Chapter 3

THE FIRST THING Lily says is: “I need your help.”

The second thing she says is: “Oh God, that’s not how I meant to do this.”

And then, before my brain catches up with my vocal cords, she’s burying me under an avalanche of words. “I planned this, you know, because I like planning things, and when you answered the door I was going to say ‘Hi,’ and then you were going to say ‘Hi,’ and I was going to ask if I could come in and the whole help part of it wasn’t going to be a thing until way later.”

She takes a breath. I seize the opportunity.

“Do you want to?” I ask her.

She blinks. “Want to what?”

I move out of the doorway. “Come in?”

“Oh. Yes.”

When she steps through into the entryway, she turns all the way around.

“Wow,” she says as I’m locking the door again behind us. “I haven’t been here in forever.”

My shoulders stiffen, and I turn around so we’re face-to-face. “Whose fault is that?”

Her eyes go soft and sad. “I didn’t mean—”

“It’s fine.”

“All I was trying to say—”

“Do you want something to drink?” I interrupt her again. “Water, or . . . ?”

Lily looks relieved. Maybe she didn’t actually know what she was trying to say. “Water would be great. Thanks.”

I look down the hallway. “You remember where it is, right? My room?”

“Yeah. Of course.” Then she turns and heads toward it.

As I fill up her glass at the kitchen sink, I keep replaying the words. Four of them. One syllable each. I need your help.

Nothing in my life is like a noir. I don’t have an agency with my name on the door. I don’t go looking for leads on foggy nights or walk alone on wet sidewalks. It only rains like forty days a year here. Another tragedy. Constant sunshine really destroys the aesthetic.

Nothing in my life is like a noir . . . except this.

Because this is always how it happens: a detective in his office. A knock at the door. And a girl who needs help.

Well, okay, they’re women, not girls. Femmes fatales, if you want to get technical with trope names. Complete with dark pasts, hidden motives, and skirts so tight I don’t understand how they even walked.

This is my bedroom, though, I think as I step through the door. And this isn’t just any girl. It’s Lily.

“Your room looks just like I remember it,” she says, taking the glass. “Exactly the same.”

I almost ask her to try to figure out what’s changed, like that game you find on kids’ menus. Spot the differences.

“Isn’t yours?” I ask.

“What?”

“The same.”

She laughs. “Since sixth grade? I still had my doll collection on display.”

I frown. Then she frowns.

“No,” she says. Quieter. “I—it’s changed, a lot. Since then.”

I don’t know what I’m supposed to say to that, and I guess neither does Lily, because there’s only silence for a moment.

“Well,” I say finally, “Asta’s new, anyway.” I nod my head over her shoulder, at Asta’s habitat.

Lily turns. Then gasps. Then rushes over to plop down beside the habitat. “Oh my God. She’s so cute.”

“He’s a boy.”

“I’m sorry for misgendering you, Asta,” she says.

He sniffs at her fingers, apparently unoffended.

Lily looks back up at me. “Why is he named Asta?”

“It’s a movie reference.” I gesture at my wall of DVDs. “I’m kind of into them.”

“No kidding.” Lily squints at the wall. She never liked wearing her glasses. I guess that hasn’t changed. “Do you only own movies that were made in the past?”

“All movies were made in the past.”

“You know what I mean.”

I think life would be a whole lot easier if people would just say what they mean and not force me to guess.

Then, out of nowhere, Lily says: “Oh my gosh.” At first, I think she’s overcome with how soft Asta’s fur is (understandable) until I see her eyes aren’t on him, but on the bulletin board above my desk.

I know what photo she’s seen, without even having to ask. It’s the one on the pushpin in the corner, the one with curled-up edges. The one where Lily and I—the kid versions of ourselves, anyway—are standing in front of my garage and the “Green Detective Agency” sign we made out of butcher paper and paint. We’re small, and smiling, and still friends.

Lily gets to her feet, walks over, and takes the picture from its pushpin. “How old were we here? Nine?”

“Ten.”

From this angle, I can see both Lilys at once, the one in the photograph and the one standing in my room. And I can see all the differences, too. Her dark hair shorter and swept up into a ponytail instead of two braids. The freckles on the bridge of her nose all faded. Taller and willowy instead of just skinny.

I’m taller, too, obviously, and my hair’s more brown than red at this point, but . . . Lily looks one step away from adult. And I barely look different at all.

“I can’t believe you still have this,” she says.

“What, a picture?”

“A picture of us.”

It isn’t a picture of us. It’s a picture of me and my detective agency. She only happens to be in the frame. I get the angle she’s going for. She wants that photo to be evidence I missed her, and I didn’t. I don’t.

