Busy as a Beaver Read online

  “Can you describe the man for me?” Chief Gary asked, but Gloria shook her head.

  “Not really, no. He was wearing a mask and gloves.”

  “Was he tall, short?”

  “A little bit on the taller side, I think,” Gloria mused. “It’s hard to tell, though. He certainly wasn’t short.”

  “Do you remember what he was wearing?” I asked, earning myself a look from Chief Gary. Evidently, I was not invited to help out in this interview.

  “A dark hoodie and jeans,” Gloria replied, nodding slowly as she thought back. “And he had on sneakers. Nikes, with a stripe and three stars across the front. I remember those, because when he hit me and I fell to the ground I fell forward and was looking right at them.”

  “Was there anything about his voice that stood out to you?”

  “Not especially,” Gloria said.

  “Would you recognize it if you heard it again?”

  “Maybe, but I can’t say for certain.”

  “Alright, thanks, Gloria. I’m going to send a patrol car over to your house straightaway to take care of things.”

  “Thank you, Chief Gary,” Gloria told him.

  “And can I expect the two of you to stay out of this?” Chief Gary asked, turning to Sophie and me.

  “Of course,” I replied. “We weren’t intending to get involved at all. We’re only here to update Gloria on Buster.”

  “Good,” Chief Gary replied. “Whoever did this is obviously dangerous, and I don’t want to see the two of you playing detective once again.”

  Sophie and I nodded. I wasn’t even lying to Chief Gary, for once. I had no intention of getting involved. I was just glad to see Gloria and Buster were both going to be ok; that experience had to have been absolutely terrifying for them.

  A nurse came by a few minutes later. “Gloria’s going to need her rest, so if you ladies can wrap it up soon, please?”

  “Of course,” I answered. “Will she be able to go home tonight? We need to know; I have her cat at the vet clinic, and if not, I’ll bring him home with me for the night.”

  The nurse looked at Gloria, who nodded. “It’s fine. I’d like to know as well.”

  “The doctor would like to keep you overnight for observation, just to make sure there’s no internal bleeding we haven’t found, and because of the suspected concussion,” the nurse answered.

  “Alright, we’ll go back to the clinic and get Buster,” Sophie told Gloria. “Bee will be happy; she gets to have a sleepover with her best friend.”

  “Thank you so much, to both of you,” Gloria said, taking me by the hand. “I do have one more thing to ask of you, though.”

  “Of course, anything,” I replied.

  “I’d like the two of you to look into who did this to me, and find them, please.”

  Oh. I thought she was going to ask us to water her plants or something.

  “We can absolutely do that for you,” Sophie replied instantly, glaring at me as I opened my mouth to protest. Could we do that?

  “Oh, thank you girls so much. You know, I do have complete faith in Chief Gary, but I’m well aware the two of you have become quite the investigators yourselves, and I really wouldn’t mind an extra set of eyes on this case. Obviously, if you’re not comfortable doing it, that’s completely fine.”

  “No, no, we’re happy to help,” Sophie said. “You rest up, and we’ll take care of it. Come and see us tomorrow when you get out of here. We’ll bring Buster back to the clinic tomorrow so you can come and get him as well.”

  As Sophie and I left a few minutes later, I turned to her, incredulous. “Why on earth would you tell her we would do that? Chief Gary explicitly told us not to,” I hissed.

  “Well, it’s not like it’s the first time we’ve lied to him. Besides, we weren’t lying at the time. And how could we possibly say no to a kindly old lady like Gloria, especially when whoever did this hurt Buster, too?”

  I rolled my eyes. “You just want another case to solve.”

  “Hey, what can I say? Willow Bay is more fun when there’s crime happening. Luckily, this time, no one was murdered.”

  “Not yet, anyway,” I said ominously. “What if whoever decided to attack Gloria does it again, and this time the victim doesn’t get away?”

  “Even more reason for us to find who did this. The more eyes on it, the better. So come on, are you in, or are you going to wuss out on me?”

  I sighed. “Fine. But we’re staying out of Chief Gary’s way, and if we find out anything, we need to tell him as well.”

  “Sure thing,” Sophie said. “I’m so glad we’re going to be investigating this together.”

  “Right. We’ll talk about it in the morning. I’m going to go pick Buster up from the vet clinic. Are you going to come?”

  “Nah, I’m like a five minute walk from home, I’ll just go straight there. See you in the morning.”

  I said goodbye to Sophie and climbed back into the car, wondering what on earth I had just gotten myself into.

  Chapter 3

  As soon as I got back home, Buster in tow, I was hounded on by Bee.

  “Buster! Are you staying the night? Great, now you have to see the hovel that Angela makes me live in.”

  “Hovel? Excuse me?” I replied, hands on my hips. “You have a very good life here, thank you very much, missy.”

  “Don’t call me missy,” Bee hissed at me as she sniffed Buster’s carrier, and I resisted the urge to laugh. Bee was snarky at the best of times, but she always felt like she had to take it up a notch when Buster was around.

  “Why is he here, anyway?” Bee asked.

