Page 22

Believe it or not, we made it to Halloween.

It would be oversimplifying things to say that the investigation was over. If anything, the real investigation was only beginning. Tripple was under arrest (and, thanks to Keme, in the hospital), and the sheriff had informed me that they’d found Channelle’s fingerprints on the cruiser’s visor mirror—one place that Tripple had forgotten to wipe down, apparently. Now the sheriff had to start unraveling the mess Tripple had created. JT’s and Channelle’s murders would be bad enough; what would be even worse, though, would be the ripples that spread outward: all of Tripple’s arrests, all of his convictions, all of his work as a deputy—it would come under a microscope now. A lifetime’s work undone because he’d been selfish and violent and, in a word, evil. And because he’d been in love.

Bobby was okay, it turned out—although he’d had a bad headache for the next day. Tripple had used a chokehold to knock him out. It took, on average, nine seconds for someone to lose consciousness when a chokehold is correctly applied. Bobby had been unconscious before he’d even really had a chance to fight. The downside to chokeholds was that they could all too easily be fatal, one of the reasons modern police departments no longer trained LEOs to use them. An old-timer like Tripple, though, knew all the dirty tricks. I was just grateful Bobby hadn’t had anything worse happen to him.

Keme—to my absolute delight, and to his panicked embarrassment—had received a commendation from Sheriff Acosta for, among other things, saving my life. I suspected it was also meant to convey, implicitly, Acosta’s apology for the way Keme had been treated at the beginning of the investigation. The actual ceremony wasn’t for a few more days, and I cannot fully express my genuine pleasure in watching the boy swing from swaggering teenage machismo to terror at the prospect of standing in front of all those people. (In case you’re wondering, the swaggering teenage machismo tended to win out whenever Millie was around.)

For the record, Bobby—and Indira, and I, and even Fox—had all performed the obligatory chorus of Don’t ever do that again . It had taken the wind out of Keme’s sails for about an hour, especially when no one seemed particularly impressed by his and Millie’s display of initiative. (They had apparently overheard Bobby and me leaving and assumed that I would somehow manage to get myself killed if they didn’t tag along. I mean, they weren’t wrong, but I didn’t feel like they needed to say it out loud.) All our hard work had gone out the window, though, when Millie had posted a long—and LOUD—video on social media explaining how my boyfriend, Keme, did the most amazing thing . After that, Keme looked like he had enough testosterone pumping through him to pick a fight with a bullet train.

Oh, and by the way: they didn’t even have the decency to tell us. Keme and Millie, I mean. We all would have gone on wondering and guessing and hoping if we hadn’t heard those magical words— my boyfriend, Keme . There was no elaborate courting ritual. They didn’t sit us down and gently explain it to us. Millie didn’t even ask me for Keme’s hand in, uh, boyfriendship? They acted like they always had. With way more kissing.

(I was starting to understand how Keme felt about me and Bobby. I was also starting to knock—loudly—every time I entered a room.)

Hemlock House was always busy on Halloween—not only because it was the only fully operational Class V haunted mansion on the entire Oregon Coast (don’t quote me on that), but also because over the years, Vivienne had created something of a tradition, which could be boiled down to: full-sized candy bars, and plenty of them. This year, with money tight, we’d had to resort to fun-size options, but honestly, the kids didn’t seem to mind (aside from one little cowlicked runt out of the Archer clan who clamored for his full-sized Snickers—his mom had to drag him away, vamping off-stage to her own embarrassed laughter).

Eventually, it was time for me and Bobby to head upstairs and help Keme get ready for the dance.

“And maybe change into your own costume while you’re up there,” Fox said, giving me an appraising look. “Or are you going as a disheveled stoat?”

“I’m already in my costume, thank you very much. And I’m not going to engage with this—with this abuse . My costume is cute and clever and cute and—”

“Clever?” Fox said drily.

“Bobby!”

“Here we go,” Bobby said with a squeeze to my shoulder that I was sure was supposed to convey his boundless support and his wholehearted agreement that my costume was, in fact, cute and clever. Bobby, for his part, was definitely cute—the Marty McFly getup had made a second appearance, and the word of the night was yum . (When he’d cuffed the sleeves of the denim jacket, something had happened inside me, and I’m not ready to describe it.)

