Chapter 11

The next morning, I got up early and got to work.

Earlyish.

Okay, I tried . But it turned out, tumbling down a hill while strapped inside a couple of tons of metal and fiberglass takes a toll on the body. Every inch of me ached. My neck and shoulders were so stiff that I moved with the grace and poise of a young Frankenstein’s monster. And the headache that had started last night had settled into what felt like permanent residency behind my eyes.

Eventually, though, I dragged myself into the bathroom. A hot shower helped. A longer, hotter soak in the tub helped even more. Best of all was the combo of acetaminophen and ibuprofen. By the time I was pulling on jeans and a tee (call me a pessimist, but this one just said GAME OVER and showed one of those ghosts from Pac-Man), I almost felt human.

As I made my way down to the kitchen, the sounds of my steps echoed back in the stillness of Hemlock House. Bobby had gone to work, of course, and Indira was probably at the farmer’s market—I was fairly sure today was a Sunday. If Keme was around, he was probably in the billiard room slaughtering people on Xbox, but he might have gone surfing or to hang out with Millie or, as was often the case, simply disappeared, the way cats do, to do his secret Keme things.

Indira, bless her heart, had left me big, fat Belgian waffles, the ones with the sugar pearls, as well as fruit and whipped cream for toppings. I warmed up the waffles in the toaster (that’s a life hack) and, uh, ate a reasonable amount. Look, there was fruit involved—take that, Bobby and everyone else who worries I’m going to get scurvy!

I was finishing my fifth (reasonable!) waffle when I made up my mind. Yes, I needed to do some writing with Hugo. Yes, I needed to do some of my own writing (I was more flexible on this point). But I couldn’t stop thinking about the attack last night.

Because that was what it had been—someone (not an editor, not my parents, not Hugo) wanted me dead. Someone had tried to kill me. And although I wasn’t everybody’s cup of tea, I didn’t regularly have people trying to end my life. At least, I hadn’t before I moved to Hastings Rock. (Try not to act so surprised.) Which meant, as far as I was concerned, that whoever had tried to kill me had done so because I was looking into Richard’s death.

That fact woke up the writer part of my brain. One of the necessary considerations for a cold case-style mystery was a reason for people in the present to care about a murder in the past. Often, it was easy enough to give someone a reason to want the investigation to succeed—a bereaved family member or friend wanted justice, etc. (Although, as my conversations with Vivienne’s family had taught me, this wasn’t, apparently, universally the case.) Slightly more difficult was creating reasons for people in the present to care about obstructing or ending an investigation. The easiest answer was that the killer was still alive and didn’t want the truth to come out. The second one that came to mind was that someone was hiding a secret that wasn’t necessarily about the killing, but that was somehow adjacent to it. Like, they’d done something they were ashamed of—or that maybe was illegal—and it might come to light in the course of the investigation.

So, what were we dealing with here?

And now that my writer brain was waking up, there were other pieces of this puzzle that I was trying to fit into place. When Bobby had asked me how sleuths in mystery novels solved cold cases, I’d told him about interviews, historical research, etc. And that was all true. But had I missed something? I ran through the examples that came to mind.

The easiest was, of course, the masterpiece: Agatha Christie’s Nemesis . The book is stellar for a number of reasons. It’s one of the later Miss Marple books, and by that point, Christie had honed her craft to perfection. Miss Marple isn’t the cardboard cutout she is in the early books; she’s grown and become more nuanced and complicated, and instead of being on the sidelines, offering advice to the police, she’s now investigating crimes on her own. In fact, the premise of the book is so much better than just a cold case mystery (but it’s Agatha Christie, so that’s not a surprise). Miss Marple gets hired to investigate a crime—but she’s not told what the crime is. Instead, she gets sent on a private tour, and, of course, she discovers not only the crime, but the killer. And, as usual, she does so through her usual combination of intuitive interviews and an intimate knowledge of human nature. But, since I wasn’t particularly intuitive or incisive about human nature, I wasn’t sure that example was going to help.

Another of the classics was Josephine Tey’s Inspector Grant novel The Daughter of Time . This one was about as different from Christie as you could get. Police inspector Alan Grant, who has already successfully investigated other twisty mysteries in previous books, is laid up in hospital with a broken leg. In fact, he’s confined to the hospital for the whole book. (Another coup, honestly.) Since he doesn’t have anything better to do—because nobody had invented the internet, Crime Cats , or Xbox yet—he decides he’s going to solve a mystery that’s hundreds of years old: did Richard III kill the princes in the tower? (I guess if you’re Josephine Tey, you play big or you go home.) He does the whole investigation from his bed by reading historical documents, interviewing physicians about the wounds and illnesses he finds in them, even by examining children’s books. Super cool stuff, and a triumph of pushing the mystery genre to a new boundary, but it didn’t give me anything new to work with. (Except, honestly, the idea of solving mysteries in bed. Maybe Bobby would have fewer objections if I took that approach? Or maybe Will Gower was, like, in a coma, but he could talk through some kind of brain-scanning-computer-thingy? I needed to work on the details.)

