t took an hour for us to film the first three clues—and about that long for Sadie-Grace to get the hang of pretending to be Campbell. It took two hours for me to realize how much this whole exercise was weighing on Lily. Six weeks of living in the bedroom across from hers had taught me that my cousin straightening her hair and tucking it behind her right ear was a bad sign.

The worse Lily felt, the more she needed things to appear perfect.

“Oh, Lordy. I can’t watch.…” Offscreen, Boone played one of Campbell’s voice memos. She was cracking up laughing. ­Sadie-Grace was currently on-screen, in her own shirt, attempting to make up a rap about good citizenship while standing in front of an enormous statue of praying hands.

It was going only slightly better than Boone’s attempt to impersonate a camel at the entrance to the local zoo.

Lily held the camera in her left hand, as her right secured her hair in place once more.

“That’s enough.” I put Sadie-Grace out of her misery. Mid-rap, she’d gone from rond de jambe–ing to a battement, which was never a good sign.

“Oh, good,” Sadie-Grace said, her entire body sagging with relief. “I was having a really hard time thinking of a rhyme for hospitality.” She turned to retrieve the next clue from the base of the praying hands.

Next to me, Lily let her left hand—and the camera—fall gently to her side. I waited for her right hand to make its move.

Another hair tuck. “It’s going to be either Maynard Park or the fountains,” she murmured. “Or, if they’re feeling daring, the bluffs.”

I hadn’t been aware that our region of the country had bluffs. But prior to this evening, I had also never been to the botanical gardens or the historical society. Tonight was a night of firsts.

“Ladies,” Boone called out. “Our destination is Maynard Park. To the Bat-limo!”

“See?” Lily said. The resignation in her tone sounded so raw that on the way back to the limo, I broke my cousin’s cardinal rule and asked about her feelings, which, to Lily, was pretty much the equivalent of inquiring about her underwear.

“You okay?”

“I’m fine.” Lily’s reply was immediate, but she followed it with a shake of her head, negating that sentence.

“Care to elaborate?” I prompted gently.

“It’s just…” She trailed off, then surprised me by forcing herself to continue. “Whoever put this list together might as well have simply asked Walker for a list of places he used to take me when he wanted the night to be memorable.”

My cousin’s relationship with Walker Ames was right up there with Secrets on the list of topics that Lily Taft Easterling did not discuss.

“He gave me a promise ring, you know.” Her voice was quiet. Not bitter, not sweet. “Last spring. He was getting ready to graduate. We were at the botanical gardens. And then two weeks later…”

The Ballad of Lily Easterling and Walker Ames, I thought, remembering Boone’s words at the auction. A tale for the ages to be sure.

And now, courtesy of the Symphony Ball Committee, Lily was being forced to relive their greatest hits.

She can’t take another three hours of this, I thought. What I said, as the four of us piled back into the limo was: “This is ridiculous.” Lest Lily think I was talking about her, I continued. “I am not…” I looked down at our next challenge. “Attempting to recite Robert Frost while stuffing my mouth full of marshmallows.”

“I volunteer as tribute!”

“And neither are you,” I told Boone. We still had three hours to burn. Based on the deal I’d made with Campbell, we had to continue to document her presence with us.

But who said that we had to continue to do so here, with a parent-­approved list?

If we’re stuck being Campbell’s alibi, we may as well enjoy ourselves. Sick of playing by the rules, I crawled toward the front of the limo and lowered the privacy window. I gave the driver our next location—not Maynard Park.

“That’s a forty-five-minute trip,” the driver said.

“So it is,” I replied. I reiterated the address and rolled up the window.

“Where are we going?” Sadie-Grace asked, her brow furrowed as the limo pulled away from the curb.

I leaned back in my seat. “I believe people around here refer to it as the boonies.”

As far as I could tell, Lily, Sadie-Grace, and Boone had all been to Europe, but not one of them had ever driven more than twenty minutes outside the city limits.

Why would they?

“Are we allowed to make the driver come all the way out here?” Sadie-Grace asked when it became clear just how far off the beaten path I was taking them. “Isn’t that, like, grand theft auto?”

“Grand theft limo,” Boone corrected sagely.

“Hey,” I cut in. “Bonnie, Clyde, if you two are done complaining, we’re almost there.”

When the limo came to a stop, my three companions followed me warily out onto the street, like they half expected to step out into the Dust Bowl.

Either that, or they’d noticed the town’s lone strip club across the street.

