I followed the noises, trying very hard to avoid touching any vegetation, since it was too dark to tell harmless vines from the ubiquitous poison ivy. Sure enough, I found the blue Honda parked at the side of the road, the bird books still lying on the front seat.

I stood listening for several minutes, trying to discover where its occupant had gone.

Then I heard voices farther along. Up at Aubrey Hamilton’s house. I left the Honda and walked cautiously along the road, expecting the fake bird-watcher to leap out of the bushes at any second.

At the end of the lane, I saw that both the house and barn were illuminated. Rob’s car was parked at the side of the lane, near the barn. The voices seemed to be coming from the barn, so I headed that way.

As I drew closer, I heard Rob’s voice.

Thirty

“Okay, I’m not sure it’s ready for prime time,” he was saying.

“Well, I told you this was harder than it looks,” a woman’s voice said. “And frankly, you couldn’t have picked a less promising subject.”

I felt incredibly exposed as I walked across the barnyard, and sighed with relief when I reached the shadows beside the barn.

“It hasn’t been easy,” Rob said. “But I like a challenge.”

“You could have fooled me,” I muttered. Maybe this wasn’t my slacker brother, but his long-lost industrious identical twin. I crept to one of the barn windows and peeked in.

Rob was wearing jeans, a black t-shirt, and a leather jacket. He had somehow managed to tie a red bandanna around Spike’s neck. Not the first time he’d done it either, to judge by the relatively calm way Spike reacted—he only turned around from time to time and growled over his shoulder at the offending fabric.

Rob took up a position beside Spike. Spike looked up at him and curled his lip. Somehow, with the bandanna, it almost looked cute. Probably did look cute if you didn’t know Spike.

“Okay,” Rob said. “Hit it.”

Music blasted out—evidently the woman had turned on a tape or CD player. I recognized the crashing opening chords of George Thorogood and the Destroyers’ “Bad to the Bone.”

Rob immediately assumed a pose of utterly theatrical menace, narrowing his eyes, slouching with his left hand hooked into his belt loops while he snapped the fingers of the right occasionally to punctuate the opening bars. Then, he extended one finger dramatically down, pointing straight at Spike.

Spike leaped up toward the finger, jaws snapping shut with less than an inch to spare. Rob and Spike then proceeded to execute nearly five minutes of the most demented dance routine I’d ever seen. At least Rob was dancing—a skill I’d never seen him display before. Dancing and acting; if I hadn’t seen the transformation, I’d have had a hard time recognizing my brother Rob as the cool leather-clad troublemaker strutting around the barn floor. Spike wasn’t acting or dancing, though—he was out for the kill, leaping up and snapping whenever Rob extended a finger down toward him. And by keeping one finger or the other just out of reach the whole time, Rob deftly managed to lead Spike through some fairly intricate choreography. Spike wound around and through Rob’s legs, eyes always fixed on that elusive, teasing finger, occasionally twirling in a circle or leaping over an extended ankle.