As a kid, my cousin poured all his energy into engineering mysteries where there were none. Swanton was small, and while it had its share of problems, real-world concerns like break-ins and unfaithful spouses weren’t on our radar. There wasn’t much material that appealed to a couple of kid detectives. And then, suddenly, there was.

When I was in fifth grade, forty-seven dollars disappeared from Mrs. Dooley’s patent leather purse. Our teacher left the bag sitting under her desk like always, and at dismissal time, the money was gone. The whole class was questioned, but Abe and I ran our own investigation parallel to our principal’s. I kept my ear to the ground and my eyes open, wholeheartedly believing I could solve the crime.

Weeks went by and the money still hadn’t been found, but we’d been analyzing our classmates’ behaviors, and felt confident a wayward boy named Will Thompson was to blame. Abe started calling him Willy the Weasel, and eventually that got him a punch in the nose. Only then did our principal find the stolen money. It was in Will Thompson’s backpack.

Then there was the case of Laurie Calvo’s brand-new tree house. It was the envy of every kid in town, lovingly built by her parents. In the middle of the night, mere weeks after the structure went up, the Calvos woke to find it aflame, the painted boards already blackened and charred. I theorized a jealous classmate had torched it. Though I never managed to prove it, I eventually discovered I was right.

Some of the mysteries hit closer to home. Like when someone scribbled Abe + Shay = kissing cousins on my locker door. I was never popular, but I wasn’t a pariah, either. I occupied a comfortable middle ground where most of my classmates couldn’t be bothered to tread, and I wanted things to stay that way—so when word of the message spread, I started avoiding Abe at school. Already belittled for his hair, his clothes, his crazy mother, he became more of an outcast than ever. At night, the guilt of shutting him out sat in my stomach like a lump of cold stew.

After several weeks of this, similar graffiti appeared on other peoples’ lockers. The focus shifted, and Abe and I were saved, but I found the whole event unsettling. Before the backlash started, Abe had declared that he didn’t mind the message. Kissing cousins. It just implied we were close, he said, and we were. It took far longer than it should have for me to realize that aside from my parents and brother, Abe was the only one who called me Shay.

All the stories my kidnapper told me in the cellar beneath an apartment building in the East Village were about his childhood. They were also about mine. I didn’t need to dust off old yearbooks to ID him. No rifling through the memory bank for me. The man who murdered three women and a young cop, the guy who drugged me at an Irish pub, was my equal. We shared the same hometown, the same childhood experiences, even the same DNA. With every bone in my body, I wished it wasn’t so, but that didn’t change the facts, and denial wouldn’t erase the truth. He was the troubled kid on my mother’s side who ran away at the age of sixteen. Blake Bram was Abe, my childhood companion.