Vivienne herself had written a cold case mystery for her Matron of Murder series. It was darker than the Golden Age stuff, of course, like much of Vivienne’s work. I couldn’t remember the details, but it had to do with a married couple who turned out to be brother and sister. (And this was before Game of Thrones! ) Oh, and they’d murdered their parents together. So, you know, that was a thing.

I toyed briefly with the idea that maybe the book had been based on a real experience, but Vivienne’s father was very much (scarily) alive, and she certainly hadn’t married her brother. Maybe there had been some taboo interest on her part? But even that didn’t feel right—and Jane or Neil or Candy would have noticed.

Without anything better that came to mind, I decided I wanted to talk to Candy—without Arlen around to interrupt. I thought I had an idea how I might do that.

After loading my plate in the dishwasher, I ran up to my room (healed by the miracle of waffles) and grabbed a hoodie, my Mexico 66s, and my keys. Then I stopped because—oh yeah—the Jeep was currently in the possession of Mr. Del Real of Swift Lift Towing.

Well, shoot.

I took out my phone (which Mr. Del Real had returned to me after towing the Jeep away) and debated calling Millie. I didn’t want to get her involved, but maybe she’d lend me her car—

“What do you think you’re doing?”

I didn’t quite jump out of my Mexico 66s, but it was close.

Keme, arms folded, glowered at me from the doorway. His dark hair was wet, and he wore his usual attire—a sun-faded and fraying Ripcurl tee, board shorts that were clearly a size too big for him, and his ancient, cracking slides. None of that, though, kept him from generating a surprising amount of menace.

“Jeez, you almost gave me a heart attack,” I said. “What are you doing?”

“Keeping an eye on you so you don’t do something stupid.”

“Wait, how long have you—” I held up a finger. “In the first place, three of those waffles were defective.”

Keme’s expression didn’t change much, but he did, somehow, manage to look disappointed in me.

“And second, what do you mean you’re keeping an eye on me?”

“Bobby said—”

“What?”

(I might have lost control of my volume at that point.)

Keme must have realized he’d already said too much, though, because he just set his jaw and stared back at me.

“What exactly did Bobby say to you?”

He stared back at me.

“You realize this is completely inappropriate,” I said. “He doesn’t have any right to—to spy on me.” I wanted to be mature enough to stop the rest of it, but it came spilling out. “Is this what he’s going to do after he moves out? Have you tell him everything I do?”

For a moment, Keme’s composure broke, baring the unhappiness that lay underneath. “Dash—”

“And what—if I go do something, you’re going to follow me?”

Keme tightened his arms across his chest and looked away.

That confirmed my suspicion.

“You’re going to call Bobby?” I asked, my voice rising again—disbelief mixing with outrage.

“He’s worried about you,” Keme mumbled. “He just wants to make sure you’re okay.”

“He needs to worry about himself because the next time I see him, I’m going to wring his neck.” I took a deep breath. “Here’s what’s going to happen: you’re going to go live your normal life like a normal teenage boy, and you’re not going to spy on me because Bobby has an overdeveloped sense of responsibility. Meanwhile, I’m going to leave and go live my life independently and autonomously like an adult.”

But when I stepped around Keme and started for the stairs, he trailed after me.

“Keme, I’m serious. Go play Xbox or scroll on TikTok or bother Millie at work.”

He just stared at me.

When I turned for the stairs, he took a step after me.

“Keme!”

His face darkened, and he wouldn’t meet my eyes, but he hunkered down like he was going to root himself in place if I tried to make him leave.

I opened my mouth, but before I could speak, Indira’s voice floated up the stairs. “What’s all the yelling about?”

Here’s the thing about Indira. She’s so smart. And composed. And calm. And mature. And all of those traits make me painfully self-conscious when I’m working myself up for a royal hissy fit.

I still managed to sound surprisingly petulant, though, when I said, “Bobby is making Keme spy on me. It’s not necessary, and on top of that, it’s not appropriate to put Keme in that position. And—” Genius struck. “—it’s teaching Keme bad life lessons about, um, trust and relationships and stuff.”

Admittedly, it lost some steam at the end, but I still thought I’d made a very good point.

Indira, though, only looked up at me from the bottom of the stairs. Then she called, “Keme, could you help Millie and Fox finish unloading the van?”

Keme glared at me—if looks could kill—as though this were somehow my fault. He stomped past me, which was pretty impressive in slides, and thundered down the stairs. A moment later, the front door banged shut, and then Indira and I were alone.

