Pawsitively Secretive

by Melissa Erin Jackson

  Amber let her friend ramble on as the group slowly inched forward. Since there was more open space across the street—one of the fences surrounding a field had toppled over—the group on that side had become increasingly larger. There were still thirty to forty people in Amber’s group, but maybe that was an easier number for the police to tackle first.

  It took a good ten minutes to reach the mouth of the dirt road that was Blue Point Lane. They crossed the street as a group, then huddled together near the weather-beaten street sign. Amber’s magic was nearly thrashing now—being so close to where Chloe’s car had been found—that the niggling worry in Amber’s gut had started to morph into full-on dread.

  Here, Chief Brown took over, telling the group that they’d be broken into groups of ten and would be paired off with an officer. This group as a whole would be starting closer to the neighborhood where Bethany Williams lived, and would be fanning out into the woods on either side of the road. The bigger group still waiting across the street from the Siamese would be fanning out starting halfway down Blue Point and would work their way back toward Korat Road.

  The chief then assigned certain officers to groups of people. Once an officer had been assigned ten people, the group started down the road. This kept happening until the only people left were Kim, Amber, and the chief.

  “Our group seems a little small, no?” Kim asked, in a tone tentative enough that it was clear she didn’t want to offend a man such as the chief, who had the power to arrest her.

  “We’ll be searching the area about halfway down the road—right about where you two spotted the car. Since you two were the ones who found it, I was hoping being there again might jog your memory,” the chief said. “There may be something near the site that we missed.”

  Kim relaxed at that.

  Amber’s magic lurched again and this time she couldn’t ignore it. Against her will, her magic yanked her forward, powering her legs to move up the muddy, rock-strewn road.

  “Guess she’s really anxious to get started,” she heard the chief say behind her, followed by an awkward laugh. The chief clearly had not missed his calling as an actor.

  They both hurried to flank her. Amber’s strides were long and determined. She hoped her magic would at least give her some warning before it inevitably caused her to veer into the foliage growing tall and thick on either side of the road. Kim was on her right side, and if Amber’s magic suddenly caused Amber to head that way, she was sure to knock the thin brunette clear off her feet and into a mud puddle.

  “What kind of thing should we be looking for, chief?” Kim asked.

  The chief replied, but Amber didn’t register what he’d said. Her magic’s pull kept getting stronger, making Amber’s mind grow fuzzy with it. She felt like a plodding robot being driven forward by mechanics and wires, not anything resembling thought.

  “This is where the car was found,” the chief said, a pointer finger angled ahead of them, his voice cutting through her magic’s fog. Miraculously, her magic eased up a little and allowed her to stop—but it was more like pulling the emergency brake on a car that was still in motion. “You can’t see the tire tracks, of course, as the storm washed those away, but Garcia and I left a marker here.” He gestured to a small flag, its pennant attached to a thin wire stand, the orange material speckled with mud.

  As they made a semicircle around the marker, Amber heard the rustle of people in the woods behind her and to the left. The call of “Chloe!” echoed around her like erratic bird song.

  Red alder dominated this stretch of road, their thin, pale trunks patterned with gray blotches of lichen. The trees were dense here, the trunks so close together it looked like a wall of white that stretched on forever. Smaller green shrubs grew at their bases. Could Chloe truly have gone in there? During a storm, no less? It was intimidating on a dry day in broad daylight.

  Though her magic had settled when she stopped before this flag, Amber knew there had to be more her magic could give her. The fact that it still hummed beneath her skin told her it wasn’t done, just that the biggest energy signature from Chloe was in this location.

  Kim had taken a few steps to the right and was hinged at the waist as she examined something on the ground.

  “Anything?” came the chief’s voice, nearly right in Amber’s ear.

  She jumped. “Maybe. Just … take a step back?”

  He did so. Relaxing her shoulders, letting her hands hang loosely by her sides, she closed her eyes. Her magic perked up, like the way Tom did when he heard the crinkle of the treat bag. It was tense, ready, waiting.

