What We Saw by Ryan Casey Page A

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,