“It’s time,” Mom said, tapping her watch. She dug a twenty out of her pocket, left it on the table, and said good-bye to everyone as we walked out.

We crossed back to the mortuary and met Mr. Marsh at the basement door.

“I have a question for you,” he said as he handed Mom a clear plastic bag. “Do you know what these are?”

Inside were a couple of small pieces of what looked like metal. They were silver and round, each the size of a breath mint.

“They wouldn’t go through the cremulator. It kept jamming up.”

“What are they?” I asked Mom.

She shook her head. “No idea.”

I inspected them more closely. Each was like a mini octopus, with multiple thin wire tentacles extending from a tiny silver disk. It wasn’t a microchip, which my mom would have recognized, anyway. There were two, one for each cremated dog.

Was this thing in Nerf?

How did it get there … and why?

CHAPTER 15

Jordan

MAGGIE CAME BY in the evening saying she wanted to hang out, so there we were, reclining in my backyard under a pergola that had been unstable before we left but now was in tip-top shape, painted white and illuminated by strings of lights that looked like large antique lightbulbs. I appreciated Maggie’s initiative in coming by. I appreciated her being there even more. She wore shorts and sandals and a striped blue-and-white shirt. Her hair, which usually hung down to the middle of her back, was pulled up into some kind of complicated braid. She looked good. Smelled good, too.

“I can’t see the stars,” she said.

“Should I turn off the lights?” I asked.

“Sure.”

I got up and unplugged them, making the yard completely dark aside from the square of light illuminated by the kitchen window.

I lowered myself back onto the lounge chair and stared up, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the low light. The pergola broke up the view into long rectangles, but soon I could see dense packs of stars. Mount Hope was small, and my neighborhood—if you could call it that—was nothing more than seven or eight homes in a cluster, with farmland spreading out behind them like a fan. There were no streetlights or businesses to light up the sky and ruin the starscape.

“I learned a lot of constellations while we were in the camp,” I said. “I wasn’t sleeping well there.”

“What’s that one?” she said, pointing to a bright dot to the west.

“That’s not a star,” I said. “That’s Mars.”

“It doesn’t look red to me.”

“Me neither.”

We stared and said nothing. It was quiet—so quiet that it was strange. Maggie’s puzzled expression indicated that she’d noticed it, too.

“Where are the crickets?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said, then paused to listen again. “You’re right. That’s weird.” I considered going in to tell Charlie this strange bit of news, given our whole crickets thing, then thought better of it. This was where I wanted to be.