After those changes, it actually wasn’t terrible. I mean, it did the job. But was rust really the right word? Maybe it should have been rusting metal? Or more vivid—maybe smelled like his grandparents’ garage, where they’d kept a rust-eaten Plymouth that had been full of moths. Okay, I actually liked the image of the moths billowing out of the old Plymouth, so maybe just one more change—

  But I stopped myself. This wasn’t the right moment in the story—the focus needed to be here and now, not on the past. In the next chapter, maybe, when he was remembering the blood, he could associate it with the old Plymouth, with his first, startled discovery when a cloud of moths came pouring out of the old car.

  Finally, I made myself text Hugo: ?

  His text came back a moment later: There’s my guy.

  I couldn’t help but grin; there were a lot of things that hadn’t worked in my relationship with Hugo, but he was a great writer, and there was something so…reassuring about having his approval. It was one of the reasons I’d agreed to write this story with him—Hugo knew how to handle me when I got tangled in my own thoughts, and he knew how to cut through the nonsense and get me back on track. (At least, most of the time.)

  Then the next text came through: When did we change his name to Bobby?

  Fortunately, texts don’t automatically pick up your brain waves and translate them into words. Otherwise, Hugo would have gotten a message that looked something like this: uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

  It was easier to fix the problem than to examine it too closely. I went back and changed the name to Dexter; that’s what we’d been calling our ex-Army gumshoe. Then I sent a text that said: Sorry, I don’t know what happened there.

  The silence on Hugo’s end lasted almost a full minute before he replied, Okay.

  Another message came through a moment later: Ready to keep going?

  Oh. Right. The story.

  I turned my attention to the screen, trying to remember what we’d discussed would happen next, but my brain kept flashing back to Bobby’s name slipping out of my fingertips, and Bobby standing in the half-moon of the apartment building’s porch light, and Hugo’s silence until that single, horrible Okay.

  I’ve spent a lot of my life wishing for catastrophes—you know, spontaneous sinkholes, an unexpected meteorite through the head (was it a meteor or a meteorite? I should definitely look that up), even something as banal as a heart attack. But, of course, those things never happened when you needed them. (Being abducted to be the bride of Sasquatch was my recent favorite, but believe it or not, the big hairy brute had never once crashed through the window and carried me off at an opportune moment. Not even the time Keme walked in when I was opening my new underwear. And I don’t care what he tells you, they do make superhero-themed underwear for adult men.)

  So, it was a tremendously gratifying surprise when something crashed upstairs.

  I dashed—yikes!—off a text to Hugo that said, Hold on, emergency, and sprinted out of the den.

  In the upstairs hall, I paused to listen. Sounds came from Bobby’s room, and it took me a moment to recognize what I was hearing: something being dragged over a rug.

  Since moving into Hemlock House, I’d had an unexpectedly high number of unwanted visitors—usually people who wanted to kill me. I guess that came with the territory of being an amateur sleuth, so I should have expected it, but let me tell you: it put a real damper on surprise parties. It also made me wary of investigating sounds I didn’t recognize. I did a quick mental rundown: Keme would never have gone in Bobby’s room without permission (in contrast to my room—see the story above), and neither would Millie or Fox or Indira. For that matter, as far as I knew, nobody else was home. Indira had gone to the farmer’s market, and Bobby was working.

  So, who was in his room?

  Hugo.

  No, I told my brain. That would make for a great twist if my life were a particularly soap-opera-y mystery novel, but it definitely wasn’t Hugo.

  Unfortunately, I didn’t have any other flashes of inspiration.

  I did, however, have a way to find out without barging in on a potential killer.

