Саманта Сильвер - Barking Up The Wrong Tree

“Oh. Well, it took you long enough.”

“Would you like to explain what happened?”

“Not especially.” Antonia was making a show of looking bored, but I hadn’t missed that her eyes had widened slightly when Chief Gary mentioned the police report. She wasn’t expecting that.

“I have the police’s side of things. Would you like to tell me yours?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Well in that case,” Chief Gary sighed, “I have to ask you for an alibi for the morning Andrea Dottory was murdered. Where were you that day at 11:30am?”

“Picking on an old woman like this. I’m in my seventies! It’s indecent,” she muttered.

“Antonia, I need an alibi, please.”

She stayed silent for so long that I wasn’t sure she was going to answer Chief Gary at all. Finally, she spoke.

“I was at Betty’s,” Antonia said. “Enjoying a cup of tea. Which is what I should be doing now. You can check with Betty. Now, if I’m not under arrest, I’m leaving.”

“Fine. But please, stay in town.”

Antonia laughed a shrill laugh as she left the room and I instinctively looked over at where Sophie was, even though we couldn’t see each other. If Antonia really was at Betty’s, then she had a rock solid alibi for the time of the murder.

We slipped back out through the door, and five minutes later were back in the empty vet clinic.

“Videroa,” I said, focusing on Sophie, and in an instant she reappeared in front of me. She looked at her hands, amazed, as I did the same for myself.

“That was so cool. We need to do that again sometime. Remind me to yell at my mom for not giving me the witch gene.”

I laughed. “Yeah, I haven’t done that sort of thing in a long, long time. It was pretty fun, except for that part where you knocked over all of Chief Gary’s papers.”

“That was your fault, for knocking me into the desk in the first place,” Sophie argued.

“It was partly my fault. I think we need to figure out a better system in the future.”

“Yeah, but that went pretty well for a first attempt, I think.”

“Definitely. Now let’s get back home and show Charlotte this police report!”

Chapter 13

“You did what , exactly?” Charlotte asked when we told her all about our little adventure at the police station.

“Relax, it wasn’t like it was dangerous or anything.”

“You broke into a police station, looked through the police chief’s office, and then spied on an interrogation. There are like, at least six laws you broke today.”

“Yeah, but no one would believe you if you went and tattled anyway,” I replied. “This is why we don’t tell you we’re doing things.”

“Oh, yeah, because it’s so inconvenient to have one person in the group who doesn’t believe in blatantly breaking a ton of laws.”

“Fine,” Sophie said with a grin. “I guess we just won’t tell you what we found out, seeing as you think it was so wrong that we got the info.”

Charlotte’s face fell. “Well, now that it’s done, I want to know what you got. I just don’t think you should have done it in the first place,” she added, crossing her arms.

Sophie passed her the phone. We’d looked at the photo of the police report from 1989 while we were still at the vet clinic. And it was juicy .

“Wow,” Charlotte said breathlessly as she read through it. “Is this real?”

“Yeah,” I replied. “I mean, as far as we know. It was on Chief Gary’s desk.” Charlotte shot me a dirty look, obviously still not agreeing with what we did, then went back to the report.

“So if I’m reading this right, it looks like back in ’89 they were all in Vegas, along with Antonia’s husband, and a fight broke out and Antonia was arrested for breaking Andrea’s husband’s nose?”

“That’s definitely what it says,” Sophie replied. “Can you believe it?”

“And it looks like what happened in Vegas stayed in Vegas,” I replied. “I’d never, ever heard about that at all. And I mean, this is Willow Bay! It must have been about something important if everyone kept it a secret for so long.”

“We should ask my mom,” Sophie said. “She was around then, if anything was mentioned she might remember it.”

“Your mom will want to know how we got the information though,” Charlotte argued. “And obviously we can’t tell her. That information just cannot leave this room at all.”

“We just have to tell her we heard something happened between them in the late 80s and ask if she knows anything about it. We’re the only people other than Chief Gary who know about that police report, so she won’t know why we care.”

“Ok. Definitely. But you said she has an alibi?”

“Apparently when Andrea Dottory was killed Antonia was at Betty’s,” Sophie told her.

“She must have left, found the crime scene and then come back,” I mused. “She wasn’t there when I got there, but she came in a little bit after to tell everyone about the body.”

“Well if she was there, then there was no way she could have killed Andrea,” Charlotte said. “So we have to find out from Betty if her alibi is real. And while you guys were out breaking the law, I did some cyber stalking and got some info about Andrew Powers.”

“Oh yeah?” I asked with interest.

“He lives in Portland, so he could have easily come back to Willow Bay to take out Andrea Dottory. Plus, I called his work and found out that he wasn’t actually at work that day, he had decided to take a personal day.”

Charlotte looked at us proudly, and I had to admit, I was impressed.

“How did you manage that, Char?” I asked.

“I called up the office where he’s working and asked the receptionist if she could remind me what time my appointment with him was, for my records. When I told her the date, she told me it couldn’t have been that day as he’d taken a personal day, and I apologized and told her I must have gotten myself confused and that I’d call back.”

“Wow,” Sophie said, looking at Charlotte appraisingly. “I didn’t think you actually had the ability to lie in you.”

Charlotte blushed. The funny thing was, even though she absolutely hated lying, Charlotte was actually very, very good at it.

“So how do we figure out how to tell if Andrew Powers was in Willow Bay a few days ago?” I asked. The silence I received in response made it obvious neither one of the other two had any idea yet either.

Suddenly, Sprinkles walked into the room, looking warily at Bee, but luckily my cat had fallen asleep on top of her scratcher, where the sunshine poured in. He settled down next to Sophie and let her pat him.

“Are you talking about Andrea?” Sprinkles asked.

I nodded. “Yes.”

“Have you found out who hurt her yet?” he asked, his big eyes looking sadly at me.

I had to shake my head. “No. No, I don’t know. The police think it was Antonia deLucca.

Sprinkles let out a low growl, the first time I’d ever heard him do that. He was normally so polite.

“Antonia is not a good person,” Sprinkles told us. Suddenly it hit me. Sprinkles was too young to have been alive back when Andrea and Antonia were friends, but maybe he knew what had happened between them!

“Why not, Sprinkles?” I asked. “Why isn’t Antonia a good person?”

“Antonia made Andrea’s daughter go away.”

I looked up at the other two in shock.

“You can look at us like that, but we don’t know what he just said,” Sophie said.

“Oops,” I replied sheepishly, then quickly caught them up on the conversation.

“Hey Sprinkles,” Sophie asked him kindly. “Where did Antonia make Andrea’s daughter go away to?”