  Where is Chloe? she asked her magic again.

  She was abruptly yanked forward, as if someone had a rope tied around her waist and suddenly pulled with all their strength. Her eyes sprang open and she started forward, her boot narrowly missing the orange marker flag.

  “Amber?” Kim asked, but Amber couldn’t stop now.

  She knew Kim and the chief would follow.

  Amber pushed aside the red alder branches as she ducked under them, trying not to picture fingers snagging in her hair as the reddish catkins brushed against her. The foliage beneath her feet didn’t crunch, as everything out here still felt so damp, but she and her companions were definitely making noise. Like a heard of elephants. The farther in they got, the more the calls for “Chloe!” seemed to come from all sides.

  Surely if the girl was out here, she would have heard someone by now. Which didn’t bode well for her.

  Branches clawed and snatched at Amber’s face, but she kept moving forward, her magic telling her where to go. The sounds of Kim and the chief seemed to grow softer and softer the farther she went. Kim might have called out for Amber to slow down, but Amber couldn’t have even if she’d wanted to. Her magic had full control.

  Tug. Under a hanging branch.

  Tug. Over a wide shrub.

  Tug. Around a tree with a much wider trunk than a red alder.

  And then her magic put on the brakes so abruptly, Amber almost pitched forward into the slowly moving stream ahead of her, the banks of which were covered in moss. Amber could easily see the bottom of the stream, the bed littered with rocks.

  The stream ran straight for quite some distance to the left—the direction the water flowed—and, to the right, it disappeared around a bend. The drop into the stream was only about half a foot, but the moss looked slick.

  Tug.

  Before Amber could protest, her magic forced her down the slippery bank and into the stream. She considered it a small miracle that she hadn’t lost her footing and landed butt-first in the sure-to-be-chilly water. The stream only lapped a few centimeters up the side of her boots, and the current was virtually nonexistent. She began to walk up the very slight incline against the flow.

  Kim had reached the bank, given the “What on earth has gotten into her?” Amber heard behind her. But soon after, there were a few grunts and then the muted splashes of more boots hitting water.

  “Chloe!”

  “Chloe, are you out here?”

  “Chloe!”

  When Amber reached the bend in the stream, her magic put on the brakes again. The water was a little stronger here, lapping over the tops of Amber’s boots. She frantically scanned the trees, the ground on either side of the stream, and the water itself, half expecting to see Chloe lying in a heap somewhere.

  Instead, Amber’s gaze snagged on something glinting near the shore. At first, she thought it had merely been sunlight reflecting off the water, or a smooth rock close to the surface, but something about it looked different. The moment that thought materialized, Amber’s magic released its hold on her and she nearly sagged to her knees in relief.

  She hurried to the spot, finding a rock roughly the size of her head, water flowing around either side of it. And, wedged partially underneath and behind the rock, was a cell phone.

  “Chief!” she called out. “I think I found something!”

  The splash of water grew louder as Kim
and the chief jogged the rest of their way to Amber. When they reached her, she pointed to the device. It must have fallen in—or had been thrown in—and had bounced its way down the stream, only to get caught by this large rock.

  The chief’s brows shot toward his hairline when he spotted it. “Good work, Amber.”

  “We don’t know it’s hers,” Amber said quickly, even though Amber and the chief knew it was. She moved out of the way to stand with Kim, giving the chief room to fish the phone out and place it in a bag he pulled from his pocket.

  Kim blew out a breath and rested her hands on her hips, as if she’d just run a great distance. “How did you even see that? Actually, how did you know to come up this stream? You seemed to know exactly where you were going.”

  An unbidden lie sprung up in her mind. “When Chloe was much younger, she and a friend of hers found this stream one day. She said she comes out here to think sometimes. It totally slipped my mind the night we found her car. I guess I was hoping there would be some clue that she’d been out here.”

  “Oh wow,” Kim said, sounding impressed now instead of suspicious.