  Here’s a quick rundown on Hemlock House: it’s big, it’s beautiful, and it was built by a crazy man. All three of those statements are pretty much objective facts. Hemlock House was a sprawling manor that, by my best guess, had started off with a Georgian floor plan and then evolved through several phases until it had all the best Victorian eccentricities. It had damask wallpaper and parquet floors and chandeliers and fireplaces and so many oil paintings of horses. It had a LOT (in Millie-speak) of taxidermy animals, and if you looked closely, you could find a hedgehog smoking a pack of Lucky Strikes. It had bone china and silver mirrors and mantel clocks that every mystery writer dreams of turning into a murder weapon. And—to my eternal delight, because I’m a thirteen-year-old boy at heart and have never grown up—it was riddled with secret passages.

  One of which I’d discovered when I’d been, uh, monitoring Keme.

  (Monitoring sounds better than spying on, and, to be fair, Keme did need adult supervision, whether he believed it or not.)

  A section of paneling in the servants’ staircase opened easily when I pressed the catch hidden in one of the stiles. I slipped through the opening into a dusty hallway. For a moment, I worried about tipping my hand by leaving footprints; Keme didn’t know I knew about this space, and I didn’t want him to feel like I’d invaded his privacy. At the same time, he was a minor, and he slept here more often than he did at home—wherever home was, since Keme refused to tell me anything about that part of his life. And we (the rest of us) all agreed that, in spite of Keme’s independence, he still needed, well, help. My fears about being caught didn’t last long, though; Keme had tracked back and forth so many times that he’d cleared a path down the center of the secret passage, and my own steps wouldn’t be visible.

  I hurried down the narrow passageway—in some sections, the walls came so close together that I had to turn sideways to proceed. I passed an opening onto a small, octagonal room that was the top of one of the old house’s turrets. Leadlights on each wall allowed a surprising amount of light into the space, making it feel open and airy despite its low ceiling, and I imagined it would be beautiful at night, too, looking out at the trees and the stars. The last time I’d snooped around back here, the turret room had been empty. Now, a sleeping bag was stretched out next to a bag of animal crackers, a physics textbook, and two different flashlights (one small, and one big). I stood there for a moment, my original mission forgotten. He’d been sleeping up here. Alone. With nothing but flashlights and a sleeping bag and the hard floor.

  Okay, it was official. I was a terrible human being. Keme deserved better than this. The problem, though, was that Keme was fiercely independent—emphasis on the fiercely. I wanted to make things better for him. I just had no idea how to do it without alienating him completely.

  But that was a problem to agonize over in the immediate future; right now, I had an intruder to catch.

  I continued down the passage. After a few more yards, it turned; dusty windows gave glimpses of the back of the house: the twisted hemlocks, the waves breaking against the cliffs, and the stretched-out gray of the sea like a rumpled tarpaulin. The passageway seemed even darker after that glimpse of the outside world, and it only got darker as I moved farther away from the windows.

  I passed a set of peepholes that, I knew from previous experimentation, allowed someone to look into my bedroom. (I’d addressed this problem by moving the tallboy to block them.) The next set of peepholes looked into the bathroom. (Yuck. It was the kind of thing that made it hard to feel sorry for Nathaniel Blackwood; I was starting to suspect that the creep who had built Hemlock House had deserved to be pushed from the balcony by his child-bride.) And the next set looked in on Bobby’s room.

  In theory.

  I mean, I wasn’t enough of a creep to try them out and risk violating his privacy. And although I was now realizing that I probably should have told him about the peepholes as soon as I discovered them, at the time it had seemed like a nonexistent problem—I mean, if only Keme and I knew about this part of the house, then it wasn’t an issue.

  Now, as I slid open the peepholes, I was starting to suspect that however the next few minutes unfolded, Bobby was going to have…questions.

  The peepholes were centered on one of the long walls of Bobby’s bedroom, and they gave a surprisingly good view of the space. As usual, it was neat and clean to a degree that suggested military precision. (Not that Bobby had ever been in the military, by the way—he’d just picked up some of those undesirable habits like daily exercise, respect, and, uh, manliness?) What was less usual was the blond boy who was currently rifling Bobby’s nightstand.

