Squirrel & Swan Stolen Things

by M. D. Archer

“I think they might be sleeping together. Which means they’re probably in cahoots. They could have done it together.”

  ROMAN DIDN’T KNOW WHAT to do.

  First there had been the incident with Sophie showing up in his backyard—he hadn’t seen her himself, but Anya had taken a photo and Roman couldn’t deny that it was her. And after a quick search of the database, he’d discovered Sophie had been issued a speeding ticket earlier today. And finally, she’d been named in a drunken brawl outside a club on Saturday night.

  Roman leaned back in his chair and looked at the ceiling for a while, then sat up and went back to the photograph Anya had forwarded him. It was grainy but it was her alright. He shook his head. The thought of her standing in his backyard like this made him feel an urgent combination of emotions he couldn’t pin down.

  And what of the drunken brawl occurring the same night, albeit much later? Had she been an innocent bystander who’d gotten caught up in something? The Sophie he knew would never have instigated a physical altercation in Fort Lane. He would be surprised if the Sophie he knew would be hanging out downtown at 4am at all, but sometimes people go a little wild, let loose. And how well did he know her anyway? It had been the same night as she’d shown up at his house, so maybe Sophie had had too much to drink and had made a few poor decisions.

  But the speeding ticket was also something he couldn’t imagine Sophie doing. Still, human beings were fallible, and when someone went off the rails, they tended to do such things.

  Was Sophie going off the rails?

  And was it his fault?

  He went back to the incident report, found the name of the responding officer, and after a few minutes of strolling around the station, found her standing at the coffee machine. He pushed away his unease so that he could smile as he greeted her. “Hey, Jen, how are things?”

  “Roman. Not bad. What’s up?”

  “The incident Saturday night, outside the nightclub on Fort Lane. Involving Sophie Swanephol?”

  “You looking at her for something else?”

  How to answer that one, Roman thought, mentally shaking his head.

  “What happened?”

  “Got to the scene and she and another woman were fighting. I couldn’t make out the problem, something to do with spilled drinks or...” She lifted her shoulders. “Normal drunken drama.”

  “So, no arrests, then.”

  “Wasn’t worth it in the end. No damage. No injury. Shortly after I got there they both calmed down and wanted it done with. Got them both into taxis and home.”

  “What was your take on Sophie’s involvement?”

  “From what I can tell, she started it.”

  Roman frowned. “Really?”

  She shrugged. “I just took their details and made sure they weren’t going to a be problem, then sent them home.”

  “Cheers.”

  Roman smiled as he walked away but there was no denying the sensation that washed around his body like an unpleasant guest.

  He was worried about her.

  15

  Paige wiped her mouth then crumpled up the napkin and dropped it into the empty sushi container.

  “A two-person team would make things somewhat easier, for the theft itself,” Paige said as she stood up and went over to the newly updated whiteboard. “And both Geoff and Tammy are aspiring writers, so there’s a motive.”

  “Cecilia said they would make a good team because she thought Tammy might be rather clever, and Geoff would have the arrogance and confidence to go through with it,” Sophie agreed.

  “Cecilia can’t remember either of them doing anything unusual during the writing group session, but when we go examine her office, maybe we can figure out a way for a two-person team to do it?” Paige said, tapping the whiteboard marker against her teeth.

  “Maybe one of them distracted her and the other ran upstairs?” Sophie said. “One of them got the key from her around her neck without her noticing...” Sophie trailed off with a dubious expression.

  “If they won’t return my calls, how are we going to get to the truth of it?”

  “We could ask Cecilia to host an extra writing group session and, uh, ambush them?”

  “Great idea.”

  “We could also re-interview Annie and Juniper, ask them if Geoff or Tammy disappeared during that Sunday afternoon.”

  “Juniper? Really?”

  “Maybe just Annie,” Sophie agreed. “I doubt Juniper can give us any reliable information.”

  They fell silent while Sophie updated her notes and Paige eyed the whiteboard.