  “Her dad doesn’t know about it,” she added softly, as if this were a secret she didn’t want the chief to hear either. “If things between Chloe and her dad really had gone sour, I didn’t want to give away her safe place if she was here.”

  Kim nodded, then shivered, folding her arms tight across her body.

  “Chloe!”

  “Chloe!”

  Amber’s gaze moved up past the mossy banks of the stream and scanned the foliage-covered ground again, raking the patchy trunks of the red alders that stretched out in all directions like someone had haphazardly dropped fistfuls of gray toothpicks. Her magic had led her to Chloe’s phone, not Chloe herself. Which meant either Chloe didn’t want to be found, she was out of Amber’s magical range, or her life’s energy was no longer traceable.

  “If that’s her phone,” came Kim’s soft, almost-hushed voice, “what does that mean for her?”

  When Amber spoke now, no lie crossed her lips. “I don’t know.”

  Chapter 6

  The chief and Amber, alongside Kim, maintained the ruse of searching for Chloe for another couple of hours. Thanks to Amber’s magical intel, she knew Chloe wasn’t in these woods. Whether she was in Edgehill at all remained to be seen.

  Since the rest of the search unveiled nothing else, Kim’s suspicions had ebbed about Amber’s ability to find Chloe’s cell phone with such ease.

  At one point during their search, when Kim was distracted, Chief Brown squatted beside her as she pretended to find something of interest under a shrub, and whispered, “Depending on how long the phone has been in the water, it very well might be ruined.”

  Amber had slumped a little.

  “There are labs I could potentially send it out to, but …” he said, poking at the ground a bit absently with a stick, and then his brows rose suggestively at her.

  She stared at him a moment. “Another spell?”

  “A spell will probably give us better results than contacting Scuttle’s headquarters ever could,” he said. “Up for it?”

  “Sure,” she said, “but I can’t do anything like that in front of Kim.”

  “Of course not,” he said, sounding offended that she would even say such a thing. “I’ll figure something out.” Then he stood and wandered off to examine something at the base of a nearby tree.

  When Amber had stood as well and turned around, she’d found Kim several feet away, her head cocked as her gaze flitted from Amber to the chief and back again. She’d offered a small, unreadable smile, and then had gotten back to work.

  Around half past eleven, the chief led the way back out of the woods for a scheduled lunch break. The staff of the Sippin’ Siamese had apparently been working all morning to prepare a feast of their delicious bar fare. Everyone who had participated could eat as much as they wanted for a flat $5. Anyone who stuck around after that had the opportunity to participate in a potential second search in another section of the woods. Amber wondered if there would be any takers.

  The group congregated outside the Sippin’ Siamese was a bit more disheveled, and decidedly muddier, than the group who had been here early this morning. Amber heard people ask if their group had found anything, and each time, they were met with solemn shakes of the head. The chief had already asked Kim not to tell anyone about the found cell phone, as he didn’t want anyone—especially the mayor—to get overly hopeful that this was a clue, in case it ended up being someone else’s phone.

  When they had all reached the meeting place, Chief Brown had excused himself to chat with his fellow officers. She guessed he would be telling them about the discovered cell phone. Amber and Kim had gotten into the long line that snaked out the Siamese’s front door and trailed out past the patio and down the sidewalk.

  Kim was silent for a full five minutes while they waited. Finally, Amber couldn’t take it anymore.

  “Hey,” she said, nudging Kim with her elbow. “You okay?”

  “Um, yeah. Oh sure. Yeah, I’m okay,” Kim said quickly, hands stuffed into the pockets of her puffy coat. Then she fell silent again. Amber mentally counted to ten and told herself she would try again if Kim didn’t crack first. She only got to eight. Kim abruptly turned, her back to the street lined with cars, and in a hushed rush said, “I know I was joking earlier about you and the chief, Amber, but oh my God. He’s married! You have to stop using your feminine wiles on him or he’s going to do something you’ll both regret! He clearly is totally smitten with you. Men can be such weak creatures. You have to be careful here. Things could go so far south if you keep flirting with him like this.”

