The shadow of an idea danced through the halls of her mind again. And another, and another. Dancing shadows on the wall. Ghosts. Answers—intangible answers, taunting her.

“Shit,” she said.

“What?”

She tapped her palms on the table in disgust.

“I’ve seen it,” she said. “Bits of it. Little flashes. Like that time I saw a moose behind some trees. I’ve seen something. Or heard it. And I can’t work out what it is.”

“Sounds like writing,” he said. “It’s the worst.”

He took a long sip of his milk shake as Stevie set her forehead down on the table. Perhaps sensing that she wasn’t coming back up anytime soon, he kept talking.

“People ask stuff like ‘What’s your process?’ I don’t know what my process is. I sit down and type stuff about monsters. Or I think about it. Or I type-think.”

The shadows flashed back up on the wall, the edges clearer. More of a shape.

She lifted her head.

“What did you say?” she asked.

“What? When? Which thing?”

“Writing. Typing. Thinking. What?”

“What?”

“Stop saying what,” she said. “What do you mean? You type and think?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I kind of think with my fingers? That sounds bad. You know what I mean.”

“You type stuff,” she said. “You type. Shit, shit, shit. . . . Give me your computer.”

“Are you going to finish my book?” he said, pushing it over to her. “Because this is good news for me.”

Instead of typing, or even looking at the screen, Stevie instead stared at the keyboard, lightly running her finger from the L key all the way over to the return, then back again. Then she grabbed her tablet and frantically swiped back and back until she found what she wanted.

“Oh my god,” she said. “I have to go.”

“What?”

“Stop saying what! I have to go.”

“Stop saying you have to go,” Nate shot back, grabbing the bike lock key. “Go where?”

“Allison’s house,” she replied, waving her hand for the check.

“No. You can’t do that. Allison is dead.”

“So she won’t care,” she said. “Give me back the bike key. I know where Sabrina hid her diary. It’s not lost.”

“Stevie, explain.”

Stevie wriggled in frustration, but pulled up a photo.

“Here,” she said, passing him her tablet. “That’s a pic of the list of supplies ordered for the camp art pavilion in 1978 and how much it cost.”

Ceramics: ring boxes, earring stands, cats, dogs, cookie jars; trash cann, turtle, teddy bear, roller skate ($ 28)

“Typewriters sucked,” she said. “They didn’t have backspace keys. Look at this weird semicolon after ‘cookie jars.’ Stupid typo, right? And this was the seventies, so if you hit the wrong key, you couldn’t fix it easily. Now look at your keyboard. The semicolon and colon key are the same. You get a semicolon if you forget to hit the shift. If you hit the shift, it’s a colon, which makes more sense. A colon would mean . . .”