Home sweet home. I hadn’t been tempted, even once, in the past six weeks to make the drive, but now, knowing my mom was back in town…

“It’s… a vacant lot.” Lily aimed for diplomacy as she followed my gaze to the address I’d given the driver.

“No,” I corrected. “It’s the lot.”

The town I’d grown up in may not have had botanical gardens, but we did have landmarks of our own. The lot had been empty for as long as I had been alive. The grass was uneven and slightly ­overgrown—but only slightly. That was one of the oddest things about the lot. I’d never seen anyone cutting it. Given the contents of the field, I wasn’t sure anyone could cut it, but the grass never seemed to grow long enough to completely mask the objects people left there.

It had started, so the local rumors went, with bottles. Glass bottles. It wasn’t hard to imagine people tossing an empty into a vacant lot, but somewhere along the way, someone must have noticed the way the sunlight—or moonlight—caught on colored glass, because slowly, the lot’s purpose had evolved. People left mirrors, metal, anything that might catch the light. At some point, the bottles weren’t tossed anymore—they were placed.

Some people left notes in them.

A thousand notes in a thousand bottles in an empty lot that would have run the length of a city block, if we’d still been in the city. But we weren’t.

By my calculations, we were roughly three and a half worlds away.

Beside me, Lily clutched her purse tighter. Clearly, she’d spotted the strip club. Instead of telling her that her wallet was safer here than it was in the city, I looked up. The night sky wasn’t quite clear, a waning moon disappearing behind smoky clouds. I walked back to the limo and made one last request of the driver. Obligingly, he angled the car toward the field and flashed the brights.

Light caught on glass. A thousand bottles, a thousand notes, and between them, mementos—scrap-metal sculptures, patches of glittery fabric, the occasional hand-fashioned cross.

“Wow,” Sadie-Grace said. “This is…”

“Trash?” I suggested, because I half expected one of them to say it.

“No.” That response came from unlikely quarters. Lily’s grip on her purse relaxed. Her lips curved slowly upward. “This is a place that Walker Ames has never ever been.” She lifted the camera up and turned back to Sadie-Grace, her eyes alight. “Get out there, ‘Campbell.’ ”

I took them to Late Nite Donuts. We visited the Methodist graveyard and the secondhand shop behind Big Jim’s that always had the mannequins in the window decked to the nines and posed like they were in crime scenes.

That was Boone’s favorite. Lily’s was the library. There was an actual library, one town over, but I’d always preferred this one myself.

“Someone made this?” Lily asked, standing at the base of the tree and looking up.

“Not the tree itself,” I said. “Obviously. But the rest of it? Someone carved the shelves when I was a kid.”

I was pretty sure we were on private property, but the fence was easy enough to jump that the owners couldn’t have wanted to keep people out too badly.

I suspected they were at least partially responsible for keeping the library’s shelves stocked.

Recesses had been carved into the trunk of the old oak, three feet wide, a little over a foot tall, one on top of another on top of another, a makeshift bookshelf filled with tattered copies of books that even the used-book store wouldn’t accept.

This was where I’d gotten my first tome on medieval torture.

“Maybe we should get back,” Sadie-Grace said suddenly—and with no small amount of reluctance. “What if Campbell—”

“Campbell wants an alibi,” I cut in. “I have no idea where she is or what she’s doing, but I’d lay good money that we’re farther away from the eye of the storm now than we would be if we’d stuck to the rules.”

“The farther away we are,” Boone summarized, “the better Campbell’s alibi.”

I told Lily to turn on the camera and issued a challenge of my own. The library wasn’t the library until you climbed it.

“What’s next?” Sadie-Grace had dirt on her face, grass in her hair, and a scratch on her elbow. She still looked like she’d come straight from a royal engagement—or stepped out of a fairy tale.

I checked my watch: forty minutes until the limo driver was supposed to circle back to the lot to pick us up. “I figured we’d swing by the gas station,” I said. “Then we’ll end at The Holler.”

I didn’t know what it said about me or the first eighteen years of my life that this was all I had to show them. Probably the same thing it said that I hadn’t made the drive back here until now.

“What’s the gas station?” Lily asked. Unlike Sadie-Grace, she had survived the tree climb completely unscathed. She literally could have sat down to brunch at the club without adjusting so much as a hair.

“The gas station,” I said dramatically, “is… a gas station.”

They all stared at me blankly.

“The Holler is a bar,” I offered.

“Your bar?” Sadie-Grace asked.

I smiled.