Саманта Сильвер: Busy As A Beaver

Inwardly cursing myself for forgetting to bring a pair of gloves, I covered my hand with the sleeve of my jacket and gingerly turned the knob. It was open.

Stepping carefully inside, into the kitchen, I ignored the ominous creak of the door as I closed it behind me. Suddenly, a shadow came out of nowhere, holding something above its head.

I was being attacked.

Chapter 4

I darted out of the way as the shadow’s arms rose and came down to hit me. I was petrified but knew I only had a second or so to react. Instead of running away from the shadow, I ran straight towards whoever it was, grabbing them around the torso and taking us both to the ground.

The shadow yelped, and I stopped.

“Sophie?”

“Angela?”

“What on earth are you doing here?”

“I could ask you the same thing!”

I found my phone, which was now lying face-down on the floor, the light still on. I shone it on my best friend, who had just tried to attack me in the dark.

“I thought you were the intruder, come back to finish the job or something,” Sophie said as she got up with a groan.

“Well, I didn’t even have time to consider who you might have been. I saw your shadow about to attack me and I just reacted,” I said as I shone the light around. “What were you going to hit me with, anyway?”

“A cookie jar I found on the counter,” Sophie admitted sheepishly. The jar lay on the floor now; thankfully, it was one of those super thick old ones, and so it hadn’t broken despite being dropped when I tackled Sophie.

“Ok, let’s put it back,” I said. “I don’t want anyone to know we were here.”

To my dismay, I realized Sophie had remembered to bring gloves, even though I hadn’t, as she grabbed the large container and put it back on the counter.

“What are you doing here, anyway?” Sophie asked.

“I couldn’t sleep. Something isn’t right about this, and I wanted to kind of get a better idea of what, you know?”

“All too well,” Sophie agreed. “Same here. Taylor’s working the night shift tonight, so I’m on my own anyway, and I figured if I got caught it’d probably be pretty easy to sweet-talk my way out of going to jail.”

“So have you had a look around?”

“Not really. I only got here a few minutes ago. It looks like there was a bit of a struggle in the main room, and I made my way back to the kitchen.”

I shone my phone around the room, not wanting to turn on the lights for fear of arousing the neighbor’s suspicions and having the cops called on us. The kitchen wasn’t particularly messy; there were a few dishes in the sink, sure, but nothing that would have indicated that this place had been ransacked.

“I’m going to check out the living room,” I said, making my way to the front door.

“Sure. I’ll be upstairs,” Sophie replied. “Holler if you see anything.”

Gloria’s front door opened directly onto her living room. The bags of groceries she’d dropped upon entering still lay across the floor, a single orange having rolled across the room and settled against the TV stand against the far wall. A large cabinet near the front door on which sat a few cute porcelain figures had a little bit of blood on it, and I shook with rage as I thought of how much pain Buster had been in when he had come to the clinic.

Still, I had to put that out of my mind. What did I see? There were the groceries on the floor, sure. And there was a light smattering of black dust on almost every surface, but that was from the cops looking for fingerprints, surely. There were a few specks on the floor from what I assumed was blood, probably from the gash on Gloria’s face.

But to be honest, the rest of the room didn’t really look like someone was after valuables. In fact, there was still a large empty Michael Kors tote bag next to the couch. It might not have been a Balenciaga, but it could still definitely fetch a thief a hundred bucks or so on Craigslist. Maybe because the thief was male he hadn’t known the bag’s value? It had to have cost three hundred dollars new and was still in great condition.

A spot on the far wall attracted my attention, and as I made my way towards it, I realized this had been where the bullet fired from the intruder’s gun had hit. The hole it made was small, even after the bullet had been dug out from the wall by the police.

“Hey, Angela. Up here,” Sophie called out. I made my way up the stairs, following the sound of her voice. Something was off about this whole scene.

Sophie was in the master bedroom, where nothing looked like it had been touched.

“What is it?” I asked.

“It’s nothing.”

“Yeah, I can see that.”

“No, you don’t get it. I think that’s what we’re missing. It’s nothing. There’s nothing missing. There’s a watch on the dresser—sure, it’s not a Rolex or anything, but it’s still a watch, and there’s about twenty bucks’ worth of coins in a mason jar on the nightstand.”

“So the thief didn’t actually take anything,” I said. “He hadn’t even collected anything when Gloria got home.”

“I think that’s important.”

“Maybe he broke in right as she was coming back?”

Sophie shook her head. “Maybe, but it doesn’t really make sense. If you’re going to break and enter somewhere, you’re going to make sure that the person who lives there is at work. If they’re retired, then they’re almost certainly going to be home all day. And this is Willow Bay, everyone knows who lives in what house; if the person who did this was local, they knew this was Gloria’s place.”

“And it seems unlikely that someone would come here, specifically, to rob a place. There are plenty of way nicer houses up in Portland where someone could blend in more easily, what with it being a big city and all.”

“Exactly. So presumably our thief is someone from here. Which means they knew Gloria would have been here during the day, so they probably staked out somewhere and waited to see her leave before coming in.”

“Which means they would have had lots of time to rob the place before she came back,” I finished.

“So how come there’s been absolutely nothing taken?”

“And how come the thief hung around long enough for Gloria to return?”

“Exactly.”

Sophie and I looked at each other, the features of her face super pronounced in the thin light from the phone camera. Sophie was right: there was something weird going on.

“But we do know the thief was after money,” I said. “After all, he asked Gloria where it was and only attacked her when she wouldn’t tell him.”

“Yeah. And yet he left the money that was here. Something strange is going on with this case.”

“I don’t think we’re going to find any answers here,” I said, shaking my head. “Only more questions.”

“Yeah,” Sophie replied. “I agree. I mean, I was kind of tempted to say it was just some teenager with an IQ of a potato who thought he was being clever and got surprised, but idiot teenagers who break into homes don’t manage to get through back doors so cleanly.”

“Agreed,” I said with a nod. “Plus, there aren’t any real signs of him anywhere else in here.”

“True. Though the cops might have taken anything that he had left here.”

“You had better not be thinking what I think you’re thinking?”

“That I should sweet-talk Taylor into telling me anything he knows about this case?” Sophie asked with a wink, and I let out a sigh of relief.

“Good. I absolutely didn’t want to use my magic to break into the police station and check Chief Gary’s files. Again.”

Sophie grinned. “Plenty of time for that later in this investigation.”

Chapter 5