‘No one has mentioned anything about this,’ I can’t help but whisper. ‘Who are these letters to? And she obviously never sent them.’

‘Are there any p-pages torn out?’ Ellis asks astutely.

I check along the binding but it doesn’t look like there are. The mystery within the mystery. ‘We need to find out.’ And then it occurs to me, hits me like a beam of light. ‘Ellis. The handwriting.’

‘What about it?’

‘Have you compared the handwriting in her journal to the note in the car?’

‘N-no. Oh, man, n-no.’

‘I read some stuff about handwriting analysis in high school.’ I had – around the same time I got good at picking locks, followed by a brief obsession with the FBI. Never thought I’d actually get to use any of this stuff for anything.

Ellis pulls up his photo of the car note on his phone and we set it beside a journal page. My absolute first instinct says that the handwriting is similar – both quite difficult to read, all sharp lines and small letters. My brain is already firing. How could this be Roxy? But I look closer and realize that, actually, Roxy’s y’s and g’s on the lyric sheets are looped and stylized, mixed intermittently between cursive and regular, mainly her r’s – some the print shape and some plateaued. And more obviously – Roxy’s spelling and capitalization are correct and consistent; the note is neither of those things. I point this out to Ellis and I can’t quite read what he thinks about it.

‘That’s crazy. Well, that means –’

‘Something’s amiss on Sandown Bay.’

We’re quiet for a moment but Ellis’s eyes have already lit up in a sort of hungry way, and now I know he’s addicted to the chase too, and the sight of it excites me like a shark drawn to copper mist. ‘This is insane. I can’t believe I didn’t think to –’

‘It doesn’t matter. Now you do.’

‘I can’t believe it.’

‘All mysteries are made up of a bunch of smaller ones, and that’s mystery number one solved, anyways.’ I close the journal gently. ‘Did Roxy write the note? No. We know that for sure.’

‘Right. So what are the other m-mysteries?’

‘Why wasn’t her file in the folder at the police station? What do Frank and Lenore and Mary Anne have to do with this? Who’s Baby Blue? And if Roxy didn’t write the note …’

‘Who did?’

Thunder. All at once, seemingly from everywhere, seemingly in my brain. To our left, from inside the forest, bark shatters like glass and shoots towards us like an assailant. The shards clatter to the ground.

‘Holy shit,’ Ellis breathes, nervously running his hands through his hair.

I smirk out of fear, maybe, or the timing. ‘Someone is telling us we’re on the right track.’