Five minutes after she’d posted the best one, sixty-two people had liked the picture . . . but none of them was Vectra.

“Watch out.” Ed Gemmell nudged her. “First band’s up.”

They were predictably awful. A mandolin, a xylophone, and a singer who sounded like a blue whale impersonating Michael Stipe. By the end of their ten-minute set, Esther’s picture was up to eighty-four likes. No Vectra.

If anything, the second band was worse. So bad that Esther caught Ed Gemmell trying to stuff his hair into his ears.

“Can’t we go for a drink somewhere else and come back? Rutting Corpse isn’t on till nine.”

“No.”

“Why not?” he said plaintively.

“In case Vectra’s here.” When his face indicated a missing of the point, Esther clarified. “I don’t want her thinking we’re not going to show.”

“No offense, Esther, but Vectra doesn’t strike me as the sort of person to worry about something like that.” He waved at the door. “We could just . . .”

“We are going to stand here until Vectra Featherstone gets up on that stage and sees how cool and brilliant a person I really am in my limited edition Bleeding Orifices ’06 tour T-shirt as I mosh along to”—she checked the list she’d written on the palm of her hand—“The Devil Rode a Unicycle and . . . er . . . Washing Machine Head Duck.”

“Are you sure it says ‘duck’?”

“Yes, Edward, I’m not bloody autocorrect. DUCK. Look!” She pushed her palm into his face.

Esther’s voice had risen with every syllable, a pressure building in her chest that she didn’t know how to release. Maybe if she could thrash about, expend it through energetic flailing to something fast and angry and . . .

The man who walked onstage held an acoustic guitar, and when he cleared his throat, he announced to the room that he liked to rewrite cheerful nursery rhymes into mellow tunes.

Without realizing, Esther had started shaking. She felt a gentle hand resting on her shoulder, Ed Gemmell’s voice coming to her as if through a thick veil woven together by stress and anxiety and the out-of-tune twang of a melancholy rendition of “Humpty Dumpty.”

“Esther. We’re going to go and sit in the beer garden, and you are going to tell me what’s wrong. OK?”

“OK,” she whispered.

Breaking and entering was immoral. Susan knew this. She also knew that the immorality of breaking and entering doubled when the victim was a friend, and the crime moved from a violation of privacy to a violation of trust.

She waited for the skeleton to object.

Ach. No jury’s going to convict you.

“Because I won’t get caught,” Susan pointed out.

Well, then. What are you waiting for?