Plus, she just handed me my bony old cat.

“How did you find him?” I ask.

The girl pauses for a beat. “I heard him.”

I glance around. My house is in view, through the trees. A prickle of distrust comes back. “So . . . you were just wandering around out here behind my house, and you heard him?”

“No. My aunt heard him,” the girl says. “Or saw him.” Oh, yeah. Mae Malcolm, who’s supposed to be crazy, or a witch or something. I don’t know what to believe about that. I don’t know what to believe about anything. I try to put on a skeptical look, but I feel it crumbling off my face as soon as Goblin takes another sniff at my chin.

“She gave me the clue,” the girl says, softly and steadily. “And he wasn’t here. Behind your house.”

I rub Goblin’s head. “Then where was he?”

“Miles away.”

Miles away? I want to ask Goblin what the hell he was thinking. The cat sags against me. He’s purring so hard that I can feel the resonance in my rib cage.

I look straight at the girl instead.

Her cheeks are pink. Tendrils of hair blow across her face.

“Is that how you knew about the other night, when you showed up at my window?” I say, before I know that I’m going to say it. “About the music executive, and the contract. Because your aunt saw something?”

The girl pauses again. She doesn’t look surprised, or like she’s trying to come up with a cagey answer. She just looks straight into my eyes. “Some of it,” she says at last. “Some of it I saw and heard myself.”

“So you have, like, psychic powers? Like your aunt’s supposed to have?” I hit the words supposed to extra hard, to show that I’m not quite buying all of this. I’m not sure if I’m showing her or myself.

The girl just smiles. “No,” she says. “I’m not like her that way.”

“Oh. Then . . .” I start, trying to look like I don’t put any stock in her answer either way, “you don’t know anything about Frankie Lynde, do you? Like—where she might be? Or what happened to her?”

The girl gives me another long look. The edges of her smile have softened away. “No,” she says. “I’m sorry.”

“Okay.” I feel myself deflate, but I try to hide it. “I just thought . . . no stone unturned. Or whatever.”

I start to turn away.

“I do know one thing.” Her voice stops me. “I know that you had nothing to do with it.”

For half a second the words are comforting. Then they turn creepy, because how the hell could she know that? And who would believe some obsessive stalker, anyway? I wonder if a stalker can give you an alibi.

“Okay,” I say again. “Well . . . thanks for saving my cat. Really. It’s been the only decent thing in this whole messed-up week.”