Terrier Transgressions

Chapter Seventeen

All eyes watched me as I waited for Breanne’s answer to come through the line. Even my heart seemed to beat more quietly for fear of missing a single word.

“I don’t understand why this is important,” the realtor grumbled, disappointing us all.

Charles grabbed the phone from my hands and practically shouted into the speaker. “Breanne, it’s Charles. We think the other realtor is the key to clearing your brother. Can you tell us who it is?”

I followed after Charles as he paced a small path, making sure I remained close enough to hear both sides of the conversation.

Surprisingly, Breanne seemed just as irritated with Charles as she had been with me. “Really?” she shot back sarcastically. “Because a couple seconds ago your assistant accused me of killing the Hayeses.”

Charles shot daggers in my direction but kept his voice even for Breanne’s benefit. “I promise that’s not what she was doing. She just… has a hard time expressing herself clearly sometimes.”

“I want her off my case,” Breanne reminded him with a heavy sigh. “And you should really consider getting yourself a new assistant, anyway.”

Charles’s voice became small. “Could you please just—”

“Oh for Pete’s sake!” Nan shouted, yanking the phone away from Charles and delivering it to Mitch, who stared down at it in confusion.

“Go ahead, honey,” Nan coaxed. “Tell her who you are what you want.”

“Hi, this is Michelle Hayes,” the girl sputtered into the phone.

Everyone grew silent again as we watched to find out what would happen next.

“Would you please tell me the name of the realtor helping my parents buy their new house?” Mitch asked, her voice shaky. I couldn’t tell whether the fresh tears in her voice were authentic or for added dramatic effect, but I hoped they would work on the coarse woman on the other end of the line.

Of course, the phone had gotten too far away for me to clearly hear Breanne’s response, but Mitch nodded along as the realtor said whatever she needed to say.

“Please,” the girl said next, her voice cracking on that solitary word. “I just want to find out who killed my parents and make sure they’re punished for it. Can you help?”

She listened some more, nodded a bunch, then turned to the rest of us and flashed a thumbs up sign before saying, “Great. Thank you so much for your help… Yes, we’ll definitely do that… Bye.”

“Well?” Nan practically shouted, ready to explode with excitement.

Mitch looked quite pleased with herself as she handed my phone back to me. “She says she doesn’t know off hand, but the info will be in the realtor database. She’s looking it up now and will text the info to Charles. She said, um, that she prefers not to deal with the assistant anymore.”

Of course. I was beginning to think Breanne’s problem with me was much bigger than just me drawing on some walls, but honestly, it didn’t really matter. Not when we still had a double murder to solve.

Charles shot me a sympathetic look as he reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone. At that same moment, a new text notification flashed across the screen. “Sandra Lynn of Lighthouse Realty & Brokerage. Anyone recognize that name?” he asked, glancing toward each of us in turn.

We all shook our heads and waited as Charles returned his attention to the phone.

“Hold on,” he said, squinting down at the phone. The clouds had just cleared, sending a direct beam of brightness down onto the campus. It was almost as if God Himself wanted to spotlight the importance of this moment.

“Breanne just sent a link,” Charles explained as his fingers swept across the phone.

I slid close to him and stared at his slowly loading web browser. When the site finally did load, I recognized the woman splashed across its front page almost immediately. There she stood in front of a spiraled black and white lighthouse with her wavy red hair blowing softly in the breeze as she smiled and held up a giant, hulking SOLD sign.

“Is that the woman we ran into at the Little Dog Diner?” Charles asked. “The one who wanted our table?”

I blinked hard and looked again. Yes, that was her, too. The diner wasn’t the place I first remembered seeing her, though. “She was at the Printing Company when Nan and I went to investigate. She said she was hoping to pick up an order before they closed for the evening. She was the reason I couldn’t do any snooping around the storefront.”

Understanding lit in Charles’s eyes. “So that means she would have known at least Bill already, if not Ruth, too,” he surmised.

I’d only ever rented, but something about that didn’t make sense to me. “But if they were close enough to have her buy their new house, why wouldn’t they have hired her to sell their existing one, too?”

Charles shrugged. “People don’t always use the same realtor for both transactions, but I do find it weird she wasn’t brought into the investigation before.”

“It says here she’s based out of Misty Harbor, which would explain why we saw her at the diner,” I pointed out. “That’s in Misty Harbor, too.”

