“Thanks for welcoming me to the neighborhood.”

She smiled, but beneath it Sam saw that scared edge again. “Wait til you know the neighborhood a little better before you thank me.”

He spent the next half hour at his bedroom window, looking south beyond downtown at the distant, pale yellow speck of Echo House. He ran it all through his head again: everything he’d seen.

The potbelly stove kept coming back to him. He wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was just the most interesting thing about the place—maybe it had nothing to do with whatever was weird.

He kept thinking about the flagstones, too, and how the ones at the edges went right under the schoolhouse wall, from one side to the other. But again, there was nothing especially strange about that. Lots of places had probably been built that way, back in the old days.

Maybe he was overthinking the problem. Maybe the answer was something big and obvious, and he was focusing too hard on small details to see it.

His dad got home at twenty after five. Sam asked how his first day had gone. He said it’d been great, though Sam caught stress in his voice. Probably normal, for a new job.

They went out for dinner at a burger place in Brenner. The town was noticeably larger than Ashland. Busy restaurants. Chain stores and banks. A used car lot. Still tiny by the standards Sam was used to.

Over dinner he said nothing about the day’s events, beyond riding around the suburb on his own. Part of him wanted to talk about Dani, and Echo House, and all that was on his mind. A bigger part of him didn’t. Maybe he just wanted to understand it all better, before saying anything about it.

More than just a riddle, Dani had said.

Whatever that meant.

It was half an hour past midnight. Sam lay in the dark, in his room, his dad asleep across the hall. The window was open, the sounds of the night coming through the screen.

Echo House.

He’d been thinking about it for hours. He felt no closer to solving the riddle.

The potbelly stove.

The flagstones.

Both kept rising to the surface of his thoughts, whether he wanted them to or not.

An hour slipped by. He heard the click, click, click, hum sound behind the closet again. The house sound. Apparently he hadn’t learned to ignore it yet.

After a while he felt sleep pulling him down, right to the edge of consciousness, half in and half out of dreamworld.

He found himself in the tall grass outside the schoolhouse again. He stood before the stone marker in the yard, with the weeds blocking his view of its engraving. He felt a sudden urgency to read what was carved there, though he couldn’t say why. It was only the school’s name. What did it matter?