“No. You can’t do that. Allison is dead.”
“So she won’t care,” she said. “Give me back the bike key. I know where Sabrina hid her diary. It’s not lost.”
“Stevie, explain.”
Stevie wriggled in frustration, but pulled up a photo.
“Here,” she said, passing him her tablet. “That’s a pic of the list of supplies ordered for the camp art pavilion in 1978 and how much it cost.”
Ceramics: ring boxes, earring stands, cats, dogs, cookie jars; trash cann, turtle, teddy bear, roller skate （$ 28）
“Typewriters sucked,” she said. “They didn’t have backspace keys. Look at this weird semicolon after ‘cookie jars.’ Stupid typo, right? And this was the seventies, so if you hit the wrong key, you couldn’t fix it easily. Now look at your keyboard. The semicolon and colon key are the same. You
get a semicolon if you forget to hit the shift. If you hit the shift, it’s a colon, which makes more sense. A colon would mean . . .”
“It was a list.”
“Exactly. That means they ordered cookie jars in the following shapes—trash can, turtle, teddy bear, roller skates. Who typed this list? Sabrina. Who has to make projects as part of her job? Sabrina. Who loves turtles? Sabrina. Remember the big turtle in the reading room at the library?” She tapped on the glass of the window in the direction of the reading room. “Sabrina said the kids went through her things, so she made something to hide things in. She made a turtle cookie jar. And she wouldn’t have had that with her on the night she died. It was back in the bunk. And now . . .”
She flipped back through the photos again, finding the images of the room in Allison’s house. She turned the tablet back toward Nate triumphantly.
“Right there,” she said, pointing at the large turtle figure on one of the shelves. “What does that look like to you?”
“A turtle,” he said. “Possibly a turtle cookie jar.”
“Give me the bike key.”
“I’m coming with you,” he said.
“You hate coming with me on stuff like this.”
“I know,” he said. “And I know you. This is what you do. It’s your move.”
“I have to do it. It’s part of the job.”
“You love that shit, though.”
Stevie did not reply to this because she did, in fact, love that shit.
“You know I love you too, right?” she said.
“Tell it to my grieving family when you get me killed,” he replied, reaching for his wallet. “Let’s pay and go before I change my mind.”
24
THE DAY WAS FADING FAST. BY THE TIME THEY DRIFTED INTO ALLISON’S driveway, there was little light left, and she and Nate were sweating and heaving.
“When . . . we . . . get in . . . there,” Nate said between breaths, “I . . . am drinking . . . whatever . . . is in . . . the fridge. Don’t care. Maybe it’s . . . stealing. Don’t care.”
Stevie nodded heavily.
“We should probably hide the bikes,” she said.
“Why? There’s no one around.”
“In case anyone comes by. Because it’s still . . .”
She decided to omit the words breaking and entering. Nate regarded his friend with a look that walked the line between weariness and terror. They rolled the bikes into the trees and set them on their sides, then walked the rest of the way up the dark lane and into Allison’s driveway.