Juanita put down her spoon. She gave Danny a look that meant This is your final warning, young man.

  “Walt, what do you mean by ‘although’?” she asked to change the subject. “You said Bob’s a good guy, although…”

  Walt sipped his coffee and shook his head.

  “What?” Juanita persisted.

  Walt frowned. “I was trying not to say anything in front of the boy. He likes Bob, and this was told to me in confidence.”

  Juanita realized her mistake, but there was no going back now. Danny would worry away at it until it came out. “What were you told?” she said.

  “OK, but this stays at this table,” he said. He looked at Juanita, who nodded, and at Danny, who gave him a “whatever” shrug.

  “You know Freddie Sessions?” Walt asked Danny.

  “No.”

  “The big guy with the handlebar mustache?”

  “No.”

  “All right, well, anyway, I was talking to Freddie—Bob wasn’t with us yesterday because he was working on his parole application—and Freddie’s just chewing the fat, you know, and we’re talking about Bob’s board meeting and Freddie says it’s a good thing the juvie record’s sealed. And I’m saying what juvie record? And Freddie says oh Bob had this bad juvie record in Alaska. He was up in Fairbanks. That was meth central even back then; anyway he did some pretty bad things.”

  “What things?” Danny asked, interested now.

  “Well, uh, don’t get too angry. He was just a kid …”

  “What things?” Danny insisted.

  “Well, some boys took a girl’s dog … a neighbor of theirs … Bob was part of the group. They tied it to some railway lines … Nasty business. It was big news up there. Reward money came in from California. They caught the kids. Bob was only fourteen, but he was the oldest, so they reckoned he was the ringleader.”

  “Bob tortured and killed a dog?” Danny asked, aghast.

  “Well, yeah, I guess,” Walt said.

  Juanita was also horrified. “I don’t want you to see him anymore, Danny. Walt, I don’t want Danny or the other kids going to that prison. I don’t know what I was thinking. I made a serious mistake.”

  Walt nodded. “I should have kept my mouth shut.”

  “No, I’m glad you told me. I made a mistake,” Juanita insisted.

  “But please don’t say anything. Freddie told me this in confidence. No one’s supposed to know about it, not even the parole board.”

  “I won’t say anything. Who am I going to talk to anyway around here?” Juanita said.

  Neither Danny nor Walt picked up on the loneliness in that remark.

  Danny got up from the table, grabbed Sunflower, his heaviest coat, a beanie, and black fleece gloves to go on over his white gloves.

  He went out and tested the air. It was so cold that morning that it stung his face but not so cold that it froze his tongue. He could skate. He went back inside and got his iPod and selected his ’70s playlist.

  He got lucky and the iPod picked Boston, Led Zep, Floyd, and Aerosmith for the ride downhill to school.

  He thought about what Walt had said about Bob Randall.

  It kind of all made sense.

  His mom and Walt couldn’t put two and two together, but he could.

  Bob tells them the cat killer is a kid to throw them off the scent and he goes out at night through the holes in the prison fence. What didn’t make sense was the motive. Why was Bob doing it? Was the compulsion to torture animals so strong that he’d risk his parole for it?

  Danny raced down the hill and skidded to a beautiful halt in front of the school gates. He was the first one there of course, before the teachers even, and he took the opportunity to skate across the playground all the way to the school entrance. He put Sunflower in his locker and walked to his detention classroom. Danny felt that he practically lived in the science classroom now. Twenty minutes before school, his classes there all day, twenty minutes after school … and he’d had to come back for parents’ night.

  It sucked.

  “Sit,” Mr. Lebkuchen said without looking up. He was doing paperwork—pink forms and blue forms that were clearly very complicated.

  Danny sat.

  “Read pages thirteen to seventeen in Scott, quietly. I’ll give you a pop quiz at the end.”

  Danny opened his geography textbook. It was a chapter on glacial landforms. It was an odd book, and Scott kept saying things like “Drumlins are a common feature of glacial deposits, though they could also have been formed in a global flood such as has been mentioned in numerous sources including the book of Genesis.”

