Саманта Сильвер - Busy As A Beaver

“Sure, but I mean, what could the link be?” I asked. “Gloria says she’s never heard of Michael, and there was no reason for her to ever have gone to his work or met him in any way.”

“Maybe we’re thinking of the wrong link,” Sophie said. “What about Gloria’s husband?”

“Francis Romano?”

“Yeah, him. What if he knew Michael Carlton, and Gloria just didn’t know about it?”

“That’s an interesting thought,” Jason said, tapping his pen lightly against the desk.

“What do we know about him?”

I thought back to what Betty had told me a few days earlier at the café.

“Well, I know that he grew up here. In Willow Bay, I mean. He was a teacher, like Gloria, but he taught high school whereas she taught middle school. I believe he retired earlier than Gloria because of a scandal of some sort; apparently, one teacher accused him of yelling at her or something, and he decided that rather than fight for his side he would just take his retirement.”

“That’s quite interesting,” Jason said. “Although, I’m not sure how anything like that would have led to his knowing Michael Carlton. After all, the guy was still an accountant.”

My eyes lit up as I suddenly realized why they would have known each other.

“He was an accountant, yes, but he worked in the same building as all of the human resources people!”

Sophie stopped mixing the cookie dough and gaped at me with her mouth open. “Oh my God, that’s got to be it.”

Jason nodded. “It does make perfect sense. Something like that, I imagine Francis Romano would have found himself visiting the human resources department of the District at least a few times. It’s possible that at some point there the two of them met.”

“True,” I said. “Although that doesn’t necessarily make things add up. I mean, we both know all of each other’s friends. My best friend is standing ten feet away from you now, and I’ve met all of your friends, like Jack, Nate, and Mike.”

“That’s a good point,” Jason said. “Still, maybe things are different when you’ve been married for, like, thirty years. Maybe they stopped caring about each other’s friends because they didn’t think it was as important?”

“Maybe,” Sophie said. “Still, I think Angela is right. There’s something weird about them being friends and Gloria having never even heard the name.”

“At least now we’re one step closer,” I said. “We may have figured out what the connection between the two victims is: Michael Carlton may have known Francis Romano.”

“That’s true,” Jason said. “I think we need to work under the assumption that this is the case. Otherwise, we are still stuck where we were at the beginning of this case.”

We continued to chat for a couple of hours, but the deduction of what may have linked Michael Carlton and Gloria was the only real discovery we made that night. Eventually, Sophie went back home, carrying with her a few cookies on a plate for Taylor, and Jason and I went to bed feeling like even if we were a little bit closer to the truth, we were still light-years away from the ultimate answer.

Chapter 14

I woke up the next day, made my way to the kitchen, blended up a smoothie for breakfast, and checked my phone, looking over the previous night’s videos from the camera I had set up by the beavers’ lodge.

For the most part, I had expected the results to be pretty similar to the last time: the occasional video of a beaver coming out from his or her lodge, looking around, waddling out of sight from the camera, then eventually coming back, sometimes with a freshly chopped down piece of wood, and making their way back into the lodge.

I scrolled through the videos at double speed as I drank a smoothie, half wondering if I had time to make a pot of coffee before work or if I was going to have to stop at Betty’s, when I stopped suddenly.

Something completely different had popped up on the screen. There was motion, which had triggered the cameras to start recording, but it wasn’t beavers. It was a person.

Straightaway, I sat up taller in my chair and forgot about my smoothie, focusing on the video. I restarted it and watched as a human came in from the right-hand side—the opposite way from how I had accessed the area—and made his way towards the beavers’ lodge. It was definitely a man; I focused on the video to see if I could make out any identifying features.

The man was obviously angry: he stomped right over to where the beavers’ dam was set up and, grabbing a large piece of wood off the ground, began hacking at the setup near the lodge. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. After he had finished hacking away at the dam, the man made his way over to the lodge directly and began kicking at it. I held my breath; I knew that the lodge was still protected by my spell, but that didn’t make this any less terrifying. My heart went out to the beavers, who I knew must have been huddled inside their lodge, afraid of what was going to happen.

Luckily, my spell did hold up. The man kicked and kicked at the lodge, but no matter what, it didn’t budge. I could see his frustration growing, and eventually he simply grabbed the stick he had used to destroy the dam and threw it at the lodge as hard as he could before turning around and storming back off in the direction from which he had come.

As he turned, the man faced the camera I had set up absolutely perfectly, and I paused the app on that one frame, taking a quick screenshot for the future before zooming in with my fingers to get a closer look.

The man wore dark pants—they were probably jeans, but I couldn’t quite make them out in the dim light—and a light-colored jacket. Maybe it was a windbreaker? It was that sort of size, anyway. His hair was dark, and he had at least five days’ worth of stubble on his face. I squinted, but I wasn’t sure I recognized him. I made a mental note to ask Sophie when I saw her at the clinic. Maybe she knew who the man was?

Bee hopped into the car with me and the two of us drove down to the vet clinic. Looking at my watch as I dropped Bee off, I figured I had just enough time to go see the beavers this morning and make sure they were alright after the repeated attack from the night before.

Explaining the situation to Sophie, I darted off towards the park, which was only a couple of minutes’ walk away from downtown, and reached the beavers’ lodge shortly afterwards. They were all out of their lodge, in the woods nearby, rebuilding. I narrowly avoided being hit by a falling tree as Lolo called out an apology.

“I didn’t see you there, human!”

“It’s alright,” I said. “I came by to see if you’re all ok.”

The other beavers stopped what they were doing and made their way towards me. “Did the magic box work?” Naba asked. I nodded.

“It did, yes. I have a picture of the man who came here last night and attacked.”

“It was terrifying,” the youngest-looking beaver said. “I thought the lodge was going to come down.”

“Well, not to worry, it didn’t,” Naba told him reassuringly. “The human put a spell on it so that he couldn’t hurt us, and it worked.”

I nodded. “Yes, it did. I saw that, and I’m glad you’re all alright.”

“What are you going to do about this man?” the main beaver asked.

“I’m going to find out who he is, first. Did you hear anything he said?”

“He was complaining about our dam flooding his yard,” Lolo said. “He was hitting the dam and yelling about how us ‘stupid beavers’ were flooding the place.”

“Ok.” I nodded. That gave me a lot more to go on. “Thanks for letting me know. I’ll go find him later this afternoon, hopefully, and I’ll see if we can’t solve this peacefully. In the meantime, I recommend you follow the same safety procedures as you have been: if you see anyone, go back into your lodge. They can’t hurt you in there.”