After a while Sam felt desperation setting in; he was running out of places to look. Already he’d studied every object and surface, inside and outside the schoolhouse. Now he went over everything again, looking closer. He checked the water pump in the yard. He crouched and looked up into the spout. Nothing there but a fat spider. He ducked and looked into the waist-high hole in the back wall. He saw only the darkness of the wall’s interior cavity. He eyeballed every candleholder inside the schoolhouse. He knelt and studied every grout-filled seam between the flagstones that made up the floor. He noted how the individual stones at the room’s edge really did continue beneath the wall to the outside: the color and grain matched up perfectly on both sides of the wall. He bent down and peered into the potbelly stove, past the nest of weeds inside. Nothing important in there. He leaned behind the stove to look at its backside, but all he saw was a tiny engraving, stating that the stove had been forged in St. Louis in the year 1885. Last, he checked the schoolhouse door, front and back. He spent a couple minutes staring at the pattern of flaked-off paint. Maybe some part of it would look like Elvis if he squinted just right. Maybe that would count as weird. But no amount of squinting revealed anything.

He glanced at his watch. 4:30. He should probably be home when his dad got there, sometime after 5:00, if only to avoid worrying him.

“We can take off if you need to get back,” Dani said.

Sam nodded. “But I’m not giving up. I’ll come back tomorrow and keep looking. I’ll figure it out.”

Dani smiled. “I don’t think you’ll have to. I’m betting you’ll figure it out tonight, just by thinking about it.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because you’ve already seen what’s weird. You looked right at it. Give it time, and it’ll hit you.”

“You know weird is kind of a loose word, right?” Sam said. “It means different things to different people. Like, scale of one to ten, ten being bigfoot in a Ferrari … exactly how weird is this thing?”

“Let’s call it a nine-point-five,” Dani said. “It’s weird. It’s lose-sleep-over-it weird.” Her expression faltered. She suddenly looked very serious. Maybe even a little scared. “And then I can tell you the real reason I brought you out here, and why this is more than just a riddle.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

They were in Dani’s driveway fifteen minutes later; her house was four doors down from Sam’s, on the same side of the street. Sam stayed on his bike as Dani opened the entry next to the garage door, and rolled hers inside. She came back and stood at the threshold.

“Let you know first thing tomorrow if I figure it out,” Sam said.

“You will.”