Thankfully, although Teague grilled him for three more hours, nobody else seemed to think Dan was guilty. He had no motive to hurt Felix, no history of violence, and when the cops searched his dorm room, they found nothing of interest. Most importantly, Felix had woken up in the hospital and sworn that he didn’t think Dan was behind this.

Dan was totally drained by the time he was allowed to go. He walked his parents to their car and declined their invitation to eat dinner with them in town. He just wanted to be back in his room already.

Dan hadn’t gone two steps on the path toward Brookline when he saw Professor Reyes pacing next to an ash bin. She waved, cigarette in hand, beckoning him over.

“Not in cuffs, I see,” she said by way of greeting. Her brown eyes twinkled behind the thin veil of smoke that drifted up from her lips. “That’s a good sign. Looked like your parents were pretty worried about you.”

“Oh, they’re fine, it was just a little tense in there.”

Her necklace was made of opals today, as fine and white as bone. “I don’t know the particulars, but you seem like a good kid.” She shook her head, pursing her lips to blow a jet of smoke up and away from them. “Brookline just has a way of taking a hold on people—always has. It’s the self-fulfilling prophecy of madness. If someone tells you you’re crazy enough times, eventually it becomes true. It’s that old psychiatrist’s joke: insanity’s all in your head.”

Dan looked at his shoes, tempted to tell her that no, some conditions were in fact very real. “I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

“All I’m saying is, people in town don’t want Brookline gone just because of what happened there fifty years ago.” Professor Reyes dropped her cigarette and stamped it out. The wind picked up her short dark hair, tossing it in front of her eyes. “Good luck, Dan. I hope you don’t need it.”

Abby and Jordan waited outside his door for him. They had even snuck out a pie from the cafeteria, hiding it under a Windbreaker. Rhubarb with extra whipped cream. His favorite.

They piled into his room. Abby pointed to Dan’s bed while Jordan sorted out the dessert for everyone. “Come and sit,” Abby said. “I have news and we want to hear all about your date with the cops.”

“Thanks,” Dan said, taking a bite out of his pie. “It’s been a hellish day.”

“The cops work you over?” Jordan asked.

“They were pretty decent, actually. My parents were there, which helped.”

“Seriously?” Abby said anxiously. “They’re not making you leave, are they?”

“No, I can finish the program. So at least there’s that. And Felix saved my ass, too. I guess he told the cops he ‘didn’t think I was a threat.’”

Dan decided not to tell them about the rest of it. Right now he needed them on his side.

“Dan, I’m so sorry,” Abby murmured, shifting her chair closer. “But at least you’re not in trouble. That’s good, right?”

“It is, yeah. So what was your news?” Abby lit up. Dan was grateful for a reason to stop talking about himself and she looked ready to pop with excitement.

“The news is that I’ve decided to come clean about Lucy to my father,” she said, bouncing in her chair. “It’s time he knew about her, that I’ve picked up the trail. He deserves to know the truth. I mean, I would want to, wouldn’t you?”

“Wow,” said Dan. He couldn’t tell if it was the exhaustion or something else keeping him from matching Abby’s excitement. “Are you sure that’s a good idea right now?”

“What?” Abby asked slowly. “Why would it not be a good idea? She’s his sister! I’m hoping he might even want to help me find her.”

“You don’t think it’s sort of coming out of nowhere? I mean, the shock and all . . . What if he doesn’t believe you?”

“I’d freak if it were me. I mean, it’s been so many years. . . .” Jordan added.

“No, it has to be this way,” Abby replied with a little nod of finality. “I’m not going to keep this from him, I just can’t. It wouldn’t be right.”

“Maybe this is harsh,” Jordan responded. “But as your friend, I feel it’s my duty to state for the record that I think your idea is pants-on-head crazy.”

“And as your . . . other friend . . . I’m sorry to say I second that motion.” Dan raised his hand in the air.

“Well, neither of you gets a say!” she shot back, shoving her pie aside. “It’s my decision, and it’s my father. I just thought you guys would be happy for me. With everything that’s happened at this horrible place, I thought this could be something good to come out of it.” She stood, dusting off her hands. “I’m calling him,” she said, adjusting the zipper on her paint-splattered sweatshirt. “He’s going to know the truth about Aunt Lucy. Tonight.”

Abby turned and swept out of his room in a huff. Jordan cocked an eyebrow at him, as if to say, what, you’re not going after her?

But Dan was exhausted, and after his long day of questioning, he was dying for a moment alone. Plus, there was something he desperately needed to check. Something he’d been trying not to think about since class that morning. Jordan seemed to get the hint.

“Well, you know where to find me, I guess,” he said, letting himself out and closing the door behind him.

Immediately, as if he were ripping off a Band-Aid, Dan reached into his backpack and pulled out his class notebooks. He flipped to the page of notes he’d taken today, when he’d caught himself writing in the looping script of the warden. On the bottom of the page he’d written:

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. —Albert Einstein

Fighting the urge to throw up, Dan tore through the rest of his notebooks, scanning the pages for any more disturbing asides. Sure enough, he found a sentence in his History of Psychiatry notes attributed to Aristotle. It was possible Professor Reyes had put this quote up on the board for them to copy down, but he definitely didn’t remember writing it, and the script wasn’t his:

No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness.

Dan leapt to his feet, tossing the notebooks off him as if they carried a disease. All these notes . . . on his desk . . . under his bed . . . No wonder it had seemed like he had a stalker everywhere he went. He’d written these notes—“delivered” them himself.

“Mild dissociative order,” Dr. Oberst had said. “Harmless lapses in memory,” she’d said. What did she know? She was no better than the doctors who’d been at Brookline fifty years ago. At least their treatments had gotten results.

Now Dan was faced with the fact that he was blacking out for long stretches of time, forgetting text messages, notes, even pictures with his best friends. And, oh yeah, who could forget the little fact that every time someone had been attacked, there’d been a mental gap he couldn’t account for—unconscious in the basement when Joe had been killed, napping in his room when Yi was knocked out, and sending ominous text messages when Felix was nearly bludgeoned with a crowbar.

These lapses in memory seemed far from harmless to him.

But Dan wasn’t ready to believe that he was a cold-blooded killer. He was channeling the warden, not the Sculptor, and as strange as it was to find comfort in that fact, Dan had to admit he’d rather find creepy notes in his possession than a garrote any day.

But what about the birth parents?

Officer Teague’s questions still reverberated in his ears. He’d been so sure that Dan was related to the cruel warden, that it had something to do with why Dan was here. Dan had let his mother cast it off as a coincidence, but he knew that nothing about this summer had been coincidental. Being here was his destiny. It was his destiny to solve the mystery of what happened to the warden, and the Sculptor, and Lucy.

Dan remembered that Abby had visited the old church and found Lucy in the records. Maybe the records could work the same magic for him. Occam’s razor or whatever the hell you wanted to call it.

It couldn’t wait another minute. He refused to accept another restless night, another nightmare-riddled sleep.

Grabbing his flashlight and the closest thing to a weapon he had—a pair of scissors—Dan stepped outside and into the night.