He’d been alone in the house.
No, he hadn’t.
The cold intensified.
Megan was not just looking at him, he realized. She was staring at him. Her face was white and her eyes wide.
Like she’d just seen a ghost.
He pushed that thought away. It was not what he wanted to be thinking about right now. Huffing and puffing from his brief, furious run, he stood in front of her, trying to catch his breath in order to tell her what happened. But before he could get a word out, she was standing and holding out her iPhone, that stunned look still on her face.
She showed him the message on the screen: James will die if he tells.
He suddenly understood her fear. He felt it, too.
“What’s that mean?” she whispered. She looked furtively around, as if worried about being overheard. “Tell who? Tell what?”
The message changed.
Hi, James!
He sucked in his breath. “Who is that?” he asked her. “Who’s texting you?”
“I don’t know!” Her voice was still low, but there was a note of panic in it.
Whoever—whatever—it was, was acting in real time. It knew he was here, knew he was looking at the phone. He turned his head from left to right, hoping to spot someone on the sidewalk or in the yard of one of their neighbors. But he knew that no one on the street was sending this, didn’t he? He’d nearly been buried alive, the kitchen door had almost crushed his hand, something had been coming up from the basement for him, and immediately after running out to the front yard so that the second after they returned he could tell his parents what had happened, Megan received the text, James will die if he tells.
This wasn’t a joke. This wasn’t a coincidence. This was a warning.
The dazed look on his sister’s face told him that she knew it, too.
A new message appeared. I will kill you both.
“Shut it off!” James told Megan. He hadn’t meant to shout at her, but his voice came out panicky and far too loud.
His alarm jolted her into action, and she turned off the device, juggling it from hand to hand as though it were hot and burning her fingers.
Before they could say a word to each other about what had happened or what to do about it, their parents pulled into the driveway. At the same time, Robbie’s dad parked next to the curb to drop him off. James turned toward his sister as his dad got out of the van, but she wouldn’t meet his eyes and fumblingly placed the phone in her pocket.
It was rare for James and Megan to be standing together by the front porch, rare enough to be noticed, and, walking over, their father glanced from one to the other. “What happened?” he asked suspiciously. “What’s going on here?”
James shot his sister a look, imploring her to answer for them.
“Nothing,” she said. Her voice sounded a lot calmer and a lot more normal than it should have.
I will kill you both.
James looked guiltily away as his dad frowned at him. “Is that dirt on your clothes? Were you digging again?”
He didn’t respond.
“I’m talking to you.”
I will kill you both.
He noticed his dad examining his mouth, trying to determine whether he’d been eating dirt, and James wanted to cry, filled with a frustration that could not be expressed any other way. But Robbie was here, and he and Megan had been warned, and he managed to hold the tears at bay.
Robbie started walking up just as Megan came under her father’s scrutiny. The heat off for a moment, James took the opportunity to hurry over to his friend. His mom was by the curb, talking to Robbie’s dad, and this was his chance to dodge both parents and avoid further scrutiny.
“Hey,” Robbie said in greeting.
James nodded. “Hey.”
The third degree had ended, and his dad headed out to the street to see Robbie’s father. Megan remained where she was. James understood completely. Afraid to go into the backyard or over to their headquarters, he was equally leery of going back into the house. So he remained unmoving in the center of the lawn, waiting for his parents to finish talking and go inside before he took Robbie up to his room, where they could play computer games or do something normal.
He glanced nervously toward the side of the house. He thought about telling Robbie what had happened—and he would, eventually—but his friend seemed subdued this morning, maybe even a little frightened. James’s brain was probably filtering things through its own prism, but, still, he didn’t want to scare Robbie off, and he decided that this was not the time to come clean.
The parents finished talking, Robbie’s father drove away, and James’s mom and dad took their Store sacks out of the van before heading into the house. Megan followed, and James and Robbie went in behind her. Anxious, James looked across the living room and the dining room at the entrance to the kitchen, thinking about the slowly opening door to the basement and those terrible heavy footfalls. He watched his mom go through the kitchen doorway and waited for some type of reaction, but there was none. He heard her humming as she put away cleaning products, and he started to relax. Maybe it was over.
Closing the front door, his eye was caught by a flash of white against the dark brown of the floor. He bent down. An envelope had fallen through the mail slot, only there was no stamp on it, no postmark, no return address. The only words written on the front of the envelope were, The R.J. Detective Agency.
That was weird. They’d settled on the name only last night, after a long phone conversation in which he’d given in on the name in exchange for Robbie’s agreeing to let James call himself “senior detective” as opposed to Robbie’s regular “detective.” Warily, James opened the envelope. Inside was a single sheet of lined paper on which was written a short note:
Dear Detectives,
I would like to hire you to follow a man named John Lynch. I believe he stole a very expensive bracelet given to me by my mother and have reason to believe he has stolen other items of jewelry from women in the north end of Jardine. If you can prove that he is the thief, I will reward you handsomely.
“This is great!” Robbie said excitedly, reading over his shoulder.
“I don’t think we should do it,” James told him.
“Why not?”
He held up the letter. “Who wrote this? Who’s it from? Why didn’t they sign their name? And why would they hire us for something like this? Besides, how did they know the name of our detective agency? In fact, how did this even get here? The mailman didn’t deliver it. He hasn’t even come yet.”
“What are you saying?” Robbie asked, although there was more worry in his voice than defensiveness. He had obviously caught on to the fact that something was not right about this, and James saw on his face the same look of uneasiness that he’d worn when he first arrived. He might not have seen what James had seen, but he could sense that some of the things that happened in and around this house were not normal.
“I’m saying we shouldn’t take this case. It’s not even a case, really. Some unknown person wants us to follow some guy named John Lynch. We have no real details, and we have no way to even tell the person hiring us what we find. Don’t you think that’s suspicious?”
“Yeah, it is, kind of.” Robbie was silent for a moment, looking at the paper in James’s hand. He nodded toward it. “Was that there when you were in the house earlier?”
“I don’t think so,” James admitted.
“Do you think someone just put it through your mail slot?”