I clear my throat. “You said you needed help.”

She leaves the photo on my desk and comes back to sit on the bed. I stay leaning against the door frame.

“So,” she says, suddenly sounding nervous. “As you may or may not know, I’m the Features editor for the Herald.”

I look at her blankly.

“The newspaper.”

My face doesn’t shift.

“The school newspaper. Of our school.”

“Oh.” I nod. “Yeah. Sure.”

“I take it you’re not a regular reader.”

“There’s a crossword puzzle, right? I think I’ve done the—”

“Anyway. I’m the editor of the Features section.”

Features is another word for full-length films. Maybe we still have something in common. “Is that movies?”

“No, Entertainment covers movies. Features is more like human-interest pieces. Profiles of people or clubs. Highlighting stuff that’s interesting but isn’t going to get a big flashy news headline. You know?”

I don’t know. I nod anyway.

“And I really like it. I mean, I definitely joined in freshman year just for my résumé, but it’s my favorite thing I do now—and I do a lot, so that says something. I would totally edit Features again next year, but what I’d really, really like to be is . . .” She hesitates, like it’s hard to say it out loud. “Editor in chief.”

“Oh.” From the faraway look in her eye, I guess this means something, to her. I can’t relate. Nothing that happens in high school actually matters. “I hope you get it.”

“Me too, but—” She shakes her head. “At the beginning of the year, I thought I was a shoo-in. It’s only me and the Opinion editor and one of the News editors who are even interested, and I’m the best writer of all of us, by far. Not to mention, the current editor in chief basically acted like it was already mine. But then lately—” Lily makes a frustrated noise. “I don’t know. It’s like she’s not sure anymore. Maybe it’s because I don’t really write stuff that’s hard-hitting. I barely ever make the front page and the one time I did it was a total disaster, which wasn’t even my fault—” She takes a breath. “I just know I have to do something. Something really big. And I think this piece could be it.”

“What piece?”

Lily takes a moment, then says: “Do you know Luke Dobson?”

I shake my head.

“He’s a senior, he goes to Presidio. Well—went to Presidio. Until recently.”

“Dropped out?”

“Not exactly,” she says. “He got arrested.”

That makes my ears perk up. Presidio has over a thousand kids, so there are bound to be people who get transferred to the alternative school for having weed in their locker or something, but an actual arrest? That’s rare.

“For what?” I ask. “Drugs?”

“Vandalism, as far as I can tell. He’s still seventeen—that kind of stuff isn’t public if you’re a minor—but that’s what he said, when I called, after I heard. I only got to talk to him for a minute, but that’s what he said. That the charge was vandalism.” She pauses. “And that he was framed.”

Well, duh. Nobody’s ever guilty in prison, are they?

“You know him,” I say, and it isn’t a question. “He’s not just some kid who goes to Presidio. He’s your friend.”

“Family friend,” she says. “Our moms formed this kids’ playgroup together when we were little, them and a couple other families. So we all saw each other a lot—it’s a pretty small club, kids of gay moms in East County—but we never hung out at school, or anything.”

“So friends, but not best friends,” I clarify. “Like we were.”

She looks down at the bedspread. “Right.”

“But you care about him enough to want to . . . what? Exonerate him?”

“I wanted to do this Features piece,” she explains, “like a deep-dive, long-form investigation on kids getting caught in the juvenile justice system and all its failings, and obviously I wanted Luke’s experience to be the centerpiece. A San Miguel kid, just like all of us, who because of one nonviolent crime has his whole life upended. Anyway, I pitched it to our editor in chief and she completely shot me down. Killed the story and let it bleed out on the floor.”

It’s not the kind of thing I’d read, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad. “Why?”

“Tess said the administration would never go for it, having some story about a Presidio student who turned out to be a criminal. But I know her, if she’d believed in the story, she would have fought for it.” Lily looks down at her hands. “She just didn’t believe I could pull it off.”

“So how’d you convince her?”

Lily hesitates. “I didn’t. Haven’t. Yet.”

A loose-cannon cop on the edge is a pretty standard trope, but I’ve never heard of a loose-cannon teenage journalist before.

“I wasn’t ready to let it go,” she continues, digging a battered blue notebook from her backpack. “So, I thought, maybe if I can show her this issue is bigger than my family friend, maybe I can convince her there’s something really newsworthy here. That’s when I started looking at the overall crime stats. And they were . . . weird.”

“Weird how?”

“San Miguel is a very consistent city—”

“That’s about the only thing you can say for it.”

“Crimewise. It’s consistent.” Lily flips through the notebook. “From year to year, the crime rate stays steady. Not that much better, not that much worse. Until . . . this year.”

