Busy as a Beaver

Chapter 9

First thing the next morning, Sophie and I piled into my car and drove to Portland—I decided I was driving, since Sophie being behind the wheel always increased our risk of dying in a fiery crash hundreds of percentage points.

When I texted Jason if he wanted to come, he replied that he had a bunch of work to do on his article and was going to pass this time, but asked me if I’d send him along any pertinent information before his deadline later that afternoon.

“Please, tell him to do his own legwork,” Sophie said with a smile as she read out the text while I drove.

“Well, seeing as we didn’t even know Michael Carlton’s name before he gave it to us, I think we can give him a pass this time around,” I laughed.

“I was thinking last night about this trip. I think we need to investigate Michael Carlton’s murder separately from Gloria’s home invasion.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah,” Sophie said. “After all, think about it. We’re having so much trouble finding a link between the two of them, but really, right now, who cares? Let’s look for the person who did it, and from there we can find a motive. I think we need to really see the forest through the trees, and right now, we’re definitely focused on the trees.”

“Ok,” I said slowly, mulling over Sophie’s words. I had to admit, they did make sense in a way.

“I mean, we’re accepting that the person who killed Michael is probably the same person who broke into Gloria’s place. I don’t think that’s stretching it, especially since the cops obviously think the same way, otherwise we wouldn’t have seen Chief Gary at their crime scene yesterday.”

“I’m with you.”

“And we were both at Gloria’s place the other night. There’s, like, literally zero evidence there. If there was anything worth looking at, the cops would have taken it away already.”

“Yeah,” I agreed.

“So let’s look into Michael’s death, and only Michael’s, and once we find out who killed him, since hopefully there might be a bit more evidence there, we can link that person to Gloria’s house.”

“Alright, I’m in,” I said. “What do you think we should do first?”

“You’re going to love me,” Sophie replied with a grin. “I think we should check out the crime scene.”

“Oh, good, it’s not even nine in the morning and we’re already committing a felony.”

“Hey, at the speed you drive, by the time we get to Portland it’s going to be at least eleven.”

“It will be ten o’clock, tops, and we’re not going to be stopped by the cops for speeding or die in a ditch at the side of the road because we lost control of the car,” I replied. Charlotte’s and my parents had died in a car crash when we were quite young, and while the crash hadn’t been their fault, I had always been a rather defensive driver.

But then, compared to Sophie, Lewis Hamilton was a defensive driver.

Sure enough, at five minutes to ten, we found ourselves a few blocks away from Michael Carlton’s home—and in one piece, I might add.

“Alright,” I said. “Invisibility spell?”

Sophie nodded. “Absolutely.”

I cast the spell on her first, and then on me. The car looked completely empty now.

“Make sure there’s no one coming before you get out,” I told Sophie. “I don’t want my car impounded for being haunted.”

Sophie laughed, the sound coming from the passenger seat despite me not being able to see her body. Even though we had used this particular spell quite a few times in recent memory, it was still kind of strange to hear her without seeing her, despite knowing she was less than a foot away from me.

I had a look around, and as far as I could tell there was no one nearby—the advantage of being in a residential neighborhood in the middle of a weekday was the lack of snooping neighbors—so I slipped out of the car and closed the door quickly behind me.

“Ready?” Sophie’s voice asked a second later, and I nodded before realizing she couldn’t see me.

“Yup. Let’s go.”

We approached the house quietly, holding hands so as to know where the other person was at all times.

“I don’t see any cops,” Sophie whispered. “You?”

“None,” I replied, my eyes moving from the lawn to the windows. The whole yard was still roped off with yellow police tape and a couple idly curious neighbors were taking a suspiciously long time walking past the place, but as far as I could tell, all the cops were gone.

Sophie and I made our way towards the front door, but as soon as we reached it, I stopped.

“What’s wrong?” Sophie asked.

“The seal on the door,” I replied. “How are we going to get past it without it breaking?”

“Can’t you put it back together?” Sophie asked. “What’s the point of being able to use magic if you can’t break in to a crime scene?”

“I can,” I replied. “The problem is, I can’t use magic to put it back together if I can’t see it. So once we’re inside with the door closed, we’d have to wait until we’re done to put it back.”

“And you’re worried a cop might come by in that time.”

“I mean, it’s a murder investigation, and it happened less than forty-eight hours ago. Yeah, I’m a bit worried.”

“Ok,” Sophie said. “Let’s go around the side and see if we can make our way in through a window or something.”

We walked around the side of the house, but unfortunately, we very quickly realized that the windows weren’t going to work. It wasn’t that we couldn’t unlock them—my magic took care of that really quickly. It was that we simply wouldn’t fit.

“I’m starting to really regret eating all that pizza over the last twenty-some years,” Sophie said despondently as the reality of our situation began to sink in.

“I’m not,” I replied. “If I had to choose between solving crimes and pizza, I’d choose pizza every day of the week.”

“This is why you’re a vet and not a detective,” Sophie muttered.

“Hey, you’re a vet tech and not a detective,” I replied. “Anyway, I have an idea.”

“Oh yeah?”

“We’re too big to get through the window, but what if we were smaller? And what if, as smaller creatures, we actually had better senses?”

“What are you thinking?”

“We’re going to turn into animals.”

“Ooh, do I get to be an eagle again?”

I thought about it for a second, then nodded. “That’s probably a good idea, actually. Eagles have insanely good eyesight, so you might be able to pick up on something that I can’t see.”

“What are you going to change into?”