  “We’d better go to Cecilia’s,” Sophie said, noting the time. “Assume you’ve got your car parked somewhere nearby? I took the bus. Luckily I still have my AT hop card.”

  “How do you do that?” Paige wrinkled her nose.

  “Ride the bus? It’s easy. You wait at the bus stop, hold out your hand to signal the driver, and then get on. You’d be amazed.”

  Paige rolled her eyes. “Come on.”

  MARTIN OPENED THE DOOR. “She’s in the kitchen.” He gestured for them to come in, then trailed behind them into the kitchen. There, he loitered in the doorway.

  Cecilia was standing red-faced and sweaty over a pot of what looked and smelled like bolognaise sauce. “I was expecting you fifteen minutes ago.”

  “Sorry. Uh, traffic was bad,” Sophie said.

  “I don’t expect to see that time on my bill.”

  “Of course not,” Paige said.

  “Cecilia,” Sophie said. “We were wondering whether you could call another writing group so that we can interview Tammy and Geoff.”

  “They won’t return our calls,” Paige added.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Cecilia looked sceptical. “I don’t want this investigation tarnishing my group.”

  “But you said you could imagine Geoff and Tammy being the culprits.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Do you know any other way for us to get hold of them? Their home addresses?”

  “Well actually, yes, I believe I have those. Martin, fetch my address book from the hall table.”

  “Sure.”

  A moment later he returned holding a battered red leather notebook.

  “Show them the addresses. They’ll be under W for writing group.”

  Paige hopped over to Martin and plucked the book out of his hand. “I can transcribe the information,” she said cheerfully, pulling her own little black notebook out of her bag.

  “Did Leo get in touch with you?” Sophie asked.

  “Yes, he’s coming by my office tomorrow.”

  “Great.”

  Cecilia looked over at Paige with a resigned expression. “I suppose you want to go upstairs now.”

  “We do.”

  “We’ve got afternoon drinks to get to in a couple of hours, so you can’t spend all day up there.”

  “That’s fine.”

  “Martin can you keep an eye on this? Keep it on low and make sure it doesn’t burn.”

  Martin nodded absent-mindedly and ambled over to take Cecilia’s place.

  “I’ll take that,” Cecilia took the address book from Paige and gestured for her and Sophie to follow her up the stairs.

  Outside the office, they waited while she leaned down and used the key hanging around her neck to unlock the door.

  “Do you ever take it off?” Paige asked, gesturing at her neck.

  “No.”

  “Not even when you shower?”

  “Well, yes of course when I shower.” Cecilia sniffed.

  Just as Paige and Sophie exchanged a look, the piercingly loud ring of the landline sounded from downstairs.

  “Oh, drat,” Cecilia huffed, hurriedly straightening and moving toward the stairs. “It’ll be my mother and Martin doesn’t like to talk to her.”

  Paige pushed open the door and they walked inside.

  “If she takes her key necklace off when she showers, then Martin could easily have made a copy,” So
phie said.

  “But how, exactly? Nip down to the nearest lock place, wait for it to get cut, then nip back, all in the time that she showers?”

  Sophie thought about it for a moment. “He could have done it in two stages. First, get a key that looks the same so she doesn’t realise it’s gone. Then get a key cut and switch it over.”

  “What if she tried to use the lookalike key in the meantime. It wouldn’t have worked, and she’d realise it was a fake.”

  “Yeah, but husbands and wives know each other’s schedules. Like maybe she always takes a long bath on Saturday afternoons, or something. Or maybe he made the switch just before she went away for two days and then engineered it so he could make the switch as soon as she got back. Something like that?”

  “OMG.”

  “What?”

  “Maybe Martin had the locks changed so that he had the correct key, and all he had to do was get a copy of the new key onto her necklace.”

  Sophie nodded slowly. “Possible.” She pursed her lips. “But we don’t have a motive. Why would Martin steal his own wife’s manuscript? What would be the point?”

