She’d been basically spying on everyone she knew since the day after the thing—rummaging around in their voices, rifling through the words they chose, pickpocketing all they hadn’t said out loud. Both thrilled and a little ashamed by it, it was automatic now to ransack people’s postures and expressions to steal what they didn’t want you to know. She’d taken it all the way to really spying: tracking, lying, scheming, stealing. And today. This morning. It was hard to think past the panicked wow.

Standing in the library, she’d been trembling so hard she’d had to clamp down on the shakes to scroll through her contacts to find Marcelline’s number after having impulsively hung up on her stepfather.

At least Marcelline wasn’t laughing at her. She wasn’t acting as if Carly were stupid. She was taking it seriously. She would help.

“I took it.”

Carly heard Marcelline make a little sound. An “Oh”-like gasp knocked out of her, instead of sucked in.

Carly didn’t want to be in trouble with Marcelline. Defense came tumbling out. “I know! It’s crazy. I’m sorry. But I wanted to show it to you anyway. I mean, before. I was just going to take a picture of it, but Mom said he got rid of it. And it’s weird that he made such a big deal out of hiding it. Isn’t it? I thought it was really weird. So I took it. Do you want to see it? But it can’t be about that dead guy? There’s no way, right? Can it?”

“Carly, where are you?”

“At the library. The bad thing, though, is John’s superpissed that I took it. I don’t think it’s about the suit.”

“He knows you have it?”

“Yeah, he saw me on the camera. He’s really mad. I’m kind of scared.”

“How long have you been in the library?”

“I just got here.”

“Honey, you can’t stay there.”

A spike of ready-to-run bolted through Carly, but also a blaring Why? zipped up her spine. She’d come by herself, but now she felt truly alone. “Can you come get me?”

“I’m on my way. But I don’t want you to stay there.”

“Should I go wait at the school?”

“No. It’s Saturday. You won’t be able to get inside. You’ll be out in the open. He’ll probably look for you at Ada’s house and the library, but then maybe the school.”

“I could walk to the Y?”