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didn’t know he was sleeping with someone else.”
    I bit my lip. Good point. “Look, he may not be perfect”—understatement alert—“but I know Josh isn’t a killer.”
    “Okay,” Raley said, holding up his hands in a surrender gesture. “Let’s switch gears for a minute, then. Courtney. Tell me how you found her?”
    “In the closet.” I swallowed, wiping my palm against the side of my jeans again as I relived the scene. I had a bad feeling I was never going to be able to cleanse my brain of those images.
    “How did you get in the house?”
    “What?” I asked, snapping back to the present.
    “You said the front door was locked, correct? So how did you get in the house?”
    “Oh. Right . . .” Compared to killing someone, I was pretty sure sneaking in an upstairs window was small potatoes. But, seeing as I was already starting to feel like a suspect, I didn’t want to chance it. “Uh, we sorta went around back.”
    “Sorta?”
    “Yeah. Sorta.”
    “Hartley,” he said, leaning in close, his voice lowering an octave into that friendly slash fatherly thing that the cops on Law & Order did right before they arrested someone, “the CSU team is going over the entire house right now. Fingerprints, footprints, hair, clothing fibers. Why don’t you make things easy on yourself and tell me the truth?”
    Why was it when someone told you to make things easier on yourself it was never by doing something easy?
    “We went around back,” I repeated.
    “And?” he prodded.
    “Do you really need all the details?”
    He nodded. “Yeah, I kind of do.”
    “Fine.” I sighed, giving in. “We hopped onto the top of the storage shed and climbed in Josh’s window.”
    He frowned. “You know that breaking into someone else’s house is illegal?”
    “Not as illegal as killing someone. Which,” I said, making the point again, “we didn’t do.”
    “All right, all right. I’ll let it go for now.”
    I put a hand to my head where a migraine was brewing. “So, can I go home now?”
    “I’ll have an officer drive you home in a minute. I just have one more question.”
    I nodded. “Hit me.”
    “Where is Josh DuPont?”
    I bit my lip. Good one.
    And I wished to God I had an answer.
    When the police finally let Sam and me go, they took down our personal information, said they’d be in touch with our parents (joy), and told us both to stick around town. Which was so clichéd I almost laughed out loud. A sure sign I was going into some sort of shock because there was clearly nothing funny about this situation. Courtney was dead, I was a material witness, and Josh was MIA.
    While Raley assured me that all the questions he’d asked were routine, the way he kept frowning every time I mentioned Josh didn’t fill me with a whole lot of confidence that he wasn’t writing the word “suspect” in big, bold letters next to his name. Courtney was found in his house; he was missing; and, as the detective had pointed out, he had a crap-ton of motive.
    I closed my eyes, trying not to think about that as a uniformed officer drove me home. Instead, I texted Josh again from the backseat of the squad car.
where the hell r u?!!
    By the time the officer dropped me off at home, it was all I could do to drag myself through the door, drop my book bag on the sofa, and raid the back of the freezer for a pint of Cherry Garcia from my hidden ice cream stash. I grabbed a spoon and dug in, leaning against the kitchen counter. I was three bites closer to calm when Mom walked in, Nikes on her feet and a basket of laundry under her arm.
    “Geez, Hartley, get a bowl, would you?” she said, grabbing one from the cupboard above the sink.
    I refrained from pointing out that I intended to eat the entire carton and instead scooped what was left into the dish.
    “I’ve got yoga in twenty,” Mom said as she trailed into the laundry room. “So you’re on your own for dinner. And ice cream does not count. There’s leftover rice pizza