Aubrey and Cody join me on the golf cart, eating from take-out containers they bought from the commissary. We squeeze on the back seat and leave Austin alone at the front, like he’s our Uber driver.

“Off we go!” Austin cries, hitting the gas with a jolt. He glances back at me. “Mind if I put my headphones on, Hay? I’m on the last episode of this amazing true-crime podcast, and I’m dying to know the end.” He winks. “No pun intended!”

“Of course!” Actually, this is perfect. I wanted to talk to my friends on this ride. Now I can do so in private without Austin asking questions.

We start off toward the back lot, first passing a maze of soundstages, and then the Silver Screen Studios gift shop, which offers coffee mugs, T-shirts, and other stuff bearing the logos of famous shows that are shot here. As we round toward some of the residential streets, I tell my friends my new theory.

“You really think someone’s just pretending there’s a ghost?” Aubrey makes a face. “That’s not nice. A lot of the younger kids are scared.”

“That’s why we need to figure out who it is,” I say.

“Where do we start?” Cody crunches a carrot stick.

“Well, we need to find a motive,” I say. “It’s like in the episode we’re shooting—where we have to figure out why someone wants to steal a book of magic spells.”

“Right,” Cody says. “Too bad we haven’t seen the whole script yet. Maybe that could help us solve the answer with our ghost.”

“I know,” I say.

On Sadie Solves It, the writers and producers often only give us only our lines for the day’s scenes, not the entire episode’s script. They say that not knowing what comes next helps us have a “fresh” approach to our acting and reactions, so that we’re discovering the truth along with Sadie and her friends. At the moment, all I know about Sadie Solves It, season two, episode one, is that a magic book of spells has been stolen…and that two pizza makers, Giovanni and Sal, didn’t take it.

But we don’t know who did.

Austin steers the golf cart down a street that’s made to look like New York City, a mix of apartments and cool cafés. There’s even a sign and entrance for the New York City subway. After we ogle them for a moment, I pull out a pen and notepad from my bag. Reasons someone would want to fake a ghost, I write. Sadie takes notes in the show too. It helps to have a list of suspects all in one place.

I look around at my friends. “Any thoughts?”

Aubrey chews on her thumbnail. “Maybe someone is bored?”