“We shan’t let you down,” Fox informed me as they opened yet another fun-sized Kit Kat. Tonight, Fox’s ensemble included a knee-length dress with leg-of-mutton sleeves; a white pinafore; and ankle-strap shoes. They’d added a featureless metallic mask that made their voice boom oddly, and they’d tripped over the hassock twice, going, uh, ankle-straps over pinafore. The whole effect was Battlestar Galactica meets Alice in Wonderland, and when I’d wondered aloud to Bobby (a little too loudly, it turned out) if it was a costume or an ordinary outfit, Fox had let out an indignant huff and walked straight into the fireplace.

Indira, in a version of her hippie costume she’d worn on Sunday, gave me a small smile. She was good at controlling her expression, but I knew her well enough to see the worry and hope battling in her features.

“He’s going to want you to give him your seal of approval when we’re done,” I told her. “You know he will.”

Her smile got a little bigger, and Bobby and I headed upstairs.

In keeping with all the other recent developments, I’d finally put my foot down about Keme’s “secret” (notice the liberal use of air quotes) bedroom. I’d been willing to play along and let Keme sleep in one of the secret passages while his own living situation was…well, unstable, to put it politely. But now that his mom had been evicted, and since Keme was eighteen and a legal adult, I’d decided it was time to put an end to the charade. He hadn’t liked it. And it had almost threatened to tip over into a fight—if you can fight with somebody who just hunches his shoulders and won’t make eye contact and keeps trying to sneak past you so he can slip out of the house.

And then Bobby had looked around the secret turret, scanning Keme’s dirty clothes and his half-empty boxes of breakfast cereal and the jumble of mismatched furniture Keme had pilfered, and said in his usual I’m-Bobby-so-I-actually-am-honestly-asking-this tone, “Are you going to bring Millie up here?”

And that, ladies and gentlemen, was that.

We found Keme in his new bedroom. He was dressed in black trousers, a white shirt, black suspenders, and a black bow tie. A pair of Chucks (mine, for your information) rounded out the ensemble. He was staring at himself in a cheval mirror, his face dark.

When Bobby and I stepped through the door, he looked over and said, “I look like a wiener.”

Boy, if you wanted to hear a nervous laugh. “Uh, Keme, Indira is right downstairs, and I don’t think you can say—”

“You look handsome,” Bobby said. He moved over to Keme and adjusted the bow tie. Then he tugged on the tight knot of Keme’s hair. He did something with his eyebrows that was apparently the way straight boys asked each other questions. (Bobby was an honorary straight boy.) Keme made a disgruntled sound and nodded, and Bobby set to work undoing Keme’s hair and starting over.

For my part, I flopped on the bed.

“Everyone’s going to be wearing a suit,” Keme said into the silence.

“Why didn’t you tell us?” I asked. “We would have gotten you—”

Bobby gave me a surprisingly stern look.

I shut my yapper.

“You didn’t want a suit,” Bobby said.

“But everybody’s going to be wearing one.”

“Millie doesn’t expect you to wear a suit.”

“That’s what you’re supposed to wear to a dance,” Keme said with surprising stubbornness.

“You look very handsome,” Bobby said again.

And then he gave me another look—a look that said, quite clearly, that I needed to start carrying my weight in this conversation.

“Think about it this way,” I said. “Millie’s already been to a high school dance with an awkward teenage boy dressed in an ill-fitting suit. You know? Because she’s older than you, and she already went to all her high school dances, and she—”

Bobby was staring at me.

Keme was glaring at me.

The enormous horse in the giant oil horse painting was looking at me like it had freshly rediscovered the joy of trampling.

“Uh, what I mean is—”

“Nice save,” Bobby muttered.

“—you aren’t one of those boys. You’re an adult, Keme. You’ve been an adult for a long time. Why would you want to look like the rest of those—” I cast a glance at the door and, just to be safe, lowered my voice. “—wieners?”

