Nate’s eyes had faintly blue shadows under them, matching his faded T-shirt.

“Yeah,” he said, sitting down on the floor and tucking up his knees. “Maybe it’s time we all compared some notes.”

“What have you two not been telling me?” Janelle said, flicking her gaze between them.

“You go,” Nate said. “I can’t start this.”

Stevie took a deep breath and ruffled her hair. It was getting too long. Everything was messy.

“David is Edward King’s son,” she said.

This took Janelle a moment to process, her sunset eye winking and widening.

“David?” she said. “Is the son of . . . the politician? The guy running for president? The one your parents work for? That guy?”

“Yup,” Stevie said. “They don’t get along. I found out the morning after Ellie disappeared. He came on campus.”

“You don’t look surprised,” Janelle said to Nate.

“I found out the other night.”

“It’s not something I could tell people,” Stevie said. “I wanted to. But no one is supposed to know. I guess it could be a security problem.”

“So Edward King really did pay for that security system?” Janelle asked. “That’s not a rumor? I thought Vi was wrong.”

“There’s more,” Stevie said. “He brought me back here. That’s how I got back to school. He convinced my parents. He did it because he thought if I came back David would calm down. Now, there’s this.”

She pulled over Janelle’s computer and opened up Hayes’s channel to play them the video of David’s beating. She had seen it with the sound off. It was worse with the soundtrack, with David goading them on. It was painful to see the blows landing on him, the way he smiled up and said something else that begged for more.

There were sixty thousand views now.

“What in the hell is he doing?” Janelle said. “That boy is not okay.”

Nate turned to Stevie slowly.

“What she said,” he added.

“He paid someone to do that,” Stevie said. “And then he told me he wasn’t coming back.”

“Okay.” Janelle’s tone suggested that she didn’t need to see any more. She pushed herself up from the floor and addressed them both from a standing position. “You know I don’t love him, but you need to tell someone what’s going on. Now.”

“Unless he’s bluffing?” Nate said. “Do you think he’s bluffing? Maybe he’s messing with you?”

“I didn’t get the feeling he was,” Stevie said. “He paid someone to beat him up. He put the video up on Hayes’s page, which he hacked into. That’s deliberate, and weird. He’s doing something, but I can’t figure out what.”

“Destroying our lives,” Nate said.

“It does not matter,” Janelle said. “He paid someone to beat him up. That’s not good. Hayes is dead. Ellie is dead. No one else in this house gets hurt. You tell someone. Tell Pix. Do it now.”

Janelle was right, of course. Telling someone was the right thing to do. What David had just done was deeply disturbing. But in his eye there was something solid. He was doing this to an end. He had been hurt, but not so hurt. And putting it on Hayes’s channel was sending some kind of message, if only she could read it.

Janelle was still right.

“I’ll tell Pix,” Stevie said. “About the punching and that he’s not coming back. Not about his dad. But the next thing that happens is that I’m going to get pulled out of school.”

“You don’t know that,” Janelle said.

“I do,” Stevie replied. “David’s not okay, so the deal is off.”

“We’ll fix that,” Janelle said. “That’s not Edward King’s call. We’ll help you. But now, we tell Pix. And the three of us? No secrets anymore.”

“No secrets,” Stevie said.

“One exciting thing,” Nate said. “This is definitely all worse than writing my book.”

22

STEVIE WAS DREAMING. THE CONTENT OF HER DREAM WAS JUMBLED. She was walking the streets of Burlington, down the same path she had been walking with David, and someone was yelling, “They’re pulling people out of the lake!” So Dream Stevie ran down to the waterfront, to where she first met Fenton, and saw dozens of bodies being pulled from the lake. But they weren’t dead. They flopped like fish on the waterside. All of these flopping human bodies. Someone came up behind Stevie, but she did not turn. She heard a voice whispering to her, a girl’s voice, but she could not make out the words. Something in her told her it was Dottie Epstein, and if she turned, Dottie would disappear. So she kept her eyes on the flopping-fish people on the dock, trying to make out Dottie’s words.

Then, the phone.

“Did I wake you?” Edward King said.

Stevie pushed herself up in bed and rubbed at her eyes furiously. Her computer was open on her lap, still on the Websleuths forum page she had been reading when she fell asleep. That was something she did to relax when things got too much. She squinted at it through the sleep in her eyes. It was seven minutes after seven.

“No,” she lied.

“I did. My apologies for calling so early. We have a vote on the floor in two hours and I have several meetings before that.”

The call was destined to come, of course. She had expected it soon after she told Pix, who took the news of David’s beating and escape with a grim resolution. She had lost two students; that another was gone was more weight on an already crushing load. Stevie delivered the news and got into bed with her computer and stayed there.

The strange thing was, she had gotten such a good night’s sleep. For the first time in longer than she could remember, there was no worry of anxiety coming for her in the night.

“Are you there?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said, trying to keep the morning croak out of her voice.

“Good. Now, there was a video that posted yesterday evening. I assume you saw it?”

“Yes.”

“It’s not my favorite video, Stevie. We had an agreement. I can’t help but think you aren’t keeping up your end of it.”

“What do you want me to do, exactly?” she said.

“That’s up to you. You were a possible solution to the issue. If this solution isn’t working, I will find another. I suggest you talk to him.”

There was no point in arguing, as much as she wanted to.

“Anything else?” she said.

“No. I will be checking in this time tomorrow. Good-bye.”

“He’s fine, by the way,” she said.

Edward King hung up.

She felt an odd sense of clarity. The clock would strike. Every day counted, and every hour of every day. This time, right now, in the cool of an Ellingham morning, was the most precious thing she had.

She ejected herself from bed (points for effort), yanked off her fuzzy pajama bottoms, and replaced them with a nearly identical pair of gray sweatpants. No shower. The old T-shirt she was wearing (one of her favorites—something she dug out of a box of old crap in the attic) would do. Yes, she still smelled a bit of night funk, but that was fine.

Sometimes detectives smell like night funk.

She snatched up her backpack and put in all she could anticipate needing: phone, charger, computer, tablet, a flashlight. One of her favorite true-crime authors who was trying to solve a murder case from the seventies would do everything she could to immerse herself in the time and the place. Stevie had read that she would make playlists of all the songs that would have been on the radio at the time of the murders, and then she would drive around those neighborhoods listening to those songs to finely tune her mind to the atmosphere. Because it all mattered, she said. You had to feel it, to understand it in every way you could, to get inside of it—and the thing might take over, it might try to rule your life, but it was your case to solve.

She found a 1930s online station and shoved in her earbuds.

The morning was apple-crisp. The air cleaned the body from the inside, scraping out the lungs, pumping cold life into the arteries. (Not veins. Veins return deoxygenated blood to the heart. The arteries were carrying this, swinging up the arch of the aorta, shooting up the carotid, giving her brain all the delicious oxygen candy it wanted.) She turned on the music, and a low swinging sound pumped into her ears. She walked in time with it, letting her foot hit the stones of the path with each beat. Become it. Tune into it. Go back in time through the air, the rhythm.