  When he was on page sixteen, which explained that all of Long Island was a glacial deposit or possibly one of the sandbanks that Noah’s Ark had rested upon, Mr. Lebkuchen finished his paperwork and sighed heavily. Danny looked up.

  “Words, words, words. You know why people quit teaching? So much paperwork. More paperwork than teaching time. I protect my teachers from most of it, but it’s hard.”

  “Yes, sir,” Danny said.

  Mr. Lebkuchen took off his glasses and pinched his nose where they’d been resting. “How are you holding up, Danny?” he asked

  “Fine.”

  “You’re a good kid and you come from good people. Other people would have tried to sue us over that gas tap incident. Although you shouldn’t have been in there in the first place.”

  “No, sir.”

  “How does this compare to your other schools?”

  “Uh, fine.”

  “What do you like about it?”

  “You learn more and, um, I like the uniforms. You don’t have to worry about what you’re going to wear,” Danny lied.

  Mr. Lebkuchen smiled. “Oh, I’m so glad to hear you say that. That’s been one of my theories. Kids are resistant to the uniforms, but secretly it relieves them of so much stress.”

  “Yes, yes, it does,” Danny said.

  Mr. Lebkuchen’s grin widened. Danny’s arrow had hit its mark as he knew it would. In many ways, grown-ups were a lot more predictable than kids. Mr. Lebkuchen brought his fingertips together and then tapped them on the table as if he were playing a piano. He of course was also wearing the school’s standard white gloves, and today he had on a dark blue suit, with a green waistcoat, watch fob, and a checked bow tie. He looked like a children’s TV presenter from one of the wackier cable channels.

  “And I also like the environment. The quiet is good for study and learning,” Danny continued.

  Mr. Lebkuchen nodded and looked at the clock. “We have a couple of minutes to kill. Do you want that quiz or would you rather just talk?”

  “We could talk if you want.”

  “Good. So, you’re liking it here?”

  “It’s OK.”

  Mr. Lebkuchen smiled and put his glasses back on. “Las Vegas must have been exciting. How did you like it there? Is that where your mother and father met?” he asked.

  “My parents? Um, you don’t want to hear that story,” Danny said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I mean, do I have to tell you?”

  “Daniel, you don’t have to tell me. I’m just curious.”

  “OK, they both worked at the casino. Mr. Glynn’s casino on the Strip. Do you know it?”

  “I know Glynn, but I’ve never been inside a casino, not even when I lived in New York, though some of the people at Teachers College went to Atlantic City every weekend,” Mr. Lebkuchen said.

  “Well, it’s a big, newish casino on the Strip, near the Bellagio. Walt, that’s my stepdad, he had kind of drifted for a while, I guess. I don’t really know what he did. He worked a few places and got into casinos. He was a lead dealer, which is a pretty responsible job, but then he got this job escorting whales around.”

  “Whales?”

  “Yes, fat cats, wealthy gamblers. Walt has this New England accent and he’s from like Mayflower settlers and stuff. He can kind of talk a bit like a butler or something. People think it’s classy. Anyway that was his job. Seeing the whales around, making sure everything was comped, giving them a good time. But of course he blew that gig. They fired him because he was always too concerned for the whales’ well-being. Like, he was always telling the whales not to gamble so much and to go to bed early, that kind of thing. My mom was the one who actually fired him … I don’t really know how they ended up falling in love in all that stuff.”

  “And you never really knew your real father?” Mr. Lebkuchen asked.

  “No.”

  “My father died when I was young, so we’re both a little bit in the same boat,” Mr. Lebkuchen said. “Let me ask you something. If someone was making a film about your life, who would you get to play you?”

  Danny shrugged. “They wouldn’t want to make a film about my life. It’s not interesting.”

  “Of course it is!”

  “No, it isn’t. And I’m not a good character for a movie. Everybody in the movies is all big and loud. You never see movies about people who just mind their own business. You know? Unless they’re funny or something, and I’m not funny.”

