Саманта Сильвер - The Purr-fect Crime

“Ok. Well why don’t we not make jokes about finding things anymore,” I said. “Why doesn’t Charlotte take everything on the Ocean Mist property to the right of here, Sophie you take everything to the left, and I’ll take the stuff in the middle. Everyone meet on the other side of the property. Charlotte, how far is that away?”

Charlotte checked some notes she had written.

“If we meet three hundred yards away we should be good,” she replied.

“Ugh, great, that’s going to take forever,” Sophie complained.

“Well, we’re not doing your thing until we finish,” I told her.

“Fine,” Sophie huffed, moving over to the left. To her credit, she started actually scouring the ground, looking for anything that might help us. I had to admit, a part of me shared her scepticism. What on earth were we going to find here that we weren’t going to be able to find elsewhere?

Charlotte and I took our cues and started on our sections of the ground.

“Why don’t I get a section to look for clues in?” Bee complained from my shoulder.

“Because that would mean you’d have to get off there.”

“Well in that case never mind. No one told me the ground here would be so wet.”

“You’re the one who wanted to go on an adventure,” I replied, my eyes glued to the ground. All I saw so far was mud, mosquitoes, sticks and grass.

“I didn’t realize adventures meant so much… outdoors,” Bee said, and I rolled my eyes.

“I’m sorry, I’ll try and make sure any future murders and everything they lead to involve more indoor adventures.”

“Thank you,” Bee replied without a trace of irony. Ah, cats. Loving Bee was the only thing that stopped me from wanting to strangle her half the time.

“I will remind you that you were the one who wanted to come here,” I muttered.

“I didn’t realize it was going to be so messy,” Bee replied.

I was about to start rolling my eyes again when I saw something move in the forest nearby. I called out to Charlotte and Sophie, who were both about fifty yards away from me at that point.

“Hey guys, did you see that?” I asked.

“See what?” they asked in unison. I pointed towards the trees, but there was nothing there. Of course, now I was the one who was going to look like a crazy person.

“Are you sure there was something?” Charlotte asked, coming towards me to get a better look.

“I am, I’m sure there was.”

Suddenly, a little bit to the right, Zoe Wright came out of the woods, holding a gun.

What on earth?

“I guess that was it,” I muttered, my eyes not leaving the gun.

“Ah, lovely, you’re all here,” Zoe sang with that same fake enthusiasm that made me want to punch things. It just couldn’t be real.

Bee hissed and jumped off my shoulder, speeding away from Zoe.

“Bee, wait!” I cried out, but I still couldn’t bring myself to look away from the gun. I’d seen Chief Gary, and all the other cops carrying theirs before. But this one seemed so… real. Like, Zoe could actually use it to kill us right now.

I felt Charlotte’s hand reach out and grab mine. I gave hers a squeeze. Charlotte was my little sister, and I was going to do everything I could to protect her. And Sophie as well.

“Look at that, the cat has more sense than the rest of you,” Zoe said. “She’s running away. You should have left well enough alone. Why you’ve been hunting around looking for Nyman’s killer is beyond me.”

“You did it,” I told her. I wanted to keep her talking. The more talking she did, the less she was shooting at us. She laughed, but it wasn’t the measured, warm laugh she maintained for TV crews and groups of supporters. No, this laugh was shrill, harsh.

“Of course I did it. The man was sitting on a gold mine, and he didn’t even know it.”

My brain was swirling. First of all, the fact that she was the murderer! I had never imagined that the head of a business project would murder someone. And for what?

“But why?” I asked her. It was like the pieces of the puzzle were starting to form a picture, but I hadn’t quite managed to slot all the pieces together. I could tell it was all linked, but I didn’t know how.”

“Because some moron at the county office screwed up when he did the surveying. It turned out that Tony Nyman’s land was two hundred yards over, which took up a significant portion of the only land here stable enough to build a large hotel on.”

One of the puzzle pieces clicked.

“So you were the one who broke into the library and stole that map!” I exclaimed. “It was old. It would have shown the old land layout, with the property that was Nyman’s being shown correctly.”

“You heard about that, did you? I was surprised no one was mentioning it at the rally. You Willow Bay people, you freak out at the slightest thing that’s just a little bit out of the ordinary.”

“I didn’t realize breaking and entering was a normal thing for you,” Sophie replied, finding her voice. I silently willed her to stop. This wasn’t exactly helping. Zoe turned to face Sophie, pointing the gun at her chest. I heard the sharp intake of breath from Sophie next to me, and I really, really hoped this wasn’t going to be my best friend’s last moments.

“Wait!” I cried out. “I need to know, why did you break into Nyman’s house?” Zoe turned back and trained the gun on me this time.

“You’ve figured out the rest,” she said. “I would have thought you would have figured this part out, too. I went there to take the will.”

“Well yeah, but why? I mean, Nyman didn’t have anyone to give his property to.”

“Except his son.”

“Nyman had a son?”

“And none of you idiots, and I include the police in that, figured it out. It wasn’t even that hard. I thought for sure the cops were going to get there when they found Nyman’s old links to the mob. Thank you for that, by the way. I needed someone to pin suspicion on, and I didn’t know how to let the cops know about Nyman’s old life without being suspicious. You took care of all that for me.”

I glared at the woman. I couldn’t believe that we’d inadvertently helped her.

“So that was you running away from us when we were in the house,” I heard Sophie mutter next to me.

“Run away? What? No. What are you talking about?”

Despite the fear, Sophie and I looked at each other for a second.

“When we were at Nyman’s house, there was someone else there. That was how we knew it had been broken into by someone who wasn’t us. When they heard us come in they waited for us to go into the kitchen and ran out the front door. Are you saying that wasn’t you?”

Zoe shook her head, looking at us suspiciously.

“No. Is this some kind of trick? I was there before the body was even discovered.”

Wow. So now it turned out that at least three groups of people had gone into Nyman’s house after he died. Sophie and I, Zoe, and someone else.

I didn’t have time to think about that right now, though. I had to think about how to get Sophie and Charlotte out of here, if nothing else.

The gun was still trained on me. If I charged Zoe right now, chances were I’d be shot and killed. But maybe I’d give Sophie and Charlotte a chance to get away. There were no guarantees, though. At least if I went this way, I would die having solved the mystery. I knew who had killed Tony Nyman now. There went my theory that Jason Black was involved.

Suddenly, there came an awful screeching sound from behind Zoe. She turned in surprise, and for an instant let the gun down, just as a giant black cat screaming her head off came running up behind her, goring her claws into Zoe’s face.

“Run!” I yelled as Zoe screamed. None of us needed to be told twice. Sophie, Charlotte and I all ran for the forest as fast as we could. “Get back to the car!” I cried out to the others as we made our way into the woods. “I’m going to stay back for Bee.”