“Yeah?” I whispered back.

“Buck wouldn’t set me up. I don’t care what he was taking or doing. He wouldn’t do that to me.”

“What about Randy?” I asked.

“Maybe,” Troy allowed. “But why would he do it?”

“Why would Buck? Why would anyone?”

That question kept coming back to me. Why would anyone want to set Troy Taylor up for a positive drug test? Who gained from it? Who hated him enough . . . ?

Uh-uh, I told myself. No way.

I said that to myself because when I thought about who hated Troy, the first name that popped into my head was Ema.

I pushed the thought away. This sadly was sometimes how my mind worked. It went places that it shouldn’t go.

“I don’t know,” Troy said.

“So let’s see how this plays out.”

“Okay,” Troy said. “What do we do now?”

I took the lead. We crept down closer to the building. I wasn’t sure exactly how to describe the size. When I think of a shed, I think of a place to store tools in the backyard. This was bigger than that, closer to the size of a one-car garage. It was oddly situated too, behind town hall, not far from the police station, the library, and the high school. One would think that this was public land, owned by the town, but for some reason, Buck’s father had decided to purchase it.

Why?

I moved toward the shed and tried to look through the darkened windows. I cupped my hand against the glass and leaned in close. Part of me almost expected to see a face jump into view, like a big clown’s face with a big smile, and then I’d startle back, screaming.

Stop it, I scolded myself.

There was nothing to see. It was too dark.

Troy was trying to peer into the window too. “Make out anything?” he whispered to me.

“No.”

We circled the building. I could see why you might call it a shed. It was flimsier than a real building, made out of some kind of prefab material you’d find in the lot of a hardware store. There were two more windows in the back, but the shades were drawn.

“So now what?”

I spotted a back door. Good. From this angle, no one near the circle could see anything. Come to think of it, even in the front, which more or less faced the circle, no one could really see anything.

“We check the door,” I said.

Sometimes you get lucky. Sometimes you put a hand on a doorknob and turn it and the door is unlocked. That wasn’t what happened here. Locked. I checked the area around the knob. The lock looked pretty cheap.