  Amber stared at her friend, wide-eyed. There were very few times in her life that she’d honestly been shocked into silence, and this was definitely in her top three. “What?” she finally blurted.

  The woman in front of them thankfully had earbuds in and was bopping along to something, oblivious to what Kim had just said, but Amber had no idea if the people behind them had heard.

  “Amber! Kim!”

  Kim turned to her left and Amber looked behind them to see Ann Marie, Nathan, and Jolene approaching. Nathan waved enthusiastically. Kim returned it. A quick glance at the shocked look of the two women behind her told her that they had heard every word of Kim’s whispered accusation. Amber offered her best tight-lipped smile, but both women scoffed in unison and turned their attention to each other instead.

  Fantastic.

  She did her best to maintain idle chitchat with the arrived trio, but she was still reeling. Sure, she’d been worried that people would start to think the very things Kim had just said, but she had hoped her friend would have given her a little more credit.

  Granted, when she thought about it from Kim’s perspective, it wasn’t like she blamed her friend for thinking she and the chief were keeping secrets—they were. But she couldn’t let Kim in on the true secret.

  As if he sensed that now was the perfect time to make a situation even worse, Amber saw Chief Brown walking down the sidewalk, giving the lined-up people a once over. He was looking for her; she just knew it.

  When he reached their little group, Kim squeaked, which drew the attention of everyone assembled, including the chief.

  “You all right, Miss Jones?” he asked her.

  She tucked her lips under her teeth and nodded vigorously.

  Please don’t ask me to come with you! Please …

  “Uh … Miss Blackwood?” the chief said. “Would you accompany me to the station? We need to ask you a few more questions for your statement.”

  “Do you need to ask me anything else, chief?” Kim asked in a voice so high-pitched, Amber winced.

  Nathan, Jolene, and Ann Marie watched this exchange with confusion, gazes bouncing between the chief, Amber, and Kim as if they were watching a ping-pong match.

  “Uh … not at this time, Miss Jones. But we’ll be in touch if we do,” h
e said, then stared pointedly at Amber. “Miss Blackwood?”

  She swallowed. “Yes, of course.”

  As she stepped out of line, Kim gently grabbed Amber’s elbow, then dramatically brought her mouth to Amber’s ear. “Remember what I said. He is smitten. Be careful.” Then Kim unhanded her and, too loudly, said, “You two crazy kids don’t have too much fun, okay?” She pointed at the chief. “Especially you.”

  “Oh my God,” Amber muttered, her face on fire, and looked at the baffled chief. “Your car?”

  “Oh, right!” He waved at the group and thanked them for their help. “Right this way,” he said to Amber and led her across the street to his cruiser which was parked a few cars down from where the news van had been.

  It only occurred to her now that she had no idea where Connor was. She fired off a quick text to tell him she had a way home and thanked him for the ride this morning.

  Only once she and the chief were driving down Korat Road did he speak. “What on earth was going on with Kim?”

  There really wasn’t a gentle way to put this, so she went with the blunt approach. “She seems to think we’re having an affair.”

  “What?” he bellowed, the car swerving as he turned to glare daggers at her.

  “Watch out!” she said, pointing ahead.

  He tugged on the wheel and only narrowly missed sideswiping a parked car. “Explain,” he gritted out.

  “You hated me three months ago and—”

  “I didn’t hate you,” he said. “I was just highly suspicious of you.”

  “Whatever. You went from being highly suspicious to confiding in me—especially after I helped solve Melanie’s murder—”

  “Solve is a stretch.”

  She rolled her eyes. “And now we’re sneaking into alleys and whispering to each other and now you’re supposedly taking me to the station to ask me more questions when she was there when you got my statement the first time. It just sounds like a terrible cover for us to have an excuse to sneak away and get it on in the back of your cruiser.”