He slows so I can pull alongside him. “Can I ask you a question?” he says.
My heart speeds, and it’s not from exertion. Are you flirting with me just to make me easier to manipulate? Are you being nice to me because you’re using me? Are you tricking me into taking you into my family’s lair so you and your crazy sisters can destroy us?
“How come no one in this town celebrates Halloween?” he says.
It’s November already today. We’re a week closer to the twenty-second and still have no idea what’s coming.
“We used to. When I was little.” It’s hard to shrug when you’re leaning over handlebars. “Maybe people figured we had enough demons around here already. Maybe there were too many ghosts to make dressing up like one seem fun anymore.”
“Yeah, that makes sense.” But it shouldn’t, not to him anyway. And probably this is the strangest thing of all: we’re not so strange anymore. He’s getting used to how things are around here. “Kind of a bummer for little kids though.”
I try to shrug again. “It’s too far between occupied houses to trick-or-treat anyway.”
He looks so sad about that—about that—that I change the subject. “So are you just super trustworthy or what?”
“Completely,” he answers at once. “I’m completely trustworthy, Mab. I would never betray you.”
Which is not what I meant.
“Your father,” I clarify. “Your father must trust you. He doesn’t lock his phone. He leaves the key to the plant just lying around.”
“The key’s completely hidden. In fact, the key is under lock and key. A second key I mean. Not the same one. That would be stupid.” He grins. “He didn’t leave it lying around. I sleuthed it out.”
“In two days?” I’m impressed.
“One.”
“One?”
“One day to find it. One day to copy it and put it back so he wouldn’t notice—it’s a good thing Mirabel already told me you have to go to church to get a key copied around here. But it only took dinner to trick him into giving up the clue.”
“Are you a magician or a detective?” I ask.
“Both. The plant has dozens of keys. It’s not like he carries them around in his pocket. But there’s one master, and I needed to know where it was. So I lost mine.”
“Your what?”
“My keys. So then he has to make a big production at dinner about how I’m growing up, and a man keeps track of his things, and a man has responsibilities, and now I’m sixteen years old, and it’s reasonable to expect me to be mature enough to keep track of my own house key, and how can he buy me a car if I keep losing my keys.” All this in a mock-deep voice, looking down his nose at me, poking the air with his index finger like he’s scolding a dog, and riding impressively one-handed. “Then Dad’s all, ‘You should do what I do. Devise a system. My house keys and car keys go on a hook by the front door. I hang them back in their spot the minute I get home, and then when I’m ready to leave again, you know where they are? Right where I left them and right where I need them to be. Smart, right? Remember the garden shed in the backyard in Boston? We kept that key at the backyard door. Work keys? Locked in the bottom drawer of my desk in my office. Get it? Backyard, shed. Work, desk. Simple.’ So then my mom in her super-sarcastic voice finally goes, ‘But where do you keep the key to your desk?’ And he’s all, ‘Behind Uncle Hickory. Of course.’”
“Who’s Uncle Hickory?”
“My great-uncle. Remember that super-big, super-ugly oil painting in my dad’s office? Point is, his tone—like Where does anyone keep a desk key? Behind Uncle Hickory. Duh—shows you exactly what kind of weirdo my father is. And the reason he drives my mother crazy.”
“What if your mom hadn’t asked where he keeps the desk key?”
When he turns his head to look at me, the hood of his sweatshirt blows over his eyes, and he sits upright to pull it back off his face, riding in the sun with no hands, eyes closed, open as a dying tulip. He laughs. “What kind of magician would I be if I couldn’t bust open the lock on a desk?”
“The kind who loses the key in his underpants?”
He beams. “Exactly.”
When we cross the river and pull up at the plant, though, the cockiness fades a little and then a lot. There’s a truck parked out front, an old beat-up Ford pickup.
“Shit. Someone’s here.”