Charles worried his lip, then asked, “Should we call her?”

“And let her know we’re coming? Heck no!” Nan broke in, then once again stole the phone from Charles. “Give me that,” she said with a huff, then marched right up to Yo-Yo and held the device in front of his face.

The dog immediately growled and snapped at the air.

Nan had to jump back to avoid getting bitten.

Octo-Cat trotted over to my side. “He says—”

“Yeah, I don’t think we need that one translated,” I said with a giant smile. We’d done it. We’d really done it. And just in time, too.

“Let’s go get our perp,” Nan said, already marching back toward the parking lot. She paused a moment to call over her shoulder, “You coming, Mitch?”

The girl hopped off the half wall. “Let’s do this!”

And just like that, we were all running back to the car—Charles, me, Nan, Mitch, Octo-Cat, and Yo-Yo—which we reached in record time for such a motley crew.

“It all lines up,” I said between heavy breaths while my fingers fumbled with the seatbelt’s clasp. “Sandra looks enough like Breanne that it confused Yo-Yo. They’re also both realtors who were working with the Hayeses, which would have only added to his confusion.”

“Plus, all humans look the same,” Octo-Cat pointed out.

“And that,” I said with a freeing laugh. Oh my gosh, we had done it. “Now we just had to prove it in a way that would hold up in court, and Brock will be a free man.”

“You leave that to me,” Nan said, cracking her knuckles on each hand as if readying for war.

“No way!” Charles answered for me. “You’ve already done more than enough.”

“Hold on,” I said calmly, doing my best to be the voice of reason. “We have a long drive ahead of us. Maybe we can reconsider all the facts we already know about the case in light of this new information and try to figure out what possible motive Sandra Lynn could have had for…” I stopped, remembering Mitch with was us now. “Well, you know.”

“Sure,” Charles answered, sending a sly grin in my direction. “Just so long as everyone stays awake this time.”

“Hardy har har,” I shot back. “This isn’t a time for making jokes. It’s a time for finding answers.”

“Let’s get you caught up, Mitch,” Nan mumbled from the backseat, then placed a hand on the side of Charles’s seat and mine. “Where’s that briefcase of yours?”

“I have it here,” I said, reaching down to grab it from my footwell. “Give me a minute to do some… um, tidying up, and then it’s all yours.” I grabbed each of the photos and the written reports describing the crime scene and stashed them in the glove box, then handed Charles’s bag back to Nan.

Nan began to explain what we already knew to her rapt audience of one.

“So are we done now?” Octo-Cat asked from the cushion on my lap. “Case closed?”

“We’re almost there,” I assured him with a gentle pat on his head.

“How do we go from almost to all the way?” he asked with a growl. I tried not to take it personally since I knew how much he hated car rides, and I hadn’t thought to bring him any Benadryl for our return trip home.

“I need to go home and sleep for the next six or seven days at least,” he informed me with a weary sigh.

“Based on what Yo-Yo’s told us, we have a very strong case against Sandra Lynn,” I explained. “The only problem is that won’t be enough for the other humans.”

“Because he’s a dog?” Octo-Cat asked.

I rolled my eyes. “I think you know why. Don’t be such a smart aleck.”

“So what now?” he insisted.

“Now we need to find evidence they’ll accept without questioning our sanity in the process. So we already have the answer. Now we need to work backward to find the clues that support that answer. Make sense?”

“Yeah, but it sure seems like a lot of work.” Octo-Cat’s posture grew more rigid as Charles took a sharp turn. “You know you have another option. Right?”

“Oh, really, and what’s that?” I challenged, placing a hand on his back to help steady him.

He flicked his tail with one giant movement before revealing, “Get a confession. Duh.”

Finally, all the TV he’d been watching lately seemed to have paid off. I was very glad he’d graduated from Dora the Explorer to Law & Order, which was no doubt what inspired this little nugget of wisdom.

Charles turned to study me briefly before training his eyes back on the road. “What did he say?”

Well, this created quite the conundrum. While I didn’t want to lie to Charles, I also knew he wouldn’t be a big fan of the forced confession plan.

On my last case, I’d headed into trouble all my own and just barely managed to escape with my life. Well, this time I definitely wouldn’t be making the same mistake.

Nope.

This time, I’d be sure to bring the cat with me when I marched straight into Sandra Lynn’s office and demanded an explanation.