And look, a part of my brain pointed out, how well that’s going.

  I led Deputy Bobby down the hall and into one of Hemlock House’s many bedrooms. The house was so quiet that I could hear every noise: the rattle of the door’s old hardware, the ancient latch squeaking back, Deputy Bobby’s ragged breathing. The bedroom itself looked like all the others in Hemlock House: the damask wallpaper, the four-poster bed, the cavernous fireplace, a gilt candelabra that looked like something straight out of Castle Dracula (perfect for holding dramatically while standing on a staircase). The mirror above the dressing table caught us, and for a strange moment, everything was reversed.

  Shaking off the sensation, I carried Deputy Bobby’s bag to the bed. He trailed after me into the room, his steps soft and scuffing. “Welcome to Dashiell Dawson Dane’s bed-and-breakfast. Bathroom is through there—it’s a Jack-and-Jill, so we share it, which means remember to lock the door. We have some very important house rules, so I’m going to ask you to pay attention. First, we have a strict policy about not getting out of bed before noon. We put the bed in bed-and-breakfast.”

  Apparently, even in the depths of despair, Deputy Bobby could still roll his eyes.

  “Second, breakfast is whatever Indira is gracious enough to make. And if she decides not to make anything, we’re going to Chipper, and you’re buying me the Dash Special.”

  “It’s not really a special, you know.” His voice sounded like he was fighting for normal. “And I don’t see why you have to have all four breakfast sandwiches at the same time.”

  “Wait, someone told you about the Dash Special?”

  “Millie put it on the menu board.”

  “Oh my God.” I drew a deep breath. “Third, if you’re going to search for hidden treasure, please don’t break anything.”

  “What was it this time?”

  “Keme tried to climb a downspout.”

  Deputy Bobby rubbed his eyes, but he looked like he was trying not to smile.

  “And fourth, if you need anything—anything—please tell me.” I put my hands on my hips and said in my sternest voice, “Please.”

  He nodded.

  “I’ll get out of your hair,” I said.

  He nodded. Whatever animation had filled his face was draining away again, and he looked around the room as though still trying to take it in, his expression dull.

  “Or,” I said, “I could stay.”

  I got another nod.

  There aren’t a lot of times in my life I’ve been brave, but I think maybe this one counted. Black spots flecked my vision. It felt like somebody else was breathing through my mouth. My guts had collapsed into that black hole of whirling, sharp objects. But somehow, I managed to say, “Bobby?”

  He looked at me.

  “I’m going to stay. Just until I’m sure you’re okay.”

  Nothing. But I saw in his eyes—what? That plea again, maybe, although I didn’t know what he was asking for. A hint of panic. He began to pace, moving his way back and forth across the room. I sank onto a chaise. Springs compressed under me, groaning. The scrolled wood of the back felt cold, and my hand was slick and oily. Deputy Bobby moved from the dressing table and the backwards world inside the mirror to the fireplace. He studied the porcelain figure of a woman there. He touched the tortoiseshell lid of a trinket box. He had broad shoulders and a narrow waist, and even now, the vee of his body was strong and straight.

  “What’s going on with your parents?” he asked as he moved to study a massive oil painting of a—I want to say a stallion. (And again, I have to emphasize in Millie style: MASSIVE.)

  “What’s going on with them?” I asked. “I don’t know. I guess the usual. They don’t talk to each other. Then they talk about writing. Dad cleans his guns. Or he shoots his guns. Or he goes down to the gunsmith and talks to the guys and buys a new gun. Mom reads court transcripts or books about psychopaths or medical journals. She gets the eggs from the chickens. She checks herself into a residential treatment program.”

  Deputy Bobby jerked his gaze toward me.

  “She’s fine,” I said. “She does it almost every year. She thinks she’s going to get some dramatic inside scoop, you know? Like, uncover abuse, or meet someone who will inspire a character. That kind of thing.”

  “Does it work?”

  “God, no. The places she picks are practically spas.”

  Deputy Bobby laughed, but it faded quickly. “I meant what about your story?”

