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The paramedics came. Then the deputies—Tripple and Bobby. A crowd gathered, mostly middle-aged, mostly White, men and women who emerged from their RVs with careful steps, drawn by the scent of blood in the water. Tripple kept them back; he was about as good at that part of his job as he was at everything else, meaning he snapped at people, barked orders, shouted, and generally acted like the rear end of a particularly stupid donkey. He was the perfect example of a guy who had let the tiniest amount of power go to his head, and watching him bully a woman on the other side of the caution tape, I couldn’t help but feel like Tripple was genuinely angry. Probably because he took any challenge to his authority personally. I felt numb in the aftermath of finding September and learning Foster had been arrested, but watching Tripple in action still made me simultaneously sick and tired.

The sheriff came, and I gave my statement—not that there was much to give.

“Go home,” the sheriff said when we’d finished. “Get some rest. You’ve been through a lot.”

I hadn’t, not really, but I said, “Are you sure he did it?”

“The investigation is ongoing, Dash.” But she was a good sheriff—good in so many ways. So, she let out a breath and said in a lower voice, “He admits they argued. His version is that she gave him the necklace as a way of buying him off.”

“But she kept the other pieces? The ring and the earrings?”

The sheriff shrugged. “It’s just one of the places his story seems wobbly. Seems to me it’s more likely he took the necklace off her after he killed her, but it might be true. We can place him in her motel room; his fingerprints are a match.”

Something about that theory bothered me, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. “Okay, but whoever killed Channelle hit her with a car. Does Foster have a car?”

“We’re working on that.” More dryly, she added, “If you happen to spot a white sedan with some fresh scuffs, I’d be interested to hear about it.”

“The car was white?”

Realization of her mistake tightened her mouth. “Don’t even think about it, Dash. You’re going straight home. Among other reasons, because I don’t need one of my deputies angry that I sent his boyfriend out to chase down leads.”

“Bobby—”

The sheriff held up one finger. “Straight. Home. Do you hear me?”

I nodded.

Bobby drove me home; I told him he didn’t have to, but he did anyway. He got me settled in the billiard room with coffee and a slice of Indira’s red velvet cake (in the spirit of the season, she’d made it look extra bloody, and we were legally obligated to call it dead velvet cake). He put a blanket over my lap. He fussed with Netflix, trying to find something he thought I’d like, until he finally settled on Real Rob.

“I can call in,” he said.

“Don’t do that.”

“I’m worried about you.”

“I’m fine.”

He crouched, brushed my hair back, and twitched my glasses into place. “You’re not fine. Nobody would be fine after that.”

“I know. But I’m fine , you know? I mean, I don’t need you to stay. I’ll be all right.”

Unhappiness drew at the corners of his eyes.

“Go,” I said with a tiny laugh. “I’ll call you if I need anything.”

“Do you mind if I take the Pilot? Otherwise I have to wait for Tripple to pick me up.”

“It’s your car, Bobby. And I’m not going anywhere.”

He studied me.

“And Real Rob ?” I said. “Some weird show about Rob Schneider’s life? That’s the kind of TV you think I want to watch?”

“You like reality TV.”

“I like bad reality TV. And there’s bad reality TV and bad reality TV.”

“You watched four hours of Ultimate Beastmaster yesterday. You told me it was, quote, ‘ Ninja Warrior meets Sylvester Stallone’s abominable brainchild.’”

“Bobby, that’s a competition. It’s—it’s a demonstration of ability. There are feats of strength.”

“And there’s that guy whose shorts always slip and you can see his Hollister underwear.”

Ladies and gentlemen: I gasped .

“Okay,” Bobby said, “I’m going to work now.”

“That is—I can’t—how dare you?”

“Feel free to change it to Ultimate Beastmaster after I leave.”

And he left before I could offer my stinging rebuttal (that I was still working on).

Also, for the record, I did not change it to Ultimate Beastmaster after he left.

(And in my defense, the guy with the Hollister underwear was swinging on a rope , for frick’s sake. I’m not made of stone.)

I tried to get into Real Rob. I really did. I ate cake. I drank coffee. I did my best to slip into the semi-hypnotized, dissociated state that junk TV usually induces. (It’s the cure for what ails ya.)

