Page 19 of By the Book

“Wait,” I said. When Salk looked back, my face heated. “What about the mayor?”

“What about her?”

“Aren’t you going to talk to her? Shouldn’t you go over there and—”See if she has a stolen bookdidn’t sound great, so I went with “—investigate?”

“Dash,” Salk said. And then he stopped. His jaw had an unfamiliar set, and it sounded like he was trying to keep his voice friendly. “You smelled some perfume. You heard a voice you aren’t sure you recognized.”

“I’ll talk to him,” Bobby said. I hadn’t heard him come into the hall, and his voice surprised me. One hand on my shoulder, Bobby said, “Why don’t we let Salk work?”

Bobby led me into the servants’ dining room. Only a single lamp burned here, casting unfamiliar shadows across the table and the gingham curtains, and filling the air with the faint scent of kerosene. On the other side of the window, moonlight picked out the tangled hemlocks massing on the cliffs, and farther out, the knit-silver restlessness of the ocean. The waves crashed somewhere down below us.

“What do you mean, you’ll talk to me?” I asked when the door swung shut behind Bobby. “Why did you talk to him for so long?”

“You need to understand Salk’s situation.” Bobby pulled out a chair for me. I folded my arms and stayed standing. After a moment, he sighed and said, “He’s a good deputy, Dash. But he’s in a bad spot. You’re asking him to show up at the mayor’s house and more or less accuse her of aggravated theft in the first degree.”

“I didn’t say he should accuse her—”

“But that’s what it’ll be, even if he never says those words. And you’re asking him to do it because you smelled perfume.”

“I smelledherperfume. And I heard her voice.” And then I realized what he was saying, and a sliver of hurt worked its way into me. “I thought you believed me.”

“Of course I believe you. But I’m telling you that you’re asking Salk to risk his job on nothing more than your word. Nobody else smelled her perfume. Nobody heard her say, ‘Excuse me.’ Nobody saw her shove you. Nobody saw her go into the billiard room. For that matter, nobody can explain how she got past everybody and into the billiard room with the door locked. By your own admission, it sounded like the mayor was talking to someone else, which means there were two people who might have slipped past us in the confusion. And most importantly, nobody saw anybody steal the diary. I’m not saying you’re wrong. I’m saying it’s a big ask, and I’m not sure what the payoff would be—all the mayor has to do is say, ‘No, I’d already left,’ and how would we prove otherwise?”

“Because everyone was focused on the cupcakes!”

“Exactly.”

I set my jaw.

“Salk will do a good job,” Bobby said. “He’ll put what you said in his report. He’ll talk to Sheriff Acosta about it. If we find something—fingerprints, trace evidence, an eyewitness—she’ll follow up on it.” Bobby stepped closer and reached out to put his hands on my arms. His movements were slow, almost cautious,like someone approaching a wild animal. “This isn’t a cover-up. It’s not a conspiracy. It’s just not enough.”

His hands chafed my arms lightly, stroking some of the tension away. Not enough, though, that I didn’t still sound grumpy when I said, “So, we’re going to sit here and do nothing because the entire sheriff’s office is afraid of making the mayor mad.”

That earned me a look. “That’s not what I said.”

“Then what are you saying?”

“I’m saying if we want to do this, we’re going to have to do it ourselves.”

Chapter 6

We got out of the house without the other deputies—and, almost as importantly, our friends—noticing. Then Bobby drove us south in his Pilot, which was, admittedly, a smoother and quieter ride than the Jeep (which had been totaled in a snooping-related accident a few months before). The Pilot just wasn’t as cool. That wasn’t Bobby’s fault; that was science.

The fog was thick that night, swaddling the spruce and pine and fir that rose on either side of the road. In the dark, all I could see were glimpses of ferns at the shoulder, and then the shadows of the massive trees. The water suspended in the mist glinted jewel tones when the light struck it right, and the air that came through the vents was sweet and damp and cool. Summer on the Oregon Coast wasn’t what most people thought of as summer, but I’d been here for over a year now, and although I wasn’t a local—I swear to God, Fox was practically a duck, the way water rolled off them—I’d learned enough to bring a hoodie.

(It showed a unicorn playing Pong, and I wore it as much as humanly possible because the first time Bobby had seen it, his face had split in that huge, goofy grin I would do pretty much anything to see.)

It wasn’t until the third time Bobby checked the rearview mirror that I realized something was going on.

“What?” I asked.

“I think someone’s following us.”

“Huh?”

(Not my most articulate response ever.)

Twisting around in my seat, I tried to catch a glimpse of whoever was behind us. Unfortunately, the dark and the mistmeant all I could make out was a pair of headlights and the diffuse rings of light created by the moisture in the air.

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