  “What?”

  “Your story. For the anthology.”

  “You already asked me about that.”

  “I know.”

  “It’s been, I don’t know, a couple of hours. It’s not like I drove home after almost being caught by the police and suddenly had the muse whispering in my ear.”

  “I meant—” He turned away again, tracing the back of a slipper chair with one hand. “Like, what do your parents say?”

  Talking about my writing always opened that black hole in my stomach, and talking about my parents and my writing was like turning those spinning blades up to ten. But I’d worked hard on not reacting to those feelings. And this was, after all, Deputy Bobby. I took a deep breath. And then another. I watched him: the way his hand followed the back of the chair, the way he angled his body away from me, the slight hunch to his shoulders. And because I’m so very, very smart, it only took me that long to realize, once again, we weren’t really talking about me.

  “Well, they haven’t said anything yet. And I really am going to try to finish that story. But I won’t. I mean, I probably won’t. And my dad will get angry and give me this gruff, manly speech about ‘digging down deep’ and ‘doing the work.’ And my mom will have a panic attack, and once that’s over, she’ll spend six weeks researching every therapist in a hundred miles and start making appointments for me.”

  The look on Deputy Bobby’s face was priceless.

  “This is why I always tell people it’s a good thing that they forget about me most of the time.” I kept my gaze on his face as I asked, “What about your parents?”

  He shook his head, and his hand stilled on the back of the chair. “They’re good people.”

  I thought I could hear the clock ticking in the hall. After what might have been a minute, I said, “They must be excited that you and West are going to move back to Portland.”

  “I guess.” Deputy Bobby gave a pained laugh. “My mom is. I mean, she loves West. Loves him. My family jokes that she loves him more than she loves me. My dad—who knows? I told you about the apartment thing, right?”

  I nodded.

  “It’s like that. Actually, that’s good, to be honest. A lot of time, it’s nothing. We don’t say anything. West and I go back to visit, and he’ll say, ‘How long are you going to be here?’ And that’s it. That’s the only thing we’ll hear all weekend. The first time I took West to meet them, West tried so hard. He kept asking questions. He was so polite. And my mom answered all the questions, no matter how hard West tried to get my dad to talk. He thought my dad was mad at him until I told him that’s how it always is.”

  When I realized he wasn’t going to say anything else, I said, “That sounds hard.”

  “It’s…it is what it is.” He shook his head. “God, if West breaks up with me, they’re going to be furious.”

  “West isn’t going to break up with you.”

  “It was bad enough in college when I told them I was gay. And they lost their minds when I told them that I wasn’t going to med school and, instead, I was going into law enforcement—and, on top of that, I was moving across the state.” His mouth twisted. “My mom lost her mind. My dad went out to the garage and didn’t come back inside until I left. If West breaks up with me, that’s strike three.”

  It was such a strange thing to say that I didn’t know how to respond. The wind batted at the panes in the old windows, swallowing the tick of the clock.

  “I just don’t know what to do,” Deputy Bobby burst out. “I don’t know what to say. I don’t know how to—I don’t know how to talk to him about it. My parents never fight. They never disagree. They never talk. But everything I do lately seems to make West angry. More than angry. And I want to say something, I want to talk to him, I want to fix it. It’s my fault. I know I can fix it.” His knuckles blanched as he gripped the back of the chair. “But I open my mouth, and it’s like—remember what you said about razor blades? It’s like that. I can’t think. I can’t talk. I can’t get a single word out of my mouth. I just freeze.” That unhappy laugh boiled up again. “But I’m talking to you, so what’s the matter with me?”

  “Nothing’s the matter with you. Talking to me isn’t the same as talking to West. With West, there’s more on the line. That’s a lot of pressure. It can be scary.”

  “I do fine with pressure. I’m under pressure all day.”

  “I know. I just mean there’s more at stake. He’s so important to you.”

  Deputy Bobby shook his head, but his hand relaxed around the back of the chair.