But I couldn’t. In part, because my brain kept looping back to September in that tiny camper, and the smell of vomit, and how pale she’d been. How hard she’d been trying to reach Foster. The same woman who hadn’t gone to the sheriff’s station when Keme, her own son, had been arrested because she’d been afraid it would look bad.

And in part because something was still nagging at me about Foster. I knew he was a bad guy. I knew he used women. I even believed, after seeing him with September, that he wasn’t above hurting a woman. But that he’d killed JT, and then Channelle, for money?

I mean, yes. It was possible. It was even believable.

So why didn’t I believe it?

Eventually, I gave up on TV and dragged myself into the den. I got myself settled at the computer. I did a quick check of Crime Cats (there was a stunning exposé on this little gray kitten that was “illegally smol,” and let me tell you: it was Pulitzer-worthy stuff), and then, somehow, it was forty-five minutes later, and I told myself I had to write.

The only problem was that I didn’t know what.

I had my plot. Ish. Will Gower was looking for his—well, whatever it was. And he was going to find it. Or not. And something bad was going to happen. Or something good. I basically had it locked down. I was definitely thinking Vancouver. Unless I was missing a real opportunity with Portland so close to me.

The real problem was the relationship side of the story. I knew I wanted something complex, something like Hammett, a tangle of desire and love, selfishness and selflessness. But I didn’t want it to be exactly like Hammett. I guess I could have just gayed up The Maltese Falcon . Brigid could become, um, Bridger (see? this is why they pay me the big bucks). And he could be beautiful and seductive, a master manipulator of men, only to fall in love with Will Gower and then, um, betray him? I guess.

But as I said, I didn’t want exactly that. What I wanted was that same tangled messiness, but with my own spin on it.

Twisty—and twist ed —relationships were a hallmark of the mystery genre. The Golden Age mysteries, for all their supposedly stout, staid reserve, were actually full of them. Agatha Christie’s The Mysterious Affair at Styles was a good example. (Spoilers incoming.) The murder victim, Emily Inglethorp, is married to a much younger man, who appears to be a gold digger. (Apparently, a gold digger used to be called a fortune hunter.) She has stepsons from her first marriage who are also hoping to inherit her fortune. And she has a companion (which is apparently what single ladies did back then—good work if you can get it) named Evelyn, who supposedly hates Alfred, and who does her best to convince Poirot and the others that Alfred killed Emily. The supposedly probably gives it away, but it turns out that Evelyn and Alfred are secretly in love, and they conspired together to kill Emily.

Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca was another good example. (More spoilers!) For a good portion of the book, the protagonist—and the reader—are convinced that Mr. de Winter (the unnamed protagonist’s husband) is still desperately in love with his deceased first wife, Rebecca. It turns out, though, that he hated Rebecca. (Frankly, with good cause—she was unfaithful, cruel, and a bit of a psychopath.)

Noir fiction had its own share of it too. Raymond Chandler’s most intricately plotted book, Farewell, My Lovely , revolves around two obsessive relationships. (Spoilers!!!) The book opens with poor Philip Marlowe getting dragged along as ex-felon Moose Malloy goes on a (literal) rampage looking for the girl he left behind when he went to prison, Velma Valento. Then Marlowe gets involved in a separate, and seemingly unrelated, case involving the beautiful (and promiscuous) Mrs. Grayle, who is being blackmailed. (Also, she’s a blonde, which is a thing for Chandler.) It turns out—big surprise—that Mrs. Grayle is Velma Valento. She’s also unfaithful, treacherous, and a bit of a psychopath herself.

Boiled down like that, all the plots seem superficial and obvious and lackluster. But that’s not doing them justice. When you read them, when you were living out the story word by word along with the protagonist, they were engrossing, almost claustrophobically enveloping, placing you in the center of the web of lies and half-truths that the protagonists were struggling to unravel. More than anything, when you read them, you felt the power of those messy emotions: people who loved and hated deeply, passionately, secretly, in ways that weren’t neat and nice and proper. Maybe that, more than anything, was at the heart of crime fiction: the belief that the human heart was wild, untamable, always burning. That love, as the ancients thought of it, was a disease.

What I really liked about these stories though? In all of them, a character you thought was good (or the victim)—Brigid, Emily, Rebecca, even Mrs. Grayle—turned out to be much more complicated. And their relationships, with each other and with the protagonist, were never what they seemed.

