Halfway down the stairs, she heard the thump of a door shutting above. An officer back on duty? That was okay. He’d peek inside the main floor, assure himself all was clear, then sit outside in his pickup. Kayla knew the routine.

Still she listened for a minute. When no more noises came, she resumed her descent. Down into the basement, where the chill was enough to make her wish she’d brought her jacket. Lissa would say it was the chill of death.

Lissa talked like that. When Kayla confided that she came here, her friend’s eyes had gone round and she’d said, “Are you trying to contact her ghost?”

“Whose ghost?”

“Your mother’s, dummy. If you could talk to her, she could tell you who killed her.”

Kayla thought that was silly, but she didn’t say so. Lissawas the only friend she had.

It was just a dark, cold, smelly basement. Where her mom had died. And no one knew who’d done it or why. That’s why Kayla kept coming back. To find out what had happened to her mom. And to Brandi, though really she didn’t much care what had happened to Brandi. But Grandma would say she shouldn’t think like that. She did want to find out what happened to Claire Kennedy, though. She hadn’t really known Claire—she was one of the girls from the cookie place—but she’d seen her around town a few times, and she’d seemed nice, always smiling and waving, even though they’d never met.

From the bottom of the basement stairs, Kayla picked her way around piles of junk until she saw the yellow crime-scene tape wrapped around a pillar, the broken end trailing across the floor.

She stopped. It was exactly the same spot where her mother’s and Brandi’s bodies had been found. She shivered and maybe it wasn’t the cold this time, but she told herself it was.

She crept forward. There was blood on the cement floor. The spot wasn’t very big, not like the big stains she could still see, almost hidden under a layer of dust.

She shone the flashlight on those old blood stains and, for a second, she could see her mother lying there, her eyes open, her—

Kayla shook her head sharply and swung the beam away. She wasn’t here to think about her mother. She was here to find out who killed her. And she didn’t need ghosts for that. She needed science.

She took her backpack off and unzipped it. Inside was her Junior Detective kit. She had a camera, too. A real one. It was on her mom’s old cell phone, which Grandma let her keep for emergencies. She took it out for a picture of the blood. Blood stains were important. They could tell you—