  “Yeah. It doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

  As they wandered around the room Sophie took a video with her phone so they could review it later and check for something they might have missed. Paige was good at taking in environmental details in the moment, but Sophie found it hard to retain such information.

  Suddenly Paige gasped and pointed at the ceiling. There was a metal latch. “It must be a trapdoor.” She turned wide eyes to Sophie. “Grab that chair.”

  Sophie lugged the chair next to the desk so that it sat directly under the trapdoor. It was immediately obvious that even standing on the chair neither of them would be able to reach the latch.

  “We’ll have to move the desk and put the chair on top.”

  “Are you sure? I can’t imagine Cecilia wanting us to move her furniture.”

  “But we have to see what’s up there,” Paige said.

  “Fine.”

  Together they moved the heavy desk a few feet to the left and then balanced the chair on top.

  “You’d better do it,” Sophie started to say, but Paige was already climbing up.

  Sophie held onto the chair, glancing nervously behind her. Hopefully Cecilia was too busy talking on the phone to notice the thumping and scraping from above.

  “Will it open?” she asked.

  “Nearly... got it...” After one more aggressive yank, the door swung open. “Aha!” Paige cried.

  “What is it?’

  “Wow.”

  “What, Paige, what?”

  “Nothing. It’s just so cool that there’s a trap door.” Paige sneezed. “It is super dusty up here.” She sneezed again.

  “Is it like a crawl space?”

  “It’s hard to tell,” Paige stood on tiptoes so that she could poke more of her head inside. “It’s basically a small attic and yes, it is big enough for a person to crawl around up there but,” she sneezed a third time, “there’s no way someone has been in there recently. The dust.” She sniffed.

  “Take a few photos just in case.”

  “Okay.”

  Paige turned on the flash and took a photo of each angle, then a video of the space for good measure. She clambered down again and together they dragged the furniture back to where it had been.

  “We’ll go through the footage, of course, but I don’t think the attic is going to be the solution to our locked room mystery,” Paige said.

  Sophie looked around the room once more, then went over to the window. “We’re on the second floor, so maybe someone climbed up?”

  “Possible,” Paige agreed. They both peered down. The back of the house was a vertical expanse of concrete. “If they brought a ladder.”

  “Paige, look.” Sophie pointed through the window at Gillian’s backyard. She was standing in the middle of the lawn wearing gardening gear. And she wasn’t alone. Martin was next to her, only inches away as they talked urgently.

  “People don’t generally stand that close to each other, unless...”

  “Unless what?” Paige said.

  “Unless they’re about to fight, or...” Sophie gestured as Martin placed his hand on Gillian’s hip. “Or they’ve been intimate.”

  “They’re having an affair,” Paige cried excitedly. “Did we just discover a motive for Martin to steal his wife’s work?”

  “To leave Cecilia and make a fresh start with his neighbour.”

  “Can’t say I blame him,” Paige said with a shrug.

  ZELDA PULLED OFF HER headphones and stood up to stretch. This was her second run at her true crime files, and she was no closer to figuring out where she had seen that diamond-shaped birthmark before.

  But she knew it was in there somewhere. And Zelda Ko was no quitter.

  Yawning—last night she got caught up watching a new K-Drama on Netflix and ended up staying up well past three a.m., but it didn’t matter because she didn’t need much sleep to function—she reached her arms up and back again, then plopped down on the ground beside her bed to stretch out on the floor. Sometimes this helped her think.

  Where had she seen it? A reference to a large diamond-shaped birthmark.

  She closed her eyes and pressed her fingers to her temples. Random pieces of information swirled around her brain, but none of them were particularly helpful. After a moment, she sat up abruptly. Why was she doing this this hard way? Just because she was sure she’d seen it in her files didn’t mean it couldn’t be found elsewhere. She sprang up from the floor and returned to her seat, reaching for the pump bottle of hand sanitizer sitting on her desk as she sat down. She pumped two squirts onto her hands and rubbed them together. Once they were dry, she opened a search engine.

