Death by Chocolate Snickerdoodle by Sarah Graves

Author:Sarah Graves [Graves, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kensington Books
Published: 2020-11-16T00:00:00+00:00

Eight

“Wait a minute. Perry Wilson has sisters, too?” Ellie asked that night, in a whisper. Like Billy Breyer, she meant.

“Yep,” I whispered back.

It was eight in the evening, four hours after I’d had my conversation with Bob Arnold, and we were hunched down in the weeds out behind Alvin Carter’s house.

“Two of ’em, according to Nanny Wolcott,” I said. “But I don’t see what they’d have to do with any of this. They don’t even live in Eastport anymore.”

We’d approached Alvin’s place from the rear, via a narrow trail through some undeveloped city acreage that Ellie had known about from her childhood.

And by “trail,” I mean the hilly, thorny, ankle-twisting, “low branch taking your head off” kind, not the gently sloping, gravel-paved, and clearly signposted variety, which I so strongly preferred.

Nevertheless, we struggled forward, squinching ourselves between crowded-together tree trunks and cringing away from dry bark-growing moss that felt way too much like human hair in the woodsy darkness.

“So do you think Perry was following you when you saw him at Nanny Wolcott’s place?” Ellie asked.

“I’m not sure how he could’ve been,” I said regretfully. I mean, couldn’t someone besides Billy do something that was flat-out suspicious around here for a change? But no . . . “I think he was just out walking, like he often is,” I added, “and happened to be there when I was.”

Downhill from us, Alvin’s big old white house, with its many gables, dormers, and pointy-topped turrets, rose ghostly in the gloom.

“So,” I went on, “I happened to glean some utterly useless information about him from his old teacher. That he wasn’t an only child.”

We crept cautiously out from the weeds and brush and began circling the edge of the back lawn. “And what’s this about Alvin?” she asked. “You were telling me, but then . . .”

Right. While we drove here, I’d gotten through the Perry Wilson part of my report, but once we got into the woods behind Alvin’s property, the rest of the story had been delayed by a sudden pratfall (mine), followed by a “sneaker meets exposed tree root” face-plant (also mine), and a whole lot of hoisting and helping (by Ellie, of me).

Now we sprinted down the lawn to Alvin’s porch and scampered up onto it and crouched side by side, with our backs against the clapboards under the windows.

“Jake?” she pressed. “What about . . . ?”

Yeah, Alvin, and what I’d learned from Bob. “You sure you want to hear this? It’s . . . gruesome.”

Her reply came patiently. “Jake, I’m out here with you in the dark, getting ready to trespass in a dead man’s house.”

“Good point.” I nodded. She was pretty intrepid. “You know what killed the cat, though, right?”

Speaking of which, I wanted to check on the cat we’d seen out here before. Who knew if Devon Sipp really was coming to care for it, as his mother had said?

Ellie elbowed me. “Let’s get this over with. You can tell me the Alvin thing while we’re breaking and entering.

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