I didn’t know what. In a sense, it didn’t matter. Tomorrow I would head back to Adiona Island. There was some kind of clue there, some kind of link between that island and the Bat Lady and the Abeona Shelter and maybe even Luther and my father. I wanted to help here. I wanted to figure out why Troy had been set up and by whom. But it wasn’t my priority.

Except . . .

I had an idea. I took out my phone and called Brandon Foley. He answered on the third ring. “What’s up?” he said.

“I’m about two blocks from your house. You free?”

“Sure,” Brandon said. “Anything to avoid studying for this physics test.”

As I got closer, I heard the comforting sound of a dribbling basketball. Brandon was in his driveway again, working on his game. He tossed me the ball when he saw me coming. I stopped and took a jumper. Swish. He threw the ball back to me—“courtesy” is a universal basketball concept—but I just held the ball.

“You have your phone?” I asked.

“It’s in the house. Why?”

“I may need you to text Troy.”

“Why can’t you?”

“Because he and I . . .”

“What?”

And that was when I stopped. I liked Brandon. I really did. But I wasn’t sure that I wanted to confess to him that I had just done something illegal. He was president of the student council and all those other things. He took his responsibilities as basketball captain seriously.

Could he be trusted?

Sure, Brandon had been the one to get me involved in helping Troy, but what would he say if I told him that I’d just broken into a storage shed and run away from the cops?

Would he tell?

I had thought that I could ask Brandon to contact Troy for me, so that it wouldn’t get traced back to my phone. But now I wondered whether that was a good move.

“You and he what?” Brandon asked again.

“Nothing.”

“So why did you want to see me?”

In a way, Brandon couldn’t help me with this. I would hear from Troy or I wouldn’t. It didn’t change anything. Brandon couldn’t help with the break-in. He couldn’t help answer why I had found urine samples in that shed or really anything that could cast light on this situation.

So even if I did trust him, even if I believed that he only had my and Troy’s best interests at heart, what was the point of telling him?

Answer: nothing. There was no point.

But there was still one key to all this—one person who could answer all my questions about that shed, about illegal steroids, about why Troy had tested positive. It kept circling back to that same question:

Why had Buck left the town of Kasselton?