  Woman with a diamond shaped birthmark.

  She scrolled through the results, sighing. Not good enough. She thought about it a bit more. Something was bugging her about what she’d just typed in. What was it? Diamond-shaped? No, that was definitely the most appropriate description. Birthmark? Again, it was a birthmark, there was no better way to describe it. Woman?

  Woman.

  Suddenly, she had it. It wasn’t a woman. It was a little girl. She sucked in an excited breath. She remembered where she’d seen it. She went to her file manager and found the relevant document. She read her notes hungrily, nodding to herself. Of course. Breathless, Zelda picked up her phone.

  “Myra? Do you have Leo’s phone number? Awesome. Get it from Sophie then text it to me. Pardon? No, I’m not going to ask him out on a date,” she scoffed. “It’s about that woman with amnesia.” She disconnected and stared at her phone, waiting for the text to come through.

  Leo’s Jane was Katrina Bellevue.

  The Lost Girl of 1997.

  16

  Leo looked around the motel room. “Where did that pad of paper go?”

  “Oh, it’s here,” Jane replied, taking it from the bedside table.

  “And here’s the pen,” Leo said nodding. “Okay, I want to try something Paige told me about earlier. Can you come over here? Sit at the desk?”

  “Um, okay.”

  He handed her the pen. “Sign your name,” Leo said. “Don’t think about it.”

  “But I don’t—”

  “Don’t think about it,” Leo repeated. “Quickly. Apparently with amnesia you keep your muscle memory. Your hand should remember how to sign it even if you don’t.”

  Jane leaned forward but hesitated, her hand poised over the paper. She bit her lip. “I’m sorry. I guess I’ve already started thinking about it.” She turned her distressed face to Leo. “I’m sorry, Leo. I can’t seem to do anything useful to help myself at all.”

  “Don’t worry—”

  Leo’s phone rang. He frowned at the display. “Unknown caller.”

  Should he take it?

  AFTER BEING SHOOED unceremoniously out of Cecilia’s house—she hadn’t appreciated them “mucking around
” in her office—Paige and Sophie pretended to drive away, but instead parked at a discreet distance down the street. They’d agreed not to mention their discovery of the affair to Cecilia immediately. Especially since Martin had returned to the kitchen shortly after they had, then sifted around as if he didn’t want to leave them alone with Cecilia. Almost as if he knew what they’d learned.

  Now, hunched down in the car, they kept their eyes trained on Cecilia and Martin’s driveway, waiting until they left for the afternoon drinks Cecilia had mentioned.

  “Keep watching, I’m going to look at the video footage of the room again,” Paige said, pulling out her phone. “Someone getting in through the window is a real possibility. Maybe Martin kept watch—made sure Cecilia stayed with the writing group downstairs—and Gillian climbed up.” Paige nodded to herself. “Hey, what about the neighbour on the other side?” she said, pointing to a normal-sized brick unit to the right.

  “Why?”

  “They could have seen something.”

  “I guess.”

  They both hopped out of the car and went up to the door. The first time they knocked there as a distinctive flutter of curtains in the window to the right.

  “Someone is home.” Paige said, knocking again.

  From the other side of the door came a muffled thump.

  “We know you’re there,” Paige called out.

  Finally, the door opened. A thirty-something guy stood in the doorway. He had a couple of weeks’ worth of stubble—or maybe an intentionally scraggly half-beard—and a gaming control in one hand. In his other was his phone, held up as if recording them.

  “Are you videoing us?” Paige said.

  “Yes. Can’t be too careful. Who are you?”

  “We just want to ask you about your neighbour. Do you know her?”

  “Why?” He narrowed his eyes. “What’s this about?”

  “She, uh...” Paige sighed. “It’s a long story. Can we come in?”

  “No.”

  “What’s your problem?”

  “Sorry to bother you like this,” Sophie said, edging Paige a little to the right. “Something happened at Cecilia’s house in December, and we were wondering if you saw anything.”