  “You could try writing it down,” I said. “I could help you. You could write down everything you want to say to him, and then when you’re ready to talk, you’ve got it right there. You’ll look like a total dingus, but you always look like a total dingus, so West won’t even notice.”

  His laugh was sudden and shocked. But it was also real. And for the first time in what felt like an eternity, he flashed that goofy smile at me.

  “This is why we’re friends,” I said. “I have all the best ideas.”

  “It’s a terrible idea.”

  “It’s an amazing idea. I literally solved all your problems in like fifteen seconds.”

  “You didn’t solve all my problems. You are like eighty percent of my problems.”

  “Only eighty? I need to try harder.”

  I got that goofy grin again.

  “Well?” I asked.

  It felt like a long time before he said, “Maybe.” And then, more quietly, “Thank you.”

  “How about we make a deal?”

  “Dash, I can’t eat an entire birthday cake by myself. I definitely don’t want to eat one by myself.”

  “No, that was a challenge, and only because Keme—it doesn’t matter. How about this? I’ll finish my story. Even though it’s going to mean pulling my hair out, and ripping out my fingernails, and screaming into the void as I face my total lack of talent—”

  “You’ve been spending too much time with Fox.”

  “—and you write down what you want to say to West and have a conversation with him. Explain what’s going on. He loves you. You love him. You need to work this out. Plus it makes me super sad when you’re sad. And I don’t want to be sad. I want to be happy. And full of cake. Like, an entire cake, even though Keme doesn’t think I could do it.”

  He came across the room to where I sat on the chaise, and he looked down at me. The dark bronze of his eyes looked even darker than usual because his pupils were swollen, and the angle, with me staring up at him, made it hard to read his expression. He was close enough I could feel him again, that awareness of his body like a sixth sense making the hairs on my arms stand up.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. It was like a spell breaking. I was suddenly aware of my flushed cheeks, the heat under my breastbone, the tingling hollowness of my legs. “About earlier.”

  I stared at him, unable to bring out any words.

  “Damian,” he said.

  “Oh.”

  “You were right. I was out of line.”

  I shook my head because I didn’t trust my voice.

  He crouched. He put his hands on my knees. To steady himself, maybe. Or maybe not. They felt like anchors, and the rest of me was trying to float away. He looked me in the eye and said, “You are a good friend. I want you to be happy too.”

  I listened to the rhythm of our breaths. Felt the warm weight of his hands. For an instant, he seemed to have his own gravity, and I felt myself tumbling toward him, tipping into him.

  And then he adjusted his weight, moving back a fraction, steadying himself, a hint of a self-conscious smile, like a boy wobbling while he tried to do a trick. And it was over.

  Chapter 9

  Big surprise: I didn’t sleep at all.

  I should have been exhausted. I was exhausted. Emotionally, intellectually, physically. After making sure Deputy Bobby was settled, I went to my room and collapsed.

  Instead of sleep, though, I lay there, staring up at the canopy, replaying every word of the conversation, every pause, every movement, every angle. I’d been so encouraging. I’d been so supportive. I groaned and dragged a pillow over my face. I’d offered to help him fix things with West.

  At excruciating length, I considered one important question: what in the world was wrong with me?

  Around three in the morning, though, I stopped worrying about that question because I remembered something else.

  I had promised to finish that stupid story.

  Why, I wanted to know. Why had I said that? Because it had seemed…right at the time. Because it had seemed like a show of solidarity. Because, if I peered uncomfortably into the deeper waters of my soul, it had been something I could offer him. And, of course, because it had been Deputy Bobby.

  I wailed (silently). I gnashed my teeth (careful not to chip the enamel). I got out of bed. I got back into bed. I grabbed my laptop. I put my laptop back. I decided now was the perfect time to give the bathroom a quick scrub—after all, I wanted it to be clean for Deputy Bobby.

