When Nick arrived home, Beverly Webb was there with his father.

His life was filled with interlopers. Like last time, Beverly had come over under the pretense of bringing her son to play ball with Danny. Clearly, though, her interest was in their father.

Was it wrong for Nick to want him to stay in mourning? It had been less than four months since the fire. Sure, the woman’s presence here didn’t constitute a “date,” but her intentions were obvious.

“I brought that stain remover, Nicky,” she said.

“It’s Nick,” he said. “Thanks.” No one called him Nicky but his mother.

He took the thing from her. It looked like an old-fashioned washboard. Of course, thought Nick. He remembered it and its buyer, thanks to the memory-enhancing Oolongevity tea he had drunk a few weeks ago. But the washboard had been purchased by some guy in a Hawaiian shirt.

“Be careful with it,” Beverly said. “It was a birthday present from Seth—it has sentimental value.”

“Uh…okay.” Nick should have left right then—taken the thing up to the attic and made himself scarce, but he lingered a moment too long. “How does it work?” he asked.

“I don’t know how it does what it does,” she said, “but rub anything against it, and it removes the stain without damaging the fabric.”

That’s when Seth came bounding out of the downstairs bathroom, passing Nick on the way to the stairs. Nick whipped the washboard up to hide his face, and for an instant he thought Seth hadn’t seen him. But before he reached the stairs, Seth spun on his heels.

“It’s you!” he said, pointing an accusing finger. “Mom, it’s him!”

“Him who?” Beverly asked.

Nick had to think fast. “Him who’s about to make you and Danny hot fudge sundaes!”

There wasn’t an ounce of ice cream in the house, but it distracted Seth just long enough for him to say, “Sundaes?”

“Yeah!” said Nick, which gave him the time he needed to herd Seth into the kitchen and out the back door, pushing it closed behind them so no one else could hear.

“You were in our house!” Seth said. “You and your friend! I saw you both! You’re burglars!”

Nick could have denied it—after all, it would be Seth’s word against his—but he suddenly realized he had an ace to play.

“Fine,” Nick said. “You know my secret, and I know yours.”

That gave Seth pause. “Huh?”

“You forgot to get your own mother a birthday gift. She said you got the stain remover for her at a garage sale—but you never went to that garage sale. If you did, you would have remembered this house. Your father bought it, not you!”

Now Seth looked like a kid who’d been caught copying answers from his classmate. “You don’t even know my father!”

“Goofy glasses? Drives a green Saturn? Likes Hawaiian shirts?”

Seth gasped. “How do you know that?”

“Oh, I know lots of things. Not just me, but my burglar friend, too. All my friends. We all know what you did!”

“But…but…”

“Here’s what I think happened: your dad brought you back to your mom’s, and at the last second you realized you didn’t have a gift for her, so you grabbed the only thing you could find in his car. You didn’t even know what it was, and your dad probably doesn’t even know that you’re the one who stole it from him.”

“And I would have gotten away with it, too,” moaned Seth, “if it wasn’t for you rotten kids.”

“So,” said Nick, putting his arm around Seth’s shoulder, “here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to keep quiet. About everything. No one needs to know about how you totally forgot your mother’s birthday and stole your father’s stain remover, and no one needs to know about me and my friend visiting your house the other night.”

“Yeah, yeah, sure,” said Seth, nodding so furiously Nick thought he might give himself a concussion. “One thing, though—why were you there?”

“Why do you think?” said Nick, holding up the washboard. “To get this back.”

“Is that all?”

Nick shrugged. “That’s it.”

“But if you wanted to keep it, why did you sell it in the first place?” asked Seth. “That was dumb.”

“Tell me about it,” Nick said simply. “So are we good?”

“Yeah,” said Seth. “We’re good.”

Then Danny came barging out the back door. “Dad says you’re making us sundaes!”

“Tell you what—what if I take you both to DQ?”

“That seals the deal,” Seth said, putting his hand up for Danny to high-five. Danny obliged, because any deal that involved ice cream was fine with him.

They all ended up going out for ice cream, as if they were a family, which made Nick miserable. At least they took two cars, so Beverly and Seth could leave from there—but Nick noticed how, before she shook his dad’s hand good-bye, she glanced at Nick—as if she would have given him a hug if Nick weren’t there.

Once Nick got back, he grabbed the washboard and took it upstairs to the attic. Before fitting it into the machine, he couldn’t resist rubbing his pomegranate-juice-stained shirt against it. It did remove the stain, just as advertised. But it did even more: the fabric wasn’t just cleaner, it looked newer. Nick examined the washboard more closely. When he tilted it toward the light, it seemed to have an artificial depth, like one of those three-dimensional postcards. On a whim, he rubbed the torn knee of a pair of jeans back and forth across the washboard’s surface. After five strokes, the tear was repaired.

So the thing didn’t just purge stains, it undid all damage. It made things new. He tried to figure out how he might use it against the Accelerati, then he caught himself. He was thinking like them, and that wasn’t good. Maybe he should stop messing with it and just let it take its place in Tesla’s grand device.

He quickly found exactly where it went. Caitlin was right—he was getting better and better at completing the puzzle. He could intuitively see the way it all fit together—sensing not just the parts, but the whole.

He noticed something about the washboard, though, that gave him pause. Two posts extended from it; one was engraved with a dash, the other with a plus sign. Positive and negative. He knew what was supposed to be connected to those two posts.

Vince’s battery.

For Tesla’s machine to live, Vince would have to die.

Nick had told Vince they’d cross that bridge when they came to it, but with each object he added, the bridge came closer and closer.

Downstairs, his father was on the phone, and he could tell it was with Beverly. Hadn’t they had enough of each other for today? When his father guffawed in response to something, it set Nick on edge. Did she think she could be a part of their whole?

He idly wondered if he could remove her like a stain, and then he laughed off the idea. But the darkness of the thought lingered.

Meanwhile, in Kiruna, Sweden, there were undocumented reports of a man’s head exploding for no apparent reason.

All the police were able to piece together, besides skull fragments, was that he had been chewing on Life Savers at the time. This detail may not seem important, unless you consider the effects of triboluminescence, which is the phenomenon that makes Wint-O-Green Life Savers spark when you chew them…and the fact that Kiruna sits atop the world’s largest deposit of iron ore.