Саманта Сильвер: A Grizzly Discovery

I saw Sophie glance at me when I mentioned my intuition, and a minute later she made her way toward Taylor, her boyfriend.

“I know, Angela. You always were a smart cookie,” Chief Gary told me. “I wouldn’t hold my breath though. The more information we gather, the more it looks like this really was a bear attack. I’ll have to wait for the medical examiner’s determination before we declare it for sure, though.”

“So basically what you’re telling me is that it’s almost certainly going to be labeled as being an attack from a bear,” I said dejectedly. I wasn’t stupid; I could read through the lines of what Chief Gary was telling me.

“Well, nothing’s been made official yet, but with what you’ve told me, that the marks on the body are consistent with a bear attack, I suspect that is what the final ruling from the medical examiner is going to be.”

“Great. Now everyone in Willow Bay is going to be calling for a bear cull,” I muttered, mostly to myself. I knew people tolerated bears, so long as they didn’t attack people. If someone was found dead, and the bears were found to be at fault, I knew there was going to be panic. This wasn’t good.

A couple of minutes later Sophie came back to stand next to me. Chief Gary thanked us for coming by, and made us promise not to tell anyone about what we’d seen. We promised—and I knew my journalist boyfriend Jason was totally going to make me break that promise later—and made our way back along the path. We didn’t speak until we got back into Sophie’s car.

“What did you go ask Taylor?” I asked when we were finally sitting there.

“Oh, you noticed that, did you? I was trying to be subtle.”

“We were practically born in the same hospital room; you can’t hide from me.”

Sophie laughed. “Fair enough. I actually just managed to sweet talk some information out of Taylor. If your witches’ intuition is telling you there’s something off about that scene, there’s something off.”

“Yeah,” I replied. “The more I think about it, the more I think that man was murdered.”

“And in that case, we’re the only people who are going to be willing to solve it.”

“Exactly.”

“So that’s why my information from Taylor is going to come in handy. The man was from England; he had a driver’s license on him with a London address and a UK passport. His name was Jeremy Wallace.”

“Well, that certainly explains why neither one of us recognized him. England isn’t exactly right next to Oregon. What was he doing here?”

Sophie shrugged. “Taylor had no idea. The only thing they have so far is his name.”

“Who on earth would want to kill a man so far from home? Unless it was totally random. Or someone followed him from England.”

“The list of people who want him dead and are in this country is probably pretty small,” Sophie agreed. “On the bright side, just think of it this way: it’s probably not going to be that hard to solve this murder case.”

Little did we know at the time just how wrong Sophie was.

3

“I know what you’re going to say before you say it, and the answer is absolutely not.”

My sister Charlotte had her arms crossed when we walked into the door after work that day, Bee trotting in behind us.

“That one’s never any fun,” Bee said haughtily, jumping up onto the back of the couch to avoid being near Sprinkles, Sophie’s dog, who came running toward us at top speed, his tail wagging a mile a minute.

“I agree with you, Bee, Charlotte isn’t any fun,” I said to my sister, sticking my tongue out at her.

“I might not be any fun, but I don’t get myself almost killed on a regular basis.”

“What are you opposed to us doing now?” Sophie asked.

“You’re going to look into that bear attack,” Charlotte replied.

“How do you know there was a bear attack? You’ve been in Portland all day.” Charlotte was just starting her third year of medical school in Portland. She was hands down the smartest person I knew, as much as it pained me to admit it sometimes.

“News travels fast. I also heard that they weren’t sure it was a bear attack, and that a vet was called in to have a look at the remains.”

“So, I just went and did my civic duty,” I said.

“And I guarantee you think the guy was murdered and want to investigate.”

“If it was a bear attack, then what’s the problem? There’s no murder, so we can’t get into any trouble,” I tried. Charlotte threw up her hands.

“You’re impossible, you know that?”

“What? My logic is impeccable,” I replied. “If it really is a bear attack, like the cops think, then there aren’t any problems, because there’s no murderer around to try and stop us from investigating.”

“I agree with Angie,” Sophie grinned. “What’s the harm in finding out if anyone wanted that guy dead?”

“I can’t believe you two. What happens if he was actually murdered? Then the two of you are the only people trying to figure it out. That’s a great way to find yourselves in the murderer’s crosshairs.”

“Well we don’t know that there even is a murderer.”

“I knew it,” Charlotte said. “I knew you weren’t going to be able to leave well enough alone. Hell, I should have let the two of you go to San Francisco and find that stupid diamond that got stolen. At least the robbers didn’t kill anyone over it.”

Two days earlier, one of the most valuable diamonds in the world was stolen from its owner in San Francisco. The Helena Diamond, named for the woman over whom the Trojan war was fought, was discovered in South Africa over a hundred years ago. Its current owner, the daughter of a rich businessman from South Africa, was in San Francisco where the diamond, valued at over fifty million dollars, was taken from her hotel room. So far, no arrests had been made, but it made a bigger splash in the news than Kim Kardashian having her first baby.

“Please,” Sophie scoffed. “After you’ve solved a few murders, robbery is child’s play.”

“Excuse me,” I interrupted. “I’ll remind you that I was the one who happened to solve most of those murders.” Ok, I was being just a little bit petty.

“Yeah, but you never would have solved them without our help,” Sophie retorted.

“I guess that’s fair,” I had to admit.

“Ok, we’re definitely getting off topic here,” Charlotte interrupted. “We agree then; we’re not going to investigate this at all?”

“No!” Sophie and I replied in unison.

“We absolutely don’t agree,” I said.

“Besides, I already found out his name from Taylor. At the very least we can look him up online and see what he was doing in Willow Bay.”

Charlotte threw up her arms. “The two of you are impossible. I’m not coming to your funerals when you get yourselves killed one day.”

“Good, we want our funerals to be fun ,” Sophie said, sticking her tongue out at Charlotte while grabbing my iPad off the table. Charlotte rolled her eyes as she grabbed some vegetables out of the fridge to make an omelette for dinner while Sophie opened my Facebook account and typed Jeremy Wallace into the search bar.

Unfortunately, with it being a relatively common name, it took us quite a while to figure out which one of the hundreds of Jeremy Wallaces with Facebook accounts we were looking for.

“How about that one?” Sophie asked.

“That guy lives in Michigan.”

“Oh. Well narrow it down then. You can search by city.”

“Fine. How are we going to recognize him, anyway?”

“We saw him today.”

“I really hope for his sake that he didn’t always look like he did today with his head bashed in and blood all over him.”