That, at least, made a smile flicker across his face, but it went out almost immediately. Bobby finished re-doing Keme’s hair in silence; when he’d finished, it was a low, loose bun—almost messy, in fact, and even though it probably shouldn’t have worked, it made Keme look much more mature as a result. He inspected Keme, frowned at the lingering bruises on his face, and said, “I’m going to get concealer.”

I popped upright. “You have concealer?”

A beat. And then, slowly, “From Indira.”

“Oh. Right.”

Bobby and Keme traded a look that I couldn’t read but, I suspected, wasn’t exactly flattering, and Bobby left.

Turning back to the mirror, Keme fussed with his bow tie for a few minutes. I watched him. There wasn’t anything wrong with the bow tie, but sometimes, a guy just needed to fidget—that was something I understood completely.

After a while, I said, “I have a surprise for you.”

Fingers stilling, he glanced at me in the mirror.

“Bobby and I volunteered to be chaperones at your dance.”

His. jaw. dropped.

It’s not often I get a reaction out of Keme, and it’s even less often that it’s a big one.

He must have seen the amusement in my face because his expression solidified into a glower, and he stomped across the room and shoved me onto the bed. Then he shoved me a few more times, really getting it out of his system.

Apparently, we were back to normal.

I was still giggling as he returned to the mirror.

When he spoke again, it was a mumble, but I still caught the words. “Foster went back to his parents in Portland.”

“Oh. Oh! That’s good, right?”

Keme shrugged, staring at something on the other side of the mirror. “My mom asked me for bus money to go after him.”

“Oh Keme.” I tried about a million different possibilities out in my head. And then I said, “I’m sorry.”

“I gave it to her. It’s fine. She—she’s like a kid sometimes. She doesn’t listen when I try to tell her things. Or she listens, but then she does whatever she wants.” He sounded much, much younger when he said, “She’ll come back. She always comes back.”

I ran my hand over the bedspread.

Keme shook his head at something. Or at nothing. He ran his fingers over his eyebrows.

And then he started to cry.

Where was Bobby, I wanted to know. And how long could it take for Indira to find some g-d concealer?

But since I was fresh out of handsome, earnest, and emotionally intelligent deputies, I slithered off the bed and hugged Keme. At first, he cried harder. I rubbed his back. And somehow, I got him to sit down on the bed with me, but then he seemed to fall apart completely, sobbing into my shoulder. It made sense, in a way. He’d been holding himself together by sheer willpower for the last few days. He’d been through so much. And even though he was a boy who’d learned how to handle himself young, he was still only a boy, and sometimes, you just needed someone to tell you everything was going to be okay.

We sat like that for a while. My arm around him. His face nestled in the crook of my shoulder. A quiet rhythm between us that settled into the larger rhythm of the ocean. I had read somewhere that the ocean has its own music, made up of incredibly low frequencies—too low for humans to hear. But I thought, maybe, sometimes we could feel it. Right then, I thought I could feel it, whatever it was that was moving between us, the slow flood and ebb of this moment.

I shifted so I could look him in the eye. He only lasted a second before he cut his eyes away, so I waited until they came back. And, because this was Keme we were talking about, when they did, they held a hint of defiance—a kind of de facto combativeness.

“I wish a lot of things had been different about your life, Keme. Because I love you, and because I can’t imagine anyone not loving you, and wanting to take care of you, and making sure you had the best life they could give you. And I know nothing I say can change the past, or make up for it, or give you what you should have had. But I do want you to know that you have a family now. And we love you. All of us. And we’re here for you. And if you need anything—”

“I need two hundred bucks for the dance tickets,” he said, wiping his eyes—which now looked remarkably alert. Even predatory. “And another hundred to take Millie somewhere for dinner.”

“Uh, I meant more in an emotional—”

“And I want to drive the Pilot because Millie has a girl’s car.”

He considered me for a moment, as though trying to decide if he had any more demands, and then—to my complete and utter and total and all-encompassing surprise—he hugged me. And then he kissed me on the cheek.

“Everything all right?” Bobby asked from the doorway.

“Yeah,” Keme said, bouncing up from the bed. “He’s just being a donkey.”