  “Buster and Gloria were injured in a home invasion,” I replied. “Gloria is spending the night in the hospital, which means that Buster’s staying here.”

  “Oooh,” Bee said as I let Buster out. “We’re going to have the most epic sleepover ever!”

  “Alright, well, Buster is supposed to limit his movements, so don’t do anything too ridiculous,” I called after them as the two cats ran off together goodness knew where. If there was one thing Bee and Buster were good at, it was getting into trouble. “Buster, stay off that broken leg!”

  “Gloria was the victim of a home invasion?” Charlotte asked as I made my way into the kitchen. “Did I hear that right?”

  I nodded as I watched her cook up an omelet in the frying pan, with Jason, my boyfriend who lived with us now, sitting at the kitchen table doing a crossword puzzle. He perked up as soon as I came into the room.

  “Home invasion? Here in Willow Bay?”

  “Nice to see you too, honey,” I teased as I grabbed a seat, inhaling the aromas of the red peppers and onion sautéing away on the stove.

  “Hey, the more big scoops I get, the better,” Jason replied with a grin.

  “Anyway, yeah, Gloria came home from getting groceries this afternoon to find a stranger in her house. He pistol-whipped her, asked for money, and then when Buster attacked him Gloria took the opportunity to run. She and Buster are both going to be fine, but he has a hairline fracture in his ulna and a large cut on his side, and Gloria is spending the night in hospital just in case.”

  “Wow, that’s terrifying,” Charlotte said, shaking her head. “I’m glad they’re both going to be ok.”

  “Me too,” I nodded. “I can’t remember the last time that sort of thing happened here. I mean, burglaries, sure. But they’re almost always when the owner of the house isn’t home, or in the middle of the night, that sort of thing. For Gloria to actually be hurt in the middle of it is awful.”

  “Absolutely,” Jason nodded. “It’s strange, too. I wonder why someone targeted her in particular?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said, thinking over Jason’s words. “Sophie and I are looking into it, though.”

  Charlotte gave me an incredulous look. “Seriously? Can the two of you just let the police do their job for once in your lives?”

  “Well, I was going to, but then Gloria asked us to l
ook into it. And we couldn’t just say no to her, lying in that hospital bed like that.”

  “Oh, so now because someone asked you nicely, you’re going to start hunting an armed robber, is that it?”

  “Hey, it’s better than the murderers she usually goes after, isn’t it, honey?” Jason asked me with a wink.

  “That’s right,” I replied. “Besides, it’s not just Gloria. It’s Buster. Buster is basically family at this point, and this person broke his leg. He probably wouldn’t have cared if he’d killed him.”

  “That still doesn’t make you the right person to try and hunt him down,” Charlotte pointed out. “You really should just leave this to the authorities.”

  “I made a promise to Gloria, and I have no intention of breaking it. If Sophie and I discover anything, we’re going to go to Chief Gary and let him know about it. We’re going to be safe, don’t worry about us.”

  “Sure, like all those other times you were ‘safe’ and almost ended up killed.”

  “Almost being the key word there.”

  “No, killed was definitely the key,” Charlotte replied, giving me a stare that had ‘are you freaking serious right now’ written all over it.

  “Well, anyway, I’m doing this,” I said.

  “Is there anything I can do to help? I’ve gotten a bit of a reputation at the office for getting exclusives,” Jason said with a grin.

  “Exclusives that are more interesting than the fact that the local gym is getting a new set of spin bikes?” I teased. The Willow Bay Whistler was a great paper, but to be totally honest, it was somewhat rare for anything remotely interesting to happen here. Sure, there had been a handful of murders over the last year or so—a lot more than was normal for the town—but it was still overall a quiet, small town in every single way. Exhibit A was the front-page headline on the previous week’s paper: a deer had eaten all of a local resident’s birdseed when they hadn’t locked their shed properly.

  Charlotte slid a plate of omelet in front of me and I happily dug in to the dinner, my worries about who had done this to Gloria and Buster temporarily forgotten.

  I tossed and turned in bed for a while that night, completely unable to get to sleep. I couldn’t help but wonder how Gloria was doing. Buster seemed ok—I had checked on him and Bee after dinner to make sure they weren’t doing anything too active, and I found Buster telling Bee everything that had happened that day.

  I turned over in my mind everything I had heard Gloria and Bee tell me about what had happened.

  I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but something about the whole thing felt off. Why had the thief waited for Gloria to come home? After all, wouldn’t it have been easier for the thief to search the house when no one was home?

  Why would he search Gloria’s home for money? I mean, Gloria certainly wasn’t poor, but she also wasn’t rich. She had been a teacher up in Portland, and most of her income came from her pension, rather than from any sort of actual assets. I had been in Gloria’s home a few times, and there was absolutely no reason why someone should have thought she had a ton of money stashed away somewhere. After all, the woman still had one of those huge CRT televisions. That didn’t exactly scream ‘there’s money here’.

  On top of that, Willow Bay might not have been Beverly Hills, but it remained a tourist destination all the same. There were a few houses that belonged to rich investors who kept them empty most of the year, except for when they came by for a couple weeks in the summer, as well as others that belonged to the small number of local businessmen who had done quite well for themselves. Surely, those would have made better targets for a home invasion than the simple home of a former teacher. Right?

