Саманта Сильвер - Barking Up The Wrong Tree

Two hours later we’d eaten dinner while watching a couple old episodes of 30 Rock, my favourite comedy when I was a teenager. It was still definitely funny! When we were finished I took our plates to the kitchen and gave Bee some attention. She was finally coming around to Sprinkles living in her house; she’d taken to simply ignoring him rather than being openly hostile, which I thought was an improvement.

“I’ll be in my room,” I announced. “Hopefully in a little bit I’ll be able to tell you exactly what Andrew Powers was doing on his day off.”

I sat down at my laptop, thinking that Nancy Drew would have had to get into a lot fewer dangerous situations if the internet had been invented when she was around.

I refreshed the screen and my heart leapt into my throat when I saw the little red ‘1’ symbol next to the friends icon. I held my breath as I pressed it, and sure enough: “Andrew Powers has accepted your friend request.”

I fistpumped the air in celebration. I was in!

Of course, I still had no idea whether or not his profile had anything useful on it, but this was a step forward! My secret detective work was actually working.

I clicked over to Andrew Powers’ profile. He was the type that shared videos of environmental causes, political memes and, luckily for me, pictures of what he was doing basically every single day.

I scrolled past a whole bunch of stuff – stopping to watch a video on how to make the most amazing frozen fruit pops for summer for a minute – until I got to the right day. I crossed my fingers as I scrolled down, and there! There it was!

“Andrew Powers added eight photos to the album ‘Family’”

I clicked on the first picture. It was Andrew’s mom, after a hip replacement according to the caption. I recognized the rooms; she was at the main hospital in Portland. His mom was smiling and doing a thumbs up for the camera while holding flowers. This must have been what Andrew had taken the personal day for. He went to visit his mom after her surgery.

Still, I thought to myself, these could have been taken in the afternoon. He could have come to Willow Bay, killed Andrea Dottory, then gone to visit his mom in the hospital. That would be ice cold if he did that.

I scrolled through the photos, hoping one of them would give me a clue. Then, bingo! The last photo was taken from the side, and showed the clock on the wall. 11:03. Seeing as the sun was shining through the room from the window, it was obviously taken at 11 in the morning, and there was no way to get from Portland to Willow Bay in under half an hour, short of teleporting. And Andrew Powers had lived in Willow Bay for so long that if he was a wizard Lisa would have both known about it, and told us about it.

I continued to stare at the picture. That right there, that was the picture that meant Andrew Powers couldn’t have killed Andrea Dottory.

Sophie was going to be thrilled; Kelly Dottory was now our number one suspect.

Chapter 17

When Sophie came bursting through the door a little while later, Sprinkles in tow, she couldn’t have sounded more excited.

“You guys!” she announced when she came back in. “You won’t believe this!”

“Me first,” I ordered. “I want to say my thing, it’s important.”

“Not nearly as important as mine… I can prove that Kelly Dottory was not only in Willow Bay the morning Andrea was murdered, but,” she said, pausing for a minute for emphasis, “ I have proof she was in Andrea’s neighbourhood at the time of the murder .”

“Ok, yeah, that’s bigger than my thing,” I replied, my mouth dropping open. “How on earth did you manage to find that out?”

Sophie sauntered into the kitchen and grabbed a fresh strawberry from the pile sitting on the counter, taking off the end and popping it into her mouth.

“Because I’m awesome, that’s how.”

“As true as that is, I think Angela was asking for a more practical explanation,” Charlotte said.

“Fine.” I was walking Sprinkles back towards his old neighbourhood, though we didn’t actually go to his place. Anyway, I ran into Elise Reeve, you know, the girl with those two little Yorkies?”

I nodded. Elise Reeve was in her late 60s, retired from her job at the post office that she’d held for years and years. She spent her days now doing yoga and taking care of her Yorkshire Terriers, sometimes combining both. Apparently ‘doga’ is a thing, now. She lived on Oak Street, the street where Andrea’s body had been found, but around two hundred yards further down the street from where the body was found.

“So,” Sophie continued, “I started talking to her while the dogs were saying hi, you know. And I mentioned casually that I didn’t trust Kelly Dottory, and Elise told me that she actually saw her when she was taking her dogs for a walk that morning. She was walking up the street towards Andrea’s house!”

“Did she tell you what time it was?”

“Yeah, that’s the thing. She said she walks her dogs like clockwork; it was eleven o’clock. Right on the dot.”

“Half an hour before the murder,” I said quietly, almost to myself.

“So you see?” Sophie said triumphantly. “It was that slimy little thing. She thinks she’s so perfect, strutting around in her expensive clothes, pretending like Seattle is the biggest city and she’s so much better than us. But she was here the morning of the murder, and she was going to her aunt’s house half an hour before she was murdered.”

“Well, I have to say,” Charlotte said, “I’m pretty convinced. I try not to be too prejudiced over the fact that she attacked Angela at the funeral, but even being as impartial as I can, I can absolutely see Kelly Dottory being responsible for the murder, and the evidence is definitely pointing that way.”

Charlotte looked at me, waiting for my thoughts.

“I have to agree,” I said, slowly. “Everything points towards her. She has the best motive out of everyone we have left, too, now that Andrew Powers is definitely innocent.”

“Wait, what?” Sophie asked. I quickly caught her up on the events of the evening.

“So that settles it. It has to be Kelly!” Sophie announced, and I couldn’t help but notice a bit of glee in her voice. Not that I could blame her; in fact it was taking everything in my being not to be secretly pleased that all the evidence was pointing that way as well.

“Maybe that’s why Sprinkles is so nervous and scared when he’s around her, too,” I added.

“Yes!” Sophie interrupted. “We always assumed that he looked sad and submissive because of how annoying and loud she was being, what if it was because he was scared of her? Because he knew that she was the one who hurt Andrea.” Sophie had lowered her voice for that last part, and she looked around, but it seemed as if Sprinkles had gone to lie down somewhere by himself.

“Now what do we do?” Charlotte asked. “We can’t exactly go up to her tomorrow and be like ‘hey we know you killed your aunt’. All that’ll do is make her leave town as quickly as possible.”

“I vote we go and tell Chief Gary tomorrow what Sophie found out. That way, it’ll also just seem like we just had a little bit of a chat with a neighbour, as opposed to actively trying to find out who killed Andrea, and we’ll look like good citizens,” I said. After all, if we had just possibly solved a murder case, at the very least we should get a couple kudos from the authorities for it. “But I was thinking,” I continued, “if Elise saw Kelly, maybe someone else did too. Maybe they’re afraid to talk about it, because they don’t want to be the next ones hit over the head. I mean, sure, it’s an isolated part of town, but it’s not completely deserted. There’s four other houses on that street. Maybe someone else saw something.”