“You’re going to wake somebody up,” Rowan says.
“I’m being quiet.”
“We’re going through our neighbor’s hydrangeas.” Rowan pauses. “What exactly are we doing?”
“Getting dirt.”
“Dirt?” he whispers, looking down. “What?”
“Just keep up.” I creep along the hedge toward the side of the house, where Aspen’s window throws a square of light onto the grass. I know it’s hers. I’ve lived three doors down for three years, and a man notices things.
“Okay. Listen.” I pull Rowan down into a crouch. “Here’s the mission. That woman in there is spoiled. She’s mean. She’s got skeletons, Rowan, I can feel it, a girl that put-together is hiding something, and we are simply here, as concerned citizens, to count them.”
“This is a felony.”
“It’s a fact-finding mission.”
“Stanley—”
“Reconnaissance. Say it with me.”
He does not say it with me. He’s got his hood up like that’ll make him less of an accomplice. I duck-walk across the side yard toward the window with the light still on, the one I clocked from my own kitchen at two in the morning two nights ago. I get to the glass, and I cup my hands around my eyes, and I look in.
There it is.
My heart starts pumping.
“Mother fucker.”
My stick.
Leaning against her bedroom wall in the dark, by the window, like it lives there. Not shoved in a closet. Not buried in a garage. Not snapped over a knee, which, frankly, I wouldn’t have beensurprised. Set out. Leaned up. Placed. In the room where she sleeps and gets dressed and sits at that desk and writes her cold little reports on me — my stick, standing in the corner like it pays rent.
And I’m speechless.
That’s twice tonight. The empty slot in the rack, and now this, and both times my brain just malfunctions and stops. No material in the chamber. Something shifts under my ribs that I don’t have a punchline ready for, so I do the only thing I know how, which is bury it fast, before it grows legs and starts walking around in me.
I stare at my stick. She didn’t hide it. She kept it where she could see it.
“Rowan.” I wave a hand behind me without looking away from the glass. “Rowan, come here, you have to see—”
Headlights swing across the yard.
A car drives by, but Rowan doesn’t do threat assessment. Rowan just hears his own thoughts, which I’m assuming is witness and felony all at once. When I turn around, he’s already halfway across the lawn doing the highest-knee tiptoe retreat I’ve ever seen a grown man attempt, a cartoon burglar fleeing the scene of a crime he didn’t want to be at in the first place.
He never sees the stick, which means nobody knows but me.
“You’re on your own, Stan,” Rowan says as he darts off onto the sidewalk. So much for my wingman.
I’m still crouched at the window, grinning, when the porch light snaps on three feet to my left and the side door opens.
It’s Linwood. She’s in fuzzy socks and an enormous sweater, arms crossed, looking down at me like I’m something the cat brought up.
“Are you fucking serious, Ermington?”
“Linwood!” I straighten up and brush hydrangea off my shirt. “Funny seeing you here.”
“You’re in my yard.” She looks at the side of the house. “At my window.”