  I had scoured three quarters of the tub when I reached the tipping point. I washed my hands, sprinted to the laptop, and started typing as fast as I could. And, an hour and a half later (not counting the two breaks I took to indulge in sweaty panic attacks), I was done. It wasn’t a long story, and I’d already drafted most of it at various stages. And because it was a short story, the premise was simple: Will Gower, a private investigator on the mean streets of Portland, Oregon, was hired to investigate the disappearance of a missing man. The only clue? An unsigned letter asking the missing man to meet at a place known only as “the eagle’s nest.” Because Will Gower knows the underbelly of the city like nobody else, he recognizes the reference: a local crime lord names all his safe houses after different birds. Will Gower rushes off, and of course, he’s dead wrong. (A poor choice of words, maybe—I mean, I can’t kill Will Gower.)

  It’s one of the oldest tricks in the mystery writer’s handbook. A piece of evidence appears to mean one thing, but it actually means something else. The deftest handling of this leads the reader to make their own misinterpretation (Christie is the master of this, of course). But even someone ham-handed like me can make it work if the protagonist knows—or thinks he knows—what the clue might mean.

  (Spoiler alert: The Eagle’s Nest is also, it turns out, the name of a café that closed years ago—and had once been where our missing man used to meet with his lover. Once Will Gower figures out this second meaning to the clue, the rest of the story falls into place, and the jilted lover confesses to murder. See? Easy peasy.)

  It might not have been a great story. It might not have even been a good story. But it had—energy, I guess. If you’ve ever picked up something and known, from the first page, that there was something there, even if you didn’t know exactly what, it felt like that. The voice was part of it; I knew Will Gower’s voice, and I knew what those dark, rain-washed streets would be like. And I liked the twist. The plot might need a little more development, maybe one more complication—

  Before I could go too far down that road, I said a hundred Hail Marys (I didn’t say any—I wouldn’t even know how to start) and I emailed my dad the file.

  The wave hit me all at once:

  Everyone was going to hate it.

  It was garbage.

  He was going to be so disappointed.

  But there wasn’t any way to unsend the email, and so, after wallowing for a while, I dragged myself to the bathroom. I finished cleaning, and then I showered and got dressed. I hadn’t heard any movement from Deputy Bobby’s room. Maybe he’d taken me seriously about the we put the bed in bed-and-breakfast thing. More likely, he was even more exhausted than I was.

  Indira wasn’t in the kitchen or the servants’ dining room, but she’d left huckleberry pancakes, and I found my stash of emergency syrup. (There’s a secret compartment, no joke, in the floor of the butler’s pantry. Intended, no doubt, for people like me, who were the unjustly targeted victims of Keme and Indira’s campaign to, quote, “not eat like you’re in the movie Elf.”)

  The pancakes were still warm, by the way. That’s real love.

  As I ate, my mind turned to Gerry’s murder. I was convinced now that it had been murder. And I suspected the murder had something to do with the blackmail Gerry had kept in his safe. I took out my phone and swiped through the photos I’d taken during those last, frantic minutes of my search with Deputy Bobby. So many names I didn’t recognize. Financial paperwork. Photos of, uh, compromising situations. Gerry had been a class act. And as I swiped, I found myself turning over, in the back of my head, what Jen had told us: Gerry’s interest in younger men. That was fine, of course, unless it became predatory. And judging by the way Gerry had pretty much groped me in public, I didn’t think Gerry was the take-no-for-an-answer type.

  I was so caught up in that train of thought that I almost missed a name I did recognize. I swiped back, zoomed in, and stared. The file was for Nate Hampton: used-car salesman and city councilor for Hastings Rock. The same man, conveniently enough, who had attacked Gerry at the surfing competition.

  It took me a few minutes of zooming in and reading the documents I’d taken pictures of to realize what I was seeing. One of the documents showed a statement for an account titled “Hastings Rock Sewage Improvement Fund.” And the second document was a statement for Nathan R. Hampton’s personal checking account. You didn’t have to be a financial genius to see the money moving into the Sewage Improvement Fund and then being transferred to Nate’s private account. Nate Hampton, who was on the city council. Nate Hampton, who had attacked Gerry at the surfing competition.