I looked down at Eddie. It was the next morning. Rafe had left for school half an hour earlier. I’d eaten breakfast with him, then showered and dressed. Technically, I didn’t have to arrive at the library for another hour and a half, but I usually arrived early to get a head start on the day. This morning, however, I was wandering around the house, doing some mild tidying and trying to think out loud. Eddie was sometimes wandering with me, other times ignoring me completely. This time his comment was loud enough to get my attention.

“You’re right,” I said, sighing. “Saying the word over and over isn’t helping. So how do I think differently about something I’ve been thinking about for weeks? How do—um, what are you doing?”

Eddie was walking up the stairs, but on the outside, between the edge of the stair tread and the vertical balusters. I wouldn’t have thought he would fit, but there he was, ascending the staircase without an apparent thought to the increasing drop to the floor if he mis-stepped.

I watched and moved close, concerned for his safety, but when he reached the halfway point, he slid between two of the balusters to reach the stairs proper, and trotted up and out of sight.

I’d have to ask Rafe, but as far as I knew, he’d never done this before. He’d sat on a stair edge, but not walked up the outside. “Why?” I asked. “What got into your little kitty mind?”

No answer. Of course.

“Well, that was different,” I muttered, then blinked. Maybe to get my brain thinking in another direction, what I needed was to do something different. Obvious, in retrospect. “Better late than never,” I said, more cheerful now that I had a direction.

“Mrr!”

“Thank you!” I called up the stairs. “Although it would be even more helpful if you gave me an idea about what, exactly, to do differently. In the next hour, preferably.” It was Wednesday already, and mushroomers would be crawling all over the woods soon. “Won’t help Ryan if I walk up the outside of the stairs, and—”

I stopped. Outside stairs. Skyler lived in that upper apartment with outside stairs. Which meant there was a downstairs apartment, just like Ryan lived downstairs and Keegan lived up above. Skyler had an alibi, so he’d been crossed off the suspect list. But there was something that made me think there was more to his story. The wealthy parents? The deep knowledge of Conti? The bright green shoes? None of those things by themselves were an indicator of anything, but there was a tiny piece of me that, in spite of the alibi, continued to wonder. Maybe, just maybe, I could talk to a neighbor and learn enough to put my questions to rest.

*   *   *