Detective Klein waits patiently. “What is it you want to tell me about Ms. Sullivan?”

All of a sudden I realize how serious this is. Skylar and I are here to tell a detective what we saw. He might arrest Mr. Boyce. He might put him in jail. This is real life, not a detective show.

I want to go home, but I’ve already drunk half the soda Detective Klein gave me. It’s like I’ve accepted a bribe. I can’t leave now.

Skylar says, “Ms. Sullivan was Abbi’s art teacher. She used to meet Mr. Boyce, our language arts teacher, every Thursday at the end of Marie Drive. She’d get in his car and they’d drive away together.”

Detective Klein raises his eyebrows. “How do you know this?”

“We saw them from our tree house,” Skylar says. “We didn’t know who they were then. He never got out of the SUV and she wore huge sunglasses and a big straw hat that hid her face and hair.”

Skylar pauses to drink her soda, and I finally find my voice. “One day they had a big argument. Ms. Sullivan got out of Mr. Boyce’s SUV and ran across the field into the woods. We thought he’d go after her, but he drove away fast, like he was really mad.”

Skylar finishes her soda. “He could have come back and met up with her in the woods. Maybe they had another argument, and he—”

She hesitates and glances at me. I swallow hard and hope she won’t finish the sentence.

“Well, we kind of think he might have killed her,” she whispers.

“But we’re not sure,” I say. “We didn’t actually see him come back to look for her.”

Detective Klein waits a minute, as if he thinks we might have more to say. When we just sit there, he asks, “How do you know the car belonged to Ms. Sullivan?”

“We didn’t at first,” Skylar says. “After she went missing, we saw the car on the news. It was gray like the one we saw, and the license plate was the same: 3MB5098.”

He leans forward and stares at us. It’s like he knows everything about us, even that we used to steal candy from Madison Market on our way home from grade school. “Is the car still on Marie Drive?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. We haven’t gone there for a while,” Skylar says.

“The last time we saw it,” I say, “a window was broken and her purse and phone were gone.”

“Why didn’t you report this?” he asks. “You saw the news. You knew it was important evidence.”

“We were scared,” Skylar says, “especially after we heard that Ms. Sullivan was murdered. We wanted to get somebody’s advice, so we went to see Mr. Boyce.”