Hide & Seek - Alyssa Brugman [24]
She drew a short vertical line at the beginning. 'I fed Diablo on Good Friday. He was definitely there then!' Next to her mark she wrote, 'Last seen by SS @ 4.45 pm.'
Her mother scraped some vegetables from the cutting board into a saucepan. 'We know he was gone on Easter Saturday morning when you went in to give him his breakfast. What time was that?'
Shelby drew another mark in the timeline and wrote, '7.30 am – gone!'
'Then I saw him in the stable at the Equus Caballus place today at about three thirty.' She drew a new mark at the end of the timeline and wrote, 'Tuesday 3.30 pm – Found'.
'Now we just need to figure out what happened in between,' her mother said.
Shelby threw the piece of chalk in the air and caught it. 'How do we do that?'
'Interview people. Find out if anyone saw anything suspicious.'
'Marie and Shelby Shaw – Private Investigators on the case!' Shelby grinned.
'Don't tell people that you're investigating a case, Shel,' her mother said as she looked in the fridge for the next ingredient.
'Why not?'
'Because people will either make things up, because they want to be helpful, or they will withhold information because they have a guilty conscience, or because they decide that what they saw is not impor-tant, when in context it's actually significant. Worse still, they will make things up and lie about real things, and then you're worse off for talking to them than if you hadn't.'
Shelby blinked. 'But why would people do that? Why don't they just tell the truth?'
'Very few things people say are about truth, Shelby,' her mother told her.
'You're saying I should lie to people to stop them lying to me.'
'No.' Her mother sighed. 'I don't want you to sneak around, or spy on people – just ask questions. If you can find out what happened – the bare facts of the case – you might be able to help resolve a dispute between your friends, but it's possible that you may not get to the bottom of it, honey.'
Shelby frowned thinking. 'Like hide and seek.'
'What do you mean?' asked her mother.
'When you play hide and seek one person's job is to hide and the other person has to find them. We're playing the same game except with the truth, and they don't know we're playing, so that makes it easier – like how easy it would be to find someone in hide and seek if they weren't actually hiding.'
'Except, of course, if someone really does have something to hide then they would be playing the game,' her mother said, rinsing the chopping board.
'I think I get it now,' Shelby smiled.
Her mother divided the meat into portions. 'An operation like this needs a name. What shall we call it?
'Operation Diablo?' suggested Shelby.
'That might be a bit obvious. How about we look on the internet and see if there is a word that means the same thing as Diablo, but other people wouldn't know what that is?'
'Can we have code names?'
'Code names are essential!' her mother answered. 'But first you have to finish peeling those spuds.'
'I thought you might have forgotten about that.'
'Not much escapes me, Shelby.'
While the meal was cooking they looked on the internet and decided on 'Operation Beelzebub' and their code names were 'Cherub' for Shelby, and 'The Seraph' for her mum.
After dinner Shelby sat at her desk and wrote a list of people she needed to interview. She decided to start with Erin. They had a Science assignment to do over the holidays, so she could use that as her cover story for ringing.
'Have you started your assignment?' Shelby asked when Erin answered the phone.
'Are you kidding?' Erin answered.
'Neither have I,' confessed Shelby. 'So how do you reckon those people stole Diablo?' Shelby held her pen over the notepad, ready to record any information that might be useful.
'I've been thinking about that,' replied Erin. 'During the storm, those circus people ran across the Gully, knocked down the back fence, ran up to Diablo's enclosure, took him,