The Golden Key.

The four friends hung out at an ice cream parlour the next day. The key stayed with Yura overnight and the three friends asked her if he had any clue what the key was for.

“Just because the key was with me last night doesn’t mean it told me anything,” was Yura’s reply. The other three friends nodded and continued eating their ice cream.

“Could it be his room? Harry was a very weird kid,” Nicole suggested, widening her eyes. Augustus turned to her and squinted his eyes, wondering whether to cringe or laugh at this suggestion.

Syimmi snatched the key from Yura’s hand and examined it. “I used to date Harry once, did you guys know that?” Syimmi said abruptly, making her other three friends look at her wide eyed.

“How did we not know this?” Nicole asked.

Syimmi shrugged. “I thought I told you guys,” she glances at her friends before sighing and telling them the story.

“It was the summer of 2016. My father signed me up to help at an orphanage, as you all know. I was signed up to help out for the whole summer and to be honest, I enjoyed myself,” Syimmi paused to lick her ice cream. “So, as I helped out there, the orphanage decided to have a sale. They’d invite people over to give away things to the orphans there for free so haha, it wasn’t really a sale; it was more like stalls at the walls of the playroom, just waiting to be knocked over by the feisty orphans.

“At this ‘sale’, I met Harry Walker. Harry sold wooden dolls, figures, music boxes and things like that. We talked, chatted, I helped him out and, well, by the end of the day it was obvious that we liked each other and well, things happened.” By the time Syimmi was done with her story, the others were staring blankly at her with mouths gaped open.

“What?” Syimmi exclaimed, licking her ice cream once more. “I broke up with him before school started. It was a very short relationship I must say.”

“So d’you have any, and I mean any, idea at all where Harry might be telling us?” Yura asks desperately. Syimmi puts a finger on her chin and starts thinking.

“Hey, strangers,” A familiar voice says. The four friends turn to see Grace Smith. Grace was a classmate of theirs who worked part-time as a worker at Brown Sugar Ice Cream. The ice cream parlour’s environment had given her a forever lasting fragrance of caramel ice cream.

“Hey, Grace,” Nicole says as she flashes a smile at Grace. Grace smiles back and looks at them seriously, saying, “Have you guys heard about Harry Walker? Poor soul, wonder what caused such a thing.”

“Yvonne caused such a thing,” Augustus said, saying it in the same way Grace would’ve, with such a high pitched tone. Yura hid his grin.

“Yvonne Patterson?” Grace asked in disbelief, ignorant to Augustus’s satire. She took a seat next to Syimmi and put her arms on the table. “What did Yvonne do to cause such a thing?” Yura shortens the story and explains everything. Grace asked if they went to the funeral.

“Of course we did,” Augustus says, putting down his ice cream cup as he’d emptied it. “That was, of course, for the sake of respecting his parent’s invitation.”

“And now we think Harry’s trying to tell us something,” Nicole chips in. Grace looks at Nicole and to the rest of the friends. “Whatever do you mean?”

Syimmi hands the key to Grace. “His sister gave us a note at the funeral a few days ago, saying that it’s from Harry. It was a code and it led us to the bench he made for the city park. And under that bench, we found this key and a note,” Yura hands Grace the note and she reads it.

“Usual place of crime?” Grace asks. “Have you tried his carpentry workshop? Yvonne and I were kind of friends and she told me stories of them both doing – ahem – stuff in that workshop,” Grace blushes at the end of her sentence. The four friends sit up and look at each other.

“Syimmi, Yura, finish your ice cream,” Augustus says, picking up his car keys. “We’re going to Harry’s workshop.”

To be continued in: Betrayed.