  Boy, I realized on a second look, might not technically be accurate. After a longer look, I pegged him somewhere in his early twenties. He had creamy skin, a mop of blond hair, and thin eyebrows that were a darker blond than the hair on his head. A narrow jaw made his face interesting rather than classically handsome. He wore a cardigan with a tee and jeans, which wasn’t exactly traditional cat burglar attire, but that didn’t slow him down as he pulled the topmost drawer out of the nightstand and dumped it into a cardboard box. Then, without missing a beat, he grabbed the cardboard box and started toward the door at a jog.

  I scrambled down the hall to the secret door that led into Bobby’s room. On my side, it looked more or less like a standard door, with slightly unusual dimensions. But the other side, which faced the bedroom, was a mirror in a gilt frame. Which, I assume, made it even more dramatic when I flung the door open, jumped out of the secret passage, and picked up the closest thing at hand—based on a brief fling with historical fiction, I was fairly sure it was a coal scuttle—and shouted, “Stop! Thief!”

  The young guy’s head whipped around, and he ran straight into the door. The box he was carrying flew into the air, and he stumbled backward. Then he fell. Then he did this weird, backward half-somersault. And that’s how he ended up on the floor, staring up at me, with a bloody nose. In a dazed voice, he mumbled, “You must be Dash.”

  “Uh, yes?”

  (I know. It wasn’t supposed to be a question.)

  But the fact that he seemed to know me and didn’t appear to be trying to run away (didn’t even appear to be trying to sit up) made it hard to stay amped up. Just for good measure, though, I brandished the coal scuttle and asked, “Who are you?”

  Pinching the bridge of his nose with one hand (apparently, he was an experienced nose-bleeder), he sounded slightly nasal as he extended one hand. “Kiefer Smith.”

  Uh oh.

  In that instant, I realized why he (now, too late) looked slightly familiar—because this was the same guy I’d seen Bobby with outside the apartment building the night before.

  “Oh my God,” I said and bent down to help him.

  And, in the process, I managed to almost clobber him with the coal scuttle.

  “Oh my God,” I said again, and after ditching the scuttle, I tried again. “I’m so sorry. Are you okay?”

  He had a bewildered smile as he let me help him into a sitting position. “I ran into a door.”

  “I know. Oh my God.” That was three times, and the writerly part of my brain suggested that was enough. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you—well, I mean I did, but not because—I mean, I didn’t know it was you—I mean, I knew it was you because I saw you, but I didn’t know who you were—” I could hear myself unspooling verbally. But when I stopped, the only thing I could come up with was “Oh my GOD!”

  (Millie would have been proud.)

  Kiefer only laughed, though. It was wet and, yes, a bit nasal because of the bloody nose, but it sounded surprisingly free of rancor. “It’s okay. It’s my dumb fault for not watching where I was going. Do you have a tissue? Bobby’s going to kill me if I ruin this rug.”

  I caught myself about to explain that Bobby didn’t care about rugs. Bobby didn’t care about floor coverings of any kind, although he was really proud of the new bath mat he’d purchased. (He seemed to think that it was a real coup that he’d found one made of memory foam, which only further supported my theory that Bobby was a straight guy who had been switched at birth.) Instead, I hurried into the bathroom and got the whole box of tissues.

  Kiefer accepted them with a smile and wadded them against his nose.

  That was when I noticed the red mark on his forehead. At this point, I figured I might as well give into it, and I blurted, “Oh my God.”

  “Huh?”

  “Your head!”

  He touched his forehead, winced, and gave another smile. “Doesn’t feel broken.”

  “Kiefer, I am so sorry.” And then, before I could stop myself, I asked, “What were you doing?”

  “Please don’t tell Bobby.”

  I hadn’t been expecting that. “Tell him what?”

  “It was supposed to be a surprise.” But the real surprise was when the tears started. “He’s going to be so mad.”

