Page 88 of Monster's Mystery

Suddenly, I was looking at the academy from the outside. It was dark. The front doors slammed open and a student I recognized as Richard stormed down the steps.

He walked out of my peripheral vision, and I couldn’t change the angle I was viewing.

Of course not.

The statue couldn’t move her head.

I thought that would be the end of it, but remembered that his body had been placed on the steps, so I settled in to wait. There was no way of fast-forwarding a memory that I could tell, and I was already counting myself fortunate for having found the correct day on my first attempt. Possibly it was because Clarissa was so willing, or perhaps because she wanted to find the identity of the murderer as much as the rest of us. Memory work was tricky and not enough study had been devoted to it.

“What’s going on?” I heard Aiden’s voice as if he were talking in another room.

“I’m waiting to see who brings the body back,” I replied. “I think—” I cut myself off abruptly, as a figure appeared in the corner of my vision. It was struggling with something heavy. I leaned closer, trying to see what it was, but the grassy area in front of the school was too shadowy.

Not so the stairs though.

The figure was lugging a body.

“Come on,” I whispered. “Turn around. Let me see your face.” I crossed my fingers.

It was definitely a man, I decided. He was thin, not very well built, but definitely male-shaped. He dropped the body halfway up the stairs and sat beside it for a moment, putting his face in his hands.

“He seems sad,” I said. “I think he might regret what happened.”

“Who is it?” Una demanded.

I held out my hand.

And the man looked up, directly into the statue’s face. His lips moved for a moment, and then he got to his feet and walked down the steps, vanishing in the next instant.

I had seen enough, though. I knew who had killed Richard.

I marked the memory with a beacon so that it could be found again, and gently withdrew from Clarissa’s forest.

She and I stared at each other, the only ones who had seen the vision.

“I know him,” she whispered.

I nodded, even though it hadn’t been a question. I felt sick. “We have to tell someone,” I said.

“He helped save me,” she said.

“And he killed someone else,” I countered.

“Who is it?” Bruce asked, his voice shaking.

“Geoffrey,” I said.

A shocked silence rippled around the small group of us.

“What about me?” a timid voice said from the hall.

It was almost funny how everyone whipped around to face the voice.

Bruce was the fastest to recover, sending a binding spell to wrap around Geoffrey and immobilize him.

“Brom, Lilia, please go get Professor Dunlop,” Bruce said calmly.

Geoffrey’s face blanched. “What’s going on?”

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