To my surprise, she came up the steps, her pace slow and measured. When she reached me, she asked, “How are you feeling?”

“Like the Jeep rolled on top of me.”

A hint of a smile touched her face. She looked lovely today, of course. She always did—cream-colored trousers; a white top; a long, lightweight gray wrap that looked like the intersection of bathrobe and cardigan (in a good way). “Maybe you should take it easy today.”

“I appreciate that, but I’ve got things to do.” I struggled for a moment, and then the words burst out of me: “And I know Bobby is stressed about the move, and he’s probably tied himself in a million knots about making everything perfect with Kiefer because, you know, he’s Bobby, and he’s not sleeping well, and he had that awful panic attack yesterday after we got in that argument—” As I listed all the things Bobby was dealing with right then, my anger started to melt. “—but this is crossing a line.”

Indira listened. Then she was silent, and one of Hemlock House’s very expensive clocks ticked away the seconds. Finally she said, “Bobby had a panic attack after you got in an argument.”

“Yeah,” I said. “He was super dysregulated, you know, no sleep, lots of stress, and then we fought and…” I couldn’t read the look on her face. “What?”

She made a sound that might have meant anything. Then she said, “Bobby didn’t ask Keme to spy on you. Bobby said he was worried about you. He was…upset last night, after you went to bed.” And I got the feeling that upset wasn’t the word Indira had originally been thinking. “Keme took it on himself to keep an eye on you. Because he loves you. And because he’s worried about you too.”

I mean, yes, at some level, I knew Keme and I were…attached, maybe? I don’t know—whatever word you’re supposed to use for your brother. Like, you can’t get rid of them, and they steal your stuff all the time, and one time they gave you a dead leg that, like, really hurt. But the logical part of me, the part that understood this relationship, was having a hard time reconciling the words love and worried with the same boy who had, less than a week before, told Millie, Watch this , and then proceeded to strangle me with my own hoodie strings. (A surprisingly effective method of killing someone, I decided after I could breathe again. I was eager to have Will Gower try it on an annoying teenage hoodlum who ate all the snickerdoodles before he got any even though Will Gower had told him they were his favorite. Er, his favorite that week.)

“Frankly,” Indira said, “we’re all worried about you, Dash. This has become much more serious after yesterday’s events. And we don’t want you doing it alone.”

“Okay, but if it’s dangerous, then I don’t want you —”

“This discussion is over now.”

And she turned and went downstairs.

I was still kind of reeling as I followed her. Did that kind of thing always work? Or did it only work on me? Would it work if I tried it on Bobby the next time he started in on one of his lectures (lectures was a kind word, right?) about why I shouldn’t crush up packets of Smarties and then blow the dust in Keme’s hair?

(Keme had been so mad. It was amazing.)

When I got to the kitchen, Indira was directing Millie and Keme as they put away various baskets, display racks, and cake stands. Fox had found the rest of the whipped cream, and they were dipping Oreos in it. (Which, okay, was genius.)

“One time,” Fox said, “I made out with a guy who had fallen off his motorcycle and then gotten run over by another motorcycle. Oh, and then a horse stepped on him.” They gave me an unnecessarily pointed look, snapped off a bite of Oreo, and added, “Just saying.”

“It’s nice to see you too,” I said. “Keme, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have gotten so worked up. It means a lot to me that you care—”

The boy had frozen as if transfixed, and his eyes were slowly widening in horror. He was even giving tiny, abortive shakes of his head.

“—uh,” I fumbled for the rest of the sentence, but the best I could come up with was: “I love you too.”

If you could have seen his face.

“And another time,” Fox said, “I made out with a guy who had been kicked in the—” A polite cough. “—nuggets at the same time that someone blew an air horn in his ear.” Another crisp bite of Oreo, and a pointed look for Keme. “Just saying.”

“Fox, quit teasing them,” Indira said.

“That was teasing?” I asked.

Keme was trying to assure Millie in a whisper, “I don’t love him.”

“Everyone focus,” Indira said.

You’d better believe we all focused.

“We’re going to help Dash with his investigation today so that Bobby can have some peace of mind,” Indira said.

“That’s sweet, but—” I tried.

“Not to mention keep Dash from getting himself killed,” Fox said.

“That was less sweet. I really don’t want you all risking—”

“There,” Indira said. “That’s settled.”

And somehow, it was. Just like This discussion is over now . Would it work, I wanted to know, if I said it when I was trying to convince Bobby that no, three extra-large pizzas were not too much, on account of the miracle of leftovers?

“Fox, you’re driving. Millie, you’ll do research. Keme, you’re going to watch Dash’s back.”

His little chest puffed right up. He ruined it, kind of, by checking to see if Millie had heard.

“And I’m bringing my gun,” Indira said. “Now, Dashiell, where are we going?”