“I’m thinking a squirrel,” I said, after a minute of consideration. “That way I’ll be able to reach the little corners, and it’ll be easy for me to open the window.”

“Right,” Sophie said. “I’ll stand right where I am now, if you want to do the spell.”

“Ok. I’ll make it last an hour,” I replied, pointing to where I knew my friend stood. “Reformaroa avem una horoa.”

There was a flash of white light where Sophie had been standing, and a second later a cawing sound indicated to me that the spell had worked. Perfect. For the next hour, Sophie was going to be a bald eagle.

“Reformaroa sciurus una horoa,” I said, pointing to myself. My body lurched forward involuntarily; it was like my insides were being turned inside and out. It was as though I was on a roller coaster, but the feeling was a hundred times stronger. Then, just as quickly as it had started, the feeling dissipated, and I looked around as I found myself standing in the middle of grass so long it almost reached my nose.

No, the grass hadn’t changed length at all. I was just four inches tall, now.

Alright. Sophie and I had an hour to look inside this place before we turned back into humans; we had to make the most of it.

Scrambling up the side cladding of the house like it was the most natural thing in the world, I reached the window, which I had unlocked earlier using a spell, and pushed it open. A squawk behind me let me know that Sophie was coming through, and I waited for the whoosh of wind from her wings to wash over me before I followed her inside.

While the exterior of Michael Carlton’s home had been relatively plain and unassuming, the interior was definitely that of a man who had money and wasn’t afraid to spend it. This was a much more obvious target for a home invader.

The window opened into the living room, which was dominated by a huge black leather sectional that took up most of the back wall. A sixty-inch flat screen was mounted on the far wall, and built-in surround-sound speakers lined the walls. A Nintendo Switch, a PlayStation, and more Blu-Ray DVDs than I had ever seen in one place filled a cabinet underneath the television.

Against the side wall was a large cabinet filled with alcohol—Johnnie Walker Blue Label, and others. This was not a cheap liquor cabinet.

What stood out to me, however, was that it was all still here. This had been exactly the situation at Gloria’s place. There were things worth stealing—heck, that bottle of scotch alone had to be worth $200—and yet nothing had been taken.

Had the thief panicked when he killed Michael Carlton? But then, these were the same questions we had asked ourselves the last time.

What on earth was the thief after if he wasn’t here to steal anything? Wasn’t that the million-dollar question?

I decided to move on. I wanted to find out more about Michael Carlton, like who he might have been close to, or better yet, who might have wanted him dead.

I darted around the living room, taking a good, close look at everything I could. It was so easy as a squirrel to scamper up the side of furniture, and my newfound keener eyesight meant everything I saw was perfectly in focus. My sense of smell had been improved as well; the metallic smell of blood reached my nostrils, as did the chemicals the crime scene workers had used, and the tangy scent of bleach.

The problem was basically anything that might have helped me figure out who had killed Michael Carlton had disappeared. The police had taken it all; there was no sign that a murder had happened here apart from a little bit of blood on the floor. And I already knew that blood had to belong to Michael.

Instead, I decided to focus on Michael’s life. Making my way over to her desk in the corner, scampering up the couch next to it and jumping onto it, I found a pile of mail and began sorting through it.

It turned out that it was incredibly difficult to sort through mail when you were about the size of a quarter sheet of letter paper. Still, I was going to be a squirrel for a little while longer yet, and I had no other choice.

The most promising piece of mail that I found initially was a bank statement from the previous month. It appeared Michael Carlton received a pension and had no other sources of income. He was definitely living paycheck to paycheck, which was basically the same as Gloria, as far as I could tell.

Weird.

There were a few more bills, most of them paid up but a couple maybe a month behind. Exactly what I would’ve expected from someone who was just scraping by.

There was a bunch of junk mail as well: an ad to preorder the new iPhone from Verizon, a series of coupons for the local McDonald’s, an ad for cheap apartments in George Town, specials on an Alaskan cruise, and that sort of thing. Nothing stood out in that group, obviously. While Michael Carlton had removed two of the McDonald’s coupons, I highly doubted they had anything to do with his death.

Underneath the bills, however, was a Post-it note with a date and time scribbled on it, followed by the name of a business: Two Sweets Bakery. Normally, I wouldn’t have thought anything of it, but the date was only three days before the murder. It was a long shot, but I made a mental note to check it out. After all, we didn’t really know anything about Michael Carlton yet, and maybe the people at the bakery would be able to give us a hint in the right direction.

After checking out the rest of the documents on the table, I glanced at the time, only to realize it was basically time to go. A squawk from near the window told me that Sophie thought the same thing, and just as I scrambled to get back out into the backyard, I turned back into a human. I found myself falling headfirst towards the ground rather than elegantly scaling the outside wall of Michael Carlton’s house.

“Ow,” I said as I hit the ground and rolled. Luckily, I didn’t hear anything crack, and nothing hurt too badly apart from my shoulder and my dignity.

“Did you find anything?” Sophie asked, evidently having turned back into a human herself.

“Yeah,” I said. “Although I’m not sure it’s worth my shoulder being this sore. I think I might’ve dislocated it.”

“Please. If you had dislocated your shoulder you would be in a lot more pain.”

“Maybe I’m just hiding the pain. I’m invisible, you can’t see how much pain I’m in.”

“Maybe not, but I know you. You stub your toe and you act like you’re dying.”

I stuck my tongue out at Sophie, realizing too late that she still couldn’t see me.

“Fine. Let’s meet at the car so nobody overhears us in the area, and we’ll compare notes about what we saw inside.”