So, I knew what I wanted. I just didn’t know how to do it.

My mouse was sneaking down to open up Crime Cats again when the front door opened.

“Oh, thank God,” I muttered.

Footsteps raced toward the den, and Millie appeared in the doorway. Her usual manic, caffeinated energy seemed to have been compounded—in the sense that she also looked like she’d been struck by lightning. Her hair stood up in clumps. Her eyes had a shellshocked look to them. She was wearing a Hastings Rock sweatshirt, pumpkin-print pajama pants, and two—TWO—mismatched slippers that were meant to look like witches.

“Millie, I’m in the middle of writing—” I said (mostly for form’s sake).

“You have to stop him!” Her voice trembled, and she waved a piece of paper at me. “Dash, you have to STOP HIM!”

“Stop who?” Setting the laptop aside, I started to get up, an idea already forming. “What’s—”

“KEME IS LEAVING!”

“What do you mean he’s—”

She shoved the paper into my hands, turned, and ran toward the back of the house, screaming, “INDIRA!”

I mean, I know she was upset, but I swear to God: the house shook .

That only registered at a distance, though, because I was staring at the paper. I recognized Keme’s blunt little pen strokes, the stiff letters that were so angular and linear, with such complete disregard for lower-case letters, that they could have passed for runes. It was one word. And it was GOODBYE .

“What’s going on?” Indira asked from the doorway. Her eyes were storm-dark, and she was holding Millie in her arms as Millie wept uncontrollably. “I can’t get a word out of her.”

“Keme,” I said and handed Indira the note.

She looked at it for longer than it took to read the word. She closed her eyes for several seconds, hugging Millie to her. When she opened her eyes, they glistened. Her voice lacked its usual briskness as she said, “I didn’t think…” But she trailed off and didn’t finish.

“I don’t understand,” I said. “Goodbye? What does that mean? He can’t leave, can he? I mean, where would he go?”

“He can’t go,” Millie said, pushing herself away from Indira and wiping her nose. “He CAN’T!”

The sound of the front door came again, and Fox appeared in the hallway behind Indira and Millie. “What’s going on? Millie texted me 911—what’s wrong, dear?”

“It’s Keme,” Millie managed before dissolving into another wail.

Indira and I filled Fox in as best we could, but there wasn’t much to say, since none of us knew anything.

“I’ll see if I can find him,” Fox said. “He’s hurting, and he’s not thinking clearly. He needs someone to talk some sense into him.”

“I tried calling him,” Millie said through her sobs. “He won’t answer. I need to talk to him. I just need to talk to him, and then everything will be okay, but he won’t answer.”

“Go with Fox,” Indira said to me. “I’ll stay with Millie in case he decides to come here.”

“Um, why don’t you go with Fox?” I said. “The last couple times I’ve tried to talk to Keme, it hasn’t—well, it hasn’t exactly been a resounding success. I think he needs someone he actually, you know, likes.” I tried to make it sound like a flash of inspiration when I added, “Like you.”

Indira looked at me.

Fox arched both eyebrows.

Millie raised her head and stared .

“You know what?” I said. “We should call Bobby.”

I pulled out my phone and placed the call. And then, because they were all still trying to incinerate me with their eyes, I turned my back on them.

“Are you okay?” Bobby asked. “Hold on; I’ll be right there. I’ve got to tell Tripple I’m leaving.”

“No, Bobby, I’m fine.” I had to stop, because in that moment I recognized that Keme had never known what it felt like to have someone drop everything before you could even open your mouth. It took me a second before I could say, “It’s Keme.”

After I’d told Bobby everything we knew—still not much—he said, “That’s so weird. I just got a text from Ziggy.”

(Listen: you, like me, can probably use your powers of deduction to figure out with a name like that, Ziggy was a surfer friend.)

“He said Keme asked him for a ride—” Bobby continued.

“Get over there,” I said. “Grab him and throw him in the car and bring him back here.”

No one, not even Bobby, said anything.

“Uh, only a little less like a kidnapping,” I said.

“Hold on,” Bobby said. When he spoke again, his voice was troubled. “Ziggy’s not responding.”

