“That’s insane. So the ethics teacher was sleeping with a student, who was also sleeping with a married lawyer she worked for. This has love triangle written all over it.”
“Definitely. I have proof of the affair between her and the professor, too.”
“How did you even get all that information so quickly?” I asked. Jason was pretty good at this whole “digging up information” thing. He grinned.
“I’ve got my secrets. Plus, it’s still just Portland. Trust me, when you’ve worked as an investigative journalist in New York, even Portland seems full of naïve, small town people willing to give away any information. I swear, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel.”
“We’re not that naïve,” I said, feeling the need to defend the nearest big city. “Portland is a real city. It’s like, the twenty-fifth biggest in the country, or something like that.”
“Twenty-sixth,” Jason corrected. “I looked it up.”
“Yeah, well, it might not be New York, but at least the people here are nice,” I replied, and Jason laughed.
“You’re being pretty protective for someone who’s not even from there,” Jason replied. “I like small towns. I like it here, and I like Portland. In part because the whole area isn’t full of jaded people who refuse to talk to you unless they know you really well.”
I smiled at Jason. He was such a nice person, I had trouble picturing him being a deceitful to get information.
“All right, so now you know what we know. Why don’t you come back over to our place, and we can continue this chat with Sophie and Charlotte?”
Twenty minutes later we’d finished off the coffee and cheesecake, thanked Betty once again, and headed back home. It was actually the first time Jason had been to my place. I’d always imagined his first visit to my place would have involved way more bedroom antics and way less talking about murder. But alas, it wasn’t to be. There was plenty of time for future visits to the bedroom though.
As soon as we walked in and made our way to the living room, Sprinkles ran in.
“Someone new! Pet me! Pet me! Say hello to me!” he exclaimed, running circles around Jason’s legs, who laughed, and reached down and scratched him behind the ears.
“Ahhhh yeah, that’s the spot,” Sprinkles murmured happily. I motioned for Jason to sit down on the couch while Charlotte looked up from the medical textbooks she was reading and Sophie came in from the kitchen, looking at me inquiringly.
“Jason’s been looking into Jessica Oliver as well,” I said in explanation. “I was thinking we could, you know, join forces and combine our knowledge.”
“Good idea,” Charlotte said. “Jason seems like he has a good head on his shoulders, and we all know I’m incapable of keeping you and Sophie in line. Hopefully he’ll be better at it.”
Bee was sitting on the bookshelf, watching everything silently.
“Angela brought a boy home! Ohhh, he’s meeting the family. He’s quite good looking, as well. Too good looking for you, really.”
I glared at my cat, who deftly jumped off the bookshelf and onto the floor, and made her way over. She purred contentedly as she rubbed herself against Jason’s legs, who smiled and reached down hesitantly to pet her.
“Hey, kitty,” he said. “Don’t worry, I think cats are cool. Please don’t pee on me.”
Sophie giggled into her hands as I looked on, horrified. I tried to telepathically tell Bee that if she tried anything—anything at all—to ruin this for me, she was never getting another piece of sushi for as long as she lived. I’d never been so tense. Most girls are scared when their boyfriends meet their parents for the first time. I was terrified of my boyfriend meeting my cat.
Bee purred contentedly. “That’s right, cats are cool,” she murmured, before jumping up on the couch next to Jason and rolling onto her back.
“You want Jason to rub your belly?” I asked in a sing-song voice. “You’d better be nice to him, or else,” I sang, my eyes like steel as they bored into Bee’s relaxed face.
“Don’t worry, I already like him more than I like you,” Bee replied, and I relaxed slightly as Jason scratched her stomach lightly and she purred contentedly. It seemed Bee actually did like Jason. Thank goodness for small mercies.
I caught Sophie and Charlotte up on what Jason and I had discussed at Betty’s.
“Wow,” Sophie whistled when I was done. “The most incredible thing about this to me is that there were not just one, but two men willing to sleep with that woman.”
Charlotte scowled at her. “What?” Sophie asked. “She was a terrible person.”
“You think that about everyone,” Charlotte replied.
“I have to side with Sophie on this one. Who throws a full-on temper tantrum because they didn’t get to see the specific farm animal they wanted, and then ask for their twenty-five cent donation back?” I said.
Charlotte shrugged. “She can’t have been all bad, is all I’m saying. After all, I met with someone who actually liked her yesterday.”
“So where do we go from here?” Jason asked. “We have two people who slept with her. One of them was an unmarried professor who’d had affairs with former students before, the other is a prominent, married lawyer. I think I know which one is more likely to have a motive for murder.”
I nodded. “Definitely the lawyer. But still, I think we should look at both.”
“Ok,” Jason said. “Why don’t I start looking into the professor then? Since I was the one who found out about him, so my contacts are closer, and yours are closer to the boss. We’ll see if we can scrounge up anything else about them that might lead us in the right direction, and if we find anything that points more toward one than the other, we’ll move our focus there.”
“I like it,” Charlotte said, nodding. “The logic is sound.”
“Wow,” I said to Jason. “You need to come here more often. Getting to this point would have involved at least half an hour of arguing if it was just the three of us.”
“Well, it would have obviously been way worse an idea if it came from you,” Sophie said, sticking her tongue out at me, and I rolled my eyes.
This was good. We had a plan now. We were definitely going to find the murderer.
Chapter 10
The next day, I decided to do something I hadn’t gotten a chance to do in years: I was going to actually visit the Summer of Fun Festival here in Willow Bay. Charlotte had class, and Sophie was spending the day with her boyfriend Taylor, who had the day off. I texted Jason, who turned out to be busy all morning covering an obstacle course event on the beach, but promised that he’d come and hang out with me in the afternoon. That left me with the whole morning to enjoy the festival that I hadn’t really been to since I was a kid.
I decided to walk from home, heading down toward Main Street where the bulk of the activity began. The hot sun beat down on the pavement, heating the day. With the weather report saying it was supposed to hit the low- to mid-eighties, without a single cloud in the sky, this was going to be a perfect day. I knew I was getting close when I passed a local high-school student dressed in a giant orca costume. He waved at me, and I waved back. I walked down Main Street, which was completely decked out for the festival. Colorful flowers lined the streets, which were pedestrian only during the festival. The windows of every store were decorated with summery scenes: paper flowers, window paintings of people surfing in the bay, fake suns, and more. Even the vet clinic, despite being closed for the duration of the festival, got the treatment. A high school art student had kindly come and painted little cartoon cats, dogs and other animals frolicking in a summer field on the front window. I was definitely going to keep that painting up long after the festival ended; it looked amazing. I decided to make a quick stop at Betty’s to grab a vanilla latte before continuing on. It was just after nine in the morning, and business was booming. Every table was taken, and groups of tourists and locals alike were hovering near the counter while waiting for their to-go coffees. As I placed my order and joined the throng, I suddenly heard someone call my name.