I finally got to ask Connor over as we sat on the bus together that day after school. Turns out we were on the same bus route. Mom had been driving me to and from school, but I didn’t see why she needed to keep doing that when the bus would drop me off only a block from Stagecoach Pass. I knew how busy she was with stuff at the park, and I didn’t want her to have to stop everything in the middle of the day to pick me up anymore.

“Is your mom working tonight?” I asked him.

“Yeah, she won’t be back until early tomorrow morning.”

“Then you’re coming over to my house-theme-park-apartment-thingy for dinner. My parents want to meet you. I mean, I know you already met my dad briefly, but they want to meet you, like, officially, especially after,” I leaned in and whispered, “Steakgate.”

Connor looked torn. “I can come over until dinner, but then I have to go home.”

I sat back up straight. “Why? If your mom’s working all night, why can’t you just stay?”

He shrugged and blinked his eyes rapidly. “Well, maybe I can stay. We’ll see.”

“I guess,” I said. Connor never ate lunch, he wouldn’t eat ice cream with me, and now he didn’t want to have dinner at my house. I was beginning to wonder if he was starving himself. I decided to change the subject. “So I was thinking about what you said the other day—about how maybe someone, you know, offed the Cavanaughs.” I whispered the word offed in case anyone was listening to our conversation.

Connor blinked at me. “Yeah?”

I nodded. “Yeah. And I was thinking we should maybe start considering the possibility that there is a murderer at Stagecoach Pass.” Again, I whispered the word murderer. You can never be too careful when discussing such things.

“Who?” Connor whispered.

“Could be anyone. There’s this guy at the goldmine—we call him Mean Bob because he’s so mean. Maybe he did it. Or maybe the guy who interviewed my parents—Gary the accountant. Maybe he did it.”

“Why?”

“To take over the park.”

“But why would he want to take over the park?”

“Money.” I nodded. “It’s always about money.”

“How much money do you think the park makes?” Connor asked.

I actually thought the park made negative money. “Okay, maybe not money,” I said. I narrowed my eyes at Connor. “Revenge.”

“Revenge for what?”

“I don’t know. Yet. But I’m going to solve this great mystery all on my own,” I announced. “If you would like to assist me, you shall do so, sir.”

“Okay,” Connor said, not quite with the enthusiasm or the British accent I had been going for. In my mind, great detectives always had British accents.

“We should go back to the storage shed,” I said.

“But there’s nothing in there except papers you can barely read and old props and junk.”

“Yeah, but maybe there’s something hidden there. Why else would it have all those signs?”

Connor nodded. “That’s true.”

I tapped my feet on the bus floor. “I’ve never had an exciting mystery to solve. Well, except for the time I woke up one morning with every inch of my hair, body, and bed covered in chocolate.”

“Why?” Connor asked.

“A Hershey’s Kiss fell out of my backpack into my bed. As I rolled around on it all night, that’s what it did. Can you believe it? One Hershey’s Kiss!”

Connor didn’t seem that impressed with my Hershey’s Kiss story. “Maybe you should ask Madame Myrtle about it,” he said. “Shouldn’t a psychic know about all that kind of stuff? Can’t they, like, talk to dead people and stuff?”

“She just reads palms,” I said. “Obviously that’s not very helpful to me.”

Connor smiled. “You shan’t worry!” He raised a finger in the air. “We shall solve this highly mysterious mystery ourselves.”

I was glad he used a terrible British accent that time.