What We Saw

Chapter Twelve

It was 10:00 pm. Adam and I lay with our faces towards the ceiling. We couldn’t bring ourselves to talk. We could only think. I looked up at the place where the spider had built its web the other day. Nothing was to be seen. It had moved on to another place, picking up the pieces of its broken home and moving forward.

Maybe it was underneath one of our beds, waiting to crawl up on our face and tickle at our lips in the night. I scratched my lip, where it had started itching a little with the mere thought, and turned over to face Adam. He stared up, hands behind his head, lying on top of the quilt. A statement of intent that he wasn’t here to sleep—he was here to think.

‘So are we gonna do this, or what?’ I asked.

He had a playful smile on his face. A hunger for mystery. A confidence neither of us had been able to display for a while. ‘You’ve come round,’ he said, keeping his eyes closed.

I bit my lip. ‘Adam, this isn’t the time for joking around, alright? It’s serious.’

Adam raised his head and looked at me. ‘Alright,’ he said, mocking me.

I felt the hairs on my arms begin to rise.

‘I’ve already started planning things while you’ve been moping around,’ he said.

‘And?’

Adam bounced upright and turned to face me. He had a little mischievous grin on his face and tapped his feet against the edge of the bed repeatedly. ‘Right, well we start a full scale investigation into Donald and his life. We ask people close to him or people around here about him, see if they know anything.’ He paused and took a breath. He spoke as if he were reading from a script.

I tried to get a word in, but he carried on. ‘We ask more distant people, too. Perhaps ask some old ladies to see if any rumours have been going around. Maybe even Gran knows something about Donald that we don’t, what with all her gossiping.’

I nodded. Adam was good. I didn’t want to show him I was too enthusiastic about his plans, though. Didn’t want him getting big headed. ‘Maybe Granddad knows something about Donald,’ I said.

Adam rummaged under his bed sheet. He curled his lip and nodded, but I could see he wasn’t really listening. He pulled aside the sheets on his bed to reveal a notepad and paper. He’d been busy writing an ‘Action Plan.’ He’d make a great detective.

I reached over for the plan of action and glanced over it. Adam had thrown several things down, in no real order. In the bottom corner, surrounded by a squiggly line, there was a list of things we knew about Donald.

Beneath the sloppy spelling and dodgy presentation what Adam was getting at was the fact that Donald had been seen burying a body. Underneath this, a proposal: Donald was a killer. Adam had drawn lines off this statement to connect the evidence. So far there was little evidence other than the fact that he was seen burying a girl in the woods. Enough reason for suspicion. Several other similar offshoots were visible, such as ‘We missaw what Donald was burying,’ but these were present just so we knew we had considered all the possible options. We knew what we saw, so the real line of progression was what we knew: Donald buried a dead girl deep in the woods. I felt a shiver crawl down my back. We were doing this, and nothing was going to get in our way. I shook my head at the thought of telling the police. Maybe we could later, but not right now.

‘We’ll spy on him for a day first. That way we can see if he acts weird or anything.’ Adam gestured to where he had written out this point on the paper, clicking his pen.

I felt a knot in my throat. ‘What do you mean, spy on him?’

Adam looked down and rubbed his hands against his arms. He spoke slowly. ‘Well, I figured if we could watch him, maybe follow him or something.’

‘No. No way. It’s too risky, Adam. We can’t go doing anything stupid.’

Adam rolled his eyes and sighed. ‘Cuz, we’ve got to try everything we can. Donald wouldn’t do anything stupid to us. He likes us.’

‘I don’t know, Adam, it’s just… maybe he liked the girl. I don’t know.’

Adam tilted his head from side to side, pondering the thought. ‘Well, how about we interview some people and see what they know about him?’

‘How do we do this without people getting suspicious?’

‘We do jobs for them. Put their rubbish out, tidy their gardens. Then they can’t ignore us, can they?’

Adam made a good point, another example of his fine investigative mind. He may have been young, but he seemed to have mastered a way of blackmailing people and squeezing out the information he wanted when he wanted it. I felt more comfortable doing small favours for information than following Donald.

‘Then, we break into his shed.’

My mouth drooped as I tried to find my voice. ‘Are you sure about that, Ad? It’s a bit risky.’

‘What’s the worst though? We get done for vandalising. We say sorry and we pay the bills. It’ll be fine if we do it sneakily.’

‘I’m more worried about what he’ll do if he catches us,’ I said. ‘Like, Gran and Granddad can pay the bills. I’m more worried that he’s a psychopathic killer who has strangled a girl. Someone who has probably seen us spying in the process of burying her. And probably stole our dog as a crazy plan to win our family over or something.’

Adam nodded again. He slumped back against his bed without saying anything and scanned his action plan, trying to connect some theories together.

I sat back and let my mind race. Adam was probably right. If we were going to investigate, we needed to do it properly, and Donald’s shed was a huge question mark. We’d never been allowed to enter it. We didn’t really think anything of it at the time. Now I wondered how we’d been quite so careless. Here was a man who we’d seen doing something beyond anything we could have possibly imagined with a shed that he kept private. I remembered sitting outside the shed a few weeks ago. Maybe she’d been in that shed all along, right behind us, with Donald waiting for the perfect moment to dispose of her.

He’d stood there smiling as we tried to conjure up mysteries, letting our imaginations run wild like escaped zoo animals. And for all that time, god knows for how long, a dead girl lay a few feet away from us.

But then again, it didn’t smell. Not like it did that day in the woods, the wind pushing the rancid breeze towards our face. I clenched my eyes together and tried not to remember that stench.

After some time, Adam looked up from his action plan. ‘Maybe we should leave looking in the shed for a while and start by asking some people.’

I nodded in affirmation. ‘I think that sounds like a very wise idea, Ad. Worst case scenario, we find proof he killed the girl. Then we can go to the police and prove we solved the mystery.’

A murder mystery, solved by a twelve-year-old and a ten-year-old. Maybe they’d promote us or put us on some sort of list so that as soon as we were old enough, we’d have a job lined up as special detectives.

Adam slammed his notepad shut. ‘I think we need to go see Donald.’

I paused. ‘Are you mad? What if he knows?’

Adam waited for me to finish, ready to come back at me. ‘We spend a normal day with him. Drop some questions in about Carla. Try to find a link.’

It was risky, and it was dangerous. Maybe Adam was right, though. ‘We do need to tell Gran and Granddad where we’re going,’ I said. ‘We need to be sure they know who we’re with, in case…’

Adam threw his pen towards the bed. ‘Nothing’s going to happen, Liam. We’re gonna do this.’

I nodded. ‘Weird though isn’t it, about Carla? I mean she’s…’ I stopped myself because I realised I was shouting. The floor outside our room creaked. ‘…she’s healthy. She wasn’t even dirty or anything.’

Adam scratched at his cheek. ‘It is weird, yeah. But we need to find out more. We can’t let him distract us, y’know?’

I stared into the light above our heads. ‘Adam, I’m worried about Emily.’ I don’t know where the sentiment came from and, judging by the way Adam furrowed his eyebrows, neither did he.

‘What do you mean? What about her?’ he asked.

What did I mean? It was all just gut feeling. ‘I don’t like the way Donald said her name today. And I know it’s probably nothing, but the bruises she always has, too. Have you seen them?’

Adam shrugged. ‘Everyone gets bruises, don’t they?’

I sighed. ‘I guess so. I just… I don’t know.’

Adam reached his hand over and touched my arm. I looked up at him.

‘Don’t worry about Emily, cuz. She’s got two big, strong men to look after her.’