  No, none of this made any sense. There was something wrong here, and I had to find out what.

  Grabbing my jacket—Halloween was only a couple weeks away—I slipped out the front door as quietly as possible so as to not wake anyone else in the house. I breathed in the crisp, cool night air as I stepped outside, listening to the breeze wisp between the leaves of the trees.

  One of the things I loved about Willow Bay was how safe it was—even though my phone told me it was just after three in the morning, I had absolutely no qualms about walking through the streets at night. Besides, if anything did happen, I had my magic to protect me.

  As I passed by row after row of houses, their exteriors dimly illuminated by the faint glow of the streetlights, I eventually made my way to Gloria’s house without seeing another soul. Yellow police tape was wrapped across the front door of the house, which had now been closed. I took a good look at the lock with the light from my phone: there was no sign of forced entry at all. If the person who had attacked Gloria had come in through the front door, they had been subtle about it.

  Before entering the house, I crept along the side, making my way to the back door. I wanted to know how the attacker had gotten in. If they hadn’t used the front door, maybe they’d gone in through a window or the back.

  I crept up to the back window and shone my light on the lock. There were a few scuff marks next to the lock—some awkwardness on Gloria’s part, or a sign that someone had come in that way?

  Inwardly cursing myself for forgetting to bring a pair of gloves, I covered my hand with the sleeve of my jacket and gingerly turned the knob. It was open.

  Stepping carefully inside, into the kitchen, I ignored the ominous creak of the door as I closed it behind me. Suddenly, a shadow came out of nowhere, holding something above its head.

  I was being attacked.

  Chapter 4

  I darted out of the way as the shadow’s arms rose and came down to hit me. I was petrified but knew I only had a second or so to react. Instead of running away from the shadow, I ran straight towards whoever it was, grabbing them around the torso and taking us both to the ground.

  The shadow yelped, and I stopped.

  “Sophie?”

  “Angela?”

  “What on earth are you doing here?”

  “I could ask you the same thing!”

  I found my phone, which was now lying face-down on the floor, the light still on. I shone it on my best friend, who had just tried to attack me in the dark.

  “I thought you were the intruder, come back to finish the job or something,” Sophie said as she got up with a groan.

  “Well, I didn’t even have time to consider who you might have been. I saw your shadow about to attack me and I just reacted,” I said as I shone the light around. “What were you going to hit me with, anyway?”

  “A cookie jar I found on the counter,” Sophie admitted sheepishly. The jar lay on the floor now; thankfully, it was one of those super thick old ones, and so it hadn’t broken despite being dropped when I tackled Sophie.

  “Ok, let’s put it back,” I said. “I don’t want anyone to know we were here.”

  To my dismay, I realized Sophie had remembered to bring gloves, even though I hadn’t, as she grabbed the large container and put it back on the counter.

  “What are you doing here, anyway?” Sophie asked.

  “I couldn’t sleep. Something isn’t right about this, and I wanted to kind of get a better idea of what, you know?”

  “All too well,” Sophie agreed. “Same here. Taylor’s working the night shift tonight, so I’m on my own anyway, and I figured if I got caught it’d probably be pretty easy to sweet-talk my way out of going to jail.”

  “So have you had a look around?”

  “Not really. I only got here a few minutes ago. It looks like there was a bit of a struggle in the main room, and I made my way back to the kitchen.”

  I shone my phone around the room, not wanting to turn on the lights for fear of arousing the neighbor’s suspicions and having the cops called on us. The kitchen wasn’t particularly messy; there were a few dishes in the sink, sure, but nothing that would have indicated that this place had been ransacked.

  “I’m going to check out the living room,” I said, making my way to the front door.


  “Sure. I’ll be upstairs,” Sophie replied. “Holler if you see anything.”

  Gloria’s front door opened directly onto her living room. The bags of groceries she’d dropped upon entering still lay across the floor, a single orange having rolled across the room and settled against the TV stand against the far wall. A large cabinet near the front door on which sat a few cute porcelain figures had a little bit of blood on it, and I shook with rage as I thought of how much pain Buster had been in when he had come to the clinic.

  Still, I had to put that out of my mind. What did I see? There were the groceries on the floor, sure. And there was a light smattering of black dust on almost every surface, but that was from the cops looking for fingerprints, surely. There were a few specks on the floor from what I assumed was blood, probably from the gash on Gloria’s face.

  But to be honest, the rest of the room didn’t really look like someone was after valuables. In fact, there was still a large empty Michael Kors tote bag next to the couch. It might not have been a Balenciaga, but it could still definitely fetch a thief a hundred bucks or so on Craigslist. Maybe because the thief was male he hadn’t known the bag’s value? It had to have cost three hundred dollars new and was still in great condition.

  A spot on the far wall attracted my attention, and as I made my way towards it, I realized this had been where the bullet fired from the intruder’s gun had hit. The hole it made was small, even after the bullet had been dug out from the wall by the police.