  Mr. Lebkuchen seemed moved. He cleared his throat. “You’re our newest student and you’ll be leaving us in June. We’ll hardly get a chance to mold you at all.”

  “Well, at least I’ll know the capitals and rivers in South America,” Danny said.

  Mr. Lebkuchen nodded. “Yes.” And again his face assumed a faraway, melancholic expression.

  “Would you be interested in there being a tenth grade here? It’s an idea I’m batting around.”

  “That’d be awesome,” Danny lied through gritted teeth.

  The man and the boy looked at each other.

  There seemed to be a connection between them. Something that could not really be expressed in words. Something that was unsaid in a building full of unsaid things.

  Mr. Lebkuchen leaned forward and his voice dropped several decibels. “Can I tell you something? A sort of secret?”

  “Well, I don’t know,” Danny replied warily.

  Mr. Lebkuchen folded his hands in front of himself, interlinking those gloved fingers again.

  “I am not a well man, Danny. You—you don’t need to know the details, but every day for me is especially precious.”

  “You’re dying?”

  “Doctors tell me there’s a fifty-fifty chance I’ll live for another five years and about a five percent chance that I could live for another ten years. And you know, ten years is a long time when you think about it.”

  “What’s the matter with you?”

  Mr. Lebkuchen sighed. “I won’t freak you out with the boring oncological details. I probably shouldn’t have said anything. I just thought …”

  Outside they could hear kids beginning to arrive on the playground.

  Mr. Lebkuchen cleared his throat. “Let’s keep that between ourselves, if you don’t mind,” he said.

  “Sure,” Danny said.

  “You know what? You can forget about the afternoon detention from now on, but I still want you to come in the mornings. I’m enjoying these little chats and I have a sneaking suspicion that you’re enjoying them, too.”

  “Uh, yeah,” Danny lied again.

  “You go outside and join your friends and I’ll see you later, and remember …” Mr. Lebkuchen put his finger to his lips and Danny nodded.

  “Oh and before you go, here’s that book of poems you wanted,” Mr. Lebkuchen said, handing Danny The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Basho.

  “Oh gee, thanks,” Danny said, and went outside.

  Interesting developments.

  Mr. Lebkuchen had given him a book and had trusted him with two interesting pieces of information: first that he was probably running some kind of illegal Bible-study group within the school and second that he had some kind of terminal disease. This was not the sort of information you gave to a teenage boy—certainly not a misfit newly arrived from Vegas. But Danny knew he was not going to do anything with it. He wasn’t going to blab—not to Tom and his little group of Watchers, nor to his mom, and probably not even to Tony. Principal Lebkuchen was one of those rare adults who put their faith in children, and Danny liked that. He couldn’t bring himself to like the man, but he liked that.

  He saw Tom and Cooper on the playground discreetly text-talking. They were probably having an argument about realism in The Matrix.

  Danny would have groaned if he had been allowed to groan.

  Instead, he avoided them.

  Avoided everyone.

  Didn’t speak.

  Said his lines in class.

  Ate his lunch.

  Mr. Lebkuchen didn’t look at him, didn’t give him special treatment, corrected him severely when he veered off script in the DI literature book.

  He clock-watched until three thirty, and because he no longer had afternoon detention he raced outside to intercept Tony on her walk home, but she’d already gone on with a group of other kids, including Charlie and Hector. They were all going downhill in the direction of Manitou Springs. “Tony!” he wanted to yell, but he was way too self-conscious.

  They were a good bit ahead, and Tony was laughing at something Hector had said.

  Suddenly it seemed the most important thing in the world to Danny that he talk to her. He’d have to risk a shortcut. He started running across the frozen pond.

  In some dark recess of his brain, he knew the ice was going to crack.

  Perhaps he wanted it to crack.

  In either case, crack it did.

  A huge fissure splitting between his legs.

