The Key Chased the Blade

Simon spent a half an hour writing things down in his sketchbook. I sat at the kitchen table staring at the wood and listening to the scratch of his pencil on the paper. He asked me questions which I answered without looking at him. After that he showed me what he had written.

He'd written down everything we had experienced with the dates and relative times. The descriptions were down to the fine details and he later added things in bullet-points what we'd need to find out.

• The murderer or group of people must have a reason to have targeted Sadie. Why her? What do we know about her?

Then he listed things from both his and my memories of her. She did track and cross country. Her mom was single and dad unknown. She was in Simon's Honors English class freshman year and dropped out sophomore year. She was in my ceramics class and actually did a good job with pottery. Her boyfriend was Tyler Marvin and he did football. Tyler has an identical twin named Alex. Tyler was friends with John except when John pulled that prank with the birds.

Simon connected the people all together with arrows. With John, there was a broken line connected to Tyler Marvin. Stemming off of John was my family and stemming off of me was Simon and his family.

• Why target me? Was I an unfortunate bystander to another crime? Or was this intentional?
---> it was probably unintentional. The person could have killed me if they wanted too, but something stopped them.

• The murderer must have a large supply of dead birds. This must mean to have traps for birds or a gun of some sort. Some implement to kill them. It didn't appear to be bloody deaths, according to Noah, so possibly used traps.

• The murderer must have a supply of rope. We need to find out, as also above, where they would get them and from who.

• Why hang a bird outside of Noah's house? Why hang them in that alleyway?

• Why kill someone under Jefferson Bridge? Why beat Sadie Amala? Why not hang her?

• Was Annie Amala's death really suicide?

"Simon," I said. "What do you mean by the last one?"

He hesitated. "It's kind of a stretch, but I really don't believe that it was suicide. It seems too strange."

I swallowed. "Okay. Lets not focus on that, though. Lets focus on the other questions. I'm going to go home and search John's room."

"What?" Simon's eyes went wide.

"Dammit, Simon, I want to find out whether or not he's a suspect for this!" My voice jumped up to a shriek. I felt stupid for doing that, but I couldn't take it back now. I was shaking. Jesus. "I'm not going to sit around while he could potentially hurt people like this!"

Simon couldn't say anything. I saw him get choked up. He didn't want to believe that John could've hurt someone either. But it made sense. John was related to Tyler, who was related to Sadie. John hung a dead bird up in someone's locker. And there was a dead bird outside my window right after we looked around Jefferson Bridge. This could all be linked to him.

"Fine." Simon's voice cracked. "I'm going to your house with you."