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the motorcycle.
    Tim’s motorcycle: it was a red, racing-style job.
    The exact same one from Dr. Mobley’s lunch.

6
    I n the backyard, paper lanterns glowed against the underside of the white tent. The NWMU orchestra played (poorly), and eventually the mayor took the platform. During his speech, the last three scholarship winners— moi included—had to stand behind him looking stupid. Daniel made faces at me the whole time. Finally the mayor stopped talking and awarded Julia her framed certificate. I have the exact same one; it’s under my bed. Everybody cheered. Julia turned bright red.
    The whole evening, the glamorous blonde sat at the head table with a stony look on her face. Tim was out there, too, but I tried not to look at him. My mind was racing to conclusions. Conclusions like: Tim and Dr. Mobley were eating lunch together, so Tim knew all about Mitch Blaylock, so he probably did the guy in. I was halfway tempted to call him a murderer and perform a citizen’s arrest on the spot.
    By the time the caterers swept the dessert plates away, it was almost dark. We walked over the grass to our car, and my parents shouted good-byes to friends through the thickening twilight. My mom linked her arm in mine and asked me in her best casual voice what Julia and I had talked about. “Our favorite sexual positions,” I said.
    My mom said she got the point. She chuckled and put her arm around me. It would have been a nice kind of moment if my mind wasn’t going crazy thinking about that motorcycle, and the morgue, and the holes in Mitch Blaylock’s body.
    I needed to bounce this off someone. I needed to find out more.
    I needed to call Mike.
     
     
    I did it the instant we got home, and our conversation was pretty disappointing.
    “Even if they were at the restaurant together, which you don’t even know, it doesn’t mean anything.” Mike let out a breath on the end of the line, like he had just collapsed onto his bed, exhausted by another one of my conspiracy theories.
    I wanted to write it off, too—Tim had been my hero—but I couldn’t. I was pacing my room semifrantically just to release some energy. “Come on, Mike. It’s weird. I don’t want to think that Tim killed anybody, but this whole thing is bizarre. And the police are obviously in on it.”
    “Umm, not to boge your high, but it’s not really that obvious to me. And think of it this way: what if it is Tim? Do you really want to find that out?”
    “Somebody got murdered , Mike.”
    “Says you.”
    “If you saw these pictures I took of him, you’d be saying it, too.”
    There was a background noise on Mike’s line. He laughed awkwardly and put the phone close to his mouth, talking low. “So look, Dana’s hanging out tonight.”
    “Oh, she’s there now?”
    “Yeah, just walked in,” he said, and then Dana must have grabbed the phone from him. Her voice came loud through the line—“ What up, Newell?”— and then it was Mike again, laughing in my ear.
    “Guess I’ll leave you to it,” I said.
    He was going to be no use.
     
     
    The next morning, I woke up to a thwack-thwack-thwack ing sound from outside my window.
    A week ago, Daniel and my dad had started making an elaborate bird feeder. They’re always doing stuff like that, for the sheer enjoyment of educating themselves in random and vaguely useless disciplines: in this case, carpentry and bird-watching. They planned to log the birds who ate at the feeder after they installed it on the birch tree. I gave up trying to ignore Daniel’s precision hammering and rolled out of bed.
    Mitch Blaylock must have been gnawing at me in my dreams, because I was thinking of him the minute I got up. Before I even showered, I stuck my memory card in my laptop for a look at the pictures. I had just brought them up on the screen when I heard a pattering in the hall.
    “Christopher?”
    “Just a sec, Mom, getting dressed.”
    Good God. In a word, the pictures were sickening. It struck me that I