Inside, the house smells delicious—like pot roast and mashed potatoes. It’s my dad’s favorite, which means he’s probably in a bad mood today and Nana is trying to snap him out of it. My guess is justified, because when my grandmother peeks around the corner from the kitchen, she tells me Mom’s staying in Cleveland for another few weeks visiting her family, which, knowing my mom, is code for “I’m going crazy in this house with my mother-in-law.” She’s been acting kind of weird and distant since the whole house fire thing, but I keep telling myself things will be fine and she’ll come back to Paradise once everything’s blown over.

Dad gets home not much later than I do. I guess that’s one of the perks of being cut out of a big investigation—you get to have dinner on time every night. He tosses his dark sheriff’s hat on a table near the front door and heads to the guest room he’s staying in upstairs. Soon he’s back down in a sweatshirt and jeans, and the three of us sit down for dinner at Nana’s ancient round dining-room table that must weigh two tons.

Nana says grace and asks us about our days. I give a vague answer about school going well—as far as my family knows, there’s no difference in who I was at Paradise and who I am at Helena. My dad asks a few questions about whether or not the administration has decided if Paradise will have a baseball team this spring or if we’ll get merged with our new school, which would be worse than having no baseball at all. I shrug and dig into my dinner.

Eventually, I get to prodding about the investigation.

“I saw Todd today,” I say between bites of meat. “He told me they’re not even letting him up to the campus, even though he’s supposed to be protecting the site.”

“Officer Charleston,” Dad says, chewing through Todd’s last name, “is not supposed to be gossiping about police affairs. And certainly not about any ongoing investigations.”

“It was my fault. I stopped by when I saw he was manning the roadblock. Forced him into talking to me. Don’t worry; he wouldn’t let me step so much as a foot past him.”

Dad doesn’t say anything, just keeps on chewing with his eyes on his plate. I clear my throat a little and keep talking.

“So, uh. Have you been over to the school? What have they got going on over there? Any ideas about who or what was behind everything?”

“The Smith kid and his father were behind it,” Dad says, parroting the same thing everyone else has been saying.