What We Saw by Ryan Casey

so confusing. But we had a case, and we would solve it. We had to.
    I looked over at Adam as he twirled his spoon in his fingers, melted cream sliding down into the bowl. He looked at Donald, but not at his eyes; he inspected his body, his hair, everywhere but his eyes. I didn’t know what Adam was thinking, but I did know it had to be to do with the case. Looking at his body language. Looking for signs.
    After a cup of tea, Donald finally left. I felt a sudden lightness as he walked out of the door. He turned round when he reached the end of our drive. ‘I hope I see you boys in the den again soon. I’ve got another chair for you. Bring Emily along too. Not seen her for a while.’
    I shuddered when he said Emily’s name. It wasn’t really the way he’d said it, not like some cartoon villain or anything like that. He didn’t whisper it out, while curling his eyebrow upwards, or anything silly. It was just the way her name escaped his mouth. The fact that he knew every little detail about us. He knew about our den and about who we hung around with. He’d even given us stuff: gifts, chairs, company. He’d taken us deep into the woods at night and let us talk to him about mysteries and ghost stories.
    If he had killed the girl, I wondered if he’d done it before our trip to the caves. I kept thinking about us sitting around that flashlight, with the moths dancing in the beam, listening to a murderer.

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