“Hey, Murder Girl,” he said. “How’s the case going? Got any perps? An unsub? How are your perps and unsubs? Am I doing it right? Perp? Unsub? Suspect?”

Stevie clenched her jaw. You could trip her. You could kick her in the shin. She could handle those things. But no one was allowed to go after her mysteries. That cut right into her.

“You know,” Stevie said, “in a murder mystery, you’d end up dead.”

He smiled wider and nodded. His body was . . . ropy. Like the word from the Truly Devious letter. He was long and thin and was probably strong. He seemed to be made of knots.

“What do you want?” she said, speeding up.

“I’m just walking this way,” David said. “We live in the same place. What’s the problem?”

“No problem.”

“Oh, good.”

They passed the cluster of statue heads on the way to Minerva. It was a weird landmark on the way home. Stevie was getting used to the statues, but this head-only grouping was still off-putting. It seemed like they were in the middle of a conversation and had stopped talking as strangers walked by.

“So Ellie was telling me about your conversation from the other day,” he said.

“What conversation?” Stevie said. She’d had several conversations with Ellie, but none seemed worth recounting.

“About you,” he said.

Stevie had to think about this for a moment. Was he talking about the conversation from the tub room? The one where Ellie had asked about their love lives and she explained she didn’t have one?

“She said your parents work for Edward King,” he said.

She exhaled. Right conversation, different topic.

“Yeah,” she said, waving away a bee. “Some of us just get lucky, I guess.”

“You a big fan too?”

“What do you think?” she said.

“Who knows?” he said. “Does anyone really know anyone else? You love some law and order.”

There was no lower insult than this, and having to say she didn’t like Edward King was even worse. Edward King was famously disgusting—rich, corrupt, vain. He was the root of a lot of the trouble in Stevie’s life. In less than thirty seconds, David had made two successful digs in the softest parts of her psyche.

“I’m not a fan,” she said in a low voice.

“Oh. I was going to say, it sounds like your parents—”

“I don’t know why they like him,” she snapped. “I try to work that one out all the time. I kind of want to get away from it here, so . . .”

“Sure,” he said, loping along. “You can’t control your parents. I mean, my mother is a beekeeper and my father invented the smorgasbord.”

They had reached the blue door of Minerva. He tapped his ID to the panel to admit them.

“We have time to get to know each other,” he said. “So much time. See you around.”

He turned and went back the way they had come. He didn’t even go inside. Stevie was left to wonder what the hell had just happened to her.

This would not be Stevie’s only strange encounter that day. The next would come an hour or two later, in the form of Hayes Major leaning in her doorway as she was trying to read.

“Hey,” he said. “Can I talk to you?”

He was wearing a tight white T-shirt. A fresh one. Possibly never worn before. (Stevie didn’t buy white T-shirts. Their shelf life was too short.)

“Do you mind if I come in?” he asked.

“Sure?” she said.

He left the door wide open and came inside with his easy, comfortable way. She indicated that the floor was his, if he wanted to stay. He didn’t sit; he squatted. It didn’t look even remotely comfortable; it just showed off the tone of his leg muscles and the outline of his patellae. (Anatomy word! Kneecaps. She was already using her knowledge.)

“I had an idea,” he said as he balanced on his little invisible stool. “You mentioned the other day that you needed a project. So do I. I was thinking, what if we worked together on something?”

Dust motes danced in the air between Hayes and Stevie. In the bright, late-afternoon light, his hair had an actual glow, like it was spun of golden thread. He could have been a statue model in Greece or Rome. The light was so rich that he seemed like a statue now, an otherworldly nature made of light and shade, with a southern accent and a formfitting shirt. Stevie wasn’t sure if the wooziness she felt around him was attraction, or just numb confusion as her brain tried to work out his exact species. “Looks human,” it was saying to itself, “but cannot be. Cheekbones not possible. Is simulation. Origin unknown.”

“Together?” she said, pulling herself out of her mental wanderings.

“See, my agent . . .” He dug a neatly manicured fingernail coyly into the wooden floor as he said this word. “. . . thinks I should make another series. I’ve been thinking about what to do, and I thought . . . what about the stuff that happened here? The crimes. The kidnapping thing. You know about that.”

“About?” Hayes was super distracting to talk to in close quarters, and now he was talking about making a series. None of this made sense.

“The crimes,” he said again. “You know about the crimes, right? The crime here? Crimes?”

“Crimes,” she repeated. “Yeah. I do. But . . . what?”

She was not coming off well.

“You’d be, like, the technical director. The expert. I even had an idea for a trailer. We could shoot it in that tunnel, the one under the sunken garden.”

Everything came into sharp focus in a second.

“The tunnel?” she said. “You mean the one the kidnappers used?”

“Under the sunken garden,” he repeated.

“That tunnel has been filled in since 1938,” Stevie said.

“They dug it out in the spring,” Hayes said, his smile widening. “For construction. They started at the end of last school year. I’ve already been in it.”

“You were in the tunnel?” Stevie said. She was leaning forward and she made no effort to hide the urgency in her voice.

“Once,” he said. “Last year, when they first excavated it.”

The idea of the tunnel being open again had never occurred to Stevie. She really did not believe in fate, but the timing of this was incredible.

“I was just thinking how it would be a good place to make something. And you’re here now, and you know all the stuff about the crimes. People would like that. We’d be the first ones to show what the tunnel looks like.”

Stevie’s heart was pounding hard.

“Are we allowed in there?”

“Well . . .” Hayes unfurled his smile slowly. “Technically, we don’t know about it. They tried to hide the fact that they opened it up, but I was back there one day and we saw that they were taking out tons of dirt.”

“And you actually went in?”

“Actually went in,” Hayes said. “But it’s just an idea. If you’re too busy, I understand. . . .”

“I’ll do it,” Stevie said. “Write. Or, whatever. I’ll do it.”

“Great!” Hayes replied. “So, you’ll get Nate. And you guys can write something over the weekend? By Monday?”