a second later a cawing sound indicated to me that the spell had worked. Perfect. For the next hour, Sophie was going to be a bald eagle.

“ Reformaroa sciurus una horoa,” I said, pointing to myself. My body lurched forward involuntarily; it was like my insides were being turned inside and out. It was as though I was on a roller coaster, but the feeling was a hundred times stronger. Then, just as quickly as it had started, the feeling dissipated, and I looked around as I found myself standing in the middle of grass so long it almost reached my nose.

No, the grass hadn’t changed length at all. I was just four inches tall, now.

Alright. Sophie and I had an hour to look inside this place before we turned back into humans; we had to make the most of it.

Scrambling up the side cladding of the house like it was the most natural thing in the world, I reached the window, which I had unlocked earlier using a spell, and pushed it open. A squawk behind me let me know that Sophie was coming through, and I waited for the whoosh of wind from her wings to wash over me before I followed her inside.

While the exterior of Michael Carlton’s home had been relatively plain and unassuming, the interior was definitely that of a man who had money and wasn’t afraid to spend it. This was a much more obvious target for a home invader.

The window opened into the living room, which was dominated by a huge black leather sectional that took up most of the back wall. A sixty-inch flat screen was mounted on the far wall, and built-in surround-sound speakers lined the walls. A Nintendo Switch, a PlayStation, and more Blu-Ray DVDs than I had ever seen in one place filled a cabinet underneath the television.

Against the side wall was a large cabinet filled with alcohol—Johnnie Walker Blue Label, and others. This was not a cheap liquor cabinet.

What stood out to me, however, was that it was all still here . This had been exactly the situation at Gloria’s place. There were things worth stealing—heck, that bottle of scotch alone had to be worth $200—and yet nothing had been taken.

Had the thief panicked when he killed Michael Carlton? But then, these were the same questions we had asked ourselves the last time.

What on earth was the thief after if he wasn’t here to steal anything? Wasn’t that the million-dollar question?

I decided to move on. I wanted to find out more about Michael Carlton, like who he might have been close to, or better yet, who might have wanted him dead.

I darted around the living room, taking a good, close look at everything I could. It was so easy as a squirrel to scamper up the side of furniture, and my newfound keener eyesight meant everything I saw was perfectly in focus. My sense of smell had been improved as well; the metallic smell of blood reached my nostrils, as did the chemicals the crime scene workers had used, and the tangy scent of bleach.

The problem was basically anything that might have helped me figure out who had killed Michael Carlton had disappeared. The police had taken it all; there was no sign that a murder had happened here apart from a little bit of blood on the floor. And I already knew that blood had to belong to Michael.

Instead, I decided to focus on Michael’s life. Making my way over to her desk in the corner, scampering up the couch next to it and jumping onto it, I found a pile of mail and began sorting through it.

It turned out that it was incredibly difficult to sort through mail when you were about the size of a quarter sheet of letter paper. Still, I was going to be a squirrel for a little while longer yet, and I had no other choice.

The most promising piece of mail that I found initially was a bank statement from the previous month. It appeared Michael Carlton received a pension and had no other sources of income. He was definitely living paycheck to paycheck, which was basically the same as Gloria, as far as I could tell.

Weird.

There were a few more bills, most of them paid up but a couple maybe a month behind. Exactly what I would’ve expected from someone who was just scraping by.

There was a bunch of junk mail as well: an ad to preorder the new iPhone from Verizon, a series of coupons for the local McDonald’s, an ad for cheap apartments in George Town, specials on an Alaskan cruise, and that sort of thing. Nothing stood out in that group, obviously. While Michael Carlton had removed two of the McDonald’s coupons, I highly doubted they had anything to do with his death.

Underneath the bills, however, was a Post-it note with a date and time scribbled on it, followed by the name of a business: Two Sweets Bakery. Normally, I wouldn’t have thought anything of it, but the date was only three days before the murder. It was a long shot, but I made a mental note to check it out. After all, we didn’t really know anything about Michael Carlton yet, and maybe the people at the bakery would be able to give us a hint in the right direction.