Chapter 6

The next morning, I stayed in the den (which, to judge by the number of crumpled-up sheets of paper, the abandoned pens, and the half-finished cups of coffee, was now starting to look more like a villain’s lair than a writer’s workspace). I stared at the screen of my laptop. The cursor blinked back at me.

Somehow, for some reason, I had let Hugo talk me into a co-writing project. When I put it like that, I make it sound like he was twisting my arm (which, kind of, he was). But the rational part of me also knew that it was a tremendous opportunity—Hugo was a published author, his star was rising, and he was doing me a favor (scratch that; he was handing me a winning lottery ticket) by letting me write with him.

And it didn’t hurt that Hugo’s arguments had been so persuasive. I mean, Hugo had been right: I’d been grappling with Will Gower, the imaginary detective who lived inside my head, for decades now. And so far, after about a million permutations, the idea hadn’t gone anywhere. Why not try something new? Why not give Will Gower a break? I mean, authors did that all the time—they might start off with an idea that lived and grew with them for years and years, but at some point, practicality set in, and they moved on to an idea that they could, you know, actually sell. (Or, for that matter, actually write.)

And Hugo’s idea was going to sell; I already knew that. The Next Night was an update on the noir genre, which was already well within my wheelhouse. Private investigator Dexter Drake was caught in a loop created by systemic oppression, the realities of being a gay man in 1940s Los Angeles, and, of course, his own bad choices (a trademark of the hard-boiled and noir was the detective who was hampered by his inability to be anything but what he was).

It was…fun. I mean, it wasn’t exactly my thing. But Hugo was basically a genius, and as he had told me—convincingly, many times—this was going to be a great way to stretch myself as a writer.

The only problem was that—speaking of the inability to be anything but what we are—writing Dexter Drake wasn’t all that much easier than writing Will Gower.

Never mind , I texted Hugo, still staring at the blinking cursor on our shared doc. I give up .

His reply came a moment later—a GIF of a cat typing manically on a keyboard.

Nope , I wrote back. I’m done. I’m finished. It’s over. It never even began .

Have you been talking to Fox?

No . But that did remind me of some of Fox’s more memorable fits of despair, so I riffed on some of those. I’m a sham. I’m a huckster. My only success was a fluke, and everyone is going to see me for the fraud I am .

This time, the composition bubbles appeared, disappeared, appeared, disappeared. And then, finally, Hugo’s reply came through: It’s a description paragraph for a sleazy office. You don’t have to write War and Peace.

Which was a helpful reminder, sure. But I decided to stick with my guns. This is what I’m talking about. I can’t even come up with a simple description for a sleazy office.

The next pause was even longer. But when Hugo replied, the composition bubbles appeared only briefly. There was no pausing. No erasing. Just a short, quick message. And then it came through: Write what you see .

I almost replied, Easy for you to say . But I held myself back. In the first place, because I knew—by this point—that I was feeling sorry for myself. But also because he was right. It was a description. That was all. And yes, it was easy for my brain to spin out of control even with something as simple as that—because in the best writing, a description was never just a description. A description was also a window into a character’s mind, into how they perceived the world, their idiolect, their past, everything that shaped the process of perception and interpretation. What you saw in a simple passage of description, in the hands of a good writer, was the character, and the mood, and the theme, even the foreshadowed action—everything, in other words.

Write what you see.

The office was small and cramped and smelled like boiled cabbage. The desk was battered steel, painted the battleship gray Bobby remembered from the Army; every desk he’d ever seen, on every post and base where Uncle Sam had sent him, he’d seen that same desk . The papers covering the desk might be interesting, but what held his attention now was the blood—spattered across the desktop, and at one corner, thick and black in the weak light from the hall. Bobby stepped back, reached into the pocket of his windbreaker, and wrapped his hand around the little gun. Fear made his heart start to pound. On the wall opposite him, a cheesecake girl stared down at the scene from her poster, looking like all she wanted was to take a break and put her feet up.

With an explosion of breath like someone surfacing from a deep dive, I leaned back from the laptop. My brain was already circling around each sentence, jumping over words, scanning the text, probing for weaknesses. Were they called cheesecake girls? Pinup girls? A quick search told me that the term was cheesecake, not cheesecake girls, but I liked the sound of the phrase, so I decided to leave it—if someone wanted to buy the story and told me to change it, then I’d worry about it. I wasn’t crazy about boiled cabbage . That was a good detail, but the blood smell seemed like it would be stronger, so I changed it to rust. And there was too much stage direction at the end; I took out the part about him stepping back . It was enough for him to put his hand in his pocket. Same with the heart-pounding fear (hello, cliché!). I deleted that whole sentence—if someone couldn’t tell he was worried/concerned/afraid from the blood and the gun, I wasn’t doing my job.