  He’d seen a film once where a boy fell into a frozen lake and a current took him up under a clear piece of ice. Everyone tried to break through the ice, but it was too thick and they’d watched, horrified, as he’d drowned in front of them.

  That film had freaked him out for weeks, and now it all came racing back.

  “Help me!” Danny screamed. “Help me!”

  Tony and her friends stopped to look at him. The crack was widening. His backpack would sink him straight to the bottom, he thought, so he took if off and yelled again.

  “I don’t really swim!” he called out.

  Tony walked across the frozen pond toward him.

  “No, go back! Call the cops, you’ll go under too!”

  But she kept walking until she was a few feet from him.

  “Are you trying to be funny?” she said.

  Danny shook his head, terrified.

  “It’s grass under here,” she said. “This is Cobalt Common.”

  “Grass? It’s not a pond?”

  “No,” she muttered, and walked back over to Charlie and Hector.

  Swallowing his embarrassment, Danny picked up his backpack and ran to catch up with her.

  “Drift, small guy,” Hector said, like he’d heard someone say in a movie.

  Danny laughed at him. “You wanna take me on? Without Todd? I don’t think so,” Danny said, hoping the bravado would cover his embarrassment. “Tony, I gotta talk to you.”

  “She doesn’t want to talk to you,” Hector insisted.

  “I can tell him myself,” Tony said, furiously removing Hector’s arm, which had somehow crept up onto her shoulder.

  “I just need one minute. It’s important,” Danny said.

  “OK, one minute,” Tony replied.

  “In private,” Danny insisted.

  Tony walked him to a massive pine tree that looked like it had been at the corner of Manitou and Alameda for a thousand years.

  “What?” she said when they were out of earshot.

  “First of all, thanks for saving my life. Never wanted to die plunging into grass,” Danny said.

  Tony laughed and, seizing the moment, Danny said, “I was wrong about your dad. He’s got no motive. Unless he’s crazy. And you would know if he was crazy, right? Although the BTK killer’s family didn’t know he was a serial killer … Still, that’s not really relevant here,” Danny said.

  Tony’s hands were on her hips. “This is your apology?”

  “No. No, it’s not. I’m sorry. I was wrong about your dad. Probably. Anyway, I think I know who the real killer is.”

  “Who?”

  “Bob Randall.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Bob. Bob from the prison.”

  “What?”

  “My dad’s friend … I mean, Walt’s friend … another convict told him that Bob has a teenage record of animal abuse. He tortured dogs and cats. It’s him, I know it.”

  “How?”

  “Think about it: the holes in the fence. He comes through the holes, kills the cats, sneaks back into prison. It’s perfect. He has the perfect alibi. He’s locked up in prison!” Danny said breathlessly.

  “Why would he do a thing like that?”

  “He can’t help himself.”

  “But he helped us.”

  “No. He didn’t. He was just trying to throw us off the scent. Remember that picture in his room? Hunters in the Snow? That’s him, a hunter in the snow … literally. It all fits!”

  Tony’s nose wrinkled up in that way Danny found almost maddeningly attractive. She thought for a moment. “You may have something here,” she said finally.

  “I do have something! Do you think we should take it to Tom and the others?”

  “Maybe. Hmm … I kind of wasn’t speaking to you and I was avoiding them,” Tony muttered.

  “Is everything OK over there?” Hector called.

  “Yeah, fine,” Tony said.

  “One thing puzzles me, though,” Danny said.

  “What?” Tony asked. Her eyes twinkled in the winter sun. She was beautiful. How could he have even thought that Olivia was the better-looking of the two girls? He must have been crazy.

  Tony poked him in the ribs.

  “What?” he said.

  “You were saying that one thing puzzled you …”

  “Oh yeah. How does he know what houses to break into? There’s what, five hundred houses in Cobalt? How many people have cats? You can’t just go around breaking into houses, you know, at random. Especially if you’re like Cinderella and you have to get back into jail by dawn.”

  Tony shook her head. “I’ve already figured that one out. The um, the rules of the town … What are those things called? The something laws?”