“There are tunnels under the house. That’s what you told me.”

“Right.”

“And last time we went down to the basement, we found a clue.”

“You’re thinking maybe we can find another?”

Ema shrugged. “It’s worth a try.”

I had thought the same thing, of course. It was dark out now. It would be easier to approach without being seen by neighbors. Then again, the night also made an already spooky place even spookier. We stopped on the sidewalk.

Up ahead of us, the house’s collapsed remains stood in menacing silhouette. The streetlights were dim. The house had been built right along the woods. It was odd, I thought now, how none of the trees behind it caught fire.

What horrors, I wondered, had this house seen over the years?

We didn’t have flashlights on us, but we had our smartphones. I got the flashlight app ready. I didn’t want to use it until we were belowground. A light might be seen by nosy neighbors. They’d call the police, and let’s just say that wouldn’t end well.

Our approach was blocked by dozens of signs reading KEEP OUT and NO TRESPASSING. The yellow tape wrapped around the burned ruins worked like a reflector on a kid’s bike.

“Strange,” Ema whispered.

“What?”

“All the signs, the tape. It’s almost overkill.”

I had thought about that too. Were the police and fire department really that worried about keeping people out? The signs didn’t look officially issued, just something you’d buy at the hardware store. I wondered whether Lizzy Sobek had put them up. I couldn’t see that. Maybe it was one of the other people who worked for the Abeona Shelter. Maybe it was the guy with the shaved head whom I had recently learned was named Dylan Shaykes.

Didn’t matter. I didn’t care about the warnings. I was going in. There might be clues about Jared Lowell somewhere in the bowels of this property, but I was more thinking that there might be information about my father’s sworn enemy, the mysterious Luther.

Bat Lady—sorry, I still thought of her that way rather than Lizzy Sobek—had said that Luther had been rescued by Abeona and that his photograph had been in that hallway he burned down to the ground.

“Another thing,” Ema whispered.

“What?”

“Why did Luther set the house on fire?”

“Because I was in it.”

It was too dark to see her face, but I could feel her skeptical frown. “So why not, I don’t know, shoot or stab you? Why burn an entire house to the ground?”

I saw where she was going with this. “Because he wanted to destroy evidence.”

“Could be.”

“And some of the evidence—”

“Could be in those tunnels under the house,” Ema finished for me.