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—”

“I wasn’t frightened. I was concerned.” At the bottom of the stairs, I made a sharp left. “And I took care of it.”

“I’m sorry—”

“He seems sweet.” And a vicious part of me wanted to say, Just like West . Somehow, though, I managed to say, “I’m sorry about all of this. Typical Dash, right? I botched the whole thing.”

“You didn’t botch anything. His nose isn’t broken and—”

Another of those sharp little turns took me into the servants’ dining room, and I shut the door behind me.

Bobby, of course, just kept coming. “—he’s fine,” he said as he came after me. “Would you slow down for a second? I’m trying to—”

But I was already passing into the kitchen, and I shut that door behind me too. Hard.

And Bobby barreled after me. At the refrigerator, he caught my arm. He didn’t pull. He didn’t even grip me particularly tightly. I stared at the refrigerator.

“I’m trying to talk to you,” he said again. And then all that control began to unravel, and he said, “Really? You’re not even going to look at me?”

I spun around, and in the process, I freed my arm and spoke in clipped, detached fragments. “I’m trying to get ice. For your boyfriend. Who’s got a bloody nose. Because I startled him when he was packing up all your belongings so you could move into your new apartment!” The sentence had started off at a normal volume, but by the end it was a full-on shout. I kept shouting. “Were you going to tell me you were moving out? Or was I just going to get the last month’s rent in the mail?”

“I don’t pay you rent,” Bobby said. “And of course I was going to tell you.”

“Really? When?”

He opened his mouth.

“Last night, after you signed the lease?” I asked.

He shut his mouth.

“Or the week before that, when you were looking at apartments?”

He put his hands on his hips. It wasn’t quite a slouch, since Bobby never slouched, but there was something insolent about the pose—a kind of juvenile screw-off so at odds with the Bobby I knew that I couldn’t quite wrap my head around it.

“Or the week before that,” I asked, “when you had your first date with Kiefer?”

Color rose under Bobby’s smooth, golden-olive complexion. “I didn’t meet him two weeks ago.”

“Oh, right.” I laughed. “Sorry. I must have gotten him confused with the guy before him. Or the one before that. It’s hard to keep them all straight. Tell me, how long have you and Kiefer been dating?”

“You’re being immature about this.”

“I’m being immature? How long ago did you start dating him, Bobby? It’s a simple question.”

His jaw tightened. His slouch didn’t look quite so relaxed anymore. The refrigerator hummed.

“Four and a half weeks—”

“A month,” I said. “You’ve been dating him a month, and you’re moving in with him.”

“Yes.”

I waited, but nothing more came. “That’s it? That’s all you’re going to say?”

“We’re in a relationship. It’s serious. This is the next logical step.”

“It’s serious ?” I couldn’t keep control of my tone—or my volume. “Bobby, he’s basically a teenager. How old is he? What’s he doing with his life? How could you possibly know, after a month, that this relationship is serious?”

“He’s twenty-two years old,” Bobby said, and this time there was an edge in his voice I wasn’t sure I’d heard before. “He’s smart. He’s passionate about—about a lot of things.”

“Oh yeah? What’s his middle name?”

Bobby cut his eyes away.

“Are you kidding me?” I asked.

More of that color rushed into Bobby’s cheeks, but he still didn’t look at me. “I guess you knew everything about Hugo before you moved in with him.”

“No, I didn’t know everything about him. But we’d been together for more than two years when we got our first apartment.”

Now, his gaze slid back to me. “And that’s fine, Dash. That worked for you. But every relationship is different. People move at different speeds in their relationships.”

“What speed is this? Warp speed? Light speed?” I don’t know why Space Balls was the first reference that came to mind, but it popped out of my mouth before I could stop it. “Ludicrous speed?”

“Not everyone is like you. Not everyone has to spend years evaluating every possible outcome before they’ll even consider taking the first step in a relationship.”

Something about the lights in the kitchen seemed off, like my pupils had dilated and couldn’t quite correct. A second passed, and then another. “Wow.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Yes, it is.”

“No, Dash—” Frustration creased Bobby’s brow. “I’m just saying that every relationship is a gamble. After a certain point, you’re just making time, and you have to take a chance.”

I nodded. My head felt loose on my neck. Stepping around Bobby, I started toward the servants’ dining room.

He reached out like he might stop me, but his hand fell short. “Can we please sit down and talk about this? I’m really unhappy with how this conversation is going.”

“What’s there to talk about?” I asked. “You made your decision. Everything is—how did you put it? Everything else is just making time.”