Katie ran out of the building, not sure what to do next. Tessa’s sudden confession was beyond surreal, worse than any nightmare. How many times in the last four years had Katie turned to Tessa when something went wrong? And then she’d begun to count on Mark as much as Tessa, maybe more. But now Katie didn’t know who or what to believe. She felt completely lost. Where was she supposed to go when she wasn’t sure who to trust anymore?

Katie didn’t go far. She ended up on a bench across from the building, sitting in the shadow of a giant oak. Brushing tears from her cheeks, she watched students walk past and tried to remember how it felt when her only fear was an upcoming exam, not whether or not her best friend was a pathological liar and her boyfriend a murderer.

A campus cop car pulled up in front of the administration offices. The chief of campus security got out from the driver’s side just before Dr. Capello emerged from the building, escorting Tessa down the steps.

Katie got up and stood beneath the shade of the tree, staring as Tessa climbed into the car. The security chief exchanged a few words with Dr. Capello before he got behind the wheel and drove off. The school shrink lingered a moment before she turned and headed toward the faculty parking lot.

Instinctively, Katie grabbed her bag and ran after her.

“Dr. Capello, wait up!” she called, reaching the lot just as the psychiatrist tossed a leather case onto the passenger seat of her Volvo.

Dr. Capello shut the door and straightened. “Katie?”

“I need to talk about Tessa. She’s seriously messed up.”

“I know you’re concerned,” Dr. Capello said as she rounded the car to the driver’s-side door. “But we have to let the police take over from here. It’s out of my hands. If Tessa’s making things up, they’ll figure it out.”

“It’s not just that. There are so many things I can’t explain.” Katie knew something wasn’t right with Tessa. And it went beyond Rose and The Box and resenting Mark. “I get the feeling it has to do with the fire.”

Dr. Capello frowned and checked her watch. “I wish I could help you, but I’ve got appointments in town. I’m already late.…”

“Great,” Katie said, feeling butterflies in her stomach at what she was about to do. But she couldn’t just stand around doing nothing. “Let’s go,” she said, and opened the passenger door. She set Dr. Capello’s briefcase on the floor with her book bag.

“Um, Katie?” The psychiatrist peered over the hood. “What are you doing?”

“I’m going with you,” she said, because it was the only way. “I have to find someone who was there the night Tessa’s house burned. Someone like Virginia Cottingham,” she said, remembering the name of the neighbor from the article in the Barnard Gazette that she’d read on Tessa’s MacBook. “So if you’d drop me off at Mayfield Avenue, that’d be perfect.”

“No,” Dr. Capello told her.

“What? Oh, sorry.” Katie cleared her throat. “Will you drop me off at Mayfield Avenue, please,” she said, then got into the car and pulled on the seat belt with a click.

Dr. Capello slid in behind the wheel but didn’t close the door. The car made a soft dinging noise as she spoke. “Being polite isn’t the problem. I can’t take you into Barnard without clearance from your mom or the headmaster.”

“Oh.”

Katie speed-dialed her mom and prayed she’d pick up. “Hey, yeah, it’s me,” she said, relieved when she heard the worried voice at the other end. “I’m all right, I swear. I just need you to give Dr. Capello permission to take me into Barnard for a bit. I have something pretty important to do. It shouldn’t take long.”

She pushed her phone toward Dr. Capello and couldn’t help but smile the littlest bit. “As long as I’ve got a responsible adult along, my mom’s cool with it. And I’d say you’re responsible enough.” When the psychiatrist hesitated, Katie asked, “You want to speak to her privately? Or would you like to hear her say yes on speaker?”

Dr. Capello gave Katie a look before taking the phone and speaking briefly to her mother. When she was done she stabbed the key in the ignition. “Okay,” she said, shaking her head a bit as if to say, You’d better not make me regret this.

When they got to Mayfield Avenue, Dr. Capello’s Volvo crept up to the address where Tessa had once lived. Katie half expected to see the blackened shell of a house from the online photo. Instead, there was a quaint-looking Victorian sitting behind a white picket fence. Someone had rebuilt on the spot. Katie wondered who’d want to put up a house on soil where three people had tragically died.

“It’s been ten years. Even when something horrible happens, life goes on,” the psychiatrist said, clearly knowing where Katie’s thoughts had gone.

The mailbox on the house next door had faded white letters that spelled out COTTINGHAM, which made things all too easy.

“This is it,” Katie said, and the Volvo came to a stop.

Before Dr. Capello dropped Katie off, the shrink made her swear she’d call as soon as she was finished. She had to promise, too, that she wouldn’t go anywhere else on her own. “If anything happened to you …,” Dr. Capello said, but Katie assured her, “It won’t.”

The Volvo idled at the curb as Katie walked to the front door and rang the bell. What if no one’s home? she worried for a moment until she heard the lock turn.

A heavyset older woman answered. “Yes?” she said. Her white hair was close-cropped, her eyes thick-lidded. “Can I help you?”

“Are you Virginia Cottingham?”

“Oh, hon, if you’re here to sell candy or cookies to raise money for your glee club or band, I can’t do it. I’ve got diabetes, and I have to watch my weight.” She patted her belly, which stretched her knit top so that the zigzag pattern looked like stripes.

“I’m not selling anything,” Katie told her. “I’d like to ask you some questions about a girl who used to live next door. Tessa Lupinski.”

The woman’s baggy eyes narrowed. “The child who survived the fire?”

“Yes.”