Bobby made a noise that suggested this was not outside the realm of possibility.

I might have been, as Pippi would have put it in one of her books, a little misty-eyed, but I managed to say, “He just extorted three hundred dollars out of me.”

Laughing, Bobby set to work with the concealer.

“Yuk it up,” I told him. “He wants to borrow the Pilot too.”

The best word for Bobby’s expression was startled .

For an honorary straight guy, Bobby had a surprisingly deft hand at concealer, and Keme looked good to go in a few minutes. His eyes weren’t even red, which was totally unfair since I was still intermittently misty-eyed.

We headed downstairs. Voices from the vestibule drifted out to meet us.

“What if he’s a wig thief?” Fox was saying. “But he specializes in dusty wigs that he attaches to his, uh, rump?”

“If you’re talking about my costume,” I said, “I’m not listening, and I’m not going to respond. And Bobby’s going to beat you up.”

Bobby, though, did not look like he was going to beat anyone up—especially not in that Marty McFly getup (have I mentioned the vest?). In fact, at that moment Bobby was whispering something in Keme’s ear that I suspected was some sort of blend of fatherly wisdom, brotherly advice, and a deputy’s reminder that he could and would find you if you decided to horse around in his SUV. Keme’s expression was caught somewhere between annoyed embarrassment and an extreme eagerness to reassure.

“Oh!” Fox said. “Or what if he’s a nightmare—you know, like the mythological beast? Only he’s old and decrepit, and that’s why his tail looks so dusty—”

“For Pete’s sake,” I snapped as we reached them. “My costume is not that hard!”

To judge by the mountain of Almond Joy wrappers, Fox had chosen not to leave any for the rest of us. Indira was reading a book called XKREKHS: MY ALIEN GRUMP – A SCI-FI ABDUCTION ROMANCE FATED MATES SWAP (which featured an incredibly well-developed blue torso on it). Last week, it had been Calvino.

“Of course not,” Fox said. “It’s obvious you’re—what do you call that bristly thing you use to clean—”

“He’s a dust bunny,” Keme said absently. He was checking himself in the window, using the faint reflection there to fiddle with his bow tie.

The stunned silence that followed wasn’t exactly polite. But when I recovered, I held out a hand toward Keme in a there you go slash finally gesture. I also made a strangled noise that suggested, in general, how frustrating everyone had been.

“You look very cute,” Bobby murmured as he scruffed my bunny ears.

There probably would have been more, except at that moment, the front door opened, and Millie stepped into view.

She’d curled her hair, and she wore makeup that managed to do amazing things while still, well, leaving her looking like Millie. The flared skirt of her champagne-colored mini hit her at mid-thigh, and the best way I could describe her shoes was sparkly. She looked beautiful. Beyond beautiful. She looked like a princess. And when I saw Keme, how his face slackened and his thoughts dribbled out of his ears and he became one giant, goopy boy who finally got to be with the girl he’d been in love with for years, the pang in my heart was so intense that misty- eyed doesn’t even begin to describe it. Bobby noticed, of course, and he slipped an arm around my waist.

(I wasn’t the only one, by the way. Indira was mopping her eyes, and Fox was suspiciously silent inside their helmet.)

The dopey look on Keme’s face was less cute a few moments later.

“Did he have a stroke?” I murmured.

Bobby gave me a warning squeeze.

“You look beautiful, Millicent,” Indira said. “Keme, go grab her corsage from the refrigerator.”

Keme still hadn’t moved.

“Maybe someone should stick him with a pin,” Fox said in their least helpful voice.

Bobby took Keme by the shoulder and steered him toward the kitchen, and I moved over to join Millie and Indira, adding my own compliments. Millie answered in murmurs and broken fragments—I still hadn’t heard a complete sentence out of her, let alone an ear-shattering burst of excitement. Then Keme came back, and it turned out Millie had a boutonniere for him, and the two of them fumbled through the process of helping each other with the flowers.

“You look nice,” Keme finally managed to say.

“Nice?” Fox said.

Color rushed into Keme’s face. “You look beautiful.”

“And did anybody notice,” I said, “that Keme looks like a total wiener?”

