I froze, too distracted to form a sensible sentence.

Laura seemed almost embarrassed. “I was wondering . . . would you like to see the garden?”

“Okay,” I said hurriedly. Anything to get her to leave.

“Great,” she said. “Come on down. Agatha's downstairs in my office. John will keep an eye on her.”

But—if Agatha was downstairs, how had she managed to write on my wall?

Laura ducked out for a moment and returned with a bundle of clothing in her hand. “I brought you some things to wear. Gardening clothes. I hope that’s not presumptuous.”

She could have reached over and pinched my cheeks and I would have been too surprised to consider it presumptuous. I accepted the stack of clothes and agreed to meet Laura downstairs in ten minutes.

After she left, I closed the door and slowly turned back to the mess on the wall. The mess that Agatha hadn’t made.

But if it hadn’t been her, then who . . . ?

GO

My chest felt tight, on the verge of panic. I had to clean the wall before anyone saw, but what could I use? When I tried some toilet paper, it came away in sticky shreds. Finally, I opened the top dresser drawer and stared down at my HOTTER THAN HO shirt. In spite of how much I hated it, I was still reluctant to ruin it. But I had no other options, so I wet it in the bathroom sink and then scrubbed away at the writing.

It took a couple of minutes, but it worked.

When I went to rinse the black substance off the shirt, it stayed put. So after a few seconds of trying to make sense of the simmering swamp of emotions it conjured, I balled up the shirt and threw it away.

Not like I had any use for it here, anyway, right?

CHAPTER

9

I PUT ON Laura’s gardening “things,” which consisted of army-green pants made out of some parachute-like material, a tan T-shirt, and a white apron with approximately four hundred pockets. In the hallway downstairs, she met me with a pair of rubber clogs and a straw hat that made me feel like someone’s grandmother.

I was kind of excited to see the garden, though I’d never gardened in my life—we always had a yard service that came once a week to mow, rake, and weed. Maybe it was just the idea of getting out of the house.

From the back door, we went through a gate in a high stone wall and followed a narrow path between two colossal rows of shrubbery. Where the shrubs ended, a pair of wrought-iron benches faced each other, with a mirrored sphere the size of a bowling ball on a stand in the center of the path.

“Here we are,” Laura said, stopping just past the benches.