She holds the open page out to me. And without really understanding why I’m doing it, I move from the doorway, sit next to her on the bed. It’s a giant graph—hand drawn—with lines in all colors. Some arching steeply upward, but some totally flat.

I point them out. “Those don’t look like they’re changed.”

“And that’s what’s so weird! Violent crime—assaults, muggings, domestics—they’ve stayed the same, and pretty low. It’s the nonviolent crimes that shot up.” She points. “Burglaries up seventy percent, vandalism up almost a hundred percent, more car break-ins than we’ve had in three years combined—”

“There goes the neighborhood.”

“Yeah, and people have definitely noticed. It’s become a whole thing, for the mayor, all these suburban moms sending him petitions to ‘Save Our Streets.’”

“Okay, so . . .” I shrug. “The city’s going downhill. It happens, right?”

“Not that suddenly,” she says, shaking her head. “Not for no apparent reason, and not in only some crimes, the kind that aren’t violent.”

“And the ones without witnesses.”

“What?”

“None of those crimes have witnesses,” I point out. “People don’t get burgled when they’re sitting in the living room watching TV.”

Lily thinks about this. “We do have a witness, though.”

“We, what we—”

“I finally convinced Luke to talk to me about the whole thing, and if he thinks he was framed, there must be something connecting him to this weird pattern.”

“I don’t see what any of this has to do with me.”

“I tried going through the proper channels first,” she says. “I put in a public records request for the arrests, but that can take months. I even called the police department directly, to see if they could give me some kind of explanation.”

I could have told Lily from experience taking anything to the SMPD was only going to get her condescended to. At best. “I’m sure that was a dead end.”

“I asked for the press liaison, but I guess the closest thing they have is the police chief’s assistant, and she just gave me some line about the department’s commitment to the community, then hung up before I could ask a second question.”

“Yeah, they’re useless and they’re dicks about it, that’s kind of their MO,” I say, starting to feel impatient. “But it’s not like I can help. I don’t know anything about crime rates, or journalism, or any of this stuff.”

“Maybe not.” Lily folds her hands in her lap. “But you do know how to solve a mystery.”

When I finally get it, my first thought is: Oh.

My second thought is: Hell no.

“Lily—”

“It might not seem like a mystery, not the ones you’re used to, but I know it is. I know there’s an explanation, but my last name isn’t Woodward. Or Bernstein.”

“Yeah, I know, it’s Krupitsky-Sharma.”

Lily closes her eyes. Shakes her head. Opens them again. “What I mean is—I’m a good writer, but I’m not a detective.”

“You heard me tell Mia. Neither am I.”

“You might have taken the sign down off your garage. But yeah, I was there, at lunch, with you and Mia, and that’s how I know.”

“Know what?”

“You’re still solving mysteries,” Lily says. “You’re just doing them in your head.”

For a moment, the only sound in the room is Asta, burrowing into his wood shavings.

“I know we haven’t been . . . close.” Lily picks at my bedspread. “In a long time.”

That’s the understatement of the century.

“And I know you might not totally trust me.”

No, actually, that’s the understatement of the century.

But . . . Lily came here knowing I might not even let her inside. She took a chance, and Lily isn’t a risk-taker. She always had to be coaxed into it, usually by me.

That’s its own kind of evidence: Lily wouldn’t do any of this on impulse.

“I think there’s something here. And I really think that together, we could solve it.” She’s looking up at me, half hopeful, half impatient. “What do you say?”

What should I say? You ditched me? You’re only here because you think I’ll be useful? You stood right behind Mia today and didn’t say a single thing?

No, I’m not thinking about this logically. That’s where detectives go wrong, if the story turns out to be a tragedy. They get too caught up in their feelings and stop seeing the facts.

Fact 1: The more I’m out of the house, the more Dad will get off my back with his whole “wasted potential” dramatics.

Fact 2: If Lily’s wrong, and this is nothing more than a big clerical error and a juvenile delinquent with delusions of innocence, I’ve lost nothing but my time.

Fact 3: If Lily turns out to be right, and this is something big, I can solve it. And that would change everything.

If I figure this out, if I’m right and everybody knows it, it would mean I was right about other things, too. It would mean I was right to consider myself a detective—a real detective—even when I was ten. It would prove this was never just a game, like Lily thought it was, or a phase, like Dad thought it was, or the start of a criminal record, like the police department thought it was. If I was right all along, that I really was born to do this, then Lily was wrong to abandon me, Dad was wrong to be disappointed in me, and everyone else was wrong about . . . well, all of me.

If I’m right, if I solve this, I can prove them all wrong.

“Okay,” I tell Lily. “I’m in.”