  Which didn’t make any sense because Bobby didn’t get mad. I mean, sure, he wasn’t thrilled when you told him you were going to do your writing for the day, only you had to use the bathroom, and then you needed a snack to keep your blood sugar up, and when he came back from his run, you were up to your ears in Indira’s Black Forest cherry cake. And he definitely didn’t like it if you got yourself accidentally, unfortunately, totally by chance caught up in a murder investigation, even if it wasn’t your fault. Like, at all. But angry? That wasn’t a word that came to mind when I thought of Bobby Mai.

  Before I had to press for answers, words spilled out of Kiefer. “I just wanted to help him, you know. And I thought it would be cute to spend our first night there together, even if it was, you know, kind of rough.”

  He tentatively peeled the tissues away from his nose. They were crimson where they’d soaked up his blood, and his nose looked puffy. His eyes were still watery with some mixture of tears and pain, and I thought again that he looked like a boy. I looked at the box that he’d dropped and noticed, now, what had fallen free: Bobby’s phone charger; his earbuds; his clock; a bottle of hand lotion. Everything, my brain registered, from his nightstand.

  “Your first night together where?” I asked.

  Kiefer wasn’t looking at me. He dabbed at his nose with the tissues and gave an experimental sniffle. “Our new apartment.”

  I didn’t remember sitting down, but my butt was on the floor, and I was staring at him, watching him study the bloody tissues as though they contained some kind of mystery. The crash of the waves was distant and rhythmic. Goose bumps broke out on my arms, and from a long way off, I remembered that Hemlock House could feel cold even at the height of summer.

  A door shut in the distance, and then familiar footsteps rang out on the stairs. I sat where I was. It was like a horror movie. Or like a nightmare. All I could do was listen as the steps came closer: firm, confident, measured. Move, I thought. Or tried to think. But my head felt empty except for the crash and sigh of the waves.

  The door opened, and Bobby stood there. He was dressed in his uniform. His black hair was in its usual perfect part. That first moment was one of the rare times I’d seen Bobby off balance, and I thought I glimpsed something in his expression that I didn’t know how to read. And then his face closed again, and he crouched next to Kiefer.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  Kiefer launched into an explanation that didn’t really explain anything. It mostly consisted of grabbing Bobby’s arm and struggling with tears as he lurched back and forth through the sequence of events.

  When he’d finished, Bobby looked at me.

  “I thought someone had broken in,” I said. And a nasty little voice inside my head said that someone had broken in—and that someone was right here. “I checked—” I gave a wave toward the still-open mirror door that I hoped would explain, nonverbally, the concept of secret passage. “—and I thought he was stealing your stuff.”

  Bobby’s gaze moved to the fallen box and his personal items strewn across the floor.

  “I thought it would be cute—” Kiefer began.

  “He thought it would be cute,” I said over him, “if you spent your first night together at your new apartment.”

  If you didn’t know Bobby, you wouldn’t have noticed his flinch.

  “Please don’t be mad,” Kiefer babbled. “It was a stupid idea, and I thought it would be fun, and I never should have done anything without asking you. I know I shouldn’t have touched your stuff—”

  Bobby shushed him and spoke into the flow of words, stopping them with his usual calm. “I’m going to get you some ice for your nose.” And then he paused, as though to give the next sentence its own weight, and said, “I’m not angry.”

  Kiefer was crying again, trying to catch the tears with the bloody tissues. Bobby let out a controlled breath and plucked clean ones from the box.

  “I’ll get it,” I said. Somehow, my legs were still working, and I got to my feet. “I’ll get the ice.”

  “No,” Bobby said.

  But too late.

  He caught up with me on the stairs. “I’ll take care of this,” he said. “I’m sorry he interrupted your writing.” He let out another of those controlled breaths. “And I’m sorry he frightened you. I know you’ve had bad experiences with people breaking into the house—”