Keme flashed me a look that promised a quick, savage murder as soon as he was back from the dance. Millie laughed. Indira had the air of a woman who was wondering if she should wash my mouth out now or after Keme and Millie left. Fox muttered a despairing, “Dust bunny,” under their breath and shook their head.

And then—after I had handed over all the money I had in the world, plus Bobby’s spare keys—it was time for Keme and Millie to leave. We all exchanged hugs. As I hugged Millie, I said, “You’re gorgeous,” and then, loud enough for Keme to hear, “You can do better.”

Keme scowled.

Millie laughed, but it sounded like she might cry.

When I found myself hugging Keme goodbye, I was surprised when his arms tightened around me, pulling me close. And I was even more surprised when he whispered, “Thank you.” And then, in a broken little voice, “I love you.” I was less surprised when I felt something sharp jab me under the ribs, and he added, “If you ever tell anyone I said that, I’ll kill you.”

If you’ve never dispatched a budding teenage psychopath to a high school dance, let me tell you: it’s a real mixed bag.

The old folks watched from the door as Keme helped Millie into the Pilot, and then he walked around and got in the SUV. They went down the drive, their headlights floating in the dark. And then they were gone.

“I hope they have a good time,” Indira said.

“I hope they bring some of my money back,” I said.

“They’ll have a great time,” Bobby said. He ignored my comment about the money, but he added, “I hope they make good choices.”

“I hope they don’t wreck your car,” I said.

The expression on his face suggested he wasn’t grateful for me opening my trap.

“I hope someone spikes the punch,” Fox said. “And they all get detention and decide to play pranks on the dean. Oh! And that there’s a werewolf that dances on top of a van.”

“That’s a lot of different movies,” I said.

And in an unbelievably haughty voice, Fox said, “I am aware.”

A bit later, the doorbell rang, and it was time for more trick-or-treaters. Supplies were running low, so Bobby and I went to the kitchen to restock. I had the important responsibility of pre-sorting the candy, to make sure we didn’t miss out on any of the good stuff, and I was diligently weeding out the plain M&M's (and looking for any stray Butterfingers) when I realized Bobby was staring at me.

“They’re plain chocolate,” I said, “and I know they melt in your mouth, not in your hand, but we have to prioritize, Bobby: nougat, caramel, heck, even crisped rice—”

“You’re going to be such a good dad.”

It was the way he said it as much as the words themselves, as though the fact had only now clicked. As though it were something wonderful. He was leaning against the counter, arms folded, the earthy bronze of his eyes catching the light. In the distance, the excited screams of children suggested another round of trick-or-treaters at the front door. The little packet of M&M's rustled under my hand.

I cleared my throat and tossed it into the for-trick-or-treaters pile. “Yeah, well. I don’t know about that. I mean, my God, Bobby, you’ve met my parents.”

“You are. I just wanted you to know. If you want to be a dad, you’re going to be a great one. I thought you should know that.”

And what in the world was I supposed to say to that?

“Thanks, I guess,” was apparently the extent of my conversational aptitude at that. As I resumed my search of the candy, I said, “Anyway, Keme’s definitely not my kid. He’s way too strong, for one thing—it’s a little freaky, actually. And he’d probably eviscerate me during my next nap if he thought I was trying to claim him. He’s more of a—what’s the word for someone who’s good at video games, but sometimes he lets you win, and you have to take care of him but you can’t let him know you’re taking care of him, and one time you were playing red hands, and he slapped you, like, really hard, but you didn’t cry even if he says you did, and for some reason everyone thinks he’s your big brother?”

Bobby, as usual, knew what I was thinking. He held up a Butterfinger, gave me that goofy grin, and flipped it to me. When I caught it, it made his smile get even bigger for some reason. And I was smiling too, even though I wasn’t sure why. And yes, gosh darn it, I was misty-eyed again. And in what was, doubtless, a moment of weakness, I thought maybe I’d save the Butterfinger for Keme.

“That,” Bobby said, and he kissed my cheek and grabbed the bowl of candy and steered me toward the front of the house, “is called a friend.”