What did that mean, I wanted to know. All my earlier thoughts about writing a twisty/twisted relationship came back to me. In a really dark mystery, the classic character relationship twist would be, well, mine and Keme’s. I’d spend the whole book thinking he was my little brother (or, if you were Fox and Indira and Millie and Bobby, my big brother), and there’d be increasing signs for the savvy reader that I was wrong, like Keme shoving me out of my chair at the station, or slapping my hand away when he’d come home to Hemlock House. And then, in this exact moment, I’d realize Keme was the real killer, and we’d find each other and have a final, deadly showdown.

But that was only in books.

Right?

“I’m going to head over there,” Bobby said. “You said Fox is with you? Why don’t you two check the Starlite’s bus stop; there’s a Greyhound later tonight.”

“Uh—”

“I love you. Be careful.”

And then he disconnected.

When I turned around, I said, “He’s going to check with this friend, Ziggy—”

“We heard all that,” Indira said.

Fox was raising their eyebrows again. “Come on, we need to go.”

“About that—I still think Indira should be the one—”

With cool efficiency, Indira unloaded Millie on Fox. Millie kept crying, and Fox patted her on the top of the head and gave me, of all people, a dirty look.

“Dashiell,” Indira said, “I’d like to have a word with you.”

It wasn’t a question.

She led me to the kitchen. It was warm, and it smelled like cinnamon and the lingering hint of rising dough, and on the other side of the windows, the sky had cleared and frozen until the moon looked like it was trapped in a sheet of black ice.

Indira planted herself, folded her arms, and said, “You’re going with Fox.”

“But—”

“No buts. Keme needs you. I understand that this kind of thing is difficult for you. I’m not insensitive. But Keme is your friend, and you, Dashiell, are a good man. So, I’m asking you to be brave and to do this, even though it scares you, because right now, Keme needs to know he’s loved.”

“Right, I know. And I’m not trying to be a coward or weasel out of this. I mean, maybe I’m weaseling a little , but—” The look on her face cut me off. “I agree with you: what Keme needs right now is to know we love him. That’s why it should be you. You’re the one he’s closest to, well, except maybe Millie, and right now—”

Something in Indira’s expression softened until it approached grief. And then the moment passed, and she was all cold resolve again. “A year ago, you’re right: it might have been me who needed to go. But things have changed. Who does he play video games with every afternoon? Who does he spend a ridiculous amount of time with, jumping off benches and trying to climb up walls?”

“It’s called parkour, actually—”

“Who does he hang out with for hours and hours, Dash? You made that horrible movie on your phone—”

“ Bride of Sasquatch was a misunderstood work of genius.”

“—and you ruined a priceless carpet with your squirt gun fight—”

“Ruined is kind of a subjective term, if you think about it.”

“—and you gave each other tetanus trying to build a fort—”

“That nail only went into his hand, like, a quarter inch.”

“—and don’t think I don’t know about that time the two of you ‘cruised the boardwalk’ playing that awful music so loud that Bobby had to give you an official reprimand.”

“Well, the deputies are legally required to call it a warning, not a reprimand, so—”

“Dashiell!”

“I know, Indira. I mean, I’m not an idiot. A month ago, it was like we were—” Actually saying the word brothers would have hurt too much, so I settled for “—really close, but now everything I do is wrong. And that makes me feel bad, because I thought—well, I guess I thought a lot of things were different. But they’re not.” I struggled for a moment to keep my voice level. “And that’s just what it is, and I don’t want to keep making things worse. So, I think you should go.”

Brushing back that lock of witchy-white hair, Indira watched me for what felt like a long time. My face was hot. My chest prickled. I was having a hard time meeting her eyes, so I was surprised, when she spoke again, to hear how her voice had softened.

“Sometimes, Dash, when people are hurting, they—”

“They lash out. I know.”

She didn’t say anything. And I had the strangest feeling that I’d been wrong, that whatever she’d been about to say, it had been something different. But she didn’t correct me. She didn’t say anything.

“I just—I know this isn’t what you want to hear,” I said. “But trust me: it’s pretty clear what Keme’s trying to tell me.”

The wind rose again, wrapping itself around the house, jarring the shutters, howling at the windows. The sky still looked like I could reach out and tap it, and it would shatter, and the moon spilled a long, white avenue of light on the restless lines of the ocean.

“He’s not trying to tell you something,” Indira finally said. “He’s trying to ask you something.”