“Is she in trouble? It wouldn’t surprise me if she was,” the woman murmured. “Those kids were both odd ducks.”

“She’s not in trouble exactly, she’s”—talking crazy, trying to get my boyfriend locked up, Katie wasn’t sure what to say—“my roommate at Whitney Prep, and I’m very worried about her.”

Mrs. Cottingham’s face closed off for a minute, and Katie thought she was going to shut the door. But instead, she opened it wider. “If we’re going to talk you might as well come in.”

Katie turned and waved to the Volvo before it finally took off. “My ride,” she explained. “She’ll be back to pick me up.”

“It’s good to be careful these days,” the woman said as she gestured for Katie to enter. She sat down on a floral-patterned sofa, taking care not to unsettle a black cat sprawled across the cushions. “It’s a scary world we live in, isn’t it?” she remarked, and absently began to stroke the sleeping feline. “You’d figure nothing much would happen in a town like this. First to have the house burn down next door and then to have that young waitress from the diner go missing.”

Katie cleared her throat. “I read an article from the Gazette about the fire. In it, you said you wouldn’t be surprised if Peter Lupinski was responsible.”

The woman nodded, the skin beneath her neck wobbling. “There was always something off about him. He drove his mother to distraction. Tanya would be over here, red-faced, asking if I’d seen him. He used to steal from her. And then he’d disappear for days. It broke her heart.” She stopped petting the cat. “They came from an orphanage in Russia, you know. Tanya said they were badly neglected and malnourished, Peter most of all because he’d been there longer. I read up on it some. Those poor babies get no affection, none. It makes them go numb.” Her gaze drifted over to the window. “I once saw him race around on his bike, run it into a tree, and fall hard on the concrete. You would’ve thought he’d cry his lungs out. Only he didn’t. Kid had blood all over and lost some teeth, but his expression didn’t change a hair.”

Katie sat very still, trying to imagine what it had been like for Tessa and Peter, first living in an orphanage and then trying to adjust to being a family. If you shut down your emotions for too long to protect yourself, it couldn’t be easy to turn them on again. No wonder Tessa didn’t want to talk about it.

“He had a speech impediment,” Mrs. Cottingham went on, and waved a blue-veined hand. “I’m not sure of the technical name, but he was tongue-tied. He didn’t talk much. And when he did, he was hard to understand. As far as I know, he didn’t have any friends. Except”—her face bunched up like she had smelled something putrid—“when he brought that riffraff home. Kids who looked like they hadn’t washed in weeks. Tanya would find them in her kitchen, eating her food, sometimes sleeping in her sheets. Horrifying.” She sniffed. “But more than anything, she was afraid for the little girl. In the end, all they wanted was to save her.”

“What about Tessa?” Katie asked. “Was she reckless like Peter?”

“Quite the opposite.” The woman began stroking the cat again, eliciting a gentle purr. “She was a quiet mouse. I saw her with her mom in the garden sometimes. I used to wave at her and say hello, but I don’t think she ever said boo to me.”

That sounded like Tessa, Katie thought. Reserved to the point of being standoffish.

“She loved her brother, though, I’ll tell you that.” Mrs. Cottingham nodded. “If he was anywhere near, she clung to him like she was drowning and he was her life raft.”

Tessa must have felt completely lost when her brother had died along with the only parents she’d ever known. Was that the reason she couldn’t move past it? Or was there something more that Katie wasn’t seeing yet? “You don’t think Tessa set the fire, do you?” she finally asked, thinking of the rumors she’d heard since she’d come to Whitney Prep.

The woman hesitated for a few seconds before she shook her head, setting her chin to wobbling again. “No,” she said, “I truly don’t. I always believed it was him. Tessa was only seven when it happened. He was twelve, practically a teenager. There was still hope for her. But him …”

“Hopeless?”

“Yes.”

“Did anyone ever find out who rescued Tessa that night?”

“Not as far as I know,” the woman said, puffing air through her lips. “I recall the firemen saying it was a miracle she’d survived without burns, that whoever got her out must’ve suffered for it. But no one ever came forward.”

Tessa had told Katie that “a ghost” had saved her. It sounded close enough to the truth. Who else could have done something so heroic and then disappeared like a wisp of smoke?

“Tanya and John just tried to do what was right, and that boy destroyed them all. He couldn’t be saved. He had no heart,” Mrs. Cottingham said, and put a finger to her lips as though to steady herself.

Katie could see that the woman had more she wanted to say, so she let her talk.

“About a week before the fire, Mr. Whiskers went missing.”

“Mr. Whiskers?”

“My dear cat.” Her red-rimmed eyes filled with tears. “He was more like my child. I’d had him for fifteen years. Got him when my husband passed. I should never have let him outside, but he liked to wander over to Tanya’s garden next door, and I never thought a thing about it.”

“What happened? Did he die?” Katie asked, and the woman’s face quickly went from sad to angry.

“Did he die?” she repeated so fiercely she left spittle on her chin. “That evil boy killed him! I couldn’t prove it, but I know it’s true.” She tugged roughly on the hem of her zigzag shirt. “The day before the fire, I found a cardboard box tied with garden twine left on my porch.” She made noises like tiny sobs and then cleared her throat. “When I opened it up, Mr. Whiskers was inside, stiff as a board.” Her rheumy eyes looked up. Her mouth trembled. “I couldn’t prove it but I know that boy poisoned him. And if he could murder Mr. Whiskers in cold blood, he was capable of anything.”